The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  With what cries of relief we greeted the appearance of a herring-gull as it hovered curiously over us bringing us the certainty that we were at last near the sea; and then with what wild pleasure we heard at last the stentorian boom of the surf on the beaches which were awaiting us, lying dazed into pearl-blue nescience by the lick of the hot sun of midday. Like phantoms we stripped naked and fell into the bursting waves, to be swiftly sucked out seawards, out of the reach of the crashing surfline. The undertow drew its hissing breaths, dragging at our ankles, but we were all experienced in maintaining a reasonable distance from the shore and so we frolicked and swam in the deafening roaring of the water. It would be impossible to describe the sense of wild elation which now possessed us – perhaps it was youth and good spirits, perhaps it was something more. Perhaps it was what Akkad claimed both then and always afterwards, that we had passed through a kind of initiation into a new area of understanding. But so much of this remained to be explained still, and I could see he was rehearsing in his own mind how he was going to approach the subject with us. He had a horror of pomposity.

  At last, sea-buffeted and breathless, salt-encrusted and brown as tobacco, we allowed ourselves to be thrown up on the beach. But here another small problem arose – the sand was too hot to tread barefoot, nor was there any shade right down at the sealine. Moreover it was obvious that we would have to dispute our lunch with some large golden hornets which had smelt the fruit and the wine. However, the petrified forest came down almost to the water’s edge, and one or two of the few stone trees left upright promised us a small pool of shade which we lost no time accepting. Here it was deliciously cool, for a light fresh breeze crept down from the dunes. We unpacked our victuals and suddenly realised how very hungry we were; ravenously we attacked the sandwiches of cold goose and turkey. Thirstily we drank the wine and the iced water in its thermos flasks. Then at last we settled back, replete with food and physical well-being, to hear Akkad out; it was a strange spot, this forest of dark petrifacts, this grove of ankylosed trees. From time to time there would be a small crack and a brittle piece of a stone branch would break off in the heat and fall to the ground. We leaned our backs against the dead stone and listened while Akkad, now with an air of peculiar intensity, holding the edges of his bathing wrap together and looking somewhat like a large praying mantis, began the homily which was our first detailed introduction to the gnostic canon.

  How to summarise what he had to tell us I do not know; for my own part the whole long speech passed through my consciousness like a rainbow silk of different colours. It was an exposition at once allusively poetical and factual, but knitted together with persuasive coherence, and formally, intellectually, quite watertight. I think I have never listened to anything with quite the same careful intensity as I brought to this first sermon by Akkad in the petrified forest. It was I suppose because I knew that he was going to explain things which up until then had seemed to me inexplicable. Best of all, he was going to provide some explanation of the drug-vision we had all experienced. So I closed my eyes and listened to that quiet seductive voice expounding the grand outlines of the gnostic scheme.

  What did he say? I can remember even after so long. He began by speaking about the sense of inner estrangement and alienation from the so-called real world which was the mark of the religious nature when once it awakes from its sleep in the world. Sometimes it awoke spontaneously, of its own accord, sometimes in response to a vision or human experience of particular intensity, or by mere accident. When it woke it quested for a metaphysical frame to contain it, to nourish it like a plant, to make it fruitful. It sought a humus in which it could flower. Of all the religions in the world, and they were as numerous as the sands of the sea, there was nothing quite like this group of gnostic systems, shattered fragments of which were all we had available today in various tongues – so well had the organised religions of the so-called perfect Good done their work of extirpation. Their adherents could not bring themselves to face the bitter central truth of the gnostics: the horrifying realisation that the world of the Good God was a dead one, and that He had been replaced by a usurper – a God of Evil. Perhaps this sounded exaggerated to us, he said, but it was the heart of the belief, and the distress and alienation of the believers was due to the deeply implanted conviction that only a miracle would ever dethrone this great Demon of Darkness, who had waited his turn so patiently and who now sat in the judgement seat over all. It was the deep realisation of this truth, and its proclamation that had caused the gnostics to be suppressed, censored, destroyed. Humanity is too frail to face the truth about things – but to anyone who confronts the reality of nature and of process with a clear mind, the answer is completely inescapable: Evil rules the day.

  What sort of God, the gnostic asks himself, could have organised things the way they are – this munching world of death and dissolution which pretends to have a Saviour, and a fountain of good at its base? What sort of God could have built this malefic machine of destruction, of self-immolation? Only the very spirit of the dark negative death-trend in nature – the spirit of nothingness and auto-annihilation. A world in which we are each other’s food, each other’s prey.

