The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “The view that the Biosphere should be regarded as a living entity with its own Inner-Togetherness has been advanced by many biologists and geologists since Süss first formulated the theory that was later developed by Vernadsky.

  “Such a view is a challenge to our simply stratified view of existence, for it entails no less than a total reversal of our Megalanthropic, Anthropocentic belief that Man is the highest order of Being given to us in sense-perception. If the Biosphere is a living Creature, then we men are parts of its physical organism or organisation, and indeed parts so small as to stand in much the same ratio of size and number as does the single cell and the living body of man.

  “If we hypothetically regard Mankind as the brain-cells of the Biosphere the numerical coincidence is indeed striking. It is estimated that in the human brain there are 3,000,000,000 cells which is equal to the expected human population of the earth in 2000 AD. Moreover there are some 10,000,000,000,000 ordinary cells in the body, which figure agrees with a reasonable estimate of the number of metazoan animals on the surface of the Earth …”

  Marcus felt some vague doubt about Simmonds’s hypothetical Scale of Matter, but felt attracted to the idea that his consciousness was only one cell in a vast interconnected system of apprehension. That made both the graph paper vision and the intrusive and excessive light more tolerable. He skipped some more dubiously related figures and analogies between human cells and created birds and beasts and arrived at Lucas Simmonds’s theory of Mental Evolution as the successor to the Darwinian kind.

  “The physical surface, the outside of matter, evolved to a certain point and produced Man. Scientific observers since Darwin looking for observable mutations that could be said to be evidence of continuing evolutionary processes have been unable to produce anything convincing. This is because the species has now achieved its ultimate physical form and identity. The struggle for existence and the process of development have transferred themselves to the Mental Sphere. Thus the developed Biosphere is in its turn contained inside an even denser layer of Thought. This layer is the Noussphere, the Earth-Mind. It would seem reasonable to suppose that the present Goal of Existence is the transference of Material Energy into Mental Energy. Thus Man, and drawn steadily after him, the whole of the lower creation, will be transfigured into pure Mind. Thus the phenomenon of entropy, the loss of tangential material energy in the terrestrial globe through the giving-off of heat in every new operation of matter, can be seen, not as a threat to our survival, but as a working-out of a higher purpose, a necessary operation in the realisation of a Plan.

  “It is reasonable also to suppose that other celestial bodies and organisations available and unavailable to us in sense-perception have nousspheres or entelechies, dimly figured in the Living Creatures of the Apocalypse perhaps, or in the crude representations of angels, archangels and so on, or as C. S. Lewis has intelligently propounded through Science Fiction in the giving of names of pagan Deities however clouded by anthropomorphism to the Souls or Nouspheres of the other planets of our solar system.”

  When the work came to God Marcus discovered that Simmonds’s habit of referring to this by a cipher was not, as he had supposed, facetiousness, but an attempt to de-anthropomorphise the Space-Filling Universal Mind which was represented in the text by G. G was the organiser of all organisations, the Planner of a Pattern which was “actualised” according to certain Laws. Marcus found the descriptions of the operations of G considerably harder to follow than the hypotheses of biospherology.

  “All our minds can be seen as aspects or particles of G. G is streaked with all minds’ world-lines like the Tulip, or the dawn-sky, but does not depend upon these flickerings for its existence: without G they would not be. It is the goal of Mental Activity, human, subhuman and superhuman, to reach fuller awareness of G.

  “The Plan springs directly from G. The Plan is the Idea, the perfect and total Idea of the Maker, towards which the whole creation strives. Pattern is the actualisation in Time and Space of parts of the Plan. The Plan and the Pattern stand to one another as Male and Female principles, the former affirming and potent, the latter denying and actual. The sun must be looked on, not as the mother of the planets, producing these out of her own substance, but as the Father impregnating the unformed planetary material with the Plan, the shining Light, of his own genetic constitution.”

