Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Full Moon came straight up from the sea and laid silver light over Earth from the sea’s edge to the towering mountains. The moon rose up through the stars and the white bird lifted its wings and soared up and up and up and away, back into the moon.

I walked in now from the edge of the square, and took up a waiting position at the outer edge of the circle, looking in towards the centre.

I hope it may now be conceded that this drug is contraindicated in this case. After an absence of five days I was shocked at the deterioration in the patient. When I saw him this morning it was clear that he has less grasp of reality than when he was admitted. From what nurse says I should diagnose that he is in coma a good part of the time .

DOCTOR Y.

This case was thoroughly discussed at the conference Thursday at which you were not present. This drug’s effects are often not fully developed for three weeks, as I have already tried to explain. Patient has been on it for twelve days .

DOCTOR X.

There was a pressure of silence, which swirled me into a singing calm. I was inside the Crystal, whose vortex had gathered in all sensation as a dust devil gathers in dust and leaves from yards around, or as bath water spiralling its way down a hole exerts its pull on every part of the water in the bath. Looking outwards from it nothing that had been there remained — or so it seemed at first, for the beginning of my being absorbed into the Crystal was a darkness of mind coupled with a vividness of sense that only slowly I was able to balance. It seemed that the Crystal was having difficulty in absorbing my comparative crudeness. This fighting went on in me as well as in it, during the few moments of the beginning. I say “a few moments.” But the very thing I became aware of first was that time had shifted gear and was vibrating differently, and it was this that was the first assault on my own habitual pattern of substance. To my eyes it seemed as if I was in a world of lucid glass, or perhaps better, of crystalline mist. My body felt a nausea which I became properly aware of as it began to abate, for it had been gripping me in a totality that was a basic — of which one is unaware. For instance, as we breathe ordinary air, our lungs are adapted to absorb a poisonous gas (poisonous to other visiting creatures, or to ourselves perhaps, once) called air. The nausea had been a tight vice, locking me in tension against it. It went at last and a delightful lightness took me over. The dragging pain of gravity had gone: this dimension was as free and delicious as a skater, or flight lying between the wings of a guardian bird. Yet I had a body. But it was of a different substance, lighter, finer, tenuous, though I recognised its likeness to my usual shape of matter. Slowly my senses, my new senses, steadied. I was inside a tinted luminosity, my new body, and this luminousness was part, like a flame in fire, of the swirl of the Crystal, and this burned whitely, an invisible dance, where the centre of the circle in the square had been — and still was, for I could see its outline, but it was the ghost of its outline. And, holding fast to the start or centre of my vision, or, rather, feeling, I let that vision — or perhaps the word was understanding, move out and around. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, allowed it to enlarge, as light spreads, and I saw that this city on this plateau did indeed exist in the new dimension, or level, of vibration. But, as my own body was now a shape in light, though not as fine and high a light as the substance of the Crystal itself, so too was the city: it was as if the city of stone and clay had dissolved, leaving a ghostly city, made in light, like an illuminated mist that has shadows or echoes held in it. Yet the city that rose everywhere about me in the same shape of the city I knew so well was thinner, more sparse. It was a more delicately framed and upheld place. This is not to say that the houses or public buildings, delicately outlined, like a tracery in frost on a windowpane, all a patterning of stars or hexagons, were less firm and distinct than the shapes of the solid city built in stone, but that there were fewer houses and buildings in this shadow city than in the earthy one. As if this tenuous city, which was a pattern and a key and a blueprint for the outer city, only fitted certain parts or areas or individual buildings in the outer city. It seemed as if the delicately fine city “fitted” best over some public buildings and some houses. In between were areas where the mist lay blank, without shapes built into it. And yet I knew very well — since by now I did know so very well the real city where I had walked and watched and waited for weeks — that this “real” stone-built city had houses and buildings here and here and here and there — where there were none in the inner pattern, or template. I seemed to understand as I stood here in my new spritely shape that the areas of the city where the inner pattern was not strong enough to impose itself were where there was an extra heaviness and imperviousness in their substance. Whereas the parts of the city that were mirrored in the inner blueprint had as it were built into the stones a sample or portion of that fine inner light or substance.

And now it was plain to me that when walking in my normal shape through the stone city, and becoming conscious, as most people are at times, of a finer air in this or that house or hall or public place, what I was registering was the places or areas where the inner pattern lay vibrating on its self-spun thought.

