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II.iii
-----I would like to ask you where
you come from, said Mima, immediately I saw you, the question
sprang to my mind, and often since. But on each occasion I have
stopped myself, sometimes with my breath drawn ready for the
question.
-----Why did I feel such restraint?
asked Mima, it is a natural enough question, but I believe
I would restrain myself from asking your name of you, or from
asking you to confirm the name that I had been given - you were
described to me, by name, by provenance, by appearance, by character,
all in words which took in every part of you as you now appear,
here, in this room, in this most impartial light of day. I would
have known you even in remote distance had we never spoken and
had we never met, I would have known you had I been blind and
you unspeaking and the both of us unable to touch one another:
yet I know that I do not know the first thing about you. Gesso
of where? Gesso from where? For all the meaning of descriptions,
you are taken from your place and I hardly seem to know you.
-----Is an origin the root of all
description and the fact that stands behind the name? I do not
know. But it does not stand upon the reason of the response which
might have been; to ask the question <where do you come from?>
sets limits on the ways in which it may be answered. Its purpose
has the direction of a legal question, and it presumes its own
system to be mirrored in the antiphon.
-----Sometimes Im in the darkening
ashwood at the close of day, and I sense the presence of someone
other, who it is I do not know, not to be seen, not to be heard;
theres no disquiet in this familiarity, though I can hear
the beating of my heart; my minds expectant, and I call
whos there?. The woods have their own sounds
at every season, and there is no other echo. Sometimes Im
alone and there is no reply. Sometimes the boy who works in the
yard, though he has not heard me, will run towards me in the
woods, to make sure I am safe, my direction somehow known to
him.
-----Your dialect is strange to me.
There is little I can recognize. When you speak to me I think,
<his words have a surface sense, but he does not speak the
language of his childhood>. From which teacher did you learn
it?
-----Mima sat down beside him, beneath the
window, her shadow dark against the discoloured plaster, turning
her head towards him, looking at his face and then at his hands
as though she saw innumerable revelations in them.
-----Gesso moved his weight from one foot
to another. Its my first, learnt, language, and it
tells you everything about me,he said. Why do you
hear me as though I were a stranger?
-----Mima was silent, as though waiting
for the echoes of his voice to fade before she spoke. You
are translating what you say before you speak. That is why I
hear you as a stranger.
-----Thats not so.
-----Theres a translation in
everything you say,said Mima, with great thought, and looking
gravely at Gesso, I dont think that you can even
begin to deny the fact without admitting it. Its not being
truthful, not even to yourself.
-----This is my ordinary way of speaking,
said Gesso.
-----Disagree with me if you must,
but to my mind you are searching for words which signify the
most commonplace of ideas as though they were strange to you.
Theres nothing of this place in your summary of the things
you see about you, nor in the way you voice your thoughts - no,
not even in the way you choose the sequence of your questions
as you conduct your enquiry.
-----Thats not so.
-----I am the listener,said
Mima, with a sudden rise in the tone of her voice, and
I am listening to you now, to every word you speak: and you make
a point of contradicting me on matters which you are not in a
position to judge. Even now I find it difficult to be certain
of the truth. Mima looked at Gesso, and then past him,
at the wall; Gesso followed her gaze, but the end of the room
was lost in darkness, as though the night still lingered there,
and the wall itself was a thing of conjecture, needful if only
to support the bare joists above their heads; even the place
they stood was difficult to make out. Theres not
much in common between your dialect and mine, said Mima.
Although, at first, I thought the similarities outweighed
the differences; but even then, near the beginning, there were
considerable gaps in speech where I had to make an effort to
understand you, and there were times when I could do nothing
but substitute words and phrases of my own, and look at their
strangeness with love; but I have said to myself, deep within,
this is not important.
-----At the beginning I thought you
were a stranger, and I searched for an easy way to speak, and
talked with care;
-----yet if I take a pace beyond myself
I see that you are not a foreigner at all, and that in our expression
we have much in common; even to the pauses; I am certain of this
because it doesnt come directly to the mind at the tail
of an insights warning. Why, less than five minutes ago,
did I have to make such efforts?
-----They looked at each other in silence.
-----There was no sound within the room,
nothing beyond an awareness of the passing of time; the coldness
had intensified. Was this the shortest day? Or must the year
grow colder yet?
-----Have I changed? I do not know.
