1

Introduction to ANON
This novel was written in Brighton, Sussex during
winter-spring 1992-3. A strange work containing some of
the most concentrated writing the author has achieved to date
it was written in broad daylight at a wide window with a
panoramic view of the South Downs. Not the most likely
situation for plumbing the depths of what can be best called
the cosmic aspect of us human beings. Nonetheless that is
how it was done. And when the narrator calls the writer his
amanuensis be sure that he means it.
ANON Summary
The novel is a retelling of the myth of the Minotaur in
the form of a detective story. Theseus is a corporate
investigator on loan to the local police to find an unusual
Midnight Rambler active in a large city park. Ariadnes
motives for helping him are ambiguous, caught as she is
between her feelings for her half-brother and her reasons for
attaching herself to Theseus. Pasiphae is involved, too. Her
interest in Theseus is dubious, a compulsion that could well
result in the creation of another monster. Theseus has no
choice but to take the assignment, his career has been put in
jeopardy by the publicity surrounding his last job. But he has
talent, and it has been hinted that success this time will put
him in line for significant advancement.
The novel is narrated by Dionysos, once man and now
god, as an updated performance of a perennial drama he is
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obliged to stage until his characters get their parts right. He

has problems with our language, but he presses on as best he
can, patiently explaining his more obscure insights and
apologising as need be for what he fears we might see as the
barbarous excesses of his story-telling.
The plot remains as simple as Ovid has it, the readers
interest is engaged instead with the question of motivation.
Why did Theseus volunteer? He wouldnt tell what happened
in the Labyrinth and he dumped Ariadne fairly quickly. But,
then, didnt she fall for him fairly quickly? What about
Pasiphae, whats a man compared with a bull? And most of
all, the Minotaur himself more sinned against, perhaps?
Dionysos gives us the gods-eye view, though he knows very
well that telling the truth is more difficult than most of us
think.
ANON is about 72,000 words long.

ANON

PHILIP MATTHEWS

Philip Matthews 1993



Sophocles
(on all roads, going nowhere;
in all places, finding no home.)

I met my sister in the bayside hotel in the city. She was

in her trenchant mood, full of her recent victory.
Have a party, I suggested.
A party? she echoed, quizzical then ironic: Havent I
done enough for them?
With friends, I edged, pushing her in that direction.
She smiled, all too knowing, brushing me away
dismissively.
We had lunch together, looking out at the constipated
waves losing themselves on the beach of stones. The horizon
was as level as you can get on earth, except where the bridge
interposed.
I left early, having a show to prepare.

Momentarily distracted, he feels the beginning of

nausea, but by reaction he lays out his mental buoyancy skirt
and the crowd on the pavement becomes abstracted to one
word, a word he does not bother to pronounce knowing the
abstraction is an expediency. It takes him some time, though,
to get back to the report he prepares in his mind. The
abstraction must be let spend its force: the mind seizes any
presence and forms to it, even a wilful expediency that keeps
it from more interesting, perhaps more rewarding, realms. He
is not aware of this condition, that his mind is nonetheless
active behind the mask of his buoyancy skirt, the unuttered
word. Only as the distraction appears to him to sink and the
crowd which had represented it here on earth disappears, does
the familiar territory of his report reappear. Only this does he
recognise, the reappearance, as though by magic, of the
object he desires to attend to from what seems by contrast to
its warm presence a vast emptiness.
Seizing on this warm presence with such
unacknowledged relief forces him at once to the point. Yes,
the point. Clever to have turned the agent of betrayal into an
instrument of destruction. Clever that due process would
destroy that instrument in turn. Economical. Clean. Almost
elegant. The obvious masking the remote. A signpost says
MONTPELIER and he starts again, the dread this times at
least having a form, some hope:
Is this another city?
The answer does not come at once and in the interval
of suspense he sees the face turning again, hope there instead,
a cynical hope already bending towards control, its own
doom. He remembers clearly his own thought at that moment,
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other than the knowledge of his success, that is, his thought
that something had been proven once again: that hope is real
and so must have a reality somewhere. Something in him
moves like an arrow towards this reality, but it is the arrow
in flight that suggests the reality as its target, the target
remaining unknown except that something in him moves
spontaneously towards it. The unknown is empty and so the
lifebelt is out again and he sees the face turn towards him
again, the beauty dark, a surface only, and already the gesture
has lost power (how many times has he rerun this moving
head?), seeing surface merely an indication of waning power.
The interval drains, waiting running down as though it
had been a force of restraint, so he has to reach out and make
an acknowledgement: this is his city. She had been another
city, a street named Calle de Maana, named for a
newspaper, organ of the right, once the landowners now
imported capital. He is side-tracking from his
acknowledgement, thinking of decision without uttering the
word decision: along a rail of generalised political
information, world issues, left and right, money, power,
drugs, profits. The power of envy, the true illimitable power
of the world, of man, the secret of all motive. The truth of
value, that it originates in the other: for which reason it is
desired, because it contains the secret of the other, the secret
of a self, the secret of my self.
I am nothing. You make me something.
The traffic is heavy, fighting other lines of traffic
through a roundabout.
Not true. Not true.
8

The smooth gear stick is vague yet it comforts, the

vibration of the transmission in the palm of his hand. The
distraction this time appears through a chink in his habitual
control: There is death in the hand. And for an instant,
waiting in line at a roundabout, waiting for the car ahead to
move, he sees this:
It is the weight of the whole universe/cosmos, seen and
unseen, felt and unfelt, heard and unheard, sensed and
unsensed, known and unknown, loved and unloved, trusted
and distrusted, feared and unfeared, believed and unbelieved,
that forms us at every instant of our existence, pressing in on
every cell and sensor. It forms an eminently formable soul,
true, but the soul retains always the persistent lack of form
that is the nature of its being a soul. The whole of the cosmos,
from divinity down to the most fundamental material,
struggles endlessly to gain a foothold in us, and fails
endlessly.
I am free. I am an emptiness that will not fill, ever. I
am a soul.
The car ahead. The report. He shoots out into the
roundabout. The report shrinks. No report is needed from
him. The media have already reported on him for those who
need to know.
A clown bursting through a paper ring:
Hello!

Some biographical detail, I think, as he nears his

office. The image of the clown is his, too much his own for
him to notice nowadays, the will to power as habituated
fretting. The only thing left to him (an inheritance he
describes in psychological terms, to do with an absent father)
is reaching: a hand extended, a faithless hand. The hand is
slightly bent, palm down, a hand that says: refuse me. He
wants you to resist the temptation, so he can resist your
temptation. Yet his business, his calling, as it were. Your
surrender is the context for his world: he sees the world
originate from you as centre. His talent is a mystery to him, a
policeman turned corporate agent working on contract, the
privatisation of law and order. A supreme investigator, a
ruthless executive, but needing direction, scared of his own
self.
We can clear up the mystery of his talent, and complete
this painful biographical analysis, by saying simply that his
director and his victim are two aspects of the one thing.
Metaphorically, he is the hound that bites the hand that feeds
him, if you can grasp the ambiguity of that image. Does an
animal do anything else? Obviously, the director and victim
are aspects of himself. He knows this, but cannot put it into a
context. This is his reason for wanting the world.
This two-fold representation of himself in the world of
course suggests a trick with mirrors. Nothing unusual in that,
perhaps. If I say that he suffers this mirroring in the hope that
someday he will see an image there that will, as it were, save
him, you will readily understand his energy, his drive. You
can see the significance of hope in this, the arrow shooting
towards the unknown target, the arrow in flight as he
10

understands vaguely, which is the reality of his hope

presupposing a target, otherwise why an arrow in flight.
Yet he has murder on his hands, albeit murder by
remote cause. This suggests a flaw in his hope. You can see it
in the matter of temptation. He believes he resists some
destructive temptation, a destruction he witnesses in his
distractions, a crowd on a street, a car in a line of traffic, but
also in the rising sun, in a bird singing in the afternoon, in a
mother calling her child in for tea. The flaw lies here: he
believes he is still pure, and so worthy of his hope. The truth
is, of course, that he is already seduced. He was seduced even
before he understood the game being played: seduced the first
time he reached for the arms that comforted, the nipple that
fed him, the hand that tucked him in to sleep.
Blinded, he sees death in his mirror. He sees your
death, because you are to blame for the destroyed world that
interferes. He hates what he sees in his mirror, wanting to
destroy that image.

11

The high resolution screen displays a succession of

patterns. Sometimes the background colour changes,
sometimes the colour of the lines tracing the pattern. There is
a randomness in this change of colour, many colours
available, really subtle variations of the seven basic hues.
Yellow patterns are most agreeable; concomitantly, tones
between ultramarine and violet give the most consoling
backgrounds. Sometimes, however, line and background
clash, tones of one colour, definition so weak as to be
unsettling; again, lurid contrasts irritate, the elaborating
pattern tearing the screen open, jagged edges hinting at the
sinister radiance of electrons a reminder that technological
benefit is deeply ambiguous, a reminder that each gain must
also be a loss, a fundamental suspicion that nothing really
happens.
He has his back to the screen, sitting at a table,
absently scratching his inner thigh. He is reading a note
scribbled on a torn piece of paper. The view from the bay
windows is of a slope covered with trees, the sky serrated at
the ridge, a cold green twilight. If you go over to the
windows and look down you will see the main railway out of
the city, two express lines, two local lines, two shunt lines,
two lines crossing all the other lines to pass at the bottom of
the garden, heading towards a tunnel hidden by trees to the
right. Down line, also to the right, you can see the main lines
bifurcate in a complicated way, twenty tracks at the bend a
half a mile away, lit by high standards at night. Count and
you find that at the moment there are seven trains sitting out
there, yellow faced, one of them, twelve coaches long, curved
pleasurably from one line across to another line.
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A tiny ladybird sits on the table about a foot from the

paper. It hasnt moved for five minutes. It is always in the
room: he comes across it from time to time, and he notes its
presence each time with a spontaneous enjoyment, as he does
his spider, that stretches its web across one of the central
windows. He admires its (her, to him) assiduous pursuit of
trapped flies, wrapping them in webbing in a thrice before
hauling them off to its home in a recess between the upper
and lower frames.
He hasnt decided yet whether the note is his own or an
unreferenced quotation. This happens sometimes. While
reaching for a decision, by means of quick flips of attention
better, by shifting the focus of his attention he is probing to
find out what kind of evening is afoot, and questioning his
dissatisfaction with the program running behind him.
At the window again, you see that the ridge is further
away than seemed the case from deeper in the room, and that
the trees on its slope are therefore tall, mature growth. There
is a dip beyond the railway, then an array of houses and
roads, already lit, one road exactly opposite climbing a hill to
a ridge intervening between you and the boundary ridge
where night comes on. Cars climb on the right, red lights
tracking up, cars descend on the left, white lights racing
down, the flash of headlights at intervals as cars breast the
ridge. This is the plush trans-riverine suburb of Whitehawk, a
boring view at the best of times, revealing the ant-like
propensities of humanity.
You cant see the river and it is years since the hooting
of the barges was heard, now that the toll bridge crosses
downriver at the harbour. He does not miss this, not having
13

been in this room long enough. Even if he had, he would not

miss it. He does not believe knowledge, granting it possibility
only. The patterns, for instance, are sometimes quite intricate,
sometimes beautiful, sometimes almost intelligible in a
provoking way: many-tined stars, figures enlaced in fantastic
robes, spaceships, beetles, spiders, flowers, crowns of thorns,
heraldic lattices. People gape at this screen, some in awe, one
person whimpered, the better kind in sheer transport. They
admire his art, putting soul into computing. Even children
admire him, for once not looking for the joystick.
The evening draws in. The note says:
Number cannot be brought
to life: only dissection,
thin slices. But you can know
that number is living.
The bed stands out among the furnishing of the room
because he values his sleep, entered at regular hours, a deep
cocoon. Sleep keeps his consciousness in check. He still
cannot decide if the note is his. This intrigues him for two
seconds, then it is not important. He knows the answer will
come. If the note is his, then he will add to it; if it is not, then
it will be like a stone in his mind. He throws these stones
away, as it were, dropping them into (figuratively, of course)
a putative bottomless pool of clear still water. Again,
figuratively, there are also fish in this pool. Stones can
become fish, and fish can become stones. There are snakes,
too, even beasts like dragons, notably sinuous. He hates
metaphor and dumped this metaphor long ago. He is not
14

afraid of dragons, hence his pet spider, because they are

phenomena, to be studied with due fatality.
The evening has many possible courses, and he tests
these while he looks at the note, the ladybird, aware of the
inertia in the room, the oncoming dark, the train trundling by
below. The program contains eleven commands: no one
knows this, though an intelligent programmer would deduce
it fairly quickly. It is the equivalent of a test card, his one
weakness in this area is his need for reassurance that
machines are operable, that is, that they are capable of doing
what he wants them to do when he wants it done. Machine
failure is about the only thing that annoys him.
He crumples the note. The paper surrenders along fault
lines determined by the weight of pressure applied.
Metaphor: the evening is a suit of armour; what he is going to
do is a chink in that armour. Put otherwise, he is going to
dive into a pool of water, the diving being the important
thing, the edge of his life, without which he would be as wild
as all the other beasts.
He dresses in neat clothes, dark cords, crimson silk
shirt, dark suede shoes, matt black leather jacket, checks for
keys, money. He looks very attractive. Last thing he does
before going out is to change the program.
In the dark room, lit by the green background on the
screen and the sodium lamps of Whitehawk, red pixels
appear on the screen, tracing a complicated boundary. This
program is not very long either, the core a subroutine of his
own devising that permits the computer to search its path
over eight vectors. Sometime late in the evening, after we too
have departed, the program will end. The screen will portray
15

an idiosyncratic fractal, its whimsical title in black lettering

across the bottom:
THE FAT LADY SINGS
Think at length about murder. That is a good metaphor
for what he is going to do. When you think about murder, as I
suggest, make sure you take the obvious into account: murder
need be done only once.

16

The man says You on your own, sweetie? He laughs

at the icy blast, she sailing by, fugitive, not worth the effort
anyway, for reasons left unstated. The ship crests the wave,
enters the trough, buffeted until reaching clear water. The
angles of her groin, the creases between belly and thigh, form
the bow, the water icy cold. But she moves tenderly through
the night, a recess singing I want to fall, I want to fall, I want
to fall, fall, fall.
Later, after she has cruised the bars off the business
district, where the water is cold but the giddiness of
unleashed employees is honest enough, she crosses the river
to the east side. Here you can drift along the deep quays, the
new university sited in upgraded warehouses, dark under
trees, alleys disappearing towards residential blocks where oil
terminals used to be. Definitely warmer seas here: inchoate
desires she can appreciate, minds charting continents of
figuration, worlds of the past, maps themselves reflexively
mysterious, a dark suspicion behind every hope of
illumination. She walks here from streetlight to shadow to
streetlight, senses enhancing, until she learns again she
cannot hear, cannot see, cannot touch, cannot speak. The
water is hot now, the bow sluicing through the calm ocean.
Her dress wafts against her body and it burns her. The recess
sings, Let me fall, let me fall, let me fall, fall, fall. Cars are
few this hour of the night, people moving like shadows. A
low wall keeps the tide in the river at bay; the Castle is dark
on the far side, a train sliding out along the viaduct, heading
inland. She can hear the city now: a low scream, to some of
desperation and greed, to her of the fact of life, as though the
cosmos had never been oiled. She can see too: that light has
17

to be there, must always be made; she can see this perpetual

struggle against the dark. She can see the recess now, the
word FALLING lighting up only to fade down, her body
catching light, flames licking up and up, seeing the
contradiction of light burning itself out of existence.
The student club is loose with confusion, a subtle selfcancellation, gesture arising only to deny itself. The music is
like that too: insistent rhythm filling the body, forgotten in an
instant, senses sensing the ensuing vacuum. The rhythm
drives through the dark chambers of the club, always there,
always absent, making everything vivid, making everything
void. There is no restriction or license because nothing
happens, by convention no stimulants permitted except green
tea and...
She does not know it yet: in places like this, Nothing is
regaining entry into your culture the essent, the thing, the
commodity, the desire is being undermined here. Nothing has
presence here, poetry at last becoming actual again: soon it
will point directions, and a few, then many, despite
persecution, will learn that boats are not needed in this dark
sea, nor rafts, nor ropes. You were born to swim. The pencil
laser, violet, cuts the dark in pulses, coming from nowhere
through low arches: off and on the same lesson,
appearances serving self-obliteration. Can you see that? Not
here and not here, but this pencil of light here then nothing
here, the light the absence of nothing as the nothing is the
absence of light. But with knowledge inferred: Nothing
pervades here as the default state, the light then as some
hopeless gesture, undertaken in vanity, ending in exhaustion,
18

the dark always present, even in the brightest light, as the

condition for light.
Someone stops to look at her: a white face, long lank
hair, lips puce in the violet flashes. He chews his tongue,
mouth open so his teeth flash too. He wants to speak, but
chews his tongue instead, the bulge in his cheek shifting. He
raises his hand deliberately and pushes his hair back off his
forehead. When he finally speaks, his face earnest with
judgement, his voice fits the rhythm of the place, words in
counterpoint, uttered in darkness:
Music cannot be alienated.
The words accentuate the rhythm she hears and splits it
from the pulses of light. She bobs about on the broken water:
restored to a distinctness of sense, sound different from sight;
and she tastes a sweetness in herself the word AMBROSIA
rising like a delighted joke, excusing its unpardonable
intrusion. And the taste? Sensed, it, too, dissolves, consumed
by the weight of its presence, something sinking away behind
this presence. Something perfect, she knows.
She smiles, knowledge already historical, a memory,
touches the boys cheek momentarily, and leaves, entering
the quietened city, a red signal light up on the viaduct,
silhouetted roofs reaching above the streetlights on the far
side of the river. Pain still, though, but she knows that is
ignorance, and is indifferent.
She calls this state, three in the morning, bliss: the only
being is this world of water.

19

I expect you want topographical detail. The ancients

loved topography because it counted the stones of their home,
of their world. Do you appreciate just how vulgarly
materialistic your ancestors were, going so far as making
gods and goddesses, demons and nymphs so that things
would be real? You decry materialism now because you
know it is only figuration: your hands are clean. This being
so, why do you expect your artists to be materialists, why do
you expect them to make your world real? So, instead of
local colour, let me say this:
Number is nonvariant. A mathematical operation is
precisely what it is and you can judge it correct with absolute
confidence. Words, on the other hand, are polyvariant,
fountains of denotation and connotation beyond your control.
Consider then that the most demanding care with language is
required in the formulation of laws. Just laws are as difficult
to formulate as unjust laws. The latter must hide something,
but so also must just laws; both must hide the fact that
meaning is to be found everywhere and that words go their
own way in this universe of meaning.
You see, lying is as difficult as the truth, and for the
same reason: you never can say precisely what is the case
words will not be fixed even when what is the case is not
true. I know you believe that lies are more accurate than the
truth, because they are invented: youre wrong, though.
But I agree that lies are uttered with more confidence
than the truth, precisely because they are known to be untrue.
Anyway, words are in some way like water, both tend
to flow out of control. Yet, be aware of this crucial
difference: water is Aristotelian, as it were, having one
20

master, gravity. Words are Platonic, as it were, having no

fixed direction other then the direction you try to give them.
This is important: words have no life of their own, but they
are always in motion, conveying one meaning or another. If
not subject to your intentions, then they follow the course of
the worlds meaning. A frightening experience, I admit, but
one worth looking into some time.
It is not the world of things that is at fault: it is because
you think words are knowledge. You cannot fool one who
attends to experience rather than language, because through
experience you discover what is the case, something you
cannot discover through language. Words are stars to the
blind, lights to the foolish.
The location now. A place of language rather than
experience: all things to all men. Two features I will indicate,
to orientate you.
There is a bridge. Shrouded most of the time in fog it
resembles a pier, a semblance reinforced by the city
corporations attempt to make money out of it. Gaily lit,
everything on offer there, though anyone with sense knows
you only get to spend money to pass the time.
There is an eminence inland. Some call it a mountain,
others call it a hill, even a ridge. The valleys are shallow, old
trees above streams and rivers. Ruins and aboriginal legends
there, illicit glamour, magic of naked flesh.
Polarities of figuration, yes. How the desperation seeps
out of your city. Let me, however, remind you of the
goodness here the pursuit of perfection. Remember that,
please: you always seek the good.
21

The office. For him, an office is an unHoly Trinity.

The Father: seat of power and knowledge, where the hidden
desire is expressed, known and unknown. The Holy Ghost:
place of inscription and records, where personal desire,
fraught with restriction and pain, leaks to contaminate the
secret of the father. The Son: his office, where the Logos
rests, trembling with memory and energy beyond personal
control, the site of the polemos that produces the world as
you know it.
His office is a partitioned section under the roof of a
tidy suburban unit on an industrial estate. The outer wall is
four feet high, composed mostly of windows, the roof angling
down sharply from a height of ten feet. His desk is as near to
the window as possible to create some sense of space. He is
adept at crouching into his seat behind the desk, the plastic
clad roof inches from his head. Freezing in winter, hot in
summer, clammy in between. There is an ante-office, desks
for his assistant and the girl, his secretary, file keeper,
notetaker, telephonist, receptionist, who answers outsiders
enquiries while disclosing nothing, a proper cuboid, even
environment. Everyone moves carefully in this department,
the floor trembles, cement dust rises from the carpet tiles,
partitions sway.
Raised in a world where words have to be
accompanied by pictures of some kind in order to make
sense, he regards reports, records, written instructions with
the kind of fear Greeks reserved for shades from Hades, as
things denuded, impotent, lingering beyond all practical
22

sense. A black pen, one blunt pencil, a pad of A4 memo

forms, a bottle of hardened correction fluid in the drawers of
his desk, an old buff file, empty, on the floor to the left of his
chair. Two certificates on the partition wall near the door, one
a police college diploma, the other a certificate issued by his
present employers to state he has completed a training course
in investigation management techniques. He rarely sits at his
desk, he tries not to be in his office, but when he is, he sits
still in the swivel chair, in a suit, in an overcoat, in jacket and
jeans, always feeling stuffed into the chair, trapped behind
the plain desk, the ceiling falling towards him: able for a
while to stop something while his mind runs on and on trying
to fathom what he has done since the last time he has sat still.
On these occasions his mind runs on something resembling
guilt, part fear lest some order has been broken by his actions,
part awe that he can act, really that he believes he has
actually acted.
This morning he is early, dawn chill, pink light in the
damp hollow in which the industrial estate is hidden. He
enters his office warm, sits in the chilly room and cools. The
chill irritates him, sparking memories, old resentments, old
unanswered questions, coming in a familiar shorthand, why
x? and y? z? until his body achieves an equilibrium. This
equilibrium may be unknown to you; its importance requires
a digression here. You can live your life under one of two
rules. You can live under the rule of expectation, a standard
of existence, as it were. Originally a matter of ethics, the
concept of standard has, as you know, been extended to
material considerations beyond the realm of ethics. In this
way, you now have standards of comfort which you strive to
23

achieve, much as your ancestors had standards of goodness.

So for instance in the present matter of simple bodily ease,
you have the expectation that a standard of warmth is
required. Therefore, you strive to avoid coldness as a means
to achieving bodily warmth. The second rule is that dictated
by circumstance itself, where the material is free to find its
own balance, as it were. In the matter of bodily ease, it is left
to the body itself to find the balance between the relative
coldness of its environment and its own heat. Consciousness
does not interfere here, and why should it? Consciousness
merely seeks to escape its own fears, and has the effect of
overriding the good sense of everything that is not of
consciousness, thus betraying your conscious fear of
everything that is not derived from your consciousness.
Generally, you can know when the material is in
balance: you cannot detect the presence of opposites acting
upon it. Specifically in the matter of bodily ease, you cannot
decide whether you feel warm or cold. Now, the curious
feature of this state of balance from the modern perspective is
that the inability to detect imbalance in the material means
that you cannot detect the material itself. This in itself should
not surprise you, after all, consciousness, like all the
instruments of detection you use, depends upon difference in
order to operate. Your universe is a universe of difference, of
imbalance, of disorder, the only way the material can register
on your instruments, your senses. More to the point, only by
means of difference can you tell that you are alive. See how
he chaffs here in the struggle between warmth and cold. How
elsewhere he chaffs in the struggle between his desires and a
universe that he sees as consuming his desires.
24

Yet, this morning in his chilly office he achieves an

equilibrium. He has achieved this equilibrium before in
various guises, calling it rest, though he has forgotten every
occasion on which it was achieved, and, of course, has never
learned the lesson of equilibrium. What he is conscious of is
a reduction of disturbance as a loss of interest in the
shorthand memories and complaints presented for his
consideration, experienced as the draining away of an
unpleasant liquid, part cold dishwater, part mild acid. In its
place there comes a still air, like the air pumped into a tyre
for cushioning. The air presses on his mind, as the water
before did, but the air is invisible and so without movement.
The complaints have drained away, they are replaced at that
level of consciousness by that which is continuously present
in his consciousness: his desire. You see here the benefit of
material equilibrium: it induces a quietness in your mind.
Strictly, if full balance were permitted, you should lose all
awareness of your consciousness. But you are ruled by fear,
so you continue to struggle against fear by permitting your
response to fear to gain control of you. Worse, you count
yourself happy in this state, a dream state less real than your
fear. Worse again, you identify with this dream state,
believing you are nothing when afraid.
So, his desire. It comes to him like a wraith in a mist,
short-handed at first, his pleasure greater as the glimpse is
most tenuous. We can put it under one word, though he
would not attempt to do so, not wanting to know what it is,
wanting only to fool himself. The word is: INVITATION.
Unaware of his body, unaware that he unaware of his body,
limp in his swivel chair, his desire firms to a phantom: he
25

basks in the unspoken concept. The state is sustained. How?

How does he keep from knowing? There are two,
complementary, reasons. One, he has been trained to believe
that he cannot know such things; he believes he can only
know difference. Two, he doesnt want to know, because the
lie is better than the truth. What is it that he does not know?
That the invitation is impossible: you cannot invite yourself
to yourself. Imagine if he understood that? Who could rescue
him? Who could rescue him from a death like that?
But he has only so much energy for his rest periods, so
in time, as the sun strengthens and warms the hollow in
which the industrial estate stands, the desire becomes
attenuated. Smoothly, without the slightest awareness on his
part, words insinuate themselves in place of the weakening
desire. With the words, of course, come the images, and with
the images comes memory.
He composes his report again.
What he also does not notice: desire fools, words lie,
images are copies: in memory he see the truth of his desire:
the woman who for love murdered and then killed herself,
leaving him free. This is a simple pattern, easily drawn: for
the love of a man, the daughter murders the father and then
murders herself. Why?
Whisper it: he is a betrayer.
Further, he is a betrayer in everything. Let us see an
example of it now.
The composition of the report has a different slant
now, from the perspective of an agent of the corporation. The
face that turns to him is now seen from a new angle, looking
down at a face that does not see him as an agent. The agent
26

knows more than the man hungry for invitation; the agent
knows what power commands him. The possibilities are
amplified: what he seeks is greater, what he can achieve is
greater. He is not a man facing a woman in a tropical hotel,
he is an agent facing a whole land, high mountains over there,
a wide red lake over there: the whole land a figure he cannot
name, the possibility not to be conceived. He is corporate
power, but directed by his own desire: he appears in this
strange land as an interpretation, and what he does there is an
interpretation. The woman facing him has a concept of him,
she sees him as a trajectory of power, vulnerable to her
precisely because she sees the trajectory, his life cycle, as it
were. She has her own desire, one she has exercised many
times before. But one flaw, a fatal flaw: she sees his
trajectory as real, if only because she sees it in the examples
of the trajectories of other men. She is over-confident. She is
also ignorant, and also too used to personal power to perceive
her own ignorance. She believes her power is greater than his,
seeing him as a man, not as an agent.
So, the middle ground in romantic: the convergence of
appeal what they will do to each other, for each other. The
reciprocation is fulfilled in the first instant, such is the scale
of the human soul. The remaining time together is surplus, at
the disposal of desire. Hence the charade of romance, roles
enacted, a drama to unfold. This is the form; then there is the
motivation. Not the desire, you understand the desire is
impossible, an answer to fear that cannot be named but the
truth behind all the masks. You are surprised to read this? Is
the truth so simple, so accessible? you ask yourself. I answer:
it is. Consider, your actions are true. They are done for a
27

reason. Why do you toil to build worlds? Why do you wear

yellow today? Why did it rain on your wedding day? Why are
you scratching your face? You see, the truth is that simple.
Let us consider the motivation.
What is your strongest, most abiding conviction? That
your world is real? Not a bad guess. But no, not simply that
your world is real that it endures. Yes? There is more. How
can you know what your strongest conviction is in its
entirety? It is the frame for all your being, guaranteeing all
your other beliefs. Yes, you believe in the endurance of your
world, in the past but also in the future. True? You see? Do
you agree that this is an astonishing belief? You believe your
world transcends death. Is this belief true? How could it be
true? Belief arises like desire. Thus belief is a response to
your fear: the truth that your world does not exist.
Consider: what you see is history; what you hear is
history; what you know is history; what you desire is history.
You live at a point, without dimensions, all that you are
having its being at that instant, the present. How long is now?
How wide?
That is the truth.
Romance lasts an instant, mutual recognition; after
that, redundancy. Who doesnt think of death at the inception
of love? What else follows on love but death? But...
In love, your death is at the disposal of the other. So
what if the woman murder the father on her way to her death?
Yes?
He does not think along these lines, of course. Perhaps
just as well. Does he want to consider his own death, at the
28

disposal of a dead woman who lives on in him as a name for

the truth he avoids? Yet she is there now.
The report. Snug in his office in the morning light, cars
on the access roads, he considers the accomplishment of
corporate command. He begins this report, as always, with a
glow of self-achievement; he does not notice that the name he
intends for this glow fades quietly. The admiration of his boss
becomes the glow of self-renunciation: he disappears into
what he believes he has achieved. What has he achieved? He
has achieved achievement. He has acted to fulfil a command
originating outside him; he has filled it, he a pipeline, the
filled thing an absence, a dead man in a foreign country. Yet
there is something in that absence: a space that is full. It fills
him with pride, that he has made something that does not
exist. He in some way fills that absence, but without
contradiction. An equilibrium of opposites here, his own
painful selfpresence stretched out as desire, and nothing, an
excavated world marked by absence through death.
Whose death? His own, of course. You see here the
truth of action. Contradictory, yes; absurd no. It is not
absurd, precisely because it is true. But the contradiction?
Superficially, anothers death is not your own death. Thus the
truth here is vulgar: displacement. But all your truth is vulgar,
how else can it be? Your world is vulgar displacement. I do
not mean to insult. If you think about it you will see. Let us
consider desire again. Where is the source of the object of
desire? Where else but desire itself? No, think. What else is
there but desire? Think. You desire that thing. That thing is
the object of desire, yes? How does desire know that thing as
its object? Because it was created as the object of desire.
29

Now, consider the trajectory of desire. From object to

object to object. From word to word to word. From value to
value to value. Why not one object, one word, one value?
You try, you try very hard to settle on one thing, one word,
constant value. The person you love; God, Country, the big
words with capital letters; you try to hold true to one value.
But what happens? Desire flows on and on, the desired object
is discovered in awe, filled with delight, it grows smaller as
you fill it up, then it has limits, horizons and you flow on
towards a new awe. Words lose resonance, values always
deflate. Desire is always displaced, can find no true home.
See that your universe is a shell of inadequate receptacles of
desire as well as the awesome object of desire. What then is
desire, if it cannot find itself in the objects its creates? You
find desire in the desire for the object but desire cannot find
itself in the object.
What motivates desire? What creates the objects for
desire? Put otherwise: what is the source of the power of
desire, the power you use to create, and to murder what you
create? Consider, if you were the object of desire, what then?
Would not such desire draw you to its source? Would you not
turn back to that source, which is drawn to you, which draws
you? Think about such a source, look for that source, and
what do you find? Nothing. And you say, the argument is
absurd. You say, if I am the object of desire, then some agent
of desire draws me; I can know such an agent.
I answer: you are always an object of desire; you are
always the husk of dissatisfied desire. You are never the
abiding object of desire except where you are a finality,
ostensibly in love, actually in murder. But you are an abiding
30

bearer of desire, always seeking to love, always wanting to

murder. I assert this of you. I assert the constancy of desire,
its falsification, its finality in death, the ultimate falsification,
the return of the object of desire to nothing. Which, I ask you,
is the better: the end of desire as death, or the source of desire
as nothing?
Do you see the trajectory of action now? Out of
nothing and into death. Do you see the truth of action now?
To act towards the object of desire is to act towards death. Is
that not a displacement of power? He sits behind his desk
considering such a displacement, momentarily relieved by the
displacement, he the agent of a greater desire than his, the
object achieved all the greater also. This is the name he can
now place on achieved love, a man murdered, a woman
selfmurdered, operation successful, objective achieved,
NOTHING gained. Do you see this now? He is happy to have
achieved nothing, believing this to be an accomplishment that
enhances him. He believes it prepares him for greater
achievement: in the woman he saw a whole country,
mountains on one side, a lake on another. He believes he
might someday gain the whole world as an object of desire,
even the whole universe.
He believes he might become a god.
This is what I mean by vulgar displacement. This is
how he conceives of desire, being an agent of desire, striving
to satisfy his desire, to find it an adequate home. Now,
released by physical equilibrium into the spiritual equilibrium
of a displacement death, his secretary and assistant arrive,
confer quietly until the assistant elects to tap on his door and
enter, corporate bonhomie straining his naturally cheerful
31

melancholy, and says, seeing his boss seated and selfsatisfied:

A successful trip, sir?
He focuses instantly and stares at his assistant, seeing
him afresh from a new perspective. He does not actually see
what he knows he sees: a disposal of power as potentiality,
selflimited. The self-limiting surprises him; he has never
considered that possibility. His assistant is a capability, not
powerful with reference to the resistance of the material, but
it is nonetheless judged, from some inner poise, to be
adequate for the circumstances found in the material
resistance. He seizes on the perceived inner poise at once, the
curiosity rising like a heat in him with a remarkable force, a
clean force, and sees in it, or about it, a kind of refraction.
The refraction is not simple, but composed of many
reflections of sorts, which regress in a way he cannot fully
comprehend, as though only one mirroring is involved. He
sees all this in an instant, staring at a point on the left side of
his assistants face. Then he sees, this time with a pure shock
to his pure curiosity, that what is reflected and refracted is not
his assistant, an aspect of his personality or character, but
something very different, another being altogether.
He must have shown shock, because his assistant
changed his expression in some small way and sight of the
inner pivot is lost, scrambled in a mess of exertion and
striving, a strong sense of someone screaming at length in
utter loss. Both he and his assistant pause at this point. The
assistant, he sees, is aware of what has been revealed. With a
slight disquiet, he wonders what he has, in turn, revealed. He
32

brings his hands up out of his jacket pockets and slaps them
on the table.
The feeling between them is embarrassment, and only
then does he realise that he has not considered the capability
of his assistant. It does not interest him, it is after all the
capability of a subordinate man. Yet he knows now that it is
important in itself, because it contains a principle of
limitation that might well explain the strange person he has
seen deep within his assistant. The word CAPABILITY
seems scored in his mind as the proper description; even so,
he finds he cannot conceive of what the word refers to. The
failure of conception in turn causes the word to dissolve, as it
were, and with it goes a range of insight into his assistant. He
knows already that his memories of what he has seen, which
are still clear despite the failure of conception, are like so
much chaff, like a memory of a room after the light has gone
out. He has an image of an eagle, wings spread for flying.
Then a sudden fear: he believes he is an eagle poised for
flight. The temptation to fly is as great as the fear of
plummeting down thousands of feet on to rocks below. The
sense of fantasy is overwhelming: what he is thinking is
simply not true, yet the temptation and fear are real.
Insanity is like that: succumbing to a temptation. In
him, it is a trick to do with memory, not so much a confusion
as a wilful overpainting, as it were. The concept of capability
is being presented to him in guise of a land to be taken, here
the eagle, there his assistants self-limitation, complementary
states permitting theft. The fantasy lies in part with the image
of the eagle that seduces him, but it lies in a less obvious, but
far more dangerous, way in the attitude he can not resist
33

taking to his assistants self-limitation, which he knows he

sees with reference, wrong as it is, to his subordination to
him. Answers are surrenders. Temptation is like that for him:
a loss of nerve again.
The girl pushes in from the outer office, widening the
gap at the door, puts a mug of coffee on his desk and steps
back to the side of the assistant. He cannot do it again, his
feet clammy in the rising heat of the room, and sees, as he
always sees, that her bra is too small, breasts smeared, the
cheap clothes imprinting straps, elastic bands, clips of
underclothes. He plops his palms on the desk, nails clean; the
woodchip board diffuses the sound immediately.
The girl says, a flat unyielding neutrality in her voice:
They want you to go down to Allcross as soon as you can.
The assistant says, a truck growling loudly as it
reverses into the store below, staring over his bosss rounded
shoulder out at the rank weed engulfing the ornamental
bushes on the slope of the hollow:
We saw it on the tele.
It is strange how his assistants capability is bent
towards him, divorced from the centre, yet with a centres
agreement. Its aura encompasses the girl, proposing
forgiveness a profound insight here for the mess
circumstance has made for a being who has been judged notideally-lovely at birth and who has made the best adjustment
to that circumstance possible, becoming thoroughly unlovely
without, a clinging angel within, a travesty of existence,
though achievable. At the same time the assistant is drawing
a new line through fantasy, cutting out the exotic, focusing up
the boundary where others fail you.
34

He has never seen this before: the assistant goes to

great lengths to guide him, almost to teach him. His
capability is a serpent, green in colour today. The assistant
shows the threat that cannot be confronted, the enemy that
cannot be killed, the fear that cannot be assuaged: showing
the truth in fantasy.
There is nothing false about the eagle if eagles there
must be. How much attention he gives to his nails, how little
to his teeth.
He nods for the benefit of his assistant and his girl,
conscious that he has not spoken for a long time.
For an instant he sees what is impossible: temptation
arises in himself NOTHING TEMPTS HIM.
For an instant he wails in a place he never visits, never
wants to visit. He will visit it one day, he knows, and find out
why he wails there.
How, he wonders briefly, a very pure insight this time,
can he pass the time till then?
He doesnt remember all the occasions on which he has
asked this question.

35

She lives the phantasy that she is married to the King.

She knows she is not the Queen, but that she has the power of
the Queen. The King is weak, depending as he does on the
police authority to protect him.
She has confidence in herself alone, because she can
bear great pain, which permits her to survive the weakness of
men. Such masochism engenders great desire: for her an
overwhelming desire for what in effect engendered the pain;
a desire to get back to that instant. Her strength to endure
pain arises from this desire.
She is lucky in this one regard: that she remembers the
inception of her agony. You do not, do you?
I will confess that except for this woman I do not
understand any of the characters in my show. I do not pretend
to understand life as you know it. I know and understand
what brought her pain into being, I know and understand
what keeps her going against all odds, and what it is she is
looking for. She is not brave; she is extremely foolish. She is
both gifted with the truth and accursed by ignorance. The gift
is unacknowledged, hence pain; she is possessed by the
human grasp for the tangible, hence ignorance: one is a
function of the other. However, by the agency of a destiny
beyond my understanding, this woman is to be given a
second chance; she is to be permitted the re-experience of the
birth of pain.
I will be candid here. I write that I do not understand
the destiny which favours her. I do not mean that this destiny
is greater than me, as it will appear to the woman, should she
notice it, to be greater than her. You know that the divine is
the limit of human experience. What you do not know is that
36

for the divine, its being exists, by reference to the human, as

motion pure and simple. The divine knows itself by this
reference; it does not know itself: if it did it would fall to the
level of the human. Nor do you know the nature of divine
being, not knowledge, as I have explained, but the sheer
motion-ness of motion, an utter agony of what can be best
called pure suspension. You see? The divine moves without
the comfort of time and space, geometry, even number, and
without the possibility of desiring an end. The life of a
divinity is of a being lasting an instant without limit.
I have revealed this in order to give us a perspective, as
it were, a context, for what I want written about this womans
destiny. Put bluntly: to the extent that I understand what this
woman is doing, rather than simply understanding what has
happened to her, I perceive this woman to have mastery over
her own life, even her fate, as you understand this word. This
is a very large thing to say, larger than I think you know. In
other words, it appears to me that this woman arranges to
have an experience, then suffers for thirty years to absorb it,
in order to re-enter that experience and this time grasp the
truth it bears. I am obliged to say this: I cannot lie, though I
am not certain of communicating the truth of what I see.
This final stage of her life begins when she leaves her
husbands house on the slopes behind the city and moves into
a small basement flat in a nondescript suburb on the west side
of the city. She does not have comfort, but she includes the
conventions of comfort in her new home: dominantly, a set of
cheap statues of cats, a television, and a too-warm duvet for
her bed. She brings her cat, of course, her freezer, fridge,
cooker, her box of documents, her medications. She has no
37

albums of photographs, music, no pictures for her walls, no

dinner service, dishes, tableware; no carpets, cushions,
cosmetics, dress clothes. She has a small garden, crams it
with flowers, works there in the afternoon, gives flowers to
all those who will take them, and has a contempt for
gardening. Her ailments: one breast removed, a plastic
vertebra in her lower back, headaches, wind, intermittent
bleeding from the anus of no discernible origin, sudden
breathlessness, loss of vigour, nightmares, excessive need for
sleep, incipient alcoholism, repressed hypochondria
producing obsessive anxiety. She relives her past constantly,
alternatively suffering guilt or sentimentality. She praises her
cooking, though what she produces is plain, overworked and
overcooked; but she eats with indifferent appetite, opening a
can for herself or grilling bacon. She has a tendency to
rapture rather than passion, and her cat has been treated a
number of times for what she and her vet have decided to call
severe constipation. She tries to have arguments with her
husband when he calls each morning to bring her groceries,
whisky, and whatever else she orders. She has had two
children, a son, who was taken from her and put away beyond
her reach, and a daughter by her husband, who has recently
moved away from home.
What I have told you here betrays no trust; further I
cannot tell you without betraying that trust. More you will
learn from what she will have to say. More you can infer, if
you understand her life.
She has six months to prepare herself in her new flat.
She finds a reliable taxi firm to provide transport promptly,
discovers how long it takes and how much it costs to visit her
38

two friends, one on Tuesday at noon, the other on Thursdays

at three. On Tuesdays she comes back at four, drunk, and
goes to bed. On Thursdays she comes back at six, reflective,
sentimental, and later in the evening lonely to the point of
terror. The woman she visits on Thursdays is old and getting
much older, she calls her mother, semi-serious. Tuesdays
visit is to a sister, this by analogy, for fun, solace, such
comfort as she trusts to permit herself, shouting at one
another, randy against all the fruits of experience. She takes
up the hobby of rugmaking, projecting to pursue it for the
remainder of her life, vividly static reproductions she works
with a tight neatness and gives to those who accept them. The
arguments with her husband are possible because he does not
argue back, contenting himself with deflationary statements
that she calls cynical and permits to inflame her further.
There is bad conscience between them, on his part because he
has failed to handle her properly, to make her happier, on
her part because she asserts that he has fooled her, though the
truth is she married for money and has not grown
comfortable with it. She feels a contempt for his greed, but
knows exactly how much he is worth and how this wealth is
composed, stocks, shares, properties, partnerships. She never
speaks about the fact that she will inherit most of it when he
dies, which he might do soon, he being much older than her.
You will notice a number of coincidences in this show.
Not my doing, but I dont intend going into the matter today,
if only because this material is easy to get down. He, the
fated man, views the flat on the ground floor on a Wednesday
afternoon. The agent and he encounter a very sharp looking
woman in the hall, pleasant professional manner. She is a
39

psychologist who specialises in hypnosis, and is arriving to

give the woman in the basement treatment to help her give up
smoking. As he accepts the tenancy of the flat, the woman
below is giving up smoking, for good as it turns out. She is
the better for this within a matter of days, skin freshened,
appetite improved, and the drinking slackened off mainly
because smoking and drinking are strongly associated. Her
mood lifts, too, morale becoming more buoyant, which
cheers her a lot, but she fails to grasp that, without the
depressant of nicotine, her feelings, raptures, agonisings,
guilts and sentimentalities will be subject to greater and
greater swings. Even as she experiences these gyrations later,
she does not associate the removal of the drug from her
system with her fearful hysterics.
The early months of summer are good, sun, little wind,
so temperatures rise quickly, promising another long dry
summer. This adds to her elation, and when the agent tells her
that a younger, single man is moving into the flat above,
everything seems to come together. Anticipation works on
her as she beavers away in isolation, until she sincerely thinks
that events will follow her wishes precisely. You must
understand that these wishes have no form, no narrative: they
are not a projected romance, walks in the evening and all the
rest of the paraphernalia that lead by diminishing steps of
increasing heat to that which cannot properly be imagined. It
is more like a shape, something fitting exactly, the shape, the
fitting unnameable but nonetheless there. See it as a kind of
habitation, a sign, a light that will shine on something already
present in the darkness. This is the happiest time, like
travelling in hope, like the first glimpse of dawn, like it being
40

December 24. You probably think that she is naive, churning

around in her little flat and garden, that she should know
through experience what to expect. What do you think
experience is? History? The lessons of history? What do you
know of your past? A few memories, selections determined
by goodness knows what hidden agenda, prompted by the
mood of the moment? How is a thin, frayed net like that of
more value than what she is living in and with at the moment,
with all its livingness? What then is experience? How wide is
it, how long? I say she lives in anticipation; really she is
living already that shape, a light constantly shining in on a
dark presence. The fault here lies not in naivet with regard to
her past, but her foolishness with regard to a putative future:
she thinks always that better is to come, as you all do, blind
to the fact that the best is already here. If only you knew how
to surrender to the obvious.

