Authors: Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner
There came then a day, indeed a succession of days, when the long pouring down of warmth had aroused us all to the same quivering pitch of waiting inaction about to be loosed at a last climax of ripeness. And then, with a parting and shedding and minute splitting of cell walls, there was cast wide upon the calm warm air about our upflung soft seed-spikes such a multitude of floating pollen grains that the very nature of our environment became changed. The light rays from the sun became paths for these scarce-weighted particles which, as though they had been only molecules of matter, could be deflected and driven by the low battering of light. Thus, then, our stigmas received them in open certainty of righteousness. Neighbour to neighbour, our unity was now in this mixing completed; we of the wheatfield having given out were now receiving, as the pollen cells nested on the open slopes of the stigmas poured themselves out in hastening long tongues of transparent life towards the awaiting seed
cell, which, when at last a pollen tongue laid hold of it, became what it was meant to be, settling with a new toughness into the common life of the corn.
How, then, put into words, the days following? For by the middle of summer we were all part of one life, through our fertility losing our identity, but ever in a daze of dancing leaves and hardening stems through which now juices scarcely crept, a daze of the mingling and splitting of cells, a uniting and casting off of chromosomes, each one a single wheat plant and yet each inseparably and inextricably part of the others. And now in our joint consciousness we became aware of a new need, since the earth no longer anchored us securely and yet our heaviness was between us and the wind. No longer did we feel identity with those roots which had been our earliest and most passionate point of intenseness. Our stems and leaves had almost lost hold on life; we had become concentrated upon the heavy goldenness of our bowing heads.
There was no pain as the steel blade severed our stems, no shock of parting from earth. Our golden heads lay ever thicker and more neighbourly in harvest. There was no pain in the threshing; all growth was dormant, and without growth there is no pain. Nor did the seed corn which was made separate from the bread corn rejoice or grieve in any way at its destiny. There was no pain in the grinding, but only wonder, and a still more profound mixing of essences.
For some indefinite time we lay slackly as flour, sacked or binned, in dusk and formless. Then hands were laid on us and there was a new mixing, with substances which were at first alien and then became part of us, bringing with them faint, diffuse
memories of a hotter sun and different growth, or of an animal life, incomprehensible and yet acceptable. Thus, by the time of the baking, all the ingredients had mingled in intimate combination of starch, sugar, milk-fat and protein molecules, making a smooth and homogeneous substance, which at last, cake-shaped and oven-hot, gathered itself into a single consciousness, so that again there was an “I,” individual and yet in a complete sympathy with the other cakes which had been formed out of the same material. I then, as a cake-individual, was proudly and gaily decorated with a cake's final and not least fripperies of coloured icing, split cherries and green pistachio nuts, which, expertly laid upon me, became part of my rich and copious edibility. I was now carefully placed upon paper and that again on a platter, and so, by mid-morning, though whether of summer or winter I cannot tell, onto a shelf behind a great shining sheet of glass interposing itself completely between my white and pink immobility and the jostling and dusty street.
Beside me on the shelf were other cakes, my sisters, they too all a-glisten with pinks and blues and shimmering bridal white, and I was aware that they too were all rounded towards fulfilment of themselves. They too were longing for the appraising eye, forerunner of the more appraising lips and tongue; they too knew themselves made for the sale, the handing-over, the ritual wrapping and unwrapping, the setting upon a strange table, the knife and the laying-open, above all the sacred and basic awakening and satisfying of hunger. We were aware now that beyond the great screen of glass, eyes were looking at us, the living eyes of hunger and delicious greed: oh if we could but have given ourselves at once to its satisfying, now with our hearts still warm
from the oven, and our icing snow-cool and fresh, unhardened by time and the tarnishing caress of air! Thus would we, without wearying and in our first freshness, have become one with life. And occasionally, indeed, one of us might be taken up and sold and given to the eyes and the final assuagement of hunger. Yet this was rare, and as the day passed and the last oven-warmth died out of the midst of each of us, our impatience grew and lay heavy upon us. Lights were switched on above us in the shop and a richer glow came on the smooth sugar, and the eyes of hunger and greed trailed past us, and now and then a finger was dabbed upon the plate glass. Yet by the evening few of us had taken on their fulfilment. We passed the night in darkness, still in the shop.
