Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ the Sun and its attendants. Mercury the Sun’s closest associate was the only one which could maintain steadily and always the consciousness of the Sun’s underlying song, its need, its intention, Mercury whose name was, also, Thoth, and Enoch, Buddha, Idris and Hermes, and many other styles or titles in the Earth’s histories, Mercury the Messenger, the carrier of news, or information from the sun, the disseminator of laws from God’s singing centre.

      Yes, but farther out, on the third crookedly spinning planet, it is harder to keep that knowledge, the sanity and simplicity of the great Sun, and indeed poor Earth is far from grace, and so it was easy to see, for at that tempo of spin that enabled me to watch clearly the marrying of events on Earth and in the rest of its fellow planets, I watched how wars and famines, and earthquakes and disasters, floods and terrors, epidemics and plagues of insects and rats and flying things came and went according to the pressures from the combinations of the planets and the Sun—and the Moon. For a swarm of locusts, a spreading of viruses, like the life of humanity, is governed elsewhere. The life of man, that little crust of matter, which was not even visible until one swooped down close as a bird might sweep in and out for a quick survey of a glittering shoal of fish that puckered a wave’s broad flank, that pulse’s intensity and size and health was set by Mercury and Venus, Mars and Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto, and their movements, and the centre of light that fed them all. Man, that flicker of life, diminished in numbers and multiplied, was peace-loving or murderous—in bondage. For when a war flared up involving half the earth masses of the globe, or when the Earth’s population doubled in a handful of years and for the first time in known history, or when in every place that men lived they rioted and fought and scuffled and screamed and killed and wept against their fate, it was because the balance of the planets had shifted, or a comet came too close—or the moon spoke, voicing the cold, the compulsion, and now, bending in as close as I dared to watch, I saw how the Earth and its Moon cycled and circled and how both earth and water pulsed and swelled and vibrated on Earth, as matter swelled and moved and vibrated on the moon, on the cold Moon, on the cold dead Moon, the warm Earth’s cold sister, the step-child, the terrible Moon who sucks and leeches and clutches on to the warm earth that was alive, for the Moon wanted to live, the Moon would live, the Moon was like a poor sad stillborn babe, but the baby would live, it fought to live, as eggs drag lime from hens’ bones, and foetuses pull life from their mothers, the Moon sucked and leeched and was like a dragging magnet of need that was the earth’s first metronome in the dance of the planets, for it was nearest, it was the deprived and half-starved twin, the earth’s other self, the Necessity.

      Here was the frightful cold weight of sorrow that had lain on the edge of my mind since I had first been absorbed into the Crystal—the knowledge of the Moon and its need. So close was the Moon, so much part of earth, that it was earth—for seen even from that short distance they looked like a pair of brothers always in movement about each other. The Moon was so very close, the always present force that is easiest overlooked when the tiny human mind looks for reasons and answers. Much easier to look out—right out, beyond even the farthest orbits of Uranus and Pluto—out to Riga, even to that other mirror, far Andromeda and beyond that to …

      Oh yes, that’s what our mind does most easily, but right here, in close, so close it is locked with us in a dance that moves waters and earth in tides twice a day, and swings in our veins and arteries and the tides of thought in our minds—close, flesh of our flesh, thought of our thought, the Moon, Earth’s step-child, setting our stature, setting our growth, feeding appetites and making them. Moon spinning closer in to Earth makes animals and plants such and such a size and Moon lost or disintegrated or wandering farther away changes animals, plants, the height of tides and probably the movement of land masses and ice masses, changes life as draconically as a sudden shower in a desert will change everything overnight. On the surface of the little Earth, a little green film, and part and parcel with this film, being fed by it, the crust of microbes, mankind, mad, moonmad, lunatick. To celestial eyes, seen like a broth of microbes under a microscope, always at war and destruction, this scum of microbes thinks, it can see itself, it begins slowly to sense itself as one, a function, a note in the harmony, and this is its point and function, and where the scummy film transcends itself, here and here only, and never where these mad microbes say I, I, I, I, I, for saying I, I, I, I, is their madness this is where they have been struck lunatic, made moonmad, round the bend, crazy, for these microbes are a whole, they form a unity, they have a single mind, a single being, and never can they say I, I, without making the celestial watchers roll with laughter or weep with pity—since I suppose we are free to presume compassion and derisiveness in the guardians of the microbes; or at least we are free to imagine nothing else—compassion and amusement being our qualities but who knows what sort of a colour or a sound laughter, tears make there in that finer kind of air?

      Some sort of a divorce there has been somewhere along the long path of this race of man between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’, some sort of a terrible falling away, and I (who am not I, but part of a whole composed of other human beings as they are of me) hovering here as if between the wings of a great white bird, feel as if I am spinning back (though it may be forwards, who knows?) yes spinning back into a vortex of terror, like a birth in reverse, and it is towards a catastrophe, yes, that was when the microbes, the little broth that is humanity, was knocked senseless, hit for six, knocked out of their true understanding, so that ever since most have said I, I, I, I, I, I, I and cannot, save for a few, say We.

      Yes, but what awful blow or knock? What sent us off centre, and away from the sweet sanity of We? In a moment I’ll know, I’m being sucked back like a mite revolving in the vortex of the bathwater, eddying into the mill-race, back, back, and then Crash! the Comet, it comes hurtling out of the dark of space, gives Earth a blow to midriff, and, deflected in its course, rushes off into the dark again, taking some of the atmosphere with it, and, leaving Earth no longer circling sane and steady, but wobbling back and forth, gyrating like a top, and all askew, which is when the seasons were born, beloved of poets, but worse, the air changed, the air that they breathed which kept them sane and healthy saying we in love and understanding for the developing organ in a celestial body which they were. The air that had been the food of sane and loving understanding became a deadly poison, the lungs of these poor little animals laboured and changed and adapted, and their poor brains, all muddled and befuddled, laboured to work at all, and worked badly. A machine all awry, but always teased and tormented by a queer half-memory of the time before they became poisoned and spoiled and could not think, and hated each other instead of loving. And there hung poor Earth, a casualty, all amiss, but soon they forgot, their newly poisoned air became their normality, a forgetting by vanity, and … but Crash, look, I’m on the other side of the Catastrophe, I’m before it. Though I’m free, too, to say ‘after’, since like ‘up and down’ it is interchangeable and entirely how you look at it, how you are situated, as is backwards and forwards. But man-wise, microbe-wise, I am before the Crash and in a cool sweet loving air that tings with harmony, is harmony, IS, yes, and here am I, voyager, Odysseus bound for home at last, the seeker in home waters, spiteful Neptune outwitted and Jupiter’s daughter my friend and guide.

      All men make caves of shadow for their eyes

      With hats and hands, sockets, lashes, brows, So tender pupils dare look at the light.

      In Northlands too where light lies shadowless

      A man will lift his hand to guard his eyes; It’s a thing that I’ve seen done in strong moonlight.

      At any blaze too fierce, that warden hand

      Goes to its post, keeping a dark; Like cats’, men’s eyes grow large and soft with night.

      New eyes they are, and still not used to see,

      Taking in facets, individual, With no skill yet to use them round and right.

      Think: beasts on all fours we were, low,

      With horizontal gaze kept safely from That pulsing, flaming, all eye-searing СКАЧАТЬ