41

Allcross House in the business district is the national

headquarters of the multinational Allcross Corporation. It
occupies a suite on the top floor, renting the remaining twelve
floors out at premium rates. The corporation is like that:
ostensibly engaged in investigative research in the financial
sector, that is, chasing out fraudulent accountants and the
like, it makes most of its money through subletting, leasing,
re-leasing, re-re-leasing, getting itself into the middle of as
many deals as possible. Its hands are clean, the only tangible
product so much print out, the only labour the lifting of
telephones. The truth it exploits is a truth that requires a
certain position in the world markets: money is not real,
money is a balloon inflation of value for profit.
The national headquarters hosts eight men, three
women, five secretaries, a receptionist, and an accountant.
The workers are out in the field, comm lines to their homes,
the agent, his assistant and girl tucked away in another
property out in the suburbs, the rest of the unit rented out at a
premium rent.
You park in the basement and ride up to the top floor.
The receptionist takes you to the conference room, where
three men await you. Going there for him is a matter of
reversal, coming home, a voiding of action, the middle
excluded. It shows in his eyes. Rotating on infinitely long
levers, they probe all motions, ignoring the still. But motion,
under such scrutiny, has only one secret to divulge: trajectory
under way, from void to void, all motions an infinite regress
of one Ur-motion, it on the Void, one Void. This is the
meaning of reversal, one sign says HOME, experience tells
you home is beyond two horizons always. Dont you
42

understand the old hare and tortoise story? The tortoise was
slow enough to let the end come to him. How we dress up the
truth for you. Here this receptionist walks before him: each
surface he sees dissolves towards the next surface, receding
as he approaches. True? You know it is. He might look,
match, savour, read the Corporation body and its masks in
that moving form, but let him reach and what happens? The
recession is in him, horizons of recoil, opening up to him his
own void, his own lack of presence here. See? Surfaces are
sponges, a soft lattice of decimals. Number is a snare for the
foolish, the once and for all mask.
Three men behind the conference table. One file
defining the gleaming expanse of walnut. On the left the
communications director, the signer of contracts, a shelf life
of, say, eighteen months, then a good reference to we-dontwant-to-know-where. Behind corporate communication lies
the parallel universe of silence, a necessary complement, the
very condition of statement. On the right, the operations
director, good pedigree, hard mask of will riddled with sloth,
always wishing to relent the better to force. Behind corporate
power there lies the profound timidity that betrays
capitalisms origins in organised religion: celibacy become a
business suit. In the centre, the chief, a conduit, the one who
exists by virtue of his absence. Behind corporate control lies
the knowledge of evanescence: the cold drift and decay of
things. Money is the souls deceit: wicked as the poets
conceit. Behind them, a fire is burning among the houses on
the far side of the river: its orange flare intense and wavering
in the misty air.
43

He is shown to a seat facing them across the table. The

greeting is perfunctory, among employees, and after nails are
checked, ties smoothed down into jackets again, hair patted,
file repositioned, practice glances across the room, operations
says: You were cautioned that the contact was volatile. The
city spreads up the east slopes, as it does up the north and
west slopes not present on view, a tumble evincing
desperation to build a way out of a pit. The few houses that
poke free at the ridge seem, in their blank faces, to report a
new despair, seeing worse horrors on the other side. The blue
smoke of the raging fire crosses rooftops, drifting seawards.
Each house, street, poky park, everything over there, tells him
the same story of restriction: you bear your cage, thinking
you find it around you in the things you name. The word
CAGE brings her face again, turning as always, fresh now
that she has not presented herself to him for hours. What can
you do with such promise but destroy, destroy, fight your
way out. Communications says, pacing himself with the tenor
of the meeting, the complexities that cannot be referenced:
Our interest is always positive, as Im sure you appreciate.
Situations are evolving organisms. A silence is now
intended. The four of them consider reward: only the weak
look for enemies, contemplate justice as punishment. The
legal system as a net, flexible, entanglement rather than
restraint: a fractal surface of barely understood prudence. Her
face makes a nonsense of such things, even as it makes
nonsense of any alternative, except destruction: love as
impatience. The city, seen in her face, is a desert, a never
ending reminder of what is always lost to you, each brick,
each cherished possession a denotation of an instants failure.
44

Are you too fast or are you too slow? The promise is always
promised, I agree with you on that. If not this instant, then
perhaps you will be ready for the next instant: something like
that? The future is always better? But, are you forgetting that
each instant, each passing now, is an event nonetheless; that
if you do not take, then something is given in that instant?
How many thousands of years of now has accumulated that
given, this accretion of husks you call the world, tradition,
history, science, philosophy, theology, art? How you increase
ignorance with each advance of knowledge? How you
increase sloth with each advance of technology? How you
increase malice with each advance of comfort? Seen in the
city, her face fades, afflatus the energy of its own decay,
steam rising among the flames, dark smoke pumping up on
heat waves, billowing until the resistance of air freezes it into
a deformed mushroom. Operations shivers ever so slightly,
someone walking on his grave, he thinks, and he frowns,
curling his tongue around the inside surfaces of his teeth. A
ripple runs from him to directorial colleagues, corporate
symbiosis, how well trained they are, and their chief says, A
set-up. He sees immediately the possibility in that: not
paranoia, as one less than him might believe, but his
extension into other recesses, seeing a recursive power that
united two separate beings, a deeper proof of love, identity.
Her design finding in him the power: his power finding in her
the... Will is so dark, only metaphor suffices: understand
freedom as a state that is also a capability and a permission,
how light goes forward as a presence, exhaustion in its train.
Something that flares into being by its own destruction. He
feels immeasurably stronger in understanding this: the kind
45

of strength that arises as it is required by that which opposes

it. He is stronger through his greater weakness, seeing more
clearly how profoundly he is displaced now seeing more
clearly the meaning of the, now red, eagle, beating its wings
against that which contradicts its presence. Like the eagle and
its wings, he feels recreated at every instant, expiring into
nothingness and appearing from nowhere at every instant. He
exists between women now, a trajectory with an objective.
There is joy in fatality, as your Nietzsche learned from my
Greeks, an overwhelming excess of power, pure freedom
burning up in its own glory.
So love breeds destruction.
An eruption in Communications face brings him to
say: And she burned the documents. The chief looks
sideways towards him. Operations places the fingertips of his
right hand on the file before him. The chief frowns at his
junior colleagues indiscretion, says across the table, the
disclosure loosening the mood in the room somewhat,
permitting intimacy, We dont yet know whose interest was
served.
The fire is extinguished, emphasising the sterility of
the occupied slope beyond the river. The clouds massing
about the interior mountains seem darker now. But dark as
they are, clouds are only so much shadow, so gradations of
light are always apparent to those who look closely enough.
This he does now, burning as he is, taking the risk of
concentrating his vision at such a distance. Sure enough, his
sight reaches out to the clouds and the clouds approach
obediently and he sees the turmoil of light, his eyes stinging
at such intensity of glare, something in his head open in a
46

way he never thought possible. He sees that the recursive

produces patterns at every level, precisely because it is an
ordering principle, a scalar of wholeness perceptible in
principle if not always existentially. There is identity, not in
individual form or being conceived as entity, but in the
trajectory, the relation that must obtain in order that anything
at all appears to be; in order that such entities be perceived,
known, an order must already exist between them and the act
of perception, the act predicated upon relation, always more
than potential, already there as an all-embracing sameness,
without dimension or duration. It is, he knows knowledge
he will instantly forget afterwards present to him in the
continuum of his awareness, a guarantee, a presence much
like a guardian angel, securing his well-being, his good, as
part of the well-being, the orderedness of all.
The secretary enters the room, carrying a round silver
salver, on which is arranged a black flask and four ambertinted tiny glasses with extraordinarily thin stems. The liquid
is deep red, and it flows viscously into each glass, trembling
like mercury, the red dimming in the amber glow within each
glass until it takes on the black-tan-brown of congealed
blood. The chief raises his glass to him, his colleagues follow
suit; the chief smiles at him, smiling someone elses smile for
him, and says:
Well done. A first class piece of initiative.
Operations smiles too and amplifies, his chief turning
to look at him while he speaks:
Neat act of containment.
They pause in silence, glasses raised to him, and he
replies simply, seeing the niche they have interpretatively
47

made for him, the corporate trajectory discovered in him and

so for him:
Hhh.
The four drink then, the spirit acting on several levels
at once, aroma, burn, heat, delineating each to each like a
diagnostic judgement, all four of the same pattern and
disposition, four lines described across many dimensions,
corporate lines, existential lines, cosmic lines: anagogic lines
of crucial importance and at the same time the collective
phantasy of four men eminently disposable in the blunder of
ignorance that is the human plane of being. But it is like that
all the time. You have such a long way to go: gullible, duped
at every instant, belief in something unavoidable at any
instant; reactive scepticism always coming too late, the crud
of assent already installed and part of the machinery of
denial. You go that far in order to have something to hold on
to. His eyes burn him, and such is the intensity of his focus
that each of the directors is lit from within by the bright red
of his meat, red like fire coruscating up through their skin,
darkening their clothes, dimming the misty sunlight at the
window behind them. Then he breaks through into them and
sees back along their lines to what guides them, drives them,
rides them with complete certainty: the same gleam of desire,
the same darkness of will, the same veiled icon.
The communications director replaces his glass on the
table with such force that the stem breaks, obviously the first
time he has partaken of this ceremony. Operations pushes the
file across the table and nods towards it. He opens it. The top
sheet is a form, the relevant space filled with typewritten
48

characters. One word stands out, which measures the weight

of the assignment:
MOLESTATION
The chief says, as he thinks of interference, a matter of
interpretation perhaps: We have to tender for some of these.
Public service. Corporate policy. He glances down at the
portrait on the end wall to his left. She insists on it.
Operations adds, hand extended to him, fingers splayed, nails
very pink: Look, use your initiative here. Take the
opportunity. He takes the file and stands up. The three
directors stand up in response. The sun is shining on the
clouds over at the mountains. It shines on the city below, seen
through all the windows around the room now.
Thoroughfares radiate, bridges over the river, snaking away
towards the slopes all about. The pattern is human, a web of
containment, the ridges boding despair: cities take so long to
grow, live, and decay, transcending any comfortable room,
indifferent to all hope, but permitting some kind of discovery,
some kind of momentary knowledge.
He spreads his wings, his own fantasy, secure in his
own fate everything possible.
The receptionist tips her hand thus, suggestively, as he
leaves, which distracts him. It takes him a long time to
recover, again in traffic, this time returning to his old disgust
for police work, his old hatred of trivial charges,
opportunistic justice.

49

Each street has its currents, eddies, pools, stagnant

water. She flows on the currents in the dim light, aware of
every turbulence and drift, circulating in this nights tide. I
say the characters in this show pursue their good. Do you
know what this means? It means that they permit a basic
disposition to perfection to rule and that they submit to this
disposition with all their courage, this courage part of the
disposition. It means, then, that they are repelled by what
they come to loath, and by this means discover the trajectory
of their disposition. You can see that this disposition is from
the larger social perspective potentially dangerous:
disposition knows no law, no control but its own perfection.
How then is such a disposition, once it is discovered in act, to
be controlled? Surely, only by a power that is equally free?
Yes. Not by prison or fine, psychiatric institution or the
ransom of great wealth or fame, but by murder in a police
cell, by a bullet in the back by obscure final violence.
Crimes of passion are mitigated by convention; acts of pure
disposition are punished in passion. Disposition is punished
out of hand because the search for the good is a judgement on
human society, and the punishment arbitrary because no one
can define the laws restricting the disposition to perfection
without betraying the very nature of human law.
You may be asking yourself: How is this disposition
permitted? The method is simple, though, given the weakness
of language, difficult to describe accurately. It is like
abandoning a picture-book mind. You live by concept now,
without virtue: you must ask of concepts if they can be
enacted by you. Act then if you can, otherwise annihilate that
concept. By act I mean to begin from nothing, to fill the void
50

that actually surrounds you at all times. From what I say you
may deduce that disposition is already present in you. It is: it
is the condition of your being alive and reading this. It is
immanent, potential, warped to different degrees: it is the
condition of your world, of the imperfection arising from
your search for perfection. This city is such a world, its
currents, for those who perceive them, warps containing, as
all such humans worlds do, a surplus, as it were, the degrees
of frustrated dispositions, that overflows from each of you all
the time, the fabric of that city, a continuum, sometimes
materialised in bricks and metal, a tainted air, sometimes a
mood, a spirit of a place, sometimes a voice crying in the
desert of your worlds. She perceives the currents, although
immaturely, aware, like all her age, of their presence as a
brute attraction, for her a medium she sails upon. The
metaphor helps her. She has not yet names for the subtle
distinctions of pain, misapplied hopes, agonies of frustration,
the shames of temptations permitted. Instead, her boat senses
shifts in temperature, cross-currents, polluted seas, stagnant
waters, an intricate flow and counterflow, crossflow,
cancellation, all impinging somewhere in her she imagines,
to give this sense a habitation, it lies across the vee of her
groin, taut cool skin, sensorium in the durational span of
being: an attenuation that delights her, attention directed
outwards as though pain is a light in itself.
The Lonesome Hill Road area: long straight road
carrying heavy goods traffic from the industrial sectors up
river down to the port. Container traffic nowadays, a variety
of artics and four-axled trucks roaring and snarling up and
down a thoroughfare made narrower by bounding mature
51

sycamores, blue haze of exhaust fumes in the trees, a

cacophonous muck on the pavements, small terraced houses
with blaring televisions. The density of the citys temper can
be understood here: fatigue, the gravity of the human cosmos,
the absolute limit placed on human endeavour, desire, and
pain. Fatigue is the abiding narcotic, all human actions aimed
at that one conclusion, to exhaust and exhaust that which in
you is capable of perceiving in fear and terror. Your work and
play are a matter of keeping one step ahead of the terrible
knowledge you are born into; you flay your soul
continuously, fearing its still truth, its invitation: your life is
one long scream as you race ahead, all labour, violence,
intoxication, laughter, no more than this scream in one mode
or another. Your art indulges in fear and terror as a last resort,
proving the nullity of language and image, that they are
merely another means to keeping truth at bay. You fear all
silence, all stillness, all darkness, all emptiness, all attraction,
fearing above all temptation, seen in all your expansion
without limit: seeing truth as an insanity, utter alienation
from pain and effort, from the pressure of the material that is
the limit you strive to make for yourself.
She drifts here tonight, now twenty minutes before
midnight, traffic quiet, flashing brilliant colour in each living
room, exhausted men women and children lost in the latest
enchantment, your pain and fear permitted a fugitive
existence, electrons with lives of nanoseconds, each flicker a
revelation, each image flashing the truth in a second, just as
the mystic receives his truth but too many flickers, too
many images, your souls deliberately flooded, overloaded, a
hall of mirrors reducing truth to multiple self reflection, a
52

futility of enforced ignorance, a deliberately redundant

chatter designed to fill up duration. And yet. You cannot
avoid the truth; every trick you employ, all your waste and
excitation speaks the truth over and over: you are a void, you
are, as one of my Greeks wrote, the STRANGEST OF THE
STRANGE. You bear otherness, difference, emptiness,
overwhelming reach within you as your very life-ness. You
bear responsibility, and each of you knows there is absolutely
no excuse for the fact of your existence. Nothing knows you,
all are helpless before you. Gods cannot know you, nature
cannot know you: you are all-power over these beings,
commanding gods and matter; they are the surplus of all your
actions, dead artefacts of a mis-used soul, the soul a window
made mirror.
These are the currents she floats on, down this street,
up this road, in and out of the light pools of street lamps. She
passes in invisibility, men lounging do not notice her, kids on
street corners glance at her without comprehension, women
betray their anxiety in her presence. The currents draw her
along. Cars abandoned for the day at kerbs and in driveways,
the gloom of fatigue turned elation now becoming the tedium
of consciousness abandoned to sleep, dreams, midnight
grope, people launching on the sea with the prior condition of
unknowingness. She drifts: water here cool, there warm, now
stagnant and impure, then flowing the flow an index of a
rise blundering into cross-currents, a man and a woman
arguing in a doorway. Sometimes the river is seen below, its
darkness limned by quay lights, sometimes other hills and
ridges reveal themselves, house lights in random pattern,
comforting, streetlights in rows, sometimes the lights of a car
53

on a high road: such lights have presence, tending to

significance, but light is only evidence, not truth light is
only an echo in the dark. She registers the currents in other
ways. As always, the voice tells her to fall, to fall. The
lassitude is her tendency to fall, a figurative arching back, a
rising up of something below, overthrowing her. Despair
registers here as an indulgence, a sentimental closure; joy is
hysteria, tears comfort and laughter an animal cry of
incomprehension. Passion is the pursuit of ghosts, possession
the obsession with toys; happiness is relief and forgetting,
sadness a glimmer of the truth. Anger is sufferance
overcome; sufferance is the permit of the other, a pause, a
delicate veil over your panic. Love is the most troubled sea,
cross-currents, hot and cold; she rocks on love when it is
encountered, as though far from land, compass spinning, and
the temptation, she knows without reflection, is to give
direction to love, to resolve the turmoil for the sake of
prudence. But it is not her love, so on she sails, flowing this
way and that, crossing streets, pausing before houses, corner
shops, pubs, noting cracked pavements, oil stains, dogshit,
trash, without motivation. She drifts uphill, tending along
streets away from the river, passing tenements, terraces,
detached residences, under lamps, under trees, buses here,
racing cars there, the last couples hurrying home to end a
date.
Montpelier is always quieter at night, yet an endless
movement in the bedsits, singles apartments, restaurants,
nursing homes, brothels; surreptitious movement, passion
curtailed to vice, knowledge reduced to pattern drained of
significance, motion certified by timidity, truth sought in
54

apathy. Here beauty, grace, acceptance are hunted as

attributes hung like masks; money, energy, open hearts
offered as graces, aristocratic values shunted away on to this
hill, Platos forms worshipped amidst the slick of abnegation,
vanity among vanities: soul ensnared in a backroom. Any
wonder then the petty transgressions, mayhem some night,
beatings, strangulations, diseases passed? You dont
understand me? Why are such things petty? All crime,
transgression, diseases are petty. Do you understand that?
Dont you see that these things are signs of failure? Dont
you understand that there is only one failure, and that this
failure is final? Do you think you can abjure responsibility?
Or that you can make rules to suit yourself? I cry for words
now, wanting at last to teach: your soul is true and therefore
real. Your soul cannot resist you, it will bend to your will,
your deception, illusion, stupidity, arrogance, your terror of
it, your terror of your own soul. But it nonetheless remains
real, and its truth permeates your failure, making a reality of
your failure. Do you understand this?
Let me try examples. Your soul is beauty, as it is all
things your soul is the source for you of all things in heaven
and earth. You seek beauty outside, that is your delusion.
You find it in another and you reach to possess it. Your soul,
in obedience to you, makes that beauty real. What happens?
The real terrifies you; you destroy what terrifies you you
destroy that beauty your soul had made real. You disfigure,
wound, make ugly. Your soul recoils then. You are left with
nothing, again.
Your soul is energy being to itself. You seek energy
in money, in motion. Your soul makes money, motion real
55

being. It terrifies you. Money burns you, motion makes you

mad. You spend money, grasping for all money for the sake
of ridding yourself of your fear of money. You exhaust
motion, moving faster and faster, finding no end to motion.
The energy of your soul pours into money, motion, until you
disfigure, wound, make ugly, using money, motion to
destroy.
You are left with nothing. That is failure.
You ask, what should I do instead? She moves along
the dark streets, darkness lurking in long driveways, decrepit
gardens, overbearing houses. Music here, clubs, parties,
razzmatazz in the night. She moves patiently, though tiring in
the thin waters here, the current drawing her along. The seas,
though thin, clash: choppy waters, geysers of spray, a sea
driven on itself, gravity uncertain. This is a sea for sinking in,
drowning in futility. But she knows that these waters are in
turmoil below, bottomless like all her seas, clashing deep
below in utter darkness, aimless violent water, the noise
overwhelming. But she also knows, adolescent wisdom, that
only where the noise is greatest can stillness be found. Two
in the morning now, street lights of the old city down by the
port glittering below, the dark pool of the estuary beyond,
lighthouses flashing, buoys flashing, ocean under starlight
beyond, bridge projecting to perfect horizon. Lights on in
lonely rooms, TV flicker elsewhere, patience a screen against
an impossible, incredible despair of isolation. Weirdos in
rooms muttering mantras, old bags ventilate on memories of
early rapes, kids with needles, tabs, sniffs, smokes, burn-outs
staring into corners, budding artists feeling their pulses for
56

the next image a crazed sea of chopped water, bad for a

boat not guided by a willingness to fall.
To fall. Begin to fall and the world is put at a distance,
you register distance as a flare. You see that difference is a
trajectory from there to there, an exhaustion of sorts. This
mans obsession lasts an instant, for him an eternity. This
womans need consumes itself, for her an ache reaching to
the end of her earth. This girls hunger, that boys greed, an
instant of forgetfulness, to them a soul seduced, a truth
overwhelming. One rule in falling: no reflection the soul is
a window on eternity deep. Think and you believe it takes an
eternity to fall; believe and you lose patience, that is, faith.
Lose faith and you fall in another way, seeing death at your
elbow, death under your nose, death in your coat pocket,
death in a lovers smile, death the promise in everything:
suicide in the guise of life. So she falls through this sea,
washed by the surfeit of endeavour, desperation masked as
fun, terror reworked into desire, sensation bludgeoned to
stupor. She falls up over Lonesome Hill and then over
Montpelier, the river coming into sight again, the dark reach
from mountain to sea, endless return, circulating water for
variety. The Castle is lit by a trick of streetlights, a dance of
crenellation, flimsy skin surrounding nothing, a cake tin.
Whitehawk serene, bourgeois peace of mind, morality as
rationalisation, one step ahead of doom as always. Then the
STILLNESS, suddenly, quite specific, moving among trees
in a park. The attraction is powerful, relief like termination,
the welcome in her a fatalism, the solid world around
crumbling like a wet cobweb in the face of that shadow.
57

The attraction is infinite, of course, and depends for its

force on the movement of the shadow, that it always remains
beyond reach. She is towed through the trees slowly, the
shadow flitting among the dark trunks, at times ahead, at
times behind, swinging about her like a most caring
companion. The park is extensive, woods and open grass,
playing fields, running tracks, cafes, a charming restaurant
straddling a carp pond, a prominent well filled now with
cartons and cans, dogshit at every step, squirrels, owls, and
fox, running the river side of Montpelier above the railway,
in daylight affording extensive views of the coastal hills,
cliffs, sea and bridge (no one looks down at the old town or
decrepit port). She cruises these waters, deep and dark, for
ever, following or being followed by her attractor, wandering
here over open park, there through a copse, the perimeter of
the boating lake, avoiding the few lamps not smashed for
momentary diversion, until she/they reach a secluded street
running directly out from a side gate. Tall houses on either
side, a secluded avenue dating from an earlier time, the
terrace extending further on the left side, the street ending in
high railings overlooking, from here, a void. She finds eddies
in the street, slow here, rapid there, a deliberate gyration, she
knows, drawing her to some centre, stillness, silence, perhaps
the place of falling at last. She flows down past houses, no
cars here, trees limp in the night air, a trundling somewhere
beyond the railing, the midnight train from the capital inland.
She skirts the railing now, the flow slack, and turning she
sees the figure in the doorway, a flash of white face, and as
she looks at the face, the still centre changes, silent as before,
58

but an absence now, an absence such that falling is no longer

possible.
Unaccountably, she faces the first restriction in her life:
a limit to descent. Is she surprised? Yes, at first. Below her a
train moves slowly through a washer, the thrash of the bushes
punctuated in a pleasant way by the click of wheels over gaps
in the rails, the hiss of water a white noise that says
something else entirely.
Then she understands. Momentarily surprised, too, at
this point. Then, coincidence excepted as it must be in this
show it makes perfect sense. Absolutely perfect sense.
She nods. Limits are ambiguous, the deepest
temptations.
A red light turns to a double amber set below. A train
rustles behind her, a mechanical ant in a mechanical universe.
The light in the window above the doorway is a radiant
green, other electrons in the red wavelength running basso
like paprika on lettuce. BLOOD ON THE ROSE she sees,
wondering why symbols are needed.

59

Her preparations are assiduous. Instinct tells her to

serve him well, where serving will be most valued. This
means in the first instance cleaning and scrubbing. Not one of
her vocations, cleaning of course needs ulterior motivation,
though such motivation need not be named, just held in
suspense as a room beyond an open doorway, as it were. She
does the work conscientiously, starting with the flat (having
the key the agent gave to keep an eye on the place),
scrubbing, washing, polishing all surfaces. Unavoidably, her
work is erratic, her vigour too great for her maimed back,
active limb muscles inducing painful torsion in her trunk, the
reaction to effort wearying as the effort itself is not. Cleaning
floors is easier than walls, gravity assisting, but it is
important that the furniture especially is polished properly.
Her face is set, serious, earnest, at times solemn, gravitas an
index of the degree to which she finds herself in these
activities. She finds herself good then, doing good a good
girl again good enough to be loved, admired, to be valued.
Such goodness overwhelms her on occasions, once while
polishing the wardrobe in the bedroom, once in the evening
poking wool into her carpet-base, bringing tears to her eyes, a
feeling of wholeness, completeness, full presence, feeling
herself better than everything about her, feeling herself the
source of the worth of everything she knows and experiences.
At night after such a breakdown she lies in suspension, peace
a tautness of her whole body, seeing herself a centre of
power, piling up the gift she is to bestow on the man that is
coming to her. She calls this sensation love: deeply
mysterious, she believes though she commands this love
it is like a beam of light from a torch in her, shining into a
60

dark she will not ever fear, the light making this man who is
coming to her.
I call this state expansion. It is faulted, as you can see,
a projection of her ego: she is inventing a future to banish a
past. Pain coming here, you surmise no doubt, very great
pain, possibly death, yes? But there you are. Let it be a
lesson. This woman of experience, of pain I have not yet
detailed, of terrible deeds, forgets on an impulse all she has
learned from her life, pain, actions, and turns instead into a
child of anticipation awaiting Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Let that be a lesson.
He comes first on a Wednesday evening. She hears the
key in the front door, knowing instantly it is not the shit from
the top flat (who never responds to her greetings). Then in the
room above her; she feels the flat tread of his shoes pressing
down on her. He pokes about in the kitchen, the rattle of the
oven door, the squeak of taps as he tests the water, the
whump of the fridge door closing. He stands at the window,
looking down into her garden. A chair is moved, chipping
against a table leg. She moves like a shadow below him, a
demon in a mirror-underworld, following him into the
bedroom. She knows before he does it, that he will test the
bed, look underneath it, open the wardrobe, rifle the metal
hangers on the rails, try the chest of drawers, draw a curtain,
kick against a chair near the door. Then the bathroom: piss
and flush the toilet, test the taps of the bath, test the
composition of the bath (plastic), open the compartment
above the sink, look at himself in the mirror she cleaned,
open the little wastebin with his foot, see the clean liner she
put there knowing he is taking all this for granted. Then
61

into the living room, the settee she worked hard on, the easy
chair she improved by adding a heavy cushion, the gleaming
table and chairs, the stand for his television, the shelves for
his books, the drapes she washed and ironed, the glass
fronted cabinet she found in the garden shed and restored
now dressing the bareness of the old sideboard, drawers
washed and lined with brown paper, the mustiness chased
from the shelving below. He scuffs the carpet, as she
expected, and finds no dust, a flowery deodorant instead,
peers out the clean window at the setting sun, the street quiet
below at this hour, closes the window she had left open to air
the flat, draws the drapes closed then open again, drums the
table, kicks a chair. Sneezes loudly, mutters, blows his nose,
feet treading the carpet towards the door. A click, a second
louder click of the lock at his front door, in the hall, slams the
street door. He takes all his presence with him.
She is surprised at this, and sits down at her table,
setting sun bright in her clear window, and thinks about the
fact that he has taken all his presence with him: what this
signifies.
I write that she thinks about a fact. What does this
mean in her case? What do we mean by SHE THINKS? What
does she mean by FACT? Consider that language operates
without external influence, that it has its own origins,
purposes, ends. The world of language is a perfectly selfcontained universe. It can be used with reference to your
everyday world, but that is only a very minor use of its
power, as anyone who understands the power of language to
persuade knows. You have had the experience, I am sure, of
suddenly conceiving a phrase like Dogs lie. or All Shining
62

Bright. or Going down. or Sturdy Three. while changing

gear, checking if clothes are dry, shaving, being annoyed by
another, upon waking up. You have moods and feelings of a
kind where you deliberately prevent the words coming to
consciousness, when you say I dont know what is the matter
with me. believing, BECAUSE YOU KNOW ALREADY,
that such words will engulf you, that in some way, akin to
how you conceive of insanity, you WILL BECOME THOSE
WORDS.
Consider becoming a word. Let us say, APPLE. Not
that you come to believe that you are an apple, as in some
parody of insanity, but that the POWER OF THE WORD
APPLE possesses you. Can you permit yourself to grasp that
experience? Do so, and you know what divinity is like. Let
one word possess you and then at once all words possess you,
and in their possession you find that you are all words, all the
power of their meaning. You find you know everything. It is
important that you understand this, otherwise you will not
understand this woman, or what happens to her, or what she
does. To know everything is not to know what happened,
what is happening, or what will happen in your world. It is
not to know that object intimately, or what SUBSTANCE
means, or what the Mind of God is like, as though knowing is
some kind of popular mysticism. To know one thing is to
know everything, and in knowing one thing EVERYTHING
ELSE finds its place. It is like finding out where you are on a
map, so that everything else around you then has its place on
that map, so that you can then find anything else you want to
find. At the same time, in being possessed by a word, you at
once recognise your ability to be possessed by a word, and at
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once your ability to be possessed by all words, and at once

recognise who you are and, far more important, what you are.
This is what she discovers this evening when she
knows that he has taken his presence with him. She knows at
once that she is certain of this knowledge, that is the facticity
of what she knows, and her thought concerning this fact is
like an immersion in the sea of this fact, his presence being
solely his, her presence being solely her own, how she has
wasted her life preserving another presence, that angry,
hysterical, crippled, interfering bag of abysmal terror she had
previously called her SELF. This thought requires an instant
of concentration, of submission, and she welcomes it, the sun
dropping towards the sea beyond the opposite houses, going
from gold to bronze, sky more green, night coming on at her
back. She understands what sin is, and sees that in
submission she has to expiate sin, that she will need to
observe her SELF work its own stupid, blind, grasping
megalomaniac destiny out with its appropriate partner. She
sees the fruits of sin, of her fear, sees though only vaguely,
from the corner of her eye, as it were that it too has a part to
play, a complex of coincidence, a group of souls, as it were,
enacting again, with perhaps a grain of new understanding,
the show that sometime, aeons hence, might lead to some
kind of truth, to some new kind of truth, and so on and so on
into a place where time does not matter, where transcendent
knowledge when achieved is merely a term report in a
school beyond ones comprehension, a school where you are
kept back until you come up to grade, a school you could
never drop out of, a school you absolutely have to graduate
from in some universe, some aeon, some reality or other.
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She is surprised to find that she can live with this

knowledge, knowing at the same time that this knowledge
will make no difference to the experience she has to undergo.
Thus she discovers what experience is, becoming, though it
will be long, long before she knows this, like the gods
themselves.
Her cat, sensing her relative contentment, leaps up on
to the table and approaches her, head bent slightly to one
side, tail erect, anticipating the precise way her mistress
strokes her, palm arched over her head, inner forearm
brushing her side, the palm sliding back, the arm falling to
the table, a caress that brushes her head, the side of her neck,
shoulder and upper foreleg, the fingers grazing deliciously
along her flank, the stiff tips bouncing on her ribcage. The cat
arches its back, tail stiffening further, and its anus opens
momentarily, releasing, as always, a little puff of sour gas.
I hope you understand that this woman gains this
particular illumination by means of an absence, by grasping
what was not available to her. She learns a truth by filling
that absence.
She castigates herself now, forgetting, as she will for
aeons to come, that the act of knowing requires courage, a
courage amounting to faith. She fails to see, as she will fail to
see for some aeons, though less time than her understanding
of courage will take, that this courage is already witnessed in
her actions, how she does things thoroughly, working with
even intent over periods of time to complete commonplace
tasks, like making rugs, like cleaning a flat for a man she
believes she has not yet met.
65

Jammed behind his desk today, sun blazing outside,

roof at his head red-hot, wool nibbling the smooth skin of his
knees. In the warehouse below a pig runs loose from what
must surely be an illicit sty, its squeals offensive as it charges
about upsetting boxes and machinery. His assistant sits on a
hard chair facing him across the desk. Here thunder about his
eyes is the only sign of oppression, while at the door his
secretary fingers her right ear, an indication that the frantic
activity below interests her more than the exchange between
her boss and his assistant. He has already swung into his
boss-act, tossing the slim file down on to his bare desk with
the comment:
WHO ARE THEY KIDDING?
His left hand is now tucked awkwardly into its
respective trouser pocket, the fingers of his other hand
drumming lightly on the desk beside the file. He is on about
three levels at the moment, tending to a catastrophic collapse
to one of those levels, which one he does not yet know. One
level has a fat arse wagging in a hallway at seven thirty in the
morning. A second level has a face disappearing for the
millionth time. The third level sees a succession of
photographs of young men and women in physical and
mental conditions that dont make sense. Each level has a
kind of name, really a charge of response given a name
because reaction is either futile or dangerous. Level one is
OFFERING; level two is SACRIFICE; level three is
MURDER. The reactions are: one, murder; two, surrender;
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three, terror. The heat in the office is not bothering him too
much this morning, except for the itchy knees, about which
he can do nothing, not having enough room. The pig he
hardly hears because blood is rushing in his ears like water
down a fall. He sees the impressed nipples of his secretary as
an affirmation, but the pallor of his assistant conveys
information that has nothing to do with heat.
Drumming his fingers, he looks as though he is
working his way to a decision part of his boss-act in fact
he is trying to isolate words to prevent contamination at the
wrong levels. In the days since his conference in the city he
has had glimpses of the disquieting possibility that in some
way his judgements, and consequent actions, conform to
tendencies in him that point towards an awful conclusion. It
is not that he thinks he is insane, or that he is going insane,
but more like discovering that he is perfectly true to himself,
and that this self is some kind of weird being, a literal
stranger in a strange world. He suspects, usually late at night,
that he does in fact come from another planet, even another
universe. Not an entirely unusual insight, perhaps, reasonable
from some perspectives in this alienated world, but what
shakes him are the answers to the question: WHY WAS I
PUT HERE? Sometimes he believes he is in exile, a fall from
grace, as it were; but sometimes, when he is truly in the pit,
he sees that he has been put here to destroy this world. On
mornings after the latter insight he always cleans his teeth
twice, once upon rising, a second time after shaving.
You can appreciate why the levels he totters between
trouble him, they contain choices in words he understands but
in images that overwhelm him. You will no doubt appreciate
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why he wishes to isolate certain words for the benefit of his

assistant: policy on the file lying before him on the desk says
that action in that regard should be disinterested, swift and
cheap, a matter of public relations, that a rich multinational
investigative corporation has time to serve local police forces
in their tedious cost-noneffective operations, putting first
class brains to work on behalf of a beleaguered society. But
the file tells him something entirely different: someone is
setting someone up for an as-yet unclear end. His analysis:
1.
Government is out to embarrass Allcross because
of some information the latter has managed to obtain.
2.
The police department of the city is trying to get
an important, baffling case solved on the cheap.
3.
A rival company or a company hurt by Allcross
is out to ruin them.
4.
Allcross is going to break him for ruining the
South America assignment.
5.
Someone (nameless) is testing him, in order to
(a) assess him for a very important assignment; (b) demonstrate
his true nature.

Anyway, he has isolated one word, it coming to him

like a flower tumbling over the brink and descending the fall
into a clear pool, turning turning about in the various eddies:
it is NIGHT, the flower dark blue but not quite violet, leaves
shine green with moisture. So he says to his assistant,
pitching his voice with reference to the rush in his ears, the
words coming out like a bark:
He operates in a closed orbit.
The thunder in his assistants eyes make him appear
manic, which he is, though during working hours it is
68

disguised as a thorough inoffensiveness, a trick learned

during his time as a policeman down in the city. He holds his
bosss eyes a moment longer than he ought to, to convey
deep affinity, and replies, one ex-policeman to another:
A midnight rambler, sir?
Exactly. He nods for the benefit of his assistant, seeing
the way open for him now, the old boss-dodge of letting the
underling do the job while he concentrates on securing his
own back. He pushes the file towards him with his free hand.
One of the photographs catches in a splinter of wood in the
desk-top and slides part-way out, exposing a naked foot, toes
splayed to a seemingly impossible extent. He represses the
temptation to push the print back, holding his hand up as
though in distaste: MURDER IS NOT CORPORATE.
Exactly. Some of your old chums at Central could
help you there, you reckon?
The assistant gathers the file with his large square
hands, fingers inarticulate in a frightening way. He muses
absently that we are all someone else most of the time, a
reflection that eases him long enough for a number of things
to happen. The catastrophic collapse occurs just as he
reflects, as the assistant takes possession of the loaded file, as
his secretary turns in the doorway, her arm crooked to permit
it jam against the wall and ram the finger into her ear, to her
intense annoyance, a bloodstained man stumbling into the
outer office, gesticulating desperately towards the phone. The
level he finds contains photographs of young men and
women in physical and emotional states he does not
understand, the word becomes DARK, the response fear, the
reaction a surge of extreme power, a capacity to go forward
69

fearlessly. The secretary, rubbing her aching ear, bra askew

on her right shoulder after the collision with the wall, says
absently, He wants to use the phone. He nods, his assistant
instantly pushing the file under his left armpit and swinging
up out of the chair, through the door in three strides, at his
desk to prevent the man putting his bloody hand on his
phone.
The period between the collapse and the arrival below
of the team to shoot the pig is a peculiar one for him, not an
illumination, as you might expect considering what has
gone before here more a confirmation, like the fatality of a
lover in some ways, but like mesmerism in other, more
important ways. Despite the keyword, dark, he does not so
much fall as open a door and step through to the other side.
And again despite the word, dark, the other side is brightly
lit. Struggling out of his chair in the now empty office, he
pulls his left hand from his trouser pocket and flexes it
vigorously, noting how the excessive heat had given it the
semblance of raw meat. Sunlight pours down outside his low
window onto the limp fronds on the slope below. The
pounding in his head is worse as a consequence of his
standing up too fast, and he suffers the frustrating nausea
accompanying the pounding of blood by forcing his
consciousness away elsewhere. But the feeling of weakness
pervades him nonetheless, giving him insight for this once at
least into the utter physical weakness of mankind; how, that
is, human sensibility hangs on a thread between the
expansiveness of well-being and the complete misery of all
illness, how the fluctuations of fluids, enzymes, proteins,
temperature have effects on you beyond all reason, turning
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your worlds from this state to very different states in a matter

of minutes. He sees, again as a confirmation of some infantile
experience of fever, hunger, unsatisfied want, overbearing
desire, how absurd all human complacency is, how
satisfaction slips away with satiation, how desire always
disappoints you in the way that all hype does.
He is not aware of how long he stands there looking
out his low window, limp fronds battered by summer sun,
earth drying out, insects scuttling with sublime indifference
over the clodded soil, his arms hanging by his sides, head
slightly bent to relieve the thunderous fall in his ears, radiant
heat from the roof like palpable light on his hooded eyes,
knees singing relief, thinking of his corporeal weakness, of
bodies splayed in some agony of ecstasy, of the idea that
finality would be welcome if it used up blood, nerves, lungs,
guts, muscles, gonads in one final rending exultation, like a
whole body shouting in recognition at the end, every cell at
last bent to one purpose defined by the master residing
somewhere between the ears, in the heart, or down in the
solar plexus, every string pulled at once.
The men arriving below are shouting hoarsely to clear
the warehouse, the pig screaming in some recess, boxes
tumbling, contents like plates smashing loudly. They use
automatic weapons, short bursts which smash other things up,
ricocheting off walls and girders, pinging against sheet metal,
thunking into wooden crates, and finally catching the pig
somewhere in the open near the large doors, the screaming
disappearing into a glottal whimper, very much as though
blood has been added at some point, the whimper containing
a relative sweetness, as the old water-whistles did.
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His secretary comes into him in the quiet aftermath,

more lumpy and stuck-together than usual in her dejection, to
tell him that they have finally got the pig, and that he would
want to see the mess down there. He remembers, looking at
her, clothes askew on her sturdy body, having overheard her
once telling his assistant that her husband made sex like a pig
snorting in a trough, remembering her quiet murderous
pleasure at describing love thus.
His secretarys face is suddenly overlaid by another
face, seen in portrait only, and he feels called.

