Tales and Imaginings (16 page)

The figure opposite me remained absolutely silent and still. All the wild sensations had withdrawn into him and the room was left
an empty geometry. Time must have flowed on, though, like a trickle of melt-water under a glacier, for in the end a signal came: a bark, that rattled the windows like a cannon-shot, from the end of the garden, or the end of the world, I couldn’t tell which. The hunter stood, and stretched and yawned, took up his stick – it was a little bow, I saw, with a thin knotted thong for a string – and stepped out into the glow of dawn. Very slowly the room was
emptied
of strangeness, as if he were drawing after him long dim tatters, glittering streamers, dazzling billowy starry banners.

After a while my dog came in, momentarily turned the
unreadable
black roundels of her eyes and nose towards me, and hopped into her basket. And I lay down, stretching out my hand to her who sleeps beside me.

I should explain, before beginning, that in my youth I used to get up late. Even after I had left home this was a source of concern and annoyance to my parents, folk to whom the concept of dreamwork, had they come across it, would have seemed oxymoronic.

One morning I was awoken by the doorbell. Stumbling
downstairs
in my dressing-gown, I tried to keep a thread of my sleep in my hand, for there had been something precious in it, a dream,
perhaps
even a hint towards a poem, which I cannot now recover. The impatient postman had already gone by the time I opened the door, leaving a small square packet on the threshold. I put the packet aside, indifferent to the reminder that it was my twentieth birthday, and followed my thread back to the warm hollow from which I had been sprung.

I hadn’t gone far through the doorshaped space of the bed when I came to the house of the Mender of Broken Dreams. I explained to him what had happened. He asked me what was in the packet, and I said that I had left it unopened on the hall table. He pointed to a little heap of parcels in the weeds in his front garden and told me to look among them. Sure enough there was my present, on top of the pile. Together we unwrapped it. ‘How thoughtful!’ said the Mender with a smile, ‘a small jar of liquid diamond’; and, looking at the label, ‘It’s from yourself, I see.’ The entrance to my dream was
already dimly visible as an arc in the air around me. The Mender dipped a paintbrush in the liquid diamond and quickly touched up the archway into brilliant existence. I thanked him and stepped through it into my dream.

Later on, awake, I looked at the packet. The writing on it told me it was from my parents, and it was with a twinge of anxiety that I tore it open. An alarmclock! I was so annoyed I nearly threw it out of the window.

‘Liquid diamond’, I suppose, would be semen. At that period, I
remember
, my morning sleeps were infested by silky imaginaries, paid for in expense of that substance, or drawn to it as butterflies to honey. By my fortieth birthday these creatures had largely quit. Also, my parents had died some years earlier, justified in their belief that I would never feed myself adequately on poetic images filtered like plankton out of the flow of sleep. In fact, having abandoned my attempts to write what I would call writing, I had gone on to acquire a reputation as an acerbic analyst of others’ gifts. Waking, consequently, had become for me less like a rending of precious fabrics. Nevertheless I was not pleased to have to answer the
doorbell
early that morning.

Once again, there was nobody on the doorstep; nobody human, that is. At my feet was a pair of penetrating violet eyes, in the face of a young cat. I picked the animal up, ascertained that it was female, and brought her in. I could admit to myself that I had need of company, though I hoped that whoever had abandoned her to me was unaware of the fact, for to sustain my credibility as a critic I habitually
disguised
my alienation from the to-and-fro of everyday emotions.

No one anthropomorphizes cats more shamelessly than cats themselves do. Kittenish, feline, catty – our vocabulary is quite
inadequate
to the range of human behaviours a cat will adopt to ensure falling on its feet (like a cat) in a human household. My own
household
was so little human that the advent of a cat could only have humanized it; but I resisted this, valued her only for her otherness.