  There followed several very specific pages of scientific “facts” which Marcus had trouble with. They concerned an analysis of proteins as pattern-carriers; there were many millions of distinct protein-structures present in living organisms but these were only “an almost vanishingly small proportion of the total number of proteins chemically possible”.

  Even a simple protein made up of 20 amino-acids, Simmonds exclaimed, each occurring once, would give about 2,400,000,000,000,000,000 different compounds, each containing the same amino-acids in identical proportions and differing only in their space relations. He went on to the genetic coding transmitted by sperm (a hundred-millionth of body-weight) and ovum: the development of the complex eye from the small number of undifferentiated protein compounds present in the sperm. Marcus, faced with figures, was troubled by weak links of coherence: his attention was focused again by a peroration on Life as a Cosmic Reconciling Force.

  “But how few Men are aware of their true nature or function! Most men are hardly raised above the level of self-awareness of the Species seen in other mammals. A cow is like a machine. She can be only what she is, the actualisation of the pattern, Cow, which irrefragably includes only a rudimentary self-awareness. The grass and the lettuce she converts to her body-matter have of course no self-awareness at all. A Man should struggle to fulfil his potentiality. An ordinary Man may act from deliberate choice perhaps 10,000 times in the course of his life. If we compare this with the 100,000,000,000 involuntary or reflex actions that his organism will have performed during the same period we must be bound to conclude that self-direction is a power that is scarcely ever exercised in Man.

  “The highest grade of self-awareness transcends of course any individual or species and is present in any entity able to be aware of the Pattern of life itself: i.e. entities such as biospheres.

  “In existence beyond Life, the existence is the Pattern, without interference from denying actuality. In G the existence is the Plan, not actualised in any form of matter. Life is response to an affirming Plan. But existence beyond Life is affirmation itself. The earth is what it affirms and the sun likewise. The difference between one supra-animate level and another consists qualitatively in the degree of freedom that resides in the power to create its own pattern and affirmation rather than receiving the imprint of a higher order.

  “It is precisely because the sun is less actualised than the earth that it is freer in respect of affirmation. The galaxy in its turn is freer than the sun, but by far the greater part of its existence remains purely potential”.

  When Marcus had got through these exhortations, and further similar ones, he pulled down the blind and curled up, knees to chin. He went into a heavy, deliberate dreamless sleep which, like the spreading, was something he had always been able to do. When he woke, Simmonds’s writings had settled in a pattern in his mind, a harmless pattern of spheres and informing lines of protista and purposeful light. He decided, on balance, to do nothing. If Simmonds was right, nothing need be done.

  This proved to be so. Three days later, slurring his feet through the cloisters, he caught sight of the familiar white hem. The grey legs paced and stopped. Marcus looked up. Simmonds, pinkly severe, beckoned and Marcus followed.

  “We meet again,” Simmonds stated. “You have read my work.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you now have some inkling of the importance of the task that confronts us. We must be very intelligent. Part of our task is to discover the true nature of the task, the modes of consciousness we must explore. I have various pilot schemes in mind. I believe in being eclectic. We will undergo various tradition
al contemplative exercises. Also we will practise direct transmission of thought. From each to each, and through us maybe to the Noussphere direct. Sit down, boy, and I will explain. The first thing is to learn – which is hard, very hard – to clear your mind …”

  Marcus sat down. He folded his thin hands, one in the other, and bent his head submissively. Lucas’s words, increasing in speed and number, fell gratefully, disturbing the unruffled surface of a mental pool only too often clear and empty.

  There was no one there to reflect on the irony involved in his protecting himself from vacancy with Simmonds’s endless discourse about clearing away the clutter and rubble of dead words and language, in his protecting himself from silence with Simmonds’s cheerful flow of talk about the silence they would achieve together.