Thought … I was thinking … the Crystal was a thought that pulsed and spiralled. My sympathies enlarged again, my mind washed out, and now I saw on the outskirts of this city moving spots or blobs of light. These were in groups or patches, and were moving away from the city. I saw that they were the troops of the Rat-dogs, and apes, but again they were fewer than I remembered, just as this new delicate city was thinner and sparser than the outer one. In this inner atmosphere only some of the beasts were mirrored. My mind moved among them like a bird on wings, and I understood that among these poor beasts trapped in their frightful necessities, some sometimes snuffed this finer air, but that most did not. Most of them were as thick, heavy and unredeemed as the bulk of the stone and earth that had no crystalline air kneaded into it. Yet some did have a light in them. And this did not seem to match with any quality of group or pack morality. For instance, one sad little blob of faintly pulsing light which nevertheless was brighter than most in its constellation, belonged to a beast I was able to recognise — and he was one of the most violent, energetic and busy of them all; and another brave little pulse belonged to a clowning, jesting ape. And yet another marked an ape quite different from either, one much obsessed with her twin apelets, a fussy nagging nattering little animal, yet her star shone as bright as the two assertive male animals. These flocks of moving lights, or lit drops, like globules of gleaming wet in the swirl of a luminous mist, moved out and away. I understood that if I were to move out there now on my ordinary gravity-subjugated legs, the city would be clear and clean again. The warring and killing beasts had moved away beyond the suburbs of the city and beyond even the forest where I had seen the orgiastic women. This forest I now explored with the tentacles of my new senses and found a paradise of plant, leaf and pattern of branch all structured in light. A scene in the ordinary world nearest to it would be that in a forest after a light snowfall when it is the essential shape of branch and tree that is presented in white shimmering outline to eyes used to a confusion of green, lush, loving, lively detail. In this paradisical forest Felicity and Constance and Vera were not represented at all, yet as my thoughts hung over the memory of what had been there, a compulsion or pressure or need grew into them: a demand from the excluded, a claim. The memory of the nights I had drunk blood and eaten flesh with the women under the full moon struck my new mind, and there was a reeling and then a rallying of its structure, while I accepted and held the memory, and then I had moved out and beyond, but now the women were lodged in my mind, my new mind. I knew, though dimly enough at that time — for so many “knowings” began then, that those frightful nights when I had been compelled away from the city’s centre to the murdering women had become a page in my passport for this stage of the journey. As this thought came in, so did another — or, as I’ve said already, the beginnings of one, these were all beginnings, that the women were now faceted in my new mind like cells in a honeycomb, gleams of coloured light, and that my comrades, whom I had seen flickering, flaming and flowing inside the greater white blaze of the Crystal were also faceted with me, as I with them, in this inner structure, and that I had understood this from the moment the Crystal had swept me up into itself, which was why I had forgotten my search for them. In that dimension, minds lay side by side, fishes in a school, cells in honeycomb, flames in fire, and together we made a whole in such a way that it was not possible to say, Here Charles begins, here John or Miles or Felicity or Constance ends. And so with us all. But while this new swelling into understanding was taking place in my mind, a move outwards into comprehension, only possible at all because of my fusion with the people who were friends, companions, lovers and associates, a wholeness because I was stuck like a bit of coloured glass in a mosaic — there was somewhere close all this time a great weight of cold. I realised that all the time there had been this weight, this pressure of freezing cold, but that I had not been aware of it as I had not been aware to begin with of my griping nausea. That had been total, and not to be isolated away from my overall condition. This terror of cold was like that. That was when I first became aware of it, or I think it was, for as I’ve said, in those early explorations of my new mode of feeling, it was only afterwards that I was able to trace strands back to a particular bud or start in my thought. But there was no doubt that about that time this knowledge became firmly lodged in me: the cold weight, a compulsion, a necessity, as it were, a menace only just held at bay by humanity, and always waiting there, the crocodile’s jaws always there, just under the water. It was a grief and a fear too ancient for me, it was a sorrow bred into the essence of the race. I saluted it, and passed on, for like the early all-pervading nausea, this was part of my living, kneaded into my fibres, a necessity like breathing and associated with it: this cold, this weight, this pulling and dragging and compelling. It was too old a lodestone for any individual to fight away from, or even accurately to know and place. It was there.