72

Everything acts to further, such is her philosophy of

opportunity now. He is hidden, his presence his own, moving
through the universe like a secret, as though behind dark
screens. Within days of his moving in she knows she needs
some booster to get her through those screens. On her knees
in the mornings had not conveyed the word, eliciting only a
curt nod, he looking shocked by the demands of rising and
getting out on time. She needs something really drastic to get
through, and as luck would have it she gets it: coming back
from visiting her sister-friend she has an argument with the
taxi driver about overcharging. She reports the matter to his
company and the following Saturday night he appears just
before midnight, she wise enough to answer the door to
receive a punch in the eye, several kicks to her stomach, arms
and thighs. Her husband over, solicitous doctor, salves,
injections, and after five days she still looks a sight,
bruisings, swellings, clotted blood rimming her eye.
Five days of preparations: not intended, though,
managing on many levels, shock, foolishness, disgust, omens,
desperation, absolute assurance, above all the shock like a
full stop to some narrative she has been enacting a lifes
striving suddenly appearing as debauchery, a serious error
indicated somewhere at the beginning. Certainly, pain gives
detachment, time for reassessment; a bruised body, a sign of
attention in itself, certainly erases the usual certainties,
permitting indication of the purity of the soul: you can see
how the victim inspires such true love, true horror admixed
with true solicitation. What else? Yes, how agony overcomes
sloth, makes you an actor rather than a figure, how you reach
rather than open amidst a web of caprice. But the worst part
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she learns in an hour that afternoon, wringing her hands while

seated in her easy-chair: from one perspective it is, or should
be, contrition; more usually this comes as a grievous selfpity, most of you knowing nothing of penance now, assuming
innocence, the modern vanity, evil a smear on the perfect
image. For her though one difference today, the man who is
coming is already like a fire to her, burning up that which she
believes she is preparing for him: coming closer, he reveals
his magnitude, scale like heat to her; she flares like a figure
of straw, seeing her absolute fatuity in thinking she could
prepare for him. She cries then, a whimper really, pathetic,
nose clogged; not contrition, of course, which requires
acknowledgement of error a subtle knowledge but at least
a clearing of obstruction, deceits, vanities, masks,
rationalisations.
Yet the danger. I stress this now. At the core of sin lies
allurement, a beauty like an answer, an end to pain:
impossible, without a certain understanding, to resist. She
clears the ground now, tears welling up from behind futility,
BUT the error is still hidden from her. She may not do wrong
at the moment, she knows this is behind the tears, seeing
relief, but for exactly the same reasons she may not do right
either, relief as sufficient for now, emptiness in place of
striving misguided striving shock a reverberation driving
presence back. BUT when she acts, as she must, though at
this instant she does not see that yet, then she will name the
action, and in that naming the empty place will be full again,
full as it usually is, THE SOUL ALWAYS COMPLETE,
being perfect. The name will establish an array, as it were,
new paths perhaps, old paths most likely, newly washed and
74

marked, and there perhaps, along old paths looking like new,
the centre of allurement again, but appearing now as new, a
new attractor, not obviously the old evil, the beauty at once
there, not approaching, I mean, and she, like any of you,
thinking in that instant, even as your soul shapes itself to that
beauty, that here is the answer you always sought, forgetting,
as you always do, that all answers are by their nature suspect.
In the matter of beauty, for instance, which so often troubles
you as proposal, you ALWAYS forget that you are already
beautiful. In the matter of answers, though, there is some
other element: truth is an instantaneous impulse. Should truth
ever appear among you, it will go through to all of you at
once, a world of many billions instantly convinced, a world
transformed in that instant, truth once received to your soul
becoming at the same time real, truth writ large in your soul
and hence in every cell, in every iota of your universe, at
once a new thing everywhere you have no inkling of this, of
how everything is changed, and certainly no inkling, NO
MORE THAN I HAVE, what that transformation means,
what we will all, gods and mankind, become. Consider now
that you view all answers in this light, whether you are aware
of it or not, believe me that this is how your soul greets any
answer as though it is true. How can you resist answers?
You agonise about power, the temptation, of beauty,
allurement, afraid of vision, yet how much weight do you
attach to the temptation offered by answers? None.
She is like this now, climbing her stairs in tears,
trembling as she acts with her strongest nerve, her greatest
need, deepest conviction, bracing herself for his
overwhelming beauty, but thinking nothing of answers.
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At the opened door he is aghast at what approaches

him, and she experiences the beauty she has braces herself
for, the profound effulgence that makes her merely atomic,
but she has forgotten the truth of beauty that it is the souls
projection and so always distant, written by the soul and so
always distinct from the soul. She could do no more in the
opened doorway than go on towards him, amazed by his
constant light, and he could do no more in his frozen
abstraction than step back, too polite before a stranger to
betray his horror and disgust. This transaction takes in its
entirety no more that ten seconds, from opening door until
she is seated on his settee. Seated, she immediately reassumes
the state she had suffered below in her own flat, tears,
helpless misery with one difference: she has acted.
The effect of this action is radical. Below, tears had
emptied her, clearing the ground for repentance or for new
sin; up here, tears fill the other emptiness, the distance
between her striving soul and the beauty the soul has
invented for her out there in the world. Her tears flow for him
now, from her perspective, they flow TO him, not water, but
scintilla more concrete than his light appears to her. But the
earlier evacuation remains in her, and in this abyss the old sin
suddenly quite suddenly, I emphasise appears, like a
grotto in a forest, an island in an ocean, a new star in the
heavens.
I find I must take time to describe this sin for you, in
case you misunderstand the situation. When I say the old sin
appears, I do not mean that sin is a thing that persists in you
over time. A sin is an event, arising in such and such a
circumstance and having an effect upon a state of affairs. A
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sin is an action only. What is of concern in the matter of sin is

not the sin itself, because by the time the sin is perceived, it is
over like yesterdays sunset, this mornings stool. What
persists is the effect of sin, like a punctured tyre skewing a
car not the act of puncturing itself, like a broken face not the
blow that did the breaking. So in saying that the old sin
reappears, I mean that an earlier disposition of circumstance
has reoccurred, the disposition not the material situation.
Even so, trusting you follow me here, it is not the situation
itself, as I say, and yet it is not entirely the disposition in
itself either. Let me clarify by means of details. In the
emptiness in her, in that absence of vanity, reflection,
intention, appears her powerful lust in all its singular power.
The situation is that of nubility in the presence of what
attracts it towards its natural end, the circuit of excitation
brought to catastrophic quiescence. The disposition is the
natural desire for this quiescence. The sin here, in her case, is
the use of this natural energy for an unnatural end. But
understand this, if you will, that the unnatural end, as I call it,
is not in itself a wrong in fact, it is the secret end of all of
you, appearing in this guise to all of you at least once in your
lives. No, the wrong, in her case, resides in her misuse of
what I have called the unnatural end: she seeks to create this
end in her body.
I suspect I am not making myself clear here. The
reason is quite simple: I cannot describe for you what this
unnatural end is. I can say only this by way of clarification:
I am confident each of you has glimpsed this end, and I
am equally confident that none of you has achieved this end.
You ask, how can I be so confident of both assertions? I
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answer: in the first case, I know this end is always in you, as

your shadow accompanies you; in the second case, I know
you would not be reading this if you had achieved this end. I
will say no more, except to entreat you to read me carefully
for a deeper understanding of this matter.
I apologise if I disappoint you, but I can do no more
here; you must try to understand that I am attempting to deal
with something that can never be a matter of knowledge. On
this unsatisfactory note, let me continue. The lust is another
fire so many fires in this room now and he steps back and
back, face set in politeness, murder and mockery competing
in him (after such a busy day, too), until he finds a chair by
the window at the back of his knees. She knows it is a
weakness in her, but she cannot suppress her triumph, and
she tells him of her troubles, crossing her legs tightly and
sending him other signals too. She burns, jumping
continuously on the settee, crossing and re-crossing her legs,
hands her and there on herself, tidying her ratty hair,
indicating the creases in her face, double jointed fingers,
proportion of her breast, shape of leg, hot seat. He listens and
listens, asks why she doesnt report the matter to the police,
but does not ask her what the hell she is doing telling him all
about it, when he is prepared to do nothing whatsoever about
it.
Lust is not enough to take her further, far as it is taking
her now. There in one more step, and to understand this
FINAL step it will be necessary to burden this show with a
recapitulation. A noteworthy feature of illumination is that it
is forgotten immediately by the novice. Do you doubt this?
Remember your last illumination? If you dont, then that
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means you have had one and only one illumination. If you do,
then you will also remember the point during the event when
you remembered your previous illumination. But the
illumination (there is only one illumination, all subsequent
illuminations are reminders only, to teach you) guides your
actions without your knowledge, the one point at which your
soul can determine you, weak though this determination is.
Now, the problem for you with illumination is what I will
here call the question of scale: What do you experience? Do
you witness many lives, many spirits, many heavens? Or do
you witness one event only? Do you experience duration,
aeons, or do you experience an instant? Do you cross
universes, transcend worlds, enter heaven, or is there no
place, no space? You have no answer, for you do not have the
means to judge: you can babble about gods, angels, heavens
and hells, good and evil, or you can turn to the wall in the
dark, praying for strength and a good nights sleep. So much
do you know. Gods, for instance, experience illumination as
an instant, an abiding event without end, their suffering a
source of constant amazement to you. The best of you
emulate the gods, steeling yourself in silence, learning how to
experience without knowing men and women who live
steadily and who are perforce charitable to those less gifted.
The worst of you kick and scream, believing the hall of
mirrors is the lesser evil. Some, like her now, not
understanding the nature of contrition, are nonetheless guided
by their souls towards an initial self-abandonment not,
mark you, the abandonment to self that is the average human
lot, but an abandonment of self to a greater agent, trusting to
the souls wisdom in this.
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Abandonment. How hard to achieve, no matter how

greatly desired. Not through desperation, hoping to repossess
self later. Not through futility, hoping another will live your
life for you. Not through love, hoping another will serve you.
Only through renunciation, like making a gift, utterly
surrendering everything except the capacity to endure. This is
not masochism, because she will not suffer in her self, as it
were, as though to put a limit on suffering, the limit of
satiation, as though saying that this quantum of pain will
suffice for today. Nor is it weakness, like the mouse in the
control of the cat, experiencing terror as well as pain, the
ultimate anaesthesia of the helpless. The soul will tell you all
about suffering; that it, more than love, is the true condition
of existence. It will show you that suffering as experience
differs absolutely from suffering as knowledge, that
knowledge ALWAYS places a limit on suffering, and so is
the true cause of pain, which is the souls regret.
Abandonment: she throws herself at him, giving her
self to him, crippled body, newly damaged, ageing body, a
wrecked life in effect. She throws this at his feet, not
knowing why, as perhaps you might. Some of you may laugh,
habitual ironists, thinking SHE CAN AFFORD TO DO
THIS NOW, meaning that the old bag couldnt get a man
under any other condition. Yet, ask yourself: what does she
throw at him? Better, ask yourself, as some of you may have
done already: who does she surrender to?
Do you see the point here? Sin is again possible, but
only if he does the greater wrong. Otherwise, they can only
do good, for her and for him. This is how souls work for your
benefit, though you must remember that souls are weak in
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your material worlds. It is something easily overlooked at

such a moment. You will experience this giftedness,
certainly, you may even feel graced, or feel chosen, but you
will not appreciate the delicacy of the situation, that it is not a
conclusion, like falling in love, or an answer, as though the
gift will carry you far. There is very great power now, but it
is a power that PLACES you; it does not make anything new
of you. It is like a beginning, that much I will allow at your
insistence, but only a beginning like each morning is a
beginning, though with the difference that nothing is
changed, nothing added. There is in a sense an opportunity,
but this fact, too, is easily overlooked in the rush of the
moment, beauty always blinding you to everything else.

81

He has chosen the Upland Road, more because it is

quieter than for the scenery. The road follows the hundred
metre contour along the western hills above the coastal plain,
once the breadbasket of the city. In following the contour, the
road of course ducks into every coombe and dene, passing
secluded farms sheltered by mature timber, ash and beech,
over stone bridges traversing mountains streams sparkling
among mossy rocks and bent alders, through woods, green
light on the road, silence palpable beyond the whine of the
engine, then breasting promontories, the plain below laid out
with careful rationality, fields etched by hedging and oak,
spacious farm buildings, villages clustered about church
spires, the ocean beyond flat and bright. Sometimes there are
ruined fortifications above this ancient road, once serving to
hold back the hill tribes now long-gone. There is the odd inn,
now mostly noted restaurants, crowded at weekends,
sometimes isolated churches dedicated to aboriginal gods and
goddesses, both inns and churches pointers to an old
dispensation, an animated land, beasts halfman-halfgod,
powers of instantaneity, human life then a dream
convergence, time a curve of recognition, terrible pathos,
wild joy, falleness no myth.
He enters a holiday mood, humming absently, but
lonely and frightened when distracted by reflection. The
moods alternate following a curve he is unaware of,
influences as subtle as momentary shade, the temper of the
land he passes through working on him. Nor does he notice
that the character of each mood changes over time, loneliness
and fear associated with a changing image, the tunes he hums
going from pop ditties to traditional airs and back again. You
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could posit a direction to these gradual shifts in mood, but

you would then need to posit some ulterior organisation in
the terrain directing these shifts. The road is very ancient,
once a trade route that kept above the marshes and fens
below, a practical matter, hardly likely to convey hidden
harmonies as well. The terrain itself is the result of a myriad
of accidents over aeons, slight changes in the underlying
rock, mostly sedimentary with ridges of granite obtruding
further west, water seeking the sea under the pressure of
gravity, again unlikely to guide the play of his moods. How
then has it been done? Names. Millennia of human life here,
experience imposed on scenes of experience, places named,
Wet Bottom, Hangmans Dell, Beech Coombe, Poky Dene,
names of saints names fixed once the spirit of the places
was discovered. Later invaders, new language, new cultures,
absorbed the names, adding suffixes, prefixes, amending the
balance of pronunciation as required by new phonetics.
Reflection: a world passing by at too great a rate, not a
face turning away but he tilting back, falling up and away,
from that face. Falling is one thing, a natural fear, but lifting
up and back engenders a new fear, something gone once and
for all. He neither seeks the reflection nor has he the power to
escape it: it comes, then it goes and he is surprisingly content
again, humming a song at a pitch just above that of the
engine, enjoying the sunshine on the hills, on the plain below,
seeing the ocean beyond as just-so. The sense of existing is
overwhelming, not a capacity, more like an image real
precisely because it is an image, that is, complete, nothing
more beyond the frame of the object itself. There is fatality in
this, but not conceptual which generates a different fear, a
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more common fear a fatality of commitment, which brings

the more profound fear that an error is being made. So the
image changes as he is taken through the narration of
commitment: a face turning, the same face, the same turn, yet
each time something added as a kind of tone. Now the face is
familiar, existence as tropical exuberance, maroon; then the
face is pallid, emphasis on the eyes, and existence is sacrifice,
beauty of course here; then loss in the face, emphasis on
regret, the burden is distance, teaching him that longing is
harder than solitude; the worst is the face of desire, drawing
him as it turns, he falling up and away, aware of darkness at
his back, not death but something much worse, knowledge of
how you live from the moment of birth; and the face as a
painted image, detail too definite as in art, the painter
presenting hours of study as a passing glimpse what effects
him most here is a detail of the mouth, an inspired accident of
the brush, a feeling of frightening excess in himself, knowing
he has painted this image as symbol of what is excessive in
himself: that will never find expression in his existence, like
prescience of death.
The contentment seems to him continuous, distraction
momentary, at this spot on the road, in this coombe, along
this slope. He drives with concentration, not very fast but
putting the car through bends and turns with economic
precision, sweeping up gradients without labouring the
engine, down hills using inertia as required. He becomes
vaguely bored with the humming, drying his throat it is
uncharacteristic of him but he cannot stop humming, cannot
stop feeling the holiday mood, switching tunes, it seems, as
though searching for the appropriate holiday-mood song, and
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he searches the scenery about him as if to find the key there,

to characterise this place in the way a holiday brochure
would. But the contentment has its own narrative, moving
from a sense of basking to one of acceptance, which in turn
brings him to a kind of submission the child in the bosom
of his family to sentiment, something lost there, and on to
security, then gratitude, then for him that very rare feeling,
tenderness, which induces a return of sentiment, and on and
on, as though choices of happiness are actually on offer, as
though he can actually choose.
It is only when he turns right to climb over the hills as
they curve in to approach the coast that this flow of warmth
ceases, and up on the plateau behind the hills a new feeling
rises in him, more austere, though no less happy, a simplicity,
as though many parts of him are redundant, the social
armour, the professional pushing, the adult performance, the
cycles of appetite, the falsifying images he carries of himself.
What is left resembles the high moor surrounding him as he
speeds over the long straight road, no other traffic in sight: a
kind of minimum, a presence of worship, a kind of rising
possibility that is enduring through all storms and blessings. I
say worship here even though there is nothing or no one to
worship; it is simply that this possibility in him is always
rising into being, like a never ending sunrise, the act of rising
appearing as an act of worship. However, as might be
expected, the distractions are equally severe, lancing through
this more stable contentment like a dark lightning, like cracks
in a picture, frames missing in a film. The fear now is the fear
of assent. Do you understand this fear? Woman, I think,
understand it better than men; though it haunts men more, as
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you might expect, if only because they always disguise assent

of this kind. He finds he is prepared to assent to something
NOT happening, thus permitting something else to happen.
The image haunting this fear is complex: the face is clear,
almost luminous, but scrutinised the features blur in a way
that makes judgement of distance difficult, as though the
image lay in a pool of still water so clear that the evaluation
of depth is impossible.
I wish you to understand this mans present experience.
It happens in an instant, so in order to describe it I will
suspend time after the manner of your phenomenologists.
Please bear one factor in mind while you perceive the
following figuration: what I show you will intrigue, but you
are not to consider at all that I am presenting you with an
ANSWER of any kind. The image he sees at this instant,
while he drives his car no more than a hundred metres along
the straight road, bare moorland all about him, glow of the
ocean over to his left, moors rising to hills and then to the
dark mountains to his right, is simultaneously very close to
him and utterly remote from him. It is close to him in his
conception of the face, derived as it is from a memory of a
recent event in his life. Its significance, its meaning as a
communication to his consciousness, however, is such that,
as knowledge, it must ever remain OTHER, like any object,
and so remote from him in the way all knowledge is. Most of
you do not perceive this, no more than he does; and he does
in reaction what you all do with presented knowledge: he
makes it a possession by assimilating it to the prior concept.
To a philosopher this is a subtle matter, requiring detailed
analysis. For me, as it should be for you, it is a DELICATE
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matter, requiring very great patience, sensitivity, and, most of

all, submission. You see, philosophical analysis always treats
knowledge as a matter of memory, that is, concept, so that the
philosopher always examines what appears to him as the
impress of knowledge, failing to understand that knowledge
is always an ACTION, not a trace or a record of something
else. If you can grasp what I mean when I say that knowledge
is an action, that is, knowledge is an act of knowing, then you
will understand why I say it is a delicate matter, requiring
patience, sensitivity and submission. But notice that patience
and submission are related, one requiring the other, to be
passive one must submit, to submit one must permit
passivity. And what else is sensitivity but a passive
awareness?
I have made the condition for the reception of
knowledge multiple in order to forestall your reaction to the
word SUBMISSION, a concept you do not like. In order to
learn, to receive the knowledge as knowledge, you must open
yourself to this knowledge, you must submit to it: you must
allow it to ENTER INTO you. Having clarified this,
successfully, I hope, let me explain the relation between the
concept and the act of knowledge. For you, knowledge is a
matter of handling concepts, and concepts are, you believe,
copies of things or ideas, things being actual objects outside
you and ideas being abstract entities in your mind that
concern relations between things. For instance, you have a
concept of a tree, you will have many concepts of trees,
apparent and latent in your mind, and you will also have an
idea of tree, the idea permitting you to handle all relations to
do with conceptual trees. Now, there are two features of this
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knowledge I wish to discuss. One: the question of cogency.

By what power do concepts cohere, one with another? Ideas
of themselves do not permit coherence, ideas after all are
only concepts too. Two: the question of truth. By what power
do you commit yourselves to make statements, that is,
regardless of your motivation, whether to deceive, convince,
confess, or confirm, what prevents you from falling into
confusion, from falling away from what you believe is
reality? By this I mean, how, despite what you say, do you
remain in continuity with your world? You must know that
no statement is complete with reference to your reality. To
say It is raining. is to say very little about your reality, and
yet you commit yourself utterly to that statement, if only
during the time it requires to formulate the statement, and yet
you can survive that utter submission without apparent harm;
more wonderful is your survival of the utterance of lies,
plausibilities where truth and falsity are a matter of opinion
only. How is this possible?
You might answer that you are physical beings and that
continuity is maintained at that level, that your heart
continues to beat, your digestion continues its work, cells,
and so on. Alternatively, you might say that speech occupies
a small part of all mental operations, so that continuity at that
level is maintained by other mental operations. I answer
categorically, as it were: without a specific operation of
intelligence, such continuities are without meaning. Idiots eat
and defecate; idiots make judgements, avoid pain and
welcome pleasure; idiots cannot make statements, lack
coherence and truth.
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Let me now assert what is the case before I return to

this mans experience: a concept requires two aids. Primarily
it requires what I can best call a truth-confirmation, that is, an
orientation to the soul. The act of knowing is this
confirmation. It is this confirmation that permits coherence,
because then the soul in its imitative action relates your
concepts. But understand, and this is why I caution you
severely not to regard what I say as an answer it is merely a
description the truth-confirmation of your soul can be taken
by you as a licence, so that your use of this confirmation,
though a truth-operation, does not guarantee the truthfulness
of what you assert: it merely permits you to exploit the
operation of your soul for selfish purposes. It is this
exploitation, possible because souls can only love, that
maintains coherence in lying, in stupidity and ignorance.
That said, by way of warning, you can see now that
what I call the souls truth-confirmation of the concept is the
ACT of knowledge: the soul moves, as it were, in response to
your request that is what, to the soul, a concept is, a request,
a plea for knowledge and tells you the truth concerning this
concept. It is possible for you to discover this for yourself:
simply learn submission to your soul, allow your
consciousness to become open and passive and watch then
for the spark of illumination that follows, within a matter of
seconds, your presentation of a concept, the souls
communication, because it speaks as best it can in your foggy
language, your inexact imagination, through the gross
impurity of your consciousness, impure through the clutter of
false concepts forced on you every minute in your
beleaguered lives, forced on you in the name of freedom,
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choice, belief, satisfaction, happiness; false concepts that

produce in you slavery, reaction, scepticism, frustration, and
misery.
Now, this man drives to see his father, and is by turns
during this journey contented and fearful. He travels an
ancient road, for his father, by means of whatever design,
lives at the end of this road, a road SANCTIFIED, as all
human things are ultimately, by tests of truth-confirmation
most things destroyed, but few surviving the test and thus
available to him, mankinds gift to itself, as an elaborated
truth-confirmation, the human soul writ large over millennia
of toil and suffering, permitting his own soul to speak to him
in a way rarely available to it. Thus his contentment goes
through a process of confirmation, being stripped of dross,
and his abiding concept, the image of a womans face turning
away from him, likewise subject to test. On the high moor,
where man sanctifies directly from his soul, without need to
construct aids, finding in the simple expanse, high mountains,
adjacent ocean, an adequate mirror for his souls
communication, he finds the conjunction of concept and truth
presented to him in the degree of detail and duration required
by his consciousness in its relation to his soul. The souls
operation is instantaneous, unhampered by space and time, by
secondary media such as language or images, but your deep
consciousness, where concepts are formed, is very fast by
comparison with your everyday consciousness, the level at
which you think you think. On this moor the souls operation
endures for an instant, long enough for his consciousness to
grasp clearly what is communicated, because the soul
responds joyfully, being loving, to your attention, and so its
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truth abides longer than usual here. First the clarified feeling
rises in him, its message the meaning of its nature, a rising-to
characterised as worship, figured as an ever-rising sun, light
appearing always in the dark. Then the soul responds with the
truth-confirmation of the face turning, luminous now as in
clear water. Do not think these operations are
complementary. The man is not worshipping something
modelled as a woman, a goddess or an ideal. The womans
face IS that rising to worship, the man seeing deep into his
own nature, seeing for an instant that at root he is his own
soul rising to himself, luminosity the glow of recognition, the
turning his own sad weakness, his inability to be with his
soul.
The remoteness of knowledge you now perhaps
understand. The remoteness of knowledge is the remoteness
of your soul. Knowledge is an impure relation, however vivid
and illuminating you may find it at first. This is as far as this
man has progressed: he borders on understanding knowledge,
but is yet remote from the true relation to his soul, that is,
direct experience of his souls nature, in a word:
IDENTIFICATION.
At length, he breasts a low rise and the land falls away
before him, the higher wastes of the foothills of the Western
Range in the distance, a desolate region covering the southwestern extremity of the country, but below, coming into
view gradually is the last habitable land, two thousand acres
of sheep pasture and arable land along the valley floor that
constitutes his fathers estate, Glengrange, the house nestling
among demesne parkland across the river from the village.
He greets the sight with his usual ambiguity, his father being
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the only person he has never considered murdering, envious

of the security, contemptuous of the weakness on display.
The village street is blocked by a truck delivering fuel oil to
the general store and he is forced to wait in full view while
the hose is uncoupled and the vehicle backs part-way into the
yard behind the shop. The salmon nets are out at the weir
above the bridge, barelegged men toiling in the water, too
busy to glance up, perhaps indifferent in this busy time. But
the gates are open, a sure sign his approach has been noticed,
the gateman saluting him cheerily. For all the ambiguity he
feels, the trees please him as always, the tall ash back towards
the river, the boulevard beeches, isolated oak and chestnut
out in the parks. The does crop as usual over by the ponds,
the stags summering up on the higher slopes, in the wild
woods, and the horses sun themselves in the level paddocks,
the fencing clean and bright as always. Then the screen of
spruce and poplar, dark with no ground vegetation, and then
the house on its terrace above, sturdy, the slabby local stone
grey but glinting, upper windows open to the sea breeze.
Then always this moment as he sweeps the car round
through the last curve, designed to show off the house, the
surrounding parks, the vista down towards the bay, open
ocean beyond heaving against the cliffs: the collapse in him,
eagerness to see his father welling in him as from nowhere.
Then his father at the head of the steps, white shirt, sleeves
rolled back off the wrists, his long grey hair, pointing down
as he instructs his personal servant. His father always has
male servants attend him, a sign, he knows, of a secret pride,
of his estimation of his son despite what he might say of a
moment. His father always waits for him at the top, the same
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vitality, head up, hair back off his shoulders, the bulge of his
gonads in the tight moleskins. The secret of the mother
concerns what is taken from her, what she reaches for; the
secret of the father lies in his wholeness, while yet you, the
son, have your origin there; generation a surplus to the man, a
deprivation for the woman. The son departs the mother but
always returns to the father.
They have coffee and biscuits in the spacious kitchen,
windows open onto the yard, stacks of winter wood over to
the right, flowers and vines to the left. Cook is flustered as
always, the combined presence of father and son both a thrill
and an embarrassment to her, her kitchen soaking up the
energetic interaction, a buzz to keep her going for months.
Afterwards, they go out to see his fathers latest breeding
success, a black bullcalf, lapping milk from a pail in the pens.
His father strokes its shoulders with a different pride,
patronising, and he knows from previous experience that the
animal will be slaughtered if it fails to come up to
expectation. Then down to the horses, the strain appearing
now, as usual, between them, a gradient as it were from father
to son (the fathers perspective this), from father to son who
is not himself a father. He has felt this tension before, but
now, having pushed a woman to murder and suicide, he feels
less vulnerable than hitherto, occupying a different playing
field is a good analogy. He watches his fathers response to
the difference as a measure of what he has done. The survey
of the horses is perfunctory, and he sees his father search
about in a vacancy, not knowing, it seems, the source of this
abyss. His fathers eyes grow vehement, and he sees to start
with that his father is merciless towards the male of the
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species, lenient to doting with the female, a weakness he had

never glimpsed before. He sees his fathers need for the
female, the doe, the mare, the cow, the hen, the woman, the
ocean; understands too his seclusion, power exercised at a
distance, the satellite dishes, radio masts, powerful boats,
large cars.
On the way back his father says, as usual: How is your
mother? Do you go to see her? Sees here his loss of the
female; generation the deprivation of man in this way, the
need for other females as a consequence. But the question
finds a new echo in him: no longer the circle of the mother,
the arrow of the father, he in the centre like the centre of a
target forever pinned down between them. A start of fear at
this point, not knowing where he is now; then he sees that
murder is unnecessary, that it has not been murder, but
something worse. He lets his father walk on ahead, his
silence presented as a rebuke, and he watches his father walk,
the muscles of his buttocks, broad back, short arms and broad
hands, the bald circle on his crown, grey silky hair fluttering
in the breeze. He has always seen death in his father, he
realises: a weakness in the loins, the one thing his father
could not control, letting decline and death speak to him in
the evacuation of seed. His mother never missed his father,
content with her life on her fathers farm, her garden,
company of old servants.
They lunch in the old library, old books his fathers
office upstairs, electronic media now, information on the wire
eminently disposable cold meat, a light dry wine from the
vines at the head of the valley, away from the salt air. His
father eats with the reluctance of a solitary, and he knows he
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wants to talk, the usual pressure on him when they eat

together. He himself eats well out of hunger, careful with the
wine (it makes him sleepy), and he fills the absence at the
table by watching the men working in the river, dark forms
from that distance. Soon, he knows, the salmon will start to
come to him, fresh at first, then smoked fish in the winter,
cases of the coming seasons wine he will give away at
Christmas. What he enjoys from the estate are the apples and
the joints of lamb, especially the latter, which he cooks with
care. The moors he will cross again later are golden in the
afternoon sun, a clean clarity that strikes a chord, so that he
relents.
To speak to his father requires above all choice of
subject. It cannot be personal, he is expected to understand
his father, through sympathy, much as his father believes he
understands his son. Their work is complementary, in a way,
but not to scale, both intelligence gatherers, business as
solution-finding in games of clear rules but uncertain
opponents. His father is aware that he has relented and in the
straining silence helps him out, their putative sympathy
vindicated by his choice of topic:
That old bitch of yours. Whats she playing at? His
father smiling, teeth closed so his lips bulge forward, blue
eyes lenient now.
He smiles in return, his smile as rare as his fathers,
and jerks his head up, looking directly into his fathers eyes,
exchanging warmth, exchanging the nearest to the ideal of
love they can. But he lowers his head again, to think towards
an answer, seeing the painted figure, feeling that burden, a
genuine secret he will keep from his father.
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Loyalty, I suppose.
His father scrutinises him closely, the lines about his
eyes attractive, the high forehead under the straight hair
expressing a gentleness nowhere else hinted at. Then he
chuckles, surprising good humour, and says suggestively:
Loyalty, eh? wiping his mouth with his napkin, a
teasing quality in this, the eyes brighter again, a hint of
something like envy there. He is taken by what this intimates:
his father envious of what he sees, for this moment anyway,
as his sons confidence in a woman. Well, his father says,
dropping the napkin beside his plate as an emphasis on what
he will say, she gives little else. Lays his hands flat on the
table, either side of the plate, presses them down to signal an
end to the meal, says further: Oh my. What that woman
knows about us all.
They rise together, and each turns indecisively at his
chair, an opening broad between them now that the rituals of
his visit are complete. He suddenly wants his fathers arms
about his shoulders, to feel his hair graze his temple, to clutch
his hand. But he see at once the gap there: how it would be
afterwards for the rest of his life, always turning back to the
sadness of a moment like that, his fathers death a reality, an
abyss that would make the world even more unbearable. If
you want to return to the womb in your mother, what is it you
want to return to in your father, except him entire, from
whence you came?
But his father does turn to take his right elbow in his
left hand, heart-hand, to walk down with him to his car. His
father says to him, conversationally, on the stairs:
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But she keeps it all to herself, you know. Thats the

amazing thing. He toggles his elbow to keep his attention
just as his mind wants to drift forward in expansion beyond
the moment of parting. I cant work out what shes up to.
Even the government is mystified.
He says, absently really, running on automatic: Is that
why you tried to take her over?
His father stops, looks at him, the habitual ingenuity in
his expression, then an exaggerated quizzical scrutiny: For
the government, you mean? The smile is tight, forcing the
creases in his face too much, the hair suddenly lank and vain:
Goodness no. He laughs, resuming his walk to the
open doors and outside into the shadow of the house, sunlight
brilliant on the stones of the driveway: I want those secrets.
They have reached the car without the usual rising tension,
his father in good humour, both on neutral territory, though
neither expecting that, given the subject: Actually, I want to
know if she knows anything I dont know.
He smiles again, this time purely for his father and his
good humour, thinking the word loyalty, but wondering if
that was true, so he says:
Loyalty?
His father subsides, ruefully it appears, and he pauses
to think while he slips into the car and starts the engine. His
father bends to the window, circumstances bringing his face
closer than he has seen it for many years, a marvellous
intimacy that brings a return of the desire to be embraced by
his father.
No. Thats simply her advantage. His father looks
very closely at him, the fingers of his left hand lying across
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the window frame of the door, nails shining, skin red and
white under pressure of supporting himself. You know what
I mean, dont you? he says directly, serious in one way,
confiding in another, the fathers words to his son.
He nods abruptly, sees murder return like something
come over an horizon, seeing also that he is, as it were,
moving in another direction, not towards the horizon of
murder, of making himself in some way at the expense of
another, like an ancient sacrifice. He reaches his left hand
across the steering wheel and touches his fingers to his
fathers fingers. His father pulls his hand back with a jerk, a
look of fright making him seem frail as well as old, and says
goodbye to him in a cold voice, an involuntary revelation in
all this, the gap from father to son more appalling than the
gap from son to father; one conveying mortality, the other
bearing mortality: the son the father entire starting out again,
always with better chances this time.
Such is the profound envy of the father.
Crossing the moor he is desolate this time, an echo in
the evening light on the high mountains he can see travelling
in this direction. No depth in him now, momentarily eclipsed
by the lesson of the father. To give himself some purchase,
before re-entering the anonymity of the city, he concentrates
on the assignment under way, the molester, finding like you
all the final solace for the mystery of your lives in the work
he does, that which he makes with his energies. You can trace
this solace in part, at least, to the enclosure work provides, a
boss on the outside, perhaps, subordinates on the inside. But
those about you work on the same terms as you, whatever
they may think they do: an impulse to make, having profound
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origins, as enduring as writing on water, yet nonetheless a

feeling of constructing heaven; unrelieved weariness,
impulsive gratitude, the true source of the concept of prayer.
It was only while driving into the city, laid-back
atmosphere of a long summers evening on the streets, that he
realises his father had been talking about trust, a fragile trust
that appeared to him as little more than an enticement.

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Submission has entailments. Her recognition of this is

momentary, at once disturbing and irrelevant: pitching
forward anyway, resignation and the possibility of
opportunity. She is to divulge her life, secrets, putting
valuable clues in the hands of another. She sees her life in an
instant, following immediately on the recognition of
entailment, her hands joined, flat palm to palm, thrust
between her crossed thighs. The sun shines on her roses
below, where the shadows of the trees do not interfere, that
is. Seeing her life whole, she sees the truth, again in an
instant, instant successive upon the life-scan. She forgets
these instants, of course, her awareness geared to her senses
and therefore deathly slow, but I witness these instants, my
role in this show, doing for these people what they cannot do
for themselves. It is of no benefit to them, as you no doubt
understand already, but it may be of benefit to you, to show
you what is possible. The life she sees, I see. The truth she
sees, I see. The life will come later this morning, more easily
as she drinks her watered-down whisky and she slips under a
hurdle she ought to negotiate. All this soon. The truth I see as
she sees: I will impart this to you, I want no false mysteries
here; there is sufficient mystery, believe me, without adding
manufactured mysteries, as though one mystery, unknown to
me as unknown to you, is not sufficient for my show, not
sufficient to maintain your interest through all my barbaric
utterance. Having said this, let me offer you some words of
comfort, to support you for the remainder of this darkening
journey.
Countless times through countless generations I have
approached this mystery, once as a man in the East, now as a
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god in the West, my god-being conditional upon the

encumbrance of these characters, these three men and three
women, a seven-fold pilgrimage, each of us part of a bridge
extending in the dark towards that mystery. By your
standards, by the standards of your ancestors, believe me, my
journey is barbaric, wild, excessive, naive, but to you who
chance upon us on our journey let me comfort you by telling
you that WE LEARN, I TEACH. Having comforted you,
now let me tell you why I offer you such support: you, too,
are part of this bridge, one of the countless bricks, girders,
cables, coloured lights. Even my amanuensis here has his
part, walking his little room, a fitful receiver, local triumphs
protecting him from the greater story.
Her truth, then: living a false life, she sees this truth
falsely, yet the truth admitted. She sees that she should be
dead, a long time dead. The uninterpreted truth? That is the
mystery, her mystery, our mystery.
Now the hurdle she ducks, before she begins her
narrative. So obvious that she fails to see it; such an insight
into herself. A pity, perhaps, she misses it, but, then, she has,
like us all, a blind side. He has come down, at her request, to
drink coffee with her. She does not ask herself why he has
assented to come down; she merely assumes reciprocation:
she drawn to him, he drawn to her. You see how her mind
plays a trick of mirrors: finding what she wants in him, she
finds her own self there too; finding beauty in him, finding
then that beauty in herself; finding attraction in herself,
finding attraction in him too. He is part of her life now, the
listener; her narration is life-long, the listener is life-long too.
So, she never asks why he has come, never sees how she
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intersects the fullness of his own life and how she fits in
there. He sits in a neutral easy chair, at an awkward angle to
her seat at the table, not on the settee which would face her.
He is composed, cup and saucer in his lap, listens with a
composed face, now and then looking about the room, now
and then looking at her. He sees a photograph on the
mantleshelf, on the sideboard cheap delft figurines of cats,
cats sitting, cats lolling, cats bristling, cats looking and not
looking. Her rugs litter the floor: products of an intense
industry that has remote stasis as its end. All the objects in
the room have this one character, a self-cancelling inertia.
She is like that too, all her gesturing cancelling out through
insistent repetition. But in her he finds the clue: she, and now
her cluttered room, betray an attempt to fill a gap, a vacancy
that he perceives to be less of an absence than the result of an
avoidance, of something not done.
Are you surprised he sees through her so quickly?
Dont be, you would see the vacancy too; you would
understand that everything points to some gap in the past.
You would grasp immediately that all the clues point to the
vacancy, that all the clues are misdirecting, objects pointing
to a lack of an object. You would doubt the cats spoke of cats
once you saw her pet cat, her living cat, in the room. Her pet
cat would tell you that she bore the secret, and also that the
secret had nothing to do with cats, but something analogous.
Then you would grasp that the clue the living cat, a real fat
cat, was mispointing to is, in some way, too awful a secret to
be allowed representation by a clue. The rugs too. All strictly
geometrical, stylised flowers, bright colours: consider the
rugs as misdirecting clues too. DO NOT associate cats and
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rugs: you are not looking for answers here. Consider instead
her activity in making these rugs. What does she do? She
stretches the canvas base on a proprietary wooden frame. The
base bears the pattern printed in colour code, the reference
colours in a column on the side of the base. The
manufacturers supply hanks of wool in these reference
colours as part of the kit. She spends hours inserting the
appropriate colours between warp and woof, using an
ingenious implement, a latchet hook, for the rugs. Now, what
is she doing? First she is passing the time in her siding,
knotting as it were this wool onto canvas. There are many
ways she could pass this time; why this way? It is exacting
work, requires sustained effort and concentration. Effort uses
surplus energy, concentration keeps her mind busy one is
exhaustive, the other repressive. The physical effort gives her
engagement, activity, and quells thoughts, though not
reflection. Let us take the positive features here and see what
is there. Reflections: preparing the narrative she is now
divulging; rug-making helps organise that narrative; rugmaking helps her look to her past, drawing her back to that
omission. Activity: she is active in his company, before him
as it were, gestures, leg crossing and uncrossing, shoulders
unhitching, her hands here and there, her crumpled face
mobile, eyes speaking volumes. You see that rug-making
engages her hands and eyes only; you see what movements
rug-making annuls, bleeding away the energy she would use
in these movements. Rug-making reduces her to nearimmobility, makes her a reflector instead.
Now, as to what she does: the rug she completes is a
copy of the pattern printed on the canvas base, in effect she
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merely embellishes this patterned base. But her rug

obliterates the printed pattern from one perspective, makes
the pattern more real from another. Take the obvious point:
she deals with pattern, a pattern moreover already complete.
She creates nothing, merely completes something already
prepared by someone else. She is not aware of this; aware
only of the wool RISING upon the base, rising for her to the
autonomy of the finished object, a rug. She is not proud of
the finished object, mordant in the face of praise from her
husband, both of them aware, at these moments of praise, of
what these objects represent: stifled, forbidden movements.
Let us take up the end-products now: rugs on one hand,
the story of her life on the other. The husband covets the
rugs, has arranged for her to leave them to him in her will.
But the one listening to her now is indifferent to them; he
would be revolted by them if pressed on the matter. But she
tells him her story, a story her husband would say he knows
already. As she speaks to him, she REHEARSES that life in
her body, the gestures fulsome, the pace of gesture hectic,
arousing her to a lust for more complete gesture, but gesture
nonetheless. By analogy, she makes more real for him the
pattern of her life, the base as it were she has prepared for
him after the manner of the canvases she works on. But what
she tells him in words parents, childhood, her love affair,
marriage, her children, cancer, degenerating spine, spasms
that paralyse her legs is not repeated in the gestures.
Instead, they form another language, attempting to indicate
what has been repressed by her in her hobby, the absence her
husband praises with relief. And yet, as he understands,
listening to her and watching her from time to time, her
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provocative gestures, like her rugs, like the cat figures, are
also misdirecting clues. But unlike the objects in the room,
her gestures do not speak of avoidance, but of luring,
proposing the original desire while betraying fear through the
repetition of gesture.
Let us consider the cat again, as he is doing. Suspicious
of him, she slinks under the table, standing with her back to
him, her head turning slightly from side to side, tail up
flickering from time to time. Consider the near-immobility of
the cat in conjunction with the activity of her mistress. Gauge
the mood of the cat: resentment, jealousy, shyness,
competition. One test will suffice for any possibility. He
gives his attention to the cat, a flicker of attention as part of
his civil attention to her mistress and the room. The cat
responds, turning her head more to the right to look at him,
her tail stiffening. In time she turns towards him, now eyeing
her mistress warily in quick glances. He places the cup and
saucer on the floor, the cat approaches slowly, a low miaow
of longing, until she stands before him, eyes steadily on his.
He leans and strokes her thickly furred head, she presses
against his hand, forcing, as some cats love to, his hand to
caress down her back. She arches in response, tail fully erect,
teeth appearing as her mouth tenses with pleasure. When he
removes his hand, she trembles visibly and turns until she has
presented her back to him. Her anus is tremoring, pullulating
a thin thread of excrement. She backs towards him, hind legs
straddling.
Her mistress shouts at her, a domineering voice, harsh
as a bark.
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He thanks her for the coffee, rises and leaves, knowing

that all clues will misdirect, but will be clues nonetheless.
She admonishes the cat at his back, frankly scandalised by its
filth, calling the shameless cat a dirty animal.
She has had already an illumination by his office,
which she has forgotten, now she has a second illumination:
in her cat she sees how the directness of animal instinct
betrays the non-animal nature of human desire. For an instant
she sees into this gap, between animal function and human
longing, seeing an image of something unfolding like a sheet
then tearing apart at every juncture, seeing the sheet-like
thing at one moment white then seeing nothing there at all.
She shudders, aware that what she has seen is really a
memory of something she has never done.