  Swiftly Akkad sketched in two or three of these despairing systems, each bearing the impress of its inventor’s personality in divergences of detail: but all united in this central despair about the metaphysical status quo. Slowly, in his quiet voice, with its flavours of an ever mounting disenchantment he sketched in the terrible fresco of the present world, often in the form of a long quotation which attested as always to the formidable memory of this strange man. “The praying Mantis which devours its male even while it is fecundating her, the spider trapping the fly, and the pompile which stabs the spider to death, the ceceris which with a triple stroke of its sword scientifically destroys the three centres of the bupreste’s nervous system: and carries it off so that its larvae will be able to eat it still living, choosing their mouthfuls with skill, preserving the vital parts with a terrible science, unto the very last mouthful of the victim’s flesh. Then the leucospis, the anthrax, the worm of which simply applies itself to the flank of the chalicodome, and sucks it dry through the skin, ingests, pumps out this living broth which is the young larvae, and then dries it cunningly, in order to keep it also fresh, living, until the last mouthful … The philante, the bee-killer, before even carrying off its victim presses out the crop to make it disgorge its honey, and sucks the tongue of the wretched dying insect as it sticks out of its mouth …”. He went on then in French, stumbling over the scientific words for which he could not find an immediate translation in English, “Quel tableau que la Création! Un massacre général! Les lois les plus féroces, les plus barbares, les plus horriblement inhumaines: luttent pour la Vie, l’élimination des faibles, l’être mangeant l’être et mangé par l’être … Si dieu existe il ne peut être qu’une intelligence sans cœur. …” He paused for a moment and then said, almost under his breath: “What implacable logic.” Silence. A long silence. A very long silence.

  “Then is there another kind of sense which is not just nonsense?” asked Piers, but the question seemed more addressed to himself than to Akkad, and his only answer was a look which hovered on the edge of ironic amusement. It seemed to say: “You know the answer to that question – why ask it?” I realised then that the gnostic refusal to accept the state of things constituted a particular kind of bravery without vainglory, a despair without tarnish. Sylvie lay beside me, her head on my arm, breathing slowly and evenly, as if she were sleeping; but I could see from the set of her features that she was awake, and following. And now she said in a small musing voice: “But if one believes that, what would it do to love?” Only a woman could have asked that.

  The question seemed to hang there, dangling like a spider on the end of a long thread woven from its own entrails. Akkad said: “If you had seen nothing last night, or just a pretty snake, I would have been wrong in my feelings about you. But the fact that you saw
something – which you cannot yet interpret, never mind – proves the contrary. In other words you are on a slope, you are sliding. There is no point in making provisos, clutching at branches on either side, asking questions, trying to pretend that you have accepted this pure experience on probation. This is it! It has happened to everything including this love of yours which you find strange but which for us forms a sort of disembodied illustration of the precepts of the gnostic incarnation after many many old texts. Old Hippolytus has spoken of you in his tract on the refutation of all heresies. The Myth is as follows: There were three unbegotten principles of the universe, two male and one female. One male principle is called Good, who takes forethought for the course of things; the other male is called Father of the Begotten, but he is without foreknowledge and invisible. The female is without foreknowledge, wrathful, double-minded, double-bodied, a virgin above and a viper below. She is called Eden, she is called Israel. These are the principles of the universe, the roots and springs from which everything came. There was nothing else.”

  Sylvie had begun to tremble a little; she placed her small hand upon my thigh, as if to seek solace or companionship. Then she said something which had independently entered the minds of us all. “You are speaking of suicide, then?” Only a woman could have asked that.

  “For the elect it was always so,” said Akkad dryly, after a pause. “The poets have shown us the way. For those, in every age, who feel the deeply humiliating condition of man and nourish any hope, I won’t say of ever changing it, but even ameliorating it … they sense the great refusal as necessary. The refusal to conform to the laws of this inferior demon leads insensibly on towards death But then death … What is it after all? It is nothing. It is not enough! We will all die. Yet to the pure gnostic soul the open gesture of refusal is necessary, is the only poetic act. As the Sufi poet says: ‘Close thy lips so that the tongue may taste the sweetness of the mouth.’ All those emblems of a hunger which engenders self-destruction, which pushes things to the very limit of the sensibility, those belong to us; and they must be strictly differentiated from the privations and prohibitions which spring from the tenets of any branch of Judaeo-Christianity. Their laws are different and based on violent repressions; ours are absolute bur personal. Refuse, refute, renounce – all religions carry in them a counter-theology. But only ours is based squarely on the sad fact that the spirit of evil has usurped the universe. Yet ordinary suicide, banal self-destruction, that is forbidden to us.”

  “Was it not always so?”

  “No. You have seen the likenesses of pre-Adamic man and the pictures of Eden which are found in ancient texts and in ancient poets. Recorded history is too long for us to be exact about it, the mist closes in and the tracks begin to blur. But we can speak of our own age, the civilisation which is ours and in which the gnostic role has been permanently derided, attacked, even physically obliterated, whether we think of the cathars of Provence or of the gnostics of Egypt who have been forced to live under cover, in hiding. Or else to scatter and take refuge in foreign lands like the Bogomils and Bosnians. It would be wearisome to follow out this theme in detail, coming at last to the prophecies of the Tarot, but I can give you the rough outline of what we believe as true for this time. The presiding demon is the spirit of matter, and he springs fully armed from the head of classical Judaism of which all European religions are tributaries. The Prince is usury, the spirit of gain, the enigmatic power of capital value embodied in the poetry of gold, or specie, or scrip. When Christ flogged the money-changers, poor harmless men, he was not behaving in an irrational and neurotic manner. No, he had seen the Prince seated among them, smirking and rubbing his hands. He had recognised suddenly the dark glitter in the friend’s eye; for the Prince knew full well what the fate of Jesus would be, just as Jesus himself knew. Our proto-gnostic had allowed himself to be trapped, deliberately. It was his masterly refusal to save himself which stamps him as one of us. But the moment of fury marks him also as very human. At least to give the demon a real thrashing in the flesh for once, in the flesh. The Bible does not say if it smarted, the beating. One hopes that it did – though of course this is childish, for it changes nothing in our blind fate, the unrolling of which is quite predictable – a dead certainty in fact. How pleasant the English phrases are, and how pregnant, when you stop to think. What could be blinder than fate, what could be deader than certainty?