What colour was she? All the pelt that showed when she curled up was brindled (etymologically, fire-flecked, I note) or, observed more closely, of burnt umber with a warm glow showing through irregularly from its roots and bright-tipped guard-hairs scintillant above it. Her forepaws, demurely gloved in pristine white; her underparts, when she rolled over and spread her pink-padded hands in play, ivory satin, as of lingerie, inviting caresses; the tip of her nose, pale mushroom, most delicately sculpted and deftly inserted into the velvet of her muzzle. As she established my dependency on her continued domicile with me, the exigent gaze that had pierced my defences on the doorstep modulated into an opalescent green, retaining only the finest of lines from where the visible spectrum is transcended by more powerful, inimical, radiations.

The name I gave her, which remained a secret between us, expressed her fluidity, her softness, the allure of her
incomprehensible
interiority. When I picked her up by the waist she would shape herself into a handle, and then as I opened the door liquefy herself for me to pour her out into the night. Perched on my shoulder she would fluff herself up into a muff, comforting my ear with a
whispering
tactility. She proposed dangerous fantasies: the flattery of a woman’s hair rubbing around my bare ankles as I shaved, the
blasphemy
of an Egyptian deity sitting in my lap. Her contentment, a just perceptible rill of something between sound and vibration, lying under my hand as I read in bed, was a deep reassurance as to my moment-to-moment continuity; it was the rhythm of Existence itself, at least as that was defined by some sarcastic Oxford
philosopher
: ‘a sort of metaphysical ticking-over’.

Sometimes, though, she would awaken my fear of loss by lying
low in the garden for hours, and then come bounding across the lawn, tail superbly deployed, with a comet’s indifference to all
prediction
or interpretation of its reappearance. At other times she seemed to demand admiration. One of her rare and discrete little calls would bring me to the bole of the laburnum tree to find her tensely curved between hindlegs flexed against the ground and forepaws clawing the bark; in a flash she would scramble up the trunk, tail lashing, and disappear into the foliage, and after a moment thrust her head out between dangling golden racemes,
crying
to be lifted down. If I was not looking for her, I would come across her again and again in the course of my long hours of
wandering
around the garden. Wherever my eye caught her – daintily posed between two primroses with her forepaws turned in under her breast; stretched out and utterly abandoned to sleep in
sumptuous
heat among clumps of thyme; heraldic, ‘regardant’, as if arrested by an abstraction while chasing fallen leaves, or snugly englobed between tree roots out of the winter wind – her exquisite
positioning
seemed to be courting remark. How did she weave unobserved through the loops of my stroll, to appear each time as mysteriously and unarguably in place as the right word in a sentence?

Of course the justness of a word sometimes resides in the
precise
degree of discomfort it inflicts. Once or twice when I returned, presumably unexpectedly, from an absence I found her equally artfully displayed for the empty eye of the sky, and wondered if I was deluding myself in thinking that on those other occasions she had had any care for my regard. Was this her meta-game, to leave me doubting whether she was playing with me or not? But to suspect her of such depth was, surely, to project my own involuted
self-questioning
onto her simplicity – or had simplicity itself become so alien to me as to baffle me like unfathomable cunning? Thus she held me suspended,
en
abîme.

There was however a game I learned to win against her.
Whenever
I finished one of my dissections of the latest poetry I would tear pages out of the review copy, fold them into darts and float them for her to snatch out of the air as she would a butterfly, and then as she rolled on her back defending the scrap of paper with all four legs I would try to wrest it away from her without getting scratched. The only way I could best her pin-sharp co-ordination of eye and paw, honed through predatory ancestral generations, was by a feint: while she focused on my right hand hovering overhead and apparently about to dive, my left hand would come creeping up behind her head to twitch the paper out of her jaws. To my surprise she was always taken in by this ruse. Do hunting animals in the wild not use such tricks? Is the ability to mislead a perquisite, or even a prerequisite, of higher consciousness? It chilled me to consider that the mark of my superiority was the lie.

