Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  She and he, making order in their living place, tidying and cleaning their home, stand together among piles of glass, synthetics, paper, cans, containers – the rubbish of their civilization which, they know, is farmland and food and the labour of men and women, rubbish, rubbish, to be carried away and dumped in great mountains that cover more earth, foul more water. As they clear and smooth their little rooms, it is with a rising, hardly controllable irritability and disgust. A container that has held food is thrown away, but over vast areas of Shikasta it would be treasured and used by millions of desperate people. Yet there is nothing to be done, it seems. Yet it all happens, it goes on, nothing seems to stop it. Rage, frustration, disgust at themselves, at their society, anger – breaking out against each other, against neighbours, against the child. Nothing they can touch, or see, or handle sustains them, nowhere can they take refuge in the simple good sense of nature. He has seen once a pumpkin vine sprawling its great leaves and yellow flowers and sumptuous golden globes over a vast rubbish heap, where flies sizzle and simmer – at the time he hardly noticed it, and now it is an image for his imagination to find rest in, and comfort. She watches a neighbour trying to burn bits of plastic on a bonfire, while the chemical reek poisons everything, and she shuts her eyes and thinks of a broken earthenware bowl swept out of a back door in a village, to crumble slowly back into the soil.

  In all of man’s history he has been able to restore himself with the sight of leaves in autumn that will sink back into the earth, or with the look of a crumbling wall with sun on it, or some white bones at the edge of a stream.

  These two stand together, high above their city, looking out where the machines that are destroying them rush and grind, in the air, on the earth, under the earth … they stand breathing, but the rhythm of their breath shortens and changes, as they think that the air is full of corrosion and destruction.

  They turn taps and handles and water runs out willingly from the walls, but as they bend to drink or to wash they find their instincts reluctant and have to force themselves. The water tastes flat, and faintly corrupt, and has been already ten times through their gut and bladders, and they know that the time will come when they will not be able to drink it, and setting out containers for rainwater, will find that, too, undrinkable from chemicals washed from the air.

  They watch a flight of birds, as they stand together at their windows, and it is as if they are sorrowfully saying goodbye, with a silent corrosive, tearing apology on behalf of the species they belong to: destruction is what they have brought to these creatures, destruction and poisoning is their gift, and the swerve and balancing of a bird does not delight and rest, but becomes another place from which they learn to avert their eyes, in pain.

  This woman, this man, restless, irritable, grief-stricken, sleeping too much to forget their situation or unable to sleep, looking everywhere for some good or sustenance that will not at once give way as they reach out for it and slide off into reproach or nothingness – one of them takes up a leaf from the pavement, carries it home, stares at it. There it lies in a palm, a brilliant gold, a curled, curved, sculptored thing, balanced like a feather, ready to float and to glide, there it rests, lightly, for a breath may move it, in that loosely open, slightly damp, human palm, and the mind meditating there sees its supporting ribs, the myriads of its veins branching, and rebranching, its capillaries, the minuscule areas of its flesh which are not – as it seems to this brooding human eye – fragments of undifferentiated substance between the minute feeding arteries and veins, but, if one could see them, highly structured worlds, the resources of chemical and microscopic cell life, viruses, bacteria – a universe in each pin-point of leaf. It is already being dragged into the soil as it lies there captive, a shape as perfect as a ship’s sail in full wind or the shell of a snail. But what is being looked at is not this curved exquisite exactness, for the slightest shift of vision shows the shape of matter thinning, fraying, attacked by a thousand forces of growth and death. And this is what an eye tuned slightly, only slightly, differently would see looking out of the window at that tree which shed the leaf on to the pavement – since it is autumn and the trees need to conserve energy against the winter on it – no, not a tree, but a fighting seething mass of matter in the extremes of tension, growth, destruction, a myriad of species of smaller and smaller creatures feeding on each other, each feeding on the other, always – that is what this tree is in reality, and this man, this woman, crouched tense over the leaf, feels nature as a roaring creative fire in whose crucible species are born and die and are reborn in every breath … every life … every culture … every world … the mind, wrenched away from its resting place in the close visible cycles of growth and renewal and decay, the simplicities of birth and death, is forced back, and back and into itself, coming to rest – tentatively and without expectation – where there can be no rest, in the thought that always, at every time, there have been species, creatures, new shapes of being, making harmonious wholes of interacting parts, but these over and over again crash! are swept away! – crash go the empires, and the civilizations, and the explosions that are to come will lay to waste seas and oceans and islands and cities, and make poisoned deserts where the teeming detailed inventive life was, and where the mind and heart used to rest, but may no longer, but must go forth like the dove sent by Noah, and at last after long circling and cycling see a distant mountaintop emerging from wastes of soiled water, and must settle there, looking around at nothing, nothing, but the wastes of death and destruction, but cannot rest there either, knowing that tomorrow or next week or in a thousand years, this mountaintop too will topple under the force of a comet’s passing, or the arrival of a meteorite.