  PART II: A FLOWERY TALE

  ‘Dawn of the Year’

  The Times, Monday, April 6th, 1953

  The complex cycle of the calendar has brought Easter back to its natural and primeval place in the year; for the Gregorian fifth of April – March 25 of the unreformed chronology – is Old New Year’s Day, a feast now habitually held in honour only by Commissioners of Inland Revenue. It emphasizes the meaning of the first bank holiday of the year, which, even though the forecast speaks of cold winds, snow and thunder, marks for the Englishman the moment when he turns his back upon wintry thoughts. Alone among the recurring annual holidays, this makes a clean-cut break with what has gone before, contrasting most markedly with Christmas, which comes as the climax of weeks of mounting preparation. For the townsman at any rate Easter generally means the sudden discovery that the annual miracle of the spring has come upon him unawares. Emerging from city streets where the seasons have for months dragged so sluggishly as to seem unchangeable, he finds in the country that all the signs of rebirth have burst upon him together – the daffodils nodding in the breeze and the primroses glimmering by the roadside, new buds breaking, birds in full song. Life so long apparently suspended in darkness and stagnation is suddenly urgent, buoyant, burgeoning again. The signal has been given, and the human routine changes in time and tune with the revival of nature.

  “Old” and “young” – they are terms taken from the measure of human life and inevitably so. There is no pathetic fallacy here for we are part of the order of eternal change that we observe and on which we moralize. There can have been no time, since the human mind became capable of compassing abstract ideas at all, when man did not see in the passing of the seasons an image of himself.

  Whose flowering pride, so fading and so fickle

  Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.

  Assuredly Glaucus the son of Hippolochus beneath the walls of Troy was uttering no original thought in that most lovely simile of the falling of the autumn leaves and their rebirth in the spring, which HOMER bequeathed to VIRGIL from whom DANTE took it over to pass it on to MILTON. The more we pore over the half-deciphered runes of pre-history, the more we are forced to conclude that primitive man, as he saw himself, not merely shared the destiny of the dry husk that fell into the earth, but mysteriously was that seed in its mortality and in its potency, and so was also the green shoot springing up again in the dawning of the year. Whole societies have been built upon the conception, for the parallel extends itself beyond and through the life of the individual to the life of the family and of the tribe and of the nation.

  In this springtime above all the primeval imagery should have for us its richest meaning; for the Coronation is the nation’s feast of mystical renewal. We have passed through a grey and melancholy winter, dark with natural disaster, darkened also in the symbolical-personal orbit wherein our society revolves by the recent loss of a beloved QUEEN. But the spring comes with its annual message that all disasters and losses can be transcended by the unconquerable power of new life. As a nation, as a Commonwealth, we take as our supremely representative person our young QUEEN, and in her inauguration dedicating the future by the ancient forms, we declare our faith that life itself rises out of the shadow of death, that victory is wrested out of the appearances of failure, that the transfiguration of which our nature is capable is not a denial of our temporal evanescence but the revelation of its deepest meaning. It may be

  that all things stedfastnes doe hate

  And changed be: yet being rightly wayd

  They are not changed from their first estate;

  But by their change their being doe dilate:

  And turning to themselves at length againe,

  Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate:

  Then over them change doth not rule and reigne;

  But they raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine.

  15. Easter

  Easter, in that year of extremes, was freakish, especially in the North. In the north-west there was heavy snow, in places, on Good Friday, and on Easter Monday there were hailstorms. In Calverley and Blesford black sleet alternated with glassy sun.

  The play people temporarily vanished. Felicity Wells turned her attention from carnation ribbons to the decoration of the dear little Easter garden in the nave of St Bartholomew’s. Alexander bought and rode away in a second-hand silver grey Triumph. He also bought the new gramophone record of T. S. Eliot reading the Four Quartets. Frederica managed by furious concentration and an assumption of pupil-to-master virtue to borrow this to play during the school holidays. She then played it repeatedly, in a talismanic manner, until everyone in that unmusical household was driven to a frenzy of irritation by the repeated rhythms.

