Pilgermann (13 page)

How nothing is simply one thing! There comes to mind unaccountably an order of the day from Jenghis Khan to his horsemen at some distance from 1071, a century or two perhaps. In this order he commands his men to leave their horses unbridled on the march—they are to have their mouths free, they are not to be galloped on the march.

Where was I when the Battle of Manzikert was fought in 1071,
Anno Mundi
4831 in the Jewish calendar? That was the year of my birth; on some frequency still sounds my birth-cry in the hum and crackle, the roar and whine and whistle where lives the mingled murmur of Romanus and his Jewish executioner. Questions arise continually, everything must be kept in mind at once—at least one must try, must do one’s best. Because everything is with us. Even now the fading heat of the universe’s
explosion into being warms the deeps of space, still it fades there, the echo of that first blind bursting shout of beginning. I note that everything that has ever happened is imprinted on me. I can feel it even though I cannot by my own volition recall most of it. With the bursting of the original explosion in me I am again in the year 1096, moving with the many, moving with the thousands towards the fall of Jerusalem, that golden city that I never lived to see. The fall of Jerusalem is at the centre of its space-time; the centre of anything is the centre of everything; how may it be looked at? Could the siege of Jerusalem have been painted by Vermeer? Can such a thing be looked at in such a way? Can the sunlight on mail shirts and blood and severed limbs be looked at as one looks at the daylight from a neat Dutch window in which a quiet woman weighs gold? A better painting to think of is the ‘Head of a Young Girl’: the look that looks out from the face of that young beauty, such asking is there in that look! ‘Are you love? Are you death? Are you the beginning of everything, are you the end?’ Not only does this young girl with her look see all of these but all of these look out at us from her face.

And the look with which Vermeer looked upon her face, that is the look with which everything must be seen; yes, even the severed limbs. Everything that is, everything that happens must be seen with the eye that is in love with seeing. All must be seen with a willing look. From the face of Vermeer’s young girl looks out at us the heart of the mystery, the moving stillness in which again and again explodes, in which even now at this very moment explodes the beginning of all things. From her eyes the unseen looks out at us, and through our eyes looking back into hers also looks the unseen.

This unseen that sometimes we call God, has it a purpose or a destiny? What is its present work? Elephants, whales, mice, cockroaches, humans—from a single cell of any of them can be made the whole creature complete; there is in the cell that reservoir of potentiality. With what we call time the potentiality is unlimited: each moment has in it the matrix of all moments, the possibility of all action. Is it God’s destiny to turn the wheel until every potentiality has become an actuality? For this has God come to hate the world? For this does God weep and curse
continually as the wheel turns and there approach him over and over again popes, Jews, warriors, idiots, kings, queens, beggars, lepers, lions, dogs, and monkeys, each busy with its tiny mortal history and each tiny mortal history different from all the others. Even if each one were to try to live out that history exactly the same as the one before it can’t be done; variations and permutations will always come into it.

Will there ever be an end to it all, is the end one of the possibilities? God doesn’t know. God created all the possibilities of variation and permutation but he cannot calculate them. How can this be? Is not God omniscient and omnipotent? Yes, and being so he was able to conceive and create possibilities beyond his understanding and beyond his capability to deal with as agent, as doer. If he were not able to do this he would be less than all-powerful. There is of course a paradox here: if God has not the power to understand everything he is not omniscient, and equally if he has not the power to create something beyond his understanding he is not omnipotent. It is my belief that God is of an artistic temperament and has therefore chosen to let his own work be beyond his understanding; I think this may well be why he has abandoned the He identity and has moved into the It where he is both subject and object, the doer and the done. God is no longer available to receive or transmit personal messages; he has been absorbed into process and toils ignorantly at the wheel with the rest of us.

In this general process some potential actions are actualized, some not. In the channel of action where I moved with the thousands towards Jerusalem there moved also the unlived action of earlier popes who were unsuccessful in their attempts at what is now called a Crusade,
Kreuzzug
in German. The most direct translation of this word is Cross-pull, and indeed the Cross did exert a pull. Pope Sergius IV in 1011, Leo IX in 1053, Gregory VII in 1074 had tried but had not been able to set these thousands moving towards Jerusalem. Time after time had violent men sharpened the cross into a sword and made their silken vestments into banners; time after time had they spat out the wafer and the wine and shouted for real blood and real bodies. Again and again had this moment tried to come into being; blown out each time like a candle its light sprang up again
whenever any flame approached the smoking wick.