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Cloud today, for a change, everyone relieved for once

by bad weather. A storm is forecast, a bad one, but most
doubt it; to the inhabitants of this provincial city, excitement
is something that happens elsewhere, where the world is real.
He clambers up the narrow stairs to the office, already moist
in the close atmosphere, to find his secretary examining his
assistants new suit. She is saying, as he enters the outer
office, stroking the shoulder of the jacket, his assistant gazing
down at the spot she touches, the light of admiration on his
waxy skin:
careful of stains.
They pause at his entry, looking over at him, a light in
his secretarys eyes also, her light of easy friendship, a light
that rises in abstraction in her, casual. She turns his assistant
by the shoulder, and he glances up, a rosy glow under the
pallor of his face, a smile of beatification, opening his jacket
and looking down at himself, trousers loose but still firmly
creased so that they jut forward from his groin and upper
thighs. He admires the suit for the sake of his assistant,
conscious of the heat of exertion in himself, the moistness of
his chest and armpits, brow, feet. The cherry red tie his
assistant wears is too bright, too much movement between
the new-stiff bluegrey seersucker of the suit and the white
shirt underneath, the red slash in between, so he goes over to
him and makes as to straighten the tie, taking the opportunity
to tighten the limp knot at his neck. He feels the heat of his
assistants body, the whiff of his aftershave, sees the sheen of
the small-pored skin, how light his limp dark hair is. The
openness of his assistant amazes him, not for the first time,
how he stands in the midst of very great danger all107

unknowing. Some vital part of him must have failed to open;

he is like a rosebush content with green buds, innocent of the
pain of flowering, of carrying the process of living through to
the end. Yet he is pleased, in all his innocence, lack of
reflection, with his bosss attention, glad that a greater
strength, a greater being of responsibility, should attend to
him, approve and improve him. Flicking off the left shoulder
of the suit, much as he had seen his secretary do, he can see
very clearly the business of touch, can see that his assistant
would dearly love to feel his bosss arm across his shoulder,
creating a protective circle about, to let him rest from the
demands of the world. In not doing this, and it is a matter of
resisting an easy thing to do after all it would also define
him with reference to that circle of security, allow him to
look back to the limited for a moment he sees the situation
of his own father, seeing a true pain there, in the case of
fathers not of bosses, that which is part of you must be let go,
to endure pain and confusion beyond your control. Then in
that thought he sees the far greater and far more painful truth:
the father cannot protect the son because the father himself is
caught in the same pain and confusion, does not understand
any better than the son, despite the deepest conviction of the
son, what on earth it is all about. The hardest thing here, he
sees, is for the father not to abjure his son in the face of this
knowledge the knowledge, not that his son must suffer as
greatly as he himself, but that he himself suffers all the more
in witnessing what it is the son suffers, not just the world, but
the knowledge that the father cannot protect him. That
knowledge above all: the helplessness of the father, the
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WEAKNESS OF THE MAN behind all appearance to the

contrary.
But he does touch his assistants cheek as a final
contact, saying jocularly, eye to eye, You getting married or
something? buoyed by the spring of feeling his insight raises
in him, loving his dumb ruthless assistant for that instant,
knowing he can depend on him in a way a father could never
depend on his son. His secretary snorts at his side, and his
assistant blushes, and she says, coming closer, a mug of
coffee for him, No fear him, with affection, ambiguity, a
vague resentment, all this in her voice, and a surplus as well
of enticement, a generalised offering, a possibility she always
proposes to all men, much as all men propose in return to all
women, rising from curiosity as much as promiscuity, yet a
deeper intent, each man willing to do it for each woman, each
woman willing to do it for each man, botched as it most often
is, ending in tears and grief, yet something always learned,
something always imparted, each meeting between the sexes
always a lesson, a signpost on the way. He takes the coffee
from her, glancing into her eyes, so typical of her, washedout blue, wide-open bold naked eyes, and she relents and tells
him that they are having lunch with staff from
Communications, a restaurant in the hills behind the city,
everyone off drink for a week in preparation.
The prospect sobers his secretary and assistant, and he
narrows his eyes shrewdly at his secretary, conveying in this
way the words: DISCRETION, SECRETS, and her eyes
change slightly, showing in this way that she understands
him, that as usual she will pump for information, no matter
how intoxicated she might appear or how lewd, all the time
109

keeping her own mouth closed. He nods in acknowledgement

and turns away from her abruptly, to an outsider as though he
did not approve of her, of her slackness, her abandonment to
the arrow of time, indifferent, passive, taking everything that
comes without judgement. This is not true, of course; he is
not a moralising man. Yet she is not, on analogy with his
assistant, a kind of daughter to him, he a father witnessing
lifes corruption in a more personal way, forbidden to partake
in the debauching of his daughter, jealous of other men and
vulnerable in an ambiguous way through his daughter, as
though the penetration of his daughter was at the same time a
penetration into him. No, the relation is very different: he is
master of a whole dimension of her that no man hitherto had
ever bothered even to acknowledge, never mind enter upon.
This she knows intimately, as she does the rest too: she is
open to him in the way a puppet is open to its master, with
this addition: that she trusts him completely, loyal to him
because he makes such good use of her, and so teaches her so
much that is valuable about herself and about him too.
When they are alone together in the office, when his assistant
is out doing the work that keeps the section in existence, they
sit together and talk, usually in his office, either side of the
desk, and she becomes something more than her sex this
longing witnessed in how she binds up her sexuality in tight
wraps, bra smearing her breasts to her chest, panties pinching
her hips and belly and his scrotum would shrivel up, hands
losing definition, mouth slack, talking together much as two
angels would off-duty. They never remember what they
speak about, the steady glow they share more the
communication than the holes that appear in and about
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uttered words wherein you lose yourselves constantly,

trying with growing desperation to start again with each new
word, until most of you give up hope and fall into a silence
that fills you like a cement plastered over a rubble stone wall.
She is his weapon, mainly a deterrent, a being of
unknown powers, like a witch with real capability. She is a
sense-organ he lacks, an intuition he cannot fathom, an
understanding so cold, like water in its penetration and
remorseless flowing, that at times he truly fears it, not for its
knowledge but for the cold implacable, true light that
intuition shines on already existing things. Her supreme value
is this coldness, her utter indifference to the things she
knows, no paranoia, no credulity, no hope, no memory. It is
not a passive light, though the result appears to be a mere
shining-upon; it spreads over things with an intelligent
interest, finding dark crannies, secret places, turning up facts
and perspectives deliberately hidden by others, by himself.
She is his main support, knowing him intimately, as he
knows, reared by a vapid inactive mother, abandoned by an
over-ambitious, hence over-inadequate, father; his powers
lacking point, his aims directed towards a vacancy, his fear of
being overwhelmed by what he is tempted to take for granted,
an investigator so he would be forced to suspect everything
and everyone, a policeman once to sublimate his secret
yearning to commit crime, to murder as a way of filling the
abyss at his feet, a corporate agent now to exploit the more
dangerous temptation private enterprise permits: murder and
crime justified by profit, a false increase, but enhanced
powers nonetheless. She knows all about his desperation,
how he sweats in his office as in a slow cooker, knows his
111

insanity, how he fumbles between levels, rationality long ago

abandoned, sees angels, seeks gods, obstructs men, murders
women, courts demons, practices magic, drinks grace
greedily, loves darkness but suffers light, makes her into an
image of himself (which permits HER to pig it with her
husband a true secret of hers surrendering her body to an
abasement that gives her true experience of carnal existence,
the proximity of excrement and joy, sweat and ecstasy, pain
and attention, learning above all in HER madness that the
glance of divinity is a flash of lightning touching every cell,
inventing life) but most of all she knows this about him:
how he is trapped in his life, all his efforts to rise merely
proof of how securely he is trapped in the powers he seeks to
transcend.
You see how this woman helps me; how in this
particular performance of our seven-fold show I learn this
much. She is not one of us, her soul linked to two others, a
trinity inferior no doubt but yet actively fulfilling its task of
reminding the likes of us of what it is we have long ago put
behind us. They smear themselves like pats of cowshit on
grass, preparing a base for themselves, knowing vaguely that
the rose flourishes in the dung heap. They suffer a
deprivation they cannot yet comprehend, even the experience
of confusion is not yet within their reach, consoled only by
what they SEE, the inertness of things, the compaction,
cohesion, blind reaction, the stupid way energy always makes
hooks to limit itself, particle clinging to particle, atom
cleaving to atom, energy running clockwork in a blind
concrete universe of its own devising. They see this, and their
delight is to traduce yes, a speech, an attitude, a comment
112

this cohesion, to tear themselves apart in a deliberately

induced passion of indulgence, to teach energy the truth of its
singularity, its lack of relation, its utter being-there. We, on
the other hand, now seek PURITY, willing to stand before
God for all eternity singing Hosannas, in white robes, without
sex, without knowledge, without sense, singing lustily for
ever and ever. This is all we know now, anything else
inconceivable at our stage, fighting off the prospect of utter
unending BOREDOM, fighting the temptation to mock the
crassness of a god happy with mindless adulation, wanting to
let go at last, smear ourselves again across the face of the
earth like slurry running from a byre.
Yet we hold to and press on. Why? Simply because
WE CAN DO IT.
What other reason do you think there is?
He nods to his assistant and together they go into the
inner office, stuffy there but thank goodness the window is
open. He sees the equipment is already set up on the
conference table. Any problems? His assistant, in his
element now, shows his snake grin, thin lips set in a grimace,
expressing his knowledge that success is always a theft. He
switches on the machines and sits beside his boss opposite
the display screens, remote, files, notebook gathered ready
there. Thunder rumbles back in the hills, making both men
shiver, a charge of electricity. He says, Go ahead then. His
assistant fiddles with his tie, to loosen it again, draws his
trousers higher over his knees, and lays his left hand flat on
the table top, speaks rapidly, dispassionately:
The case is with Vice now. Luckily I know the Exec
there, so I could access their files. Heres what I found. he
113

taps in a set of numbers on the remote and script scrolls

rapidly up the screen. This is the Juvenile Department report.
A year ago. Doesnt say much. Covers two hundred
incidents. No suspects. Advises improved street lighting in
the Montpelier district. Now. Taps on remote again. Some
cases. I selected these myself. Photographs appear in rapid
succession. Mostly teenagers. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Mostly female, but some male. His assistant pauses to allow
the photographs run on to the end. Notice anything? He
grunts rhetorically, not noticing yet. OK. Ill show you a
sort. Photographs run again, his assistant silent while they
flash one by one. Pretty standard stuff, yes? His assistant
glances at him. Now watch these. Photographs run more
slowly now, ten frames. See it? He grunts again, seeing the
point now, but lets his assistant do the talking. Do they look
like rape victims? Not a mark on them. His assistant pauses,
checks his notebook, and presses keys on the remote. Look.
This girl died forty eight hours later. Not a mark on her. Look
at her eyes, though. OK. This girl is still being treated. That
was taken on the night of the attack. Note the physical
tension. Now, this was taken a year later. Look at her hands.
Without drugs she wouldnt breathe. OK. Now. He keys
more numbers. This is the Vice file. They have it because
someone thought drugs might be involved. Here. Script
scrolls up the screen again. Trouble is, most kids have some
drug or other in them. This is a stats analysis of five hundred
cases of attack. See? A normal distribution. OK. Now. Taps
in numbers again. I did a search of the Vice files but didnt
find much. Sex attacks are not their business normally. So I
patched into Juvenile records and did a search. File numbers
114

and headings began to scroll up the screen. His assistant

glances at him. I took these in case you want to go over
them. Ive highlighted the possibles. Criterion: reported
attack but no physical marks. Out of two thousand odd cases
I got another twenty two possibles. His assistant keys the
remote. Here. Now some shots. See these, the same
situation. Extreme tension. Out of these twenty two cases,
fifteen have died, mostly heart failure. The rest are in
psychiatric care. His assistant clears the screen and sorts
through the files as he continues. So. Thirty two cases I have
identified. I daresay there are more. Here is a map showing
where these attacks occurred. Mostly distributed along West
Side. Only two cases on East Side, in the university district.
Ive analysed the distribution. Here. See? Lonesome Hill
Park is the obvious focal point. But I dont understand that,
boss. Its out of the way. Unless the victims are lured there.
OK? His assistant draws his notebook over. We did some
surveillance in the park area. Seeing his bosss query he
explains: Vice helped me out. Still think theres a drug
angle. OK. He selects a disc and inserts it in the player under
the monitor, presses a number on the remote. This is an
edition. Not much I warn you but see what you think. We set
up hides in different parts of the park at first. Passive
observation. As you can see. The screen shows a lot of
shadow, glimpses of amber light in the distance, flashing
lights on the railway on one occasion. Sometimes shadows
appear to move, though the pattern of movement indicates
wind, but he concentrates so hard on the screen that the
shadows come to appear as a kind of script, articulated
patterns of darkness that throw stray light into blinding relief.
115

They both watch with mounting tension, his assistant, who

knows what to expect, breaking this from time to time with
sudden movements. Thunder rolls outside, closer now,
though they hear faint echoes back in the mountains. He
watches the shadows and sees superimposed, in sudden
flashes, photographs he has seen earlier, naked girls with
willowy bodies stretched out in straining extension, wires of
muscle at their necks, hands reduced to bone, faces eerie,
nostrils flared, eyes bulging, mouth a rictus, teeth bared in a
frozen snarl. His assistant says suddenly, causing him to
tremor, Now. We changed tactics. Set up remote cameras,
keyed to shoot any significant change in the shadow pattern.
Watch. This is interesting. A succession of ten second shots
follows: base pattern for one second then nine seconds of the
altered state. Most are again due to the wind, but three show a
shadowy figure moving across the field of the camera. None
is distinct, the shadowy figure blending at different points in
the shot into the background shadows. His assistant stops the
disc and says, We think thats him. We did some analysis.
Watch. He puts a new disc in, keys the remote. On the
screen a pattern of shadow dissolves into a range of greys and
blacks. His assistant comments, Light sensitivity gives us
depth here. Reference light is about one fifty metres left,
roughly fifty degrees out. See. We get the darker part of the
figure and can track it across. So. Hold on. Yes. See this.
Abstracted this. You see the shape. We reckon about
seventeen eighteen. Male. White. Slim. About five ten.
Wearing corduroy pants. Light brown. The jacket is matt.
Synthetic. Has a gold ring on his right hand, unusually on the
middle finger. His assistant stops the machine and sits back
116

in his chair, running his fingers around the inside of his

collar. They both notice the patter of large raindrops on the
metal roof above.
He stands, stretches his legs, and walks across the
room to ease the tension in him. At his back his assistant
says, hesitant in his candour: None of this is conclusive, you
know. Vice thinks we are being strung along by someone... I
didnt show them any of these photos, the thirty two, I mean.
His assistant hits the table with his notebook, causing his boss
to turn away from the window. Lightning flashes in the room,
an ugly glare of reflected green. They wait until the crash of
thunder passes. Then his assistant says, staring up at his boss,
a glaze of worry in his eyes: I think this is weird, sir. I mean,
I dont understand it. It looks as though he terrifies these kids
and I dont know how he does it. But look at this. On the
screen there is a shot of a girls body, extended like all the
others. Look at that gash at her neck. I nearly missed this,
except the report said there was no other sign of violence. See
the curve of that cut, down and suddenly to the right of her
body. She did that herself. You know knife slashes, they only
curve slightly and usually because the turning of the blade
exaggerates the natural curve of a downward sweep. This
curve is more acute, that is because of how your arm would
draw back as it moved down. She did that herself, to tear her
clothes off. His assistant looks up again: The gash says she
used all her strength... Look at the nails of her right hand.
One is torn away practically.
He says, studying the screen, seeing the torn and
broken nails, blood in the fold of the cuticle, Hypnosis?
117

His assistant suddenly shakes his head, genuinely

uneasy: Maybe. But could you get these reactions with
hypnotism? I mean, could you FORCE someone to lose their
mind completely?
Why not? he says rhetorically, soothed by the
drumming of rain above while he thinks aimlessly about the
fact of gesture.
His assistant looks down at the table and nods: OK. I
spoke to one of the psychiatrists treating these girls. She said
they tried hypnotism as a treatment. Hang on, Ill show you
this. He grabs the remote, checks his notebook, keys three
numbers. On the screen a middle-aged woman sits behind a
metal desk saying trial. Its as though there is nothing there
to hypnotise. Do you understand that? Something in the
patient must register the fact of being hypnotised, the
something which maintains normal rationality during the
suspense and restores it on command. That is lacking in these
cases. The assistant presses that fast-forward button and
when he lifts his finger the woman is saying, parlance, off
the record, of course, but it is as though they have been
frozen at a particular moment, a moment when the faculties
which control all mental and bodily functions were switched
off. The way it is now, if we fail to maintain the existing
levels of sedation these girls will simply die, of heart failure
or asphyxiation. The assistant fast-forwards again until the
woman is coming around the desk, heading for a door coming
into view on the left, saying with a lighter expression on her
face, frame charges. But one of my more spiritually minded
colleagues says their souls have left their bodies. He doesnt
pretend to know why or how, but that is what he says.
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His assistant switches the disc off and lies back in his
chair. To his assistant he looks stunned, but he is thinking
about murder, realising that one, he does not understand
murder, after all; and two, that everything is in some way
back-to-front. Then, being in the presence of his assistant, a
puzzled assistant, even scared, he catches at the last insight
and hastily draws back, feeling a sink in him at this
disturbance to his flow of thought. A flash of lightning pulses
in the room, forked lightning overhead, and the crash of
thunder is deafening. What he has seen in the last hour is
suddenly meaningless; meaningless, he realises at once,
because of the word soul. The sink this time is deep, leaving
him tottering between levels, for once hung between the
everyday world he habitually ignores and a world of
speculation suddenly frightening, like a bad habit moving
into the condition of addiction; possession.
His assistant stands up and stretches, then smiles at his
boss, a rueful smile, as though embarrassed by what they
have been watching. He collects himself to that smile, catches
his assistants elbow as they cross to the door, remembering
as once what he wanted to tell him:
Who will be there? Archives?
His assistant nods, catching on immediately.
Well listen, about the South American job. See if you
can get the file reference, will you.
His assistant smiles more knowingly now, glad no
doubt to mesh into a more important, and more
understandable, matter. He squeezes his assistants elbow,
Want to see Head Office signals.
119

Sure. At the door his assistant turns back towards the

conference table and adds: Theres an index file. On top.
He nods, almost indulgently for his assistant, saying
softly, Its good work. Dont worry, well fix something up.
Pats his assistants shoulder as he leaves, disliking the
crimped feel of the material, cold and rebuffing, You enjoy
yourselves now. Pauses and reaches into his back pocket,
counts notes and pushes them into the top pocket of his
assistants suit. His assistant begins to protest but he pushes
him out playfully, saying, Call it a bonus. Go on. Go on
now.
Alone, he hears the drumming on the roof with a new
clarity, and wonders if he has had coffee that morning.
Thunder rumbles in a comforting way in the distance, flat,
out over the ocean now. His shoulders are stiff with tension,
the air electric, storm not nearly over, clothes clinging to him.
Suddenly, the face is clear, etched in detail against a dark
background. It is shaped like an elongated heart and full of
such yearning, eyes slightly started with expectation. His
reactive sob is equally sudden, hurting his nose. He turns,
amazed, and looks out the window at the rain beating down
on the vegetation, water sluicing over the dry compacted soil.
It is the familiarity most of all that stuns him. He finds he can
recall the face easily, detail shimmering as his conscious
attention interferes with his memory, but the shape of the face
remains though he must supply the expression in the eyes
from his memory of his emotional response to that
expression.
He has turned away from the window and strode over
to the conference table before he realises what he is doing.
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The index file is on the top but it takes a minutes feverish

searching to find the disc reference, then find the disc itself,
load it and set it going. He watches the shadows without
thought, feeling the anticipation rising in him. With a dart of
his finger he freezes the disc, eyes burning down onto the
patch of light in the right background. It takes him more time
to remember how to operate the computer, cautious in case he
loses the image. He gets the screen control window up at the
first attempt, punches for zoom and uses the mouse to define
the area about the spot of light. The machine is fast and
almost at once a blurred image of a face fills the screen, heart
shaped, the eyes expectant, mouth partly open.
But he is not satisfied, so he runs the disc on, adjusting
the zoom focus as required to keep the face on the screen.
The expression on the face changes slightly as the girl pauses
to check her whereabouts, but the image becomes no clearer.
His concentration becomes torpid, bringing him back to the
storm outside, heavy rain now but otherwise utter silence. A
mood chases round in him, as though looking for a name.
At the door, his secretary cuts through the silence,
Were off. He glances up, then steps back, eyes flickering
one last time at the blurred image on the screen, wondering
again how he could see the image so clearly, the pale tension
in the young skin, determination and fatality in her eyes,
surrender in her mouth. He has seen his secretary dressed like
this only once before, when she married, a police
superintendents secretary then, raw but nubile. The dress is
blue, flat blue almost like her eyes, white collar and cuffs, the
belt with a glossy gold-coloured buckle. Her breasts are
firmed up in a larger bra than usual, the skirt of the dress
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flaring over her thighs, white stockings. He scrutinises her

face closely, it is very alert, and asks simply, beginning to
understand the mood that drifts in him:
A staff lunch?
She hitches her shoulders, expressing thereby how
absolute her dispassion is. He nods, nodding as much at his
assistants behaviour too: at least he felt something about the
coming abandonment. He glances at the image again, hoping
that now he has grasped the mood in the office his memory
will cut through his torpor and find the face for him. His
secretarys shoes hit the floor sharply, resonating through the
girders underneath the metal cladding of the walls. She looks
at the image on the screen.
How long? he asks, looking with her at the image,
feeling a sadness in him: it isnt much to show her in the end,
is it?
In your own time, she replies, matter-of-factly,
studying the image closely.
He nods, understanding perfectly, seeing the chance he
is being given. You know about this? he asks her, not
demanding anymore.
She nods, her sprayed hair bobbing stiffly. The
perfume is heavy, unsuitable on her light skin, the light fat of
her figure.
Tell me.
She turns to him, puts her left hand on his forearm,
wedding and engagement rings, both large and seemingly an
integral part of that hand, and says, looking into his eyes,
open still to him:
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They put one of the photographs in the initial tender

proposal.
He nods, remembering.
But its real, he states for her benefit, in case she
might not understand.
She comes closer to him, her eyes only inches from
his. The whites are startling bright, showing how good her
health and vigour are, saying:
Its make or break, yes.
She kisses his cheek. He feels the stickiness of her
lipstick, feels her breath on his skin, warm then immediately
cold as she draws back:
Put your arms around me.
Her mass surprises him, though it should not. She
conveys a sense of contentment he fails to understand, the
compress of breasts telling him something of what he has
always failed to understand about human life as human life:
its restriction but its consolation so long as you dont look
elsewhere.
When he drops his arm, she steps back and murmurs in
a husky tone, arousal always just under the surface in her:
Thank you. You should do that more often.
When she has left he turns to the screen again, feeling
the warmth of his secretary ex-secretary down the front of
his body, the coldness of the comfort offered, the truth of
human solitariness.
Then he sees the photograph, the clue he has missed:
the clue she had been unaware of herself her daughter.
Thunder rolls again in the mountains, the echo and reecho a comfort: another storm front coming.
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He wipes his cheek: sees that he has been set free.

At last.

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He wakes up suddenly. It is early morning, birdsong

somewhere. A word repeats in his mind; he is not
immediately aware of this.
TERGIVERSATE.
He does not know what the word means. He read it in a
book a long time ago. He is not troubled by the intrusion; in
fact it fills a gap he knows is there, not yet to be named. He is
facing a wall, pale cream with a hint of pink, a strange wall, a
strange bed, a strange room. The strangeness is appropriate,
he knows. A car passes outside, working up the hill, vibration
in the room. He knows where he is, why he is there, what he
is doing in this place, but that does not absolve the
strangeness because he finds the strangeness imposed on
the room; not only there, as he knows well, but on
everything, even on himself. In the early light, comfortably
laid out in the bed, the sense of strangeness is a comfort,
something to nestle in: he sees that in strangeness is the
possibility of truth because the strange abolishes all the lies to
date, annuls history, denies the titles of objects, makes
motion absurd. He also knows why this profound detachment
is now possible, after so many years.
This knowledge gives him the name he has awaited
since waking with the strange unknown word in his mind. A
name is a sign that indicates an essence; a name is a failure, a
succumbing to temptation: a name is arbitrary, a panic
response you are all habituated to, panic made the
fundamentality of your existence. This morning, laid out
under a sheet in a cool strange room, he is going to
understand something of this, the knowledge articulated from
a recess in him, something to be experienced rather than
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grasped and possessed as though any instant of knowing

should replace other instances of knowing.
The word is a sign, and the sign is the memory of a
man lying beside a barn, body broken, a thigh bone jutting
through flesh and resting in a pool of congealed blood, a face
flattened to a mash, bone here again, a white pulp where an
eye used to be. And seeing this sign, a child gazing with
uninstructed eyes serving an open, credulous mind, he sees an
earlier sign, a man lying beside a drystone wall, severed at
the waist by an almighty sword slash, entrails spilling out
through the rent in his fine shirt, clotted blood adhering to the
slick coating the mangle of tubes.
He gazes inwardly on these names, not recoiling now
as he has done hitherto, the recoil the engine of his life,
fearing at every moment to see mangled bodies on roadways,
in corridors of business premises, in the setting sun, stretched
out across whole mountain ranges, in a womans face, in his
bowls of soup. He is pleased by the sharpness of the signs,
pleased now to have a deeper conviction vindicated, that his
images, all human images, come from within, not from
without. His abiding intuition, that the world he and every
one else sees as though out there in a glossy colourful world
is in truth produced within, eyes more mirrors than windows,
television inside your head, is correct. The new confidence he
finds here now permits him to act: he dismisses the name
signified by the broken bodies, crude imitations of mortality
and requests the actual sign prompting terror. He sees a cask
in a cellar, fallen from the stack, split open on the stone floor,
staves sprung up and away, red liquor in puddles, appalling
stench rising from the red-tainted white growths that cling to
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the inside of the staves, his grandfather saying to his uncle,

keenly satisfied: A bad one.
The figuration, he recognises, concerns spoiled
maturation,
vulnerability
and
contamination,
the
impressionable ever at risk. Thus maturity is a recursive state
not an achievement a plateau from which correction can
be undertaken, weeds pulled, undergrowth cleared. In a
broader context he sees life as a two-fold process, each step
forward providing new insight into the depredation accrued
in growth, the labour forward at once a turning back to
correct, to cleanse. You see this in the instinct for purity, to
prevent the accretion of accident calcifying him, turning him
into what many of you become, idols conforming to arbitrary
title, soul suborned to the accident of matter. You understand
here the nature of his suffering, his pervasive unhappiness:
his struggle to overcome enchantment, the pain of
surmounting temptation, the weariness of renouncing rest in
the reflection. You grasp for an instant the phenomenon of
blurring, of indistinctness? Setting out, he is on all roads,
finding himself on no road; pausing, he finds himself in all
places, at ease in no place.
This, too, has a name, a sign. When it is announced to
him, still snug in the strange bed, silence while light in the
strange room strengthens, he sees it at once for what it is,
marvelling at himself, both for his duplicity and the capacity
in him to survive such a fundamental and thoroughgoing
deception. He sees how fearful he is of cracked eggs, how
abiding this fear has been, how it has ruled him for thirty
years and how he has been unaware of this fact till this
moment. He sees eggs being cracked, into pots for poaching,
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into pans for frying, into bowls for scrambling; sees them
beheaded for eating, the bleeding yolk, the viscosity. He sees
them most of all lying broken on floors, smeared into carpets,
on pavements, trickling down walls, once covering the eyes
of a shocked politician, once by the dozen in a gutter, shells
mixed promiscuously, yolks at an orgy, most of all the
albumen, viscous like snot, like semen, the glutinous
substratum of all life, matter clinging to itself without
intelligence, without a trajectory.
There!
Thats it!
It is like that for him now, the relief of knowledge. He
sees life as a parasite, matter an accretion of energy that
senses a light above, a weed climbing a rock to approach a
light it can never reach. He sees nature as a vain attempt to
get leverage on soul, to sit on the right hand of what it
conceives to be God: nature in all its variety and display a
vain attempt to attract attention, to be universal, as infinite as
the soul; energy wrapped on itself in a vain attempt to
become a soul pleasing to what it conceives to be God.
This knowledge is present to him in an instant of
recognition, an instant requiring an eternity to narrate, but
requiring only that instant to understand. And in
understanding, he sees also the limitation of that energy: he
sees the limitation in the duality energy conceiving that
there is something other than itself, energy perceiving God in
its own image, energy looking for itself outside itself. Nature,
cosmos, the self-deception of this energy: at once the act of
reaching for this putative God and the result of this action,
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thus a middle ground of confusion, both the act of searching

and the barrier to searching.
Now he begins to falter, reaching a limit, not of
understanding as you might think, but a limit of belief
really a limit of faith, because it is faith that must be
permitted, not understanding. His faith can grasp the vanity
of nature, harder it is for him to grasp the vanity of mankind,
harder still to understand his own vanity. Understanding
proceeds by analogy, an exercise in form, one form only at all
times. What is true of nature is true of mankind, and what is
true of mankind must be true of himself. He sees this
morning more clearly than he has seen before that faith brings
him an understanding that is at once a truth grasped and a
truth impossible because it denies the very condition of
understanding it. Do not misunderstand this situation. He has,
as I have, the words describing the situation: a paradox of
understanding at this point on the threshold. He sees that to
understand this truth is to understand that understanding is
not possible. Further he can see, too: that the act of
understanding this truth is profoundly false; that
understanding the truth sets that very truth at a remove, so
that understanding is at once the pursuit of the truth and the
obstacle to reaching that truth.
Analogy: the universe is a comportment that renders
impossible what is sought, so also understanding is an
impulse that is a barrier to what is sought. Analogy: an actor
performs a role so that the actor is the barrier to the creation
of the character enacted; the musician is the barrier to the
experience of the music he performs, always the grating of
wood and metal in place of the music; the word you read here
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always the barrier to what the word is intended to mean; what

you see around you always the barrier to what you seek to
see.
He understands this clearly, have no doubt about this,
as you all understand this. We are concerned here with a
limitation of faith, as I have said, not a limitation of
understanding: there is no limit on our understanding, except
understanding itself. You understand this, yes? You
understand now, yes? So what of faith, the limitation there?
There is no limitation in faith itself, because faith is a
permission, and there is no limit to what you can permit,
because permission is an opening, where understanding is a
closure. He understands all this too, dispassionately,
increased traffic outside his window now that the day is up
and about. He even understands that he misunderstands the
concept of permission, believing until now that it signified
something that he does himself, caught in the absurd
regression of permitting himself to permit permission. He
sees now that permission is more like a relenting, a letting-be,
a stepping back, a surrender.
Thus far he has it true. But SURRENDER? To what,
he asks the recess in himself that has so far shown-told him
so much in the language of form. There is no answer, just a
spotty darkness before his eyes, the equivalent of white noise
over the radio, the operator lost for words, the camera and
this is the worst truth by far passive eye, pointing out on the
dark. But he is in so close this morning, knowing he makes a
new start today, that he presses for an answer, any analogy
will do.
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It takes about two seconds, the limitation of matter

here, not of the soul: his heart stops, blood rushes into his
lungs, fluids still and slide down his intestines, he pitches
forward, darkness suddenly engulfing him: HE DIES.
What is death after all but the dis-integration of
organisation, the reduction to a slime on the face of a planet.
By analogy, if you wish: as sleep is the loss of consciousness,
so death is the loss of intelligence; the one stilling movement,
the other unloosing coherence. But consider further: sleep is
required for the maintenance of consciousness; consciousness
is the awareness of difference, and sleep is the abatement of
the indices of difference, light and motion. By analogy, death
is required for the maintenance of intelligence; intelligence is
the awareness of form, and death is the abatement of the
index of form, knowledge.
But consider his experience this morning. Death is a
lesson concerning truth. So sleep is a lesson, which,
unlearned, leads to disordered awareness, consciousness
flooded, as it were, by memory dead consciousness. So if
death is avoided, then intelligence is disordered, the soul
overwhelmed by will, dead knowledge. But this is not what
he has experienced, is it?
No. A further analogy is required. There are two forms
of sleep: that of rest and that of contemplation, that is,
meditation. So also with death, two forms, the negative death,
the withdrawal of soul from the strengthening embrace of
will, the idolater within, and the positive death, the death by
permission, the surrender of the soul, to its truth.
And the truth, as he has learned today? There is only
one thing, and being only one, it cannot be known, for there
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is nothing to know it; it is an identity, innocent, unknowing,

simply being without reference.
This is the hardest death, above temptation, beyond
knowledge, beyond the comprehension of nature, a deepest
darkness to mankind, the agony of gods, who live, they
believe, on its threshold.
I, man-made-god, can tell you this secret of the gods:
they are the highest and the lowest at the same time. They
seek to surmount soul, to surrender the brightest, the most
true, the most beautiful in exchange for the darkest, the
unknowable, the silent. I am limited in my knowledge, I
readily admit, but it seems to me that it is this agony of the
gods that creates universes and all they contain; that what is
experienced as energy is the writhing of gods, a twisting and
turning before naked soul, like a serpent scorched by the sun
in the desert, a snake helpless in the talons of an eagle.
This is my agony, too. This is the agony I transmit to
my amanuensis as he paces his floor in mounting terror, his
faith permissive this far, his reason perturbed now. I say this
for his sake and he writes it in faith: I am the one-in-themiddle he knows of. With me are two gods (write without
fear, I intend only the good as I intimated in the beginning),
two men and two women. The gods experience soul, the men
and women seek soul. But the gods, in experiencing soul,
have forgotten knowledge, and the men and women, seeking
soul, have only knowledge. But KNOWLEDGE is the
greater, for it draws one on and on. I seek to draw these gods,
these men and women together, to remind the gods of their
true purpose, to overcome the greater enchantment, to go on
to the dark soul itself with open faith and put an end to all
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agony, all pain, the suffering of all creation. I wish gods to be

reminded of the knowledge of mankind: truth is within,
already present, requiring cessation only: complete and utter
surrender.
Rest now. Like him that sleeps after his lesson,
heedless of the bustle outside, the awareness of the woman
below. Forget for now what you have been told. It is written
and so it can be safely forgotten, until it is needed.

