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A BOOK AGAINST FEAR

by

davy lisle (davy girardet de l’isle)

consists of two parts:

SITTING IN MEDICI’S
(new century press, durham 1998: ISBN 0 948545 06 2)
pp 2-41

LIVING IN THE SUN

(new century press, durham 2000: ISBN 0 948545 13 5)
pp 42-67

free email copy from: davy.girardetdelisle@yahoo.co.uk

post: 11 springwell avenue, durham DH1 4LY, UK

SITTING IN MEDICI'S
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a title can just as well record the moment a book began as tell what it's about; and this book began with
laura buying me dinner in medici's because i didn't have much money after abruptly leaving the university. and
now it's begun i must go on with it.

what i hope is that what i write here will have both the unpremeditated quality and the irreversibility of
speech. what i say in speech cannot be unsaid and if i wish i had said something different, there is no delete key
which will make it as though it had never been; all that can be done is to negotiate the sense one now wants to
make, out of the collective memory of what has already been said. one of the grievances i have against the word
processor is that processing is not something which should be done with words, that they should not be too
elaborately messed about with to prepare a face to meet the faces that they meet. this is the verbal equivalent of not
being able to meet the world without being groomed and pomaded. it is at the other end of the scale from the
sudden contact of ‘i would meet you upon this honestly’. or say that the difference is between the eerie perfection
of a musical performance recorded and re-recorded bar by bar until no blemish is to be heard, and the rougher life
of the piece heard live (perhaps the phrase live music should invite a description of its recorded opposite as dead
music) - to want speech, or live writing as its written equivalent, is not to suppose that human communication is
somehow best when it is careless or slovenly or approximate; rather it is to suggest that the best communication is
what is distinguished by ingrained habits of honest, fearless, direct and accurate language. the habit of saying
what one means and of using only words that mean something is so much to be preferred to the crafted intricacies
of much modern language - and so i come to the fragment of vergil which has been pressing upon my mind for a
little while, waiting to be used, and say that i hope this book will be ‘breve et irreparabile’, short and irrecoverable,
and also vivid with the human life that vergil was celebrating as he mourned in those words its swift passage.

*****

II

chapter one sounds like the undefended heart, and at this precise moment i can’t think of any other kind
of book to write, and this because the things i couldn’t find ways of writing about then still leave my pen hovering
over blank space - now is the moment to try, and as is surely always the case, it is only at the precise moment when
the endeavour rightly starts that the energy and ingenuity is suddenly there to be drawn upon. it is not fear that has
made me hesitate but rather the thought that a book from which its readers turn away might as well not have been
written. - i shall say what seem like many absurd things or offensive things or indelicate things, but really i don’t
even want to lose a single reader who has read this far.

i look directly at that reader and say that the heart of the matter is never to cause fear and never to feel it,
and that those two different states of darkness which are the readiness to cause fear and the helpless experiencing
of it are intricately and closely linked; so that behind the inhuman mask of a causer of fear one may always detect
terror, although the reverse need not apply, so that to feel afraid need not mean that inevitably one begins on the
business of making someone else afraid - indeed, it may be a sudden relief to realise that the resolution not to reply
in kind when another human being tries to make you afraid is the most effective form of escape from fear.

to cause fear is the central act of darkness, and even the mildest form of that causing associates one with
the grossest form, much as an anti-semitic joke touches hands somewhere with the extermination camps, as of
course does the willingness to bully someone out of an anti-semitic feeling with the observation that this is so. the
hunters down of nazi war criminals are dancers in the same dark dance as those they pursue - indeed conceivably
more so, because there is perhaps no deeper form of self-deception than to suppose oneself on the side of the light
as one defends it with the weapons of darkness, so that the most convinced and whole-hearted dancers are those
who think that by fear something may be done that is other than dark. it is the judge who is more deeply deceived
than the criminal, and the lunacy of his understanding of reality will cause him more severe momentary vertigo
after he dies and reality offers itself to him in its proper shape.

the great, if temporary, triumph of darkness is to be found among those who are prepared to use it for
good ends - the light-bearers, the lucifers, who can say ‘evil be thou my good’, and it is in this sense that the very
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centre of darkness in milton’s poem is to be found in the God of paradise lost. the great concentration camp in the
sky (far better and more cruelly organised and run than the nazi variety because run for the express purpose of
creating fear and suffering) that milton’s God prepares for the fallen angels would have been for the seventeenth-
century mind the ultimate justification of all humanly imposed punishment, every judge a little God presiding over
his little hell in the name of good; but milton’s unconvinced humanity revolted against what his creed obliged him
to believe, as happened with leonard cheshire when he was required to accept that the successful bombing of
hiroshima showed that God was on our side.

i believe judges still go to church before they set about their grisly business, and there they bow their
wigged heads, their heavily disguised and burdened humanity, to milton’s God. i wish for them freedom and
delight, and for milton’s God a place amid the relics of other savage superstitions.

*****

III

is there then to be no law? are there then to be no regulations? - is the world to be like the land of ulysses'
nightmare fancy?

take but degree away, untune that string,

and hark what discord follows. each thing meets
in mere oppugnancy. the bounded waters
should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
and make a sop of all this solid globe.
strength should be lord of imbecility,
and the rude son should strike his father dead.
force should be right, or rather right and wrong,
between whose endless jar justice resides,
should lose their names, and so should justice too.
then every thing includes itself in power,
power into will, will into appetite,
and appetite, an universal wolf,
so doubly seconded with will and power,
must make perforce an universal prey,
and last eat up himself.

it has about it the insistent logic of nightmare, this vision of what must happen if the order of our society
is shaken; and it has the characteristic touch of many defences of the established order, that it writes in the blank
spaces of what would happen without that order, familiar monsters, rather like the almost tame, almost well-
beloved sea-serpents and anthropophagi that crowded the unknown parts of the world in the old maps, and now
crowd the outer regions of space in the new films. this conjuring up of horrors introduces us to worlds not
unknown enough, it uses all the old ideas - like a politician evoking with awe the prospect of a world without
politics. we need by contrast to think in really new ways, ways that spring neither from a defence of nor an
opposition to what surrounds us now - this book is not a tract for the times; it can only take place in the absence of
news.

for it is our daily ration of news, in the papers, on the radio and television, which holds us firmly to the
belief that no order is achievable without fear, without threat. if ulysses' speech is a set-piece of reaction with its
own intrinsic momentum, then the envisaging of a world without news would trigger a reaction every bit as
confident, as richly and familiarly detailed in its exploration of the spaces thus made blank.

it is the characteristic of the most effective kind of propaganda that everyone believes it, even (or perhaps
most of all) those who produce it; even (perhaps most surprisingly) those who oppose it. to see instead a world
genuinely without news of the kind we have every day, one has to live without it so that it drifts into a kind of
irrelevance. then it may seem mildly surprising to contemplate a strange, orwellian culture in which everyone is
subjected daily to an account of the latest laws and their attached punishments, to stories of the frightfulness of
law-breaking, to exciting stories of the pursuit, capture and punishment of law-breakers (with special mention of
parts of the world where the punishments are inhumane), and to the latest information about wars and the rumours
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of wars. the inhabitants of such a culture are so overwhelmed, so sodden, with the notion of retribution, revenge,
that even those who strive most strenuously, for instance, against the horror of war propose as their ultimate
remedy the use of war.

there has always been war, there has always been revenge, so a culture flooded with ideas of it is, someone
may say, not flooded with propaganda but with the natural atmosphere of human life. - well, if we say rather that
this is the natural atmosphere of human death, one might be nearer the mark. it is surely so that in most human
lives the moments marked by death, by fear or by the resolve to use fear, stand out as interruptions, distortions of
the energies by which we live; and if we are subject daily to a carefully selected catalogue of fears and disasters,
drawn from the corrosion of misery which spreads throughout the whole world, then it is right to suggest we are
being fed with propaganda, that is, with an edited version of the totality of what happens daily, designed to
persuade us that being alive means constantly fighting for survival. - but let the mind drift away from that to the
realisation that the sun does not fight to rise again every morning, nor my heart to go on beating - the miseries
that everywhere infect the world are nevertheless not the fundamental story, and we should rather bring to the
opposing of those miseries the habitual ease of life, the sense that being alive is a fact not to be striven for but to be
enjoyed, than to bring to the ordinary business of living a poisonous attitude of competitive fear bred from a highly
specialised culture of misery which is capable in reality only of spreading misery and darkness and not of
dissipating it.

*****

IV

the sun rises in the morning even though no one would punish it if it did not, just as i imagine most
people drive on the correct side of the road in order to avoid the natural consequences of not doing so and not in
order to avoid a police fine. - what i have just written here invites me to talk about the darkness of natural disaster
with its attendant fears and the darkness of humanly engineered disaster with its attendant fears - do i need to
distinguish between plague and police? - well, perhaps this: things fall apart if they lose hold on their proper
intrinsic order - the plant dies cut at its root because it needs to be joined to the earth to live; the engine of a car
with the plug leads muddled will not function because the cylinders are trying to fire in the wrong order - in the
universe inside which we have been created there are many things which attack or impede the order which is
essential to life, because in this universe darkness (the fount of chaos) is almost as much at home (almost) as its
native light - to be on the side of light means leading a naturally orderly life, not with the fussiness of an imposed
order which operates by fear and traps us with its pretence of the real thing (always stand to attention on the parade
ground) but with an intuitive feel for the intrinsic order of things, the shapeliness that fosters the ease and delight
of life - because darkness is on every side, this kind of order is always under attack, by plague or tempest, by the
clashing of one order with another (so that to survive one animal, for instance, must eat another), by the arising of
spurious and fear-laden versions of order, so that fear, the very heart and voice of darkness, is linked by what seems
a naturally indissoluble bond with the idea of order that no one can do without - and that brings me from plague to
police - that very intuition of a natural order that delights in the freedom of life thus enabled, that delights in the
well-tuned string of the beginning of ulysses’ speech, should enable us to recognise instantly the spurious order
which rides cancerously on the back of it and suggests that life is only possible within the restraints imposed by
fear - about natural disaster, about cancers of the body and the inevitability of death we can do something but not
much; but about humanly engineered darkness, about spurious order imposed by fear we can perhaps do more,
even by just writing orderly words about it that try to focus steadily on the disjunction between the tree in its good
spot of earth and the citizen kept obedient by the threat of punishment -

*****

i’m writing this in the early morning - bird song and sunlight and a little dog sniffling about - in the new
forest. the tent is full of sleeping bodies amid a considerable jumble of stuff since we are half-way through a tour
with the comedy of errors - our collective and individual efforts to maintain the order of domestic life reveal how
complicated that order is and in what unexpectedly different ways each of us experiences distress and apprehension
as bits of the usual order become difficult or impossible to maintain. what makes for ease in these circumstances? -
to rely on a very simple rather than a complicated order of life, evidently; but also something more than that -
something to do with the avoidance of the tyranny of perfection - it is perhaps true that as we come close to the
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natural order by which we live so as not to die, it reveals itself as capable of being flexible and approximate. our
whole culture, the christian notion of God in all his perfection at its now rather decayed centre, inclines us to
suppose that the nearer we get to reality the more demandingly, geometrically perfect it will be, and we strive for
that perfection, even though human beings (unlike the machines originally intended to assist this effort at
perfection, and now likely to outstrip us, irrelevantly, in the achieving of it) are not designed for moral or bodily or
logical perfection, nor for the perfectly geometric completion of tasks - and that is because the high god (high
always as in high summer not as in on high) who created them is not that way either, and himself contemplates
anything but the approximate with a degree of perplexity - the earth he made is not (perfectly) round, but does
well enough; neither does it go that smoothly round the sun, tends to wobble a bit. what i am saying, i suppose, is
that beyond what functions perfectly well without much effort there is always a nightmare world created out of
darkness in which with more, and more, effort it might be made to work better, and even better - the ludicrously
accurate watch, reliable to a trillionth of a thingumybob. - why this? what’s it all about? - for an answer that suits
me (and which i offer as a possibility) let me contemplate the christian notions that animate our western culture in
terms of my own understanding of the opposition between light and darkness. - Almighty God, Infinite in all
perfections, as the christian theologians would say, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, created a world
similarly perfect in its moral and mechanical order; the darkness of sin arose and severely damaged that order,
producing disaster and death, a death that would have been final had not Christ opened a path for believers back to
that moral and physical perfection for which they were intended. the true believer, then, will especially strive every
second of his life for a moral perfection, observing every commandment, which will make him entirely pleasing to
God who saves him from the just punishment awaiting sinners. - this set of notions, in my own understanding,
feeds firstly on the undeniable fact that there is darkness opposing light in the world, chaos opposing order, and
then grasps hold of the light as a weapon against darkness in such a way as to make it itself an instrument of fear
so that the realm of darkness is subtly in fact extended by the apparent struggle conducted against it. - in reality
the light of the high god is not terrible in all perfection, searching out all the hidden sins of the heart (any more
than he wears the ultimately accurate wristwatch) but more like a friendly, useful 100w bulb. we should try for the
things we can easily do, evade the restrictions that prevent us, not bother much with a moral orderliness, or an
orderliness in this tent or on this tour, that we can’t maintain with ease and delight - and keep sniffing the air in
the direction of freedom, which has a natural habit of spreading to and delighting in the ease and freedom of other
people, animals, things.

*****

VI

when god made us he didn’t do everything that could be done, didn’t make the greatest effort of which he
was capable; and neither should we. all this striving, whether in technology, in business, or in sport seems to me
just a set of strange dark blossoms arising out of the decayed remnants of christian moral striving that are stinking
the place out at the centre of our culture. - i think of the runners i’ve just seen on television in someone’s house,
puffing their way round the track, and how odd that activity is when set in the context of all the other physical
movements on the face of the earth - except under the impulse of fear no animal would run as fast as it could; it is
only human culture which produces false fears, the fear of losing a race, to make people produce effort near to their
limit of capability, like soldiers training for real war with blank ammunition - perhaps one of the features of
human civilisation is its ability to produce false fears, to simulate the real fear we can feel and so extend the
darkness in which we live for its own sinister purposes. - but in reality our voluntary human activity should go in
exactly the opposite direction so that we are careful to learn nothing, to derive no lesson, from the fear by which we
are unavoidably surrounded - it is not, after all, as though we should not reach high peaks of physical effort whilst
travelling in this opposite direction, arising from sexual excitement or a child’s delight in being alive and running
downhill - we would use our capacities but not be grimly training and straining to shave half a second off our best
time - i remember the kind of effort i used to put into ‘having a fight’ with my best friend at school when i was
about ten years old - it was not like training for real war with blank ammunition but subtly and totally the reverse
of that (i can feel the subtlety and totality of it but must pause here before trying to put words to it because my little
daughter is dancing naked in front of me wet from the bath and ..) - so let me return to this feeling and reach for
words for it now - the soldier training for war with blank ammunition has his consciousness always directed
towards the real business of killing and being killed in a fight - whereas ian and i ‘having a fight’ were using the
starting point of battle but moving away from it towards sex; no sports master would conceivably have been
satisfied with our fighting, and had we been put in the boxing ring our fighting would have been directed
powerfully in the other direction, not towards sex but towards real fighting.
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*****

VII

i suppose it’s important, when thinking about human civilisation, to consider whether its manufactured
fears move towards the real fear in the world (as i assumed in the last chapter) or away from it, in the way of that
pretended boys’ fight - because there is all the difference in the world there between malignity and benignity - it is
difficult to believe that the major cultural fears by which we are encompassed are other than malign: army, police,
law, religion, officialdom all look eagerly towards the real inevitable fear with which we are surrounded as the
source of their power over us, indeed sometimes try even to pretend that their manufactured fear is greater than the
natural sort, as with the unspecifiable pains of hell or its modern religious counterpart, the indescribable grief of
God at our sin - these forces hold hands darkly with each other as they look towards and venerate the real fear of
pain and death and conflict which is there for us all; so bishops bless those about to kill and be killed for their
country; so in the old testament (numbers 31) the israelites at God’s command massacre all the adults and children
of the midianites, saving only the virgins for themselves; so in england, before setting about their business, the
judges robed in the red fire of hell go to church; so we see that in all the places where there are police they tend to
act in ways strongly reminiscent of the bullying fearsomeness they are alleged to be curbing - better an unofficial
thug, one might say, than an official one, because firstly he will have more limited power at his command to cause
fear, and secondly is more open, honest and innocent about his involvement with darkness than the thugs on the
bench and on the beat - i speak with emphasis, but if it really is the case that the high god uses no fear, then the
emphasis is not misplaced or exaggerated.

and what of culturally benign fear, what of ‘having a fight’?- we see a different world here: we see how
human culture can be on the side of light - i think of certain kinds of drama: of some mediaeval English plays, for
example, where the devil has become a figure of fun, the dramatic presentation a way of anaesthetising the private
fears of individual spectators by bringing them into a common arena and laughing at them; or of some modern
plays about aids, where it is not laughter but the acknowledgement of the fearful that allows a negotiated
withdrawal from it - facing it allows facing away from it. it may even be that certain kinds of military manoeuvre
are as much a substitute for the real excitement of killing and being killed as a preparation for it. as is very often
the case, there may be a turning to the light in the midst of what seems like an engagement with darkness, just as
the reverse may be true as well. the needle may flicker back and forth across the dial in a very perplexing way,
which is nevertheless susceptible of a very simple understanding - perhaps one of the characteristics of truth is just
this, that it doesn’t so much simplify the tangle of things as allow that tangle ample space for itself within the
copiousness of a simple understanding -

*****

VIII

- i don’t suppose, for instance, that the high god, if called upon to explain the phenomenon of electricity,
would issue forth a textbook of daunting complexity - the resort to complex explanation is rather what
characterises an insecure and ‘non-native’ understanding. the difference is between my setting out to learn the
english language by grammatical means, a fearsomely complex task, and the more complex the more intelligent i
am, and simply learning and knowing it as my native tongue. there begin to be ways now of teaching a second
language which resemble the ways in which it is thought children learn their native language, even though these
tend often to be clumsy and approximate resemblances, and to encounter the great difficulty that adult learners
have more or less lost the ‘language learning capacity’ of children - whatever the difficulties, though, it seems a
good aim in general to have, to know things in the secure and ‘native’ way that we know our native tongue. this is
certainly the way to know about literature, for instance, or about physical skills like riding a bicycle or joining two
pieces of wood, rather than the way of theory, diagram or graph - and as we try to learn more and more in this way
perhaps our childlike capacity for native learning will slowly recover, so that more and more we seem to know
things by instinct not by reference to a wilderness of books and articles - we shall know then with the kind of
security and the kind of accuracy with which an animal moves, a security not to be attributed to much theoretical
understanding of the behaviour of physical forces, and an accuracy much more relaxed and undemanding than that
of the ultimate wristwatch - i guess that when we talk to god finally, he’ll just seem to know about things, and will
uncannily give us the sense that we do too - and so i understand a bit more what i don’t like about computers, it is
the raw theory of them, the rigid, demanding, uncomprehending, simple-mindedness with which their
programming fails to match the simpleness and subtlety of the human desire to act, like taking a mechanical dog
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for a walk; it would for ever be looking up at you and asking in its tinny voice whether you wanted to change
course now - a question, like many others in many forms, prospectuses, syllabuses, systems, theories, to which
there is no fully human answer - let this drift off into silence now; i could say more (and no doubt shall later on)
but not so as to succeed in saying the thing any more clearly.

*****

IX

in a week’s time i’m going to france, to stay in a little house by the river loire about 30 miles from where i
was first born, sixteen hundred years ago. - and in the space of that stroke of a pen a week has passed in which i’ve
written nothing, and now i’m lying full length in a sunny breeze a few yards south of the loire and about 30 miles
upstream from the top of a hill on the north bank and my old home, where i lived in some grief and in the greatest
possible delight and love some time ago. time is most really not to be measured by mechanical means, the
movement of accurate clocks, but by the pauses and leaps, the certainties and forgettings, of human memory. i,
who can scarcely remember what i was doing a week ago, at the back end of that pen stroke, have the most
crystalline picture in my mind of the time a bit further down the river; and i know what it is like to be there with a
certainty i have never felt about the way i know what it is like to be here. the grip i have on physical life there pulls
me with a magnetic force which makes my never so confident grip here at times seem eccentric - so for example i
habitually wear a roman tunica (accented in the gaulish way on the second syllable) next to my skin, and speak to
my two little girls and the girl who is their mother and my lover in the latin i spoke then, a very far cry, or rather
laugh, indeed from cicero, or indeed from the worn and crumbled remnants i now hear making the new and
different experience of the french language all about us on this side of the river. - i speak latin so slowly, as slow as
the river loire, which with the exception of occasional dashes is a very leisured affair, and these makers of rapid
sounds all about me would be astonished how slow their origins were - the communication, of course, every bit as
subtle and easy and almost instant as now but the long oars making almost no splash in the water. - which runs
silently, or rather hardly runs at all, past this little farmhouse, past a hardly used track which leads round the
corner and then itself past a statue of the virgin tucked into an angle of the hedge. not many people see the goddess
of these fields and fewer take much notice of her, for sure, but her residual presence is evidenced by the fact that
no-one would think or dream of removing the statue and every now and then someone cuts back the hedge behind
her. across the other side of the river we had a statue in wood, of the god mercury, quite small and rather angular in
feature, peasant woodwork, in an angle of the wall that enclosed the small garden near the house. mercury was
then as ineradicable a residual presence as the virgin round the corner, and made wednesday, mercury’s day, not
sunday the important day of the week. we thought of him as the little god, his day slipped in among all the big
names, jupiter, venus, saturn, sun, moon, mars, just as we preferred ourselves to all the big things about the
empire. the virgin, too, still perhaps excites more affection than the crucified God further on where the track joins
the road. the crucified God is nearer to a position where he must be either accepted or rejected, not so easily to be
carried about in a fold of the mind, like mercury or the virgin - we took no notice of mercury, which was easier
than with the virgin because he was the fading representative of a never morally strenuous creed, but we would
have noticed his final absence. of course, no one ever fought a war about him, or for that matter about jupiter or
venus (though vergil had fancy literary notions about the gods and their chosen cities and races), as they did about
the crucified God and how to worship him. looking back, i think i understand that the unobtrusive and entirely
undemanding presence of mercury in a credal landscape almost empty of serious claimants to the top position (we
thought as little as possible of the emperor) allowed a more easily arrived at instinctive sense of the reality of the
high god than my experience in this present life, where the sense of god as undemanding and like a scent borne on
the air has had to shake itself free of a savagely strenuous false claimant and all his credal works, including even
the apparently innocuous little virgin round the corner. i could never feel as easy with her as with the wooden god
and i imagine god might quite willingly have nercury in his garden but less willingly the virgin. anyway, he’s
against virginity - one life drifts into another, the past and the present commenting on each other, and giving me
more space in which to try to understand things than i would have in a single three score years and ten. -

i think it is the contrast between different lives which most of all makes for that space; they not only
interweave with each other, but each of them also embodies within itself a sharply distinct account of reality,
extending from the most general notions to the smallest particulars of living. as i contemplate the way we live now,
there is a constant commentary on it from my memories of gaul in the fourth century, crete in the fifth and north
africa in the sixth. so the present state of things has constantly to give an account of itself, to answer wide-eyed
questions. - in some similar way, to come from england to france for a few weeks’ holiday has a similar effect. you
can park almost anywhere, on any spare piece of pavement, on market days in ancenis, but at the local lycée all the
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children have the same satchel. england is infested with traffic wardens but not saddled with a uniformity of school
bags. it is good to fancy a country with crazy-paving parking and an unofficial carriage of learning. nothing about
learning in france is unofficial, and come to that, not much in england, though the official line is different.
thinking backwards and forwards between the two countries one becomes acutely aware that the hidey-holes and
enclaves of freedom are often by chance found in different places, cherished by different means and overlooked for
different reasons by the darkness. the race is on perhaps between the steadily more uniform operation of the forces
of darkness as communication in the world improves, and the more and more active questioning of rule and law as
the variety of life on the face of the globe in the late twentieth century becomes more apparent. as always, the
heavy guns are on the side of darkness, and the human heart in its most covert operation on the other side. package
tourism (and insulated travel of all kinds), news, international meetings, official co-operation, against the oddity of
arriving where you don’t understand and are not understood without a flexing of mind and body.