  The man, the woman, sitting humbly in the corner of their room, stare at that indescribably perfect thing, a golden chestnut leaf in autumn, when it has just floated down from the tree, and then may perform any one of a number of acts that rise from inside themselves, and that they could not justify nor argue with or against – they may simply close a hand over it, crushing it to powder, and fling the stuff out of the window, watching the dust sink through the air to the pavement, for there is a relief in thinking that the rains of next week will seep the leaf-stuff back through the soil to the roots, so that next year, at least, it will shine in the air again. Or the woman may put the leaf gently on a blue plate and set it on a table, and may even bow before it, ironically, and with a sort of apology that is so near to the thoughts and actions of Shikastans now, and think that the laws that made this shape must be, must be stronger in the end than the slow distorters and perverters of the substance of life. Or the man, glancing out of the window, forcing himself to see the tree in its other truth, that of the fierce and furious war of eating and being eaten, may see suddenly, for an instant, so that it has gone even as he turned to call his wife: Look, look, quick! – behind the seethe and scramble and eating that is one truth, and behind the ordinary tree-in-autumn that is the other – a third, a tree a fine, high, shimmering light, like shaped sunlight. A world, a world, another world, another truth …

  And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago – and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.

  This, then, is the condition of Shikastans now, still only a few, but more and more, and soon – multitudes.

  Nothing they handle or see has substance, and so they repose in their imaginations on chaos, making strength from the possibilities of a creative destruction. They are weaned from everything but the knowledge that the universe is a roaring engine of creativity, and they are only temporary manifestations of it.

  Creatures infinitely damaged, reduced and dwindled from their origins, degenerate, almost lost – animals far removed from what was first envisaged for them by their designers,
they are being driven back and back from everything they had and held and now can take a stand nowhere but in the most outrageous extremities of – patience. It is an ironic, and humble, patience, which learns to look at a leaf, perfect for a day, and see it as an explosion of galaxies, and the battleground of species. Shikastans are, in their awful and ignoble end, while they scuffle and scrabble and scurry among their crumbling and squalid artefacts, reaching out with their minds to heights of courage and … I am putting the word faith here. After thought. With caution. With an exact and hopeful respect.

  JOHOR continues:

  Warnings that it will be dangerous to delay any longer have been received. Before I enter Shikasta on the necessary level, I must make a final check on two possible sets of parents suggested by Agent 19. It is even more difficult than was envisaged to choose circumstances that will allow me to develop quickly, and with time to become independent, and without incapacitating damage.

  JOHOR reports:

  There is not much to choose between the two couples.

  First Couple. He is a farmer, a farming technologist, and will not find himself unemployed. She is similarly employed. There are already two children. This is a healthy, intelligent, practical pair, not likely to split up, and with a responsible attitude towards their offspring. There is one disadvantage: both are natives of a certain island of the Northwest fringes, and suffer from a characteristic disinclination or inability to adapt to other races and peoples. As I have, of course, in view of one of the major tasks in front of me, no alternative to choosing parents who are white or partly so, this problem must be circumscribed. By, I think:

  Second Couple: They combine between them many useful capacities. His parents came from the central landmass during World War II and he was brought up speaking several languages. They had the energy that often is to be observed in immigrants and refugees, and he has this, too. He is a doctor, an administrator, and a musician. Her mother is a native of the extreme western islands of the Northwest fringes: being ‘working class’ and much handicapped by her origins in a class-obsessed society, though she was able to overcome these to a certain extent by energy and ability, she has made sure her daughter was equipped with as good an education as is available. This woman has therefore as much energy and effort in her background as her husband. She is trained in medicine and sociology and writes books of an informative sort. This couple is not likely to divorce. They, because of their cosmopolitan background, are particularly able to view the world scene with competence and comparative lack of regional bias. They are healthy, well balanced, likely to be responsible parents. They have no children as yet. They are, because of their dispositions and their work, likely to travel.

  This couple seems suitable.

  JOHOR reports:

  I had taken so much power from the Giants that I did not expect to see anything left of that sad habitation, its pitiful occupants. I travelled as fast as I could across blowing sands, and saw that these were deeper and wider, the rocks starker and blacker, no green anywhere, no life – just as on Shikasta the deserts spread while the forests were levelled or died of disease. The halls of the Giants were like a mirage, shimmering towers, battlements, courts, broken walls – ghosts and illusions, all, all, and I walked through them as through a soap bubble. In the great hall the thrones, the dais, the banners, the crowns, and the sceptres glimmered into sight and vanished, so that one moment I stood in a deceiving dream of halls and princes looking for Jarsum or for anybody at all who might survive there, and the next on empty sands that lifted and settled around my feet with a small hissing sigh. When the scene appeared, I saw the transparent wraiths of my old friends, Jarsum among them, but they dissolved, and I waited for a reappearance, and tried at that moment to grasp at least his hand – but when I stood where he had been a moment before, waiting for him to be there again, and he came, his great eyes yearning awfully towards me, he was like a reflection on water. Jarsum, Jarsum, I said, or called to him, through the shaking and dissolving reflections, Jarsum, you may not know it, but you and your companions have been of use in your end, you have helped us, you have steadied and speeded me in what I had to do … and then it was the end. It was as if a fountain had faltered and gone, the last emanations of that power that had sustained them from those millennia long ago faded and went and there was nothing. And never would be again.

