Authors: Thomas Pynchon
They walked through the tracks of all the others in the snow, she gravely on his arm,
wind blowing her hair to snarls, heels slipping once on ice. “To hear the music,”
he explained.
Tonight’s scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the wide
necks of the white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the exhaustion of soaked
and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in
the clouds, tents whose lights inside shone nuclear at twilight, soullike, through
the crosshatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there.
Yet there was one black face, the counter-tenor, a Jamaican corporal, taken from his
warm island to this—from singing his childhood along the rum-smoky saloons of High
Holborn Street where the sailors throw mammoth red firecrackers, quarter of a stick
of dynamite man, over the swinging doors and run across the street giggling, or come
walking out with high-skirted girls, girls of the island, Chinese and French girls . . .
lemon peels crushed in the gutters of the streets scented the early mornings where
he used to sing, O have you seen my darlin’ Lola, with a shape like a bottle of Coca-Cola,
sailors running up and down in the brown shadows of alleys, flapping at neckerchief
and pants-leg, and the girls whispering together and laughing . . . each morning he
counted out half a pocket full of coins of all nations. From palmy Kingston, the intricate
needs of the Anglo-American Empire (1939–1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse
church, nearly in earshot of a northern sea he’d hardly glimpsed in crossing, to a
compline service, a program tonight of plainsong in English, forays now and then into
polyphony: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, even a German macaronic from the fifteenth
century, attributed to Heinrich Suso:
In dulci jubilo
Nun singet und seid froh!
Unsers Herzens Wonne
Leit in
praesipio
,
Leuchtet vor die Sonne
Matris in gremio.
Alpha es et O.
With the high voice of the black man riding above the others, no head falsetto here
but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought over years of woodshedding
up to this range . . . he was bringing brown girls to sashay among these nervous Protestants,
down the ancient paths the music had set, Big and Little Anita, Stiletto May, Plongette
who loves it between her tits and will do it that way for free—not to mention the
Latin, the
German?
in an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary
as the black man’s presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which, taken in the mass,
are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of the
real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it’s
doing. . . . So the pure counter-tenor voice was soaring, finding its way in to buoy
Jessica’s heart and even Roger’s she guessed, risking glances at his face sideways
and up through brown ghosts of her hair, during recitatives or releases. He wasn’t
looking nihilistic, not even cheaply so. He was . . .
No, Jessica’s never seen his face exactly like this, in the light of a few hanging
oil lamps, the flames unguttering and very yellow, on the nearest the verger’s two
long fingerprints in fine, pollen V-for-victory up around the belly of the glass,
Roger’s skin more child-pink, his eyes more glowing than the lamplight alone can account
for—isn’t it? or is that how she wants it to be? The church is as cold as the night
outside. There’s the smell of damp wool, of bitter on the breaths of these professionals,
of candle smoke and melting wax, of smothered farting, of hair tonic, of the burning
oil itself, folding the other odors in a maternal way, more closely belonging to Earth,
to deep strata, other times, and listen . . . listen: this is the War’s evensong,
the War’s canonical hour, and the night is real. Black greatcoats crowd together,
empty hoods full of dense, church-interior shadows. Over on the coast the Wrens work
late, down inside cold and gutted shells, their blue torches are newborn stars in
the tidal evening. Hullplates swing in the sky, like great iron leaves, on cables
that creak in splinters of sound. At ease, on standby, the flames of the torches,
softened, fill the round glass faces of the gauges with apricot light. In the pipefitters’
sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the Straits, here’s thousands of old
used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings, thousands of somber man-mornings
made tolerable, transformed to mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across
the quicksilver mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled
foam up out of soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words
among the chalky bubbles—bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of
fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the counterpane—uncounted
soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to sewers and the slow-scumming gray
estuary, the morning mouths growing with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with
fear, foul with idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead
for the week’s offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the usual
points, and isn’t menthol a marvelous invention to take just enough of it away each
morning, down to become dusty oversize bubbles tessellating tough and stagnant among
the tar shorelines, the intricate draftsmanship of outlets feeding, multiplying out
to sea, as one by one these old toothpaste tubes are emptied and returned to the War,
heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube
wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns,
hand against hand, waiting now—it is true return—to be melted for solder, for plate,
alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children
of that other domestic incarnation will never see. Yet the continuity, flesh to kindred
metals, home to hedgeless sea, has persisted. It is not death that separates these
incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the Empire, will
expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to
subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together.
The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans
have engineered, ein Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not
oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say
what
the War wants, so vast and aloof is it . . . so
absentee.
