In two weeks time Jason had a part in The Bill, so he felt entitled to a break, and he had decided that what he must do was to find out as much as he could about the picture and its painter. The desire came partly from guilt—if he knew more about it he would be able to persuade himself that he deserved the object—partly from a wholly unspecified compulsion which seemed to emanate from the picture itself.
As an actor, Jason was someone whose powers of concentration were above average, but he was surprised by the length of time he could spend simply looking at the picture. It began to alarm him that an hour or two might pass in this way, at the end of which he had only a very indistinct memory of what he had been thinking. After one or two of these sessions, he found that the picture’s image was etched onto his mind and formed an almost permanent background to his thought. It was like the tune that keeps playing itself inside one’s head.
Researches in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, revealed Gaspr. Poussin to have been Gaspard Dughet, sometimes known as Gaspard Poussin, who worked mainly in Italy and died at Rome in 1675. He had painted classical landscapes, somewhat in the manner of the more famous Nicolas Poussin, to whom he had been apprenticed, but often with stormy or overcast skies. The books spoke of him with respect, but essentially as a somewhat derivative minor figure. Jason could find no reference to In Arcadia.
The information he had gathered did not satisfy Jason as he had hoped it would. The one fact which haunted him was that In Arcadia was, if the label on the back was correct, painted in the year of the artist’s death. Could it have been his last work? Could the old shepherd, sitting exhausted by the roadside have been Gaspard himself? Jason was aware that this was the kind of gloss an old-fashioned art critic might have put upon it, attributing all kinds of personal references to a public work with an accepted iconography. He had read that in the seventeenth century artists were not individualists as they are now, and therefore In Arcadia need not be Gaspard contemplating his own death any more than Prospero drowning his book was Shakespeare renouncing the stage.
He was aware of this intellectually, but he could not deny that the picture had a power of suggestion quite beyond that of conventional classical imagery. Was it perhaps his own state of mind which had induced the extraordinarily intense relationship he had developed with the painting?
On the evening of his return from the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jason sat down before the painting, much as, on another lonely evening, he might have sat down in front of the television. For the first hour or so, he contemplated the picture as he had before, his thoughts slowing almost to a standstill before it. Then something started to happen, something which, even in his hypnotic state, disturbed him. Though he remained seated, a part of him began to move towards the painting. He might have thought that he was dreaming except that his mental faculties seemed fully alive. In fact he felt more fully conscious of himself than ever before.
That consciousness presented him with a choice. He could either draw himself back into his body, his flat in Fulham and the twenty-first century, or he could move forward. He chose the unsafe option and drifted forward, as if pushed by a gentle breeze.
When he reached the surface of the painting, he halted. He had reached a two dimensional plane and he knew he could go no further. For a space of time which could not be calculated in minutes or seconds he studied the canvas in detail. Every brush stroke, every tiny gradation of pigment was revealed to him. But even as he studied these minutiae, he was conscious of waiting for something. A change was about to take place. Then it happened.
Slowly the varnished surface of the canvas began to soften. Jason was aware that the source of light had changed too. Instead of coming from outside the picture and striking its pigmented surface, the light now seemed to come from within. Colours glowed. The next thing he noticed was that objects on the surface of the plane had begun to move in a strange way, shifting somehow and yet remaining in the same place. He could not understand it until he realised that the two dimensional surface was being transformed into a three dimensional space. Very soon he would be able to walk into the picture.
Once again he was presented with a choice. He could stay outside looking into the picture like a spectator in a darkened auditorium gazing at a lighted stage set, or he could move forward. He chose the unsafe option.
The landscape into which he moved was absolutely familiar, except that it was solid and three-dimensional. It was quite static, but not as a statue is: Jason felt that the animation of its trees and the old shepherd, who was some distance away from him on the path, was merely suspended. It was an entrancing prospect. Moments in a normal life succeed each other relentlessly without pausing to allow themselves to be considered. Here Jason could bite this moment to the core.
Before he could do so he was made aware of his own state. Up till this point, he had thought of himself as a disembodied being, as when, in a waking dream, one seems to float bodiless over wide miles of vivid scenery. Now he appeared to be recovering some physical senses besides that of sight. He could hear, though a great way off, the sound of London traffic which pervaded his flat. He began to feel a faint breeze on what he thought was his cheek. A numb pins-and-needles sensation affected him, as if he had some kind of body. Looking down he saw a pair of bare legs, identifiably his, and feet shod with sandals, standing on the yellow dust of the road. He was dressed in a rough brown tunic, like the ancient shepherd in the picture.