  I left there and walked towards the borders of Shikasta. I passed many possibilities of slipping over into the other Zones, Zones Four and Five in particular, and, remembering the lively scenes I had observed or taken part in on past visits, it was a real effort to make myself move on.

  Besides, there was an unpleasant region of Zone Six to pass through, and I was not looking forward to it.

  All around the boundaries with Shikasta, on a certain level, crowd the avid ghosts, and not one of us enjoys contact with them.

  They are souls who were unable to break the links with Shikasta when they left it. Very often they are unaware they have left it, are like goldfish who find themselves inexplicably outside their bowl yearning in, not knowing how they got out or how to get back. Like hungry people at a feast: but while the food and festivities are real, they are not, dreams in a real world. These poors wraiths crowd around every part of Shikasta, as thick as bees. Some scenes, places, occasions, attract them irresistibly. Around the proud and the power-loving, there they cluster, trying to partake of what they yearn for, because in their lives they were powerful and proud and cannot stop themselves wanting that sweet food, or because they were beaten down and humiliated and wish now for revenge. Oh, the revengeful and bitter ghouls that surge all about the pomps and the powers of Shikasta! Scenes of sadism, cruelty, murder – there crowd those who allowed themselves to be sunk in the aromas of pain and the inflictions of it, and who never got their fill of it, and who want to feel it, or to deal it … Sex: there they crush and crowd, for of sex one can never have enough, that is its nature, and most of those who stand hungry there are those who in life fed most on sex. Food: around the kitchen and the dining places throng the greedy, whose lives were spent in eating or thinking about it. Those who spent their lives on their own beauty, or on thoughts of the superiority of their family, or race, or country, those who … but every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers, swarming close, invisible, seeing everything, hungry, wanting, never fed, and never to be fed …

  And there are those who long for the subtler fulfilments, for not all by any means of these hungry ones long for the sensational and violent, the crude or the ugly.

  Around those beds where lovers lie obsessed, what accomplished beings hover, savouring each caress, each long drunken look, each kiss – of all the intoxicants, this is the most powerful, and these are not savage or brutal ghosts, no hungerers for pain or to inflict it, not owners of comfortable bellies and soft beds – no, these may be among the most refined and responsive souls, most closely tuned to Canopus, but who allowed themselves to be tangled in these Shikastan nets and could not free themselves before they died. Among the fascinated crowds are uglier beings, the succubi and the incubi, the many varieties of vampire, those who have learned how to feed off the energies of Shikasta.

  Around the accomplished and the talented, those who have easily, or through some lucky combination of circumstances, become artists of all kinds, the tellers of stories, musicians, makers of images or of pictures – the souls who linger here are to be pitied more than any. These knew what it was to feed the needs of poor mankind with the nourishments of art (part food though it is, only shadows of what they might have had) but who could not, for some reason to do with the oppressions and hazards that are the very nature of Shikasta, which chokes off and destroys so much vital creativity. These are not souls to be feared or shrunk from. As I passed by a scene, perhaps, of a scientist calculating the nature of stars and star-forces, or a woman at work on a tale that may help others to see a situation or a passion more clearly, I recognized friends crowding hungrily the
re. Poor ghosts. ‘Move on, move on,’ I urged, ‘leave here, don’t allow yourselves to be fastened here around these glass walls, go – free yourselves. Find useful work in the other Zones, or return the hard way to Shikasta – those are your ways out. You may yearn and lean and pine here for long ages and never know anything but frustration and emptiness and longing …’ But they cannot hear, these bewitched ones, hanging there, eyes fixed on scenes which to them have a wonderful attraction, a glamour which makes them forget anything they ever really knew of the truth.

  I passed through crowded souls who, knowing in the imminent and awful trials of Shikasta, tormented with anxiety for their children, their friends, their lovers, sigh and pine around the council rooms and discussion chambers where the powerful talk and make decisions as to the future of Shikasta – or think they do – and found there many old friends. They recognized me, some of them. ‘Johor,’ they cried, ‘Johor, look, let me back, let me tell them, let me, let me, me, me, me, me …’ and great wails and groans go up, as they stand listening to the infantile wranglings of the conference tables, the matchings of strength with strength, power with power – and ahead lies destruction, where nothing will remain alive across continents but an occasional diseased animal, a demented child. ‘Johor, Johor,’ they cried, grasping me, pulling me back, ‘let me in, let me through, let me slip through now, and stand there among them and tell them, warn them …’

  ‘Leave it,’ I said, ‘go, leave these frontiers. You’ve played your part, and it wasn’t chosen by you – and if you did not do as well as you should, then turn your back on what you may not change now. Or if you want to be one who can change, then don’t crowd here like little children who cannot do anything but imagine competence in a future they are unable to direct, children who are nothing at all except in their imaginations. You may not help your families, your friends. Not this way. Come back into Shikasta, but the hard way …’