The next morning again we were set out, again we offered our sweetness and richness to the eyes behind the glass. But by now it was becoming apparent to me that those eyes in which pure, sharp hunger itself was the dominating forceâeyes whose live bodies we on the cake shelves most longed to satisfyâwere not the same eyes as those of our purchasers, which were in general illumined by a less frank and to us desirable force. For it seemed to us that among these purchasers, most of whom were women, elaborate as ourselves in pinks and blues and silks that shone almost like icing, there were those who might merely and brutally use a cakeâa cake made for the food of mankindâfor the decoration of a party; there were those, it seemed to us, who might languidly and without appetite shear off a thin slice and unadmiringly consume or perhaps only crumble it, leaving the great body of the cake to wither and dry up and at last be eaten grudgingly and ingloriously; there were those, we thought, who would
not scruple to throw away a half-eaten cake into hideous non-fulfilment. But why then, why could the hungry eyes not choose out and buy the cake they needed and which needed them? We did not know, we only wanted to be a satisfaction instead of a temptation to the hungry eyes.
So passed a second day and a third, and a strange weariness and heaviness began to come on me and such of my sisters as still shared my loneliness. We felt that we were no longer so delicious, so assuaging as we had been. Our sugar icing had hardened unkindly, here a cherry was loose upon us, there a nut. And still the many hungry and the few who could buy! It was after the lights were turned on that this pressure of eyes upon us became almost more than we could bear. We knew obscurely that some of these eyes belonged to children finished with school, children who would seize on us joyously and unashamedly with both hands, gobbling us whole-heartedly into their growing life. And others belonged to men coming back from labour, hard work of hands and bodies which had left their muscles worn and fainting for sugar to burn up and reconstitute them; we knew the great hungry mouths of these men and the teeth that would meet on us and the strength we would become in them. And yet other eyes belonged to women whose thoughts, beating upon us through the unmoved glass, were of many hungers, their own and their husbands' and their children's, and we knew that if one of these women could have had us on her table, there would have been no crumb left unpraised and uneaten. But those hungry eyes passed and hesitated and passed reluctantly on, in an endless stream, and none might cross the threshold and take us from the shop into their homes.
And so passed days, and with them a terrible discouragement to the cakes which no one had bought, which had lost their freshness, which had hardened and dried and cracked a little. And the cakes knew the fear of mildew and crumbling and of being no longer fit for the assuagement and life-making of mankind. And the sugar on the cakes was a little flecked with dust, and pieces had broken off here and there; they were handled roughly morning and evening. And it came about that one morning the master of the shop bade his servants to clear out the old rubbish, and I and the other cakes which had not been sold were bundled together, breaking as they did so. A piece here and there was picked up and eaten by the servants of the baker, but mostly the stuff of the cakes had become dry and unpalatable, so that even the eyes of the very hungry would not have looked on them with any pleasure. And I and the other cakes were thrown out on the dust heap and it was as though we had never been of the stuff of cakes.
And with that I was again standing before the witch in Soria Moria castle, but there was yet in my body and mind a terrible dryness and fear, so that I could scarcely face her. She was sitting beside the cauldron going on with that stocking, and the smell which rose from the cauldron was no more attractive than it had been. She looked at me and sniffed and wiped her nose with the half-knitted stocking. “So you're back, are you?” she said. I nodded, being still unable to speak. “Bad pennies,” she said. “Well, you'll just have to have another turn. Or of course if you didn't want toâ” She licked her lips and glanced towards the cauldron, just as a small and purposeful seeming flame jetted from below it, giving me sufficient illumination for me to see that her hand was
crooked into half openness. Nor did I wait for another word from her, but immediately snatched up the next of the small objects out of her palm.