Perhaps the War isn’t even an awareness—not a life at all, really. There may only
be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life. At “The White Visitation” there’s a
longtime schiz, you know, who believes that
he
is World War II. He gets no newspapers, refuses to listen to the wireless, but still,
the day of the Normandy invasion somehow his temperature shot up to 104°. Now, as
the pincers east and west continue their slow reflex contraction, he speaks of darkness
invading his mind, of an attrition of self. . . . The Rundstedt offensive perked him
up though, gave him a new lease on life—“A beautiful Christmas gift,” he confessed
to the resident on his ward, “it’s the season of birth, of fresh beginnings.” Whenever
the rockets fall—those which are audible—he smiles, turns out to pace the ward, tears
about to splash from the corners of his merry eyes, caught up in a ruddy high tonicity
that can’t help cheering his fellow patients. His days are numbered. He’s to die on
V-E Day. If he’s not in fact the War then he’s its child-surrogate, living high for
a certain term but come the ceremonial day, look out. The true king only dies a mock
death. Remember. Any number of young men may be selected to die in his place while
the real king, foxy old bastard, goes on. Will he show up under the Star, slyly genuflecting
with the other kings as this winter solstice draws on us? Bring to the serai gifts
of tungsten, cordite, high-octane? Will the child gaze up from his ground of golden
straw then, gaze into the eyes of the old king who bends long and unfurling overhead,
leans to proffer his gift, will the eyes meet, and what message, what possible greeting
or entente will flow between the king and the infant prince? Is the baby smiling,
or is it just gas? Which do you want it to be?
Advent blows from the sea, which at sunset tonight shone green and smooth as iron-rich
glass: blows daily upon us, all the sky above pregnant with saints and slender heralds’
trumpets. Another year of wedding dresses abandoned in the heart of winter, never
called for, hanging in quiet satin ranks now, their white-crumpled veils begun to
yellow, rippling slightly only at your passing, spectator . . . visitor to the city
at all the dead ends. . . . Glimpsing in the gowns your own reflection once or twice,
halfway from shadow, only blurred flesh-colors across the peau de soie, urging you
in to where you can smell the mildew’s first horrible touch, which was really the
idea—covering all trace of her own smell, middleclass bride-to-be perspiring, genteel
soap and powder. But virgin in her heart, in her hopes. None of your bright-Swiss
or crystalline season here, but darkly billowed in the day with cloud and the snow
falling like gowns in the country, gowns of the winter, gentle at night, a nearly
windless breathing around you. In the stations of the city the prisoners are back
from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as dreamers or men on the
moon, among chrome-sprung prams of black hide resonant as drumheads, blonde wood high-chairs
pink and blue with scraped and mush-spattered floral decals, folding-cots and bears
with red felt tongues, baby-blankets making bright pastel clouds in the coal and steam
smells, the metal spaces, among the queued, the drifting, the warily asleep, come
by their hundreds in for the holidays, despite the warnings, the gravity of Mr. Morrison,
the tube under the river a German rocket may pierce now, even now as the words are
set down, the absences that may be waiting them, the city addresses that surely can
no longer exist. The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred
perseverances—stare out of blued orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian
P/Ws curse underneath the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour,
in seasonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the trains
have been all night underground, passing through the country of the dead. If these
Eyeties sing now and then you can bet it’s not “Giovinezza” but something probably
from
Rigoletto
or
La Bohème
—indeed the Post Office is considering issuing a list of Nonacceptable Songs, with
ukulele chords as an aid to ready identification. Their cheer and songfulness, this
lot, is genuine up to a point—but as the days pile up, as this orgy of Christmas greeting
grows daily beyond healthy limits, with no containment in sight before Boxing Day,
they settle, themselves, for being more professionally Italian, rolling the odd eye
at the lady evacuees, finding techniques of balancing the sack with one hand whilst
the other goes playing “dead”—
cioé
, conditionally alive—where the crowds thicken most feminine, directionless . . .
well, most promising. Life has to go on. Both kinds of prisoner recognize that, but
there’s no
mano morto
for the Englishmen back from CBI, no leap from dead to living at mere permission
from a likely haunch or thigh—no
play
, for God’s sake, about life-and-death! They want no more adventures: only the old
dutch fussing over the old stove or warming the old bed, cricketers in the wintertime,
they want the semi-detached Sunday dead-leaf somnolence of a dried garden. If the
brave new world should also come about, a kind of windfall, why there’ll be time to
adjust certainly to that. . . . But they want the nearly postwar luxury this week
of buying an electric train set for the kid, trying that way each to light his own
set of sleek little faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs
all, brought to life now, oohs and aahs but not yet, not here in the station, any
of the moves most necessary: the War has shunted them, earthed them, those heedless
destroying signalings of love. The children have unfolded last year’s toys and found
reincarnated Spam tins, they’re hep this may be the other and, who knows, unavoidable
side to the Christmas game. In the months between—country springs and summers—they
played with real Spam tins—tanks, tank-destroyers, pillboxes, dreadnoughts deploying
meat-pink, yellow and blue about the dusty floors of lumber-rooms or butteries, under
the cots or couches of their exile. Now it’s time again. The plaster baby, the oxen
frosted with gold leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens
to flesh. To believe is not a price they pay—it happens all by itself. He is the New
Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the sky will be milk.
