Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Or, words having to make do for pulses, impulses, dartings, influences, star-stuff, star-winds, up she gets, that responsible elder Daughter, and says to Jupiter: “Father, isn’t it about time you gave a thought to poor humanity in its plight, poor Odysseus pining there in the arms of the enchantress and wishing only to go home. Haven’t you punished him enough?”

“I?” says her Father. “You are always so personal, my dear, so emotional. In the first place, I’m as bound by the cosmic harmonies as everyone else. And in the second place, it wasn’t me at all — surely you remember it was Neptune who hated him? He fell foul of the sea, that favourite of yours.”

Who was Neptune, when Homer lived and sung. Oh, the sea, of course … but then, as now, seas like all the other forces and elements had their sympathetic planets. Neptune the planet is a new discovery, or so we think. However that may be, Odysseus the brave wanderer was hated by some force to do with the sea, the ocean in its drugged condition, its moon-madness, always tagging along after the moon. It was the ocean Odysseus displeased, could not remain in harmony with, the ocean, our moon’s creature and slave.

Neptune had not been discovered, was discovered by us, modern man. So we know, quite definitely.

A hundred years or so ago (earth time), divines and historians and antiquarians of all kinds stated categorically that the world was created 4000 odd years ago, and anyone who did not go along with this thesis had a hard time of it, as the memoirs, biographies and histories of that period make so sadly clear. What a great step forward into sanity and true thinking has taken place in such a very short time: they’ll concede now that the age of the physical world is longer than that — oh, quite considerably, by many millions. A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilisations; they can’t even begin to concede that civilisations might have very old histories. The earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilisation is still set somewhere between two thousand and four thousand B.C., depending on the bias of the archeological school and the definition of civilisation. We, now, are civilisation, we are the crown of humanity, the pinnacle to which all earlier evolution aimed, computer man is the thing, and possessed of wisdom those earlier barbarians did not have: from our heights man dwindles back to barbarism and beyond that to apehood. They say (or sing) that writing was first invented in the third millennium B.C.; agriculture is so old; mathematics so old; and astronomy is dated exactly like the rest, having become scientific at that moment it divorced itself from astrology and superstition. And everything is dated and known by things, fragments of things: the children of a society that is obsessed with possessions, objects, have to think of previous civilisations in this way: slaves of their own artefacts, they know that the old barbarians were too.

Every time a new city is dug up, the boundaries (in time) are grudgingly shifted back — a couple of hundred years perhaps, half a millennium. On a plateau in Turkey part of a top layer of a city has been laid bare, which takes a high form of human living (one dare not say civilisation) back ten thousand years, and underneath that layer are many other layers, still unexcavated … but do the specialists say: We cannot make any pronouncements at all about human history, because our knowledge (or our guesses) is limited to the last site we have (partly) dug? No, no, not at all, what their present knowledge is — is knowledge, for this is how they always go on, it seems they have to, it is how their unfortunate brains are formed.

Well, it is at least possible that astronomers of ten thousand, or even twenty thousand, or even thirty thousand years ago were as clever as ours are; it is at least possible that the evidence for this lies easily available in easily excavated cities — available to people whose minds are less bound by the prejudices of our time.

We may suppose that ancient astronomers did not necessarily believe that the world was created on a certain day four thousand odd years before their own time, and by God in person. That they understood that words had to be used for their benefit — and understood what the words were symbols for.

That long before the Roman Gods and the Greek Gods and the Egyptian Gods and the Peruvian Gods and the Babylonian Gods, astronomers listened to Jupiter and his family, or to Saturn, and knew that Thoth (however he was called then) served Amen the Father, (and here again comes in the idea of deputy, of substitution, for Thoth created the world with a word); and that there were names for planets, suns, stars, and crumbs, blobs, and droplets of earth and fire and water; and that their patterns and sounds and colours were understood, and tales were told of them, instructive of Times and Events — why not? For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world’s great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times Man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the Sun’s being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets — and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity’s resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance.

“Father,” says Jupiter’s efficient and bossy daughter, “why don’t you send down Mercury to do something about that poor voyager, stranded there on his drugged island? He could ask Neptune to let up a bit. It’s not fair , you know. It’s not just.”

“Well you see to it then, daughter,” says Jupiter, a busy man, Sun’s deputy, and with all those bounding children, tugged this way and that like a busy housewife and mother with her large brood. “You just see what you can do, but mind you, don’t forget that We, Jupiter, are not the only influence on the traveller’s journey. No, it’s a harmony, it’s a pattern, bad and good, everything in turn, everything spiralling up — but yes, it’s the right moment for a visit to Mercury. It is the exact time — thanks for reminding me.”

“Timing is everything,” murmurs Minerva the Flashing-Eyed, bustling off to find Thoth, or Hermes, and finding him speeding around the sun in an orbit so dazzling and so lively and so gay and above all so many-sided and accomplished that it was hard to keep up with him.

“Ah,” says he, “it’s time again, is it? I was thinking it must be.”

“You sound reluctant,” said Minerva.

“I’ve just been visiting Venus.”

“Everyone always likes her best,” says Minerva, drily. “As everyone knows, she and I don’t get on. She’s so silly— that’s what I can’t stand. People say I’m jealous — not at all. It’s that damned stealthy dishonesty I can’t tolerate — that appalling hypocrisy. I’ve never been able to understand how it is that intelligent men can put up with it — but there you are. And I didn’t come to talk about Aphrodite. I’m here about poor Earth, poor traveller!”

“Your kind heart does you credit. But don’t forget, it was partly their fault.”

“Stealing the fire?”

“Of course. If that fellow hadn’t stolen the fire, then they would never have known what a terrible state they are in.”