*****

the smallest detail of physical difference is often the best to start with, not the large and abstract ideas
which can slide more easily and treacherously into the realm of insulated travel - an exchange of ideas can well
involve no passage at all either way of understanding - but we are physical creatures and little physical details
speak to us with a kind of intensity and persistence that evades the blandness of much thought. - so i begin with the
physical detail: the chapter numberings in this book are in roman figures (the mildly irritated modern reader will
know why by now), and when i made the figure ten about five minutes ago at the beginning of this chapter, i began
writing it at the bottom right hand because that’s the way i would have written it sixteen hundred years ago, and
wherever possible all other capital letters. if i were writing the roman ten now, or any other capital, i would begin
at the top left hand. - consider this difference, and its consequences - formal roman handwriting of the kind that i
was taught tended to go one step forward and half a step back since many of the letters were made from right to left
in a script that itself ran left to right - when i learnt this hand, of course, such an observation did not occur to me,
even though the more rapid and informal handwriting used for a few ordinary purposes ran pretty steadily left to
right - it is only when my writing hand compares a twentieth-century capital with its superficially similar fourth-
century equivalent that i realise how like an engraver’s art the roman way was - one wrote formal letters
deliberately against the grain of the movement from left to right, and with a reed pen no happier than a modern
one at being made to make strokes from bottom to top - in a similar way an engraver in wood or stone has to cope
with the recalcitrant natural wishes of his material - formal roman writing is furrowed into the paper, not kissed
onto it with the light touch of a modern press, and just as one would not engrave in wood or stone without
something of serious consequence to say, so then likewise not into paper - has my hand then, and my body,
understood something from remembering the way it once wrote? or, come to that, from the experience of being able
to write nothing at all in my two subsequent lives? - what it understands is the primacy of movement of the tongue
and not the hand in language: the hand with the pen makes permanent or semi-permanent moves, but it can no
more than the camera catch the reality of life as it lives - just as a really fine photographer can hope to make his
camera lie its way back to the truth he saw, so a good writer; but no one would suggest that one should primarily
look at the world by photographs, though many would hope to understand it by books. - what my hand
understands, holding the pen, is that the single advantage of writing lies in a heaviness of permanence which
disables it as a carrier of the feather-light detail of life as it is lived, that it is in that detail, the set of a head, the
exact tone of a sound, the glance of an eye, that the struggle against darkness has to be conducted, and so that at
least one should try to make writing that can convert itself, lie its way back, reach again the course and movement
of the living creature moving, speaking, engaging with the constant movement of the world. - of course, there is
an oddity here as well, that modern scribble has perhaps more of a chance of catching the bird on the wing than the
heavy older way which suggested that the bird on the wing was what counts, for who could really take engraved
words that seriously, or things thought of enough consequence to write? - so the old life and the new writhe gently
with each other and neither leads the other; only the light should lead, wherever it may be now and then - i write
with the slow brevity of an engraver as i make this book and with the hopes and attitudes of a scribbler.

*****

XI

the river loire runs right to left as you watch it from this south side, and left to right from the northern
bank, checked but not stopped by many islands and sandbanks, now as then - worded with the usual staggering
 9

effrontery of officialdom, notices on this side proclaim that bathing is forbidden in its waters and threaten
punishment, precarious islands of pompous foolery in a sea of the laughter of all who have swum in this river and
the few who have drowned in it. i have never drowned in it but i spent much of my first life swimming in it,
walking down with peter (petrus) the mile or so to its banks from the top of the steep hill where we lived. you
could swim in it, and of course swim naked in it, without being arrested, and we would have been incredulous to
hear that a time would come when both those things were forbidden and when most people would find the
prohibitions sensible and decent. there were things prohibited in our world, and savage punishments, and of course
slaves who could do very little freely, though they could certainly swim naked in the river; but there was not the
finely extended cobweb of prohibition, delicately anticipating the detail of human desire, that there is now. you
could piss in the field or spit in the road. you could fuck in a hedgerow since sex was thought a normal and
ubiquitous part of life. we did on occasion. - you could also be crucified or flogged - the powers of darkness
sometimes, in some societies and times, seem to clump themselves into great thickets of oppression, and sometimes
to spread like a thin disabling mist across the face of the earth - i don’t know which is more difficult; to counter
the great oppressions or to keep one’s self dry and promise sunshine to others amid an extended drizzle of
monition and prohibition. let there be no competition for first place; though it just happens at the moment that it’s
the drizzle i want to think about - the difficulty about disliking drizzle is that the water in it gives life; the
difficulty about disliking the ‘baignades interdites’ is that, for all that those who have drowned laugh at the
regulation, they laugh (as those who have died can do, knowing and understanding more) with great accuracy and
precision, never for an instant laughing away the fearsome moments of their death because finding the regulation
ridiculous and sinister. what one objects to is being saved from fear by fear, the objection is to the means and not
the end, but it is difficult always to speak and feel and react with the full energy of opposition the darkness ought to
arouse and with nevertheless an accuracy of aim which overlooks nothing of the darkness countered by means of
fear. i am against threatening regulations, i am against the drowning they seek to prevent. - perhaps, however,
because in most people’s minds the loss of life is immeasurably a greater oppression than the loss of the freedom to
swim, it is the more important to concentrate on the folly of prohibition, even though that invites a supposition that
one doesn’t care about death - both the difficulty and the importance of speaking against the drizzle lies in the fact
that most people don’t seem to think it too bad a thing to be damp.

*****

XII

from the river loire to a travellers’ resting-place in the middle of crete about a hundred years after - just
conceivable that a very old man in gaul who had known me there when he was a child would still have been alive
when i was born again at the other end of the mediterranean. i do the arithmetic for idle interest’s sake, as i think
of something to say: if he had known me as a child of three in the year i died ... but suddenly a more striking
possibility: my little brother, patricius, was seven when i died in 368; he could have been a very old man of over
90 when i was born again in 456, knowing nothing of gaul, or the latin language, or the life of a roman noble, but
about to learn uneducated, common or garden greek and to begin the life of a feeder and cleaner-out of horses, a
good deal less valuable than they in the current coin, but for all my roughness of manner capable of greater
suffering and greater delight than they were - two opposite imaginings are possible here: either the way in which
every moment of all one’s lives might be qualified, commented upon, by the whole range of living possibility
experienced, as though the roman noble, galerius, should contemplate the cretan petros for a moment; or else the
way in which all living instants can be just themselves in a sea of forgetting what went before or came afterward -
put it in terms of a single life and say that a successful man may be for good or ill reminded of his humble origins,
or may succeed in isolating what he now is from what he was, for good or ill - or the other way about, lambert
simnel in the royal kitchens, or hardy’s tess seduced by the illicit claimant of her family name - fruitful ground for
moralising, all this, a quicksand to be avoided which swallows up all life; better to start thinking about it while
holding on to the certainty that to be seduced is a good thing, and what god wants - marked out for tess before she
was led astray was the narrow path of duty owed to almost every other human being she would meet, as daughter,
wife, mother, worker; and the sense that the high god knows nothing of duty and wishes no living creature to be
dutiful hidden from her by the commandments of the christian religion. the parson might also, to ensure her more
effective imprisonment, advise her to forget the grand past of her family and live in the reality of her present
humble state; or alternatively, to remember the humble lives of her parents and learn a dutiful way of life from
them - the past conjured away or conjured up at the behest of an enslaving social and religious creed. by contrast,
a better seducer than alec d'urberville might ask tess to remember her grand past with a smile that allowed her to
forget the humble lives of her parents, and so to set out on a tricky path, beset by but not blocked by the other
enslavement of nostalgia, towards freedom of spirit and body.- the past, in other words, whether of one’s present
 10

life or of one’s previous lives, is an instrument as readily in the hands of darkness as of light - i write these words
while sitting in the seventeenth-century library cushioned between the castle and cathedral of durham, and can
feel, experimentally, both an antiquity of books that might draw one to the deathly service of their longevity of
minimal life, and the glorious uncoupling of age from the bustling pressure of minimal life outside - when and
how to remember, and when and how to forget the past, or indeed remake it as it never was, is the skill to learn in
the nosing out of freedom.- the memory of past lives is perhaps an instrument less easily grasped by the darkness
than the memory of the past of one’s present life. to start with, in our western christian culture, the reality of any
past life is simply denied, so that that reality has never been inhabited by or used in the service of the christian
religion; and again, such remote and scarcely to be arrived at memories could hardly be summoned up and held in
the imagination except for pleasure, curious delight, inquisitive lust. they have no automatic status in our minds
and can be dismissed cursorily from view as not part of us if they threaten imprisonment, as they can indeed from
the minds of some different believers if they threaten freedom - just because the memories of past lives are less
easily grasped hold of in the service of darkness, it does not at all follow that they need often be picked up and used
in the service of light. -

*****

XIII

i was ruffianly though not vicious in crete in my second life - utterly uneducated - a looker-after of horses
in a resting place in the middle of the island, the askifos plateau, through which travellers passed continuously on
their way to and from arabia and parts further east. i knew nothing of that; only that strangers came and went all
the time, and my business was with them. often they could hardly understand my speech, but this mattered little,
since a horse is a horse is a horse. - i lived a long life, 68 years, and was married very young, at 14 (though i
thought myself a bit older) - my little daughter, whom i cared for with much greater care than the horses, was run
over and horribly killed by a laden cart when she was three years old, and her mother, who had never much liked
her, was hysterical with grief, and refused after that any thought of any more children. she became by degrees a
childless virgin devoted to religion (christian) and to my own mother.

and i not by degrees but suddenly, and without ever ceasing to care for my little daughter, became a lover
of boys, for the rest of my life, hundreds of boys as they passed through north or south. an indiscriminate lover. i
knew nothing of how appropriate a place crete was for that (though for certain i had known before i was born);
how the cretans in classical greek times had been famous even in a greek culture devoted to the beauty of boys for
their love of them; how plato had suggested that the cretans had invented the ganymede story to give the father of
the gods, who had been born in their island, his catamite. - if this piece of life history had happened not fifteen
hundred years ago but twenty years ago, many correctives would have been applied, some stinging, others
emollient, to me and the boys i went with; psychological explanations would have accumulated to deal with an evil
that could not be tolerated or left unexplained - but then, luckily, i was largely unnoticed; the prevailing christian
belief certainly threatened the wrath of the new God upon those who followed the habits in this matter of the old
one, but neither i nor the boys i went with were important enough to catch the attention of the official creed - there
is a privilege and a freedom in ignorance and illiteracy which is extended in our days to fewer and fewer, and i had
no idea what a sorry figure i would cut at the bar of the christian God when i died (and of course nothing like that
happened when i did eventually die), only that my wife and my mother were angry at this other life of mine which
gave me an energy and resolution not derived from them nor returning to them - it was not a happy state of affairs,
and my ignorance not only protected me from the foolishness of the prevailing educated creed but also made it
impossible for me to understand or come to terms with the bitter anger my life bred in them - i had a mulish
obstinacy about the only way i could live, but i think i knew obscurely that i was in the midst of what was for me an
insoluble knotting of light and darkness; and so i was neither surprised nor grieved when my wife and my old
mother, reaching into the educated creed, or a fragment of it, for resolution to do the deed, at last poisoned me -
and so rid themselves of a scandalously sinful man -
*****

XIV

i can see that the shape of a life which i have just described offers itself with enchanted ease to ordinary
modern psychological understanding and evaluation. what interests me, though, is the clear sense i have that the
events of that life (and so perhaps of all lives) were decided upon before i was born to it, and that it was only the
sleep and forgetting of birth that could so clear the ground of possible explanations for what i did and experienced
 11

as to make way for the superficial level of explanation we call psychological or for the stubborn attention to the
event of the moment that, with the exception of the steady memory of my little daughter, filled almost all the
horizon of my contemplation when i lived in crete. - let me add what i now seem to know, and certainly didn’t
then, that the two human beings of greatest moment to me in my cretan life i had known already in my first life -
or rather, more oddly than that, that my younger sister in gaul, who was called alicia and was sixteen when i died
at the age of twenty-three, lived two partly overlapping lives afterwards, as my daughter and as the boy who first
converted me to boys, the boy of course born a good number of years before the girl, and on the mainland of greece.
- in that perspicuous but alas insufficiently physical antechamber to the solid but darkened reality of real physical
life there was an understanding, a shape of energy, which i can try to reach for as an explanation of the cretan life.
the explanation, the described shape, will be more poetical than psychological; and it will accept sexual energy as
the polymorphous flinger of the light of what is created and existing on to the dark backdrop of non-existence, and
not as the embarrassed necessity or the fumbling and illicit obsession of a society that thinks of itself as arising
from other energies and looking towards other goals, whatever they may uncertainly be. - the energies of desire
curl, dance, are checked, agonised, seek freedom, seek meeting, through the long string of lives each human being
has, and alicia’s for me in gaul were checked by such great difficulties: that i being a boy had a boy for my lover,
that she was my sister so that the passage was blocked by a fear that said incest, that i died and went away - i think
i never knew her lust for me, and perhaps she had only known it clearly before she had been born - when he came
to be born again, it was a long way from crete and he had to travel to meet his lover, to go on a journey after the
one who had gone away, now no blood relation and no girl; but not losing the closeness of blood relation nor
failing to be loved as the little girl killed by the cart; whose hands opened the latch of the gate that let in the boy -
and then for most of my cretan life they were both memories to me, the boy gone away when his party of travellers
left, the little girl dead, as though alicia were to explain to me that her wish was not to replace my lover in gaul but
to be part of the dance - and to explain to me how extensive and capacious the dance was, how much and how
many fidelities it asked - hundreds, many hundreds.

*****

XV

my little six year old daughter kate (with whom the undefended heart ended) came the other day to ask,
on her own behalf and that of her nearly three year old sister, nell, what was the truth about father christmas - i
told her it was just a story -- that there is a physical reality, really possible, which is larger, more alive, more
responsive to the range of desire, than the one in which, life after life, we have to manage, i am in no doubt - that
the human imagination calls to and is called to by that physical reality which darkness for a while cripples, i am
certain - that therefore we should value the human imagination not as leading us to imagined worlds but as holding
out the sometime certainty of the physical satisfaction of our desire at its most extended and intense, seems clear -
in this sense the greatest poetry is not imaginative but simply real - but there are some comforts of literature less
bold and strenuous, father christmas comforts, which acquire a vacuous freedom for their imagined worlds at the
price of admitting that they are not and could not be real - in the face of those one needs the physicality of a
samuel johnson striking the table with his fist to make the point that human beings cannot live on meringues, and
one needs the strength and courage of tennyson’s ulysses setting out for the happy isles to make the point that the
insufficiency of meringues should nevertheless not reconcile us to a physical arena crippled and darkened in which
to know and take delight in our desires - the cultivation of a meringue-world is often quite consciously allied to a
ruling out of the possibility of the happy isles: ‘it’s a shame to deprive children of father christmas, because they
soon enough have to grow up and live in the real world’ - the comforts of many religions are similar: paradisal
candy floss entails an acquiescence in the most reduced hopes for our physical world -

when kate asks me whether the potion she’s making will help her to fly, i am in greater difficulties - i say
perhaps - this isn’t like father christmas, a culturally despised story which commands belief among the helot class
of children while being safely unbelieved by the patrician adults - the wish to fly is a more genuine language of
desire, and i want to say that the good physical universe, in some way or another, will eventually be found
capacious enough for all the delighted desires of living things - that imagination here is a foretaste of the real,
both making demands of it and assuming its flexibility of response.

little children have not yet learnt the false lesson of repeated disappointment, nor of the postponed or
substituted satisfaction of desire, though they are surrounded by an adult world which is willing to teach them this
realism or to play stupid, already defeated games of make-belief with them. - that we must be mistaken in our
understanding of the reality that surrounds us, or that that reality is unacceptably damaged, no more completely
 12

real that the table held up by three legs, needs an almost lunatic clarity of mind to perceive, especially when the
adult and educated world is so practised at leaning on the table-top only in ways that don’t make it wobble, and
indeed at dancing on it in ways that cause an answering quiver but require no fourth leg.

*****

XVI

i return to the ‘light of what is created and existing’ and the ‘dark backdrop of non-existence’ of chapter
XIV. that darkness resolves itself finally into non-existence and light into existence i don’t want to deny: but i
think the mistake god made in creation was to suppose that, in the face of it, darkness would remain inert and not
take up the business of creation on its own account. - it would be nice to be able to say with blake, who didn’t
believe it either, that everything that lives is holy; but to take that simple and unified path involves either a
ludicrously sophisticated acceptance of the shark’s teeth as gleaming with light or an equally sophisticated denial
that the attacking shark lives. - it doesn’t seem sufficient to describe the energy of the shark’s attack as a gap in
the fabric of a creation born wholly of light; any more than anyone can ever truly have thought sufficient the
traditional christian explanation of evil as privatio boni, an absence of good. - better to admit that that energy of
attack is a counter-creation, darkness learning from god the trick of creation for its own death-dealing purposes;
and to say that when light does finally prevail in the created universe, when finally everything that lives is holy,
then many modes of life there have been will not be found, will have dropped back into the vacuity of nothingness
from which they came. - by contrast, what remains will acknowledge an origin in a quite distinct unformulatedness
of energy which was the high god before creation all began -
*****

XVII

the light is not a light thing, but it does weigh light, almost no weight at all - when one meets god one
finds his touch upon you is like tree-blossom falling on your hair (so different from the heavy metal of the
traditional christian expectation, all trumpets and profundity) - and the same is true of desire in its freedom
wherever it is found: the amatory intensities of courtly love substitute for a lust not allowed its way the solemn,
quivering affirmation of its importance and its presence - profundity is in the absence of enjoying what is praised -
and by contrast the light of love actually being experienced makes sex the most casually occurring delight, lightly
asked for, lightly given - and one should remember, when casual sex is being given a bad press, that its native
function is not as the mark of a damaged, oppressed, furtive desire but as the mark of the undamaged and easy flow
of it - casual and promiscuous sex is what god does, and the blossom on the hair is his friendly, smiling, direct
propositioning - and this is a propositioning that doesn’t (as it does in the ludicrous christian account) compete
with and challenge an inferiority of love between two human lovers, as in the mediaeval hierarchic distinction
between heavenly and earthly love; but is a propositioning that understands how all intensity of delight felt for
another spreads horizontally with the surface volatility of quicksilver and engages one in a network of other delight
and desire - so different from the tunnel vision of reverential profundity alleged by the christian theologian or the
courtly-love poet (whose writ still runs today) as the effect of true love, presided over, walled-in by, the chiming
darkness of jealousy.

perhaps it’s true that, in the whole pattern of one’s various lives, there is one love which seems central;
perhaps it is true that the high god has just such a central love among the human beings he has created (acting in
this as in other ways no differently from the way he would like us to act); but certainly that centrality loses all sense
of itself if surrounded by the space and silence of other prohibited desire, and becomes then instead an unlocated
spot in an empty universe, the lovers fleeing away into the desert - the centrality of the love, by contrast, really
knows itself by (to borrow a shakespearean word) its increase, by what it spawns, propagates, suggests - and it
may be that, eventually, the whole of the restored universe will be a variety of central desires each with its network
of propagated, spilling-over desires, overlapping in a great maze of light, the air full of blossom settling on hair -
and, for god's sake, not spiritual blossom and spiritualised desire, but the ordinary, real, common or garden sort
produced by real trees and real bodies.

*****

XVIII
 13

the language of physical sexual desire is the simplest and most powerful dialect a human being can
command; and both its simplicity and power cause difficulty - the tendency of things is for a human culture to
rescue itself from simplicity by complication and to turn the very varying degrees of mastery of that offered
complication into a bastard version of power - the powerful people, in this newly designated sense of power, then
become those who are able to live at the remotest remove from simplicity - they do it in our present world amid
technique and jargon as once they did it amid dogma and ritual. the path by which one returns from this state of
absurdity is one which allows a clear view of the lack of understanding of those immersed in complexity, the lack
of subtle feel for the texture of real things - the thing is to negotiate with oneself and the world around a return
from complexity before the internal pressures of the complexity themselves bring about a destructive and fearful
collapse - in my third life i was the servant to the abbot of a small monastery on the north african coast from the
age of five to nine, when i died in 576 on a sort of refuse tip - shortly before i died i watched the abbot himself die
in terrible agony of body and even more of spirit, screaming against the horror of damnation his own complexity of
dogma and practice offered one who had covertly not been able to live as an abbot was supposed to, the model of
rigour for all his monks, answerable at the awful judgement seat of his unsearchably complex and unsubtle god for
the state of himself and his community -

the abbot (whose name was, predictably and ironically, benedictus) had always been a simple presence to me. one
has to have in mind that darkness can challenge light not only by being evidently different in the contours of its
actions (thus complexity to simplicity) but also by identifying with and simply inverting the shape of light (thus the
simplicity of war for the simplicity of lust); and the abbot for me was an overwhelming and undifferentiated terror -
i was not aware, of course, of the torment of complexity in which he lived; he was not simply a bad man, he was
complicatedly a bad man (still is, still is, ... but now suddenly no longer, no longer!) who attempted to present
himself as an authority so simple to those under obedience to him as to seem inevitably real to them - but the
psychological complexity (and all this was clear to me some time after i had died) of a system which made him
grovel before the God while being the pattern of perfection to all his monks, multiplied a hundredfold by his
inability to control the sexual desire he was taught to loathe (for it would take him straight to hell), created a vortex
of terror inside the man different in shape but not in intensity of darkness from the terror he inspired, especially in
the servant who had to live closest to him - and beneath all this, far beneath, as i realised much later, a degree of
acquiescence in this situation, reaching back to before he had been born, which made him truly unreachable by any
light thing - it was only as he came to die, as the added strain of imminent death and judgement broke open his
shell, that the monks of his community saw their father in God for the first time as he was within, and there was
paralysed horror that the devil had struck with dreadful effect at the very heart of the goodness and godliness of
their monastery (as they saw it), at the link between them all and the God -

he died on the ground, in the position a monk was supposed to die in, but not in the physical attitude
prescribed - neither the agony of his bowel cancer nor of his mind would allow a cruciform body yielding its spirit
to the crucified God - and after he was dead and before even another abbot took his place the community
convulsed together to try to identify the chink in the monastery's defences through which the devil had been able to
make so terrible a way (for it was inconceivable to them that the plague was always from within) - the finger of
accusation pointed at me as having been, as it were, the abbot's familiar - i was strikingly fair-haired, unlike
everyone else; i had been given to the monastery because i was a bastard (no doubt my father some fair-haired celt
from a distant place); and the abbot in his terminal raving had treated me with a public version of the mixed desire
and disgust with which he had always treated me in private - they thought i was his devil - they were wrong, of
course, but i believed them as well and consented to die not long after they expelled me with solemn curses from
the monastery, expecting after death to return to the hell from which i had come -

it took a long time to wake from that imprisoning dream of darkness after i was dead into the simple
power of light again; and a long time to persuade myself to try being born once more.

*****

XIX

it would have been a lot better if the abbot had been in the ‘lowest’ terms a savage human being, because
the ‘highest’ reasons for darkness, the most exalted context for it, the finest soil for its growth, produces the most
noxious and penetrating form - one reads on pretty happily in montaigne’s essays, and suddenly there he is talking
about the ennobling effects of war, the arrow of darkness gone straight through all his humanity because tipped
with honour, with all the chivalric virtues - it is the special action of christian dogma and practice, and that of
 14

other religions, to tip the arrow of darkness with material of the finest quality - or let us change the image slightly
and say that in the actual circumstances we live in, it is not light but an alloy of light and darkness that proves
durable; and religions, beliefs of all sorts, tend to specialise in the production of complex and various alloys for all
kinds of different purposes - the alloys are more efficient than darkness unalloyed, which tends to get up people’s
noses; and light unalloyed is offensive for different reasons and in different terms.

when the abbot died, he found the darkness that made sense of his striving through his lifetime, because
he was determined to find it - he has been alive many times since then, always intent on holding on to darkness
with the golden net of virtue, whether religious virtue (mostly) or political virtue (more recently); but this last time,
his energies for this enterprise seem less eager, his life messier, less directed, less credal - and his friends, who
stand all around, watching life after life, begin to grin a little in relief as he gives up so long-lasting an effort.

it is ironic, really, that the kind of undirected, aimless life, the kind of drifting, which would seem to most
observers alive at the same time a sort of moral decay, a lack of high ideal and purpose, should be in truth not the
slow twisting of wreckage in the embrace of the sea, but rather the final magnetic turning of life to the light.

for so many people, when they die, the shock will be profound (though perhaps short-lived, soon replaced
by a grin of relief) to discover who it was among those who were alive with them who were responding most
energetically to the magnetism of light. - that ungovernably rebellious boy, that thiever and deceiver, that sexual
transgressor, in fact knew in some way where the striations of the alloy were trying to force him, sniffed a false
God in the air when it was presented for veneration, and swung towards the freedom of light with astonishing
boldness and recklessness - if you had asked him what he was doing, then for sure he would not have said that, but
would have used, or abused, the only language he had been allowed in which to speak of himself, and would have
described himself, willingly or unwillingly, as darkly rebellious - but way beneath the imprisoned surface, with the
ludicrously clumsy alloys of light and darkness he was busy with there, he knows what he knew with such clarity
before he was born, that in the language of light he is trying for magnetic north.

