Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ anywhere always beats on its own wavelength of sound/light, there could not be individuals in this nourishing web. Together they formed one beat in the great dance, one note in the song. Everywhere and on every level the little individuals made up wholes, struck little notes, made tones of colour. On every level: even myself and my friends whom the Crystal had absorbed into a whole, unimportant gnats, and my women and my children and everyone I had known in my life—even someone passed on a street corner and smiled at once—these struck a note, made a whole. And this was the truth that gave the utter insignificance of these motes their significance: in the great singing dance, everything linked and moved together. My mind was the facet of a mind, like cells in a honeycomb. Letting my mind lie dark there, quiescent, a mirror for light, I could feel, or sense, or recognize, a pulse of individuality that I had known once as poor Charlie, or Felicity, or James or Thomas. Pulses of mind lay beating and absorbing beside my own little pulse, and together we were a whole, connecting in this wholeness with the myriad differing wholes that each of these people had formed in their lives, were continuously forming in every breath they took, and through this web, these webs, ran a finer beat, as water ran everywhere in the stone city through channels cut or built in rock by men who were able to grade the lift or the fall of the earth.

      But yet while I observed this, felt this, understood at last, I was conscious always of that old, that very ancient, weight, the cold of grief I had become aware of so early on after my absorption into this new area of being. There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punishing, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. There it was, close, always—I acknowledged it and in doing so moved out and on, since now everything was open to me and I floated deliciously, like a bubble in foam or as if lying at ease between a bird’s stretched wings.

      The corporeal Earth, like a round boulder, lay revolving erratically at about the distance it would take a shout or a hail to carry. It spun slowly about, wobbling badly. This spinning made a system of streaks, brown, blue and white, show on the surface of the globe, but I knew that these streaks were the seas and continents and ice-caps in motion. The globe lay surrounded by its envelope of pulsing light, through which, however, I could see, as if I were peering through a thin opalescent cloud. I was seeing this Earth spinning in a time that was not humanity’s time. Somewhere behind me, or to one side, was the vast white blaze of the sun, and in this steady blaze the Earth spun. I lay steady, a minuscule planet of the sun, watching the Earth in its spin. Day and night were not visible except as a soft flicker, and the violent rocking back and forth that makes our seasons seemed like a green flush that passed in a wink, and a momentary thickening of the white streaks at north and south poles. At this speed all I could see was a whizzing around on its axis and a whirling around the Sun—and there was the weight of cold grief present here too, the compulsion, but I did not now attend to this, for as I thought of the speed of the planet, it began to slow, and now it was turning no faster than it needed for me to take in a pattern of earth and water before the pattern turned out of sight. Since I was now farther away than before, when the chart of darting impulses had shown itself to me, I could examine in less detail but in more perspective how the illuminated envelope about the Earth thrilled and glowed and changed and shivered in its dance, and I could see very clearly how this envelope which clung to the Earth’s surface like a white summer fog on a warm morning matched and spoke to the areas beneath. A continent, I saw, gave off the same subtlety of shade—not absolutely uniform all over, of course not, but enough to be a recognizable basis to whatever other currents then ran and danced over it in their netting of sympathetic movement. It seemed as if there was something, but I could not see what, which made, let’s say, that mass of land which we call Russia, European Russia, give off a glow which did not change, and this shade was different from that shade which pervaded the mass we call Asia, and these were different, but steadily different, from other areas of the world. Each part of the globe’s surface of course had its own distinctive physical shade, that was its vegetation (or its lack of it), its plant setting for its animal life, but as distinctive, as clearly differentiated as jungle and desert and swamp and highland, was the light that lay above in the aerial map that was its mirror and its sister—its governor. In this map of the currents of the mind and sympathies and feelings, countries—that is, nations—were marked out, and held what was necessary and appropriate to them, and it mattered very much whether a concept ‘nation’ matched with the physical area beneath it, and where these were in discord then there was a discord of light and sound. I had an old thought, or rather, an old thought was transplanted upwards into the keener, swifter air of this realm, that no matter what changes of government or what names were given to a nation’s system of organization, there was always the same flavour or reality that remained in that place, that country, or area—and seen from where I was, where time was speeding so that one revolution of the globe was like a slow human breath, so that I was watching great movements of human event, but as I might, as a human, watch for an hour the change, growth, and sudden destruction of an anthill. I looked close in at little England, catching a quick glimpse as it turned past, and saw how it kept its own pulse, which was a colour, a condition, a note of sound—for all countries, every one, every crust of mould, or part of humanity, were held in laws that they could not change or upset. They were manipulated from above (or below) by physical forces that they did not even as yet suspect—or that they did not suspect at this moment of time because it was part of this little organism’s condition to discover and forget and discover and forget—and this was a time when they had forgotten and were about again to discover. But their terrible bondage, the chains of necessity that grasped them—it was this thought that came in again, bringing the dreadful breath of cold, of grief.

      As I thought that I would like to see the Earth speed up a little, but not as fast as before, when a year’s turn around the sun seemed like the spin of a coin, it did speed up, and now I saw other patterns of light, or colour, deepen and fade and marry and merge and move, and as I thought that all these patterns were no more than a composite of the slower individual pulses and currents I had seen earlier, and that they were making up the glowing coloured mist that was the envelope of the globe, it came into my mind that the glowing envelope of the globe seemed to be set, or held, by something else, just as it, in its place, held the rhythms of the Earth, our Earth. My mind made another outward-going, outswelling, towards comprehension, and now I saw how lines and currents of force and sympathy and antagonism danced in a web that was the system of planets around the Sun, so much a part of the Sun that its glow of substance, lying all about it in space, held the planets as intimately as if these planets were merely crystallizations or hardenings of its vaporous stuff, moments of density in the solar wind. And this web was an iron, a frightful necessity, imposing its design.

      Now I watched, as the Earth turned fast, but still so that I could see the change and growth and dying away of patterns, how as the planets moved and meshed and altered and came closer to each other and went away again, exerting a pressure of forces on each other that bound them all, on the Earth the little crusts of matter that were men, that were humanity, changed and moved. Just as the waters, the oceans (a little film of fluid matter on the big globe’s surface) moved and swung under the compulsion of the Sun and the Moon, so did the life of man, oscillating in its web of necessity, in its place in the life of the planets, a minute crust on the surface of a thickening and becoming visible of the Sun’s breath that was called Earth. Humanity was a pulse in the life of the Sun, which lay burning there in a vast white explosion of varying kinds of light, or sound, some stronger and thicker, some tenuous, but at all forces and strengths, which fluid lapped out into space holding all these crumbs and drops and little flames in a dance, and the force that held them there circling and whirling in their dance was the Sun, the energy of the Sun, and that was the controlling governor of them all, beside whose strength all the subsidiary laws and necessities were nothing. The ground and soul and heart and centre of this little solar system was the light and pulse and song of the Sun, the Sun was king. But although this central strength, this majestic core of our web, was an essence to the whole system, farther out and away from the centre, where poor dark Pluto moved, perhaps it might be that the tug and pull and pressure of the planets seemed more immediate, perhaps out there, or farther, the knowledge that the Sun is still the deep low organ note that underlies all being is forgotten—forgotten more even than on earth, spinning there so crooked and sorrowful and calamitous with its СКАЧАТЬ