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On the television a woman, lean with managed fatigue,

says acidly: Leisure is labour undone! and she pivots
suddenly, taken from her task of making toast out in her
kitchen, another twinge up her back, another attack coming
on. But the pivot tracing a different twinge across her groin,
pain there too, but a pain that moves towards her like a wall
of water she once saw in a film on the same television. She
wants to croon plaintively, like her favourite singer thirty
years before, a slip of smooth sentimentality that would buoy
her more and more rigid frame, a complex indulgence she
likes to experience because it intimates what she would call,
had she the concept, an act of justice, but what she SEES as
something being taken back from her, so she can try again the
better to do it properly this time.
She hears him above her as she returns to her living
room, the cat sitting on the table, broad-chested, white downy
fur, staring implacably at her. The desire for a cigarette hits
her suddenly, another memory here: abandonment, whisky,
cigarettes; then the other memory, face cheek-wise on a
carpet, sheer openness of her buttocks above, the tension in
her curved spine. She almost drops the plate of toast, staring
at the cat and the trees at the bottom of her garden, the sense
of horror and loathing rising in the face of the darkness
before her eyes, the terrible allure of proffered ignorance, she
not grasping the true secret of sexual desire: that sexual desire
offers another knowledge, a knowledge beyond calculation
and feared by what in you calculates, holds time and space in
patterns of past and future, that wants solidity, heaven on a
plate, real god, real heaven, angels with wings beautiful but
not tempting, like a cosy home for all eternity. Yet she does
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understand something in this, because she can at least SEE

what is going on, having experienced this renaissance of
desire many times in recent weeks.
She is content to grasp the possibility of understanding
as a shape that can appear if allowed, so she sits in her
armchair, places the plate of toast on the tattooed canvas
spread over the coffee table and eases the various stiffnesses
in her body. We, however, will pursue this understanding;
unlike her, we need to follow all clues available to us in order
to grope our way into the darkness proposed to her, as it is
proposed to all of us, clues like waystations.
To start with: consider the significance of grasping the
possibility of understanding. What can this mean except that
she already understands, that she need only make the effort to
recall a memory or make the effort to follow the line of
circumstances to a conclusion she has previously followed?
You see this? She knows something! Now, she perceives it as
a shape, a shape that can appear. Let us call this shape a
presence not a form, you understand, because form is of the
intellect, a construct of the soul, miserably inadequate as it is,
but nonetheless carrying the key as the intellect can best
penetrate it. But presence, shape, is REAL; it moves, or
rather it could, if she allowed it, move in the room with her,
could command her, could draw her physically. Can you
understand her horror now? A phantom in the room with her,
a shape so familiar to her, knowing her secret? And loathing?
Oh dear, but what is loathing but your recognition of the
power of what truly fascinates you? Consider such a
presence. Its in the corner of the room, dark, yes, but dark
only because you have not yet acknowledged it. You know it
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is there in the same way that you know that you are here,
sitting in your chair eating toast, cat on the table, footsteps
over your head.
What could have such terrible familiarity? Yes,
something you know as well as yourself. But what is it that is
so familiar to you and yet so dark, something you know is
present even without looking? You know, yes, but let us put a
name on it, or, rather, let us remove one name from it.
Consider her line of reaction. Why cigarettes and whisky?
Abandonment, yes. Then she remembers sexual abandon,
yes? Ah, you think, she desires to have sex with the man
upstairs; we have been aware of this from the beginning, and
we know how the power of such longing can create ghosts of
satisfaction. So you think, yes? And you connect carpets and
cats, a woman splayed for penetration, the old game before
disease rendered her less than attractive, yes? And you grasp
further, the theme of temptation, here witnessing the other
side of temptation, where temptation is simply impossible,
and the phantoms such an impossibility raises, frustration,
despair, the allurement the allurement of death. Is this how
you see her? A study in frustration, an itch that cannot be
scratched, her cats and carpets a game of magic, replications
that speak of an absence, a lattice defining a void? Fine,
having come this far, let us fill that void, yes? What do you
put in that empty place?
Let us see then. She has eaten the toast, wiped her
mouth with tissue, her mind allayed by food, thinking that
she will work on her latest pattern now, stretched on its frame
over to the left of the table, opposite the television. Her
doorbell rings, once, twice. She is galvanised by its urgent
136

buzz and she hurries into her bedroom, throws up the window
and shouts towards the street door:
Who is it?
No one answers. No one peers over the railings
bounding the path to the doorway, no delivery man, no crony
come for a drink and a natter fewer come now anyway, she
living so far away from her old haunts only silence and the
whine of engines climbing the hill. At moments like this,
when the expected does not happen, she slips into a kind of
automatic response, entering a framework of dutiful action, a
child performing a learned ritual who wants to be thought
capable of doing what she is told. She goes back into her
living room, brushes down her shell suit, goes back into the
bedroom to check that her hair is tidy, grizzled weak hair
imperfectly dyed black and caught up in a practical ponytail
with an elastic band. Her bell rings again, once, twice. A
deliberate even pressure, each ring of the same duration, a
quality that alerts something in her, that proposes something
within the structure of duty that now inhabits her: she must
remain erect, prepared to answer questions. The caller is
official, but neutral; questions that answered will help carry
forwards those larger affairs that pass beyond her
comprehension.
She climbs her stairs heavily, drawing herself by
means of her right hand on the banister, head down, seeing
for a moment a fat girl in a white dress, her mother in the
offing stern in a wryly loving way, a woman that brooked no
deviation, no relenting from suffering. Opening the door to
her flat, she sees his face so clearly before anything else
impinges that her jaw drops and her legs shudder, sending
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darts up her frame like cracks up glass. She acknowledges his

request to speak to her for a moment, invites him down,
shaking all over now, steadying herself against the banister,
all the time absorbing what she has seen, knowing at the
same time that what she absorbed was false. His face had
expressed sadness, consideration, mildness, upper lips
stretched up giving a touch of aloofness, smoothly shaven
cheeks inviting touch, eyes very clear, not focused but yet
wary, above all bright, even radiant.
She worries in her living room, inviting him to sit,
noticing he sits where he had sat the last time, the awkward
chair that does not fit into the room, facing the fireplace at an
angle to the television and the table by the window. She goes
into her kitchen, aware that she has not gone through the
welcoming small talk she normally performs, abstracted by
the expression on his face, knowing it thoroughly false, an
old guise donned for some ulterior purpose. She fills the
kettle, using bottled water because he is a visitor, switches it
on, spoons instant coffee into two cups, adding more to his in
an obscure desire to prompt him to greater talkativeness. The
abstraction concerns the face, within the abstraction she
reconstructs the face of the earlier visit, the expression of
polite interest, eyes searching the room more than they search
her, despite all her signalling. He coughs in the room, the
short cough of a dry throat in summer, and she feels in the
pitch of his cough an additional tension that cues her to the
other tone she had detected in his voice, that first time when
she had thrown herself on to his sympathy, sitting hot in his
room wanting to tell him...
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Suddenly she is confused and in that confusion there

arises her real response to what she senses lies behind the
expression on his face: modernly it would be called guilt, the
now-abandoned religious view would have called it sin,
meaning in this context that state of self-discovery when you
realise that the blasphemous secret you have kept hidden
from yourself is known to another; all in all, when you realise
suddenly that another knows how deeply and completely
false you are, even to yourself. The tension in his voice when
he opened the door and saw her, battered, bruised, crying, and
knew at once how far this pathetic old bag would go to have a
mans penis, erect to bursting point, purple and hot with
engorged blood, veins bulging, the mans face tense with the
labour of it, this unique thing pushed to the hilt the length of
her vagina until it pressed painfully against that recess where
pain issued as a glory, unique itself, stunning, obliterating, an
agony of such sweet dark pleasure that she would abandon
everything, the world, God himself, every tomorrow, for that
glory, would gladly die in order to suffer that agony for ever
and ever.
The kettle has boiled by now and switched itself off,
wisps of steam the only sign of this state, and still she stands
in stunned awareness, staring at the little green frog
magnetically adhering to the door of her fridge. She can see
this guilt or sin with complete clarity, experiencing for the
first time in her life a true state of knowledge: she knows all
the detail, seeing it from the outside like a schematic,
interlocked flesh, the logic of the construction and operation
of complementary organs, the purpose of fluids, the
ingenious elastication of living tissue, the role of energy in
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erotic sensibility, whole bodies operating automatically when

allowed to generate the whole mystery of a pleasure that has
no locus, no signification, no meaning at all. She understands
in this instant all the fidgets, signals, symbols, displacements,
the horrors, loathings, avoidances that point to this lack of
meaning: understands for once what she has worked at with
her hobbies, what I have called the lattice defining a void,
what she sees more directly as a careful preparation for this
moment of revelation.
Now she notices the wisps of steam, shakes herself,
calls out, With you in a moment, in a tone she has not used
for years, not since she had acted hostess to her husbands
colleagues during informal evenings discussing city politics.
This tone, this MANNER, expresses her satisfaction with
herself, that she has reached the secret, that she has cleared
away the rubble of a life to see behind what she now
understands to be the whole world, all the planning and
building, the veneer of achievement and failure, the sensed
futility of dawns and springs, the pointlessness of stars and
seas, speech pronouncing truth, organisations, aspirations,
possessions. She pours the water, milk, places the cups and
saucers on the good tray, with its floral pattern, and heads
back towards him, knowing that he too understands this
behind all the dross, even her dross, that he understands her
to her depth, approaching him through the short corridor, tray
aloft, the daylight in the room like his glory, a clearing in the
forest, grass, rest.
He is not in the chair it faces the door which throws
her momentarily in a way that echoes something even deeper;
instead he is at the mantleshelf, bent forward slightly, head
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up nonetheless, hands joined behind him resting on the curve

of his buttocks. She sweeps into the room, still the old skills
she is aware, but aware also that the glory she had framed
herself for is not there for her, that it has receded for some
reason to sit on the crowns of the trees outside, to intensify
the sunlight flashing there. But she says loudly nonetheless,
Here we are! Sorry for the delay. knowing at once that she
is compounding the problem, that her presence is like a front
of darkness crossing the room to the table, that he is turning
and looking towards her in such a way that she knows he
cannot see her.
She places his coffee on the opposite side of the table
from her own seat, but he takes the cup and saucer and sits in
the awkward chair, crossing the calf of his left leg over his
right thigh and resting the saucer in the hollow of his lap he
has created. He sips the coffee, smiles appreciatively towards
her, then lets his gaze settle on the rug in front of the
fireplace, a lurid rendition of a mountain scene, and she hopes
he doesnt notice the mess she made of the stonework of the
bridge, when she lost patience with the detail, drunk one day
soon after moving in here. She exploits his inattention to
draw her chair forward so that she can sit closer to the edge
of the table at an angle towards him, crossing her legs so that
the rotundity of her knee points at him. She sips her coffee,
finds it stronger than she expects, realises the mistake, gives
way suddenly, all pressure gone, floating non-plussed, staring
at the saucer lying in his lap, the cat in hiding.
He speaks suddenly, with no preparation that she can
detect, still gazing at the embroidery, Are there arrangements
for cleaning the windows? The question is so unexpected
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that she pitches into a world of association, at the same time

seeing herself as a little furred animal vainly trying to mount
a greasy pole, and she says in a stupefied vague way, at once
trying to focus her attention and to prevent a feeling of
revulsion from invading her: Windows? He glances at her, a
focus in his eyes now, and she knows he does see her in a
way she cannot comprehend, as though some part of her she
does not know is speaking clearly and calmly to him, a part
of her that knows everything, that enjoys communicating to a
similar part in him. He says, voice more pointed in a way she
knows is deliberate, to prompt attention, Yes. The outsides, I
mean. The attention she gives him is not to her liking,
beyond her control, caffeine in part, but she can see also that
his glory still resides in him, but that it is really a power not a
mere light, and that it is exceedingly dangerous to her. So she
speaks in the chattering way she knows she always does, a
way that bores people, the way she uses to hide herself by
assertion, talking about management agents, the terms of
contract, service charges, a gamut of complaint that itemises
every defect. At the same time she rehearses the power of his
glory with the kind of morbid fascination that arises from an
awareness of falseness, of the sin described above. It is the
insight, new to her, of the danger to her that is prompting this
rehearsal. She sees herself frantic, now the animal in a box,
unable to scale the sheer sides to escape a nameless threat, the
power here both the tongues of a flame and an iron nail that
will pin her to THIS spot. She enjoys these visions of course
behind her chatter, but she is also bewildered by them, their
variety and novelty, as you might expect, but also by their
familiarity, though she has never seen such images before.
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She talks for twenty five minutes, getting on to other

defects in her life, mainly her husband, before her sense of
the glory begins to fade, the images losing clarity, losing
energy, most of all losing interest. She finds herself sitting on
her left calf, her enlaced hands holding up her right leg by
means of an embrace of her knee, her elbows tight in against
her sides, her face sore from over-gesture, her mouth dry. He
sits, slumped slightly, it seems to her, empty cup on the
saucer in his lap, hands resting open on his thighs, deep in
some kind of reflection, perhaps dozing with his eyes open.
Tears come to her eyes; she cries.
Tears are a good defence, a screen almost impenetrable
behind which you experience the pleasure of being with
yourself, the appallingness outside a good enough excuse for
complete withdrawal. But in her case, this time, the confusion
is not outside, not in his boredom and the failure it indicates,
nor in her husband, a failure she is party to there as well, nor
in her broken body, accidents avoidable and unavoidable it
mattered little anymore, nor in the larger world she tries
always to ignore, it goes on and on in its insane detail but it is
dead, a kind of rubbish heap of spent effort. This time, for
her, tears do not fall like the falls that seclude her cave,
instead there are waters whirling everywhere, running in deep
beds by lush greens, teeming down over rock in a hurry
somewhere, dribbling from leaves and flowers elsewhere, all
of this water, it is true, going to a central place, but not some
ocean of calm, an oftentimes serene sea that ends a crying
jag, sunset on smooth waters perhaps, consolation as wide as
a world of water. This time, all the water she pours out does
something completely different, something that amazes her: it
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continues in motion, not like a stormy sea, whirlpools,

geocurrents, tidal breathings, but as though all the stars in the
heavens have been stirred up and set flowing like a cosmic
river, turning this way then that way, falling down, cutting
back on itself, an immense tracery of flowing light, an
intricate patterning, the trajectory of the universe gone mad
with joy, disporting itself across the great abyss of potential
space, the universe suddenly pleasing itself, playing with its
quantum of energy.
This is another event that morning to stun her, but, as
before, there is more. This time the knowledge is certain,
dumb certainty in the sense that no other assurance is needed
to prove the knowledge: someone or some thing is speaking
to her. The vision of the universe gone mad with joy is a
phantasy, insofar as the world outside the window at her back
is as it usually is, she can hear the chirping of sparrows, the
twitter of blue tits. But it is a phantasy with a purpose, a
vision with a message. She looks at the twirling, swirling
stars, a streamer in the hand of an exuberant child, and she
sees the sense of what the gyrations, surgings, swoops, coils
mean. And they mean?
Well, she gets the message alright: it is simply a
reminder, repeating what she sees every day of her life in
everything: SHE IS A FOOL. She is a walking, chattering,
busy, self-deceiving fool. She is a lie, every-which way she
looks at herself a lie. Naturally, she reaches at once for the
one thing in herself she knows to be true, and at once she sees
that all the stars have formed a circle, a perfect circle,
everything whirling in unison. Then the circle degrades bit by
bit until what was a circumference is now a meandering line
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that seems to join itself more by accident than design. But it

degrades further and further, stars separating from the line
until the line itself begins to disappear. Stars continue to
separate until only little clumps of light remain scattered
across the increasingly sinister abyss. Even these clumps
break up, and she discovers to her dismay that individual
stars do not have sufficient light to withstand the immensity
of the abyss. Soon there is no light, the darkness complete:
yet she knows that every star is still there, but isolated,
shining feebly but impotently in the void.
She stops crying abruptly and he shakes himself and
leans over to place the cup and saucer on the table. He looks
preoccupied, and she guesses he has taken advantage of the
time with her to dwell on his own problems and interests,
perhaps because it is unusual for him to have time to himself,
enforced quiet. But aware that she now looks at him, he
glances across at her, much as you might glance at an
uninteresting person in a railway carriage, skating over the
surface, not even bothering to form a judgement. He stands
up, glancing around the room, brushing down his trousers,
she getting to see something of the size and shape of him as
he does this. Your work? he asks, catching her eyes on him,
indicating the rug-making frame with his head. She leans
towards him, knowing her mouth is curving open in that way,
obscene out of context, and, about to chatter again, she sees
lies strung out behind her like brightly coloured gems, like so
many threads all tangled together. She closes her mouth
abruptly, till her teeth grind together, pressing on her gums in
a way that will surely induce new ulcers.
Any word she utters will be a lie.
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You have witnessed the nature of his experience of

death. Now you are witnessing the nature of her experience
of the same death. In order not to lie, she needs to be dead.
He crosses to the mantleshelf and bends to look at the
photograph there.
Your daughter?
She stands up, afraid to speak, afraid to lie anymore.
She mumbles what she means to be assent. But she can say
nothing more, because anything she adds to that mumble will
be another lie.
He smiles at her, an open smile, full of sadness for her
and extreme happiness for himself.
She does not understand his happiness, cannot see that
far into him looking for lies all the time as she does.
At the foot of the stairs he thanks her for the coffee,
then places a foot on the lowest step and continues:
Thanks for telling me about the windows. Its not very
important, really. I wont be staying here long.
His goodbye is final.
She puts the tray on the draining board in the kitchen
and goes into her living room. She can smell him in the room,
a distinct aroma of male hormones, the traces of specific
secretions. Her body reacts, but she turns to look at the
photograph of her daughter, in a white dress in the garden
under the lilac. She checks her response, and for the first time
in her life examines what she is about to think: YOU ARE
LOOKING FOR TROUBLE, MY GIRL.
Her body is still reacting to his remainder, and she sees
something of the truth now, not coincidence at all, more like
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blindness and the stick a greater wisdom in her beats her with
to force her to see truthfully.
Him, too, she realises, granted another vision now that
the crisis is past: his erect cock the rock on which man builds
his own lattice against the truth. She sits down to witness this
last schematic: form extended through accident; accident
woven by mankind into some semblance of pattern; pattern
concreted as history; history the display of false forms, called
knowledge.
She watches this, and for her final patience she is
rewarded: a flash, as of lightning, source and extension
ambiguous, becoming so bright so quickly that she is blinded;
blinded, she understands for an instant what the darkness
actually is.
She is reeling, convinced she is surrounded by that
darkness, and a voice within her says very clearly, the voice,
the words, the presence all one thing:
Thank you. Finish in your own time.

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He finds an envelope addressed to him on the hall floor

under the letter box. In it is a photocopy of a fax which reads:
POSITIVE ENABLER INITIATE PROCEDURE
The details of the source of the fax have not been
copied, so he reserves judgement as to its authenticity.

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He parks the car in the carpark of the Castle, the public

carpark, an amenity for the tourists. It is one of those castles,
an ideal castle, the kind you imagine as the acme of security
in a troubled world, an accretion of styles extending back two
thousand years, skirting walls, turrets, towers, dungeons, a
moat (with swans), secret passages, tunnels going goodness
knows where, flagpoles, guards in fancy dress and the
stories and legends: princes in captivity, extra-legal torture,
forced confessions, nocturnal executions, kings in distress,
the legends of the crows, of the swans, ghosts, voices, secret
documents, impounded works of heresy, secured works on
magic; and the treasures: gold, silver, jewels, crowns, regalia,
sacred weapons, shields embossed with significant heraldry;
and the blood lines: lineages extending back to Adam,
rumours of divinity, smears about devilry, certainly curious
demons and fairy princesses, all behind fifty foot walls,
twenty foot thick, a mile in circumference, symbol of human
will, human freedom, the desperation of possessions, the
burden of power, the rank glory of success, peasants
cowering in hovels the sign of royal majesty: all reduced to
bestiality so one can appear human, washed and combed,
attractively dressed. It is what they used to call a maiden
castle, never taken by storm as was the way in the old days,
changing hands on distant battlefields, the exchange priced in
the flower of a nobility, great hecatombs of ill-equipped
commoners, territories wasted for a generation, cities and
towns stripped of capital, manpower and goods. The only
assault occurred about two hundred years ago, a group of
bourgeois at the gate one night, plan to capture the armoury
and arm the poor in a struggle for equality, four shot in the
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ensuing melee, nine hanged later, two thousand cityfolk cut

down in the bread riots, twenty five thousand starved, a new
national anthem, a thanksgiving church on a hill. Now you
can walk around the confines any day, except Christmas Day,
between nine and five, buy brochures, souvenirs, marvel at
all the colourful history, histrionics, hysteria.
At night, the Castle is bathed in light, as is the carpark;
a glaring orange light that flatters the castle stonework but
which looks ghastly among the cars, like fire that cannot get
hot. It is now twilight, the extended summer evening, so the
light is not yet too bad, merely a seeping jaundice on
surfaces, the air otherwise clear, sky distant and ineffable,
strictly minding its own business now that the sun has set.
The car parked and locked, he surveys the Castle above him,
immense doors with the restored portcullis protruding
suggestively shut for the night, like any citizen, with the same
vague bemusement of one reconciled mysteriously to a
symbol of containment, restriction, oppression, his private
desire for security perforce identified with the larger public
fact of enforced stasis. Still, this reflection is fugitive, a
habituated response, and he soon turns away, hands in the
pockets of his pale linen jacket and gazes instead across the
river to the shaded masses of the warehouse-cum-university.
There is a new concept here, and people still take in this
prospect with some interest, marvelling with inane wonder at
the apparent transformation, new frames in the long rows of
windows, the interiors chopped into a variety of volumes,
lecture halls, offices, conference rooms, libraries, toilets,
ground floors of pubs, clubs, shops, trendy restaurants, the
surrounding land pedestrianised with fast-growing hybrid
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trees scattered carefully about the exposed and windy

expanse. He gazes at this scene with less wonder, being
reasonably informed by the quality press, seeing the
ambiguity of storehouses of knowledge, the pretentious
entrance tagged onto the leading warehouse echoing,
intentionally, the great entrance to the Castle, the question of
what this new university represents, the confinement of
learning or the rationing of teaching. However, he is
ultimately indifferent to the fate of this new institution, as are
all the writers and readers of the quality press, having studied
at the University secluded in the ancient town by a lake back
in the foothills, so he turns up the pathway connecting the
castle carpark to the City Park.
The park, too, has its great entrance, though in a style
that suggests an entrance to a religious institution of more
than usual vulgarity, intended as the castle entrance and,
latterly, the university entrance are, to impress and intimidate
those driving along the River Pass, the main route to the
capital inland. But the park entrance, like that of the Castle, is
now a relic, an heirloom for some, the pomp and majesty
little more than flatulent gestures of a strident vanity for
others, and he strolls through with an ease commensurate
with the ease of the summers evening, though like all others
walking here preoccupied with private concerns. The park is
extensive and includes a variety of terrain, so it has been
arranged as a set of landscapes evoking the different moods
of the countryside around the city. The scene as you come
through the entrance is of a wide central promenade that
extends almost a mile to a large public monument, an obelisk
dedicated to the last monarch to reside in the city, bordered
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by mature oak and beech, gardens laid out on either side, the
bright flowers visible beyond the massive dark trunks. These
gardens are bounded on the three sides before you by rising
land, to the left the lawns of the gardens merging (ignoring
the high curtain wall) with the lawns of the old palace within
the Castle, but forward and to the right the slopes are heavily
wooded. The confinement can be oppressive, especially on
dull days, though it is relieved to the right by glimpses of the
upper parkland that stretches for several miles beyond the
wooded slope. But the central prospect is unrelieved in its
gloom, made worse by the conifers that compose the wood
there, dark in winter, dark in summer, and the recent proposal
to clear this slope was abandoned when it was realised that it
would expose the high-rise blocks of the working class
district perched on top of the hill. Nonetheless, the gloom is
instructive, as he knows, recalling the infamous essay by the
now defunct city poet, who carefully recreated the milieu that
invented these gardens in order to parade the knowledge their
new leisure had given them, a knowledge expressed in other
ways by the labouring poor they controlled, in violent chaotic
action rather than sombre contemplation.
Even so, all kinds of people stroll these gardens
nowadays, some, like the young couples parading their love
and the older couples with linked arms taking their secret for
a walk, unaffected by the atmosphere, but others, of course,
like a young woman ringing her hands alone on a secluded
seat, finding a consonance here, old men, too, searching the
pathways for gold, young men searching the pathways for
sport, young girls in noisy groups keeping one step ahead in
the game, and it is strange, as he realises absently, that the
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broodiness of the gardens engenders a tenderness in

everyone, himself included, grasping for once at least the
common condition of mankind, its thwarted goodness, its
innocent longing, its sad knowledge, the compulsion of love,
and the overwhelming regret as time flies by and nothing
worthwhile is achieved, made real. It is only then that he
becomes aware of the birdsong, recognising the dominant
arias of the blackbirds, the sweetness of the thrush, the
piercing trills of the robin, the chorus of smaller birds in
bushes and trees, one thrush directly above at this moment
giving vent to its cosmic joyousness, as though God spoke to
his people in this way, revealing secrets. He is moved, raised
by sweetness, buoyed by the light air of the extended
evening, drawn away by the brilliant sky, another revelation
here, what it is like to be angelic, lighter than air, pure, a
filament embracing what is real.
The Paradise Cafe is still open, serving alcohol and
pizzas now rather than coffee and cakes, and as it is still early
he goes in for a drink, more to prolong the mood than fortify
himself for his work. The appearance of the cafe is deceptive.
Surrounded as it is by mature chestnut trees, it peeks out from
the drooping foliage like the gingerbread cottage of legend,
fretwork in bright reds, green and yellows, walls of slotted
board painted white, coy groining in the windows, a wide
terrace bordered by intricate ironwork railing, white furniture,
lights hidden in the trees above. The effect is deliberately
magical, only part of the structure can be seen from any
vantage point outside, so you are given the impression of an
isolated setting deep in a wood, a handful of people at ease
away from it all. The contrast with the gardens round about is
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complete, a point noted very fulsomely by the abovementioned poet. The name of the locality, Paradise, he
argued, predates the establishment of the gardens, and reflects
the aboriginal name recorded in ancient documents, which he
translates as Waters of Refreshment, the name derived from a
well, now dried up but its location indicated by a jumble of
rocks amid the trees behind the imperial monument. From
this evidence he inferred that the Castle now occupies the
ancient temple precincts, the castle chapel occupying the site
of the temple itself, citing the marked stones in the fabric of
the crypt below the chapel as actual remainders of the temple,
the marks intelligible if studied in this light. (These claims
have never been taken seriously, though ancient documentary
evidence can be interpreted to give circumstantial support to
his argument, furnishing a name for the presiding deity and a
description of the ritual performed there.)
The poet advanced the following hypothesis: The
establishment of a raptor social organisation over two
thousand years ago led, among other things, to the conversion
of the temple precinct into a defensive centre, in effect
cutting off the symbols of sacrality from their source, now
outside the castle wall. Increased population caused a
lowering of the water table, thus the well dried up. Even so,
the area, now called Paradise Common by the new settlers,
became a notorious trysting place, a scandal to the authorities
for centuries until it was decided to enclose the common and
develop it as a public resort for the benefit of the new suburbs
spreading up Lonesome Hill and Montpelier. The history of
the site, the poet argued, reflects the transformation of human
living during this epoch: overdressed citizens obliged to walk
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prearranged
paths
among arranged
flowers, an
acknowledgement of the futility of compulsive sexuality in
place of a living spirituality: cogently symbolised in the stone
imperial monument now hiding the remains of the original
spiritual source, in itself repeating the primary fracture
represented by the Castle, a chapel of stone surrounded by a
secular imperium of stone. The cafe, he admitted, was an
attempt in the last century to restore some semblance of
gaiety to the place, but he pointed out that now it was not the
refreshment offered by the cafe that was primary, but the
location itself, hidden among trees and brightly lit, by garish
paintwork in daylight, by electric lamps at night. Thus the
cafe indicated a change in the nature of human spirituality,
the abandonment of an earthly spirituality in favour of a more
abstract spirituality, symbolised by light. However, though
such a transformation of human spirituality might be
welcomed by the established religions, the cafe itself
indicated a disquieting aspect of this aspiration to light: THE
LIGHT IS NOT COMPLETE. Whereas water flows
continuously and is efficacious in all its particles, light
nowhere in human experiences vanquished the dark
completely, and a partial light is not efficacious.
He muses on this as he approaches the cafe, passing
along the tunnel under the dark trees, and recalls further the
poets justification for this curious claim: it is the
development of artificial lighting that prompts the spirituality
of light. Ancient man did not see by natural light; the light of
the sun was valued because it nourished all living things not
because it lit the day. Ancient man saw by a spiritual vision
that was valued not for its luminance, which was low by the
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standard of material light, but because it was true. This

explains their reverence for water, for it, like their spiritual
vision, was clear, wonderfully mutable, always flowing to its
proper centre. Light, on the other hand, induces fixity, fear of
darkness, an endless search for confirmation: in the poets
own words,
Light reveals the mountain
Water leads to the fountain.
Passing inside for the first time you experience a
pleasant surprise. The cafe presents itself as a gingerbread
cottage deep in a wood, its light promising, but inside space
suddenly expands and you realise that you are within a dome.
Your response is to exult, gazing up at the soaring white
arches, cunningly lit by an immense chandelier, the more
effective with your modern light technology. The bar
facilities are in the centre, the slogan BANISH CARE!
inscribed repeatedly in stained glass along the partition
hiding the kitchen, seating for several hundred arranged in
clusters of tables, the remaining space used for dancing and
general cavorting. There is always a crowd, business people
for coffee and lunch, then mothers with their children for
afternoon tea, couples for dinner, later the young people
come to drink and mix. The music varies, of course, bland in
the mornings, plaintive in the afternoons, easy for dinner and
fast late. It is fast now, faces are flushed beauty of the
young a pervasive rhythm that determines movement, an
easy swing, a continuous swaying, boys hotfooted, girls
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wanting to embrace, a piping clamour of voices, shrill

laughter losing itself in the great space above.
The cider is dry, fruity, its effect instantaneous he
drinks rarely and at once the place is brighter, gesture more
intense, and he sees in the parade of fashion how uncertain
you are concerning what is the case. There are many faces, of
course, so bright and naked at that age, faces with pink lips,
glistening eyes, lucent skin, abundance of hair streaming like
nothing else does. He sees himself suddenly, at their table
over by the bandstand, facing out towards the dark trees at
the rear, his face glowing, high with his friends, and the sad
poet returns to speak of containment, alcohol turning the
place into a crche. But he knows from experience that you
cannot think your way out of that truth, and fears now, at last,
that you cannot kill your way out either.
Morose, he returns to the sombre gardens, most of the
light gone from the sky, and sets off towards the wooded
ridge to do his work. He is very rarely morose, though often
quiet and so apparently subdued, and you can see that it has
some relation to the distraction he experiences so frequently.
I can best put it like this: like most of you, he lives his life
under large scale determinations, rest at night, active by day;
eats food that is in effect supplied to him by major producers
and distributors; similarly with his clothing; obeys traffic
laws of necessity; is a product of an education determined by
philosophical and ethical assumptions the rationales of which
are ambiguous, capable of principled definition as well as of
opportunistic interpretation. But, again like most of you, he
preserves a sense of his own freedom within these
determinations by defining the objectives of his own actions,
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ignoring the fact that these objectives are chosen by him

primarily because they do conform to the larger social
determinations and not because he wants to do them because
he is free to choose to do them. You can readily understand
why distraction always irritates him and sometimes makes
him extremely uneasy: distraction spoils his concentration,
thus spoils his habituated effort to find himself reasonably
whole within a social determination that is profoundly
ambiguous. Sometimes distraction has much worse effects
than a mere loss of concentration. An example will show you:
in a queue of traffic entering a roundabout, you are
momentarily distracted, never mind for now by what.
Distracted, you lose track of the rationality of your present
actions, that you are sitting in this queue of cars, trucks and
buses because you are on your way to see someone or to
undertake some business. You are then irritated because you
have to repeat some mental work, that is, trace the rationality
behind sitting in this queue. Now, sometimes the distraction
throws you a little further out of your normalcy, and you find
yourself wondering why you are prepared to sit in the traffic
like this, more, you may wonder, if only for an instant, what
cars are, who other people are, why the sky happens to be
blue. In such an experience as this, you are put in the position
of finding EVERYTHING strange, alien, and your unease
arises in part because of this sense of strangeness, but also in
part because there is some echo in you, a feeling that you
ought to be living elsewhere, in another place, where your life
has a sweetness and truthfulness so complete as to be beyond
question. It is as though a veil lifts for a moment and you can
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see into another order of being, and see as a concomitant that

this world is utterly false.
Understand that I am not insinuating that you have a
glimpse of some heaven here if you glimpsed the truth
behind this instant of insight I assure you that you would
experience more than unease and I readily accept that a
memory is recalled here, perhaps life in the womb as some
claim, more like a moment of peacefulness from early
childhood. The point I want to make though is that regardless
of the sheer beauty of that experience, you will make every
effort to overcome the distraction and restore the rationality
of your actions and continue queuing as before. However,
moroseness has a somewhat different character. Judging from
the circumstances you have witnessed, you can see that his
moroseness involves an experience of what may be best
called a falling-away. It is similar to distraction in this, except
that it occurs at a moment when one is already disengaged,
temporarily or otherwise, from rational activity. As you have
seen, he had already fallen into a state of feeling, akin to
contemplation, during his walk through the gardens, inspired
by the mood of the evening and sustained by his recollections
of the poets essay, which he had read as a youth and which
coloured his outlook for many years afterwards. We can see
further that this essay had affected him more deeply than he
ever believed, for with the recall of his student days there had
occurred a coincidence of that memory with the poets
judgement upon the very activity he was recalling. It is this
intersection that induces his depression in that particular
form, leaving him not simply distracted, that is a momentary
falling-away, but more profoundly alienated, outside the
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rational world of normalcy but also deeply resentful of its

existence.
It is noteworthy that his first response to this shock of
recognition of how wasted his life has been is to finish his
drink, make his way carefully to the exit and set off to resume
his work, that is, to grasp at the local rationality he had set in
place earlier that day. The moroseness only supervened on
this grasping, perhaps, though this is an empty speculation for
our purposes here, rising as a result of that grasping, and it
elaborates as he walks the isolated pathways at the back of
the gardens, the hubbub of the cafe behind him, the imperial
monument in the dark over to his left, the glow of the light
from the River Pass, the tops of the warehouses-cumuniversity with their serried lights away to his right, a
mounting darkness before him, a sky turning to night above.
Perhaps you will allow me to pause here and make a
comment that you might find helpful. This show has been
performed many times, as you might have already
understood, over a long period of time, but I find in your
epoch that the rich materialist terminologies are an
improvement on the resources previously available to me.
Considering what it is that I am obliged to do, a language that
permits me, through the resources and talents of my
amanuensis, to define more clearly the nature of the fault in
this, my chief male character, permits me in turn to see more
clearly where he goes astray. Admittedly, such a language is
of negative benefit, as it were, permitting me to indicate
failure only, but it is nonetheless an improvement, which I do
appreciate very much, upon languages previously available to
me. By contrast, I have enacted this show in epochs where
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mankind, all reality in fact, was seen to be no more than the

outcome of a gods inspiration and expiration, where the idea
of changing ones ways was inconceivable because life was
only an epiphenomenon of a gods life. In other epochs the
concept of salvation was available to me, but as salvation was
seen to be a drama concerning souls rather than beings, I was
helpless to act because of the ignorance of my characters,
who believed that their souls could be affected by their lives,
when of course it was more a matter of their relations to their
souls that were affected, souls being perfect. Then there have
been ages of what I can best call magic, though mankind in
these ages would not have described their endeavours as
magical. These were ages in which it was believed that
language could affect spiritual matters, that statements of
belief, earnest requests couched in elaborate and carefully
defined sentences could determine the conditions of souls,
even oblige divinity. Mankind in such ages forgot that
language is of and for the material world, that it is an
instrument of the senses and feelings, that intellect, insofar as
it comprehends spirit, is shackled by the operation of
language. Now, as I have said, I am glad to have use of a
language thoroughly material, that has no truck with spiritual
matters, that is ceaselessly employed in searching out the
nature of material and examining in detail the influences of
the material on mankind. I admit that such a language makes
the spiritual reality difficult, but that is not important, because
spiritual reality is to be entered upon and experienced, not
described as though you could remain at a remove in any
encounter with it.
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To resume. His state of being is appropriate as he

approaches the dark slope. I say appropriate; why it is so
should be viewed as another coincidence because he does not
know where he is at present or where it is he is going. Yet a
part of him does know, and he would recognise this if he
enquired within himself, the clue available to him as a
quavering in his solar plexus that says he is being drawn, as
he has been drawn all his confused, earnest, unhappy life. But
he has a rationale for what he is doing: a corporate
investigator undertaking some contract work for a public
service, capitalism pitting its expertise against crime, an act
of appeasement, not much profit but no loss either. On the
last footpath, roses here, large blooms shedding scarlet light
tinged with yellow castle light towards him, he checks his
equipment, infra-red spectacles in fold-up case, pocket
computer for notes and backup information, maps, his police
automatic. His moroseness has levelled out by now: leaving
the cafe, he had stumbled along paths oblivious of his
surroundings, the misery a true memory but without location,
a sum of distractions indicating graphically the false nature of
his life. It is not self-pity, which of itself is a sentimentality,
another trick of the ego that invents the world as its empire
and makes war on all other egos. Self-pity would lead him to
think of his mother, the nurturer though servants nurtured
him to think of an absent father as though he did not love
his father a consolation of infantile groping, copious tears
perhaps in the dark, little boy blue lost at last. No, his misery
names him as the culprit, lacerating him with the clear vision
of his own vanity, every instant of complacency a mockery of
what is lost, what is ignored, what is not known, a catalogue
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of stupidity, every instant a succumbing to temptation, not

resisting, taking it with both hands, genuinely pleased with
himself, yet every moment gulled, lured by promiscuous
flashings, spurious distinctions, means made ends, and the
ultimate temptation still pending, the ultimate vanity of
murder: the cynical proof of the emptiness at the base of your
world, murder as a complicity, as though the giving and
taking of life added anything to the nothingness that inspires
that act of mutual surrender, a death there, relief here,
tomorrow a new day and deeper in illusion.
Such self-laceration is perceived by some to be the
beginning of contrition, but surely it is another vanity, a
momentary insight, a reassurance that a way out is available,
if a way out ever becomes desirable. But this problem is with
him on the garden paths, WAY OUT TO WHERE? much as
it is with all of you at such moments of exhaustion, when you
raise your eyes as though God is in his heaven up there and
an abstracted glance is sufficient to correct an error millennia
old built on the inexhaustible labour of mankind. He suffers
like that. Grant him this: he has a fault he shares with all of
you. Call it humility, as some do, call it weakness, as he does,
call it incompleteness, as the wise do: the vulnerability of the
time-distended riding the dimensionless wave of the present,
racked like a god in ignorance, sheer incomprehension behind
local rationalities, projects, history in bricks and mortar an
orientation no better than the lesson of the graveyard, the past
like mouldering bodies, achievements like writing on water,
consolation like feathers in a storm. You see how he suffers?
He suffers suffering, he feels pain in his pain, cut into strips,
reduced like a burst balloon, squashed, ignominious before
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even a blade of grass, less virtue than a star doing its job in
the heavens above. How WRONG he feels, how false, how
traduced by himself solely, yet look at the vanity here: it is he
who decides his ignominy, his pain, his lowliness. Believe
me this is true: he finds a name for his weakness, that is, the
strength to suffer. But you do understand why it is this way?
In all his pain, self revulsion, in the destruction of his history,
HE MUST YET FIND A NAME. Without a name, there
would be nothing. You see? Falling in agony, he asks: Falling
to where?
Yes? You understand now? You know something of
the enormity of human vanity, your vanity, now? You
understand this matter of finding names? Every instant of
your lives you do this, tottering from name to name, mostly
innocent of this, blocking up at every instant this question, To
where? Not evasion, though you are often accused of evasion,
no, an honest fear, a fear most carefully covered by all the
ingenuity of mankind. Let me characterise your abiding
experience: a dark opening eternally present. Yes? This is
what draws you forward all the time. Call it the
dimensionless present, this instant now, no future, past
annihilated. You see this? This instant NOW. Already it has
passed, annihilated into the past, and it is another opportunity
lost, another chance missed, another name plugging that hole,
and yet another instant NOW see, that dark hole, a door, a
cave the gap in the trees he sees by means of his infra-red
spectacles, heat lancing up leaves and twigs, flashes glaring
along trunks, a glittering macadam pavement wending up.
Previously, he had groped in here, heart in his mouth,
warriors courage in his breast, sweaty palm gripping sword,
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sometimes with a guttering torch, his followers cowering

behind down by the campfire, sometimes with candles, once
with a lantern, the night windswept, brave with
eschatological desperation; now he enters a dark wood,
moroseness inducing the calm of a mesmeric distraction, the
never-failing wonder of the infra-red spectacles absorbing
him, gun in one pocket, computer in another, map in hand:
the technological wonders of your world giving him heart this
time, your instruments mastering space, action at a distance.
You see that he enters the dark as he has always done,
as a hunter not as a searcher, the fundamental disposition
betraying itself here, to murder, to end the discontinuity of
the living, that experience of the present, to establish a name
once and for all, to make himself historical, complete like a
stone monument, to stop time. Yet he moves! He does not
consider this clue, he whose life has been devoted to the
searching after clues. He does not investigate his movement,
why one foot after the other on this slope, dark trees
encroaching, the hum of traffic in the far distance, stars above
like a muddle of beacons. Like all of you, he does not notice
the obvious, looking at everything except the fact that he
looks, that he searches, treading the earth as though to find a
boundary there. Very well, he has his rationality in this,
murder in his heart, seeking that which keeps him going: but
murder so rules him, from the moment of birth, that he cannot
ask WHAT IS IT? If he would only see the perversion in
his root, if he would only ask: what do I seek to murder? He
would see nothing, true, only this darkness that infra-red does
not penetrate, but he might hear the voice in that dark, low,
that calls to you all the time, a siren, if you wish, inducing a
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terrible fatality perhaps, as though it hunts you too, murder

on the agenda on that side too. But he does hear this voice, as
you do, now his solar plexus thrumming, a receiver in him he
is ignorant of drawing him in despite all his tricks, a song so
pervasive that its absence would render you insane, the
sudden regret unbearable.
I labour this lesson for your benefit, not for his, who
cannot hear me. In his moroseness, in the laceration of his
heart, there is one gift, bestowed if you like by coincidence,
which he witnesses to in his travail: LOVE. Never mind what
he thinks he loves, the love is there, and with it my hope.
Thus does he climb the path among the trees, murder on his
mind, love in his gut, gun in his pocket, an image in his
memory, glasses to show him everything, a pain pointing at
nothing.
The park has several names. Most of the inhabitants of
the city refer to it as The Park; it is a reference commonly
understood, even the activity undertaken is understood by
context, such as:
We went to the Park last night.
I took the children to the Park.
Lunch in the Park today with...
He took her to the Park.
Here the Park designates the Gardens, which is the
only part of the park most people are familiar with. Residents
of the Lonesome Hill area, however, experience a different
park, of playing fields and broad parkland, and their
references are correspondingly different, sports and strolls on
Sunday afternoon, broad vistas, the mountains to the north,
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uplands to the west, the river below to the east, the ocean to
the south, the city, though not by contrivance, hidden from
view by chance folds in the surrounding slopes. The residents
of Lonesome Hill, and to a lesser extent those of Montpelier,
regard the park as theirs, indeed the official noticeboard just
inside the Lonesome Hill Road entrance is headed
LONESOME HILL PARK. They regard the gardens below,
three miles away, as a separate entity, as somewhat tamer,
suitable for old people and lurkers-in-bushes, referring to it
with bourgeois dismissiveness as the Castle Gardens. In
fact, the public notice in the gardens refers to THE CITY
PARK and describes the gardens as simply that, THE
GARDENS, or in one place in the list of regulations as THE
FLOWER GARDENS. But among those dwelling in the
isolated terraces of cottages dotted along the River Pass, the
park is still called the Deer Park, carrying on a memory of
the function of the park several centuries ago, when it was a
convenient hunting park for the denizens of the castle, the
cottagers being the descendants of ancient park wardens,
imperial tenants who now live in the city as strangers,
keeping to themselves by and large and speaking their own
patois. They still have rights in the park, firewood,
allotments, setting snares in the densely wooded gullies and
ravines that once carried water off the hill into the river. The
city people rarely wander in that part of the park, knowing the
cottagers resent intruders, and the more credulous convey
what are old rumours about strange rituals and magic
practised in these isolated glens.
However, these three sections cover less than half the
total area of the park. There is a large central expanse,
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comprising in excess of nine thousand acres, mostly a sloping

terrain but broken in many places by outcrops of rock,
hollows, abandoned quarries, covered in part by dense wood
and scrub, the remainder grassland tending to heather and
gorse higher up the slope, dotted with copses and isolated
trees, some evidence of prehistoric habitation, and the famous
ruin of a church set prominently on a jutting outcrop of rock,
its tower still intact, a landmark for many miles. There are
few metalled pathways, which in any case skirt the wilder
parts of this area, but discernible tracks lead out from the
pathways, though few last more than a mile or so, until it
becomes a matter of making your own way as you want. Few
people come here, and those that do are a distinctive breed,
the park rangers, mostly middle aged men, dressed in
plusfours, heavy shoes and thick socks, a distinctive jacket,
sold only in one shop in the Old Town, of green corduroy,
reinforced with leather at the shoulders and back as a
protection against the knapsacks they carry, and a trim hat,
also of green corduroy, with a jaunty black feather set in the
band, always on the right side. They walk this area in all
seasons, scarf and gloves in the winter, a light cotton shirt in
the summer, traipsing back and forth, up and down all day
long, sandwich-lunch on a convenient rock at midday, a pipe
in the afternoon lying in the grass, always the same set
expression on their faces, benign, slightly glazed eyes, a
mildly ecstatic expression induced by hours of steady
walking, but, curiously, a disturbingly sinister curl to the
edge of the mouth, as though some wild streak is kept in
check by endless exercise of the body. None seems to work
for his living, for they are out every day of the year, and
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while they can be numbered in their hundreds, they never