*****

XX

it’s that weekend in the year when french museums and châteaux are open to the public for nothing, the
so-called journées du patrimoine, so to angers to the castle and to pick a museum - wrong choice really, the
museum devoted to contemporary tapestry - i feel mournful about it quite soon after going in - cathedral-like
silence, reverential gazers, sunday clothes, the thread of boredom, the tincture of futility, noli me tangere - i begin
to think about the inside of the tombs of the pharaohs, or the total darkness of the deep caves in which neolithic
paintings are found; some art reaches for transcendence by a kind of withdrawal that has preceded it - and which
thus swirls round it when it is complete; to leave it islanded in darkness, or royalty, or reverence - but the easy
path is too easy from this point, to suggest that art must not withdraw from life - it would not be honest of me to
pretend i liked the sunday traffic and press of crowds outside the museum in angers any more than the sepulchre
within - it’s not the process itself of withdrawal which seems dreary, it all depends what you are withdrawing from
and to; the best withdrawal from the traffic seems not to the museum, nor the best withdrawal from the museum to
the traffic -

a mile or two along the road from us, in the village of liré, is the modestly substantial house where the
sixteenth-century french poet, joachim du bellay, spent his childhood, and to which he longed to return when
trapped amid the splendours and the crowds of the busy life of his uncle the cardinal in rome - in one of his
famous sonnets he turns to the thought of seeing the chimney of his own house giving out its smoke as he returns,
turning the corner of the old road to see his domaine perched on the edge of the hillside above the little stream that
flows down to the loire - i feel such sympathy with such a perch and such a stream down to the loire because so
like my own mansio a bit further down river and a bit further back in time - with the cardinal it must have been
like a dreadful combination of the museum of contemporary tapestry and the traffic outside, and the poet would
have been in no danger of mistaking either of these forms of death for a life to be escaped to from the other -
instead he looks to the place where he can at any rate more nearly be nakedly himself -

that the cardinal himself was also trapped between reverence and sight-seeing crowds there can be no
doubt; no human spirit could freely breathe that air, but there is no knowing whether, like du bellay, he was aware
of his imprisonment - i was wondering the same thing a day or two ago seeing the pope visiting france in his
 15

cathedra on the television screen at a catholic friend’s house, evidently tired, evidently ill - was he longing for his
home, his domaine, and if so where was it? - i hope it was poland but i suspect he may have persuaded himself it
was heaven, a christian mythic land he can certainly never have seen and so could not revisit.

the great thing about the triumph of light will be the overwhelming sense of déjà vu - no need for them to
have rebuilt in the nineteenth-century the cheminée of his little house that du bellay mentions in his sonnet of
homecoming, because effortlessly what is light will have survived, and no exalted spiritual survival this, nor
anything to be wondered or gawped at, but ordinary evident physical survival, the universe dense with all the
possible forms of life, du bellay's loire, masculine like the latin river liger, accommodated to the feminine one that
flows past me now.
* * * **

XXI

if the door handle doesn’t work, you can buy a new door, or repair the handle, or take to pulling open the
door by other means - there is perhaps something feverish about getting a new door, the radicalism a kind of
surrender to the hopelessness of the damaged situation; and a new door will always seem like a solution imposed
rather than discovered, the new piece of wood not sitting too comfortably with the old lintel, like a house with
replacement windows - of course, if the handle has never worked, then opening the door by pulling at the top will
seem so much the usual, the intended way of doing it, and the strain on the hinges so much accommodated by an
answering distortion, that only a visitor will notice that the proper handle is out of use - i would notice
immediately because i seem to be by nature a repairer - the radicalism of the protestant conversion experience,
together with its modern secular counterpart in the throwaway society, seems too much out of love with what
actually exists; but equally it seems quietly monstrous to bodge up a way of carrying on with a damaged humanity
by putting a hook of fear in at some convenient point to drag it along by a kind of traction that delicately created
thing was not intended to afford - to pull by ear or toe and allow the rest of the body to scrabble along as best it
may in the wake of the pull, with whatever humiliating caricature of proper movement, is what is mostly done - as
though we were not intended to be free of fear -

the good repairer, by contrast, finds the point of balance of the whole system, the moment of central
articulation, and considers how the freedom to do what it wills to do may be restored - the intervention the repairer
makes will often be by something new or even novel to the system, but that newness will not be a replacement but
an enablement - all this by way of saying that one’s tactics in the world should be those of the good repairer of the
damage caused by darkness.

by comparison with the actual differing complexities of tactic needed to try always for the freeing of light
from darkness, the strategic description of the engagement of these forces which from time to time i have
embarked on so far in this book seems simple and evident.- what i must confess centrally for myself in the attempt
at good tactics is that their needed extreme flexibility is arrived at by holding on to no principle, moral, academic,
intellectual, sexual, fiscal, political beyond that single hook in the wall which is the resolve to have nothing to do
with fear - and indeed that hook in the wall is itself not any kind of principle, but rather an erotic passion.

to remove from the spirit both fear and principle is to leave a great space for the poetic play of energy, for
the variety of delight in things. if that play is to be as large as possible then one must be like the best of all
chronometers in the best of gyroscopic systems, impossible to unbalance, either by a sudden shock or by a long
dragging pull lasting hours, or months, or years - once off balance one loses the energy of delight, emergency
lighting comes on, with enormous expenditure of rapidly ebbing energies some minimal response to the world
around can be kept going - you see the pain and difficulty this causes hunan beings in the overset faces of children
going to school on monday morning or the weirdly unbalanced smile of the salesman you’ve just bought something
from, or the sudden utter weariness of a mother knocked sideways once too often by the sudden rush of desire of
her little child - the first thing then is to rebalance one’s own gyroscope, to find again one’s delight and one’s
energy - there’s no rule book to tell you how to do it, no maker’s instructions (perhaps surprisingly, some may
think), just one’s own innate skill at managing one’s own light - and it’s no different for god.

*****

XXII
 16

the thing about a boy running in gyroscopic balance is the spacious poise amid all the possible shapes of
sexual energy, normally denoted by fear-ridden specialised names like male and female, active and passive - the
overwhelming attempt any society must make which values its unbalanced specialisms and the screeching energies
they emit must be to make sure no boy reaches the fine pitch of his own native balance - and in this almost all
societies are almost wholly successful. the high god laments it.

*****

XXIII

it’s curious that when we speak in biological terms of highly specialised animals, or bits of animals, we
see this not only as adaptation to a rare physical context, but as a form of survival bought at the expense of
limitation, sometimes even comic limitation. the front pincer five times larger than the back, the three-foot tongue,
the eyes on stalks, commend themselves more as the ingenious diversions of the circus ring than as anything one
really feels easy about. for some people the same may be true of weightlifters, who have variously concentrated on
certain physical features so that they may excel at picking up very heavy things. but perhaps relatively few people
see intellectual specialisation as the developing and then flexing of the enormous pincer, out of balance with the
rest of the body.

if you can pick up weights overwhelmingly well, you’ve got to have weights handily around to be picked
up. if you want to be more than part of the entertainment industry, you have to persuade others of the importance
of picking them up; overwhelming success would be to watch develop a whole new pick-up society - the ability
creates the need, flywheels screaming off balance everywhere, to generate the music to accompany the pick-up
mode.

no good giving the flywheel a tiny push to rebalance it; at that speed of vibrating revolution you might
only destabilise things more; better to cant the whole world over a little to bring it true again to the spinning wheel
and make the music pythagorean. -

the thing perhaps is always to be playing a larger game than the darkness, and with the kind of slightly
obsolescent equipment that has lost the keenness of edge to enslave which fires with weird energy what is the state
of the art. tactics this; but just never use the most modern equipment or the fire-new fashion. for that will come
with the microsoft corporation’s undiluted desire to open fresh markets, to make fresh conquests of human
territory. it’s the computer software that no longer excites them, that is not their market leader, which may turn out
to be unexpectedly helpful after it has lost or been stripped of its brief moment of heady leading. nothing
obscurantist about the use of the last technology but one; just a declining to be used by the tools one uses, a refusal
to ask the questions they are programmed to answer.

the same with state of the art academics or intellectuals. they’ve devised the rules of the game so they’ll
win it, or one of their number will. so be fiddling about with the counters from the game before, with the kind of
unfrantic thoughtfulness that is not translatable into the failed desire to be state of the art oneself. a very vulgar
thing to be.

*****

XXIV

impossible to think if someone is always offering you the definitive answer to the question you didn’t ask,
like the world wide web - for the very beginning of fruitful thought is to know what the question is one is asking
and to see it’s not what you thought it was, not one of that battery of conventional curiosities with which an
inhibiting culture makes docile an enquiring mind - the really limiting ignorance, as socrates might have said, is
not not to know, but not to know that one doesn’t - and the more often one asks those questions to which there are
snappy and authoritative answers, the less one may see the shape and extent of one’s ignorance - if training is
about being persuaded to ask the questions to which there are known (or ‘known’) answers, then education is that
kind of steady growth of mind and spirit which comes from an active contemplation of all one doesn’t know or
understand, and of all the things about which one may be mistaken - there are no teachers in the act of being
educated, only fellow experiencers -
 17

and what one comes to hold as real in the midst and in the face of as broad an acknowledgement as
possible of one’s ignorance, one holds to without clamour, without rancorous or oppressive insistence, because such
a recognition of what one thinks real will be no more and no less than a recognition that one exists - for me, it is
of the nature of my existence that i identify fear as the centre of darkness and i have no more need to clamour out
that unalterable fact than to campaign in favour of my brown eyes - indeed, need not to clamour, even though i see
the savagery and distortion of fear everywhere, because clamour will make a propaganda fiction out of what is real,
and one must, for the sake of the light, be real.

which is not to be confused, of course, with always telling the truth - there are habits of truth-telling
which constitute deep disguise and conversely (as who needs to be told?) fictions which enable what is real to
emerge in the face of opposition - one arrives at reality, perhaps, when there is no longer any position to be taken
up behind what is there, reality in this sense is the end of negotiation, the abandonment of manoeuvre - a condition
of complete simplicity, i would have said, but that that seems to connote seriousness or heaviness, a certain
strenuousness utterly unlike the ease i have in mind - and out of that ease can easily arise again the tactics and
manoeuvres which may from time to time be necessary, because although one may say that what is real has no
position behind it to be taken up, that is not to say it seems like some kind of final rigidity, final
uncompromisingness, rather, it looks with a kindly eye on the extended detail of manoeuvre which were its
outworks and may need to be again - indeed one may go further and say that after every encounter which had
made it reach out - whether towards some difficulty experienced with oneself or with someone else, it will relax
into simplicity and ease again, and this perhaps fifty times a day - it will turn with a grin to its lover again -

*****

XXV

as i begin writing it is twenty minutes away from 1997 (or 2750 if one prefers the roman dating and thus
to avoid approaching millennial fuss) - what is all this business about anniversaries and festivals? - actually there
didn’t seem much fuss tonight because very cold outside, so almost no revellers, to judge from what can be seen
from this flat in worcester quite near to the cathedral; and as usual we missed big brother’s revelling because of the
unspeakable freedom of no television screen - not a freedom that would now be permitted if it were at all
widespread, though the means of prohibiting the freedom would be subtle enough to be taken as the consequence of
individual choice, like most of the prohibitions which ensure the weird flourishing of this late twentieth-century
civilisation - orwell was so absolutely right about the television screen, and 1984 is well upon us in 1997
(midnight having come) - it’s worth having in mind that for all but a lunatic and criminal few, the world of 1984
was normal, acceptable, with effort getting ever better in spite of the intense challenge from enemies beyond our
shores, even perhaps because of it, for that challenge furnished the opportunity for urging the workforce to ever
greater efforts in pursuit of the final happiness.

which if not actually christmas, is bodied forth by christmas, which gives us in a yearly festival (one of a
number: also new year, birthday, mother’s/father’s day, wedding anniversary, summer holiday, winter break, bank
holiday, win the lottery) some inkling of what this society will be when finally it satisfies all human desire - or all
that is left standing -

or what has been hoiked up on sticks to replace natural erection.- whereas the erection of the sun in the
morning and of my cock in the evening are the circumstances that truly make me alive -

*****

XXVI

by laying waste all around it, an energy which is shallow and trivial can seem to arrive at a certain unique
intensity, as you can make a castle by digging away the sand all round - so there are experiences that come to seem
like love by eroding the possibility of all other - a hundred or more years ago, a voice spoke constantly to newman,
and in a somewhat different dialect to manning, urging them to the high places of spiritual achievement, and round
about these high places, these eminences, the altars flamed day and night with sacrifice of all lesser things, the
more cherished of these lesser things burning the more brightly for the satisfaction of the lunacy of the sanguinary
deity who would be God by having no other gods - you can see the damage wrought by feeding bits of themselves
to the altar flame of worship in the faces of these two cardinals as old men, the emptiness of human landscape
 18

devastated like the battlefield of the somme and lit by a certain ghastly energy of triumph - duty, self-sacrifice,
ideals, the pursuit of the higher good come all alike in the end to a bloody sacrifice offered to the God in the midst
of the death of all else - forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him - bind yourself to your love in the isolation of
mutual esteem, icon to icon - but in reality god is promiscuous, and that makes all the difference; it certainly spells
the end of all eminence - when those two cardinals died, it must have been for them like coming to a dinner party
ludicrously overdressed - one wonders how quickly, with what difficulty or ease, they shuffled off the eminence;
together, of course, with the sense of personal unworthiness that no doubt always went with it (for they were not
renaissance cardinals, like some in rome) -

i remember someone telling me once that it’s particularly difficult when a pope dies. his friends have to
rally round very strenuously to help counter the shock of reality not being as he supposed, no casting down of
golden crowns before the throne on high, no crowns, no throne - i took my harp to a party but nobody asked me to
play.

when paul vi refused the plan to have himself embalmed after death in the usual papal fashion, it might
have been no more than a spectacular casting down of the golden crown, like the selling off of the papal tiara a few
years previously; but perhaps it was more radical than that, not a spectacular refusal of the proper and customary
honour, but a deep realisation that the ordinary way is best, a realisation which owed none of its power to a
rejection of special status, was not in that sense a gesture at all, but a waking from the dream, not a continuing of it
by other means -

for it is no good striving for the light by any of the means recommended by moralists in favour of virtue,
by acts of the will or the developing of good habits. the light is a gypsy presence for so long as it must co-exist
with the darkness, not to be wooed by the establishment, not travelling on metalled roads much, but across fields
and by by-ways. if you meet it (and there are many by-ways, mostly not on the map), it will be by chance; that is to
say, not by conscious design but by a delicate and decisive ordering of things whose shape and functioning one
feels no urgency to enquire into - the only thing one might exercise one’s abilities in is speed of recognition and
reaction to the light when it gleams, and the habit of not being surprised at the company it keeps.

*****

XXVII

as a society moves from being deeply sexually inhibited to being shallowly inhibited, it may exhibit at its
surface and conscious levels signs of moralising panic which could mistakenly be interpreted as a reversal of that
process. by contrast, a deeply buried paralysis of fear may leave the surface relatively calm, with that slightly
creepy feeling of something not quite natural given by well applied make-up.

it is true to say perhaps that societies differ in the shape and the extent of the geometric area they are
prepared to abandon to sexual desire - and abandonment of a certain sort it is, because sexual desire is not easily
converted into a currency of power that may be competed for, though that currency itself may artificially stimulate
a kind of sexual desire or enable its satisfaction in other than the surrender of genuine orgasm - the gathering of
power is compatible with the use of it but not with the squandering of it.

one may speculate that societies with large geometric areas given over to sexual desire will differ
profoundly from those with small areas given up to it, and that the desire to enlarge the geometry will contrast with
the desire to contain or diminish it. the society we live in is engaged at the moment in a very vigorous attempt to
prevent an extension of the geometry to human beings below a certain age, and the more or less familiar arguments
normally used for and against any extension are being deployed - if boys and girls could have sex with their
teachers, what an undesirable use of power that might be on the part of the powerful in our social currency; but if it
were sex desired on both sides, what an even worse dissolving of the currency of power itself would ensue -
schools would become impossible - in the days when this particular extension was unthinkable, charles dodgson
could be keen on photographing little naked girls; in days like now when it is thinkable children have to be
energetically defended from what it is possible they might be - he would be put in prison now.

as the boundary line of the geometry is moving, whether it is moving in or out, witches, heretics and
perverts are discerned beyond its limits - they may be the potential underminers of the line at present held, or the
recidivists recently left behind, but in either case the energy of heresy flickers on the walls - when enlargement is
 19

taking place (as we see in religious terms, though the parallels are far from exact, in the sudden craze for finding
and burning witches in the seventeenth century, as the enlightenment got under way) the energy with which
perversion is countered by those who resist the change will be greater than when diminishment is taking place,
because in that second instance the defenders have already essentially won and only mopping-up operations are
needed - of course, once enlargement to the new point is completed, the perverts cease quite suddenly to be
perverts; there are no more witches (once, in the eighteenth century, christianity had developed into deism) and no
more homosexual lepers.

it may be that in western society at the moment the most dreaded thought (no longer safely confined to the
pandora's box of freudian theory) is that everything is sexual; so that what is being resisted is not the mutating of
the pound sterling into the eurodollar but the undermining of the entire currency system by sexual speculators.

such a relief, at any rate, to be clear that pornographers do it for money, like other business men, the
criminals acquiescing in the conventions of life as much as the respectable.

*****

XXVIII

sitting in a room with a boy, confronting the ordinary difficulty of saying I fancy him, without disturbing
the surface of the water with the slightest ripple of consternation, I think of a sense or notion of my desire not as
promiscuous (with the implication that has of passing uncomfortably across boundaries), but as ubiquitous - with
john i've been reading some of ginsberg’s howl, and I feel emphatic that freedom is not to be found in the
romantically tragic shadowlands of that poem’s imagining - that sexual freedom, for instance, should there be
found amid the variety of physical and mental desperation which abounds in the marginal society of those only just
about holding on to life is a curious (and no doubt unintended) tribute to the conventional morality of those
apparently more successfully alive - by contrast I want to say that such freedom is not a prize bought at ginsberg’s
price, not a heretical energy snatched at in the gutter, but a ubiquitous, ordinary, natural delight whose presence is
discovered by relaxing into an honest account of one’s physical nature without either the fear which resists in the
name of conventional morality or the fear which translates into bitter hostility to such a morality.

although i’ve been more than once described as a heretic, I don’t feel interested either in rebutting or
enjoying that charge - better just not to play the game at all, neither to whitehouse nor to ginsberg, but rather to sit
at what honestly seems the point of balance and interaction between all the forces within oneself, with the
expectation that what will characterise such a point of balance will be a relaxed generosity towards what one
imagines or supposes the point of balance of others -

one way, i suppose, in which i could describe a certain sort of uneasiness or reserve i sometimes feel with
other people, is to suggest that in meeting these people i simply haven't found their point of balance; and that may
on occasion in turn be because they either have not or will not -

this is not to say, i hope, that only what i fancy certain kinds of perfection can meet with ease; because it
often seems to happen that two or more people will be able to balance themselves in each other’s company in a way
or to a degree not possible elsewhere so that a great mutual freedom and generosity begins to seep out of the walls
of each of the separate prisons.

*****

XXIX

an extremely complicated intellectual or social or technical system may be kept going by human beings
provided that a significant proportion of the manœuvre needed by it has become purely automatic, not thought
about - the process of learning to drive a car is one of necessary desensitising of hands and feet to the various
complicated co-ordinations required between them - by contrast, to have sex well with another human being, or
with oneself, or to write a poem, or to paint a good picture, seems to ask exactly the reverse of the skilled driver’s
change of gear.
 20

it may be that, where the physical world is concerned, the evident and repeated success of a certain skilled
technique makes it a ready and obvious candidate for the great substructure of unheeded, automatic skills - though
even here the consciousness of skilled manœuvre may give an edge of delighted appetite to a mundane task:
unlocking a door, drying a teacup, cutting a slice of bread, working a cash dispenser, opening a tin, riding a bicycle
-

where the mental world is concerned, however, i wonder whether (to use a weary piece of automatic
phrasing) we can afford the luxury of automatic response. for here the shadowy substructured mechanisms will be
in a significant proportion mistaken, largely because the fact that they are mistaken will not be discoverable by the
open and evident means of physical failure but only by the barely discernible distortion of spirit that may be the
result of fifty years of belief in the doctrine of the trinity, or the principle that children should be seen and not
heard, or the necessity of swimming trunks, or the importance of sport, or the desirability of high ideals, or the
value of honesty - the distortions caused by such things barely discernible not because they are not grossly
destructive of the shape and movement of the human spirit but because human beings can manage (and mostly do)
to function somehow in their terms whereas no-one can ride a bike with a locked wheel.

what life in orwell’s 1984 has to say to us is that nothing should be automatically thought - or mental
switches should be set permanently at manual, and most importantly when we are occupied with what (perhaps
rightly, perhaps wrongly) seems most unquestionable.

i suppose, at this roughly halfway point in writing it, i could say this little book could be thought, in the
sense i’ve described, a manual.

*****

XXX

just before his ship was wrecked off the scilly islands in 1707 because of disastrous navigational error, sir
clowdisley shovell had had the ordinary seaman who had given him what was in the event the ship’s true location
hanged for mutiny, because seamen in the british navy were not allowed, on pain of conviction of mutiny, to make
navigational calculations reserved for their betters.

in some places in the american south during the slave era it was a seditious act for a slave to learn to read.

to stand up in the public gallery of the court and suggest to the judge that he was making a mistake would
incur a conviction for contempt of court which would not be purged by any subsequent evidence that you were
right.

the lesser should know less that the greater, or else where would we be? - it is a fundamental principle of
our society that knowledge and power go together; and if knowledge confers power, then power must be allowed to
confer knowledge. - knowledge, understanding, is in fact hopelessly compromised by being promoted, or paid
more, or given titles; because then the power it has brought you must be allowed to give rise to the supposition that
you have knowledge of a commensurate sort; for the fundamental act of power is to define itself, and anything
pressed into the service of that definition loses all reality except as a definer of power - so even the things you
really do know are bastardised.

if you had told shakespeare he was the greatest writer who ever lived, he would have fled the opinion and
the consequences of it, because he is -

the problem for god is very similar -

*****

XXXI

1. we really live out of the delighted desire within us, whose centre is sexual desire.
 21

2. what we can benignly learn is to know more of the subtle, simple, orderly shapes of that delight, to be
shown possibilities.

3. if we are faced with demands external to that delight, to which we cannot find a delighted response, it
is vital to make any demanded response as sleepy and minimal as may be, so that our delight is not colonised by
fear, either from the outside or by means of being made to produce it in the form of aggressive response.

4. the most usual form that that colonising cancer takes is the form of duty, and once established the
cancer is difficult to shift; and itself produces by means of aggression secondary cancers inside the delight of others
whom we attack with notions of obedience.

5. the end point of the cancerous transformation of delight is a kind of servile idiocy, which may however
seem to be an intelligent energy used in the service of the company.

*****

XXXII

i feel like thinking my way back to the beginning of creation, which is not a long way but only a few
seconds, in consideration of what is to come after the intrusive darkness, which has briefly achieved consciousness
in man and is no longer just a force within the created universe, has been drowned in light.

the high god, too, came to consciousness in the act of creation, came to birth of consciousness by giving
physical birth. before that double birth is what god himself, of course, can give no sure account of - whether he
was then the detritus of light, of existence, left over from a previous, failed struggle with darkness, with non-
existence; whether there had been many struggles before; or whether in the midst of non-existence there had
always been the possibility of existence which now for the first time moved - any one of these speculations leaves
still the question about how that dormant or detritus state came to be, a question not answered but only evaded by
saying (rightly) that time itself is part of the created universe, so that ‘before time’ makes no beforeish sense.

to turn with loyalty to existence, to light, however and to say that whenever, or wherever, that is
nevertheless one’s element, is not so much to evade the question as to let it fade - rather as one’s life before being
now in love fades into what is little thought of, something not vividly oneself.

when god speculates over the horizon of his consciousness, and talks to us about it, or points to the same
horizon reproduced in us as we slip regularly into sleep (death is not such a horizon because that is a wakening to
fresh urgency of energy in relation to darkness, against it, or temporarily and insanely for it), then what sense he
has is of the fundamental unassailability of himself and that that unassailability is what made creation inevitable -
this unassailable existence is not like the abstract certainties of mathematics or logic, which seem to need no
embodiment to exist (but which are in reality created shapes); but is something physical; which is why all reality
also is finally physical - the physical electricity of desire to exist it was that defined the boundaries of non-
existence, made of the darkness of non-existence a directed and shaped tendency - in some sense, before all
created things, the two forces owing their definition to each other, that by definition each was to be intent on
swallowing up the other.

creation is the circumstantial evidence of the light of existence; and has become the ground within which
darkness struggles for death, for annihilation. what goes for us by the name of evolution is the see-saw struggle
between the two forces, with god learning all the time what may be done and what not, what are the best tactics,
what proves a disaster. - our complacent notion that what powers evolution is the survival of the fittest is no more
than our registering of the presence of the force of darkness in the struggle; for such an idea is of all things
loathsome to god, for it embodies the idea that one kills to live, using the weapons of darkness in the service of
light - that it has come to this in the unfolding of creation is because darkness like a massive distorting force in a
magnetic field, has pulled the compass needles off their setting.

god came cautiously and late to the bringing of creation to his own consciousness in human kind because
that would also, at a kind of second remove, afford a consciousness to the force of darkness - so with the creation
of human kind and its will to be either light or dark, the focus of the struggle has become finally intense - the
 22

focus is here at this spot in creation and nowhere else, because after the first flinging ejaculation of matter in
primal shape, it was necessary to leave it and to concentrate all effort at a single point -

each human life embarked on and lived is a conscious addition to the field of struggle. everyone knows
before they are born exactly what their life will be; they can see how the energies they have, once they meet the
energies into the midst of which they throw themselves, will work in this or that detail of shape, as to length and
brevity of life, happiness and misery, all the great complication of what will happen, down to the tiniest picking-up
of a match from the floor.

happy lives or wretched lives, and all possibilities between, may be embarked on as a flinging oneself in
either on the side of light or of darkness, or of complex combinations in between those final extremes - for, to give
only one uncomplicated example, a wretched life may either devote one to the love of annihilation or be a gauntlet
cast down in the face of the worst darkness can do -

when darkness is swallowed up in light and is no more in this spot of creation then all can go forward,
and where (as i’ve said before) there is no more death there need be no more repeated, reincarnated birth - the
sexual energy, which of course is at the very centre of the struggle against darkness, will no longer need to be the
prime instigator of the repeated rebirth that challenges repeated death, but can simply become the chiming with the
primal ejaculation god made - there will be no death, no ageing, no need for all the physical apparatus required for
birth - so that in their final long unending life in the physical creation, all of human kind, though nothing light in
all their previous lives as either male or female will have perished or become dim, will be boys.