I have been copying you - and yet I do not feel that I have changed
- but, if this is true, then where do I stand? Do we understand
each other more thoroughly, to know how we would be, were we
in different times and different places? Do we gain some insight
into one another, or - do I copy you, and, in trusting you too
much, are you leading both of us astray?
-----Am I leading you astray?
Gesso stood, lifting the chair and carrying it to the side of
the room, where its shadow was heavy against the wall. He walked
through the space which had been cleared by his action, but the
profusion of furniture in the room prevented his following any
steady course, and he stood amongst the tables looking down at
the worn carpet. You said that you wished to know the place
I come from, he said, and Im willing to be
open about myself, as open as I can be, for theres no reason
why I should wish to keep secrets from you, to ask is at the
end to seek a yes or a no, nothing more, one shakes another persons
hand, or kisses their brow, and thinks there is more than the
affirmation of a concluding-point. I come from Elea.
-----I have heard of Elea, said
Mima, and I can guess what you have in mind in saying that.
Do you come from Elea? Or does one choose ones origin to
make a point?
-----Theres no point that I
want to make, said Gesso. The name of the town is
in the natives mind when the walls are so distant they
are lost to him; a names a thing of absence, and says nothing
of itself in the dialect of origins. There is, as far as I can
see, no argument and no question in the minds eye. I have
been through many towns; I have looked towards them, looked down
at them, from the high-roads brow; my father was itinerant:
I cant remember the first town that I saw - there are many
pieces of several towns which take the mind, many parts of villages,
each with the cast of its own ground which seems the manifest
to its inhabitants, all beyond seen as though askance; I cant
remember any early name beyond the names and precepts
change, and this a change we took for granted; for certainty
youd have to ask me the first sight of my infant eye, which
truly I seem to repossess, beyond the word, and that unsure,
for its a thing resorted to in the wandering hours of the
colder and the unsurer nights, sleep being at the edge of the
imagination, while walking, eyes half shut, sometimes at the
crown, if you can call it that, more often in the rut, at the
edge, but what truth there is in that I do not know, the mind
dislikes it, how it would turn doubt into a principle, and, whichever
way one wills, it turns from the sense of void which lies beyond
disquiet - there is nothing that it will not make to repossess
its poise.
-----Elea was the name which came
to mind, but any name will stand. No point was made.
-----Where is the town which would
not be the example? Any would be the place to be established
in the minds eye, but, no, early in my journey, in the
early day, I thought I knew my origin and looked back towards
it with the hindward gaze, while walking on, but now I am unsure
and there is little more to say, it is in the past and yet it
seems dispersed, and the more I search my memory the less I grow
to have a trust in it, and the more I have attributed to it from
fragments of the places seen in later days and with a more fixed
and ambitious mind. Memory is the entrance of the delphic cave.
How the inscriptions on the stone are worn away! The straight
stone courses of the highway dispersed upon the roadless valleys
rocks: and I might mock your style, Mima, and say, with truth,
since for the moment Ill believe there is more truth in
mimicry than questioning, and so to make the point Ill
make your voice my own:
-----Well! I would ask you where you come
from, its an easy question to ask, I am an easy woman,
I will ask it, this easy question, I will accept an answer, at
any time of day, but, as for the question, I will not ask it,
because I only ask the expected question, by which I mean that
it is the expected question which receives the answer, heard
as the answer, by the ear, felt as the answer, by the hand; to
many the question where do you come from? would be
the expected question, from me, and might be answered with a
single word, where, there is no doubt about it, but to you the
question is not appropriate, not to be kept ready to the hand,
so to speak, within the forefront of the mind, to you it is the
unexpected question, the unexpected question receives no answer,
not that I can summon up an unexpected question, as an example,
without it being expected, the asking voice within the disguise,
am I called Mima for nothing? Well! In truth, Gesso, every question
is opaque and stands without an answer, once the expectedness
is lost, thats a certainty, and was the reason why I never
asked your name of you, a question unexpected, I should have
been reluctant to have put the thing in words, but there would
have been no effort to it, your name was told me before you came,
I had only to find in you an affirmation, of a name standing
for the generality of name, there is no mystery to that: none:
I will, as I say, ask only the expected question, that is to
say, the question whose own answer has gone before it, preventing
words, made by its answer, followed by its answer, pushed forward
by its answer, surrounded in all its aspects, as though entire
and comprehensible, by its answer: so we make the theme our thrust,
the dark weight hidden in the middle of the mind, invisible,
but by whose gravity the whole thing moves, cycles of days and
lunar months and years, one day no doubt it will flicker into
light, one day no doubt its sight will penetrate the dust, but
now, now, unless the question is expected and the thread is followed
then there is no point in breaking into speech to follow as much
a ravelled skein as a line of recollection, for you might search
your mind for the answer and never find it, but, with place as
with man, you have taken it for granted once but now no longer,
no longer accept without a thought the divisions, and live or
die by them, theres mortality within a name and within
a place, and every line of questioning comes sooner than one
would ever have believed to the stop before the unexpected questions
weight, there is an end in the name, is there not, Gesso, name
and way and line the same, not from nicety do we avoid the grossest
undertaking which makes of the sun a light by which we see our
way to evil and of the all-providing earth which underlies us
the advantage of the moment, and by this course move to find
the arid place and the empty city waterless. Well! Well! Now
our persons are most vague and without substance, let me say
this, Gesso, now, or I shall forget it, or change it, or make
of it what it is not, Gesso, I have only just begun, the unexpected
question is a long way off, as yet, the hour being what it is,
events as measured by the clock, one day alone, look at the movement
of the heavens, look at the shadows on the wall, see how they
have moved, your own amongst the rest, we have the rest of the
days convention to travel through, let me tell you of.