meet on the slope and never walk in company, excepting that
some attract birds, perhaps because they feed them, mostly
crows and magpies, and for the few, the elite of the fraternity,
who walk towards the back of the park, up beyond the
Lonesome Hill area, the ravens who nest among the rocks
around the ruined church.
There is no moon tonight, but he finds, once he has
cleared the trees and breasted the steep slope, that the massed
starlight creates confusing flickers and flashings of red light
that disguise the terrain, creating what seems to be a land of
fire, so he removes the glasses, collapses them into their case
and puts it in his pocket. His pale linen jacket is bright.
Looking up, he sees a star-lit land, sloping ridge after ridge
with darker recessions between, trees throwing back sparks of
white light, blades of grass shaking themselves of jewels,
until he realises how dark it is and his vision immediately
behaves itself and the darkness draws in about him like a
protecting veil, to hide so much dangerous information. He
fails to grasp the metaphor here, of course, shrinking instead
from the isolation, cringing like the lost child he is, wanting
as always someone to come and take his hand. But he is on
the job, and practicality indicates for him the path turning left
to follow the ridge, the dark wood below now, a flicker of
coloured lights off to his rear among the trees, street lighting
further off on the River Pass, dark river then the university,
only the odd light now on the upper floors, the city down
towards the port an assemblage of white and amber light,
awfully remote now, and a glimpse of the phantasmagorial
bridge arcing out into the mist, glistening ocean that tells him
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it is heaving though it seems as placid as a dinner plate. He

walks the path, eyes down to discern its borders, thinking
darkness, how dark it is, but sees gems again on blades of
grass, feels there is a message at the edges of his vision, that
the inner mysterium of the park has something to say now
that stars are picking out the script. He keeps walking the
path, though, heading west as its skirts the centre, the upper
stories of the high-rise blocks beyond the park brightly lit, yet
things getting worse as his eyes adjust to the dark and he
becomes increasingly aware that the word is coming in from
a particular spot away to his right, from a dark spot on a far
ridge. This is irrational, he knows, a need rising from within
himself to find comfort in the dark; it is irrational, an infants
need, not to be considered, but nonetheless it is a comfort to
know that such a need is within, that the basic mechanism of
crying for mamma in the dark is still there, the foundation of
so much that endures in mankind. The path is rising now, the
high-rise blocks revealing more storeys above the trees
ahead, people still up drinking beer and watching television,
scratching crotches and wondering what else they can eat. He
walks on, head down again, jewels in the grass but his feet
firmly on the macadam.
He has picked up from his moroseness, as you can see,
the resistance drained away by the comfort of the darkness,
though the jewelled communication bothers him with
reminders, keeping alive the tiny voice crying in his heart.
But he fights this wail from the past, where before he had
been saturated by the greater pain, driven to extremes, now he
clutches the map and thinks of what he is doing, hunting,
though the implied murder in abeyance because resistance is
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down, an operation with implied special status he deliberately

avoids thinking about until the job is complete, the special
factor the word from Allcross HQ, HER interest, perhaps
something greater to follow if successful. Crying in the
dark, you understand, a metaphor for what has run through
his life like a dark thread, murder, if ever achieved, a
commotion to attract attention, a soul sent aloft; message: Im
here! Remember however that he does not recognise this,
plodding the pathway in the dark, watching for the curve to
the right, looming trees ahead the indicator, remembering the
portrait in the conference room, Allcross, in edible (sorry, he
feels this, not a word he would apply here) colours, himself
growing sufficiently to make the crying in his breast
proportionally smaller why heroes become clowns over
time, Pantagruel the Titan for instance somehow more
worthy because he can then grin. But I know where he is
now, less of the secular dross to distract me, and I see what is
implied in edibility, see the tightrope humankind walks,
release from pain releasing the surplus of desire for the
release from pain releasing a new desire, which always
figures somehow in the shadow of pain, thus the metaphor of
murder, terminal pain, because there is a profound human
insight that pain is the real energy of life, motion as agony of
the disturbed soul; power, your service to your soul, revenge
for pain already endured, never mind the suffering to come.
You want to see the problem of boredom in here, I know, the
problem of inverted desire, the great discovery of your epoch,
the foundation of enormous modern wealth, proposing a
switch from Plato to Aristotle again, yes? Fine, boredom is
what, then? Yes, the other discovery, so far unspoken: desire
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is a drug you tolerate, thus desire must increase, boredom

then the always looming failure of desire, always the looming
conceptualisation of pleasure, release, gratification,
whichever word. You see, anxiety becomes knowledge, this
the secret understanding of your marketing professions.
And you think all this is new, dear me. Consider what
you do in your epoch. Once, one image sufficed, the rest
idolatry how well that was understood in its time all
human pain, and it was an enormous amount of pain,
concentrated in one desire, a desire only satisfied by the death
of a god. Consider the experience of your ancestors in that
time: a life was one long scream for release, a unit of agony
requiring no memory, no speech, no monument; an agony
where science was useless: what amelioration could matter
give, which was also racked; philosophy impossible: pain
indivisible permits no analysis; theology unnecessary: the
god in every heart, sacrifice livid and unremitting; sex the
symbol of weakness, the infant born to pain; war the symbol
of desperation, death a momentary release. You must see that
it was in murder that the first glimmer of hope appeared the
word here is appeasement, finding figuration for the
sacrificed god, thus you get the master and the slaves who
take on an iota of his pain, thus then possessions, nature piece
by piece taking on the burden of human pain, thus then
money and power, the socialisation of appeasement, thus then
the growing abasement of you all, finding figuration for your
pain, knowing the trick involved, forgetting: thus the growth
of memory, of language, of history what hides the pain.
Thus as you are now, the proliferation, of possession, of
knowledge, thus the secret of boredom whisper this to
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yourself amid great crowds, in your metropolises, at your

noisy gatherings, when deeply intoxicated, when busiest:
PAIN IS INDIVISIBLE.
Thus boredom is the threshold of pain, number its
symbol and music its mirror; most of all, pain explains
everything.
He is for the moment blithe in the dark, finding the
right bend in the path, almost under the trees, pockets
weighed down with equipment, heroics coming, a snapshot
leaking out of his memory index of renewed confidence
anticipation rising as the north-tending path levels out, park
extending down right, suburban lights now on the transriverine ridges, stars dancing with joy as always. The night is
warm, a faint easterly wind only, so his body is covered by a
fine perspiration, a feeling as of swelling, muscles tending to
torpor, a consciousness that becomes familiar to him, night
patrols years ago, scenes of crime hallucinations: blood
darker, skin paler, light thin and brittle, darkness leaden. He
recalls running one night, along a narrow street (this was in
the capital then), a street traversing the dead plain of that city,
pounding along hand on gun in shoulder holster, hearing the
dhump of plastic soles ahead, the radio clipped to his
trousers-belt saying at one point:
Watch your back!
He remembers the sweat exploding on his back, behind
his knees, becoming like a water he dived into, rolling across
the pavement into the gutter, the gun clattering on another
trajectory, three men running at him, weapons ready. He
sweats now in memory, a whimper rising in him in sympathy
with the fear he felt then, lying on his side in the gutter,
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wanting this scene not to happen. Then the flash, quite

sudden, and for an instant he was in a lighted room, white
walls, yellow something-or-other over there, a voice
speaking, and for an instant he knew he was eternally safe, no
matter what might happen to him. He reflects now, strolling
the level path at a good pace, burdened pockets beginning to
drag at his shoulders, that the vision or whatever must have
made him reckless: he pushed himself back onto his knees,
tensed, then as they came on to him, he dived forward low,
falling forward really, feet scrambling to stay under him, and
butted between two of them too fast for either to strike him.
Then the patrol car came swerving in and the three men broke
and ran, and he saw clearly one of the weapons, a length of
square section, taped handle, a joint of some kind at the head,
a short bar that could swivel, a mace, a multiplier effect in a
skilled hand that could increase the impact lethally.
He relaxes now, recognising the old trick of releasing
accumulated tension, the flush on his skin pleasant, muscles
enlivened. He pauses, feeling more practical, forgetting the
trough of despond he has passed through, and considers his
options. But another memory surfaces, a voice clear, The
problem. Police are soldiers, thugs are warriors. The lean old
face, a father figure in those days, corrupted by power but not
consumed by it: Thats the crucial difference you should
bear in mind. I mean, always keep rank. Thats the only way
youll survive against them. He grunts at this memory,
thinks his mind is drifting in the night, no longer used to
night duty, and bends to pick up a twig, notably dark among
the blades of grass. He studies the twig, really wanting
something tangible in his hand, thinking about the word
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rank. A ghost of tiredness crosses his mind, real weariness,

a feeling of too great a weight, and moroseness is there too,
an irritation that causes the twig-bearing hand to tremor. He
fails to understand this experience, a mood of resignation
proposing itself, when he suddenly turns and looks at the
wood behind him, above the path, and sees that something
like a cold wind flows from the darkness there, pushing at
him. He is not usually impressionable to external influences,
but the word rank is still on his mind, despite the rapid
changes of mood, and he can now, connecting the cold front
from the trees and the word, wonder why he remembers those
words from his old super. His mind says, with a kind of
placid logic that strikes him as funny, that keeping rank is
walking a straight line. He doesnt understand this either, so
he steps on to the grass, to ease the chill he feels on his left
shoulder and thinks instead that he should check the map he
has been grasping all along in his left hand. He drops the twig
and opens the map, folding it back until he has exposed the
section representing the area he is in. It is hard to discern
detail in the weak light, which he notices seems to waver, and
it is then that he realises he has forgotten his pencil torch; that
because he was so concerned to procure a loan of the night
glasses.
This has been a long way in, but at least he realises
where he is and what he is about. The glass of cider he thinks
threw him, visiting an old haunt, when he should have come
in by the Lonesome Hill Road entrance, the scene of most of
the attacks. He squints at the map, tilting it to catch the best
of the sunlight, until he can discern some detail, the path he is
on arcing ahead until it enters the Lonesome Hill sector over
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by the perimeter along the road, and can see that the red dot
marking the nearest attack-site can be reached by a short cut
straight across the open ground before him. He is relieved by
this knowledge, having forgotten already, of course, about the
cold wind from the trees above. In any case, given an
objective, the open sward is inviting, a sheen like water on
the level area before him, due north, the ridge it culminates in
a line of softly twinkling light, one dark spot below like a
rock or a clump of bushes, the copse he wants a smudge
beyond on another horizon. So he sets off, his first step
tentative, as though testing water he cannot shake himself
of the illusion that the star-soaked grass is a broad expanse of
shallow water, still and abundant. The ground is hard,
drought this summer, but he distinctly hears the swish of the
dew laden blades and sees in confirmation the sparkle of
disturbed drops, sees further the dark spots appearing on the
pale suede of his boots. This induces a sudden chill, more by
way of imagination than fact, and the perspiration on his skin
assists the transmission of this sense of chill over his whole
body, until the roots of his hair contract, a feeling of seizure
that momentarily frightens him, perhaps another indication of
strain, but at once he looks up to escape this worry, and sees
that the world about him has changed. His mind is working
rapidly in the night, detached because thoroughly distracted
though he is not aware of being distracted anymore, so long
has he been in this state since the glass of cider in the cafe
and he looks at the world about him, seeing the change,
seeing what has been changed, and understanding the change
as phenomenon, if not otherwise. Until he stepped out onto
the grass, the world had seemed withdrawn, dark and light
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somewhere else as though he were out at some edge and the

world turned towards some centre distant from him. Now he
finds the world gathered around him, as though he is at the
centre, or at least very close to it, and with the world facing
him now, he sees it more clearly, not as though lit, of course,
but as though he has the proper orientation of each place in
the world about him, as though this world, not just the
artefacts, streetlights, bricks and mortar, and the like, but also
primordial things, like the ridges and contours of the land, the
dark line of the river discernible beyond the slope north, and
back towards the port, the mountains whose mass he can see
against the sky, all the trees, even the sky itself, everything
has been built out from the point he occupies, or very near the
point, so that even the stars seem arranged in a complex
pattern from this point.
He stops abruptly, struck with wonder, not golly
wonder, more an intense curiosity, more to find out what is
there than to run some concept of conventional beauty. It is,
if you will allow the word, an innate response, the
complexities of his own being signified more usually in
him as in you by confusion finding a match in the
complexity of what he sees. The world about him appears no
better ordered than hitherto, still the dumb regularity of
streetlights along the suburban streets across the river, the
meander of these streets, but he senses a correspondence in
everything, as though one mind, one nature, one ability is
responsible for the entire assemblage, though he is
immediately aware that this assemblage is entirely, as matter,
an existential affair, the components brought into place at
different times, stars so long ago, hills and river, trees, streets,
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inhabitants, himself. Yet, despite this reservation, he is

convinced just now, there is an order here, not simply a
matter of some ordering principle in himself, but something
out there possessing/expressing the same principle, a
coincidence of his capacity to order his perceptions, his
experience at large, and a capacity in the world about him to
order matters in agreement with his perception, his
experience.
He is still standing on the grass, not very far from the
path, the wood at his back, and all this insight is coming
through very rapidly, a matter of heart beats, though it is
taking longer to describe. He has this insight into the
agreement of principle, then at once his life runs before him,
from his earliest memories, plus perceptions he has no
memory of, the earliest, of his mother crying at his side he
is on his back, very young he filled with a cosmic
(everything, known and unknown to him, included)
desolation, overriding helplessness, a lesson for him here that
he MUST learn once for all now, of helplessness, of absolute
limits, that he is a part and not an absolute whole. All the
memories and perceptions stream before him, and he views
them and with a speed unknown to him hitherto he fits them
into his understanding of principles, seeing a profound
balance, seeing the ordering principle now in terms of pain
the word startles him, connects him back to something else,
something far greater than the insight into principles. So far
he has been a viewer, a perceptor, now the new connection he
makes involves him in a way going beyond recognition and
understanding, and his immediate response is a defensive
click that appears to him as dismay. It works for an instant,
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and he sees he can pull back if he wants to, but the attraction
is too great, the involvement has sent a surge through him of
such familiarity that he takes a step forward on the grass, his
right hand coming up as though to detain the possibility of
the withdrawal of what involves him. Then he is in, lost in
involvement, even the word pain, profound as it is and so
explanatory, is brushed away, and at once he is tiny, very
very small, and he SEES that he can never understand just
what he is, cannot understand the full implication of what has
been gathered in him over aeons, and cannot even begin to
see from where he is standing at present anything of the why
of his existence. He understands here the prescience of his
initial dismay, that it is a boundary marker, the fault inhering
in organic integrity, that living beings must have a
preoccupation with maintaining their ongoing viability and so
must have an abiding sense of limit, a sense of what cannot
be violated: dismay, like scepticism in some ways, is a brake,
a sign of the limit of understanding at that point. Yet the
countervailing tendency to inclusion, here involvement, is
always the greater, if only because though an organism is
integral it is not complete, it must always seek outside itself
for everything it needs in order to sustain itself. This is not
mysticism, but hard rational thought. The limit of an
organism is always this limit, not a final limit, so that the
organism is always in a state of striving out, to grow, on a
mundane level, to be enhanced in every way, even in the very
principle of its existence, in that which makes it animate.
You see that the feeling, better call it experience, of
involvement brought him I use part tense now because he
has already passed on to the next stage even while I hurry my
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amanuensis along to get my words down as fast as possible,

and is on his knees on the wet grass, hands over his face,
weeping bitterly to see the extreme limits of his
understanding with regard to his own being, his composition
and the why of him. He was dismayed again at this point,
dismay clamping on him like a shock you understand that
dismay and scepticism are always violent and why goodness
has the primary characteristic of gentleness striking him in
his solar plexus, thus pulling painfully on his gonads and
perturbing his heart. Yet his involvement remains, gentle,
flowing out to that which involves (forgive the tautology:
involvement is a state, a matter of experience rather than
perception), and it flows on towards that centre, for every
organism has an origin, and always bears that origin as part
of its being an organism, so that his dismay is once again
overcome by the attraction of that which attracts (that is, of
that which involves him), and he opens his eyes and looks in
front of him and sees that the grassland is radiant, far
brighter, he thinks even in these circumstances, than it should
ever be in starlight, and he understands at once, taking the
hint, that what involves him is everywhere in any case, that
the radiance he is witnessing now is as it were the carrier
wave of what is the case, that the why of his existence is
simply there as part of the substance of his existence, that
everything that is true of himself, as of everything else he can
perceive, is at once present to him in this instance. He
understands, by means of the radiance he perceives upon
everything, even on the shadows among the grass blades, that
the whole universe, even God, is simply present NOW,
dimensionless, without duration, a wavefront with no past
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and no future, everything a flaring up, as it were, without

duration and without place.
He understands this very completely, and it is at once
familiar to him, an abiding truth he systematically works to
forget. And in understanding, he is filled with a joy,
composed as much of relief as anything else, as though he
has finally admitted a deeply buried secret. And with the joy
comes a clarity, a sense of his own worth, that he is full of
worth, clean throughout, each cell worthy of display, and the
relief is so great that it releases in him the last constraint, so
that he wants to speak. And in wanting to speak at this level
of complete release, so that he knows the truth, he wants to
address the person he has always wanted to assure, his father.
At once, he is convinced that his father stands behind him,
waiting as he believes he has waited for thirty five years to
hear him speak and so reassure him. He speaks as he turns,
shouting out the words with irrepressible joy:
You see, it is just there!
Turning, he finds his father not there. I am there, the
god whose mystery he has plumbed. I raise my hands to him,
to greet him, full of love for him, that he has found himself
worthy, to welcome him to my company.
He recognises me, of course, but his dismay is very
great; it moves with its implacable force and I at once
withdraw, as I am obliged to. He understands at once. He
cries out, the fear overwhelming him, and he falls to his
knees, tears flooding his eyes, and bends over, hands to his
face, and weeps bitterly.
I can do nothing but remain by him, giving him love,
as I have done so many times before, over and over.
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You see how helpless gods are. You understand now, I

hope, the limitation placed on divinity by mankind.
The tears subside in time, and he rises to his feet,
fussing over the wet patches at his knees, then searching the
dark ground for his map. How does he feel? Mostly foolish,
believing he stumbled in the dark, momentary panic as he
fell, not seeing where he was falling. He wipes the tears from
his face absently with his handkerchief, not remarking on the
presence of tears, not being consonant with the scenario he
has just invented. The map is damp too, which irritates him,
seeing now that this reconnaissance trip was not fully thought
out. He sets off again once he has checked the terrain and
spotted the copse beyond the ridge before him. Walking with
care, studying the ground before his feet, peering in the
gloom, his mind chatters, rehearsing his intentions, reassuring
itself that the rationale of a night expedition is correct, to try
to sense the situation in the park at the time of the attacks,
exercising the myth policemen hold to, that they have an
intuition for crime, in much the same way as a ghost hunter
has an intuition for ghosts. There are night crimes and there
are day crimes, as he sees it, and night crimes must be
investigated at night, for imagination plays a great part in
investigation, the ability to reconstruct the crime, the
motivation of the criminal and hence learn something of his
nature. All violence is undertaken in weakness, so violence is
a kind of language uttered by one who cannot speak in any
other way. All communication is an expression of the person
speaking and so bears the character of that person; this is
inescapable. How a person speaks, how he phrases his words,
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emphasis and affectation for language attracts stylisation

with ease, perhaps because most of you merely repeat words
all these elements tell you about the speaker, how he sees
the world and relates to it, what is important to him, and most
important what it is he is doing. Speech is as much an action
as any act of violence. So likewise the aggression, there is
style here too, of all human physical acts violence is the most
repetitious, but the expression lies most of all in the form the
aggression takes, how the attack is undertaken, weapons
used, parts of the person addressed, property or body. And
just as in the case of speech, violence can be refined and
articulated, even intelligent, and it can be crude and
inarticulate, disability in violence as in speech.
These reflections pass the time while he mounts to the
first ridge, the copse sombre, and then other ridges beyond, a
haze on the highest part of the park, as though something
gleams up there in the starlight. The wood to his left, running
along the Lonesome Hill Road perimeter, is no longer in
evidence, the spine of the hill intervening above him. The
grassland slopes away to the right, towards the river, but the
mist is there too, so that he can no longer see the River Pass
and its lights, or the lower trans-riverine terraces, only the
streetlights on the heights, steady glare, curiously calm, even
beautiful, now that the city sleeps. The ground in front of him
descends at a shallow gradient before running level for a bit
and ascending gently to the next ridge. He sets off again,
cautious on the wet grass, his shoes he finds not suitable for
the terrain, a tendency to slip. However, he quickly finds that
shortish steps do the trick, so as he becomes accustomed to
the new pace his mind begins again to drift back to the job on
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hand. This is how he works on an investigation, thinking it

out as he potters about, handling evidence, asking stray
questions of suspects and witnesses, theorising and surmising
in an absent-minded way, patiently working his way through
all the material available, physical and mental. Now he
considers the other side of the coin, as it were, the recipient.
Speech acts can invite speech acts in reply, a dialogue, or
they can initiate other actions, as instructions do, or they
invite no action in response, except perhaps an inner
acknowledgement, the speech of teachers as an example.
Likewise with violence, a fight is a dialogue, while many acts
of bullying or rape seek to initiate physical actions in reply,
while many acts of aggression are intended as lessons, though
violence being what it is, it almost always generates a desire
for violence in the recipient, whether performed or not.
He drifts now from this reflection, mostly a rehearsal
of standard theory, but it has toned up his mind much as
exercise before a games tones up the body. He considers the
case in hand, slipping momentarily as the ground levels out
and an image flashes in his mind and at once he is thinking of
involvement, his mind drifting suddenly into an area of
theory that always makes him uncomfortable: the complicity
of aggression. There is little problem in understanding why
someone is aggressive, though the received wisdom is
necessarily vague on some aspects of this, not wishing to
understand the virtue underlying violence, as virtue
necessarily underlies all human action, regardless of how
perverse such an idea may seem in many cases. More
difficult is grasping why this person is prone to attack while
that person is not. Victimhood, perhaps, as is taught, one can
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learn to expect and submit to violent communication. But

why this person rather than that person? He probes this
question because the word involvement makes him uneasy,
even though the literature on the matter is fairly conclusive,
at least prominent authorities in agreement, the complicity
occurs in context, no aggression without victim, one learning
from the other. He is not shirking social theory here, you
understand; he knows very well how pervasive violence, and
its concomitant, is in society, such that a simple theory of
subordination and repression will not explain aggression. He
has remarked with irony on a number of occasions that an
extension of aggression might well be the best solution to the
problem of victimhood, a gun in every hand, casual slaughter
for a few years to weed out those with speech problems. No,
there is another word haunting him, one he has already
attached to this case: attraction. The whole case, as he
understands it, can be put under the heading of this word. Not
a question of something imposed, a gratification stolen,
despite the interpretation of the police department and,
implicitly, his employer, even for that matter his ex-assistant.
Not sex crimes, despite lonely places, naked bodies. Oh, he
has a word for what happens, the photographs show it clearly:
ecstasy, but an ecstatic experience that kills or renders insane.
No, attraction, that is the nub: what attracts, how could one
young man attract in this way? You see his point here? He
regards the suspect young man as an occasion, perhaps
inviting those attracted, perhaps not. This is important where
crime is involved. You dont blame the owner of the
possession for the theft of the possession, even though being
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the possessor is the occasion for the possessors loss and

suffering.
He doesnt pretend to know what happens. He allows
the possibility of drugs, psychic instability, obscure cultic
practices, even perversions unknown to him. Perhaps the
youth has charismatic powers, uses hypnosis, perhaps he is
some kind of holy man, avatar, possesses a particular kinky
talent. Perhaps the victims, as such, are overly susceptible,
escapists from appalling family or social situations, perhaps
they are mistaken, looking for casual sex or prostitutes out for
business and getting more than they bargained for. Perhaps,
he even allows with some mystification, they know what is
going on and go for it despite the cost. He will allow anything
in this area, an element of intellectual interest in him on this
side, but what concerns him is the simple question: does it
involve a crime? He thinks this aspect is more important than
most people believe. This is because of the peculiar nature of
acts of judgement: judgements purport to decide what is the
case in human actions, yet they merely supervene on these
actions and are based on formal considerations that serve to
define the judgements in abstraction from all actions, so that
judgement is the imposition of a definition upon a complex
manifold that constitutes even the simplest human action.
Thus, in asking if a crime has been committed, you are asking
if a certain definition of a given crime can be imposed on a
given action, and that is all. All features of that action that do
not come within the purview of the definition are ignored.
There is more, however: while a human action might permit
the imposition of this definition, this judgement, it might
well, and often can, permit more than two definitions,
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perhaps many definitions judgements, moreover, that

conflict, that are mutually exclusive, such that, for instance,
one cannot be simultaneously guilty and innocent in one
action, at least in legal theory.
He has reached the copse, and has patiently endured
these latter reflections while peering into the dark interior
under the trees. Though the reflections have completed
themselves, he remains absentminded, an urge to sit
somewhere in this quiet night and ponder the philosophical
implications of judgement, a luxury he has never permitted
himself (though he has more than once promised himself the
opportunity sometime in the future, most likely when retired),
yet he knows from experience that investigation is best
undertaken in this state of mind, where the conscious mind is
less likely to interfere with this instinctive search for clues.
To start with, he fetches out his computer and keys for the
program he has prepared for this case, and then brings up the
details of the attack at this site, designated twenty four
oblique cee. However, the screen is unlit, display a matter of
contrasting dark and light tones, a fact he had overlooked,
and so, without the invaluable pencil torch he has left behind,
he has difficulty making out much detail with the help of the
starlight. He gleans basic facts about the attack, female,
fifteen, incarcerated in the citys psychiatric unit under heavy
sedation, diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia, an incurable
psychosis. Found sitting in the copse, partially undressed,
clothing strewn all about (items of clothing not specified, he
notes), in a state of severe shock. Has never responded to
questioning. No physical injuries except, incidentally noted
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three days after admission to clinic, thumb nail of left hand

torn off. Identity unknown.
He nods to himself when he has finished reading the
report, his success the result of finding the best angle of
illumination by starlight, a complex tilt of computer and of
his head, which reduces him to a slight crouch before the
dark copse. Now he puts the computer away in the left pocket
of his jacket, withdraws the case from the inside pocket,
opens it up and dons the night glasses. The entrance to the
copse is immediately framed in flashes of a low smouldering
red, the interior taking on a vaguely haunted glow, the light
sources up among the trees brilliant by contrast. A steady
breath, clutch the butt of the gun in his right hand pocket, and
in he goes, but a strange event at that moment that he will
immediately forget in the sudden resurgence of his
reflections: a flying creature, bat or bird, no doubt disturbed
by his entry, swoops down towards him with a rush of wings
and darts by his left ear out into the open. The first rustle,
high among the branches, had alerted him, but looking up
through the night glasses he has seen what appeared to be a
ball of scintillating light, a ball that shifted shape even as
light flashed over its surface and points glinted within,
rushing down towards him. Close to him, it has seemed a
living being of an unknown nature, and a memory has been
touched, of unknown provenance, that induces an instant of
terror before he realises what the thing is, a realisation
confirmed as it flies by his face, inches from his eyes, the eye
of the creature luridly red. Relief brings him to laugh to
himself, laugh at himself, touching the glasses reassuringly,
yet a deeper worry that he is under strain and so liable to be
188

freaked, worse, liable to be reduced by the dread that is

linked to the unknown qualities in the case he investigates.
Yet entering the copse calms him immediately, a
sensation of coolness, even remoteness, lifting the pressure
off him, and for a moment he is taken by the sheer beauty of
the confined space as it appears in infra-red light. The space
is not detailed in its entirety, many parts are in darkness and
so not available to him even with the glasses, but what he
sees is impressionistic, creating a sense of volume uniquely
dependent on the light actually available, enhanced though
distorted by the glasses. The roof of the place is resplendent
with flashing light, a heaven of flaring red stars that shift
position as the light wind strokes individual leaves. Then
among these stars, as it were, appear what seem like beams of
a lower light, arbitrarily filling space among the stars,
connecting some, striking others out momentarily until the
leaves change position and the star shifts away. It is like the
secret structure of the heavens, a mechanism whereby the
vault is sustained and the means whereby stars can hang
suspended. The array of star-like points and beam-like
streaks, the latter obviously light reflected from twigs and
small branches in the higher reaches of the trees, is random,
dependent to a great extent on the play of the wind, yet to
him, gazing up with slightly open mouth, there seems an
order there, as though by the nature of the trees and the nature
of stars and the nature of winds an order is always
unavoidably present in the world, that randomness is actually
impossible because of the order that necessarily inheres in all
things, the order that permits things to be in the first place.
Then, lower down, the light on the larger branches and great
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boles is more diffuse, a lower temperature here; even so, here

there is a very convincing sense of landscape, as though some
world is mapped in three dimensions to a novel but
sophisticated projection, such that this world appears as
though laid on the interior of a shallow bowl, the convex
converted to concavity without distortion, a place of
mountain and valley, rivers in deep gorges, plateaux and
plains dark but relative elevation suggested by boundary
conditions, light here suggesting a ridge, there the floor of a
valley. And at one point, to his right, a very complete
darkness broken only by a few points of light suggesting
itself at once as a deep wide ocean, islands here and there in
profound isolation, paradises it would seem, hard to find,
impossible to leave. The sensed order here is all the greater
for being more simple than above, the stability of the great
trunks speaking more clearly of the order of the trees, how
they share space together with an economy that itself is
graceful.
However, it turns out that there is a time limit to this
display; when he tries to gather all the elements in the grotto
together, celestial and terrestrial, he finds his interest as
though draining away, the scene consumed of its import by
his initial scrutiny, becoming a group of trees witnessed in
infra-red light, the wind chilly in the confined space. But this
is alright, because in the short time he has taken to enjoy this
view, his mind has otherwise been tending towards the
practical matter on hand, so he goes on at once to survey the
floor of the copse, bare earth under such dense cover, while
he grasps that the charge of molestation is a good implied
definition of what would carry conviction in the courts, and
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sees then the logic of the police interpretation that avoids the
unanswerable aspects of the case. Perhaps an argument for
insanity here, specialists working back from effect to cause:
he stops his searching abruptly, his mind working out
towards remote eventualities could any interference be
proven?
Is there a culprit?
He removes the night glasses and stands thinking in the
dark interior of the copse, stars twinkling in a chink among
the leaves his eyes have settled on. His immediate response to
the question, that of course there is an assailant, the cluster of
attacks in the locality centred on the park shows that. He
takes his stand on this assertion as the basis of the whole
investigation: the case derives from the police authorities,
after all. Fine. One assailant then the cause of all the attacks.
Dates? The computer is useless in here and he doesnt want
to go outside, so he concentrates on his assistants exassistants briefing, remembering nothing unusual said
about the dates of the attacks, no pattern in the series, attacks
occurring a week, a fortnight apart, sometimes within days.
Not a matter of appetite then, nor the bleeding off of a
psychotic pressure. He balks at the latter assumption, seeing
even more remote possibilities loom: if he attacks a likely
victim when such an opportunity presents itself, then... That
means he can do it whenever he wants. He recalls the ring on
the middle finger flashing in the dark, his only hope of a
positive identification, and he feels a cluttering of new
questions, especially the question: why assume the assailant
is male? Then the other image, of course, that has been lying
in wait all evening, a face looking towards the camera, the
191

daughter. Her? It feels wrong to him, the possibility that a

woman is doing it, an unknown quantity here that scares him,
pointing at a vulnerability in himself.
Now he sits down on the dry compacted soil, feeling
little stones, bits of twig press into his bottom, the better to
sort through the clutter, now that two words present
themselves, not policework but always the possibility of
personal engagement: involvement, attraction. Not words
precisely, you understand, not the sort of thing you find in a
dictionary, words existing purely to imply other words, but
shapes, really, dark forms that are part of him and part of
something else too: involvement indicating interlocking
circles; attraction like a net closing, something threatening for
so long that he realises he is weary of it, the constant struggle
to remain one step ahead to remain uninvolved. The
impulse now, caught by this hidden knowledge at a moment
like this, is to just give in, but he believes this is part of the
strain too, every weakness surfaces when morale goes.
Nonetheless, the forensic habit is cranking on and what
would have been in earlier contexts a resurgence of desire for
murder, the basis of the strength of his will, appears now as a
moment of self-loathing within which he sees that more work
must be done, from the beginning again if necessary, to
establish more clearly the nature of the case; for instance...
But the for instances multiply rapidly and he recognises in
them merely all the reflections he has had already on the case,
and understands finally amid this welter that there is a bottom
line here, that it is for him to resolve the case, that there is no
drawer marked UNSOLVED where he is now, that some
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solution must be imposed by him: that he is free to choose the

solution.
He gets to his feet and dons the night glasses again,
recognising that the burst of self-loathing has granted him a
return of objectivity and, he recognises also with relief an
end to speculation. Turning to search the ground, his jacket
swings out heavily, reminding him of the gun in his right
hand pocket, reminding him of the nature of the freedom he
has grasped in this crisis. He finds the spot where the girl had
been found very quickly, some of the plastic stakes used to
outline the site remain jammed into the earth, the surface all
round showing marks of raking. The spot is arbitrary, just
there within the copse, not at the back, not at a tree trunk, not
especially hidden from view. The outline remaining on the
ground suggests a place where the girl finally collapsed, so he
searches about the area, conscious that he is repeating work
already undertaken by the police investigators. Yet he is also
conscious of the difference now, not team work on his part,
more like a dog sniffing for a scent, more like someone
looking for an excuse. And it works, an instinct involved he
would readily admit to not understanding: he gets a sense of
waiting. He concentrates on this, moving around under the
trees, the ground shining fluorescently like a radar image, and
is rewarded with a glimpse of what he can best call
expectation, that something was understood by the girl as she
waited here. His grasp of this intuition is wavering, and he
concentrates harder to suppress stray thoughts so as not to
lose the signal. The girl, he sees, building the insight up like
an image, waited with knowledge of what was coming: the
spot is now under a tree, one of the oldest in the copse, a
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beech with smooth bark, where he finds a scuff mark on one

of the roots, little balls of clay adhering at the edges of the
mark, some soil ground down fine in the interstices of the
bark. So, leaning back against this trunk, one foot raised to
rest on the trunk. He turns at the spot and sees he is looking
across at trees on the other side of the clearing, the entrance
away to the right. The thrill he feels standing there is purely
sexual, seeing the girl standing there like that, nubile, pent-up
in expectation, darkness, isolation, then at once, seeing
beyond the sexual, just as his sexual response evaporates in
the face of the idea of complete vulnerability because
sexual desire, as a desire for something not certain of
attainment, requires a surface of resistance to press against
to what is given under such a circumstance, naming it
tentatively as HERSELF. He walks to the entrance, turns
and looks left across to the beech, perceiving it vaguely with
the night glasses, a burnish of red on the pale bark. He
removes the glasses and studies the spot, realising with a start
that he can see nothing there in normal vision. The start is
very real, raising the hairs on his neck, and he understands
with remarkable coolness, considering the night he is having
just where murder fits in: seeing that what is given, no, he
corrects
himself,
what
is
made
available, as
incomprehensible, except in terms of a similar response, in
making something similar available; that, faced with such an
incomprehensible request, he can understand why taking
makes sense in such a situation: how taking a life resolves the
problem by acting as though the problem does not exist,
murder being the statement that it could not exist.
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He can see now that murder is your response when too

much is asked of you, to accept refusal, betrayal, defeat, your
own life, love. He marvels that he can understand this clearly,
an even greater relief in this, that is, in seeing how
incomprehensible is the thing that provokes murder, even all
violence, an incomprehensibility that is so much like,
conceived abstractly, not being yourself, that is, putting it
more clearly, like being dead, like being able to die in the
same deliberate way you would elect to raise your right hand
and touch your nose. He raises his right hand and touches the
tip of his nose in the dark and marvels again at this
understanding, seeing, again abstractly, how much control,
and power, is implied in such an ability, to die that way. He
turns and walks out under the stars, red light flaring in the
lens so that he tears the glasses off his face and blinks
furiously at the sharpness of the light in the sky, then gives up
and stands with his eyes closed, resisting the need to wipe
away the tears which have welled in the corners of his eyes,
turning cold and itchy very quickly. He has gone stock still
because it has occurred to him that such a death could not be
real, in the sense of complete, otherwise the controlling factor
inducing death would fail at some point prior to actual
extinction and thus permit the strong force that maintains life
to reassert itself. But he does not doubt that there has been
death, a number of deaths, so the only conclusion from this is
that something must survive the moment of death, something
very powerful.
He discovers that the map is missing and goes back
into the copse, finding it on the ground where he had sat
down to think. Outside, he checks his trousers first and finds
195

stains, though knees no longer wet, smudges of earth and a

variant radiance he assumes to be grass stains. Then he
checks the map and works out that the next site of attack is
further north and some distance down the slope. He sights out
into the night in that direction, thickening mist down by the
river, no light there now, feeling a better energy in himself
now, more eagerness now that he has grasped a fundamental
point concerning the mysteriousness of the whole case,
seeing the hospital cases as engaged in a ferocious struggle
between a fundamental life principle and an intention of
overwhelming power, reason, nerves, bodily functions
sacrificed in the terminal struggle. He sets off north, around
the copse and down the shallow incline towards the next
ridge, keeping height for the moment until he has pinpointed
the little wood named ABSTONE GROVE on the map, in the
centre of which is struck a red spot.
Now that he presses forward over the damp grass,
watching the ground before his feet for obstructions, he is
less prey to the marginal influences of the night, and once
habituated to the requirements of walking, he turns his
intuition again to what he has discovered. The key question,
he decides very quickly, is the role of the assailant, that is,
why does he always survive these encounters, if he does, but
allowing for the moment that he does, how then does he
survive, and what does he provide in the encounter? He must
struggle himself for a while now, tramping over the grass,
occasionally raising his eyes to check his whereabouts,
abstraction tending to usurp insight, logic vying with what
feels like a key in his solar plexus, the key that can adjust
itself to fit all locks. Logic is pointing to a provision by the
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assailant, the enabling power crucially required by the victim,

but he sees only murder again in this; he wants to allow for
some other idea here, for a change, because his insight into
the complete availability of the victim is so new to him, and
because this insight has given him new energy, even the kind
of happiness that arises when you learn that something you
deeply wished for is after all not only possible but also
permissible.
So he considers the assailant as an occasion, someone
who in some way facilitates the victim. He recalls the insight
he had into availability and at once the swell of feeling in him
swamps the stutter of his reason, freeing the sensation in his
solar plexus. For almost ten minutes, as he walks up onto the
next ridge and over and down again towards the next ridge
beyond, he tests the sense of availability in relation to the
assailant in terms of supervention, still the idea of something
added, though not now a mere enablement, more like
approval, a compressive boundary, a surcharge, a
disinterested provision, an act of charity of a special kind.
These tests increase his happiness, as any contemplation of
charity increases your happiness, a grace that increases the
quantum of love in your world though it is unfortunate that
such a grace is usually released in marginal situations as a
replacement for the others selfishness, gratitude expected,
resentment given but they do not turn the key, as it were, so
that availability remains present in force in his imagination
while the provision suffers from a kind of reticence, as
though the two cannot meet.
However, he breasts a ridge, which one he no longer
knows, and he sees below the smudge that should be the
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wood he is looking for, the first he has seen, and according to

the map it should be the first wood he will see below. He
keeps to the ridge for his descent, above the wood, which is
in a hollow between this ridge and the next one north. He is
vaguely dissatisfied that he cannot explain the role of the
assailant yet, but not as dissatisfied as he is happy to think
about the whole situation, the sense of availability having lost
none if its power to affect him. Going forward with such
eagerness, as might be expected, engenders a loss of attention
to what he is doing, so that he maintains the gait that has
brought him up to the ridge and discovers his error here too
late, his feet sliding forward from under him. He lands
heavily on his right hip, the muzzle of the gun intervening
between him and the ground, the pain sudden and intense, his
eyes filled with a startled light before a darkness succeeds, a
scream of sheer anger released involuntarily. He twists on the
ground at once, arms and legs flaying to gain purchase on the
wet grass, fingers interlacing in clumps of grass, but his feet
repeatedly slipping away, until he gains an equilibrium on his
hands and knees and so can lever himself to a standing
position from there. His mind meanwhile fills the gap
remaining after the happiness absented itself abruptly,
scandalised by the failure of trust, with a desperation like
someone scrabbling on a cliff face, and thoughts of strain
reappear further off, remote within, a voice crying with
profound misery, a cry revealed rather than occasioned by the
sudden fall.
Standing with complete distrust on the ground beneath
his feet, stabs of pain radiating from his hip, affecting his
stomach most of all, he is stunned, the misery dominant at
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first, but the profundity of the misery couldnt help but amuse
him, so he laughs, ruefully as though testing the propriety of
laughter under the circumstances, then more indulgently,
aware of the thoughts about strain break down, confusion,
an even worse darkness thereafter: shameless entreaty a
rationality permitted as a short-term solution, opportunistic, a
virtue made of helplessness. Yet the relief is real, something
surmounted: he has a stronger sense of where he is, hands
wet, pain in his body, seeing the earth in that, an insight into
rock and soil, the trickle of water, the unending strain of
growing borne with the kind of fortitude that precludes
reflection, movement in one dimension only up, up, up. He
understands why plants dont think, and why they have no
voice: they are exactly as they appear to be, a symmetry of
root and branch, plumbing depths in order to rise so high.
And he sees further that part of himself which is plant-like: a
fortitude at that level, too, how nerves are rooted in the body
and to what end, the pain there like that of a plant reaching
for the sun it will never touch, which draws it upwards to its
limit, to the limit of the plant not of itself, which holds plants
in its sway and bears all life, and which perhaps has its own
business too beyond the ken of all that depends upon it.
The short-term rationality works, permitting the earlier
happiness to return, happiness being supernumerary, needing
a place prepared for it, a space, as it were, in excess of that
needed for mere living. He doesnt quibble here, of course,
welcoming all the happiness that comes his way, as you do.
His hip is stiff now, but pain attendant upon movement only,
and he moves carefully in his search for the map, finds it,
checks the contents of his pockets, checking the gun,
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ensuring that the safety is still on. He walks slowly at first,