The same sensations overcame me as had done so upon the first occasion, shrinking and hardness and darkness. And again the tension, becoming unbearable, broke into pale, thready growing-points, a pushing up towards light and warmth and down towards dampness and anchorage. And again I grew and spread green leaves and sucked through their pores the gases which dissolved through my warm chloroplasts. But this time I was a stronger growth, my stem thickened and became the chief part of me; strong cells within clustered and pushed and became the bud-points of branchlets. Rain and sun passed over me; my fibrous roots clung onto rock, sucking the life-giving soil salts away from weaker, brittler root-growths. In autumn my leaves fell, no longer part of me, and became food for me as they rotted; and in winter I rested, scarcely aware of my aliveness, only a core of potentials between twiggy dry stem and twiggy clinging roots. There was a man who bent over me in my winter sleep and sheared the thin end of my stem and took from round me the weeds, they too half dead. But all this passed me by, until in Spring I came alive again, with swelling and splitting of cells, rush up of sap, hurry towards the hot bright sun which drew the tendrils of the young vines after him all across and across the well-tended vineyard.
And so, for me as a vine, seasons went by, and at last I was to be part of the vintage; I put forth flowers, I sent out pollen and received it again, the minute green cell clusters swelled to berries, hard seed and around it the growing pulp that sucked up and
stored the sugar out of my sap. I was aware of my neighbours then, although less closely than when I had been a wheat plant, but I knew that they too had brought forth grape bunches and were holding and feeding them in the shade of their leaves. I was aware too of the men who came, aware of their pride in me, dimly aware of their purpose with me and my grapes. I endured the pain of the summer pruning, and the shearing of the smallest bunches, knowing that the great purpose was coming closer upon us. I endured the spraying, the branding and spotting of my wild loveliness by the ugly security of the cuprous solution. My leaves bent carefully, sheltering the bunches from a too drying sun, or from rain which might spoil the bloom which now had begun to dawn wonderfully upon the baby skin of my grapes. More and more, the “I” that I was became concentrated upon the ripening grape-bunches, purpose and intention of my existence. There was now a mingled sweetness in the still air of the vineyard, breathed out from the compact proletarian bunches of good wine-grapes, so that our selves, pollinated from one another, became inextricably one by the time that the vintage was upon us.
For a time now, as at harvest, I was no self of my own, but part of an experience which was re-shaping the whole purport of our joint being. It was thus in the cutting of the grape bunches and the heavy dumping of the full berries into the baskets and the heavier, steadier pouring out of the berries into the vats against whose sides the bursting mass heaved and pressed, so that the juice began to run and flow together from the grapes of all the vines of the vineyard. There was more pressure and more bursting until there was no grape which had not broken through its tough delicate skin and poured out its stored sweetness. And
then there began a strange movement, a tossing and prickling and dizzying, so that for a time this being of which I was a part was lost and transported into a sweet chaos; our crushed and spilled life had been invaded by another life, seizing upon and struggling with and dancing among our warm grape-sugar. While this went on, at first there was constant motion and interpenetration of substances, but later all was dark and quiet, the full fermentation of the wine having brought to agreement all struggle. We rested in the casks.
It was not until later that I became again a separate self, enclosed in the smoothly fitting glass of a wine bottle, wisely stoppered with cork. Yet the stopper and the bottle were both so much part of me that I could feel through them and know myself one of many, of a deep and cool cellar, breathing out flower sweetness to the unstirring air. And I knew that we all waited to be poured into the tingling throats, the hastening blood, of men and women, who through us would become braver and happier and more generous, makers of songs and stories, adventurers and lovers. This was our noble destiny; for this we had once been given the name of a God.
Thus then the embottled wine sang in the darkness of its Dionysian fate. Men and women had formed and tended us and taken thought for us; we had become aware of their needs and dreams. We had divine understanding of tiredness and discouragement, and how it was in us to allay these sadnesses. We knew the pains of those who cannot escape from the toils of their selves and their own miseries and knew too how we could help them to escape, show them the way out of self-pity and self-regard to comradeship and philosophy and kindliness. We understood
that we held the secret of the crack in time, so that all those oppressed with vain endeavour and the fleet passing of life and love might through us become aware that there is also eternity. For us in darkness flashed by the leaping leopards of poetry, swept close the moth wings of rest and relaxing, bubbled the pure gaiety of youth and friendship, the springing of ideas, the springing of love and the setting free from bonds. So we waited, sure of our gifts.