But once, when I was playing this game without due attention, a claw raked the back of my hand. Immediately a little ruby oozed out of the line she had scored in my skin. I looked at it, and tasted it, in wonder. My own victims could have been no more amazed than I was by this vivid drop – though it remained a question for me, and more than a philosophical one, whether my blood was so passionate a colour inside me, where no one could see it.

After I had abandoned even the deployment of intellect that my readers deluded themselves was writing, and having no other resource, my days became a carefully cultivated desert. By my
sixtieth
birthday I had acquired somebody to look after me, and if the doorbell rang that morning the somebody would have answered it; in any case I was not disturbed. I wandered out to where the cat was buried and had presumably long rotted away. The laburnum was shedding its crooked little peapods on the spot; I had often looked
at them with a question in my mind, knowing how poisonous they were. Idly I arranged a few of them to spell out her name on the bare soil.

Even that was writing, of a kind, I supposed. As I watched it lying there I began to wonder if it was not more fecund in its
obscurity
than all the lucid journeywork I had produced in my adult life. Such a word, plunged into the right medium, might reach out
filaments
to other words, other potential seeds of deposition. This medium was – I pursued the images – a saturated solution,
evidently
. Would it be iridescent, effervescent, transcendental, a
Pierian
springwater? Or a dark telluric magma out of which both dream and reason coalesce, on which they float and nudge like tectonic plates? The logic of my story, correlating literary and emotional sterility, pointed to it being a fluid instinct with life, with all that I lacked and desired of love – but the verbal flux itself, these phrases which I was trying, with the ineptitude of a child clutching at snowflakes, to catch in the act of coming to mind, suggested some abstract formative principle, a self-generating, inexhaustible,
complexity
. This, I realized, was not mere spindrift off the linguistic reservoir I’d been plenishing all my life; it was the spontaneous crystallization of meaning out of the limitless interplay of words themselves.

This glimpse of the ultimate source on which writing depends, and to which alone the writer is
by definition committed, left me still utterly inadequate to the tremendous datum of language, but it called forth a momentary renewal of hope. And although I would have been incapable at that time even of the above cautious eulogy of my cat, already I felt on my eyelids evidence of the dissolution of those pillars of salt within, sites of the backward look, that had held me up for years.

As it happened, when I was invited to provide a text for a
performance
by Olwen Fouéré on some theme to do with Artaud's visit to the Aran Islands, I was already nursing an obsession with a
certain
field in Inis Meáin that seemed to hold theatrical experience in suspension in its emptiness. And now a brief film unreels in my head, with nobody in it. An actress known for the mysterious gift of presence, for an accentuated and baroque corporeality, would surely find the role I have in mind for her – not Nobody, who might be an allegorical figure, or even A Nobody, who might keep a diary, but nobody at all – the ultimate challenge. Whether she could make the part her own would depend solely on our
awareness
of her past successes in embodying a bizarre range of passions.

Balla an Tairbh, the bull's wall, is
the name of the field in
question
; no doubt a bull was kept in it at some period. My film begins with a distant view of the island as a dark silhouette against grey skies. A slight instability of the scene suggests that we are
approaching
by sea; there are faint watery noises and creaks as of rigging, though nothing of a boat is visible. Now we are near enough to make out a rocky shore, a jetty with indeterminate run-down
buildings
, a road leading inland. No one is in
sight. Next we are looking up the village street; it is apparently deserted, but we hear quiet rural sounds: a chicken clucking, a pail rattled. A boreen, a rough
and narrow track between drystone walls, parts from the street to climb the ridge sheltering the villages and then follows a slow decline towards the Atlantic shore. The season is
winter and light levels are low. The soundtrack is
very quiet but rich and virtually continuous; it could be put together out of ambient natural sounds – wind, distant breakers, a hint of seabird calls – but becomes rhythmic at times, with touches of almost subliminal music. We – the camera, that is‚
for no protagonist is visible – stumble once or twice, and pause here and there to negotiate a leafless bramblestem arching across the path. At one point we pause to scan the terrain; the field-walls are so high that little is to be seen except their ragged tops, one beyond another like breakers in a sea of stone. After a time – which seems long but is
probably only a minute or two – the boreen ends, and a narrow stile admits us into a field, barren apart from a little withered grass growing in crevices of the stony ground, where we come to a stop. Twenty or thirty paces ahead is a gap six
or eight feet wide in the farther wall of the field, giving onto another field. We wait for something to appear in this rather proscenium-like space, but nothing materializes. The camera turns to one side and then the other, allowing us to glance around the field we are in, but little is
to be seen except the rather more than head-high walls and the low grey sky. It is
quiet but not quite silent; a dull rhythmic hushing is
probably waves falling along a shoreline not far away. What might be a scrap of music is perhaps only a briar scraped across stone by the slight breeze. Our attention returns to the gap.