distrusting the wet grass, but keeping to the ridge as
originally planned, hands extended like a tightrope walker.
The fall, of course, has spoiled the whole tenor of his
thought, most notably, though it will be some time before he
becomes aware of this, by inserting this tangible sense of
earth he savoured some moments ago. Yet this apparent
addition, as concept, I mean, is really a label, a name, for a
state already inherent in him, which he has always ignored
as not proper but which now appears as something
unveiled, though of necessity heavily disguised: passivity.
The earth endures in its passivity, an essence (if I am
permitted such a word) abiding through all change, the
principle of growth, if you like, the fact of its being there, as
some of you might prefer, but nonetheless something which
is earth about which everything else coheres, has its
meaning as part of this coherence, but which is not any of
these things, elements, energy, and the like, forming the
matter of that coherence. Dont misunderstand me here, you
may call this essence spirit of the earth if you wish, but you
must also bear in mind that this spirit is not, nor cannot be,
distinct from that which forms the coherence, no more than
the principle or essence of growth in a plant can be separated
from the matter that forms the plant. I admit that this idea is
difficult to grasp, given your habit of assimilating names to
things and therefore conceiving that all names must refer to
distinct things, But you must accept that language arises
first of all in you, and not from the external world, as your
use of language seems always to imply. You do not have a
word for a thing, for instance, for a tree, because there are
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trees in the world, but because you can know, and

understand, recognise that you know there are trees. This may
seem trite, an occult intervention in a sensible process, yet if
you do take this primary act of knowing into account, you
will see then that knowing and the attendant understanding is
not itself dependent upon there being things to know, for
instance, without trees there would be no knowledge of trees
and so no word tree, but there would nonetheless the
capacity to know and to understand. Of course, you never
encounter this pure capacity in the normal routines of your
lives, no more than the spirit of earth or of vegetation can be
separated from those things forming earth and plants, can the
capacity to know be separated from acts of knowing. Yet,
that there is an earth, plants, knowledge implies some
essence, an identity, if you wish, which founds this earth, this
plant, this act of knowing. Consider it as a presence for the
moment: look out your window and see the earth, see a plant,
consider your understanding of these words my amanuensis
writes here for me, try to grasp the radiance that accompanies
all these things, how the earth glows under your gaze, how
the plant extends itself to your benefit, how the word is
radiant with the knowledge it permits you. This is the
presence of these things, their identities, their coherences.
You will say immediately, as my amanuensis does, that
all this light is the light of understanding alone, something
you give to mere objects, but I insist against what you believe
is your understanding in this matter, that these objects make
possible your understanding of them. I repeat: without the
object, there is no knowledge of the object. However, I hasten
to add that I do not discount the light of understanding, only
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to assert that this light of itself does not make knowledge

possible; there must be the essence of the object first, the
essence that is grasped in the act of knowing, essence to
essence, your understanding then the result of this
coincidence. I realise that this explanation seems to deal with
occult phenomena, the word essence itself raising the ghost
of an intellectualist tradition content to pronounce from the
comfort of armchairs, but perhaps if I explain why it must be
so, you will have a clearer understanding of the situation.
You assume things persist over time, have their source in
potentia, such as seeds for plants, or are determined by sums
of forces, or are constituted by materials which themselves
are considered foundational, elements, molecules, particles,
whose being are governed by laws expressible in number.
Thus you believe that you perceive aggregates, whose
constituents can be isolated by various forms of analysis, and
that descriptions of objects in terms of their constituents,
along with descriptions of the forces that maintain these
aggregates, are altogether complete explanations of these
objects. Thus you believe that all existential objects, that is,
those objects that you perceive, have histories, and can infer,
from abstract knowledge based on memory, and so also
historical, the futures of these objects. Thus a tree grows from
its seed, draws nutrient from its environment, matures into
such and such a shape and character, and then after so many
years dies.
But your actual experience of the world is not like this.
You experience now, and only now, at what I have
previously called the dimensionless present, of no width,
depth, or extension, so that all objects, and your own acts of
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knowing, only appear in this present, and cannot appear

otherwise in their reality, because they do not exist as or in
any other reality. Only the Now exists, a wavefront, if you
wish, but a wavefront that leaves no trace except in the ghost
of your acts of knowing, in your memories, a living present
now upon an utterly unfathomable abyss. So, as you can
appreciate, objects existing in this way, at this instant, cannot
have meaning in terms of what has gone before or what you
believe will come after, cannot be grasped in terms of
constituents, which are in this instant thus, and in this instant
differently thus. At every instant of now, such as NOW, each
object, animate and inanimate, is only what it is at that now,
and it is what it is at that now that shines out to a capacity to
know that itself is at any now only that which it is at that
instant.
This is what you are, then, at this instant: just that
being and no other, undergoing this act of knowledge and no
other, your understanding recognising this act of knowing
and no other. In comparison with this experience of now,
your memory and your books, your buildings, your art, your
desires and fears, are like ghosts, for many a substitute for
experience, a form of death more tragic than the death that
obsesses you, a death in life, a potentia recognised only by
hindsight pitifully vague and dim, the lives you live no more
than a striving to conform to a history already dead and
utterly GONE.
The dark you all fear is within each of you.
This is how he lives, terrified of experience, trapped in
the past, fear rising as murder, more timid than the smallest
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animal, less alive than the merest protoplasm. Yet he is happy

at the moment, descending this ridge towards the wood
indicated on his map, thinking for the present of stone, the
only way the passivity that has been uncovered in him can
appear to his fraught consciousness. The situation he is
entering now is extremely subtle, and I want you to pay close
attention to the play of a number of words in what follows:
PASSIVITY, AVAILABILITY, INVOLVEMENT,
PROMISE.
The wood is not large, but it appears more extensive
than he expected, mainly because it is straggled out, trees
spread unevenly over broken ground, a local extrusion of the
underlying rock breaking the otherwise smooth slope. The
mist in the river valley below is thickening, he notices during
a last look-around before donning the night glasses, patches
of mist among the more extensive woods he can discern
below, wisps even in the hollows above him, though the
spine of the hill high above is clear, the stars still twinkling
over his head. He knows he will have trouble locating the site
of the attack here, the red spot has been placed on the map
simply to indicate the wood and no detail in the computer
gives a more precise location, except to say that the body was
found, naked, adjacent to an oak tree. He is confident of
finding the spot, however, because he has nurtured the
intuitions gained at the copse, and believes that these will in
some way guide him, on the argument that a similar act will
require a similar locality, a context, if you will. Now, he
makes a last touch-check of his pockets, crouches slightly
because the glasses exaggerate the dark-light contrast, and
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enters the wood, padding carefully, wary of slippery roots.

There will be no wonderment this time at the world the
glasses present him, the eagerness keyed in him shows up his
growing fatigue, not used to night duty now, which is just as
well because the play of red light, flashes, smouldering
patches, myriad scintillations, brilliant shafts somewhere to
his left, might this time overwhelm a sensibility already
extremely attenuated. Even so, having protected himself
against one aesthetic strain, he finds himself vulnerable to
another: the uneven distribution of trees, clearings here, a
thick copse there, an old tree alone over there, a line of
saplings running this way, creates a feeling of a manifold of
boundaries behind which a forest extends an unknown
distance, a feeling enhanced by a peculiarity of the lights
visible among the trees in the infra-red spectrum, a fretting
peek-a-boo quality of particles of intense flaring light,
winking here then there, like the sparkle of sunlight on a red
sea, but here, with the deep black background, no means of
gauging depth is possible, so that the wood takes on an aura
of vastness, an unnatural extension, as though no laws
operate here, a door opening on a new world, that can be
entered in the way you would dive through a surface and so
enter a deep deep ocean. Seeing this depth, he knows very
well that if he bothers to turn around he would see the grassy
slope rising up whence he had come, stars in the sky, a city
beyond the ridge, yet the depth is so compelling, proposing
itself as an imaginative novelty, like the flicker of glowing
embers, the surface of a still pond in moonlight, highly
coloured mappings of fractals, proposing the concept of
infinity so pleasing to your soul though your science denies
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the possibility in reality. He accepts this proposal, glancing

frequently into the interior of the wood, delighting in the
novelty as a kind of break from the earnest attention he gives
to the matter of working his way between trees, stray roots
hiding in grass, the odd outcrop of clean rock now, another
level of attention above this, aimed at picking up anything
that chimes with the intuitions he bears.
These intuitions have changed character somewhat
since leaving the copse. He had, you will remember, made of
them an image remarkably real for him at the time of a young
woman leaning back against a tree, one foot raised on a root,
completely open to what was coming to her. Though this
image had aroused a strong response in him, he knows very
well that she is a creation founded in the mystery of the
nature of the attack on her rather than in a phantasy of his
own desires. By now, here in the wood, the image has lost all
detail and all that remains, to the left in his imagination, is a
sense as of a cloud, an undefined possibility he names
availability, not, I stress, an availability to him personally, as
though he is in some way searching for such a person, but an
aspect of the mystery of the case he is investigating for which
he at least has a name and therefore for which he has a
concept. At the same time, however, as the image has
emptied of all personality, it has also taken on other aspects
of the mystery of the case. It is difficult to describe precisely
what I mean here: it is more a matter of feelings, as I say,
intuitions, which he can present, as you know, without
definite form or specific name. Figuratively, the best that can
be said is that the cloud image in his mind takes on a variety
of solutions to the mystery. The clumsiness here is my fault,
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not that of my amanuensis (who is working away patiently

with his pencil and eraser). I will try again. Consider the
cloud image in his mind, named availability, as a kind of
imprint left by the vision of the girl he had constructed out of
his insights into what occurred in the copse. What he does
now with that imprint is to test it over and over, something he
is not fully aware of as he picks his way over the broken
ground, intuitive radar probing his surroundings, glancing
from time to time into the vastness he enjoys, by imposing on
it ideas, feelings, guesses, speculations as to the nature of the
event that robbed her of her reason and set her body in a
permanent spasmodic posture akin to ecstasy. He hopes
thereby to find an answer that will fit the imprint in such a
way that it will take on a new form, a form that will tell him
what he so badly wants to know, not any longer who did what
to whom, but what happened between them. He searches this
wood now to find an echo of this imprint so that he can
rehearse his intuitions a second time, confirm them certainly
if he can, but also add to them, increase his chances of hitting
on the answer.
He undertakes all his investigations in this way:
imagining murder, rape, brutality, sadism, drug dependency,
violence of every kind; latterly he has imagined theft on a
grand scale, imagining money, power, charisma, also
weakness, vulnerability, envy, vanity, trying, like a
philosopher, to grasp the common factor, What is it that you
do to each other, and more important, why you do what you
do to each other? It isnt a conscious ambition, more an
epiphenomenon of a practical activity, the exercise of a skill
that earns him his living, yet he is drawn to answer a
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profound question he knows implicates himself too: why is

mankind everywhere and at every time so incomplete? Now,
he does not consider the present case as one which, if solved,
will answer this question in some unique way. So far, it is a
case among cases, a sample, as it were, a representative of the
human condition, with an equal chance with any other case of
providing a clue to the problem. But he is learning that this
case is different in some way from any other case he has
investigated. The unusual conditions of the victims were
initially academic to him, he was more concerned with the
problem of finding a suspect. Latterly, though, what seems
like collusion between assailant and victim aroused his
interest, suspecting at this stage some bizarre sexual or cultic
ritual; a novelty, no more, that increased his desire to find the
culprit and have some questions answered, answers he
assumed that would be of interest to the police authorities in
the city and elsewhere. Now, however, the idea of availability
consumes him, seeing collusion as a level previously
unknown to him, an attractive mystery rising this night in a
dark park to engage his deepest intuitions and...
And. I must confess that as he draws near to finding an
answer to this mystery I am tempted to elaborate upon this
and. I have remarked before on the opportunities the
language of your epoch grants me to delineate his condition
in remarkable detail. I had intended going along with him
here and restrict myself to describing his actions and
responses, as I have done up to now, but I wonder now if I
should perhaps attempt to describe other features of his
experience, features less easily understood by you in this
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epoch. You see, it is the very strength of your language that

tempts me here, its power of description, the extent to which
your language has lost what I can best call rhetorical power.
By rhetoric I do not mean here merely the power to move or
to persuade, a rather banal use of language if it had not been
used to such destructive ends during the last two and half
millennia. No, I mean an older, more profound quality of
language, upon which the later use of rhetoric battened and
exploited for wholly sinful, yes, sinful, ends: the power of
language to create. I dont mean here the Let there be light.
myth (as though anyone or anything you or I can conceive of
could do that), though this, of course, as a product of human
imagination is itself based on the experience of the creative
power of language. This digression should go within square
brackets. The power of description: it is possible with your
language to refer to shadowy features of his experience
without affecting you adversely, that is, without creating in
you these features, which, given the condition he has entered,
would perhaps place upon you a responsibility you are illequipped to discharge.
Let me begin by making a number of assertions:
You know everything.
You remain responsible for what you hide from
yourself.
You remain responsible for all actions arising from
your evasions.
You cannot evade your responsibilities.
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And...the next word is involvement. You have seen

how he fears this word and what it implies for himself. He
fears this word both because of what it demands of him and
because he cannot see what is demanded of him. Thus
involvement means much as an idea of death means to him. I
have commented on this already. Now, involvement and the
image he bears, that he calls availability, are, figuratively,
contiguous, that is, as forces, or movements, within him they
are drawn irresistibly to one another, in the way that water
from one jug might be poured in to join the water in another
jug, either jug to either jug. At present, he perceives
availability as being outside him, sited evasively in the
circumstances of mysterious attacks in a city park, and the
involvement is within him, related evasively to this image of
availability, though heavily disguised as police-work. But in
the image I proposed to illustrate their contiguity, I imply that
the two states are contiguous only at his initial level of seeing
their relationship, and now I tell you that they are one state,
one state leading into the other as a kind of deeper immersion
in that state. Thus he has experienced involvement and
entered availability, only to draw back in terror and grief. On
his second approach now, deeply timorous, as he should be in
the circumstances, he begins with availability as an external
factor, and skirts in every way he can the question of
involvement, putting many other names, feelings, images,
desires in its place, every one of the latter intended to give
him a reserve of control over the experience of involvement,
in much the same way as the externalisation of availability in
a vacant image gives him a measure of control over that state.
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This balance of power is exceedingly delicate, for the

two concept-states (accept that though they are identical in
reality, they will obey naming and become distinct states, this
is part of the creative power of language) are attracted in the
way lovers are, wishing at every moment to rush together in
union. How he succeeds in keeping them apart depends upon
an assumption he holds, which he has held for so long that it
goes unnoticed as a second nature: having externalised
availability, he sees it as something promised to him. There is
sexual contamination here, part of that significant transfer of
spiritual energy to sexuality made in your epoch; it is no
accident that he first perceived availability tonight in the
guise of an expectant nubile girl. But you see here a common
sublimation, in two parts, a result not entirely of modern
invention. First, availability is projected, among you across
the sexual axis; anciently across the human-divine axis.
Second, concomitantly, once projected, availability appears
as a promise, that is, availability ceases to be a state
permissible to you and becomes instead a sign of something
else, that is, the projection takes on a being of its own and it
is this being or thing that is available to you. Hence, you
search for the ghost of yourselves in others, dreaming a
dream of surrender, sometimes attempting to make it real by
violence, best illustrated by your tendency to murder your
gods.
You notice that of the concept-states, it is availability
that is projected. Projected involvement is more difficult,
involving as it does personal surrender and as such
abandonment of the possibility of permitting either
availability or involvement within yourself. Thus each
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concept-state involves the idea of death, availability leading

to murder, involvement leading to suicide: there is a
congruence here that reflects, even at the level of vulgar
projection, the identity of the two concept-states.
However, he holds to a balance of forces at present, a
gun in his pocket making possible murder, a growing
recklessness in himself, which he does not yet recognise,
making possible self-destruction. He can hold this balance
because he is habituated to the idea of promise, that is, that
the thing available to him will at some point be offered to
him. There is a profound arrogance here, of course, but you
must invent something to care for your evasion, to protect
yourself from the lies you live, and this something, let us call
it ego, must be invested with very great power in order to
protect you and support your monstrous lies. Do you
understand this? Lies are monstrous because they live at the
expense of truth; they pervert the power of truth though
truth itself needs no power, it is the perversion itself that
creates the power that gives life to your lies, this power being
in fine your resistance to the compulsion of truth and it is
this power that founds the ego. But the ego needs to be more
than simply powerful, it needs to be more than a machine of
containment, it needs also to be isolated, that is utterly free of
truth: hence the arrogance, hence the will which is always a
rising-up-against.
Yet the ego has its pathos: it cannot live its reality, a
mere sustainer against fear lies are born out of fear; it must
look forward always to something brighter as a relief from its
dark task. But being false, it knows it is unworthy, hence the
promise, that something that is available to it will someday be
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given to it, which will relieve it of its darkness and bring it

into the light; that will relieve it of its burden and permit it
to... There is the crux for you. Without its burden of lies the
ego would have no reason to exist.
You see why he has, like most of you, become merely
habituated to promise, making no endeavour to have the
promise fulfilled, seeing the idea of death at its end too. The
question you may be asking yourself now is this: how does he
resist the promise? All these concept-states, availability,
involvement, promise, are dynamic conditions, that is, like all
lies, they must be sustained against the compulsion of truth,
but as truth draws us powerfully so the energy sustaining the
lie must be active there is not enough energy in all creation
to maintain a lie in a state mimicking the self-presence of
truth so that the lie must always tend away from truth. But
as none of you possesses the unlimited supply of energy
necessary to maintain such a trajectory (despite the efforts
some of you make to gather that energy through obsession),
you are obliged to find other means to maintain the lie. This
is done by continuously re-establishing the lie, by living a
series of lies, each instant the lie made anew. To do this, it is
necessary for you to experience again and again the truth: and
so it is, each of you like a stone skimming an ocean, the stone
touching the surface frequently to gain energy for the next
bounce, and on and on in a futile flight.
Thus you impose availability on all things, creating
promise in these things, thus in turn you destroy these things,
imposing the death hidden in promise on the things you make
available. But you need some things to remain, to create your
world amid your destruction of that world: hence you impose
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involvement, calling it value, dying in yourself to the things

you call art, heritage, religion, and here you can witness the
fourth concept-state that has arisen in him this night:
passivity. You see that at a moment of forgetfulness he was
drawn to an aspect of his world, to understand for an instant
his incompleteness, the ground of involvement. Then you see
how later that same world, after his second fall, as it were,
appeared to him in a new guise, a fixity, in truth of essence,
as I have attempted to define that word, but which he, in his
delusion, sees solely in terms of stone, in terms of what is
hard, dry, inert.
Admittedly, compared with promise, such an idea as
this passivity is rebarbative, threatening an end to all effort,
the birth of complacency, a more congenial home for the ego
than the exertion of promise. Yet, you can easily understand
its falsity: fixity is not possible, for reasons already given. So
we see it to be the case for him: he enters this wood with the
strivings of his being quietened by the contemplation of
stone, and see what happens. He ignores the lessons of light
that captivated him in the copse, only to fall prey to a sense
of vastness: now, what is this vastness but a great stillness,
and what is such a stillness but a projection of passivity. And
see further: how he has emptied his image of availability,
how he is attempting to give a name a form to promise by
reforming that image, and yet how his passivity, which hides
involvement, likewise finds an empty image, an imaginative
projection onto a dark wood, and how they are arrayed,
availability a potential to his left, involvement a potential to
his right.
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Very well, then, he is consumed by availability, his

intuition seeking a form there, a revelation, his residual
control over the compulsion drawing him forward, and at the
same time he finds delight in his vision of vastness, content
to move in its space, he believing it keeps the pressure of
revelation off him, easing the strain in him he worries about.
He is deep in the wood now, ascending gradually between
trees, over fallen branches, around bare rock, his senses alert,
intuitions seeking an echo to their form. He searches about
every oak tree he passes, a random search because he knows
there are perhaps many oaks away to his left and right, but he
keeps this course he is on, deeper into the wood, up the
craggy outcrop, wanting a centre from which he can probe
outwards, not sure how this can be done in the time available,
many other sites yet to be examined. But his growing
knowledge of the oak he believes is informative: the rough
bark, the extended roots, its isolation, as though the oak
speaks to him, explaining the circumstances of what occurred
in this wood. He recognises his light-headedness in this
maundering attention to the trees, deep in the night, bodily
functions slowing, consciousness missing its seclusion in
sleep, but he undertakes it in any case, a compulsion here too,
believing that some character of the oak in this rocky
environment has a secret for him. It is the reference to the
tree in the report on the attack that draws him to the oak, as
expected, but it is something else in himself that draws him to
the rock strewn wood, loose boulders in places, great slabs
protruding through the grass elsewhere, some clean, others
covered by a dry crackling moss, scrubs of earth in fissures. It
is a curious rock, bright in the infra-red band, from the
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distance seeming scrubbed and decorous, but close up it

looks friable, a wasted material like old bone, a remainder
crumbling in desolation. He avoids stepping on it, partly a
fear of falling again, partly also a kind of horror of the stuff, a
conviction that touching any of this stone would alert
something of which it is merely the tip of his presence. This
is nonsense, and he knows it is nonsense, nonetheless he
avoids the rock, and, as by contamination, it makes him
nervous of the oak trees as well, as though they too have
communication below by means of their roots. This unease is
crystallised at one point, where he chances on a gigantic oak,
fit site for his intuitions when he first sees it, but a frission
when he sees that the roots of the oak clutch a massive
boulder, obviously exposed by centuries of erosion, and he
cannot avoid the feeling that the tree has a sinister
relationship with the rock, clutching it as a means to
destroying it chips and pebbles litter the earth surrounding
the rock and yet also embracing it at the same time in some
mysterious love pact, perverse but deeply pleasurable, the
reason this oak has grown so strong and mighty.
He know this feeling is nonsense too, the whole a
phantasm produced by arcane movements in his own mind
under strain, so far into the night, but he cannot escape the
conviction, which is of course implausible without the
pathetic fallacy, that this rock presses into the oak tree and
that this pressing, which the tree welcomes, is the cause of
the trees greatness, either as a stimulus or, worse, because
the stone has entered the oak in some way, the greatness of
the tree in fact the greatness of the rock. He doesnt stop here
to try his intuitions, rejecting the possibility that a girl waited
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here with her back to this obscenity, thus far having

penetrated into the mystery of the case he is investigating to
wish to see purity at its heart, a naivet on his part perhaps,
but inescapable considering who he is, a policemans naivet,
believing if no evil is present then goodness must preside. So
he presses on, clambering of necessity over great branches
fallen from the oak, a litter of crumbling twigs, old acorns,
dried leaves abandoned as above requirement, a growing
distemper now, fatigue fraying his concentration, out into
another clearing, tall grasses coming to seed here, rocks in
shadow, a density of birch next. He wont give up, you know,
though he feels now that he has struggled through this wood
for an eternity, no easy passage permitted anywhere, no time
to consider the larger issues anymore, his horizons limited
except to the vastness he imagines over there, whose
immensity he skirts, yet without ever looking behind him to
the shadow that haunts.
And he is haunted by a shadow, lying well back in his
more recent darkness, and all his intuiting, his policemans
extra sense telling him nothing about this presence. Nor
would they, because this shadow moves in a different
medium, floating behind him, flitting as though borne aloft
the encumbered ground. But on he goes, clear earth for once
under him in the stand of birch, though he must beware
trailing branches, one of which has already grazed his left
temple harshly enough to raise a low weal. It is stuffy
amongst these frail looking trees, dust in the air suspended as
he pushes by branches, the detritus of a dry summer, the
white slender trunks splendid in his glasses, and still he sees
those roots, so old, embracing that boulder, a confusion of
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names gathered about this memory, the rock an egg, the tree
an appalling primitive bird, a rudeness here verging on the
grotesque; then seeing a lovers embrace, the components
reduced to the level of nightmare, a vagina with implacable
tentacles, a penis quite alone and sufficient, an embrace of
obsessive particularity, destructive of all semblance of life,
decency, love, an utterly selfish embrace centuries long; but
worst of all, the tree as a woman at last having her way his
first real fear of delusion here, that is, not a play of
imagination but a descent into a terrible truth and oh how
his phantasy here tries to find a redeeming feature for the
rock, trying to evade the image of an ecstasy unto death, a
surrender as though food to be served so that another may
live, seeing in the end only a sacrifice that is bitter, how man
does return in the end to provide sustenance to the vegetation
he is careless of.
Then out of the birch, spitting dust from his mouth,
wiping it from his nose, dusting it from the surface of his
glasses, to see open ground before him, rising towards a great
jumble of rock. He pauses at the sight of this and breathes
deeply, knowing that at last he is at the centre, and that his
work here can begin. He sets out to toil up this last slope, a
night of slopes to ascend and descend, the weighted jacket
pulling on his shoulders now to induce muscular strain across
his back, avoiding the beds of high ferns that litter the place,
wading through long grass, heavy seed heads jostling his
thighs, and then the grass giving way more and more to rock,
crevasses here and there filled with grass and low stringy
bushes, so he clambers at last on the rock, finding good
purchase in its eaten surface, shoes pounding resoundingly as
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though the stone recoiled from his touch. He doesnt think

about giving his position away to some chthonic element
anymore, now that he has no choice and he wants to get to
the summit. Then he must clamber from platform to platform,
rising fast now, then ledges, map tucked into his belt, the
glasses somewhat misleading but he is convinced he cannot
see without them, scrambling up broken faces, the rock
trustworthy despite its fragile appearance. The summit
surprises him: expecting a pinnacle upon which he might
totter, he finds an open space covered with low mountain
grass, slabs of rock conveniently arranged for seating tired
climbers, a feeling of intimacy here, stars that bit closer, the
world of man that bit further away.
He walks to the centre, examining the surface at his
feet for no conscious reason, intuition in abeyance for now,
walks about then until he chances on one of the slabs, where
he sits down, expelling breath in a long sigh. He is suddenly
immensely weary, yet he is happy enough for the moment,
that feeling of tenderness for self that is the obverse of selfpity, a man loving himself with a gentle consolation, at rest
with a world as rest with him, the true eschatological instant.
The grass dances in a waving, ducking rhythm before him,
the red light strident, flashing along stems, glinting in the
knuckled seed heads. All at once he hears the soughing of the
night wind, realises that he has not listened all night, an index
of the strain in him, so he begins to hum a ditty, a pop song
he remembers his secretary ex-secretary singing about the
office, remembering the voice of his ex-secretary, he sees her
vividly, a regular slack-Alice, like a comfortable sofa, and his
mood shifts towards sentimentality, sees the consolation of
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the muddled lives of people, how their living transcends them

at every point, their freedom of expression, tears, rage, doting
affection, turning always to whatever happiness is possible in
any moment, always finding themselves in the welter of
confusion they cannot grasp, tears, rage, doting affection,
humour where possible, sullen otherwise.
The humming makes his mouth and nose dry, so he
swallows, tasting the residue of cider, apples at once
reminding him of his father, isolated in his wealth, obsessed
with virility as a counter to extinction, streaming
unhappiness, frustration, outright pain behind him, a man he
cannot help love for his naked vulnerability, his strutting, his
search for something called love, so loving the male animals
he breeds, destroying them if they fail him. Now the ingested
saliva disturbs his empty stomach, acid rumbles, so he
searches his pockets until he finds the bar of chocolate he
sequestered in the right inner pocket, surface towards his
body softish, surface towards the night hard. The familiar red
wrapper looks very peculiar in infra-red, the chocolate itself
even more so, like a slab of congealed blood, so he removes
the glasses and lays them carefully beside him on the rock,
something at once relaxing inside him, he blinking in the
black and silver darkness, grass gone away into its own secret
mass, but the rock lustrous with a low milky light, the
chocolate dark but that is the way it should be at night. The
taste is bitter, though he knows it is going to make him even
more thirsty, the heavy cocoa oil already bubbling in his
throat, the bitterness relieving an unserious addiction in his
body, one of many. But the satisfaction he experiences is
very great, and it debauches, as though sufficient excuse has
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been found, into a vision of vastness, very dark but also very
still, and he feels himself at a boundary, like the proverbial
child playing at the edge of the proverbial ocean, and he is
not afraid anymore, seeing the one wave in that infinitude of
irrelevancy, the myriad of everything roiling there, pain and
anguish from this perspective an unending leap of a joy that
has no echo, something exulting on the abyss because that is
its nature, a singular identity he feels at home with,
dispassionately viewing for that reason.
But it is only a vision, like the novelty your television
tries to produce, so he is easily distracted by the scrabbling
sound at his back. A big crow stands on the slab about two
feet from him, eyeing the chocolate in his hand with total
attention. The hand bearing the chocolate shakes reactively
he is amazed to see a crow about in the middle of the night
and it in turn reacts to the movement of his hand with a
peremptory caw, as though to remind him of the part he
should play. He breaks off a segment and holds it towards the
bird with his left hand. It draws back, the gesture obviously
too sudden, eyes him with its total stare, then hops forward
and grabs the chocolate in its ugly beak. Consuming the
chocolate gives it some trouble. At first it bites down, finds
the chocolate mashed across the lower beak, shakes its head
violently to dislodge it, fails, bites down again, mashing it
more securely into its lower beak, shakes its head again, one
claw lifting preparatory to scraping the mass away, but the
bird tips sideways, so it hops madly to regain its balance,
wings flapping, head thrown up, eyes trying desperately to
sight the freakish situation in its beak. He says, sucking a
segment himself, gurgling slightly as the cocoa oil bubbles in
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his throat, Let it melt in your mouth, and finds he knows its
name, Billy, so he says: Take your time, Billy. The crow
stops its prancing, beak apart, so he leans over and eases the
tamped chocolate up from the lower beak, tears off a piece
and places it within its mouth, resting on the narrow tongue
of the bird. He finds the crow remains unmoving, beak open,
its tongue quivering under the slowly dissolving chocolate, so
he gently but firmly closes the beak and leans down to catch
the birds eye and commands: Swallow, Billy. The bird
obediently throws its head up and he sees its throat work, and
the bird then shakes its head from side to side, quickly at first
then more slowly, and he knows it is savouring the bitter
taste, the drug already working into its veins, an addiction in
the making.
When it is ready for more, the crow hops up right
beside him and opens his beak, eyes steady on him, the
wings, he notices, drooping slightly, the whole ungainly body
in fact gone slack, so he breaks off another piece of chocolate
and inserts it into its mouth, and they suck on the chocolate
together, side by side, immense satisfaction all round. After
that, the crow keeps at him until it devours all of the segment,
and he himself eats more chocolate than he intended, to keep
the bird company, until he feels stuffed with it, the heavy
mass like a greasy ball in his stomach, and his eyes droop,
both of them by this stage thoroughly out on cocoa, the bird
drawn so close to him that he can feel the quiver of its wing
against his thigh, and he feels like embracing it
companionably, except that he knows it could not support his
weight. But the bird Billy likes being with him, whether
because of the chocolate or insomnia he is not sure, not that it
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matters anyway, and he himself feels that the company is

entirely appropriate.
Later he has dozed with his eyes open for fifteen
minutes he notices that the rock rimming the flat summit is
raised all about, like the parapet of a tower, and seeing that he
is atop a tower, he rises to survey the domain, walking slowly
because Billy complains if he goes too fast for him, hopping
along beside him, with a rattling sound as though he is made
of lollipop sticks and feathers, and they do a circuit of the
tower, but nothing to see because the mist has encompassed
everything except the highest ridge on the far side of the
river, coming so far up the height he is on as to hide away the
entire wood below. He is too intent on his circuit at first, and
on keeping pace with Billy, to dwell on the implication of the
mist, but when he does, looking north-north-west to where he
judges the next attack-site lies, he sees that he is in a difficult
position, both for continuing his survey and for getting back
to his car in the castle carpark, several miles south. He breaks
off another segment of chocolate, chips away at a sliver with
his thumb-nail and crouches to place it in the crows beak,
and sucks on the remainder himself, pondering idly on the
options available to him, feeling secure in his vantage point,
as though his realm lay about him, an encroaching mist that
perplexes his eyes, at once an infinity of vacuity and a
confining cloud, standing about as he imagined in childhood
God does in Heaven, Lord of infinity, nothing to do because
he is too great to do anything (like his distant father, as you
can easily imagine). This memory, unfortunately, recalls an
unhappy mood, a hurt wistfulness, the old old feeling of
unworthiness, though he knows by now that it was only a
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stage on the way to where he is now, ace investigator of

human evil, having a power against his father should it be
called upon, better perhaps than the hatred of the father that
too great a proximity can induce. Yet, though rationally
settled in this way in adulthood, the ambiguity remains,
loving his father, resenting the abandonment, pulling him this
way and that when let, and he searches the dark mist as
though for a sign, a stray light perhaps below, perhaps a bell
in the distance, but he is rewarded with only the clatter of a
late-night or perhaps, an early morning train picking up
speed below on the lines running beside the River Pass, on its
way to the capital inland.
He is doped on chocolate, spaced by the mist, buoyed
by isolation, dulled for the want of sleep, bored by the
endless speculation, yet his police instinct clinches the clue
here, the train below saying something significant that
doesnt quite appear in detail: nonetheless, it is about going
on to the next stage, an arbitrariness permitted now, in the
way that trains dont have steering mechanisms. He is
perplexed by this, squinting his eyes at the fog, because this
insight suggests that he knows, that somehow he has already
learned what he wants during the night, a matter of deciding,
he intuits further, though this doesnt make anything clearer.
He is grateful for this insight it will get him off the summit
but also vaguely disturbed, the events of the night coming
back to him in a dream of momentous import that has in large
been forgotten already. Thinking back, the most he can
remember are the phantasmagorias supplied by the night
glasses, now a suspect indulgence, and way beyond that some
misery earlier, in the cafe in the gardens, a depression that
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has ridden him all night long. The word depression tells him
that it is the wrong word, and he sees himself in a flash on his
knees laughing, then on his knees crying, then the tree
embracing the stone, and though he is not using the word this
time, the situation not being that extreme, he sees
involvement and now calls it commitment. This word pleases
him, as it does all of you, because it adds a nice moral tone
while permitting continued disavowal, until, intending to
celebrate this achievement with more chocolate, he finds the
bird missing, and turning to search, discovers her standing
behind him, her face exactly as he expects it, floating, as it
were, in the dark, her eyes intent on him.
[I must admit to an unexpected failure, the nature of
which is not entirely clear to me. Either I have overlooked
some aspect of his character, perhaps because I am not
sufficiently familiar with the operation of your language, or
else my amanuensis has lost faith or, worse, interest in what it
is I am attempting to express through him. I am loath to
blame this failure on myself; after all, I have witnessed this
tale many times and know very precisely what is at issue
here. Even if the cause of this failure lies in the strangeness of
your language, then my failure here arises because my
amanuensis does not understand as fully as he ought to the
nature of the language he has made available to me. This
being the case, I must therefore link his ignorance in this
respect with the disenchantment I detect in him, that is, his
loss of faith arises through his own ignorance rather than
through any failure in the show I am presenting here.
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Let me try to pinpoint what is not understood here

about your language. Your language is concerned with
reference, that is, your language has existence after the fact of
the existence of the world in which you find yourselves. Thus
this language is the outcome of an ongoing need to state what
is the case in that world. But your language does not seek
merely to reflect the world it refers to otherwise it would be
a language concerned with movement and change, a language
with no history, a language of speech, utterance dead and
forgotten once grasped as communication. Instead, it is a
language of things, concerned to fix the world as a form, a
language of subjects, nouns, and myriad predicates, a
language that is in effect nothing more than a listing of
attributes of things. The definition of what constitutes a thing
for your language would be complex, taking account as it
must of nouns that refer to parts of other nouns and nouns
that include in many different ways other nouns, such as for
instance the nouns branch, tree, wood. The definitions,
in fact, would show that your world, considered as a thing, is
infinitely divisible into other things.
There is something strange in this, though it is not
perhaps immediately evident. That you divide your reality up
in this way arises from your needs in your world, but that you
can do so arises from the nature of your language, that it can
take account of states of affairs only, that is, it can do no
more than assert that such and such a thing is in such and
such a situation. Now, this limited capacity of language
seems to you to be sufficient for your purposes, if only
because most of you survive long enough under tolerable
circumstances. But this limitation is in itself a grave fault; a
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fault, I hasten to add, inescapable in the use of your language,

but profoundly misleading nonetheless because you permit
your language to define your reality. A simple example will
suffice: you say today, The sun rises., and you say
tomorrow The sun rises., and because of the nature of your
belief in your language, you believe that the same action is
undergone by the same thing. Again, you believe, for similar
reasons, that the tree in your garden is always the same tree,
and you believe that you yourself are always the same human
being. But in all cases you are wrong. Nothing is ever
repeated, nothing is ever the same. Thus, there are no
things, and, more radically though it is more difficult to
show you this in your language there is no motion and
therefore, at the base of your experience, there is no change. I
know this seems contradictory to you, but you must
understand that the whole of your philosophy, being
language-bound, is based on the mistaken belief that there are
things, either one thing or many things.
I know that your (I address my amanuensis here)
disenchantment with my tale has arisen because in the period
between ending the last section and writing down my words
between these brackets, you have permitted yourself to be
distracted by the assertions of the reading you have done,
especially the reading of a Sunday newspaper, so that the
assertions of a dead language incomplete, opportunistic
assertions on a variety of subjects have broken your
concentration on the experience I am relating through you, so
that you have been tempted as you have done previously
but without dire consequences to complete my tale by
projection. The truth is that you have at last understood that
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your world is a chimera, so that the failure you are witnessing

affects you as a loss of faith. You have seen this as a story of
love and find you are in despair because of the impossibility
of avoiding triteness now in this subject, but I tell you now
that this is a tale about being, and that you know far less
about being than you think you know about love.
Let us return to my show, you curbing your speculation
and sharpening your understanding, while I delve deep
despite the limitation of this language and try to show you,
and those others who may come to read these words, how
you all fail, over and over, and how you suffer for your
failure, and create endless phantasms in place of the glaringly
simple truth each of you bears in your very beingness. Square
bracket!
I will not concern myself with his reactions on his
tower when he sees her there, his past finally gone now. They
face one another for a time then they set off side by side, each
thinking the other leads, down off the summit of rock and up
the slope north west, soon enclosed in the mist but
unperturbed by that. They see each other differently, of
course, given their different reasons for searching. She sees
him seeing figurative here as a node within herself, like a
bright blip on a radar screen, and she goes with him because
he is going, and because it appears to her that he goes where
she herself feels drawn to go. He sees her more directly by
reference to the image of her face, an image that does not fail
him in the dark of the mist, bobbing as it does near him like a
plate, not turned towards him, of course considering that
they are under way but not turning away from him in that
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case. I dont want you to get the impression that they are
somehow become zombies together, marching side by side to
a fated doom; this is not, as I have already said, a story about
love, souls are too free for that: besides, there is a residual
consciousness in all your earthly actions (whether you like it
or not) to keep constant check on those actions. This
consciousness is necessarily selfish, knowing best that from
which it springs and doing best that for which it exists. Yet
there is a profound intimacy between them, arising in the
main from a shared objective, though not an identity of
objectives, thus they are linked by what they share, each
separately sharing, the objective so rapturous that their
awareness of their difference has been reduced, seeing in
each, as I have shown, what they want to see without
contradiction by the other. To see her face, in profile except
when he takes the opportunities to lean forward and see her
plain, has a significance for him that he hardly understands,
but you can understand me, I think, when I say that her face
has significance for him because of the context in which he
first saw it, picked up by a surveillance camera at the scene of
a crime, the putative assailant appearing in the same context.
There is the connection with murder, you see, she appearing
initially in the role of victim, at least according to his
prejudice, the novelty here, which generates the warmth he
feels though he is not aware of this, drawing, he believes,
this warmth from within himself: what moves him to search
for her is that she is a victim looking for her assailant; quite
specific, this; the desire, as he sees it, to be murdered the
other side of the mystery of wanting to murder. And yet,
though he does not understand the why of it, he does feel, not
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in so many words, of course, that he has entered into the heart

of the murder, she alone in the park with him, he with a
loaded gun in his pocket, they both intent in the search for the
attack-site, his intuitions certainly trained-up now by the
nights experience, the site specific, to be recognised by
salient features, perhaps a tree, perhaps something altogether
different.
This will remind you of lovers seeking a hidden place
for their passion isnt the congruent figure apt? precisely
the same distraction in each, intent on respective satisfaction,
the meaning of what is coming possibly entirely different for
each, perhaps carnal, theoretical, cosmic, or eschatological
for one, something entirely different for the other, an itch, an
agony, a compulsion, curiosity; one worried about the organ
of performance, the other about the weather. But he sees the
plate that is her face, contextualised, not turning away and
not remote either. The remoteness is important here though
again in not so many words, he seeing more how far he is
away rather than vice-versa, unworthiness the bane as usual
but a painting on a wall is to a child sometimes a picture of
heaven, what he has been told to strive for, descriptions of
which are the beginnings of the philosophy of many,
unbeknownst of course, childhood religion (or what replaces
it in secular circumstances) the training of the ego, its first
lesson: that its transcendence is both real and impossible to
understand, how can that thing in the back of your head be
outside everything you experience as inside. You see? A life
thereafter spent finding a home for that ego, somewhere it
can come in God on one hand, the Father of Lies on the
other, as Heaven above and Hell below: the ultimate banality
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of human existence, the profound delusion, mankind