Looking at it all from where I am now, looking at faraway events from this great distance I see them as if jumbled together or dancing in a ring, unseparated by time: Crusades, plagues, massacres of Jews, dancing madness, peasant revolts—a dance of life and a dance of death. A dance of life that spins itself into death like gold being spun into straw. Life cannot tolerate itself, life wants to become death. Almost one might say that the function of life is to manifest death. Perhaps death is the gold, life the straw. Death is the natural expression of life. See the swift and fluent dance of maggots in a dead mouse, such a relief, as when a smoking log bursts into flame. And of course it was in my country that the Dancing Madness arose, following hot on the heels of the Black Death which followed on the Crusades.

Because of what happened, because of what was done in the name of Christ, Jerusalem ceased to exist. What remained was not Jerusalem, it was an image fixed on a dead retina. An image retained on the dead retina of an idea. An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.

I must be more precise: Jerusalem has not ceased to exist any more than bread has ceased to exist; the bread that has been eaten is gone, now there is more bread. The Jerusalem that was is gone, now there is more Jerusalem, other Jerusalem. One assumes that the world simply is and is and is but it isn’t, it is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again.

With the ear of the mind I hear the army of the Franks on the march, I hear the massed clinking of their tread, I hear the horses snort and whinny, the rattling of leaves of iron. With the eye of the mind I see spokes of sunlight revolving through marching figures, I see the night gleam of armour, I see the Orontes River. As I recall life now I sometimes think of it as a sort of raisin-cake with vast distances between the raisins. As I send the idea of my being questing back it is from raisin to raisin that it makes its way, like the line connecting the dots that make the constellations of the Virgin and the Lion on the star charts.
Or the route of the Franks across plains and mountains as they headed, with the harmless migrant storks high above them, for the water-crossing at the Bosporus. The line seeks the image, it smells out the image-making dots as a salmon returning from the sea smells out the river of its birth, swims upstream, spawns and dies. So with the line: it swims upstream, spawns a dot, and dies. The action of the spawning and the death make a dot; what was smelled was the place wanting the dot. Why did the place want a dot, how could a place want a dot, what was the need of the place, whose need? The line’s? The place’s? God’s?

No. We assume always too much, we assume what cannot be assumed. We see dots so we connect them with lines and we claim to know what the lines and dots signify. There is a marching, there is a galloping, there is a hissing of arrows, a clashing of swords; or it may be that there is simply a stretching forth of the neck to the sword, there is a wrapping in the Torah scroll, there is a burning alive and we assume (always the assumptions) that these things are happening to different people. We assume that the Frank is distinct from the Jew who is distinct from the Turk but I cannot now think of it as being like that. It seems to me now that that busy line, that motion in the circuitry, did not leap from one dot to another: from the leap of its original impulse its being continued on its way to flash into Christian, Jew, Muslim, fortresses, rivers, dawns, full moons, battles, crows, the wind in the trees, anything you like. Mountains in the dawn; the shock of Thing-in-Itself, the enormity of Now. So it is that although my being is in one way or another continuous I cannot present to you Pilgermann as continuous, only flashes here and there.

How there are vortices in the space-time! My mind keeps spinning down to Manzikert where in actuality I as Pilgermann never have been. It was one of the big dots, one of the juicier raisins. The dust! So much dust stirred up by those hooves, by those feet that trampled out, that trod the grapes of mortality into the wine of history for the Byzantine Empire. Wine! Wine and dust at the same time, at the same time the hot and dry and the cold and wet.

No. Not Manzikert. I mean to tell of Antioch. Yes, where the walls undulated like a serpent on the mountains, where the
four hundred towers waited for the line to flash into a dot. Four hundred towers!