*****

XXXIII

whenever we light candles on the table, all the children present try to blow them out, as they certainly
wouldn’t have done two hundred years ago - candles are for fun now, not for any practical use - is this a
trivialisation of their function? - well i think both yes and no.

the trouble with a history of usefulness is that it may colonise the nature of the useful thing and cause one
to forget that, although created things fit together, they are not created for that sole purpose, but to be themselves
and not other things - on the other hand, to remove the co-operative usefulness of something and let it just play the
game of being itself may allow a slide from the independent to the virtually disregarded.

which is to say that in the co-operative endeavour creation is intended to be, no thing can well be without
either its independence or its importance to other things -

we contemplate the territorial aggression of the world of living things and of human societies, and can
easily forget, especially if we dignify such competition with the term darwinian, how lunatic a physical endeavour
creation would be if it were fundamentally in competition with itself - the extent of the wreckage and waste caused
by competition is the comet track of darkness criss-crossing the universe, and it should be little comfort (just as in
human affairs) to the temporary victors in the struggle to survey the field of their hard won victory, even if they are
proud that their weaponry now has an edge it would not otherwise have had.

it will be interesting to discover, in the end, what proportion of the skills we usually reckon to have
developed naturally from the way things are, whether these are animal or human skills, are just the sharp edge put
by darkness on creation for its own purposes, the shark’s teeth, which will be missing in the final count of all
living matter, as being not real.

no doubt when we wake up one morning and darkness has gone, we shall be temporarily very surprised at
what has gone with it, and shall find our familiar world pock-marked with absences - but soon, too, it will be
difficult to remember such absences, or where they fitted in - because they never did really fit, the structure is
complete finally without them.

*****

XXXIV
 23

how in practice can one act when someone’s contrary plan impinges upon one’s own? - it will hardly
cause surprise to the reader that i exclude from the beginning what will be thought the usual tactic: fight - but with
just as much firmness i feel i must exclude the opposite tactic of self-sacrifice, which is no more than the reciprocal
of fighting, inhabiting the same world.

instead i want to suggest to myself that reality is large enough to allow the possibility of a plan which will
adroitly meet the necessities both of mine and yours, encompassing them both, seducing them into co-operation;
and that that large plan will be energetic and attractive enough to consign to the nullity of complete overlooking
whatever bits of my plan or yours were the offspring of darkness.

as the high god grasps for the most generally extensive plan he can manage to conceive of, to hold the
differing energies of the whole universe together and seduce all existing things into its largeness of desire so that
the striations and spottings of darkness fall into oblivion, he is doing what i am doing when i try, in the face of the
sudden desire of my little daughter, neither to sacrifice nor to be wedded to my own plan - if i’m quick enough,
skilled and experienced enough, practised enough at it, i can slip intelligently into some larger gear which will
save both me and her from mutually antagonistic entrapment in our own previous plans -

it is true, perhaps, that especially children feel desires, have plans, of a strength they are not yet very
practised at yielding to a yet stronger and larger plan; but the usual procedure in such cases, to explain about give
and take or advise against selfishness or insist on sharing, sets up a pattern of self-sacrifice which will very likely
flip over into its reciprocal of aggressive insistence as the child grows to be adult, with an adult’s power to insist.
so we find adults all about us who are trapped inside their own plans and wish for no other, but only for the power
to ensure they prevail; or alternatively adults trapped inside someone else’s plan and devoting themselves to its
ends.

and not noticing that the universe is bigger.

*****

XXXV

impossible to conceive of life without movement; and can you have the whole fabric of movement in the
universe without death? would there be, as wallace stevens suggest, a lifeless permanence without death, the
‘mother of beauty’, the boughs laden with fruit hanging always heavy in that perfect sky, the ripe fruit never
falling?

i think the end of darkness, though it will be the end of death, cannot signal the end of passage, of the
coming and going of things. how can this be?-

i think that, even though nothing dies that was ever alive with light, nevertheless time does pass, and that
notions that in some sense it doesn’t are fanciful.- i think that living things are intended to change, but
nevertheless resist death, by renovation, as this year’s flowers are the renewal and in that sense the survival of last
year’s, as the cells of the body constantly renovate themselves.- inconceivably complex and yet almost simple-
minded the great renovation will be after the attempts of dark death are ended - and then there will be an end of
reincarnation, which will be seen clearly then as only the temporary stop-gap of multiple fresh starts in the face of
the pressure of darkness, rather than the natural and constant renewing of the only start needed - reincarnation is
temporarily the best gesture that can be made in the direction of renovation, for so long as the process of change is
not a process of life but of death -

and what of all those reincarnated fresh starts when the dark pressure is finally off? well, each of them
arriving by some route at what they were trying to renovate, and the renovation an expansive welcoming of even
the most faintly marked path towards the light -

and what, in that light time to come, of the inanimate creation? is it different for the cart from the way it
is for the horse?- well, fundamentally the physics of the inanimate creation are as for all of it, permanent; but the
inanimate creation is intended to carry the flow of time differently from the animate and must be consciously
repaired or remade or restored or invented freshly as the constantly renovated energies of the animate creation
 24

desire it - plenty of room in the universe after these first few seconds of creation are over for all the different
desires and designs of the animate upon the inanimate, for all its conclusions, arrivals, discoveries, memories,
ejaculations.

*****

XXXVI

the reason i will eat fruit and vegetables, but not animals killed for the purpose, is my supposition that,
just as the inanimate creation carries the flow of time differently from the animate, and doesn’t experience what we
could define as death, so the vegetable creation is rather already in a constant state of renovation than experiencing
death. and i suppose that, in eating and drinking, in living one’s animal life, one must try not to co-operate with or
rely on any of the forms of death against which, for the moment rather desperately but soon triumphantly, the high
god has set his face -

so i can reassure wallace stevens, i feel, that ripe fruit both falls and is eaten when darkness and death
have had their day.-

how? - i want to say that what would constitute death for the vegetable creation is the death of the whole
vegetating world we live in, because the ‘animal’ of the vegetable creation is the single one of the whole earth, and
its variety, its variousness, this tree or that bush or that flower, is like hair on the head, growing and cutable.

if we note that in animal bodies cells renovate continually, it is nevertheless clear that this process of
renovation is not yet powerful or extensive enough to counter death. one might say that in the vegetable creation
renovation is much more powerful and extensive already, and only an onslaught upon it that entailed the
destroying of the whole thing can be thought death-dealing.

we may perhaps then think of the vegetable creation as single, but of the animal creation as multiple in its
multiplying of animals; and then of the human creation as in addition multiple in its multiplying of
consciousnesses.

from the inanimate to the vegetable to the animal and finally to that specialising of the animal in the
human, the process of creation reaches out, ever more vulnerable to the death-dealing darkness, ever more starkly
and finely, delicately, asserting the quality of light, of life, against it. the furthest extent of the extension, the most
defiant and the most vulnerable, is human like god himself, whose resistance to the darkness is desperate, last-
ditch, inch by inch prevailing. perhaps the whole of creation is evidence of god’s determination, however, to
survive.

*****

XXXVII

there are many things proposed as important whose importance waxes and wanes in a way that relates to
the context they find themselves in: passing the exam is vital in the moments before sitting it but hardly of much
consequence if one suddenly remembers vividly the scale of the universe - i feel by contrast, however, that one
should aim for steady state understandings that neither wax nor wane, that would, for instance, remain at the same
angle and intensity in the mind as one was falling under a bus.

that sounds all very fine, but it has to be put together with the sense that one should have such delicacy
and responsiveness of mind that every change of context, no matter how slight, will colour it differently - if we put
this in slightly other terms, we say that the most undefended and conniving responsiveness to the beliefs, the
moods, the passing whims of others must go with the most profound indifference to them, without the one stance
being undermined by the other.

i am intensely and passionately concerned that whoever reads this little book should credit it, and also
quite indifferent to the response of any reader - i try to write in a way which is as seductive as i can make it, and i
put down nothing but what i myself want to say. i am open to persuasion on every topic, and my mind is entirely
 25

closed. i come away from a deeply interesting conversation with someone else with my mind full of it, and dismiss
it instantly from my thoughts.

how is one to make sense of this? - it’s worth saying first of all that there is no actual difficulty, no real or
experienced difficulty for me about the fact that these evidently contrary impulses inhabit my mind - such
difficulty as there is is only in turning this into coherent sense for someone else, who may be either the reader of
these lines or myself as with an objectifying consciousness i write them.

i think the things about which i am stubborn and uninfluencable are simple and radical enough not to
make complex demands on the surface of the world - they colour and angle everything, but don’t fuss about with
rearranging the detail of angle between things - as though to say it is like seeing everything from a walking stance
ten degrees out of the vertical; or better say that what i assume is vertical looks ten degrees out to most other
observers - so i can engage quite readily with the usual relations of things, as commonly understood, with just an
arrière pensée which puts a patina of different possibility over everything and prevents final or primal engagement
with those usual relations.

is that satisfactory as an account? - well, something to be said for it - it’s true to say that what i like and
find easiest about my fundamental attitudes, and i have almost none that are other than fundamental, is their
simplicity and brevity - and i don’t really mind about anything else, am prepared to speculate more complicatedly
but without being apprehensive that the speculation might crash - come to nothing.

such speculation may derive from the fundamental attitudes but is not necessary to them, and so the mind
is freed and in holiday mood as it investigates the rock pools and builds castles and river systems on the shoreline.

*****

XXXVIII

a shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old - suddenly the sunlit patch of those words and
that sound amid the tedious gentility of sidney's arcadia - and the pipe an appropriate instrument for a shepherd
boy to play because very like the treble voice with which he would sing, the sound unqualified, unimpeded by
anything chordal, requiring no effort, delicate but not subtle.

it’s as though that sound has not yet taken upon itself the weight of function, it neither announces, nor
accompanies, nor designates; and the reaching of a pitch of energy which is quite free of such conniving is one way
of describing freedom - the boy is presumably playing a tune that the pipe is capable of yielding, but not a tune
written by anyone else -

the greatest works of art have often arrived again at the unbroken voice of not being about anything
(which is at the other end of the scale from being meaningless), much less of being at the service of anything,
except perhaps the sheep - good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest - that means
everything in meaning nothing at the end of shakespeare’s play - put any pressure upon it and it would break, ask
that it carry some significant hope for hamlet and it would turn out not to be able to do so - but leave horatio’s
words in the open, doing nothing in their field of sheep, and they persist, they prove to have an undislodgeable grip
on some reality not before encountered in the play.

most boys’ voices don’t actually break, they drift downwards, so that there is a point where the possible
range of pitch is very great, from treble downwards - if that range could be kept, and could be kept in an unbroken
sequence, then it would be as though the parts that could bear a load were in constant touch with the parts that
could not - it is that moment where what is of use holds hands with what is of itself that defines the unity of
creation.

but the darkness is a great interrupter, so horatio’s farewell to his prince, though undislogeable, is also
unreachable from the territory he immediately afterwards turns to, the practicalities of politics, the necessity to
clear away the mess.
*****

XXXIX
 26

the thing is to reach back past the immediate causes of events and feelings. the reason i feel like death
today is not that i’m probably being affected by nellie’s spectacularly bad chicken-pox, but some other reason,
whether i’m infected or not - we settle gratefully at times for the sometimes stylishly robust and unmorbidly
uninvestigative secondary cause (a couple of paracetamol and a stiff gin is what you want!), and true, there is little
more tedious than the knowing tracking back of immediate events and feelings to a remote cause; but i think both
the morbidity and the tedium pretty much guarantee that what is being unearthed on such occasions is something
fancied and not real - rather exciting and liberating by contrast to be on the right track back, like hearing the
horns of elfland behind the morning traffic.

for myself i feel sure i hear the horns of elfland all right, and i’m certainly oppressed by the morning
traffic and its immediate causes - but it’s the middle bit of the map that eludes me. and i have wanted in writing
this book not to fill it, as i did the undefended heart, with the kind of creatures that make very promising middle-
ground map material - with poems and philosophies and beauties and sayings - because though they are without
doubt well and properly at home in the middle ground, i know about them and how they sit and how they point,
and still the links between what is finally the case and what is immediately the experience are not really there, the
middle bit of the map is too sketchy.

so in this book i have all the time confronted what i experience with what i fundamentally will assert, in
hope that those two honesties will breed. i hope this book is the child of the union, the missing middle ground of
the map.

*****

XL

all this will be fanciful nonsense perhaps to some readers, though perhaps those readers will have given
up long before this point - but i doubt whether anyone without strenuousness and an outraging of proprieties can
make his two honesties meet on equal terms. what often seems to happen rather is that one or the other will extend
itself and pretend to be also the other, because the strain of accepting disjunction is very great and it seems difficult
to distinguish apart a genuinely founded sense that one is the same in the furthest reaches of the mind as in the
most ordinary circumstances of life from a spurious and manufactured sense of it. - in that regard there is even a
kind of admirable honesty about a man like bertrand russell, whose understanding of the ways in which war might
be averted and of the importance of avoiding it had nothing at all to do with the trail of destruction he left behind
him in his personal life, in which he was tyrant and destroyer.

but suppose for a moment that bertrand russell was a bad man pretending with very partial success to be
good - what then becomes of my just having spoken about the spurious and the manufactured? - if the only
alternative to ineffectual pretence at light is darkness, then pretence is obviously the thing. for just as light is to be
discouraged from using the weapons of darkness, no matter what the pretext, so the opposite holds as well; and
darkness is to be encouraged to use the weapons of light upon any pretext.

or say more. just as physicists used to say that nothing in the universe could travel faster than light, so i
would like to say that there is no higher morality than the use of it, and no failure other than the failure to use it.
in the competition between the admirably honest prince of darkness and the schemingly dishonest doer of light,
there is no doubt who wins. to abstain from doing light until one can do it honestly reminds one of the worst
excesses of a christianity which would always value an upright position in the complex moral intrigue over the
half-accidental pushing forward of the white counters.

the light of the high god is like aids in reverse and if you dabble in it, no matter how tentatively or
furtively, it will eventually, perhaps after many years or many lives, break down the immune system of darkness.

*****

XLI

oddly, it seems for me that the way to achieve some sort of family relationship between all the things i
think is to follow no chain of thought very far (hence these very short and independent chapters) -
 27

i suppose i say chain of thought advisedly, and i may have in mind those immensely long and
interconnected logical chains with which a philosopher like bertrand russell encumbered himself in his search for
freedom. the chains of logic are difficult to break free of once one has given oneself to them, are immensely tough,
and very thin, like piano wire - not everything in the world can be done with piano wire, even though it is very
strong; more particularly, the capaciousness of what one wants to say and mean has to be sacrificed to such a
strength. and one can hardly hope for a family relationship between all one says or thinks unless the whole family
is always allowed to be present at any thinking or speaking.

nevertheless, a surge of thought will often move ahead of the family game and get open space for itself,
which is all very well for a while, and can be terrifically active and agile for lack of the accompaniment of other
human activity, as when a gymnast succeeds in a spectacular manoeuvre because she doesn’t have to be
simultaneously carrying home the shopping - but it’s no good carrying on with the manoeuvre for too long; the
shopping has to catch up, or no one would eat.

*****

XLII

a clump of flowers seeded itself in the garden a little while ago and sometime after i was pleased to be told
it was wild camomile - but how wild are you if you submit to a given name? so let the flowers not become speech
and what are they? - assuredly god didn’t say ‘i will create wild camomile’, although he knew one day i would
learn that’s what it was -

for like all human beings i am surrounded by life that is less conscious of being alive, so i both lend and
impose upon it my own sense of life, of how it is divided up, graded, named, valued. but how to lend that sense
without imposing, without intruding on the proper ignorance with which plants and animals live and die.

a little mouse has just died in the house here, and tomorrow everyone will be very upset. i think there is
no falsity of sentiment about treating the death of a mouse as a human death, for finally all life is in common cause
against all death; but the connections that hold the mouse at one with the common cause must be of the most
delicate if they are not to enchain it, colonise it with a meaning it never knew nor cared for.

the more passionately one is against death, the more delicately one must be against it; and the more
resolutely one opposes it, the less moved one must be by it. the death of little animals allows more than human
death the kind of opposition which expresses itself in a turning away from the thing as of no significance. the dead
camomile flower in my hand even more (if it is so that this is just, as it were, hair cut from the head) presents death
in a form which emphasises it as of no significance; and in that sense the camomile lights the way for us to the
universe where death shall have no dominion - and let the mouse go on before us too, like catullus’ girl’s pet bird
qui it iter tenebricosum; and let me give it as delicate, as playful an obit: died in worcester 28th july, 1997.

*****

XLIII

to be entirely unconcerned about a death and to be intensely engaged against it are two attitudes that may
share the same turning from it; a deeply felt inability to cope with death and a deeply felt ability to cope with it
may share the same turning from it - and we must note, as in distinguishing sometimes two identical phrases at
different points in a poem, that the widest difference of attitude is carried by the most minimal distinction of
feature, a slight emphasis or hesitation, a fractional pause or lack of it, or that distinction itself, indeed, between
hesitation and pause, the one uncertain, the other most certain.

and one must think of darkness and light, not as widely separated, but as so fundamentally disjunct that
they can be found at times occupying almost the same ground, using the same words, offering the same perspective
- the thing is to have a nose for the distinction between the two rather than an argument for it; the argument can
come later if it must, but cannot work so quickly or securely as the nose, which may detect in an instant, as it were,
the false sound, the tiny mistake a native speaker would never make, in an otherwise convincing manner of things.
 28

there is detecting and detecting, of course, the dark and the light, distinguished not by their acuity of
perception, but by a certain final seriousness leading to moral tyranny in the dark, and a certain final levity in the
light, a certain liberating sense of ‘well, who cares anyway?’ - a certain total lack of the authoritative.

the struggle is not bunyan-like, not in that sense a struggle at all, where light disengages itself from
darkness not with a speech or an uphill climb, but with a flicker of the eyelid, the slightest movement of the right
shoulder - you have to watch the eyes of god very closely and see the odd moment of grin in them - he doesn’t on
occasion actually say much.

*****

XLIV

it has come to be the fashion to admire professionalism in almost all areas of human skill except love -
the professional lover is looked down upon as much as the amateur historian - what damns the whore is that he or
she does it for money and what damns the amateur historian is that he or she doesn’t.

i don’t want to be too sniffy about coin: by establishing the goal of attraction somewhere outside the
boundaries of the human skill being exercised it may not only subtly undermine the intrinsic, intra-mural reasons
for engaging in it but may also at times profitably undermine intra-mural hesitations and inhibitions - so that
money may be a great enabler of sex and historical research amongst those afflicted with defect of desire or doubt
as to their capacities in these fields.

the payment of money has a shifting, uncertain quality about it: which is why one feels uneasy and
suspicious when it is proclaimed as the great betrayer of properly human activity in the case of whores and held up
as the great test and assay of excellence in the case of academic pursuits that someone will pay you large sums to
do it -

of course if you are a girl prostitute or a rent boy or a reader of seventeenth-century pamphlets out of a
liberated desire to be such, then that desire itself is enough to encourage all the skills one is capable of acquiring,
and money is a firmly extra-mural though necessary appendage (one must live) - and by contrast if you are a
whore disgusted with sex or a scholar bored silly by footnotes, then only money brought right within the walls in
generous amounts may make it seem worth while continuing -

to live on a life-support machine, in this case a financial one, is perhaps better than being dead but no
substitute for being alive; and it would certainly seem very odd to be so wedded to one’s life-support as actually to
prefer it to the natural functions. the natural functions are so much more various, flexible and graceful than
whatever is afforded or enabled by artificial means - no matter how slickly the professional operates, or to what
exacting professional standards, nothing can disguise the limitation of the complexly human, the zimmer-frame-
like movement of his high-powered concerns.

*****

XLV

kate put two ants in a jar to look at them, and within moments one had half eaten the other - we felt the
horror of it and tried to separate them, but couldn’t.

but our horror small in scope by comparison with the helpless baffled horror of god when he first saw the
effect of darkness on the life he had made - with the ants we thought for a second or two that they were playing
with each other, especially because we’d put two in so that one alone wouldn’t be lonely - so god may have
persuaded himself for a second -

as nothing could have convinced us, no different or larger frame of reference, no fancied good, that there
was anything other than horror in one ant eating the other, so i suppose there is no frame of reference which will
commend darkness to god, the maker of light.
 29

there is only the resolution to learn nothing of its ways, even when it seems impossible to live without
doing so - what to do about the scorpion that runs straight at you, or the nest of wasps in the roof? what to do
when there is no place of retreat for harmless life?

if this were all made into a metaphor for human society then something might relatively easily be
suggested, some course that was neither savagery nor its companion, servility, that was neither hostile nor
deferential - but the implacable mindlessness of the running scorpion and not only that but its curious
unimportance in the whole scale of things, resists the sophisticated facility with which a course of action relating to
human beings might be suggested - as darkness climbs the scale of subtlety it becomes more and more ingenious,
often more and more difficult to distinguish from light; but by the same token it becomes more vulnerable to the
subtleties of light - so just as death is said to spread from the feet upwards, so it may be in the end that light will
spread from the head downwards; and god will have been right to take the risk, even in the presence of darkness in
creation, of making human beings -

but then the question of the running scorpion remains - and do we simply move out of the wasp-infested
house? - perhaps after all our human metaphor will serve us, that we should be neither savage nor servile, that we
should counter but not kill - we can share our living space on earth with any creature that will share it, but a
creature who would commandeer it must be restrained from doing so.

this restraining energy, i feel it important to say, is not a simply milk and water version of the savage
response, but is in its own right fully and totally energetic, totally and quietly ruthless in the defence of light. the
absolute refusal to be pushed around, the absolute refusal of self-sacrifice, however, has nothing in common with
any savage assertion of dominion - it is self-sacrifice which is the sudden, abrupt flip-side of savage dominion, the
deference towards fancied authority going neatly with hostility to those one has fancied authority over; or, to return
to the scorpion, the willingness to kill it close kin to the fear that flees it.

wherever self-sacrifice is recommended, look for the teeth.

*****

XLVI

‘we can share our living space’: easy words, one may hear the rabbit or the lion or the salmon muse, from
human creatures whose simple abundance and whose modification of their environment is a kind of savagery
towards us, even if we do accept that they might no longer kill us for sport or for food -

that the abundance of successful life itself constitutes a kind of savagery is a strange thought to accompany
one’s being on the side of life against death - but just as the shrinking of the mind away from the possible extent of
human freedom is one shrivelling effect of darkness, so is the confining of physical life into spaces too small for it.
in the universe at large there is to be enough space for all the various abundance of living things, and there are to
be no empires, so that the relation between one living thing and another will be a looser weave than it is now,
involving no sacrifice, voluntary or involuntary.

and perhaps one should try to cultivate now (even at the cost of a little artificiality) the habits of response
that will be appropriate then - to stop acting in the darwinian manner bred in the seething constriction of a single
spot and second in reality, surrounded on all sides by nothing alive.

in this seething spot, what passes for the design of things are relationships of hostility and dependence
(dog eat cat, cat eat mouse, how wonderfully it is all planned!) created by the almost intolerable pressure of
constriction at the outer limits of the vessel of life - and to learn one’s habits of life from these circumstances is, as
it were, to elaborate a set of engineering principles to cope with a gravitational force one hundred times greater
than was intended when the physical materials of the art were devised.

even as one builds one’s heavy bridges and one’s armoured bracework, one should build in the
imagination the light and delicate things that will serve to cross by in a hundredth of the gravity, so that (because
the imagination can be the first arrival of an altered reality) steadily one’s physical step lightens, lightens to a
degree that people find perhaps momentarily alarming and then either seductive or foolish.
 30

*****

XLVII

in the latin i speak a caterpillar is already pretty much what it will become, is a papiliellus, a tiny butterfly
- whereas in english, the verbal groundwork conspires with the visual difference between two stages of a
butterfly’s life to allow it to be always a delighted surprise that the one should become the other. do i have a taste
for the miracle of transformation; or do i prefer the quieter, sturdier sense that that is what happens in butterfly life,
they start green fat and wriggly, and end coloured diaphanous and fluttery? -

i grant that it is one way of expressing a delight in beauty to exclaim that one would never have supposed
it; but it’s almost as though that very exclaiming is a way of denying a regular place to beauty in our circumstances
- and so perhaps better to stop pretending there’s a miracle when there isn’t, to stop being surprised that little
butterflies become big ones - beauty is what you have a right to expect from a caterpillar, and it is no proper part
of the reaction to beauty to pretend to be unfamiliar with it -

this is not intended to sound sour, nor to deny the sharp edge of delight; but more to suggest that the sharp
edge of delight doesn’t have to be seldom experienced in order to remain sharp; that there is no need to pretend
delight is unexpected in order to keep it sharp; that one can live accustomed to the sharpness of delight, drawing
one’s energy from its edge while seeing it always coming -

it’s rather like birthdays - in the feeble way of our culture one day in the year suddenly transforms itself
into a surge of excitement and pleasure, and can only do so if all the others stay more or less dormant - i want the
contrary of this: that this single little green worm should be seen in company with the billions of others, all about
to grow up into the air - artificial miracles, like birthdays, seem like father christmas land; and one has no need of
their falsity. every day of one’s life begins in the dark and grows into light, every caterpillar grows into a butterfly;
one should hold firmly to that intense habit of delight.