-----Do I speak like that? said
Mima, laughing aloud, and watching Gesso with shining eyes, clear
and intense, those of a child, and following the articulation
of his words by her expression. Am I like that?
-----They are like stones in the garden
path, those phrases, but where does it go?
-----How far have I taken your line
of thinking?
-----If I copy you, its out
of love for you. Mima spoke these lines singly, with long
pauses between them, her voice low. I would not have sat
listening to you at dawn this morning, silence was the property
of that time, and the stranger of it, said Mima. You
do it very well. Not far beneath you are an actor.
-----O no I am not acting.
-----His face was covered in sweat despite
the coldness of the room. His voice was shivering. I do
not know when I act. It eases something, to take for the moment
the part, to ask anothers oblique question in the certainty
that it shall remain unanswered, the sideways self thinnest target,
or - to act as best I can once more - to turn intensity aside,
to break words with a clear diction, to set the block in the
teeth of the open question. Words, words, words; in which side
of the balance am I? The equation is one of query and its prey,
and, simple as it is, it invites its own abridgment:
-----I am bruised in being here.
-----Gesso ran a hand over his brow and
stared at the sweat on his fingers; he lowered his hand; his
sweat marked darkly the slate of the mantel; beyond the window,
the day was more shadowy than he had thought, the sun recalled,
the slant of that beam unchanged, but behind it the moving finger
of light crossing the boards on which they stood, the pause in
thought answered by the change within the angle of the light.
Mima put her hands round Gessos waist, saying, Do
not look out of the window with such a cast of mind, to examine
is to destroy.
-----I dout it, as the monkey said,
when he fled and overturned the lamp; an animal of reason.
-----Listen to me, Gesso. I was talking
to my father this morning. This morning? It was night.
-----A man and a woman, hardly more
than children, bride and groom, married yesterday, alone together,
in love, were leaving this house at that unusual hour. It was
halfway through the night.
-----My father had grown to know and
love them as though they were his children, and, with the intention
of being at the door to say farewell to them at the moment of
their leaving, the hour itself being indistinguishable from any
other in the pitch-black night, he set his clock to be up with
Martha and myself (the boy in the yard being out of bed and at
work already) so that he might call them himself, and bring up
hot water to them with his own hand, and take their meal to their
breakfast table - he was intent on this, and talked of little
else all evening, in the public room, to those few friends to
whom he opens his mind, though not entirely, and, as a consequence
of his preparations it was very late before he went to bed, so
late that there was little possibility of any sleep, and, in
the same clothes which he had been wearing the previous night,
his head still full of fumes, the tray in his hands with the
silver-plated teapot and the water-jug, which he sets a lot of
store by, though they are quite ordinary vessels, you could buy
them for next to nothing in any auction-room, though he treasures
them because he and his wife had come by them in the early days
of their marriage, when they had little to call their own, I
have seen his photograph, from that time, a brisk and thin young
man with dark and thoughtful eyes; one night, during a period
of exceptional stress, he resigned himself after a long discussion
with his wife, well into the small hours, to selling these jugs
and pots, preparing to rise as early as possible the next morning
to walk the miles into town, to the pawnbroker, this was when
they were living in a rented basement, his books were gnawed
by mice, but in the morning, rising early by the clock, at first
light, these pots in a paper package, on going to the door he
found beneath the letter-box a cheque for a small sum owed to
him but long dismissed. A small sum? To him it was the answer
to a petition never put in words. The teapot and the hot-water
jug were taken upstairs again, and unwrapped, and washed out
with boiling water, even though they had never stood upon the
pawnbrokers shelf, and, so he tells me, in the solemnity
of the occasion, as though the day were the extent of time, they
made tea, in these vessels, and drank it as though in celebration.