  On Easter Day Stephanie decided to go to church. She found herself a hat, to observe the proprieties, a half-melon of navy velvet with a wisp of veiling. Under this, preceded by a wavering circle of scarlet umbrella, she fought her way across tombstones and wet grass.

  She might have come to church anyway without the problem of Daniel. She might have come to please Felicity. She might have come because she liked to take part in the ceremonies of the year. At other Easters she had dyed eggs, cochineal crimson, onion-skin gold, and had travelled to mining villages to see eggs on trestle tables in the upper rooms of pubs, tie-dyed, boiled with ferns and lace doileys, boiled with lurid socks and old club ties, beetroot, wax and gentians. Bill liked the eggs, but never went near Easter in Church. Stephanie had taken both as they came. This year was different. She was angry with Daniel. She had come to take a look at him, there, in the Church. Where he belonged.

  He had upset her. He had pushed his consecrated huge face between her knees and trembled. He had declared passion and told her to go home and disregard it. He had involved her in his jumble of tea-party politeness, dead stories and ceremonial: he had made her feel like a professional cock-teaser. When he saw her in Church he would see she was sorry and respectful. When she saw him in Church she would know for certain it was all ridiculous; she could wipe her feet of it, after, in the Church porch.

  One of her own Fourth form handed her a prayer-book: she sat down at the back, against a pillar, and watched Miss Wells come in, fluttering chiffon scarves in various pinks, depending from a dish-shaped hat and bursting like bedraggled butterflies out at the neck and between the buttons of her rat-coloured gabardine. The next people to come in were her brother Marcus, and a young man she vaguely recognised, and then placed, as the curious biology chap who had once, at a school Christmas do, repeatedly asked her to dance, and had left large sweaty hand-prints on the back of a pale evening dress. Simmonds bowed and smiled to everyone and then ushered Marcus into a pew, like a hen with a chicken, a chamberlain with a prince.

  Stephanie was profoundly shocked to see them both genuflect and cross themselves. What was this? How long had it been going on? Marcus had not seemed to see her, but then he never did.

  The organ wheezed, raised itself, crashed. The choir marched and shuffled in, singing with a shrill effect that was damped by the weight of unstirred air in the arches of the roof. With them, a heavy shepherd, came Daniel, in a surplice. These were followed by
Mr Ellenby, who was to speak for his Easter offering. Daniel’s expression did not match the jubilee of the music. His black brows met across his nose: he looked as though he was about to embark on the commination service. She could pick out his voice, a rough bass, in tune but not harmonious. His exertions seemed directed to making a heavy beat to align other singers. She did not attempt to sing herself.

  He did not look, as she had supposed, perhaps feared, he might, silly. Nor did he seem, as she had also imagined he might, to burn with spiritual energy. She had come to see that energy directed: she had come to watch him pray. But he looked as he always did, black, fleshy, solid, with the white cambric a flimsy and extraneous bib. She smiled to herself at this thought. And whilst she was smiling, he saw her. He looked at her and frowned deeper, with the electric rigidity of shock: he turned away. Then slowly, above dog-collar and snowy pleats he flushed red and hot, blood flaming through the dark jowl to cheekbone and brow. She felt caught out in a lapse of taste. More hailstones rattled on stained glass.

  They sang, rose, kneeled, chanted, murmured, confessed. Her dislike of Christianity hardened like ice. She realised she had half-hoped to share what was ancient and inherited. Christmas moved her. O Come All Ye Faithful, especially in Latin, left her with real regret at her exclusion from faith and community. The difficult birth in bad weather, the golden angels singing in snow, the word within a word unable to speak a word, this she would have liked to have, feeling excluded from the heat and light in the stable by redundant rationalism. But the dead man walking in the new morning in the garden left her cold. The congregation rendered psalms in that combination of speech and song, grutching and sharp as chalk skidding on blackboard, wailing, toneless, patient, dismal, English. She was repelled.