*****

XLVIII

i feel i must return to the business of self-sacrifice and try more effectively to lay the spectre of its nobility
- put the opposing case as strongly as possible: the nations war together each for its own ends; the clamour of
greed arises on all sides; the seizing of short-term advantage is commonplace; children squabble about who is to
have the prize - and there rises above all the maturity, the restraint, the orderly calm of one who does not seek his
own ends -

and what i want to insist is that the majesty of noble disinterestedness, the forgetting of one’s own
immediate desire, is as surely a way of darkness as the squabbling idiocies of greed - to be blind to one’s own
desires is as bad as to be blindly committed to them.

if desire is, as i suppose, the evidence of being alive, then when the child says ‘just one more go on the
swing’ one cannot afford to suppress one’s own unwillingness any more than one can afford to snuff out the child’s
desire - to snuff or be snuffed keeps all desires small; whereas if one desire copulates with a contrary one, each
will grow by being seduced into the world of the other - the negotiation between contrary desires is not to be for an
instant thought of as a sophisticated version of winner and loser, or indeed as the game of let’s all be losers - it’s
got to be the game of let’s all be winners -

on the occasions when i feel myself drawn somewhat down the dark road of self-sacrifice (that road that
eventually, as yeats says, makes a stone of the heart) i feel the most overwhelming exhaustion; this because of
missing the vital turning (sometimes almost impossible to find when children are concerned, whose map of their
own desires will tend to be drawn with little detail) to a direction all are travelling in - that there is such a
direction to be found makes sense of the unity of the universe (though darkness will do its best to destroy that
unity), whereas even a momentary supposition that in this case it is either you or me introduces a hideous
disjunction, a life at the expense of death.
 31

if i felt that, in the question of another go on the swings, it were really ever you or me, i would drop this
three parts written book in the fire as wholly mistaken - but that is not to deny that the finding of the common
route which is neither self-denial nor denial of the other is the most complex of the daily realities i face - the more
complex because the possibilities of desire we are working with are chipped, truncated, bowdlerised, vulgarised,
harried so that often they are scarcely recognisable as human at all, like a walt disney film version of some human
experience.

almost the first move one must make, perhaps, in the re-negotiating of conflicting desires, is to recognise
that they are more extensive, more disreputable, more interconnected with others than the piddling set of standard
desires we are presented with in quiz shows or newspapers or sermons as an account of the reasons for being alive.

*****

XLIX

in sketching a face, the tiniest flicker of the pencil at the wrong point, the smallest mistake in the shape
and direction of a line, can mean the difference between a striking re-creation and a worthless, labouring failure -
so too with the nature of things, i suppose - if one is right, one is right by a hint here, a touch of the pencil there,
that suddenly brings the whole alive and into focus.

i find noses particularly difficult to do; and they provide in their centrality a good analogy to the centrality
of sexual desire - everything begins and ends with such desire, but of course at many angles of the human spirit,
just as of the human face, that centrality quite properly doesn’t seem central - if one tried artificially to make the
nose central at whatever angle of vision one saw the head, very odd distortions would ensue - just so with certain
distortions of sexual desire when it is not allowed the gracefulness of knowing its centrality but has it nervously or
desperately proclaimed - the central thing, like the central god, is not to be thought of as despotic.

many less startling but still sharply notable nasal distortions of desire occur, turning the otherwise human
features into a miserable, caricatural bodge - they are all in one way or another to do with sexual desire feared, the
fear either causing the nose to be diminished almost to vanishing point or emphasised, with desperate necessity to
breathe, at some off-centre or marginal point - the fear producing a kind of cordon sanitaire round the nasal
protuberance, to ensure that other parts of the face need to acknowledge it as little as possible, so that by
consequence the nose begins to operate in a kind of savage isolation from all other facial concerns -

when i say that everything begins and ends with sexual desire (and of course i intend no safely
metaphorical or unphysical nose here, but the real physical thing) i think most of the objection to that would arise
out of a sense of nasal functioning that in one way or another had lost the fine and delicate and non-mathematical
centrality of this feature in a fine human face.

and just because most human beings, amid the damaging darkness that shadows everything, have to walk
about with damaged features, with noses smashed or distorted or painted red or surgically removed, or covered
with spiritual patches, little pieces of cloth sewn with improving mottoes or edifying pictures, there is no reason for
the skilled artist, in love with the human face, not to restore the reality he knows should be there - draw that face
as it should be, as it plainly so wants to be, as it delights to be.

*****

and as creation becomes steadily more conscious, steadily more willed and less merely automatic; as one
arrives at humanity, as humanity itself tries more and more to free itself into the willed and the self-organised,
away from the cradle of automatic and obligatory functions and protectors; so sexual desire is no longer simply
used as a means of ensuring reproduction, no longer the province of automatic bodily functions, but is more and
more manual, the camera settings not automatic as in the cheap throw-away but everything to be set by hand,
exposure time, aperture, focus, as the circumstances suggest - no longer only possible to have sex in the way
provided for by the automatic functions, the automatic secretions and lubrications, but we come into the larger
arena of what is possible by human thought, care, effort, preparation, and so into the arena where god has sex -
 32

god being wholly manual, one supposes (at least by this time) and no longer in any part the cheap automatic with
its simply envisaged set of possibilities and its predictable and satisfactory but not stunning result -

and so one bewares of arguments about various kinds of sex, that they are ‘against nature’, for this may
only mean they are not provided for in the automatic programming -

of course, one must put the other side of the picture too - there is a certain kind of photographer who
fusses so much about his preparations, his tripod and light meter, his lenses and filters, that one feels inclined to
suppose the picture is a bit low on his list of priorities - one shouldn’t forget that the snap of the shutter and the
entrance of light are really the thing, with neither too little nor too much thought beforehand.

no rules about beforehand, as usual, only a sense when the picture’s done of whether it’s as good and alive
as may be or not - and all manner of things may conspire to influence one’s sense of things -

there are times when proustian life seems a lunatic evasion of the central energy of being alive, and times
when proust seems by his elaboration precisely a celebrator of being alive - the crucial thing about a passage in
proust, perhaps, is whether a simplicity survives amid and animates its elaboration, so that the elaboration becomes
a celebration of simplicity, so that subtlety and delicacy of the most fragile and sensitive kind can be understood to
be a simple matter; not, for god’s sake, a matter of art - so sex

*****

LI

i’m reminded by the last two words of the preceding chapter of browning’s caliban upon setebos, in which
shakespeare’s caliban speculates that the divinity he knows of, his dam’s god setebos, may remarkably resemble
caliban himself - so He.

no doubt, if i were proust, i could write thirty pages upon the way in which my last two words were
prompted by a memory of the repeated phrase in browning’s poem, and upon the way in which the last two words
evoked the memory of browning from the past - no doubt in some way the memory and the evoking of it worked
together, and we don’t live in the temporal simplicity of either the one case or the other at any one moment; but i
find myself able to be interested in such a complexity while supposing it just to be a simplicity i’m not familiar
with, so that it doesn’t fill my mind with tangled knitting -

the very short chapters of this little book have been a way of abandoning the tangled knitting sufficiently
often to preserve the clear simple spaces inside oneself from which may arise the movement of a cat and not the
straining (whether ‘successful’or not) of the competing athlete - so also with the dashes which make up so much
of the punctuation of what i have written - i feel that if these few pages can’t be read with a certain unsurprised
ease then they are better not read at all.

which is so much as to say i intend no effort at changing anyone’s mind from the way it wants to be - i
think such an enterprise is hopeless anyway - rather i am trying here to make a map of the arena i might share
with someone of essentially like mind, a sketched-in map with tricky bits suggested but not lingered over (like
noses) so long as they seem about right - i’m aware that the matter of reality is of the most profound and delicate
subtlety, that the relation of a single human being to what surrounds him or her is a matter for hundreds of fine
sketches by the most skilled artist (unlike the relation of an animal to what surrounds it, which could be done in a
few) - but if we are essentially of like mind most things can be left to themselves to be understood; and if we are
not, then things are too delicate and subtle to be conveyed -

*****

LII

what i have just said still seems true, but nevertheless i do think it misrepresents the scope of the intention
with which anyone must write - and more particularly it misrepresents the total conviction with which i am
writing, the conviction that what i say is right.
 33

if it is, then it’s no good being wrong, and not even the most positive and generous thoughts about the
play of different opinions can make it seem worth being wrong for -

it would not be honest for me to pretend i don’t identify my own fundamental sense of things with the
light, and contrary things with the darkness - that being so i can really only devise a place for what one might call
the classic virtue of toleration by various ingenuities; and in any case my supposition about fear, that one should
never in any way, even the slightest, make use of it, that it is the fundamental contagion of darkness, seems to
relieve one of the necessity of the subsidiary virtue of toleration, whose existence is only necessitated by an
acceptance that in some cases fear may be used. that may also be true of a lot of other virtues.

it is not tolerance, i think, to delight in the clash of opinion about superficial things with someone whose
fundamental set of spirit you are in harmony with, but rather an appreciation of the variety of possibility - and by
contrast no quantity of agreement about superficial things will fudge over the fault line in a relationship with
someone whose set of spirit is poison to you. in such circumstances one accumulates superficial agreements in the
rather hopeless attempt to trigger off something better -

to be a fool, perhaps, is not to know what one’s fundamental set of spirit is; to play the fool is not to want
to know - foolishness has nothing to do with intelligence and is compatible with the highest levels of education. it
might arouse in one either a kind of temporary despair about the particular life being led, or a sort of respect for
the adroitness with which someone is avoiding the pressure of darkness upon him: pretend it isn’t there - to be a
fool born may not be, as ben jonson supposes, always a disease incurable, but sometimes a manoeuvre of great skill
in the face of what otherwise seems the unavoidable embrace of darkness. to live a foolish life of this sort may be a
brilliant finessing of the dark.

what powerfully conditions my thought is the supposition that darkness is never final, even though it may
have been primal.

*****

LIII

from foolishness to failure - most of the enterprises in the service of which success is demanded are
themselves so crass, so myopic, so wrong-headed, that the button labelled failure might be re-labelled ‘release to
the light’ - i have in mind a french friend of mine caught in the clutches of a successful academic career, with all
the fear-laden miasma of form-filling, report-making, decision-implementing, leadership-giving, appraising,
reproving, responsible nonsense about him on every side - if only he had failed to become a professor - if only
now he could change the habits of half a lifetime and have a good breakdown, or take spectacularly to drink, or in
some other way give grave concern to the fools above him they would devise a way of getting rid of him.

because for this friend of mine the situation is too serious to be serious about; no responsibly thought out
way of escaping the trap exists - and perhaps if the conscious mind cannot be persuaded into the jokiness of
failure, of ‘failure’, then the body will be, and will suddenly, at the most solemnly inopportune moment, let him
down, so that he falls over and is at rest.

perhaps the body is less easily seduced into darkness than the mind, so that the gradually increasing
rotundity of the steadily more important man is a ribald comment on his enterprise, and the body become a
grotesque jest peeks out constantly from behind the decent veil of a well-cut suit to cackle at the fine pretensions of
the mental and moral life.

and that grotesque jest holds hands with the physical beauty of youth, is in the same way of wisdom,
rejoicing in the inextinguishable urge to freedom that youth and beauty with no job and no status, no career, no
success, no prospects represent.

*****

LIV
 34

a most beautiful late autumn morning today - and i wonder, sitting here, whether it adds to or subtracts
from what i have said or makes no difference to mention it is a sunday - some aspects of human organisation, for
good or ill (and it may be either), seem to make less impress upon the natural world than others - to say it is an
autumn morning resonates with the position of the sun; to say it is a sunday seems simply to have little to do with
it.

sometimes one seems on the side of light by abandoning the human organisation for the natural, and
sometimes by emphasising the authority of the human: it all depends upon whether at that moment nature is
simple and in a blue sky, or alternatively red in tooth and claw - there is no attitude towards the natural world, i
think, that will automatically always produce the right answers, because the effect of darkness upon it is itself not
patterned but spotty and chaotic.

and if that is true, as i suppose it to be, of the effect of darkness in general, then it means one must always
be making fresh practical judgements, that one can never simply, as it were, read off the answer by the slide rule of
one’s life - the decision for light, or indeed for darkness, is an elementary one and will not in itself act as much of
a guide to the complex casuistry of things - one needs practice, more and more of it, to go on distinguishing the
perfect from the diminished fifth as the full orchestra is playing, especially when (as is inevitably so) you are one of
the players -

and just as, in music, the tiny semitone of difference between those two intervals takes one from best to
worst, so in the rest of life what seem the slightest differences can embrace the infinitely great transition from light
to darkness or darkness to light.

to have a sense of the vastness of the transition and of how unobtrusive the step may be that makes the
passage perhaps encourages one’s attention in the way the best poems do, where the great issues and the small
sounds claim a conjoined attention, neither having to yield to the other - “pray you undo this button” - and as
shakespeare, with his sometimes sloppy time sequences and untidy plotting, seems to acknowledge, once the vital
things are heard with great clarity in tune or out of tune, no other kind of accuracy much matters.

god wears an ordinary wristwatch.

*****

LV

when someone says something to me, proposes something as true or desirable, i think i ask of it only how
long the note of what is said goes on sounding inside me - there’s no mileage in something being true if it has no
life within you, and to subject one’s inner resonance to the external authority of what will not resonate with it, is to
live one’s life as a cracked bell, making a dull sound. - the obverse of this is to watch and see how all that one
knows is in harmonic relation together (and let no one object that one can’t see harmonics, because seeing is itself
harmonically related to hearing).

the old notion was that the heavenly spheres vibrated together in a musical perfection.

i broke off writing at this point last night, and now something has happened this morning which takes its
place - i was up before dawn, at 6 o'clock, to do a couple of hours, as usual, on the nineteenth-century letters i’m
editing - i sat down at the desk between 5 and 10 past six, amused that i wasn’t as tidily prompt to the hour as i
usually am - set out my work, with the 3 sheets of paper which are organising it (and which are so fundamental to
it that i have copies) - ticked off on one of those sheets the work i’d done yesterday and turned to consider the
letter i was to begin today - about 20 minutes later i had to check (for a cross-reference) the sheet i’d begun by
ticking and it wasn’t there - i hadn’t moved from my desk in the intervening time and a quietly thorough search
(quiet because i had a copy!) failed to turn it up - i made a second copy from the surviving copy to replace the
missing original - and now, later in the day, i’m thinking about all this.

i think the original disappeared in more than the casual sense of that word - and that physical energies
are abroad in the created universe which we are not aware of - when something surprisingly arranges itself very
 35

neatly, we are used to the vague supposition that there must be some kind of providence; but it is less often that a
shaping intervention seems to have occurred that, as it were, changes what has already happened, already exists;
and one can see that especially such a shaping intervention re-organising the already existing fabric must be very
rare if our own sense of competence with the world around us is not to be much undermined.

the hint, however, that there are parts of creation other than those whose operation we are familiar with,
and that these other parts may occasionally impinge upon ours perhaps will rather adroitly serve only to make
more sophisticated and flexible and intelligently ironic and delicately provisional our own common means of
engaging with reality.

and certainly, if the change of moral and psychological attitude i have frequently been occupied with in
this book is to be anything more than a credal curiosity, it must both have physical consequences, and attract
towards itself physical energies of a radically transforming kind, a radically mutating kind, which will reveal
unsuspected possibilities.

i cannot in the end feel much interest in the kind of experience religions offer, of a creed that aspires to
have influence in the human moral and psychological sphere but that leaves untouched the physical reality beyond.
to be on the side of light means for me an assumption that the shark’s teeth will sometime mutate; and i take heart
as a consequence from the disappearance of my piece of paper.

*****

LVI

perhaps it hardly needs saying to human beings who must accept it except in the most diaphanous and
strenuously unreal parts of their minds, that all reality is finally physical - so that we need not invoke for those
parts of physical reality separated from us, to their and our own cost, by the action of darkness, any notion of the
supernatural, that wholly fictitious creation of religious activity.

there may be parts of the universe in which the physical energies are spread out thinner, as it were, with
more nothingness in the mix, more death in the mix, than in our parts; and perhaps we may call the physical
energies of such parts energies of the spirit - whereas in our parts, which survive in recognisable form for us so
long as death does not visit them to dilute their density, greater solidity seems the order of the day - but neither the
densely physical experience of living without death in the mix nor the tenaciously surviving experience of living
with it, can afford to lose touch with the other, for dense life is, in the present condition of the universe, temporary,
of short duration, before it yields to the approach of nothingness, and spiritual life is a great survivor, of long
duration, because it has yielded so far to nothingness.

these competing disadvantages make a single preference for the one or the other physical life very short-
sighted - but the sharp differentiation between the two forms also suggests how there may (will) come a time
when it will be the sudden conjoining of differing advantages which will turn the tables on the darkness. - to be
able to see clearly those lineaments of reality on which darkness chiefly squats (because darkness is so much in the
mix), to be able to see with elasticity and perspicuously through walls and round corners and into heads and
through times and places has only to touch and hold, touch and hold, with our dense sense of what sensation is like
that has no vacuum of nothingness about it - then the powers together of the one and the other may outmanoeuvre
death and darkness.
*****

LVII

the moral and psychological persuasion i have tried to engage in in this book, that one should not allow
the death and darkness of fear into one’s thought and action, has been not for some moral end, but so that the death
which the spiritual world has suffered corporally (and which we do not experience corporally for so long as, as we
say, we are alive) should not be incorporated into our dense existence in some non-corporal form - we must, on the
contrary, be as alive in our inner attitudes as we are inevitably (though temporarily) alive in our bodies; just as in
the spiritual world those who have the light of life fully in their minds pitch their energies against any accepting of
the corporal death in their mixture, and try to be as alive in their bodies as they are in their minds.
 36

the obverse of this is truly ghastly - that one should freely allow (in the dense world) the death in one’s
mind to advance upon the life in one’s body; or (in the spiritual world, as some do) should allow the death
inevitably present in one’s body to advance into one’s mind -

*****

LVIII

in the dense world (which is where the uniting of forces against the darkness must finally take place) we
can even now, if temporarily (because corporal death can only be kept temporarily at bay), have at moments the
almost complete experience of being both mentally and corporally alive (although the boundaries of our vision of
the universe are limited by the dark) - whereas in the spiritual world the experience of being corporally alive must
be a hard-won imaginative ‘figment’ that requires immense mental life to keep going, even though that mental life
sees beyond boundaries that hem us in.

they need us; we need them - we need to credit their boundlessness; they need to credit our corporal life.

*****

LIX

a sad though common sight for a spirit full of light to see a human being in our part of creation with a
mind deeply damaged by annihilating darkness, either suffered uncomprehendingly or (worse) rejoiced in - and to
see that darkness in the mind seep into and attack the physical life which is so vital a thing that the spirit is deeply
dependent on it to ‘figment’ a physical life for himself.

the vivid centre of the physical life is sexual energy and it is this the darkness chiefly makes for, so the
enlightened spirit will see with huge disappointment that sexual energy made jagged and fragmentary or quiescent
or ferocious as it succumbs to the dark - worst of all with boys because it is here that sexual energies are able to be
at their most carelessly intense -

*****

LX

religions, being generally among the most skilled and accomplished creations of a darkness intent on
using as much light as possible in order to disguise its purposes, often give the uncannily accurate sense of being
sensitively focussed in geometrically precisely the reverse of the direction the victory of light would require.

so for example with the common religious subordination of the physical to the spiritual - a spirit full of
light must be torn somewhat between amusement and despair to see the corporal preacher disparage the greatest
gift of energy he has to offer in the struggle against the dark - to see the corporal preacher recommend the very
absences of physical desire the enlightened spirit has to struggle so hard to supply for himself, to fuck, to eat, to
sleep, to shit -

the skilled darkness uses light to weave the net of deceit, for the preacher will in the act of disparagement
or indeed as the reason for it, set his face against greed and physical violence, pain (sometimes) and sickness,
death and decay.
*****

LXI

even though it may seem strenuous and odd for a few chapters to think as i have been thinking, there is
really no need to do any more in the cause of light than trust our most basic responses, for even the most eloquent
preacher of the supremacy of the spirit will look forward to his tea after the sermon -

we must hope, i think (no: expect) that the time will come when the channels are so far open between the
divided parts of the universe that physicality can seep back into the world of spirits, so that their elasticity in time
 37

and place becomes a physical reality - then also we can look forward to the disappearance of any competition for
or between times and places; the disappearance of any territorial instinct of a geographical or temporal kind,
because there will be space enough for all possibilities -

to tie down the terrific energies of physical reality to compete for singularities of place and time, to
remove its intended elasticity, must have ensured most of the operation of darkness in our world, where there is
always competitive struggle between many for what only one can have, a struggle that has seemed so basic to a
sense of value as to reduce to a mere device for children the notion that everyone has a prize -

but if the channels are opened again, everyone has a prize; and there is room in the spaciousness of
created reality for the accomplishment of all its desires.

*****

LXII

since there is nothing in the world of spirits that has not at some point been physical, since that world of
spirits (whether of human beings or all other things besides that live in the light) is waiting for its entrance again
into physical reality, not by the interim method of singular physical reincarnation but by the final elastic method of
total physical restoration, like blood to a cramped limb again, then when the restoration comes it will be upon our
own ground, not like some ethereal last trump in a theological heaven, but like this chair against which i’m
leaning - the thing familiar, solid, though excitingly full of possibilities unexpected before, of renovation, of
multiplicity -

once one is assured of its basic familiarity, one can be content perhaps not to speculate much more upon
the nature of things when darkness has gone; rather as once one knows one’s lover and is on terms of reality with
him, the exciting and unforeseen possibilities of love can simply be allowed to arise - the real thing is to be at ease
in the solid normality of love -

and so too perhaps in the solid normality of a reality without darkness - which will be a world principally
without fear. i begin to realise that what i have been doing in this little book is to habituate myself in every turn of
my consciousness to the absence of fear, to the absence of that nothingness, that yawning emptiness in the pit of the
stomach - to habituate myself to a world more amiably compacted in its physical delight once the spaces made by
fear have been revealed as the spaces they are and filled in -

as things are for now we are used to isolated moments of delight, used to surviving or negotiating across
the space to the next isolated moment - and we are used to deriving some murky fear-laden falsity of wisdom from
the notion it won’t last, or someone might take it, or you’ll have to pay for it. by contrast, i protest, one should live
without such false wisdom; live so you can have love and see another have it, without the isolating poison of
jealously guarding your own preserve against time or a rival; live as though the elastic simultaneity were already
there present in our physical midst -

*****

LXIII

in the little book of blank pages i’m filling up with this writing i’ve written first on all the rectos and then
turned it and written back again on the versos - so that as i reach the last few blank sides i’m writing on the back
of the first things i said -

which is, i hope, not only an image for the coherence of what i’ve said but an assurance of it - on the back
of the page i’m now writing on i am contesting the belief that no order is achievable without fear - in the pages
that have followed i have opposed that belief and its consequences in every way i could conceive, and have
explored the topography of a reality without fear in all the ways i could imagine -

what i propose, i think, is more irrevocable, more irreversible, than a belief; its effect upon one is closer to
the effect of a powerful drug than of a body of propositions, and the drug works hand in glove with the basic
predisposition against being frightened that is in all of us -
 38

the first question one should try to ask, very quietly and with absolutely genuine concern to know the
answer, so that this is no kind of semi-hostile ploy, of another human being who is trying to frighten you, is why;
and then if the second question can be asked without any shadow of aggressive manoeuvre (or when it can): what
are you frightened of yourself? these are the fundamental questions, no others, and if they cannot be answered then
no other answers are of consequence.

it is difficult to ask them, however, without causing fear, because the willingness to frighten and to be
afraid are clutched so close to the psychological centre that such questions may seem to be groping for the essential
privacies that make one person’s life his own and not another’s - it is as though darkness has particularly homed
in upon, has engaged particularly closely with, our basic predisposition against being frightened, so that sometimes
the finest probe cannot split apart the join between what is natural to us and what is not -

it is not, i think, that we are not aware of the distinction within us between what is natural to us and what
not, with a perfectly sure and confident instinct; the problem is to make of that perceived distinction a workable
disjunction in the ordinary circumstances of every day, so that we are not frightened all the more because we don’t
want to be, fearful of what we dislike so much.

*****

LXIV

and now a most beautiful late autumn morning in the middle of wales, with the sun pouring over the ridge
of the hills to the south and east - and a sense gathering in me, because of that and because there is little left now
to write of this book, that one should turn from difficulties and complications to ease and simplicity - i spent a
small part of yesterday looking up some things on the internet, with the overwhelming sense, as i waited for the
machine to creak through its work, not of the amazing facility of communication there is now, but of how
extraordinarily cumbered it all is - the clutter of rules and scaffolding through which one makes one’s way to
whatever has most recently been written about browning, threatened at every step by expulsion from the game if
you put a foot wrong, reminds one very much of the extreme complication of creed, desire, culture, affinity, law,
custom, regulation browning’s own characters find themselves in in the great monologues -

but what draws one to browning is his sense that beyond a certain point complications crumble into
whatever still greater chaos lies before them as they lose hold, and that out of this emerges unscathed at last the
human spirit, of the dying bishop remembering his mistress, for example, in his last words: “so fair she was!” -

“so fair she was!” - and the ‘was’ of the dying man is drawing irresistibly close to the present tense as she
is in his mind and desire - near to death he turns so powerfully towards the simplicity of life: “so fair she was!” -
out of the tangle of intrigue, politics, jealousies, fears, persuadings, out of the chaotic system in which he has lived:
“so fair she was!” -

and let no one say he merely idealises the past and the beauty of his girl, that things weren’t really
altogether like that - as though what is real is the grey tumble of half worn or half worn out things for us to shuffle
or fling ourselves about in - because such moments come clarified from the past into the present to join the
autumn sun this morning and they fit us, they are our proper dress of experience.