destroying everything to find a home for its illusion, calling
the result happiness, peace, success, beatitude, and for the
worst of you, the truly stupid, VICTORY.
So he carries a gun to find heaven in a picture, what
about her? I must be careful here, for I love her dearly, she
who has come closest to me and who has remained most
faithful to me. Her consciousness? Extinguished to the nth
degree (this is possible, where only one word, one image, one
desire remains), she has taken care not to allow
recontamination, but has waited patiently, with some
cynicism, some rancour, yet a blithe hope behind all that,
having tasted death and having seen the secret in death, and
hence the secret in the popular fear of death. Her life is a
throw-away, the despair of her father, the real agony of her
mother (though the mother thinks otherwise, perhaps with
some justice), always being disposed towards extinction, yet
valued highly for the truth it bears, the disposition towards
death at all times a vindication of life lived thus far, each
instant a falling, each instant something other picking her up:
a ship relying on the desire of the ocean to bear it, a bird
sustained by the charity of air, a star beloved of gravity, a
flame gifted by love. Her secret? He does not know it, though
the other does (and is shy): to murder her is to enter upon the
meaning of her death, to see what maintains her life. Would
you be willing to murder her?
I thought not.
The mist thins the higher they climb, and soon dawn
begins to lighten the air behind them, birds waken and begin
to sing, birdsong as though pumping light into the world.
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Dawn, after a night awake, always brings a ghostly

resemblance, the world appearing after the waking dream like
an unwarranted extension, always cold, always stony, a
diminution of self. So it appears in this dawn, each growing
smaller, presence receding to the proportion of flesh, the
spirits and demons of the dark replaced by inarticulate cloud,
grassland at their feet, din of birds in their ears. She appears
to him by degrees as a thin shouldered, long limbed,
undistinguished teenager, bobbed hair about an oval face,
pale thin lips, large blue eyes, long neck; he appears to her as
an overweight adult, dark jowled, red eyed, grim mouth, the
hard stare of the lonely, hands clutching the pockets of his
jacket, badly stained trousers and shoes. And yet the chill of
the dawn always underlines the heat of bodies as no other
time of the day or night does, that much of the nights dream
remaining, a hard thin erection standing out in his trousers,
engrossed nipples on her loose black dress, goosepimples on
their limbs, and if they go that way at this moment, that
abandonment to short term expediency, then matters will turn
out differently, sore flesh perhaps keeping them both this side
of mortality, pain, of course, and in plenty, for a while, then
back to where they were only a few hours ago but with an
unfortunate lesson learned, life then the slow attrition of
sexual temptation rather than the life enhanced by the always
impending threat of murder. But they do not even touch,
wading on through the wet grass, trees looming from time to
time, sorrowful plants bent by mist, though for them at least
better times to come with the risen sun, and he is humming
now under his breath, the same pop ditty, sign of a trituration
in him somewhere, signified by the heat in his penis, and she
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is carrying some rhythm, more up-to-date in her music, as is

to be expected, shown in the vibration of her head, finger and
thumb of her right hand furthest from him beating it out
too, though here indistinguishable from shivering, indicating
in her the impossibility of something she knows, written in
her body alongside the future she knows as well as the
prediction in a palm, lines running together in a dire way, or a
natal horoscope with ominous conjunctions, a mischief moon,
for instance, or, better still, learned before the age of reason,
the age of consent, the age of criminal responsibility, in an
experience not definable in law if you cannot make
complaint.
So music keeps them going, as it is designed to do,
stepping out to different rhythms, he the child early trained to
marching with his head up, squinting in the light, she the
child early inured to a more inward game: the energies of the
body turned back on themselves like a fractal volume, the
game of consciousness kept to a minimum. The differences
are important, as you no doubt appreciate, as marching is to
dancing, as marching leads to murder as surely as dancing
leads to surrender, one the way of history, the other the way
to oblivion, music in both cases purely indifferent as to the
ends, amoral, self-existing, the purest abstraction known to
man, impossible to corrupt, impossible to tame, impossible to
silence: plangent oceans, whistling birds in trees, nodding
grass heads, tumbling clouds, dancing stars, striding beasts,
strutting cocks, slithering snakes, night and day, gods
tangoing to the music of the spheres, your heart beat. And so
day comes on, mist crumbling under the first rays of the sun
come over Whitehawk beyond the river, grass momentarily
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red, then the sun gets down to work and they walk among
jewels, flashing emeralds, so brilliant and piercing, there,
rubies here, a masculine vibration, earnest, modest, willing,
millions of dewdrops on thousands of blades, a nod of wind
to transform the disposition of pattern and they see colour
flow across the ground, cerise, violet, ruby, pale yellow,
green, indigo, and she is most moved at first, stopped in her
tracks, her hands out and moving with a tiny vibration, trying
to catch the rhythm there, then he is moved, but differently
as expected his head going back at the sight of her
succumbing so easily, scandalised, then when she turns to
him, arms out, eyes closed to slits in ecstasy, he steps back,
becoming frightened now, fearing the loss he can see coming
(from so far back, though it merely seems to him now like
something pushing him forward), but it is a tenderness that
moves in him, even so.
In order that this tenderness can have an expression,
that is, as he stops retreating and accepts the approach of this
blind, desperate girl it is not beauty she sees in the dancing
lights, but release: something that is just-so feeling the
elasticity of her flank, the narrowness of her back, her long
arms wrapping around his neck and her body collapse against
his, he must also permit anger rein, concomitant feelings, one
the structural epiphenomenon of the other, and more than
ever previously which he knows because of the new shape
he experiences, more hollow now but also larger, as though
his soul at last sees a way out now that this girl has
approached him the two feelings tear against one another,
losing their old rationale experience here as the death of
sacred objects, father in his tower (an image that is new and
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which surprises him by its familiarity), mother in her

chamber (not new, but a new clarity here, seeing that she is to
blame too, after all), and mostly himself, seeing the child
appearing between his mothers legs slicked with mucus and
blood as a sign of evasion, so much knowledge gained in pain
and anguish to permit the covering of the evasion, to allow
talk of new life as though man, more than any God can,
invents the future in much the same way as he invents his
past, by asserting what is the case (as though anything else
paid attention). Tearing within him, as I say, tenderness
tougher than you know, anger weak in its need for external
energy, both alike in reaching out from a centre that is
avoided, both, like all your feelings, intended to create the
illusion of life (as distinct from existence), and so he holds
her with tenderness and anger in balance here, feeling her rest
against him, a strain in her too at this point though he
would not believe this a need to rest, call it submission, but
also a need to remain pure, call this suspicion so together
they fight a complex war, temptation here (ambiguous in
itself, to give and to take) a hatred there (ambiguous too, of
self, of other, of giving way and of not being able to give
way).
Yet both must give way today, both through an
exhaustion, reaching the moment when something must come
to pass. But the difference: a matter of finding what you are
looking for the idea of searching important here, a mask
desired, you may be sure and what is found being merely
the occasion for a new and more profound agony. So, he
comes to himself in embrace with this girl, she the occasion,
and he finds a self not to his liking, as though the residue of a
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wasted life, a wrong turn taken before he even knew the road
ahead was not straight, and seeing at once the lie here but
unable, no more than any of you can, to sound the lie, the lie
transcending him like God the Father in Heaven, like the
concept of evil, like happiness. So he cries into her neck. For
her part, she is to some extent luckier: the lie has a home in
her inadvertently, you may think, but I tell you not so and
she knows that the lie will never budge within her, so she is
free to find another, holding this man as he holds her, an
occasion, he a brother for her, whom she approached (in
desperation, admittedly, having searched for him for so long),
wanting recognition, something analogous to his need for
worthiness, but finding herself instead permitting utter
helplessness, impotence, uselessness, the nullity of existence
nothing worthwhile and she understands two things at
once: no recognition is possible; that she possesses a truth.
She suffers his tears on her neck, seeing in the dancing jewels
beyond his shoulder that nothing else in the end is possible,
except perhaps the truth she grasped now anew: seeing also
that this man fears this truth, and seeing how dangerous he is
for that reason, though not at all dangerous to her.
They resume walking, grass itself again now that the
sun has surpassed the crucial angle for dancing jewels, and he
blows his nose hard and wipes his eyes, feeling bulky now,
needing to put something behind him. She is blithe, though
you would not believe this if you were to pass them now on
that path, her face in the favourite repose of the Mother of
God, dwelling on the pain and sin of mankind as epitomised
in one man (sufficient for all truth in this matter, believe me),
perhaps a smidgen of guilt for escaping all that (though she
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would perhaps indicate an imposition in her case, gifted by

the lie as she is), the glory inside her now leave rapturous
gaze to the mystics gleaming, as it were, like an
indifference to pain, the face thus a performance arising from
habit, yet the gaze nonetheless a true one, made possible by
the glory within. [I must confess now that within this show
she is my greatest risk: if she goes elsewhere then she will no
longer come to me. But I readily acknowledge my
involvement here; I cannot avoid doing so. I am not simply a
ringmaster, a story teller someday, perhaps, I may not be
able to complete this tale.] It is only with the agency of pain
that you can see one another more clearly, being returned to
its base, as it were, illusion for the moment impossible, deceit
unnecessary: so she sees him, blond hair trailing his ears,
stubble darker, mouth that of a damaged life but tensed as a
fighter, the hands clutching his jacket pockets again those of
a weak man made desperate by the heaven he perceived once
as his mother cried, his walk by now a lurch of emotional
exhaustion, the walk of a determined man for whom failure
might perhaps reveal a new lie rather then the truth, the lie
that failure is perhaps his responsibility, the lie here
unbearable not because he is abandoned by truth but because
this lie makes truth even less comprehensible not as a
possibility of truth but as his final unworthiness of receiving
the truth. This is an extremely complex condition, I admit,
but I tell you that she can see this in his body, seeing the
layers of hopelessness, fear, unworthiness in him,
understanding with ease how overwhelming to him is the
power of the lie, how it can push him away from truth so that
he at once knows there is truth it is in his very being,
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available to him always yet the lie has the power to

persuade him that there is no truth for him anymore, that the
truth in him belongs now to something or someone else, as
though some god could take back the truth of his being.
There: do you see what she sees? Do you care either?
He sees nothing of her now, grimly determined now, as she
perceives, so we must rely on what she sees of herself on this
occasion: it is simple, she has placed something at his
disposal, and in doing so has made possible the truth for
herself. Because of who she is, bearing the lie within her
rather than in heaven, she has the permission he needs to
resolve what she sees as the dangerous power in him what
we know to be his propensity to murder simply by being
the one person he cannot exercise this power on, that is,
murder her: in terms of his earlier insight (which, of course,
he has forgotten in detail, that is, by name, though not as
trajectories available to him to be named over again with
his usual capacity for being surprised) we can say that instead
of offering him the promise he seeks, she permits
involvement, in other words and this is how he would
understand it if he ever even approached an understanding of
what she means to him in place of murder she offers him
suicide. He would see it as suicide, that is, though she sees it
differently, bearing the lie as she does and as he does not. As
for truth: that in the course of their meeting she has seen how
the truth she has grasped for herself, permitted access to this
truth by reference to the lie imposed on her, leaps from her
into him, how the truth of truth is compelling, entering him
despite the layers of lie, fear, illusion, will, and how it works
in him, showing him to her so clearly, seeing finally his need
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for death in his desire for murder, growing in courage as he

grows in desperation, abandonment feeding on unworthiness,
though death for him is the BIG LIE, the truth so heavily
masked here. It is not that the truth is revealed to him, quite
the contrary, but that the specifics of the operation of truth in
him, reducing him to utter helplessness, shows her that what
she has considered as the truth is in fact the truth, that she is
not blind in this matter, not fooling herself. Hence her
blitheness for herself, hence her profound indifferent pity for
him. Hence his desperation, hence his ignorance, an
ignorance I regret after all he has attempted this night, hence
his profound fear, a lack of faith he shares with you all.
The path now breasts a final ridge and they are in the
Lonesome Hill Park area: playing fields in the distance over
to the left, the clock tower of the Lonesome Hill Town Hall
prominent further off, the high rise blocks poised
inconsiderately on the hill top above, sapling chestnuts
bordering the path now, a modern extension of the graceful
borders over near the Lonesome Hill Road entrance, though it
will be less successful here as many of the saplings have been
damaged by vandals. From the distance, say taking your dog
for an evacuation on a playing field, they would appear two
early morning walkers exercising before a days work. Close
up, each looks ravaged and more than a little wild: his
clothing soiled and rumpled, face drawn, hair unruly,
clutching his jacket with obvious anxiety; she seems vague,
arms limp at her side, pacing beside him with a gliding walk,
eyes on some point just above the horizon. You would think
of a rough night in the park, misunderstanding, brutality on
one side perhaps that had proved the superiority of a moral
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argument; a man disturbed because the woman managed to

elude him. The interpretation here, of course, would depend
upon your own assumptions, and experiences, in these
matters. For instance, another might surmise that frigidity had
a role here, the difference in ages responsible to some extent,
or even that a successful consummation had been achieved,
the girl blithe, the man never satisfied anyway.
No matter. They walk side by side, an understanding of
themselves individually, at least, neither capable of sparing
more attention for the other; in any case, such attention as
you each desire from others is hardly possible in the partial
vision available to you in your world, for complete
understanding, of your individual selves even that is, before
understanding of another could be attempted requires a
complete understanding of everything. You cannot know
yourself while you do not know the meaning of existence, as
such, I mean here an understanding of situation rather than,
as you usually consider the objects of understanding, of
processes, of beginnings and ends, of motives and purposes. I
do not imply either that what you conceive to be a state of
affairs, those contexts imposed willy-nilly upon a manifold of
states of affairs already constituted by previous judgements,
is the same as what I here call situation. There is one and
only one situation, so long as our reality sustains, incomplete
to us always in terms of what you conceive as a state with
its arbitrary closures, limits, fixity of reference, repeatability
without place, space, duration, direction, source or
terminus, without essential development, progress, without
gradations, hierarchy, not amenable to analysis or synthesis,
not one, yet not constituted: but simple, present, self240

disclosing, entire, sufficient, worthy. They are, as I say, on

this path together, pacing side by side, but to themselves
distinct trajectories, disjecta upon the fact of the lie, holding
to what they can of themselves, instinctively wishing truth as
a centre of their respective beings, but not too exact here in
their desperation, their pain and, above all, confusion, lies
laid upon lies in them at every hands turn, themselves
incapable of truth as something raised up from themselves,
I mean lies in every possible fold of their lives, language,
gesture, symbols, signs, acts of will, acts of knowledge, truth
buried like the proverbial pearl in the proverbial dungheap.
Who is in a position to pity them? You? You are
reading here need I say more? I am speaking here need I
say more? Her indifference is truer than any sentiment; she
has done what she could, for him as well as for herself. His
determination is truer than any sentiment; he has tried every
other way to avoid what is coming.
So, at the junction with the main avenue of the park,
mature beech stepping in two lines either side to the number
of one hundred and seventy two beeches a line from the Main
Gate to this junction, but they pass on straight into a narrower
path, no saplings here, some trees at the boundary ahead,
houses beyond at one point, otherwise fresh air, the slope
beyond abrupt. Then to a small side-gate, opening on to the
cul-de-sac, familiar to you, I think, as it is to her, but
completely unknown to him, terraced houses on either side,
expressive of secluded comfort from the previous century:
each dwelling, though conjoined, expresses its own
completeness, a nicety of hedging, bushy trees setting visual
determinations better than any ten foot wall, redbricked with
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stone edgings in pink limestone, same stone composing the

borders of windows, culminating in a modestly curved portal
above five steps of white granite, generously proportioned to
the root of two, repeated in the window embrasures, the
residences of prosperous professional men and their families,
the park their extensive garden and cordon sanitaire a
pleasing expansion out over the railway below traversing a
platform cut from the slope of the hill the River Pass hidden
but the river, then bounded by picturesque meadows, visible
for a stretch of four miles, then the northern slopes of
Whitehawk beyond, other ridgings folding away towards the
hills west, the dark mountains north mercifully hidden from
this vantage point. The avenue itself is broad, running straight
for its two hundred yards to the high railing above the
railway, a promenade really, no access for vehicles now
though carriages had access through the park until the byelaw was repealed twenty years ago and hence no
requirement on the part of the city corporation to maintain the
surface, so it is breaking up, grass here, dandelions there,
long fissures in the coarse concrete, pools of greasy water
surviving into the dry season: this they walk in the centre,
hedging in places rampant now, trees too, higher than houses,
an air of neglect now, the strain of maintaining appearances
good for a generation or two only, porches within jungley
gardens like black holes, old residents disappearing into
recursive memory, where sunlight grows finer, temperature
moderates, flowers bloom without cease, parents ageless as
gods, all history summed up in an afternoon an accident of
events never intended millennia of philosophies, theologies,
jurisprudence, exploitation on continental scales, the
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nameless misery of millions, thievings like grasping water,

all hopes, delights, all optimism culminating in the declining
incomes of annuities reserved for all time, scrabblings behind
decayed lace, spirit drained by the inevitable sundering of
things returning to the dust of oblivion.
She stops at the end house on the left, but he moves so
in union with her that it is not noticeable to either that he
stops on her cue, and he follows her eyes, too, up to the first
floor window, a faint flicker of green light in the residual
gloom of the room within. Momentarily, a flicker of
rationality disturbs, a need for reference here, an expansion of
something in him to tell him that he has accomplished his
task, but she moves forward towards the five steps and he is
with her at once, shoulder to shoulder, the sense of
accomplishment overwhelmed by the great doom he bears
now, rationality just too awful at this moment how to
delimit the girl beside him, the cold trituration proceeding
within him, how to face this struggle of love and rage, what
name could he find for the marchland of their congruity
except one denoting what is normally called insanity: how
could he face this state without entering upon a scream of
sheer incomprehension at what appears now to be possible
within him, that any individual, capable of dressing and
feeding himself, of following normal routines of hygiene and
civility, could bear also this appalling feeling that everything
is in principle useless, worthless, hopeless, a mockery, a
profound lie, of feeling confined by something of infinite
dimensions, that is dark, that is timeless, that is above all
other possible considerations absolutely inescapable,
unavoidable, inevitable though loathed, feared, rejected,
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denied, cursed, abandoned? He goes on with her, then,

forward through the front door, avoiding the bicycles in the
hallway, avoiding the loose carpeting on the stairs, ignoring
the stained wallpaper, the bare light bulbs, the smell of grease
and staleness, the stink of poverty, the depravity of
weaknesses never chosen, the miasma of relayed violence,
evasion here too in this abasement, selfishness never stronger
than among the poor, who desire possessions as much as
anyone else.
This door is unlocked too and they go through
together, a slackening in her at this point, of arrival and
expectation, but he sees the flickering screen at the end of the
room immediately and the curiosity is reflexively strong
enough for him to go there, to see whats on: a succession of
abstract patterns etched in bright red on a green field, lines
connecting points in rapid sweeps down the screen then
across the screen, now star-like shapes, ten, twelve, fourteen
tines, lines overlaid from points deviating fractionally from
centres on these tines, then obscure squared patterns, overlaid
lines suggesting screens, then, suddenly, a coherent shape,
highly suggestive, densely worked triangles expanding up
and down from the centre, then lacings left and right to form
two globes, a portentous pattern, suggesting cosmic insignia,
an esoteric demonstration of a principle of universal balance,
then it too is gone, its significance no more than the random
patterning preceding and proceeding, more stars, then figures
of eight, arches and circles interlacing them, then a mask
forms, the head of an animal, the impression of multiple
wings rising behind, a lamb it seems, budding horns he
starts here, an ambiguous familiarity here, a grasp of some
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underlying principle of divinity, he senses then it is swiped

and more stars, roundels, meshes of varying degrees of
interest. Then he turns and sees that she is looking at him, the
remains of doubt in the corrugation of her forehead (this
doubt terrifies him, the terror coming like a flash of light and
going as fast), but her face now showing interest, even,
though almost submerged by another dominant feeling,
flickers of irony the nearest thing to reflection he has
witnessed in her but dominating is an expression of joy, the
expression shown on receipt of an unexpected gift, and he
sees beside her the bed, seeing that it is occupied, someone
profoundly wrapped in a quilt, peace emanating from there
into the bare room.
He doesnt so much hurry across the room as leap from
where he is before the terminal to the side of the bed.
Curiosity, intense, and a powerful sense of grasping an
abstract consideration, like finding a Platonic form in your
pocket or grace in an appropriately labelled bottle
nutritional information, sell-by date, manufacturers logo and
slogan but the anti-climax stuns him: the figure in the bed is
so familiar. Yet he does not know why the figure he sees is
familiar, though the memories strain he feels this clearly
to surface, to bring another figure to mind; but the straining is
resisted by another element in his mind, of such stability, like
an ingrained habit, that though whole areas of his life fold
away like clever stage sets, indicating those parts of his life
of no significance whatsoever, and a clarity grows in him,
like climbing out of a deep cave towards a broadening blue
sky, all this is sacrificed by the stable thing so that the
memory will not come to consciousness. Needless to say, this
245

new struggle within him finds an echo in that other struggle,

but it is not easily dragged into the marchland I have
described; it cannot be, for it has already found its
battleground in the figure in the bed, the source of the
struggle and so also in a sense the site of that struggle. The
two struggles, of course, as you might suspect, are related, in
effect the same struggle but in different planes, as it were, the
earlier in the foundation of his being, to use a figuration, this
new one within the ambit of his existence, grounded in
experience and available to his consciousness as knowledge.
This is a common feature of all your lives, the original
evasion appearing frequently in those conflicts that arise from
a word, an action, a decision, that you know immediately are
unfitting and which lead to a scale of rancour, remorse,
depression out of all proportion to the causal act, resulting in
prostration and helplessness, a very real experience of not
knowing what is the matter, a wordless, meaningless gloom
that can last for days, even weeks.
This moment is the crux of his present incarnation, the
fault of his existence lying exposed in the sleeping figure on
the bed. What memory tries to arise? What experience has he
wiped most thoroughly from his life; I mean here not a
memory repressed, but an experienced renamed, redesigned:
where and when did he experience his lost self? And what
stability thwarts this memory to such cost? What endures in
him, though only by figuration? I admit to being at a loss,
your language failing me here, and can only suggest you
consider at a quieter moment the names I have found for all
the contrarieties in him, most recently love and rage, and
remind you that I discerned between these contrarieties, at the
246

most profound level of his experience, an identity, and that I

did at that point explain to you what this identity is. Now,
however, she has moved to his side, an inconsequential
movement in itself, but his mind is not so febrile that it is not
extraordinarily sensitive to nuances while not
understanding anymore what he is experiencing that he
turns his head towards her and sees the expression on her
face: if love has an expression, then it must be that awe your
philosophers associate with the sublime, that greeting of the
presence that is both infinite and entire, the face of love both
that presence and the awed recognition because it is love that
always greets love, only love can grasp love, and this he sees
in her face while she gazes down at the figure in the bed,
AND WHICH, WHEN SHE TURNS TOWARDS HIM, SHE
RETAINS.
Under such a gaze, happening like a flash of lightning,
he sees her transformed, a light as though pouring up out of
her, truth, as one of your songs says, ever-dawning in her
eyes, even the loose black dress she wears covered by a
radiance, and then a surface gives way and he sees down, as
if into her, to what he really is at all times: the enabler. But he
sees this with rapidly mounting exhaustion, understanding in
that fraction what he had always known, that what is real
there is impossible here, and so he turns and lifts his right
hand to the sleeping figure and hears the rapid discharges as
the magazine empties into him, he thinking about the word
mistake and the enormity that lies in that word when
properly understood. When he looks down at her, he sees that
she understands this too, though tears are now pouring out of
her eyes, and he realises that there are no more bullets, that he
247

has therefore condemned them at least he himself certainly

to repeat the mistake now that the moment has passed. So
he leaves the room, she behind him he hears the rustle of
her dress out into the front garden, where he finds a break
in the fence that permits them to descend to the level of the
tracks. They run north alongside the tracks, luckily an accessway here, until they reach Lonesome Hill Station.
They take the first train out, and it only when they are
seated in the crowded carriage that he notices the spatters on
his clothes and flesh. No one else notices.

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His credit card is good for all expenses, the Allcross

logo impressive even to those who have not heard of the
company or its reputation. Getting a room in a decent hotel
was less trouble than he expected, despite their appearance
he can always command respect when he needs to, how he
lives vicariously in the shadow of his father. Neither was
hungry, though the coffee sent up by the management as a
courtesy was welcome; afterwards he showered and then lay
down, to rest if not to sleep.
He lies on his back, naked under a sheet, arms at his
sides, closes his eyes and waits. In South America, the rest
afterwards had been haunted by images of the local
vegetation, trees with high crowns, bushes rampant, gaudy
flowers, a feeling of being wrapped up in cool leaves, liana
corkscrewing up his body, an indefinable sensation, part
threat, part a desire for reward, the haunted face turning away
from him to merge with the profusion of leaves and flowers
behind. He had been too content with his success then to
concern himself with the significance of those images and
had treated their return in the days that followed as simply a
vivid memory of the novelty of the tropics, much as the sea
would haunt you after a day at the seaside. But you can
readily understand why he delved no further into this
memory, considering the enormity of what he had done, I
mean the gratuitous nature of his actions there, inciting such
terrible deaths when all he had been told to do was take
delivery of some documents. There had been one bad
moment, when at last safely in the air, a lapse, as it were,
when he had experienced doubt, but he decided that if the
worst remainder of the incident was this image of vegetation,
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then he could live with that, a decision that seemed altogether

right when the image began to fade.
He was wrong, of course, but it is a common error to
consider conscience as an effect attendant upon wilfulness,
like the pain that follows an injury, that, like the pain, will
fade over time. But, to keep to the analogy, the cessation of
pain is not the end of the effects of an injury, there are other
remainders, scars, traumas, twinges, perhaps cancers and
other spoilations years later; an injury, no matter how well
repaired, is always an interference with the fundamental
integrity of the body, and the breaking of this integrity can
never be fully repaired. This deeper understanding of the
analogy can be applied to the matter of the effects of
wilfulness, but the situation is far more serious, for one
simple reason: the integrity of the body is ultimately passive,
that is, it is based on a complex co-ordination of physical
processes, even if there are non-physical controls of the body,
and such a system degrades once interfered with, while the
integrity of conscience is active, that is, conscience is a power
acting to maintain integrity. As well as this, while pain and
the succeeding blemish are actually part of the damage to the
body, the agony of conscience is not part of conscience itself,
but messages, as it were, from your conscience, couched in
such images, memories, even physical manifestations, as you
can provide it as the means of communication. There are two
important features here that I wish you to note: conscience of
itself (or rather, a matter of naming only here, spirit or soul,
or whatever other name you use) is not damaged by
wilfulness, but its relation to you is interfered with, though
more in the way that static affects an electronic signal than
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how an injury affects your body, and its response is a

communication with you, that is, conscience speaks to you, to
tell you what you have done and how it is to be corrected.
Now, such communication is difficult, conscience has
presence on an altogether different level, dimension or
whatever, to you, so it seeks always to convey its message in
symbolic form, using, as I have said, such symbols as you
understand. As for the affected relations between conscience
and you, the damage is real and implacable, its correction not
a matter of contrition but of a renewal of the relation, not a
renouncing of something done but a surrender of what was
gained.
This surrender, as you can readily imagine, is the most
difficult demand of conscience, if only because it requires
you to discover exactly what has been achieved, in effect
discovering the lack you sought to cover. I use the word
cover advisedly, though I appreciate the obscurity; conceive
of lack as that abiding experience of vulnerability and I think
you will understand something of what I mean by cover.
Now, in his case, the image of the encroaching tropical
vegetation and the unfortunate woman turning her face away
to merge with the vegetation suggests the idea of reproach
initially, then the idea of something more insidious, an idea
of the toils arising from his action. Today, however, when he
lies down and closes his eyes, he sees first the garden
surrounding his grandfathers house, where he grew up,
seeing it very clearly as it was in the summer, the roses, the
flowering vines, pansies, dahlias, begonias, the bushes and
trees behind, mature poplars. This vision pleases him, and it
permits him to forget the eventful night, the girl moving
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somewhere in the room, and he hears, as he ranges with his

inner eye around the garden, the murmur of traffic four floors
below, music from a fairground down by the beach, a
background clutter of other sounds, birdsong, an aircraft in
the distance, hammering on metal in a confined space, and all
at once he feels what the day is like, sun high in the sky,
some cloud hugging the peaks of the mountains inland, rivers
on their way to the ocean, trees drinking water, insects in
flowers, birds in the grass, cows in their field, people about
their business, children chanting in schools, housewives
shopping, men tallying, television chattering, youths
dreaming, the earth turning at a thousand miles an hour,
famine in the south, war in the east, profit in the west, ice in
the north: he smiles at all this, until the lesson comes home to
him, that he is outside all this.
He turns on to his left side to relieve a burden he feels
on his chest. Despite the insight, the totality of the world
remains with him, seeing birth, growth, generation, work, and
death, a continuum though styles might change and poverty
succeed plenty until things improve again, and the wind
blows on unchanging mountains and sea, clouds dispense
rain, plants crowd and insects are busy, animals hunted and
hunting, decimation here, abundance there, and always the
wind blows, cold in winter, cool in summer, and people die,
cities grow, memory cools, expectation always arising, and
he sees the grace in this, that no one can know enough, but
must act ultimately in faith, even though this faith is no
guarantee: things can go wrong just like that, so a man
stunned, a woman aghast, a child screaming, a few here and
there suddenly understanding the meaning of the word
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ABSENCE. All this he sees, yet he knows he is no longer

implicated, and in knowing this, he understands just as
clearly that no one is implicated, that individual lives are
lived utterly in isolation, each creating a world and a history,
a theology, philosophy and morality: then he knows he is
seeing his own world, simplified for the sake of
communication, and knows also that this world means
nothing other than its presentation to him, having no depth,
reference, implication, is untrue, expedient, will die with his
death and have no effect thereafter.
He finds he is grinding his teeth now, the fingers of his
left hand resting against his brow, his right hand clenched on
the mattress. The insight that his knowledge amounts to
nothing jars him: he tries to find knowledge, words, to
encompass this amounting to nothing, and concepts come,
metaphysical concepts, big words like all, one, me, but
each goes to join his other knowledge and pretty soon he
understands that he is recycling his knowledge, bringing in
words and ideas already implied in what he has seen, the
whole operation of his consciousness no more than what you
call a bootstrap construct, hoisted aloft, as it were, by means
of a phantasy, an illusion, a lie. He lies now as in total
darkness, impotent, as though waiting for some other
knowledge, holding still to the conviction that truth is a
statement, a matter of language and consciousness, but into
this emptiness there comes only another insight: that the
instant he moves, or even takes his attention away from the
darkness, that the whole false sum of his knowledge will
return at once, loaded with suggestive significance, pregnant
with proffered illumination, and he will resume his life of
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illusion, forgetting at once what he has seen here. So he

clings to the dark, palpable to his inner eye, but it begins to
weaken, not as darkness, but as something shown to him, and
he realises that it is now a mere part of his body of
knowledge, part of the illusion, and it finally sinks in that
knowledge is useless, that signs, symbols, ideas, words,
concepts of themselves are utterly vapid, lacking power to
change anything, to achieve anything. And behind this
realisation a worse insight: that the salvation he has always
sought will not, can not, come in this way, a glory of light to
his consciousness giving him knowledge as a restoring grace,
and, worse, that he does not know where this salvation can be
found, or who will grant it to him, if that power has not come,
can not come, will not come, or has come and found him
unworthy.
The sense of abandonment here prompts grief, but even
so he sees the uselessness of grief, of tears, of any act of
entreaty: salvation is completely beyond his control. He
contemplates this knowledge with some objectivity, his
dispassion possible not because of stoicism but, simply,
because he does not believe that this matters: it is only
another way of saying that he is lost and that such loss is
complete. Abruptly, he falls into a deep sleep, fingers
pressing his forehead, hand clenched, exhausted.
You see how conscience speaks to him now: he has
fulfilled his desire for murder and conscience shows him the
meaning of his action that killing another is in any case the
killing of oneself. It will be a long time before he understands
this; typically, he searches for truth and forgets it once told.
Be that as it may, you must understand that all this is a matter
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of figuration, symbols, murder here a figuration and vision of

self-extinction also a figuration, he yet alive, full of potential,
still capable of loving, though now lost in a dreamless sleep.
Figuration is a kind of knowledge, but not a knowledge
enclosed and complete as you believe referential knowledge
is it has roots outside, both as communication and in
meaning. This is easily grasped once you attempt to exhaust
the meaning of a symbol: you find that the figuration never
finally fits what is ostensibly the case, that something is
always left over, always beyond your understanding.
Consider his vision today, this speech of his conscience. He
knows as we do that this phantasmagoria follows upon
murder, he expecting the worst when he lay down, only lying
down because of utter exhaustion. He sees his grandfathers
garden, the scene of his childhood, yes? He sees the garden in
detail and is pleased, relieved, grasping this vision as though
it is the reward for murder, for releasing himself of a terrible
burden. Yet the vision has a remainder, and he seeks this
remainder in his later vision, obliged to include his whole
world in the attempt to secure the meaning of his childhood
garden, finding only towards the end what the garden figured,
finding it in the word Absence. And what is absent there?
Crudely, his mother is absent; but mother is another
figuration appreciate how profoundly you indulge in the
creation of figures so we can say then that what is absent is
the womans face turning away from him, this turning away
the occasion previously for the appearance of vegetation as a
figure.
And what of the girl sitting out on the balcony, you
ask, gazing down at the ocean: she showed him her face? I
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answer: she is innocent; she appears to him in the guise of

promise, his figuration I hasten to add there is morality here
embodying the promise he has already acted upon. This
may not be very clear to you yet, but it is a matter you must
look into on your own; if I give you words here, then you will
not have to find words for yourselves, but I suggest you begin
with the word mistake, taking account of all its applications
here. Now she waits while he sleeps, patient as she can afford
to be, knowing already that he cannot go any further. She is
not disappointed after all, she appears to him merely as a
promise and she understands what was done to her brother,
the mistake as I have said, and sees that even after so long it
cannot be any other way. Her patience may seem to you to be
somewhat unfair, a deus-ex-machina even: all I can say in
this case is that if you have come to understand the nature of
the coincidences in this show, then you are a fair way to
understanding the nature of her patience, and if you do not
understand what is sought here, then at least you understand
what it is you are reading. And if, in exasperation, you want
to be told more, then I answer that, yes, I can tell you
everything in a sentence, but then all you would have is
another figure, a thing, a concept, but you would not have the
essence (as it were words!) itself you would not find it in
yourself. Truly, we have failed here again, as so many times
before, but perhaps one or two of you will find the truth in
yourself in this rendition and so be saved the countless
readings all of you undertake and with what patience! in
the course of your wretched lives.
Now he awakens after his short sleep, refreshed for a
moment, the light in the room very pure, fingers pressing
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against his brow, before he dons his burden again, rolling to

lie on his back. He has forgotten again, so his burden is no
weight, in fact it is arrayed through him, in the creases under
his eyes, in the discomfort in his hip, the ache in the heel of
his left foot, the tension above his heart, in the form of
character, what he is, what he does, what he intends. He rises,
finds the phone, dials his corporate employers and makes his
report. Then he orders lunch, puts on the rumpled stained
clothing and goes out to the balcony.
He is aware of the vacuity around the girl, so he avoids
looking at her, sitting himself at the table so that he too looks
out over the ocean. Lunch is served to them there cold
meat, salad, bread, coffee and they eat, each staring intently
out to sea. He realises during lunch that the vacuity he senses
about her about her, not in her, he sees reflects something
in him, that it is this that makes the space around empty. He
thinks at first it is cowardice naming it a loss of nerve
certainly makes sense of it but what it is he is afraid of does
not appear to him; instead he sees his hand pointing, hears
again the stutter of the gun, and remembers that he did not
see the effect of the bullets. The word he has now is failure,
seeing her face aglow, seeing himself alive still, drinking
coffee, waiting for the return call. She speaks then but he fails
to catch what she is saying, starts at the sound of her voice
and looks at her. Her face is drawn from lack of sleep but her
eyes are big, blue with the clear light of the ocean. She
repeats:
He was my brother.

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Completely still, watching her mouth, the world

excluded by his attention on her, he says, as though he has
never uttered the word before:
Brother.
He feels her eyes on him, studying his features, as she
continues:
My father took him away from her and hid him. She
tried to kill me when I was a baby. My father took the pillow
away from her just in time.
He raises his eyes to meet hers, seeing there a passivity
in her steady gaze, not resignation or defeat but a stony
quality, as though she looked at a truth.
He was your brother, too. She pauses, her eyes glaze,
as though she is removing her attention from him. When she
speaks again, her voice is utterly without resonance, like the
chink of stones: You had the same father; we had the same
mother.
Her recession threatens him, but he has the presence of
mind not to grasp the significance of this, seeing at once how
others could follow her too. He thinks he understands, about
her half-brother, at least, so he says:
Was he afraid?
She shakes her head once, a flicker of attention in her
eyes that showed him how even here he projects himself.
Then the remoteness again, though he feels her stir in some
way, seen in the slight vibration of her hair:
I loved him.
For him, though he will not understand this now,
murder is irreversible, so that any transgression of the justice
of that murder itself invites murder: this is how he is now, the
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nearest analogy the jealousy of the passionate lover. But he

does recognise even as he is galvanised into reaching across
the table to grab her wrist that love was the agent, that it
was because he understood love to be another figure that he
could kill, that she was the agent of understanding.
She does not resist him, and he can go no further
against her remoteness, her indifference as he finally
understands. So he releases her and sits back, returning to
looking out over the ocean, concentrating on the straight line
of the horizon. The gripe of his rage has left him trembling,
proposing insights he is reluctant to face, seeing his failure in
a new light, but all he can say, the words echoing in him as
the word mistake does:
Yes, I know.
She sits still, her remote eyes on him, absorbing what
he has said. Then she says, some interest for him in her voice:
You are like him.
The silence following her words tells him that she had
intended saying more. He concentrates on the silence, trying
to intuit those unspoken words, but hears only his Yes, I
know. reverberating, so that he sees she would only repeat
earlier figurations of brother. Knowing this, silence grows in
him too, and with the silence that is, the silence of possible
words unspoken grows too the enormity of his failure, a
failure that takes the form of a gigantic jewel, each facet
sparkling with its own light of significance, each facet a lie
he manufactures to cover his ignorance. He calls it ignorance,
but he knows at once that even this is a lie: knows that he
cannot evade responsibility, knows too that he always evades
responsibility, and knows why sees it in the love he has for
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his father, but sees that it too is a lie. Then he is at a loss

and knows that it too is a lie.
As he is not capable of despair, he breaks the dilemma
by standing up. Something flashes far out on the ocean, and
the distraction permits the insight that his half-brother had not
wanted to die either. He looks down at her, the sister of his
brother, and says:
He didnt want to die.
She is looking out to sea: she nods her head once.
He sighs with relief for understanding that much.
Leaving the balcony he strokes her head with his left hand,
feeling the silky smoothness of her hair and the flat crown of
her skull. She shakes her head at once to remove the
impression of his caress.
He sits on the edge of the bed, back to the window,
studying his dirty shoes absently and humming a ditty,
maudlin air, suitable for day-dreaming. The physical effect of
the long walk is telling on him now, muscular strain chitinous
when he moves, and his mind is clouded with the fainting
euphoria of exhaustion. Such a state always permits the rise
of a mild regret, the accompanying need to snuggle in
comfort conveying the source of this regret, and indeed he is
a small child just now, humming with abstract anxiety, a
memory of a wet afternoon in his grandfathers house
bringing with it the presence of comfortable old furniture, the
sound of activity in the kitchen beyond, the plops of
raindrops from the trees in the yard outside. He drifts in this
mood until a door, as it were, opens and one of the servants
screams and then he sees the broken body in the yard, how
blood seeps from the wounds, nameless thick fluids bearing a
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scum of matter, a horrible truth he never understood: even a

shaving cut a sign of the senseless mortality of the physical
vehicle that balks the complete clarity of the mind, that bars
him and all of you from true understanding. Seeing the
broken body again, he must act as he must always act: he
goes and relieves himself of the watery waste of the coffee he
has drunk, then looks at himself in the mirror above the
handbasin. His face is red from sun and exposure, a low weal
across his brow and temple, his cheeks inflated, eyes sunken
and glazed with rheumy moisture, light hair beginning to thin
and recede. The loss he sees searches back for an origin, for
what was once possessed in order to be lost, but no matter
how far back he searches he finds only that same sense of
loss.
A ladybird is sitting on the shoulder of his jacket.
The phone rings, breaking his reverie, and he is
immediately pleased that it is his employers, as though lights
switched on again to reveal the stage-set that is his practical
world, movement, action, most of all purpose. The voice
gives three sentences of instruction, then the line goes dead,
and he is triumphant now, the test passed, dedication
reaffirmed, the child permitted to become a man again. He
checks his pockets, regretting the loss of the night-glasses,
and leaves the room without glancing back. The world
outside is big after the night and day of confinement, the
beach in front of the hotel crowded, but less so further east as
he marches across the tidal sands towards Brighton Stone, his
destination. There, he seats on a convenient outcrop, feet
square on the dark sand, and waits, finding himself in these
quiet moments, as you all do, that nothing achieved or gained
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becomes part of himself, that he is always bereft and so

wanting, knowing that only his bones are required, the
muscles strung from them, his loss sufficient motivation, as it
is for all of you.
The helicopter comes in from the ocean, hovers for a
moment, the crossed circle prominent on the underside, then
approaches him, nose up, stirring even the wet sand.

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Well, my sister threw a party after all. It was a pretty

sedate affair, my sister is a fighter but she likes her leisure to
be decorous, and the corporate types she invited didnt help
improve matters. I stayed for a while, until they began to talk
shop pleased with her success then I went down and
found her still out on the balcony.
The sun is setting gloriously, everything lit red gold,
the ocean a perfect turquoise, the strings of cirrus vivid
against a green-violet sky. She too is lit by the sun, a sheen of
red light on her pale skin, but she brightens when she sees
me, recognition almost instantaneous, an animation that
would have surprised those who have known her here. I am
relieved to see her like that as I have said, we run a great
risk each time we stage this show and I take her hand in
mine, both of us rapturous to be together again, saying to her
joyfully:
Ill make you a star, my love!
That brings a smile to her lips, and she glances up at
the approaching night, bantering in response:
Arent there enough of them by now?
I smile at that, happy to see some advance, and she
disengages her hand from mine, dives with a graceful twist of
her body out over the balcony rail and falls away towards the
earth.
She thinks of rain as she falls, seeing herself falling as
rain: falling in silence.

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The Dragon dieth not except with his brother and sister; and
not with one of them, but with both of them.
Rosarium philosophorum, fig. 19

Spring 1993

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