He has often told me this story in times of emotional excess,
or tiredness, when he has been stressed. So he holds these little
items very dear.
-----This morning he went down to
the cold kitchen, and had washed and dried these same vessels,
and put them on a tray, and boiled water himself, on the enamel
paraffin stove, the range not then being lit; I have hardly ever
seen him working in his shirtsleeves in the kitchen, now it seemed
as though he had worked in no other place all his life; he emptied
the ash from the range and laid the kindling wood within the
grate, even now I can see the circle of flickering yellow light
as he looked down into the body of the stove, the boy from the
yard standing next to him, his bare arms black with coal-dust,
it is not an easy fire to light when the air is damp and the
flue cold; my father said nothing, but took his instruction silently
from the youth, and when the fire was lit and the condensation
evaporating from the cast-iron stove-back, soon it would be ready
for making the breakfast, my father carried the tray to the bridal
room, a generous and airy chamber which overlooks the valley
more widely than any other room; it is at the corner of the upper
floor. My father climbed the stair, he was in his shirtsleeves,
the shirt yesterdays, the collar unbuttoned, the sleeves
rolled up, not a sound but for his feeling for each tread with
his feet, a matter of faith, I can see the expression on his
face at this very moment, tired and sleepless as he then was,
it is all as if the event had taken place some long time ago,
maybe I might in time to come think that I had not witnessed
it for myself, but only been told of it, a long time ago, half
lost to memory and now recalled, as an event of great significance,
are the accounts of it true: thats what comes to mind,
beyond the temporal, a part of history beyond the events, now
bearing some meaning which had not been present at the origin.
And I have to remind myself that it took place only this morning.
I can still hear the creak of the stairs, each springing board
I know so well.
-----To see the bride and groom at
this table, here, in this room, was something that surpassed
all I had envisaged, and, leaving the kitchen to its own stilly
coldness, the smoke pouring from the crack in the fire-door and
lying in a layer on the floor, and, feeling my way through the
passage, my fingers brushing the cracked and hachured boarding
of the wall, to open the door, and to see this room, this room
even as it now stands, as I had not seen it with these eyes before;
I had never looked up into its soaring vault, nor seen the light
in its well-proportioned frieze; I had never seen the panorama
which lay outspread and given beyond the sloping lintels of its
windows: the very air was changed. So permanent and real: on
looking back I cannot attempt its recount.
-----My father waited on them at this
table. What was the nature of this change? What heightening of
magnitude had occurred? They had entered this room still exhausted
with the recent night - even then not halfway through - to show
much fear at the nature of the journey which would upon the present
moments ending begin for them; they were unwashed; their
hair uncombed; they could only look at one another with loving
eyes. They sat at these chairs; this one, where I am; that one,
where you are. There was the bond of unifying love between them,
in their eyes depth and in the disposition of their bodies.
Their breakfast was a silent meal. But there was an unheard music.