*****

LXV

the great tyrannies hold down the human spirit not so radically by the apparatus of law and convention as
by offering a fundamental account of reality to be believed - to escape so deep-rooted, so apparently real a hold, it
may be one has to come to seem almost insane, even to oneself, as one ceases to be persuaded of what any child in
the system could tell you was plain even if regrettable fact -

it will need, in such circumstances, all the resources of the human imagination to replace the reality by
which one is surrounded by an alternative reality, which may seem only to be held in place by the unsupported
 39

energy of one’s desire that it should be so. if that energy cannot in the end find support from outside and yet
nevertheless persists it may come to seem as imprisoning a fantasy as the original tyranny.

but i think we should not suppose on occasion too quickly that no outside help will come - one sees in the
accounts of opposition to insufferable creeds the whole range of outcome, from the collapse into fantasy or
compliance to the sudden astounding response from outside the tyranny that reality need not be so - and the
response may be very long in coming.

the tyranny of darkness and its energy fear is the most established of all, its account of reality seems the
most unshakably real - it may be tomorrow that help will come from the outside to those who imagine it need not
be so, or it may be the longest of times we must wait - but however long the wait, let us not be forced back into
compliance with fear, nor into deep dreams of a time when darkness ceases; but rather look steadily for the outside
evidence that darkness and fear is the lunacy, ground ourselves always on the evidence that light and delight are
normal, expect with no hectic cries but with a steady stubborn certainty the time when we shall be, in common
with all created things and the high god himself, fully physical, free of the singularities of time and place, undying
unfrightening and unafraid.

*****

LIVING IN THE SUN

the flakes of darkness drift through the light of the universe, some huge, bigger than worlds, some smaller
than dust, some combining readily with the light, others not. i try to figure what it is like to live in a way that
dodges the flakes, supposes their end. i contemplate in these first lines of a book to follow sitting in medici’s how to
 40

write in a way that makes no compromise with central desires, no compromise with the sun, (and yet which doesn’t
seem disgraceful or disgusting to a fellow speaker of this language bred to a reality a million miles distant from the
sun, and with all the telescopic sensibilities that an acknowledgement of the sun’s importance to us and a relief at
its distance from us have developed.) - for the universe is not the home counties and cannot for ever consent to be
kept within their boundaries, no matter what skills, of irony, command, deprecation, sentiment, ignorance,
depreciation, are deployed by the boundary commissioners. -

i’ve just got off the train at carmarthen behind a most beautiful boy in tee shirt and shorts, with a tight
necklace round the slenderest neck imaginable, and watched him meet his pretty girl friend on the platform - and
thought, what are the reasons that would prevent an immediate full joining in desire between the one physical
beauty and the other - a thousand reasons, a thousand reasons, and i want to engage with such reasons in what
follows in this book.

*****

II

if you feel uneasy read no further, or turn off the tape - it will have cost you nothing; and this book will be
defenceless against your dislike, too easy a prey to your anger, not worth responding to with hostility - for me too
nothing is gained by outraging the reader and it would be a dark stupidity to suppose otherwise. nor is there only
my way of saying things.

*****

III

the smallest unit of a roman legion was the tent, in which eight men lived and slept - indeed when a
legion marched in step (pede quadrato as it was called) it did not do so in the way of modern armies but with only
each group of eight keeping together in step - such men as these were taught savageries on what would seem in
modern times a small scale; and the practice of sharing round a tent for sex a boy captured from the enemy would
have passed without other than envious remark - let us neither be easy with the small scale of the savagery nor
romanticise the sex (though there must have been times when the sex, unlike the savagery, was other than savage) -
if soldiers were found in the modern british army sharing a boy there would be headlines in the newspapers and
imprisonments; yet they are taught to contemplate and are trained to assist in slaughter of a kind and on a scale
unhoped for in the bloodiest imagining of the legionary -

they are taught how to obliterate nations while retaining the sexual respectabilities of the home counties -
odd that if the world is blown to bits it will not be by a modern version of attila the hun, but by a senior soldier who
wouldn’t dream of insulting a lady, much less of having sex with a boy - as though we needed to be reassured about
the scale of modern military possibility by the niceness of those who are trained to it - the airmen who dropped
napalm on the natives in vietnam were not allowed to paint FUCK on their aircraft; absolutely; i think that would
have been the darkest misuse of sex; and i’m against napalm too -

i suppose the disparity between small politenesses and the willingness to use an immense power to kill
would seem only a tragi-comic holding on to some shred of civilisation in the face of barbarism if i did not find the
sexual habits of the home counties, or those recommended by the three-personed mutation of a semitic deity,
sinister and ludicrous -

*****

IV

?will your view of reality only hold together and make sense if you’re wearing a suit, or on your knees, or
sitting behind a desk, or opening a letter addressed to Professor X, or chairing a meeting, or giving a lecture - but
not naked with a stiff cock, or legs apart asking to be fucked. a dog’s view of reality holds together whether it is
curled up courteously by the fire, or running in a field, or after a bitch, or legs in the air waiting to be tickled or
excited - never act with dogs, because they never act.
 41

just as a body that is incompatible with nakedness leaves something to be desired, so a creed or motivation
or conviction or manifesto. it is clothing that produces wars because into clothing can run the various fictions
whose origin is elsewhere than in the marvel of beauty of the unconstrained human form. who, if they allowed
themselves to be swayed by the toes of a child’s foot, could bear to mess on with the theology of grace or the
politics of national regeneration?

not that physical beauty (and the clothing that genuinely, not cock-teasingly, celebrates it) shuts out
thought, excludes philosophy or the other attempts to understand, as witness (i hope) this book which has near its
beginning the boy on the carmarthen train; but that the steady, undissolvable argument-of-presence of such beauty
should show up the tawdry boredom or menace of creeds or devisings which merely act the part of centrality.

the central criminal court gives us a good picture of all such spurious centrality. a human being in heavy
disguise as something else exacts complementary disguise from those who appear before him; the distrust of
nakedness is here so fragile and extreme that it can tolerate not the smallest hint of the human, and language,
gesture, facial expression, bodily posture must all be carefully controlled to exclude the virus of reality; reality is
contempt of court. the contrast and parallel with circus clowns is instructive: the central clown in the old bailey
wears a dish mop on his head and the audience is constrained by threat not to laugh. if you cannot laugh at that,
you cannot laugh at anything; any absurdity may now pass as acceptable. the circus clown, by contrast, with the
mop on his head knows and delights in the fact that all attempt on his part to make that absurdity acceptable will
fail.

*****

we use the word pornography to describe the kind of sexual expression in pictures or words that we don’t
like (or think we shouldn’t like). i want to use it, consequently, to designate the sort of nakedness that is only
apparently so, the pictures, or the psychological states, that though technically unclothed still in fact wear the
clothes that have apparently been discarded. whether this is the nakedness of a posing muscleman or of a crucified
body at the centre of a doctrine, or of a girl wearing the latest fashion in nudity, or of a man meeting you in
conversation less candidly than he supposes you suppose, such pornography does what pornography is alleged to
do: it tends to corrupt - more than that it tends to weariness of spirit. this is to be distinguished, i think, from the
pretence at nakedness which rejoices not at all in the difficulty of leaving clothing behind, though it finds that
difficulty only partly overcomable - no one can be free always of that condition, nor of reliance on the hope that
goes with it, the hope for more complete nakedness than one can at this moment persuade oneself to.

there is pretence and pretence; some sorts go in one direction and some in another. and the wounds that
fear has cut into us from our earliest days alive can produce a scar tissue it may seem virtually impossible to live
without - so the little child, a boy, of a friend of mine, one term at school, seeing at 4½ years old his xmas presents
in a pile, said in a manly voice to disguise his pleasure as he expressed it: “fuckin’ hell!” - and was gently but
decidedly reproved and a little shamed for that, so that the knife cut again into the scar tissue formed over the
previous fear learnt at school, to make it grow a little thicker. he was reproved, of course, for bad language.

what chance has he?

and if at 4½ years old there seems already almost no chance, then what of the brutalised and embarrassed,
hounded and terrified children at bigger schools, surrounded by fears both from the tribe of the child and the tribe
of the adult, their sexual energy cut down to a savage and hostile minimum possible or to a deadly quietude, under
the flail of fashion and propaganda produced or mediated by human beings who themselves are terrified.

the other day, at the post office on the corner, i heard a rag of quotation from keats torn and drowned in a
cheerful sixth-form conversation of desperate animation.

*****

VI
 42

i have been imagining what durham cathedral might seem like in 50,000 years’ time:

THE TEMPLE RUINS AT DU-ROME

this ruined temple is one of the most impressive remains of the primeval era. it was probably abandoned
about halfway through the third millenium, at the approach of the ice age, and it seems likely that it had been
constructed about 1½ millenia before that. du-rome is in the midst of an almost totally uninhabited area, at long/lat
W1.35/54.47N, and for the last 60 stadia there are no transfer lines and wheels are needed, but the trek is worth
making.

the temple seems to have been the centre of a semitic mystery cult and to have been devoted to the worship
of the god jah-we (traces of whose cult are found elsewhere, even from before the primeval era). in later phases of
the cult the god seems to have developed a triple form, or a series of 3 aspects, represented by jah-we, an
anthropomorphic aspect called jeh-su, and a purely spiritualised aspect.

it was the deity in this triple form who seems to have been worshipped in the temple at du-rome. at this
distance in time, nearly 50 millenia afterwards, much is doubtful, but perhaps a subsidiary deity was also involved;
for among the few things recovered from the site has been (the language is largely indecipherable) a paper
fragment with the letters:

BUS..ME.ABL.

which may refer to a god buh-se (perhaps to be identified with the bah-al documented from before the primeval
era).

the precise form of the cult at the temple of du-rome is unclear. altars have been found, but there is little
in the animal and human remains directly to suggest human or animal sacrifice. we do know, however, that in the
later stages of development of what are now generally called killer-cultures imaginary or symbolic sacrifices of
either human or ‘divine’ victims took place, and perhaps these altars were for that bloodless purpose, a bloodless
purpose which nevertheless ministered to the deeply-rooted antagonisms and competitions of a killer-culture.

it seems likely that the du-rome site was the centre of a priestly cult, then, which ministered to the need
for and the sense of significance of blood-letting, symbolic or otherwise, in this particular killer-culture. if this is
so, then we can say with reasonable certainty, from the study of other such cultures, that the code of behaviour
instituted and fostered by such a cult would have been what is generally called orifice-restrictive: that is, that the
priestly power will have been focussed and wielded by a set of ritual prohibitions as to the use of human orifices.
some such cultures have been found, for instance, in which introduction of sperm into the bum mouth, or sputum
into the auricles, was visited by severe punishment or death. it is well known that ritual prescriptions taking on
moral authority focussed priestly power in primeval societies.

the society grouped about this massive ruin would not have appealed to us, even though the ruin itself is
worth an arduous visit. killer-societies were not only very often physically at war with other such societies; they
fought also in less evidently bloody ways when exhausted temporarily by war; and they fought within themselves,
taking it that what we know as surface distinctions of, for instance, gender and age, race and belief, were
fundamental features of reality.

*****

VII

i want to think a little about the difference and the resemblance between the life we know and the life that
goes on after we ‘die’.

if one can think of the absolutely basic energy by which there is something existing rather than nothing,
one describes it best as electrical (we bear in mind that our own ordinary ideas of electricity are very elementary
and scratching the surface).
 43

then the world as we know it with all its physical nature is a kind of solidified electrical energy, and we
put an enormous amount of effort into keeping our solid human bodies solid and substantial (and it is our effort;
just as it is by our own effort that we feed ourselves and keep ourselves clean and warm). because so much
electrical energy goes into this, the amount left over for knowing and imagining things is quite small, so our
knowledge and our power to imagine vividly, to ‘bring things to life’, is very small.

if that is the condition of existence for us and all we see around us, then for those who have ‘died’ the
terrific electrical effort at keeping a solid physical reality going has abruptly (at ‘death’) been given up. as a result
the amount of energy available for knowing and imagining is enormous, and it becomes possible for them to know
in a wide sense we cannot dream of, to move back and forth in time and space, seeing inside and all around the
physical solidity they still inhabit but do not any longer contribute energy to.

when we imagine things we can only produce rather dim pictures (imagining, for instance, in mid-
summer what it would be like in mid-winter); and when we do the kind of imagining we call memory, it’s always a
bit vague and faded. when they imagine; for instance to imagine themselves suddenly from one side of the world to
another, or from one physical life they have been in to another, there is nothing vague about it - they are there. they
can be whatever of all the ages they choose to be at this moment or that, and they can be whatever in any past solid
physical life they have been.

the great tear or rent in reality is the division between the kind of electricity by which they live, and the
kind by which we live - because the full desire of real creatures is both to know vividly, to imagine vividly, to be
agile; and also to be solid, physical, down to earth. and so, in physical life after physical life, we move (as it were
restlessly) from one state of reality to another, through successive physical experiences and successive times
between. we move restlessly across the boundary line we sometimes call ‘birth’ and sometimes ‘death’.

whatever it is that resists the whole business of existing made the breach and all the lesser breaches we
know by the names of fear and aggression that go with it, and the creator god amid his creation and, so much as
may be, with it, tries to remake the connection between the two great islanded fragments and to bridge across the
rest of the bewildering variety of hostilities and terrors.

*****

VIII

the god of immediate desire in classical mythology is a boy, and whoever first had the instinct that it must
be so had an accurate feeling.

and similarly if we think about the boy pharaoh now generally called tutankhamun, the golden mask of
whose face survives for us. the boy’s father had understood more about the high god than anyone before or since,
and had called him (naming him after the disc of the sun) aten. he called his son, the boy pharaoh, tutankhaten,
the ‘living image of aten’ - and even though the reasserted old priesthood, when the boy became pharaoh (at the
age of about 9), obliged him to change his name to tutankhamun, the living image of the high god remains for us
in the mask of his face when he died about 10 years later.

if what i have said in chapter VII seems attractive, then it will be clear that the best point of
approximation for us between the islanded halves of reality will be where our own solid physicality is at its most
flexible, imaginatively energetic, agile, comprehensive of desires: fullest of possibilities for male and female, child
and adult, play and serious, assertive and yielding, solid and airy.

i do not speak of boys as we generally see them in our killer-culture; who are taught to be intent on adult
savageries and competition, to aspire to be ‘men’; or perhaps who (if their intelligence absolutely precludes this
path to manhood) are offered instead quieter, more intelligent, but no less foolish opportunities to become powerful
officials.

in many ways, it is girls in our society who seem to preserve the kind of quiet poise, the kind of reserve in
the face of propaganda, the kind of delicacy that one might associate with that agile point that comes closest to the
 44

other islanded energies of reality. a girl brutalised by fashions of dress and behaviour offered by the adult world is,
for sure, as promising an adult citizen as a boy similarly transformed; but perhaps it happens less radically with
them, even less often. what is certain is that very very few adult possibilities are open which might give house
room to the agility one seeks: an agility sufficiently delicate would be desperately close to failure in killer-culture
adult terms, and failure (either the monetary reality of it or the disabling sense of it) breeds no flexibility of mind,
no delight, no free run of desire.

* * * * *.

IX

what is spoken of conventionally as evolution is evidence both of the potency and of the non-omnipotence
of the creator god (which i wrote about in sitting in medici's); of his long learning and his struggle with darkness,
which has also (as i suggested in medici's) got in on the business of creation.

evolution by jumps and not by gradual modification (as, for instance, most emphatically in the matter of
the appearance of wings: what bird could have fared other than disastrously in trying to fly with an evolving
wing?) is the pattern of the learning process of god, as the solidly physical creation builds towards bridging the gap
between it and the other part of created reality (where a similar struggle has gone on, and continues in its final
phase).

in what seems also to us like the last most rapid and tumultuous phase of the evolving struggle between
light and darkness, now within the human race itself, the stakes are highest, the contest at its most acute and
crucial. in our time especially we see the most evident forms of light (of delight, kindness, gentleness, concern, co-
operation) writhing in contest with the most emphatic forms of darkness (destruction and tyranny on a scale and of
a subtlety not dreamt of by the most intelligently oppressive and savage of the predatory dinosaurs in their complex
of light and dark, of beautifully functioning physicality and slaughter of physical prey).

with what perplexity god must have contemplated the pteranodon, a creature most bewitchingly adapted
for flight and a deadly killer of the fish it lived on; with what perplexity wondered whether to abandon the miracle
of flight if it could not be at the expense of vegetation rather than fish; with what puzzlement wondered at what
level of consciousness animal prey ceased to be like plant food.

we must take the potency and the non-omnipotence of god seriously if we are to help him and be helped
by him in this last phase of the struggle, where all might be lost or won. we must try to work out with him how to
live in the sun, how to live a life that has no relationship with darkness either overt or covert, and that sacrifices no
atom of energy in avoiding the furiousness of the dark.

*****

it may be that in the earlier stages of his potency, when he had only just escaped from being no more than
an inert function of darkness’ self-definition as not-existing, god was hardly aware that darkness, nothingness, was
in on the act of making. for as electrical charge streamed out, as gases whirled in explosive separation or
combination, then later as rock collided with rock or sea swamped land, or even later as foliage grew and withered,
perhaps no distinction was apparent between the energetic movement of things and aggression. if the impulse
behind one rock crashing down and smashing another is in part the energetic movement of creation and in part the
urge to destroy, then it may seem easy nevertheless not to realise this, nor to see where the distinction lies nor how
to make the distinction into a total separation of the light from the malignity (now defined) of the dark.

if two great animals, by contrast, are trying to tear each other to pieces, the role of darkness is more
manifest, more proclaimed; and clearer still as the developed self-consciousness of human beings turns aside from
delight in existing to busy itself with the malign ‘delight’ of destruction.

the matter is now fully in the open. but also by now darkness has been infiltrating the act of creation for so
long as to seem ineradicably part of it, a necessary constituent. how, for instance, do the transformations which
alone make possible human life, of eating, or making a house out of a tree, not call upon a willingness to destroy?
 45

the defining of the separation between light and dark and the resolute pushing of that defined separation
into an unbridgeable gulf as the final act of creation, is now hampered not by an overall primal obscurity which
makes the role of one look much like the role of the other, but by a complexity which seems to make light
dependent on darkness and which quietly and very nearly successfully blurs into undefined conglomeration what
light does need in the way of transformations with the act of destruction.

the opposing of darkness, then, is still a matter of seeing where the distinction lies between it and light,
but the distinction lies in many hidden places, and we have to ask may we eat corn but not other animals or other
human beings; may we make a table out of a tree but not a purse out of alligator skin or a lampshade from the skin
of a human baby killed for the purpose.

*****

XI

the malignity of christianity, in practice and in creed, has now to a significant degree been tamed by the
context of humane unbelief with which it has had to contend for several hundred years. it is possible now to be a
christian and not either in theory or in the practical arrangement of life and society suppose a deity who sends
people to his hell, the ‘everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels’ as the gospel of matthew has it.

but we see by the contemporary example of islam that the seeds of ferocity in a religion may be re-
awakened once the restraining context of unbelief is removed, and there is no reason to suppose that the dreadful
certainty of falsehood might not again in the appropriate circumstances produce damnations and burnings.

- no reason at all, either, to suppose that unbelief is other than fitfully humane, that it does not produce its
own damnations and burnings, human beings terrified, cities bombed, living things incinerated, on a scale much
greater than in the tyrannies of the past because the instruments are more sophisticated. - this is the complexity of
the situation in which we live: where, for example, a gentle christian may rebuke an unbelieving warmonger;
where even a pope may forget the full force of the dreadful creed to which he is technically committed and speak,
full of light, for tolerance, humanity, peace, in the name of a gentle god.

*****

XII

the grand inquisitor of spain, who had spent his life punishing heresy with the greatest torments that
could be devised, discovered when he died and looked for his reward that there was no such thing as heresy, and
that what seemed now like light was in the midst of the practice of unspeakable vices. what was he to do?

he spent many years searching for his God, searching for what alone could justify the life he had led. in a
reality where he could adopt what shape and garb best suited him, where he could have been the little boy he was
before he became a dominican, if he had wished, he chose to remain the Grand Inquisitor and to associate with
those who understood reality in these terms and could search with him for the Unfathomable God. no one stopped
him, though of course he could do no practical evil, he could light no fires to burn the people round him. after a
very long time and a number of additional lives in the physical world intended to help in the hunt for God, in
which he was variously police chief, terrifying headmaster and famous soldier in a desperate lost cause (this last a
particularly subtle search), he gave up and yielded to the gentle persistence of light, joining first tentatively and
then with sudden overwhelming relief in its unspeakable vice.

the story is true. and many times repeated, in little versions and large. we see it at some point of the
process in the lives of little and great frighteners - the God may differ superficially but is always unfathomably
demanding in his justice and for his rights, and is always feared by those who serve him/it.

*****

XIII
 46

simplicity is perhaps the characteristic of the flatly wrong and the flatly right; complexity is what is in
between. i was reading the other day an article opposing the arid scholastical complexities of literary theory in
which the writer said that “each new race, class, gender, and historicist theory has ontogenetically recapitulated the
philogeny of the Levi-Strauss/Derrida encounter.” i don’t think this was a joke, this incomprehensible dollop of
academic sludge; i think the writer was less free than he supposed of the status conferred by theoretical prose,
unable to struggle to either shore of simplicity. -

there is some impressive writhing energy at work in complexity, which can be contemplated with terror or
excitement from the shore of falsity, though with bored indifference from the shore of truth. - the paradigm case for
universities is of complex argument leading away from the hopeless imprisonment of false belief, and the twentieth
century has seen many times over the mind of man liberated by impressively complex demonstration from the
belief the world was created in 4004BC.

the liberations have been perhaps also somewhat indiscriminate - to be freed of the fairy tales of the book
of genesis or the gospel of john is one thing; but to have the relatively simple and useful ‘truths’ of newtonian
physics replaced as fundamentals by the fairy tales of quantum mechanics seems less alluring. you have to be a
believer in the legends of the more unlikely saints to swallow without gasping the propositions of this particular
branch of twentieth-century complexity.

a right simplicity, whether of language, dress, demeanour or habit, is not either naivety or unsubtlety.
indeed to aim for simplicity is to set oneself in the direction of skill, of the easiness with which things may be done,
and to see opening up a world of subtle tones that the noise of jargon or the jostle of complex tasks blankets out -
and so also i think with the emotions: in the sun they offer themselves as just the thing they are - antony says it,
near the beginning of shakespeare's play: “the nobleness of life is to do thus” - and the tones with which such
emotional simplicity opens itself do not need to be anxiously or curiously investigated, classified, mapped, half-
understood, ordered into some clumsily evolved scheme or terminology; they will, given half a chance, flit free and
be instead fully understood because uninvestigated.

i try to keep my thoughts simple, i try not to be wrong, as i write this short book. - i try to suggest a reality
which is simply so different from the run of things as usually considered that it can only be given some chance to
express itself by a series of snapshots. the reasons against what i’m writing, or against the way i’m writing (which
are much the same thing), will have been suggesting themselves from chapter I onwards, now decidedly, now more
tentatively, to any reader who has bothered to persevere this far. - i have no need to formulate the reasons; they
have their space round what i’ve been saying; i have no desire to engage with them; if something flits free of them
in the mind of this or that reader, that’s what i hoped might happen.

*****

XIV

if we suppose that reality cannot be as the newspapers, television and radio tell us it is; and that it is worth
trying other possibilities; then there is no negotiating with those purveyors of a world view. - they are too
clamorous, too ubiquitous, too skilfully insistent to be tuned down a little so that other thoughts may emerge - it is
worth the experiment of trying, let us say for a year, to live entirely without them.

news and opinion will still filter through, but will not crowd in with a sense of its daily importance. one’s
mind will slowly clear; bit by bit there will be more time to think; one will get out of the habit of having parts
(perhaps large parts) of one’s thinking done for one by commercial or political or religious enterprises with designs
upon one.

there will be lots of books still to read, some people to talk to, lots of human knowledge and belief to
consider, parts at any rate of which were invisible before. - since one will have given up what insists upon one’s
reading or listening or watching, one will naturally not easily gravitate in this free year to books or people that
themselves insist or are willing to make of one a follower.

one will probably avoid contact with authority, because in giving up this triad of things one has broken
with the main authoritative thrust of the society we inhabit. - one can instead be abstracted, miles away, head in the
clouds, as often adolescents try desperately to be by simply not getting up - no need, though, to deny oneself the
 47

pleasure of getting up once one has become thoroughly accustomed to thinking one’s own thoughts and saying
nothing about them to hearers who will jump savagely upon them.

one may find a few people who will listen with courtesy and be pleased that one does so in return. - if
there had been enough people like this at any moment in the past much suffering would have been avoided - if
there were enough people like it now, we would be a free society.