  “So Jesus went to his foolish personal fate, dragging humanity with him, and not even leaving behind a coherently formed system of beliefs which would distinguish him once and for all as no Jew of the Temple but a renegade Jew and a gnostic. Jesus, like so many Jews, belongs to our persuasion. We can infer this from his behaviour and his fate. His end was poetic and not theological; the cosmogony from which his spirit issued was not one of the four Ms – which characterise our own age with such a great depth of focus. I mean Monotheism, Messianism, Monogamy, and Materialism. But you can illustrate this simple thesis at every level – whether you take Marx’s great analysis of our culture or the Freudian analysis of absolute value as based upon infantile attitudes to excrement. Gold and excrement, that is poetic indeed! The cornerstone of culture then is another M – merde. The gold bar is the apotheosis of the human turd. You will see from this how radically we poets of gnosticism part company from these Judaic thinkers. Every age has its metaphysic, and every calculus is built up upon a first term, a bedrock. Possession for Marx and possession for Freud have dictated excrement as the basic term upon which the calculus of our philosophy raises itself.

  “But we have substituted another term, we have let sperm stand in place of excrement, for our world is a world not of repression and original sin but of creation and relaxation, of love and not doubt. This is what sets us apart from the others who today rule everything in the name of death. I do not need to mention other great Judaic creations of the day. They rule the hearts and minds and presumably will do so until our age comes to an end in one form or another. But one cannot wait around, one must engage one’s forces, one must believe something. Self-realisation is an imperative. But how truthful dare we be? How truthful will we be allowed to be? The answer is not far to seek; we are still regarded as the enemies of the status quo, the vested interest which the Prince has in keeping us quiet. There is only one thing, one weapon which we hold. He is terrified by the idea of the gnostic suicide by attrition, by a steady denial of the world as it is. He is only troubled when a poet gives him the lie. Then for a moment he feels himself shrivelling in the flames. Apprehension fills his soul; but then he recalls that we are not numerous, and for the rest of the world seem to be simply a small band of wrong-headed fanatics who refuse to admit the sovereignty of darkness, who refuse to be ruled. We are not hard to crucify, and the death is an elegant one in its sad way. He can wash his hands of it before the people and the majority will accept his excuses with a bonus and a rise in pay. As far as death is concerned one must develop a certain discretion about choosing one sort from another. All questions of sorrow, fear, illness, for example must be drained away until only the pure precipitate, like calc, of the gnostic death remains. This style of mind once achieved redeems all nature for a second or two, re-establishes that self-perpetuating cycle of joy which was the bliss of yesterday – the ancient mode of yesterday.

  “Yet when we say nature we really mean rhythm, and the basic rhythm is oestrus, the beating egg in its primal pouch. Naturally having lost the marvellous amnesia of sexual periodicity we live by a time-pining, time-bound, chronology. And we never forget that death sets in with conception. This alters everything, even an element like love. We are making the orgasm more and more conscious. Yet to have loved capably and methodically, to have loved with a sufficiency of attention for the fragility of the thought and the transitoriness of the act – that will teach anyone the truth of what I say about death. Ah, but once your words start to make super-sense you must either stop talking or become a poet. Choose!

  “We believe also that ev
ery thoughtless or inconsequential act vibrates through the whole universe. And all the time thoughts pass through us in floods, there is no time to touch them with the wand of consciousness, to magnetise them, to redeem them, so to speak. Fish in their shoals pass not more thickly. Yet each one has ideally to be realised separately. How is this possible? Yes, there is a way, we are sure of it. There is a type of realisation which makes this possible. Ah! but the new universe has got cancer, it is evil, that is to say mediocre, to the very marrow, in the biological not the moralistic sense. It is, poor thing, twisted and luckless and out of kilter, foredoomed and star-crossed. Inferior demons have painted it in their likeness. Our hopes of stepping outside this sepulchre are very faint, but they are there. There is a way to comprehend the gnostic’s giant onion of a world, the concentric circles, with the Pleroma beckoning there, the white heart of light, the source of that primal vision which for a second or two can recapture paradise. We can make amends by loving correctly.

  “Thank goodness, nature’s machinery is vast and intricate and completely comprehensive. There is no norm, no absolute. Every deviation is allowed for. Yet total freedom is the key we must dare to turn in order to repose her. It was not always thus, and sometimes when we are asleep we dream that it will not always be so. Our intitution gives the lie to so many of the prime notions like omne animal post coitum triste and inter faesces et urinam nascimur. These ideas belong to the impoverished world of our modern demonology.”