Were they still half asleep? There was no more than the beginnings
of wakefulness about their limbs and their tired faces. My father
was still wearied from the night, he had had an hours sleep,
and that most likely in the discomfort of a hard-bottomed chair,
perhaps in the chamber he calls his office, it was as though
everyone had risen early to see some aspect of a greatness come
to light; there was an assonance about the air, and that I took
to be the music, a great deed about to be brought to fruit, the
all-altering moment lying beyond the moments edge; once
I looked across towards my father; he stood behind the table,
his gaze cast downwards, his eyes half shut, half asleep as he
stood, there was no sound, only the flying wind, the lines of
rain lying diagonally across the glass, the yellow light of the
lamp reflected from the streaks, a warm light, it made one feel
the presence of the night beyond it, where soon they would have
to go, we stood at the threshold, the night beyond us, the house
behind us still filled with the drowsiness of sleep, perhaps
we never would awake, the lamp had been brought out into the
hall, it was still dark, a lamp with a broad yellow wick, the
shadows broad and falling quickly beyond, against the night,
the rain came down, the yard awash with water, heard flowing
down the drains, the squall hissing in the uneven stonework,
it had rained all night, and, driven, had come in through the
cracks and knotholes of the outer doors, and beneath the leads,
to stand in pools upon the floor, one heard the rain falling
deeply in the woods, out in distance, and the rising torrent
of the stream, one could hear the sound of the wind in the trees,
in chance directions, following some course, perhaps no wind
at all, I have heard it before, and then the sash rattles in
the still air of the sleepless night, the room I sleep in varies,
it goes with the work, and so they left, leaving the light and
our recognition, my father had fulfilled his last nights
wish, and was asleep; outside, within a few paces, there was
nothing beyond the outline of the trees within the wind. Strangely,
the wind had dropped. There was nothing but the falling of the
heavy drops of water from the leaves. The clouds could be made
out in outline overhead, and moving fast, a purpose to them.
Yet the ashtrees were in motion, a flurry of water drops. I thought
I saw someone beneath the trees. Come in to dry yourself,
I said. Are you talking to the empty night? said
Martha, there is no-one there. Someone heard
me, someone listened to my words.
-----The house was in deep shadow,
after the brightness, no, there had been no brightness, something
had gone, something was about to happen, both together, both
part of the same thing, something moving, a changing time, the
house was in deep shadow, a deeper apprehension of mortality,
perhaps, all events however else they might pull one from another,
by that weak force are summed in all their mass, a deeper apprehension.
-----How may I describe the event
that separated the things which went before it from those which
followed? All leads back to it, and yet I cannot fix it in my
minds eye. The doorway of the house was truly a threshold,
a blackness with the night beyond it, and, inside, darkened rooms
and darkened passages where the water lay, both unfamiliar places
in the presence of change. All was silent. One goes, another
stands at the threshold. Thats how days are. The kitchen
stove, although it had been lit, was still hardly yet warm, its
flame reluctant, perhaps it had gone out, there might never have
been a fire in it for twenty years, the rain had brought some
soot down from the chimney, it lay in little heaps and inky lines,
on the hob, drops of water were falling from the ceiling, and
some plaster had fallen, the iron fender was already specked
with orange spots of rust; and I thought to myself: Is this all
I have known in my life?
-----Mima paused in her speaking to look
up at Gesso, as if to ask him to give some signal of how much
she should say, and how she might choose her words. The
boy in the yard was bringing in the logs, sodden though they
were he could make a fire from wet bog-wood, he could kindle
the peat from the ground, but now he was shivering; it seemed
that I had not been out of bed for more than thirty seconds,
coldness after exertion, steam was rising from his back, the
mousetraps by the side of the fender had been sprung, the bait
taken, but nothing caught; and then my father came in, standing
in the middle of the room, looking at nothing save the little
piece of floor where he was standing, wondering which direction
to take, and then pulling over a bent-wood chair and using its
back to take his weight, his head nodded in the beginnings of
a nightmare, he said, O Mima, I dreamed that it was you
that had gone, found some man, and then he slept, in that
chair, on the rungs of which we keep the cloths to dry, before
the fire, and then the stranger came in, who looks so much like
you that you do not seem to be a stranger.
-----The fire was lit. One thing from
another. The earlier presaging the later. The later reverberances
to the earlier.
-----What else will occur? And, Gesso,
you might give yourself to the question, instead of asking questions
of me, who knows what drives them, or in playing the clown and
imitating me, I dont take myself seriously enough to be
offended, and your manner entertained, one needs the wide eye
in such surroundings as these, very beautiful, from time to time,
remarkable, only the stale sight makes the ground dull and debatable,
my fathers words, last night; no, when you question me,
you dont know what the question means, let alone the answer.
What will be the end of this train of ends? And what is there
for me as well as you, if they are linked, they are linked, they
shall be linked, however one sees links where there are none,
and, in the habit-minded eye, ignores what cries out to be seen,
is still seen, drawing the ground and seeing in it the event
to which one is drawn. Is that the poor thing of seeing what
one likes? No, here it is, Gesso; who will sit here this evening,
when the sun is about to go, no lamps prepared? Can you tell
one day ahead?
[An extract from Days and
Orders by David Wheldon]
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