*****

XV

midday at the very end of august, and the sun is hot on the river loire, though not here in the shade. on hot
days in france one does if possible very little apart from being alive; and in the sun of my title (the reality; of which
this hot day is a vivid analogy) nothing is to be done in addition to being alive, nothing to validate or justify, to
assert or privilege - indeed even the act of writing has to be of other than its usual character if it is to find itself
happening: not an engagement with the anxious complexities of other writing, some addition to the sum of human
complexity, but rather a way of gazing at all that.

there is a simplicity arrived at by subtraction, which while it may seem strong and direct, also demands
the sacrifice of lesser things: so an overwhelming sexual desire that dispenses with all preliminary nicety - there is
a simplicity arrived at by inclusion, which has without thinking filled and satisfied all more displaced or
preliminary actions: so a sexual desire that carries swiftly with it in a totality, swept up by it, all less complete
gestures of desire.

i remember when i was about twelve seeing an older boy kissing a girl in a caravan, with an intense
riveted energy: and i suppose i thought then it was the beginning of sex between them: now i suppose it was the
substitute for it.

when god sees you there are no passionate words or kisses; whatever is preliminary is a delicate lace-like
outreach from inclusive desire, the flutter of an eye, the syllable of a tongue - no foothills masquerading as
mountain tops.

*****

XVI

i have friends who are part of the time occupied in sending other human beings to prison (at least they
don’t do it for money); i have friends who kill living things for fun. the one activity is put beyond the reach of
question by muttering the mantra ‘public duty’, and the other by mention of ‘country sports’ - i have had enough of
duty and enough of sport; i cannot go on doing what i have done hitherto, allowing my silence in response to such
things to be interpreted as dissent.

after all, the evolution of human history has demonstrated that in any age those who are for greater
gentleness, less fear, less punishment, less savagery have always been right, in the end right... and from the ranks
of prisoners have emerged many enduring kinds of greatness, none from among the ranks of gaolers. in some
momentary fashion, a novel savagery may aspire to a little standing, but it will be always at risk from a succeeding
savagery; and the whole succession of savageries again and again outmanoeuvred, outflanked by the apparently
ridiculous suggestion that one should never flog a prisoner to death. why not? no reason i can give. one just
shouldn’t. let that little bit of light free into the world and it is self-propelled.

dickens when writing of the prison chapel at newgate describes how the condemned pew,
where those who are to be hanged take part in a part of their own burial service on the Sunday preceding their
execution, is its central feature. formerly, he says, the man to be executed shared his pew with the coffin in which
his body was to be placed. now they don’t put the coffin there any more. why not? no doubt the move to remove the
coffin was opposed, but those who opposed it were unable to counter the defenceless suggestion that it shouldn’t be
done any more... and now things have gone further and even the less explicit late twentieth-century ways of
destroying human beings by fear in prisons are ripe for defenceless, irresistible revulsion.
 48

i am in that stream of things; i think the stream can’t be stopped, though it can be temporarily dammed or
diverted.

*****

XVII

the real difficulty of god against the darkness is that it is not strength against strength, but delicacy
against force; and the more the high god is engaged the more delicate he is, the finest of scalpel edges, the most
acute discriminations, the most sensitively arousable horrors and aversions: and this against the brute force and
skilful insensitivity of the dark - the more effectively god engages with the dark the more vulnerable he is to its
force - so he must play the best game of chess he can against an opponent almost as skilful and backed by a
terrifyingly unskilled will to win at whatever cost - god cannot try to win at whatever cost; that would be to lose.

just as darkness got in on the act of creation, so it may use for its purposes things and ways light in
themselves - just as we see in the forms of military and political death spread about the world, so on that broader
front directly of death itself, the weaponry is not only evident carnage, evidently unspeakable gun-running, evident
malice, but also disinformation, the propaganda production of reason or reasons, the use of humane notions with
quietly savage intent - the high god has not the same range of weaponry, will never be dark, must with
consummate footwork be utterly simple -

and the thing for him is not to be deflected from the central effect of darkness, which is death itself - there
is opposition to be brilliantly or less brilliantly well engaged in, by as many as love the light, to all the ways in
which human beings visit misery upon their fellows or the neighbouring creation; but the main deployment of the
darkness is not in war or poverty or oppression or natural disaster, but in the calamity of death itself which
underlies all this.

*****

XVIII

if i suggest, as i want to, that as many people as possible should stop watching television, should stop
buying newspapers, should buy of other things only what they really need, then i am going about to cause a great
deal of fear. because the makers and sellers of things no longer in such demand as before would, if this suggestion
were at all successful, experience panic. this would also be so, and would cause a great deal of resultant
unhappiness and fear, if i were to suggest that our government should stop gun-running, because our economy, and
even more the economy of the united states, depends to an appreciable degree on the manufacture and sale, to
almost whoever will buy them, of weapons of unspeakable atrocity, with which our governments also arm
themselves, and which they must use from time to time to keep the whole weapons industry feasible and to provide
active demonstrations of the degree of ferocity it offers for sale.

the rationale of the market system, now even more dominant in our society than it was twenty years ago,
is that the financial success of the company is more important than the people it employs; a neat and exact reversal
of the sane view. - this being so, any threat to the company’s profits will be visited first on the employees, starting
with the least important. - so the least important people, those least involved in the barbarity of the barbarous
products of a barbaric company, will suffer first from any effective attempt to suggest that the products should not
be bought - and not to buy things is the only way to counter the forces at work in a market economy run for profit.

if i suggest that the benignity of my views is more important than the people, beginning with the least
important, they will unavoidably and without direct intention harm, i set out on a path not unlike the one sketched
out in the previous paragraph - even if i suggest, as most notably with gun-running, that the benignity of my views
has as its goal the saving of hundreds of thousands of human beings from the unimaginable torments prepared for
them by the governments of britain and the united states, still, still, there are also those (by comparison with these
torments) much less afflicted people less grossly tormented by losing their livelihood.....there are even the bomber
pilots who draw a salary for wives and children by killing the wives and children of other men.....i am not lapsing
into easy irony here; but stating the whole problem as i see it.
 49

benignity cannot be blinkered, must ignore nothing about the path it has chosen. and here is a version of
the difficulty i was speculating about in the previous chapter.

is benignity then trapped because it cannot be blinkered? - well, yes; unless the chess player can find a
way out - let me begin with newspapers and a possible move: not that (to begin with) we should not buy them but
that we should buy them and instantly throw them away unread and make it evident that we do it - we then (as a
first move) evacuate the production of newspapers of any value other than as a means of making and distributing
money (not in itself in any way a contemptible activity, though not a sufficient one for a human being) - - thus we
isolate the fiscal heart of a company that makes newspapers, we deny any other, non-fiscal value to that activity; we
encourage the fiscal heart to yearn for some value beyond itself, a slow but possible process. who for long would
not want to look for other ways, as and when he could, of getting money if he daily saw the things he produced
bought and instantly thrown away as useless or worse, certainly worse? - if daily he was brought to think “i get
money, certainly, but i do nothing of any other value for it”? - one sees that those engaged in what are already fiscal
activities not easy to represent as more than that seek solace in the notion that the customers want it, are prepared
to exchange money for a non-money ‘value’ they want - suppose the customers, some of them, a good number of
them, were willing to exchange money for something of no non-money value? buy it and instantly throw it away -
one might hope that there would be a slow movement in this middle part of the chess game towards doing things
for money that also had other commonly acknowledged value - - and meanwhile newspapers would be read less - -
and similarly about paying one’s television licence and then turning the set to the wall.

what then of gun-running?

but firstly, is not all this in the last long paragraph just moonshine, an argument on the page, a movement
in the head, impossible in reality? - impossible, i think, if we conceive of reality as a public stage on which people
act out performances - in that kind of public arena such a delicately structured manoeuvre as i have suggested
would have no presence - the prevailing language is coarser than that in all directions, coarser in its incredulities,
coarser in its beliefs. but then nothing is to be done, nothing achieved, nothing changed from the way it has always
been, in that arena. that is the space where failure continues as it always has, in its accustomed paths, with its usual
energies.

if anything is to be done, if anything of real change is to happen, then it must be by the totally private
honesties of speech addressed to this and that single person, heard in private, only ever overheard because
incidentally amplified; amplified not as part of the original or central design - in such a privacy one may hope that
to buy and not to read might make so total a sense, might have its face so totally towards and so averse, that the
oddity of the manoeuvre might come to seem no stranger than the bold sacrifice of a piece as one neared the
endgame.

*****

XIX

what of gun-running?

no point in ‘buying and not using’ - it is not we who buy, and weaponry of this kind begins to be used,
necessarily, as soon as it is bought, used to create and manipulate fear, even though it may be some time, or a long
time, before it is used for physical slaughter. a long and active shelf life is promised by our government to its
governmental customers, though not so long of course as to inhibit too much the steady prevailing of new and more
hideous fashions in terror; the market (at any rate the market) must be kept alive and buoyant.

there seems no private arena here in which to allow light to appear...unless (one tries to think of a way) it
is in the area of recruitment to our own soldiery. if the willingness to kill at the order of one’s government came to
seem even more repugnant than the willingness to kill in pursuit of private grievance; if the home market for
weaponry began to fail because of a shortage of people willing to pull the trigger; if, once conscription was as a
consequence reintroduced (as of course it would be), unwilling recruits did the minimum and, like the splendid
italians in the second world war, surrendered at the first opportunity.....
 50

the immediate thing is to permit no euphemisms in the matter of gun-running. - i remember john pilger
writing somewhere that at an arms fair he asked the well-dressed salesman standing in front of a well-polished
bomb what it did, how it killed; and the question was found not to be answerable in that form.

the running down of the armaments business is likely to be slow because the government will not easily
give up so evident a form of power; so one may rely here on the tenacity of darkness to soften the side-effects of the
appearance of light - that is not to use the weapons of darkness in defence of the light, but to allow them to operate
against themselves, chess is a tricky game; one doesn’t need to be high-minded, just intent on the light.

*****

XX

it may be said that the last two chapters dance the futile little minuet of an exaggerated sensibility through
the tough matter of ordinary reality; but i think it is wrong to say it - what may seem futile may only be what has
not yet been seen to work; what seems exaggerated may only be what has not yet been felt.

i have it always in my mind that there are many more people watching what is happening, or intent upon
what is to happen, than those alive in the world. the audience for the battle between light and darkness is made up
also of all the dead, of those we see no longer but who see us still; and it is their sense too of what may work or of
what might reasonably be felt that must contribute to any sense of reality that is not in its own turn to be futilely
limited.

as i write i am vividly aware of all these watching people with their various inclinations to darkness and
light, some of whom know more than i do and can do less. if i had no sense of this continuance of human reality
beyond the visible, then there would be no point in writing the things i have written and certainly no point in
reading them. there would be no point in treating the visible human reality as significant.

i want to say that last thing more accurately if i can - there would be no point in trying to look for a
significance not already felt as present within the visible reality...no point even in enquiring why the significance
felt has changed, grown or diminished from time to time...we would just sit at the feet of such changes, incurious
because unknowing, as we do with changes in the weather - now it seems a good thing not to hang murderers; then
it didn’t; perhaps it may come to seem a good thing again to hang them...we are subject to the changeableness of
the weather.

all attempt to rouse oneself from such an entirely reasonable state of subjection risks the opposing laugh,
the opposing sense of the ridiculous.

*****

XXI

but after all the best thing that could happen to the argument of this book would be to be overtaken by an
event - it is interesting to think how total a change would occur in everything if one undeniably dead human being
reappeared as an undeniably physically alive one.

christians would say that it has happened once before; but the resurrection of christ which is the object of
their belief is both just that, an object of belief and not a physical presence amongst us, and is also theologised into
a variety of remotely derived consequences which shift the attention (perhaps because there was no alternative)
away from any triumph in the physical realm towards illimitable rewards and punishments in a heaven (and for a
few still, hell) beyond it.

but suppose it were absolutely clear that a human being had, in the plainest, least sophisticated sense,
come back from death...what could happen to one could happen to many, but, even before that, what had happened
once would make nonsense of pension plans and would seriously undermine the sanction of death which either in
that precise form or in its various tributary and weakened forms (imprisonment, removal of livelihood) is the only
sanction those who maintain themselves in power really have, now hell is effectively gone.
 51

there would, i guess, be as fierce a reaction to the entirely physical reappearance of someone undoubtedly
previously dead as to the arrival of an alien from another planet. one would see how fragile the supposedly
unchangeable ways of human society were. would there be any point in fighting wars any more? or in claiming
what others also claimed? or in learning to read and write and cipher? or in making a lot of money?

“death, where is thy sting?” and it would become clear that much of the edifice of normality as we
understand and often grieve about it, was upheld by that single sting.

i guess that it will happen. meanwhile we might spend the time beforehand, long or short, plugging on
with tactics directed against the derivatives of the sting.

*****

XXII

as it is being written this book is edging towards the light of its own redundancy, looking for that,
expecting it, filling in time - to return from the dead, not by the restarting of physical life overcome by death as in
reincarnation, but by the repelling of death by some precisely located physical life previously overcome by it: would
introduce into the world we know an ungainsayable authority.

a single human being again exactly as he physically was before would overturn creeds, outmanoeuvre
philosophies, evacuate fashions. the question “upon what authority do you speak?” would have to be asked of all
other things with unaccustomed energy, everywhere, and previous accounts of the sources of authority would seem
entirely inadequate.

indeed, as things are now, one has only to ask that question “upon what authority?” with reasonable
persistence to receive vacuous answers. things and people held to be in authority are often so because and for as
long as the sources of their authority are not persistently enquired about. such things and people are unused to the
question, and to the domino-like collapse of reasons alleged in support of reasons that even a mild persistence will
produce. “i do it because they said i must; because after all they are the government; the government’s authority is
that the people elected them; we the people; actually we not i; they don’t do what i want; i am not the people; who
are the people? i don’t know where the people are; the people is a fiction that doesn’t exist; and by the authority of
that fiction they said i must.”

in the absence of replacement authority for the easily pushed over variety, it re-establishes itself, like a
child’s toy with a leaded bottom coming upright again; or else no one bothers even with mild questioning; or else
no one dares to counter what is simply there in physical force. all arguments persuading about social authority in
everyday life are in fact superfluous to requirement because the real answer is “you must do it because i can make
you do it by the threat of physical punishment” -

but what if there was a human being in this physical realm, from which this force to oblige assent comes,
who was back from death, not killable, who as a consequence couldn’t be made to do it? then the true poverty of
existing arguments for authority would reveal itself. it would be seen that there is no real other foundation for the
social authorities that seek to govern our lives than the ability to cause physical fear.

*****

XXIII

animals, especially carnivorous animals, are helpless about the degree of light and the darkness in which
they live, and there is nothing to be done about their darkness by means of them, in their terms, only extrinsically -
i watch our little terrier puppy, jenny, tearing at the small animal of an old glove - if darkness is not in a general
and total way defeated yet, and if there is no light to be persuaded forth, seduced out of jenny when she is faced
with a small animal, even the kind of small animal she herself was before she had this life, how do i act?

i act to prevent what cannot yet be changed. by contrast with the animal world, the human is one in which
the variation of light and darkness happens from internal causes, and one must try so to situate oneself within the
 52

complex of these causes as to make light grow and darkness diminish - that internal situating is impossible with
animals, so not conversion but prevention -

it’s true, i suppose, that there may be human times and human individuals that present so animal-like a
quality that all that is possible, at least temporarily, is prevention - but in general so to give up on the nourishing of
light within the human arena as to devote oneself to prevention is an abandonment of the route by which light
must ultimately prevail.

that nourishing is poisoned at the root by a use of fear - and i think any human being whose energies are
greatly engaged with cultivating the light in human circumstances will turn aside from the use of fear instinctively
even when preventing. if i speak clearly, boldly, to a dog about to bite i do it to be clear and not to be fearsome; i do
it to prevent, using my voice as simply as i would use a hand or a gate to restrain. i use language shorn of subtlety
so that it becomes simple like a physical barrier.

to put a verbal fence between attacker and victim is, i grant, to go near that simplicity of language, that
shearing away of subtlety, that also characterises words used to cause fear; and most especially if the verbal fence is
used to prevent a human being, because human beings live with subtlety and are abruptly rejected and held at a
distance by its absence.

but the distinction between prevention and fearsomeness can be held, i think: characteristic of the
engagement with darkness that only a scalpel will slide into the crack between it and light at times - the whole
choice here reliant on a tone of voice, an inflexion of sound.

*****

XXIV

the last three chapters reread ask me to do some untangling of general notions:

1. all authority that pretends ultimately to rest on other than physical reasons is kidding itself, and others.

2. the use of fearsome physical energy is darkness.

3. the use of physical force to prevent is all right with animals, but too unsubtle and too like fearsomeness
in the human arena.

4. the simplicity of physical fact of a return from death is not a reductive force, but an ‘ungainsayable’
physical authority that brings with it seductive and persuasive opening to possibility.

5. that seductive opening and possibility has left behind the world of authority, whether the dark kind or
the ungainsayable light kind - that light kind delights to watch itself overtaken by seductive possibilities.

6. god looks forward to being finally quite unauthoritative.

*****

XXV

should one do what one is bidden to do in an intolerable public situation and cultivate private dissent as
the best, or indeed only possible, form of resistance? or should one be a public resister so that others may take
heart, if they are not instead disheartened by one’s public dismissal? ...which may represent defeat, of course, only
in the short term.

public heroism is by no means required on every occasion of tyranny, but private, internal dissent that is
not heroic and is always vulnerable to the slow leakage of assent to what is publicly demanded, should not arrogate
to itself any self-congratulatory notion that it is sufficiently heroic.
 53

private dissent can never fully satisfy the requirement to resist tyranny or foolishness, even though it may
be for the time being at any point the most damaging, effective, uncounterable kind of resistance.

private dissent is always insufficient, so that its only justification is that no more is possible, no more has
any real prospect of succeeding. indeed, totally private dissent, never communicated to any other person, as distinct
from the samizdat variety, seems so emphatically insufficient as merely to provide the arena for an exercise of
authority so undiluted as to need no other motive for obedience than the obligation to obey.

for how long, in what circumstances, can samizdat dissent be honourable in the absence of anything more
public?

a) provided one accepts no special distinction to reward assent to the public system
b) provided one keeps alive in the imagination an entire and feasible alternative way of conducting things
c) provided one never forgets that an act of outward obedience to the oppressive system can be in no
degree praiseworthy (one should not obey, for instance, in order to avoid lying or deceit, because in these
circumstances not to lie or deceive is no virtue)
d) provided one at no point acts in such a way as to give the positive impression to others that obedience
to the system is other than a barely tolerable necessity

*****

XXVI

before i fuck with you again

i watch you through the eyes of men,
aware of you, before i feast,
unwaveringly, like a beast.

since last we loved, a thousand years

of separation, pain and tears;
the love to come now, past recall
already reconciling all.

i know before i touch your skin

what it is to be within,
i know the common feel of you
and wish for others what we do.

feral, and gentle as a child,

i lusting for you in the wild,
consider that the world may come
to be by such love rebegun.

that physical love is the extensible fibre that holds together the changes in reality in time and space; and
that it is no more polite or tea-and-cakes than a ligament that holds together bones.

*****

XXVII

it seems sensible and useful to think of psychological capacity as one would of physical capacity, and to be
as careful not to pull a muscle or break a leg psychologically as physically.

the physical vehicle one has to hand and that must live with one’s desires will always, of course, be more
limited than the mental range of imagination - that is in the present nature of things - but the limitation may also
be felt as more severe than that, and to hold one back from what might reasonably be expected.
 54

and similarly, in one life or another that one lives, in one incarnation or another, the total physical vehicle
one has to hand may sit more or less easily with the range of one’s desire more deeply and centrally considered, as
it seeks to express itself in this life or that or the other. - of the lives i have had (and that i wrote about in sitting in
medici’s) the first was in this respect the most complete. my initial sense of the matter is that i was left more
unencumbered by constraining false notions in fourth-century gaul than afterwards; and certainly the contrast with
the third time and this fourth time is in that respect very marked: as a servant in a monastery or as the servant this
time (steadily more mutinous) of that interlocking and various spectrum of false notions commonly now called a
free society, the room for manoeuvre has had to be found with difficulty in this and that odd corner - certainly the
second time i was alive, in crete, i was more free in this respect, as being largely beneath notice and a very
competent performer of the services required from me: but i sense that even there the extreme vigour of my life
engaged a less complete range of the energies wanting expression than was true for the gaulish lord.

et ideo...erat in gallia petrus; and besides, in gaul there was peter.

*****

XXVIII

there will always be some part of every speaker that lies outside the limited system in whose terms he
functions. and great literature, and good talking and writing about great literature, flourishes in that unclaimed
territory beyond the walls - grub street academic critics always trying to enclose it, too, with an ingeniously
extended version of the walls of the system that enslaves them: proud of the ingenuity of the extension, secure in its
being nothing in reality beyond the already acceptable.

i suppose that civilisation is the preservation of what one has within the walls and revolution the
supposition that it is false. civilisation is bought at such expense of truth, at such a price of falsehood. - the great
classical minds, like dr johnson’s, are great because they are aware of the price they nevertheless willingly pay.
they are the real betrayers. - you can see why dr johnson couldn’t rid himself of shakespeare, and why he tried to;
tried to translate him into respectable moral currency.

and perhaps why johnson was attracted to the intolerable richard savage (appropriately named). for there
must come soon a terrible ennui about civilisation, about being able to put it in latin verses, a terrible sense that
that is not it at all - although there will always be many who make themselves content to live in the city because of
its plain advantages and because of the effort they have made to build the image of it in their minds; there will also
be those attracted to the outlaws because of a wish to throw off that once made but also continuing effort.

many, if not most, of the outlaws will live in a way that proclaims no more than their incompetence in the
matter of living in the city, but there will be some, here and there, who live beyond its competence - these, unlike
the incompetent, are not definers of the achievement of the city but questioners of it. - all that needs most vitally to
be known and understood lies within their purview. for the city will be conscious only of what it massively is and
might expectedly be - it limits questioning to the capacity of its answering. it is aware that what has been achieved
has been achieved with effort, and that mental and physical effort are its currency.

- - it will be evident that the city of this chapter resembles the limits of capacity or the false notions of the
last; but there are, i think, differences - to restrict one’s mental range to the limits of the physical vehicle it is
nevertheless truly completed by is evidently absurd. it is in the nature of human beings to imagine what is not or
cannot be, and no human life can be conceived in which, for instance, there was no concern at all for the future, no
wish that things might have been different in the past, or might be again as they were in the past.

to wish for another life altogether, to think of the possibility that what one fundamentally is might be
better transported totally to a different body and mind, demands a more radical conceiving of what it is one is. -
somewhere between the absurdity of never moving mentally beyond the confines of one’s bodily existence and the
rare radicalism of total transportation lies the city and its outlaws.

*****

XXIX
 55

insistently in the twentieth century the background to any consideration of human affairs has been the
observation that the race of men appeared perhaps about a million years ago on a moderate-sized planet circling an
undistinguished star somewhere fairly well away from the centre of an average sort of galaxy: with the supposition
that this cannot be the apex of things in the development of reality -

let us suppose it is (as it is) - even a moderate amount of fiddle in a very non-geometrical brain will allow
one to say that one cannot designate the centre of a spatial system (like the universe) whose boundaries are
unknown - or that a pattern cannot finally be understood as unfractured or fractured (and the universe seems full of
both) without a knowledge of the whole picture - what look like random or chancy events (now in a temporal
system) may for similar reasons not be: indeed the supposition of chance is itself a confession of understanding
limited, even if the assertion is that no more is to be had.

that assertion: that no more understanding is to be had, that the pattern of things is finally unknowable,
has oddly presided over the expansion of certainty in the twentieth century and allowed it to be without the
constraint of other than very unfundamental plan - in a strange way the avalanche of confident new human
knowledge has been intimately linked with the supposition of final meaninglessness.

the sense that human beings are very powerful manipulators of natural forces and also without
significance is rich earth for the growth of tyranny (as what earth is not, one might ask a little grimly) - the
argument that this or that exercise of power is immoral, it might be argued, never had much force and has lost
almost all it had with the disappearance of religious notions of hell (islam a temporary exception) - the still
attractive argument that this or that exercise of power is meaningless, whether it be the imposition of military rule
or of bureaucratic or of legal, encounters its decisive neutralisation at the observation that finally all human life is
meaningless anyway - so that if there is to be activity of any sort it is bound to be not answerable to any final
purpose.

the remaining urge is for power as power, stripped of any but the thinnest veneer of philosophical
justification - the american state has set itself up as policeman of the world (having inflicted in the last 50 years
probably more savagery on the world in pursuit of its hegemony than any other state) because it is determined to be
in charge; no philosophical justification is other than top dressing of the urge to power, nor is meant or needed to
be.

the american state, and its dependent allies, not only prosecutes war by military means but (when there
isn’t enough of that kind of war safely offered) by police means - this is very easy to do: you have to decide that
some fairly common (but not too common, you can’t fight everybody) human activity is illegal, like smoking one
kind of leaf or sniffing one kind of powder, and then try to stop it - you will need a very satisfactorily large and
powerful police force to do it.

behind all this urge to power there is no fundamental thought beyond mental gesturing of a kind familiar
to us from the speeches of politicians or the recommendations of publicity firms.