The grandparents, who’ve waited each week for the Radio Doctor asking, What Are Piles?
What Is Emphysema? What Is A Heart Attack? will wait up beyond insomnia, watching
again for the yearly impossible not to occur, but with some mean residue—this
is
the hillside, the sky
can
show us a light—like a thrill, a good time you wanted too much, not a complete loss
but still too far short of a miracle . . . keeping their sweatered and shawled vigils,
theatrically bitter, but with the residue inside going through a new winter fermentation
every year, each time a bit less, but always good for a revival at this season. . . .
All but naked now, the shiny suits and gowns of their pubcrawling primes long torn
to strips for lagging the hot-water pipes and heaters of landlords, strangers, for
holding the houses’ identities against the winter. The War needs coal. They have taken
the next-to-last steps, attended the Radio Doctor’s certifications of what they knew
in their bodies, and at Christmas they are naked as geese under this woolen, murky,
cheap old-people’s swaddling. Their electric clocks run fast, even Big Ben will be
fast now until the new spring’s run in, all fast, and no one else seems to understand
or to care. The War needs electricity. It’s a lively game, Electric Monopoly, among
the power companies, the Central Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep
Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest concrete
wells of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding,
the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes—gathering in their minutes whining,
pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night’s Mad Carnival. There
is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between
the numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the clocks will
slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads expected daily do
not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the old faces turn to the clock
faces, thinking
plot
, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that
will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. But
over the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the city the
arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the centerlines of the streets,
too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for holocaust . . . the tall red
busses sway, all the headlamps by regulation newly unmasked now parry, cross, traverse
and blind, torn great fistfuls of wetness blow by, desolate as the beaches beneath
the nacre fog, whose barbed wire that never knew the inward sting of current, that
only lay passive, oxidizing in the night, now weaves like underwater grass, looped,
bitter cold, sharp as the scorpion, all the printless sand miles past cruisers abandoned
in the last summers of peacetime that once holidayed the old world away, wine and
olive-grove and pipe-smoke evenings away the other side of the War, stripped now to
rust axles and brackets and smelling inside of the same brine as this beach you cannot
really walk, because of the War. Up across the downs, past the spotlights where the
migrant birds in autumn choked the beams night after night, fatally held till they
dropped exhausted out of the sky, a shower of dead birds, the compline worshipers
sit in the unheated church, shivering, voiceless as the choir asks: where are the
joys? Where else but there where the Angels sing new songs and the bells ring out
in the court of the King.
Eia
—strange thousand-year sigh—
eia, wärn wir da!
were we but there. . . . The tired men and their black bellwether reaching as far
as they can, as far from their sheeps’ clothing as the year will let them stray. Come
then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your
love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it. All day it’s been at you, coercing,
jiving, claiming your belief in so much that isn’t true. Is that who you are, that
vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera
as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the Stage
Door Canteen, where they’re counting the night’s take, the NAAFI girls, the girls
named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon
organs with their yellow garnishes of fat—oh Linda come here feel this one, put your
finger down in the ventricle here, isn’t it swoony, it’s still
going. . . .
Everybody you don’t suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor,
your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home
Service programme, let’s not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death
and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the
lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney
causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under
the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around
a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering
up under Liberty’s wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell—what do you think,
it’s a children’s story? There aren’t any. The children are away dreaming, but the
Empire has no place for dreams and it’s Adults Only in here tonight, here in this
refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking,
heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the
black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless
plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary,
seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel
singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen
for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong
here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights
bad as this one—something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually,
with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries
between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one
night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost
too frail, there’s too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily
outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure
somebody’s around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish
collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers
are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear,
just like the innkeepers who’re naturally delighted with this registration thing,
and up in the capital they’re wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a
number
, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping . . . and Herod or Hitler, fellas (the
chaplains out in the Bulge are manly, haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world
is it (“You forgot Roosevelt, padre,” come the voices from the back, the good father
can never see them, they harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams: “Wendell
Willkie!” “How about Churchill?”“‘Arry Pollitt!”) for a baby to come in tippin’ those
Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin’ he’s gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his
head examined. . . .