Imagination, prompted by the name of this place, begins to
configure
this gap as the entrance to a labyrinth. The severe
proportions
of the walls and their massive stonework situate it in a Cyclopean world; Knossos, perhaps. We might be allowed a glimpse of Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, in the cow-body made for her by Daedalus, seducing the sacred bull. Was this act an
obscenity, or a sacrament? Fouéré could take that dilemma by the horns; one knows of her interest in Artaud's bestial ceremonials, and of his vision of the Aran Islands as a gateway to the primitive. The outcome of the coupling was the Minotaur, a creature so
monstrous
it had to be hidden in the Labyrinth, where it was fed on
virgins
supplied as tribute by Athens. Is such a horror being enacted behind these walls? One begins to expect a hideous resounding clamour to erupt from deep in the complications of the terrain ahead of us – Theseus slaughtering the pathetic hybrid of animal and human, or of God and human. Is there no Ariadne to keep vigil at this gap, holding the thread that will guide the hero back to her? For a moment we think we saw something – the fringe of a shawl or hem of a cloak – twitched back out of sight behind one of the walls framing the gap. But it was more likely a dead thistle nodding in the wind. Perhaps Ariadne, knowing how legend foretells her abandonment by Theseus on the rocks of Naxos, has left her post, condemning him to wander the Labyrinth until he starves. At any rate, nobody haunts the gap.

We begin to be distracted from our own vigil by details of the walls to left and right of the opening. Chinks of dim light show through them. Each stone is highly individuated, tensed in its immobility, clamped by its neighbours. The complexities of
interlocking
angular shapes of dark and light weary the eye; something heavy and bulky could be shifting about on the other side of the wall, but the appearance is probably an optical illusion. I once wrote that Aran's walls with their endlessly varied grey facets and dark crevices look as if they had absorbed all the faces and gestures of the generations of shadows cast upon them. These particular stones under our gaze seem to have added to their memories the shadows of Pasiphae, Ariadne, Artaud, Fouéré.

It is finally clear that we will see nothing, but still our longing, our anxiety and fear, form an almost visible wall of tension across
the gap. Absence is supposed to be a feature of our derelict
contemporary
world, deserted by the Gods, drained of meaning,
wandering
without purpose. It is strange to glimpse the same phenomenon by peering between these nineteenth-century walls of Inis Meáin into Bronze-Age Crete. Disappointment underlines our expectations. As time passes and nothing changes except gathering gloom of evening or of wearied vision, we become more aware of all that such an announcement as ‘Olwen Fouéré appears in promises. It is in this sense that the impression made by her
non-appearance
in
The
Bull's
Wall
draws its strength from all her past appearances, her commitment to the illusions of immediacy, the ambiguities of the physical. Set among a thousand featureless little fields, with its title supplied by the name of one of them, this film stages and directs Fouéré as inexorably as a jigsaw puzzle outlines and locates its one missing piece.

The film ends with the camera still staring at the gap while the credits materialize and fade away in complete silence.