Before Antioch there were the Anti-Taurus Mountains. Perhaps I was not a Jew then, because I remember the heat and the weight of the mail shirt that rusted the skin and chafed the body bloody, I remember the donkeys plunging over the edge roped one to the other, the black letters of their braying frozen in the silence of their deaths.

‘Now help me, Memory!’ Only a little space from here have I heard myself speak these words. But as the words and pictures of my thoughts go out on those few millimetres of waveband assigned to me I begin to understand that I myself am a tiny particle of Memory. I am a microscopic chip in that vast circuitry in which are recorded all of the variations and permutations thus far. Not all of my experience is available for recall by my Pilgermann identity, only that in which the energy of the input was above a certain level. Thus it is that I can at any time call up that veiled owl to whom I said, ‘Hear, O Israel!’ but most of my education is lost to me.

Like any parent I wanted the best for my death, I remember that well. Walking beside me he was scarcely more visible than breath on glass but the manifestation of him was continually more detailed and refined although his face was obscure. He was not as yet ready to speak, perhaps he never would speak, but he looked at me with a look that said plainly, ‘I know that I can trust you to do the right thing.’ I nodded with a false heartiness, trying to look reliable. When the time came I did the best I could. I don’t know where he is now, I don’t know what’s become of him. One does what one can; the rest is a matter of luck and chance.

My recall is offering me Antioch but the last dot was still in Germany. How did I get to Antioch? Pirates. I was on a ship from Genoa bound for Jaffa when they appeared. Even now I must smile when I see with the eye of the mind the hungry triangle of that red sail cleaving the white dazzle of the sunlight
on the dark blue sea. Larger, larger and more and more urgent it becomes and I smile because there is no surprise in it, perhaps even I am not unwilling that this should happen.

When I came down to Genoa out of the north there was the sea dividing with its horizon the picture in my eyes. Everything on this side of the horizon was in the world of HERE, everything beyond it was THERE. Here was a fresh and salty breeze from the sea, here were the clustered masts nodding in the harbour and the gulls soaring, circling, crying, crying, ‘Where are you going, Herr Keinpimmel? What is Jerusalem, that you should go from HERE to THERE?’ This of course was the voice of the Mittelteufel, the halfway devil; I came to know it later but at that time I had not yet learned to recognize it. I was suddenly cowed by the overwhelming and undeniable reality of the sea, I was reduced to nothing by the objectivity of the gulls, I could not think why I wanted to go anywhere or do anything. In that particular Now that comes just before one embarks only the sea seemed real; not Christ; not God; not sin. I looked round for Bodwild and Konrad, for the bear, for Udo, for the tax-collector and my young death and Bruder Pförtner. There was no one, I was utterly alone.

In front of me stood a fat brown-faced shipmaster with a gold circlet in one ear, a look of contempt on his face, and his palm outstretched. He looked as if he might, after taking their money, chop one lot of pilgrims into pieces and salt them away in barrels for the feeding of the next lot. Behind him were the sea and the circling gulls and his ship tied up at the quay. The ship was a wallowing-shaped thing with its brown sail furled on the yard and its deck all a-clutter with wineskins, bales and bundles, chickens, pigs, and goats. I looked to see what the name of it was:
Balena, Whale.
’ If this ship is a whale,’ I said to the master in Italian (I had studied medicine in Salerno), ‘I hope that doesn’t make me … ’

The master laid his finger across his lips. ‘Don’t say it,’ he said. ‘Bad luck.’

I paid him fifty ducats and abandoned all hope. That is, I thought that I had abandoned all hope until I went below decks and smelled the smell there; then I found that there was yet more hope to abandon. I paid five more ducats to be
allowed to sleep on deck with the chickens and the pigs and the goats.

When it was time to sail the seamen all lurched aboard fit for nothing but vomiting and sleeping. Some did one, some did both. When woken up to raise the sail and haul up the anchor they all began to sing. Their singing had that peculiar falseness sometimes heard in the choruses of provincial opera companies; it made one lose all confidence in any kind of human effort whatever; it made one doubt that the ship, the anchor, the ocean or indeed the world was real. The ocean proved to be real enough and the ship wallowed in it in a way that was sickening as only reality can be.