*****

XXX

when the landowner, for his own purposes, moved the little village of nuneham courtenay on to the
turnpike from london to oxford and there built model houses in the most enlightened eighteenth-century manner,
one old woman was left in her crumbling original cottage by the large tree where she had lived all her days; and
there after a few years of cultivating her garden died happier than she would have been up the road - i have a
photograph in a book of old pictures of country people of just such a woman, in 1942, sitting by a fireplace with
eighteenth-
century cooking utensils still in use, in a seventeenth-century chair; and an immemorial fire - the one cottage now
swept away; the other preserved and restored and worth £200,000 to a rich buyer: similar fate: worse.

outlaws both; not city people, you might say - what kept them where they were? - poverty, yes, of pocket or
expectation; but anything else?
 56

perhaps one could say it was the sense of a multiplicity of links to worlds now disappeared, and that they
knew nothing much more of than any other living person. the refusal to move because of what you remember is
one thing: you are simply then living in a world of knowledge different from that of others, and that is not
uncommon; in one way or another some degree of difference of this kind is what characterises individuality - the
refusal to move so as not to break links with what you nevertheless don’t remember has to be more stubborn
because the stance is too remote to be ordinarily or easily defended.

it is just such a sense that we owe much of what we are to things present in us that we don’t know,
couldn’t put words to, that marks out both a deeply sensitive human being and a deeply bigoted and unreachable
one. i don’t know which of the two the old women were - such a sense, when it closes down one’s mind to what is
nevertheless to be known, put into words, discussed, when it leads to atrophy of any desire to learn new things,
begets the unreachable - but when such a sense negotiates continually with what can also be known, with things
presenting themselves as new knowledge, new capacity, then it brings one to a shape of sensibility open to what is
beyond it both by routes labelled and unlabelled - so that one avoids the unreachable bigotry of the newly known as
well as of the felt but unknown.

that balance of mind it might be that made socrates delight to speak of his ignorance.

*****

XXXI

if, as i have suggested in sitting in medici’s, one knows and assents to every circumstance of a life one is to
have before being born into it, then why should one choose a life full of fear?

let us set aside to begin with lives chosen to be horrifying, either in their suffering or their actions, so that
darkness may prevail the more: that there are such lives, such decisions made in favour of darkness, i have no
doubt; but the puzzle there is of a different order of intensity: as to why living things should choose to cultivate
death. let us set aside, too, as simply false, a version of that cultivation of death, the usual kind of religious idea
that there is value in self-sacrifice, with its attendant underpinning notion that somehow the creator of life requires
or delights in sacrifice of life made to him: even if this were true it would be too disgusting to contemplate.

we are left with the problem of those who, while wishing that light and life should prevail and while
assenting that it does so by means of the simple absence of darkness and death, nevertheless choose to live lives
full of darkness and death. - well, part of the answer seems already present in those last words: that it is
impossible, no matter how delighted a life one has had, to avoid its ending in death (for so long as darkness
prevails). if you choose to be physically alive you necessarily choose also to die. and that element of unavoidability
can be extended to cover a good deal of the suffering in what one might call an ordinary life at any one stage in
history or another: that if one is to live at all in the physical world, these are the unavoidably accompanying
circumstances, and a delighted decision to live will put up with them.

but what of lives, at any one time or another, which by comparison with others of a similar kind, seem
peculiarly to attract to themselves disaster, pain, fear? - if we set aside the idea of self-sacrifice (and we are not now
considering the fundamental perversity of a devotion to death on the part of a living creature), what way of
understanding why someone should choose such a life can we come to? -

i think we can allow the image of poison in a body to help: there are some people, at some stages in their
pattern of lives, who find in themselves a particularly strong delight in the light, an abundance of energy, which
they can use to draw the poison of darkness to them and away from other parts of creation; still surviving this
inundation of darkness, if not obviously to the eye of an observer alive at the same time then at least clearly to the
eyes of those seeing from the space between lives. - this is not self-sacrifice, it entails no sense that living things
should be destroyed, it is a tactic used to help in the struggle that all life should prevail against all darkness - we
should rather say that what such lives exhibit is an imaginative generosity, the largeness of imagination which will
contemplate more of the whole field of battle between darkness and light than would ordinarily be taken on.

on the occasions when god has been alive in the physical world he has acted as a magnet attracting the
darkness; it has not been for the religious purpose of sacrificing himself.
 57

*****

XXXII

what is fundamental to us is the energy to exist, and that energy, as physical life succeeds physical life, has
different shapes of opportunity to realise itself. we bring with us into the physical life we have now the experiences
of realisation of our other lives, and sometimes this may make for ease (if suddenly now there is greater expanse
than there was before, for instance, even though this may entail the pains of sudden extension), sometimes for
unease, and always for complexity of some sort.

there is unease, even disease, if the abundance of a previous experience of how to exist comes to be
bottled up in the next - i think of the times i have been physically alive (as i wrote about it in chapter XXVII) and
can feel certain that the first time was the largest arena for the desire to exist; and that the second in a curious and
ingenious way offered an approximately similar extent in very different circumstances, almost as if to experiment
with how that might be done - my desire to live the second time was, however, rougher, had to make sturdier
headway against encroachment, had lost some of the delicacy that came with the privileged gift of space before.

by contrast the third time offered a tiny space for the desire to live that had previously had such a good run
for its money - the social and credal circumstances of a child servant (slave really) in a christian monastery in the
sixth century blacked out most of the arena with different forms of death. - i lived my short life of nine years then
in an almost constant state of imprisoning dismay.

this time i have had a longer engagement with the blacked out parts of the arena; they have behaved with
greater ingenuity, often made to look like freedom or success, but in part because of the longer time span of this
fourth life, i think i have been able to make counter moves, after many years of an oppression only superficially
very different from the sixth-century enslavement, in some ways worse.

i can see a pattern that makes sense in all these four lives by saying it is as though i was gradually taking
on more darkness. - the shape of things observed across a number of lives can also perhaps be seen within a single
life: a sudden enormous increase of energy at adolescence, for instance, meets the enslaving constriction of
benighted adult notions, and if the result is not violent break-out, it is often terrible exhaustion - as though to say
“this is it, then? for this i came to be alive? to get my qualifications?” - not surprising that in adolescent eyes you
can often see bravado, dismay, disengaged exhaustion, violent emnity and disappointment.

*****

XXXIII

one crucial tactic, it seems to me, is not to adopt the dialect of the oppressors, because embedded in that
dialect are all the attitudes and assumptions of their power. what a form represents, with its blank spaces to be
filled in, is an extreme variety of the demand that one should speak that dialect - no matter what it is that one
writes in the spaces, no matter how much one may try not to conform, the surround of printed matter will have its
way with you.

it requires either a very educated or a very uneducated grip on language to speak and write in other than
the official fashion (which no longer manifests itself only, of course, in the crudely unsophisticated guise of the
speech of officialdom, but now also in the speech of fashion). official fashion speak has now, by means of television
largely, penetrated to the most private levels of language, and it is either real education (with the abundant access
that gives to other ways in which language has been used in the past) or real ignorance (which has not managed
the semi- educated band of linguistic skill where official fashion speak is to be found) which makes possible kinds
of language not generally in approved use.

the process, however, by which all real education is being converted into semi-education is now, alas, very
advanced; and we have known for a century or more that it is the policy of governments to replace real ignorance
with semi-educated forms of life. - the school and university system now pursues this double end with vigour, to
frustrate by means of the imposed idiocies of competition (with all that entails of turning understanding into
prizes) any real education and to raise the illicitly ignorant to game-show levels of fashionable response and
opinion.
 58

that puts the matter with more rhetorical ease than is justified, perhaps, since real education has always
been a rare commodity in the advanced reaches of the educational system and by no means unknown in the
elementary reaches. what is different now is an attitude from those in power which no longer finds it even in theory
justifiable that education should be without fear or without the bias of commercial or other extrinsic interest. -
education has always been in practice one of the instruments of the governing powers, but not, at least in recent
history, an admitted instrument, and so less efficient as an instrument of government than it might otherwise have
been - now it is, in theory and so more largely in practice “accountable” to the interests, enthusiasms, bids for
power, strategies for survival, of those who provide the money for it (as though it were their money to provide).

*****

XXXIV

but! but! - what are these tripping words in that last paragraph about some time in the past when at least
in theory education was without fear? never that, surely, as witness the terrible record of boy-beating schoolmasters
since time was, of myopic and tyrannical pedantry, of the use of the once living language, latin, as a dead hand to
control the living - so what am i talking about?

i think it is this: that the development of attitude which has made beating a thing of the past, at least in
this country, has held hands with some admirable sense always somewhere to be found in the educational system,
that learning was good in itself (that the technically dead latin language, for instance, made human communication
beyond the bounds of vernaculars possible), and opened a human life to humane possibilities other than the purely
mercantile. - the impetus behind educational reform in the middle years of the twentieth century seemed, too, to
derive even more clearly from such a notion. one might, as late as the 60s perhaps or 70s, have had great hope that
whatever had always seemed benign about education was really at last flowering.

that hope, for officially organised education, is now gone, lost in a wilderness of forms and vacuous
terminology and in a jungle of politically inspired competitiveness. fools and politicians, fools and knaves, have
done their deed; and other means must be found.

*****

XXXV

on not knowing and knowing, on being right and wrong -

when i took my little dog out for her morning shit today she didn’t want to go to the usual place, and
tugged furiously on the lead; i stubbornly tugged back - there was no question of my trying to make her afraid; i
was just stubborn and stronger - she wouldn’t shit in her usual place, however; and so i let her go where she
wanted, and she found a better place and shat there -

that is part one of the story - part two is about her walk later on - she saw a dog on the other side of the
road and tugged furiously; i stubbornly tugged back, again with no attempt to shout or make her afraid; and this
time it happened that i was right because if i had let her go she would have been killed by a passing car -

does the fact that i was wrong in the first matter and right in in the second make any difference about my
stubbornness? - does it make any difference that the fact of being right or wrong in these particular cases was a
matter of chance and not of superior understanding? there happened to be a better place to shit; there happened to
be a car passing - how is the matter altered by the fact that the dog operates at such a low level of intelligence that
no interchange of views is possible, no testing of possibilities in theory before the actual event of action?

certainly in part one of the story my stubbornness looks in retrospect foolish and in part two wise - but this
apparently fundamental difference of worth is a fictionalised reading back into the past of a later knowledge - a
doctor who stubbornly made you take mercury in the seventeenth century was not a monster because wrong; any
more than an old woman who stubbornly made you wear a moss bandage for a wound in the seventeenth century
was a wonder because right -
 59

i feel justified in using the fact of wrongness to undermine authority when that authority works by using
fear; but in that case, the using of fear, the fact of rightness would be no justification either.

so is wrongness or rightness of no account? surely that can’t be so?

*****

XXXVI

it plainly is subjectively the decisively important thing: one is stubborn because of a sense of being right;
and, at the other extreme, not to be concerned about being right or wrong would be to work at a notably low level
of energy - and unconcern about being right or wrong is relatively so unusual that a fearsome schoolmaster who
actually delights principally in the power to be stubborn can still be neatly undermined by the demonstration of his
error: the delight in the power to be stubborn is a cancerous growth that needs as its foundation the healthy tissue
of the stubbornness arising from a sense (whether objectively justified or not) of being right.

i remember vividly a terrifying schoolmaster i had when i was about thirteen, who made us learn speeches
from shakespeare together with the punctuation (which he evidently thought, mistakenly, was also shakespeare’s),
and then stand up and repeat them, including the punctuation; thus: “to be or not to be comma that is the question
colon...” - had he been kind and amiable this would be an eccentricity to be fondly recalled and not a monstrous
idiocy - with the appalling master who taught me latin, by contrast, there is no chance in retrospect of playing the
error card because he undoubtedly did know very accurately the rules for ‘quin’ or how you did conditional clauses
in oratio obliqua - i can’t deliver a technical knockout neatly and rapidly there, but must go the more elaborate and
fundamental path of trying to dismantle the idea that he was justified in using fear; or the intermediate path of
saying that his knowledge of classical latin grammar had killed any sense he might have had of latin as a possible
living human language.

*****

XXXVII

a strange recorded life and afterlife latin has had - the language is of particular interest to me because it
was the first i spoke - the boy who spoke it in gaul sixteen hundred years ago was amused, no doubt, to hear me
being told at school a few years ago you couldn’t say “yes” in latin, or that there was no definite or indefinite
article, or that to say hello you said “salve” - all of these confidences quite untrue in his living experience of the
language.

with latin the recorded form of the language, both at the time when it was naturally spoken by the
illiterate and afterwards, has always triumphed over its ignorant life. - with difficulty when i was first alive in the
fourth century i understood vergil, with greater difficulty cicero, because i had been taught to; tacitus i never heard
of and would have made almost nothing of, i guess - the word order in all these cases was my principal difficulty -
but nevertheless of course i was a high-born native speaker of what was unquestionably latin, though i would have
called it colloquially “sta romanitas” and would have said i spoke “roman[i]ce” - the nearest formal modern
equivalent might be the difficulty a native german speaker would have in making head or tail of german
professorial prose, which specialises in vilely lengthy and contorted syntax and barely intelligible abstraction.

interesting about word order - the artificiality of word order in formal written latin was the difficulty for a
native speaker unaccustomed to its chinese puzzles; but it was precisely mistakes in word order, oddities of choice
there, which chiefly betrayed to us a non-native speaker, because in a spoken language with few syntactic rules
about word order there were many possibilities and native speakers chose by feel the paths that native speakers
chose - the formal written style of the language accurately identified the central grip a native speaker had on it and
deliberately replaced that unconscious ‘ignorant’ sense with something to be learnt in polite literary circles or
toiled at in schools - if one were to generalise roughly about one feature of it, for instance, you might say that in the
latin i spoke the verb always tended to come at the beginning whereas in the formal style it was obliged to go at the
end, as though by a clear decision to make things as different as possible from native speech.

the ways in which we used the language day by day, of course, went on unimpeded - and that daily speech
in the course of decades and centuries imperceptibly became what grammarians defined later as some other
 60

language, some less and less explicit sort of latin, while all the time remaining for those who spoke it day by day
the totally genuine, fully expressive language of their reality - only in the definitions of those maintaining as they
defined the importance of a latin that was not their ordinary everyday speech either did this spoken latin, always
‘vulgar’, become ‘late’ and finally ‘infima’, of the lowest and most wretched kind - though still to be distinguished
from the dog latin of those who had learnt badly the artificially preserved form of the language.

there is no help for it; we must speak our own natural speech if we are to say genuinely what is within us -
that speech will find ways of subtlety and of pleasing to the degree that we are ourselves subtle and pleasing - but
to embark in life with an artificially learnt language is to abandon to a silent unspoken region the things that may
not, according to the grammar and dictionary we have before us, be acceptably spoken - and the same process may
be seen at work within the society of speakers of what is our native language: more insidiously here, one is
encouraged to speak according to the grammar and dictionary of what is fashionable, acceptable, and one can
arrive at extraordinary surface fluency with such linguistic apparatus, and in the course of the effort required lose
one’s natural speech.

i once knew an old dominican friar who had in more formal terms lost any native language - he was
originally swiss german, worked every day in mediaeval latin as a historian, had lived for many years in france,
learnt french and forgotten german, then in italy, then in england with the same process - he was not any longer a
native speaker of anything, he spoke everything however, badly.

this is a remarkable linguistic situation; its psychological equivalent is remarkably common.

*****

XXXVIII

tolstoy in war and peace writing of napoleon after the battle of borodino describes a familiar variety of the
situation, and indeed his whole novel is about the speaking of artificial tongues:

and not for that hour and day only were the mind and conscience darkened in that man, on whom
the burden of all that was being done lay even more heavily than on all the others who
took part in it. never, down to the end of his life, had he the least comprehension of
goodness, of beauty, of truth, of the significance of his own acts, which were too far opposed
to truth and goodness, too remote from everything human for him to be able to grasp their
significance. he could not disavow his own acts, that were lauded by half the world, and so he
was forced to disavow truth and goodness and everything human.

or again i remember an academic (smith, we shall call him) saying to me once in the common room “the
real john smith disappeared without trace years ago” - the search for oneself and one’s native tongue is perhaps,
however, more complicated than is sometimes supposed: i wonder whether the real john smith who disappeared
was any more himself than the put-up job that succeeded to power. it is sometimes thought that simply to reverse
the process of artifice, involving education, movement topographically and socially from where one began, by
which one has arrived at being adult is the thing - but part of the impetus behind such movement (where it is not
dictated wholly by external necessity like that of doing examinations) may often be the feeling that one’s starting
point in life did not represent the genuine self either, that one has to move into a fictional unknown in the hope of
more conformable lodgings for one’s spirit.

if we suppose, as i do, that most people come to be born with a history of lives lived already a part of them
in some almost but not quite wholly forgotten way, then we can suppose too that the beginning of a new life is not
entirely a beginning, not inevitably the genuine point where one comes to be, but a moment accompanied by
desires, experiences, frustrations brought from other lives one has had; so that the movement to discover who and
where one centrally is has to be across territory stretching back further than birth.

what seems like the invention of a new john smith may sometimes be only the attempt (with whatever
imaginative materials, good or bad, ample or narrow, are to hand) to remember what is by definition, in a society
not given to belief in past lives, not matter for remembering.
 61

truly effective memory, then, has to resort to imagination, as well as imagination to memory. what is true
of one’s past, even in the present life which is available ordinarily to memory, is not whatever quantity of facts
could be put down on a form and sorted in due order, but what it was like - and it may be that the crucially
important part of it all showed itself in that brief instant about which, in a way, there are no facts - and that that
brief instant was the showing of the thread in the weave that would lead to the central pattern joining many of
one's lives.

memory without imagination is probably, then, too restricted; but imagination without memory is certainly
too unphysical - if it was not so when and where one loves to suppose it, then it has to have been so at some point -
in this sense all ample desire, all longing, is circular, a memory of the freedom of one’s creation, for the moment of
creation is not like the moment of birth we are roughly familiar with, with much only potentially there, but rather
is of life fully and physically deployed, set out - in consideration of that, nothing needs to be new under the sun,
only newly rediscovered.

*****

XXXIX

i find myself drawn on, by the distinction i have just made between creation and birth, to say some more
about chapters VII, IX and X. i think in chapter X it was misleading, not the whole picture, to speak of the
beginning of things as though it were like a birth, potential, not yet realised -

a previous stage needs to be described, the originating impetus behind all the culture-bound human myths
of paradise and fall, the reason for the sense that, as eliot says in little gidding, the last gate we go through is both
unknown and remembered.

i think there existed in its totality in the hold of the creator briefly the way it might all be with creation
wholly undamaged, unsplit, before it became impossible for him to keep a grip on that in the face of the negation
of darkness - when we imagine “gases whirled in explosive separation or combination” and so on, we are at the
moment not of that ‘held’ creation but of ‘birth’, when the held creation has begun its long encounter and struggle
with darkness - and the ‘held creation’ slips out of its wholeness into encounter with darkness not all at once but
like a slipping rope through the hands of a sailor in a storm: the highest, most terrifyingly to be damaged bits
escaping into the maelstrom last, as human beings begin the encounter, and as individual human beings come to
the encounter - when we embark first on our series of lives we are like a tiny knot in the rope slipping out of the
grasp of the creator god into the storm, but we are full of the experience of the undamaged totality of our creation -
and it is the authority of that experience which we have in us to navigate by as life succeeds life in a series of births
and deaths across the riven texture of reality.

*****

XL

AFTER THE DEATH OF THE FIRST MAN

i had forgotten
what i knew before my birth
that i was the first

and thought instead the world a hostile place

that moved with vacuous force
within its ways
thinking of nothing
and i outside it all

and so i could not hold my consciousness against it

but died the animal i should not have been
after much success at being one
 62

this path will be difficult not to take again

*****

XLI

since this is a book not, in spite of some appearances, about what ought to happen but about what will, it
has to absorb into itself both the vacancy of before the event and the redundancy of after. i feel a bit sorry for it,
fixed at one moment in time as it is, even though a well-poised one, between the before and the after of the flood
tide - for myself, as distinct from what i have written, i expect to go with the water, and so feel less worried about
more temporary fixities.

the unebbing flood tide is the great fixity - the surge of life unrestrained by death - not, any longer, the
panic stricken over-abundance of birth in the face of the possibility of extinction which we see now in things born
in unassimilable multiplicity; but the simple full extension - where there is no death there needs to be no birth, just
the steady state of life, with none of its ample movement contributing to any passage to death, and no part of the
desires of the living needing to be alienated to counter that passage.

desire, then, tautologously itself - the creator pleased at last -

*****

XLII

a pure white kitten a few weeks old comes out of the country into the house in france - she will never in
the future be so graceful, so delicate; the apogee of her life is now, at about ten weeks - we must be prepared, much
more than in practice we are, to understand there are different peaks of empire in a life, some earlier, some later,
rather than more or less one steady process from youth to maturity to old age, ascent, plateau, decline -

it is in the interests of those who control society to value little what they do not exhibit, what they cannot
do or be - so that childhood and youth are seen in terms of lack, of deficiency, and not also in terms of abundance.
the social powers privilege matters to which young human beings necessarily must aspire, since they could not in
the nature of things already be in possession of them, thus the ability to decline a classical greek verb, or
distinguish a good from a bad poem, or drive a car, or mend a computer - and these powers forget to value what
they themselves have lost, beauty, energy, curiosity, vividness - so hideous old schoolmaster defeats beautiful
schoolchild by knowing an irregular aorist.

the subtler religious and philosophical positions affect to acknowledge these other possibilities by
theologising childhood; in such cases it is theology which has childhood in its grip and not the reverse: toleration
as a means of extending hegemony -

if one asks, in a group of human beings, not who is in charge but at what different peak of empire this or
that individual is, and how these supreme moments may hold hands with each other, be exchanged, be learnt or
relearnt, be delighted in, then the feeling is likely to be more various, subtle, imaginatively generous than if one
asks who is in charge or what the policy or the activity is.

to be concerned always to know who is in charge, and what the pattern of subsidiary authority, is to
subject rich and various human situations to the myopia of management and managerial aims, even if this myopia
is a little offset (as in the more advanced forms of managerial theory) by official consultation and even informal
soundings of those who are not in charge - this kind of ‘sensitive management’ is, like other attempts to move a
little away from impossibly crass or mistaken positions, in a way more ludicrous than the unreformed kind; as
though to suggest, in a fresh access of belief in what is nonsense, that there is something to it after all.

religious reform is not seldom ludicrous in the way of sensitive management, and those with an eye on the
fundamentally untenable character of a religious system may often prefer it in its unreformed guise, pre-vatican
two as it were, the old, coarsely confident, beautifully expressed impossibilities about eternal salvation or
damnation, not the mincing new varieties tricked out in their awkward disguising of what cannot be swallowed.
 63

*****

XLIII

the thing about dickens is his desire to be real and his incapacitating terror in the face of reality - he must
resort all the time to play acting, either with his reader or between his characters - and it is the force of urgency
with which this play acting wants to be real which gives it its weird and riveting imaginative power and makes him
a great novelist.

masks and filters, plasters and patches, no waiting and no entry signs are what help the majority of us
cope with the way things really are - and constructions of art may be made with them at times, sometimes at great
expense of time or money or energy.

noise, or pother in general (which may also be at low volume), is pretty much essential to the functioning
of systems of disguise, since, like insubstantial paper fans whirling round, they only seem substantial when moving
fast, bent upon an activity.

the activity of the television or of newspapers is rather a different thing, of course; designed to produce the
constant variety of entertainment, not at all the bells of moscow in the 1812 overture - such activity may fleetingly
underpin the simulation of importance or concern or delight (and one should never forget that simulation may,
erratically and momentarily, and with enough good will, become the real thing); but chiefly it betrays it, so that the
well forged £20 note is revealed as counterfeit not by being held up to the light but by being thrown into the bin
when not wanted for the next game - a disaster in a caribbean island, many dead, followed by today’s weather -

“what's hecuba to him or he to hecuba/ that he should weep for her?” as hamlet says of the player in a
passion of speech - shakespeare, unlike monochrome racine or corneille for example, works with a variety of tone,
a mixture of trivial and serious, which constantly tests the one against the other, revealing false coinage and true -
the trouble with the variety of the variety show of television is that it specialises in a skilled ease by which one may
pass from tragic to comic: the audience is supposed to forget - any unforgetting, any testing complexity of tragedy
against the weather, would result in the collapse of both - the screen would go blank for lack of matter -

that we should not ourselves be in the state the television is but in a shakespearian mind in the face of the
complexity of human experience, would be best.

*****

XLIV

there is very little left to say and much to do - god is not the terrifying invention of some theologian or
philosopher or church or religion, in the presence of whom the disguise of virtue has to be put on, who has to be
pleased with what it is officially supposed might please him

wait until you finish your life this time and enquire

the enforcers of disguise in human society are afraid, disguised, without any authority or power that is not
derived from darkness

wait until you finish your life this time and enquire

if what this book suggests is not completely true then it is an entire waste of time - fine sentiments and a
nice bit of writing will be little help against reality if finally it opposes - this book urges no quixotic attitudes - it is
not intended as a psychological survival kit for use in a world fundamentally hostile to humaneness - it is intended
as a fingerpost to the real way out of these temporary savageries -

if what is said is not to the reader evidently and immediately true, then for god’s sake don’t try to believe
it
 64

wait until you finish your life this time and enquire

and if it is as this book says, don’t settle next time for any kind of oppressor’s life

then we might in the future run a bit short of oppressors

THE END