As he took his first steps down the path two things happened. Firstly, the faint noise of London traffic vanished; secondly, he began to acquire sensation in all his limbs. His hands seemed particularly sensitive: he could feel a tiny speck of dust and roll it between his thumb and forefinger.
The silence was complete; everything about him was still unmoving. The only movement came from him, because, as he moved down the path, he began to see things from a different angle. The trees were bent and their leaves twisted as if in a wind but they were still. Only the glint of the low sun which Jason could now see had an animated quality to it. The beauty which surrounded him both entranced and oppressed him. He felt that it was his task to bring it to life.
The sheer oddity of what he was experiencing struck him and he turned round to see if his room in Fulham was still behind him. He saw nothing, only a white mist. How was he to get back? The question did not disturb him too much. Apart from his role in The Bill (of an ex-public school drug addict) he had little to return to. How puzzled people would be by his disappearance! The idea amused him.
He turned back to his landscape and walked quickly down the path towards the old man. The path snaked so that his journey took him longer than he expected. When he reached the old man he bent down to look at him. The man was motionless but his eyes shone. Jason touched the man’s tunic and immediately he began to stir. Jason, suddenly full of an almost unbearable fear, stayed quite still. All around him he could hear things stirring into life, wind blowing, branches creaking, leaves rustling, a distant murmur of thunder, the song of a strange bird. The old man blinked and stared at him without curiosity. The face was old and grey bearded, but the deep-sunk eyes betrayed nothing. Jason felt he could animate him by speech, so he addressed him:
‘Who are you?’
The old man stretched out a hand and pointed to a spot behind Jason, who turned round to see what was being pointed out. It was the grey slab, like a tombstone, on the other side of the path. He crossed over to examine the slab and saw the letters carved on it:
bouloimhn k eparouros ewn qhteuemen allw
h pasin nekuessi katajqimenoisin anassein
Though normally the letters would have meant nothing to him, in his heightened state he understood, but their inner meaning still baffled him:
I would rather be a serf working by the day for another
than be the prince of all the dead.
He looked back at the shepherd resting by the roadside, but the figure had gone. This disturbed him, because the old ma
n had been a stable physical presence in this strange world that he had entered. Moreover when he looked behind him at the way by which he had entered the painting, there was no longer a white mist but yet more Elysian landscape. Twisted trees fluttered their golden leaves in the declining sun. The snaking path wound up a gentle slope to where stood a white marble temple on a mound before a grove of oak.
Jason decided to walk to the temple. It was the only recognisably human element that he could see, and even that possessed a certain inhuman perfection. It occurred to him that he might be trapped forever in this beautiful but somehow threatening world. He did not think that he would wake up and find himself again in Fulham; he felt too alive for that. As far as he could understand it he had found his way into another dimension of existence; but whose?
It was an odd question, that ‘whose?’, because as long as he lived in one world—the Fulham world—such curiosity had not existed. The question would have been meaningless, because there was nothing else. Now it seemed full of significance, even though its answer was quite beyond him.
At each step he took, the view seemed to compose itself into another classical landscape. It was as if he had walked into not one but an infinity of pictures, each one a subtly varying depiction of the same exquisite but melancholy mood. No one scene in the Fulham world had the same monolithic intensity; a hundred moods competed for attention within it.
Sounds were slight and precious to his ears. The breeze fumbled at his skin and rustled the trees. No animal noises could be heard, beyond that one invisible bird. His own feet on the path were loud and jarring. When he stopped he listened intently and could just discern, behind the wind, another very faint sound. It was a twittering, that was the only way he could describe it, but he was sure that it was not birds. Could it have been bats or insects? A moment of synaesthesia gave him a mental image of thousands of tiny sparks of light, each of a distinct shape and colour, each with its distinctive tone, whirling in a black void. Then the moment passed and he could barely hear the twittering. He continued on his way to the temple.
In the declining sun the temple’s white crystalline marble shone almost like gold. It was of Roman design with an ionic porch attached to a plain rotunda domed with dull green copper which indicated the occasional presence of rain in this strange land. Jason could make out two bronze coffered doors standing ajar under the porch. The inscription on the cornice under the pediment was: ET IN ARCADIA EGO.
He mounted the marble steps and entered the cool portico. As he did so he was invaded by a strong sensation of loneliness, an intensification of melancholy so extreme that it was no longer pleasant. However something drove him on to penetrate the mystery of the place and he walked through the bronze doors into the rotunda.
The coffered ceiling had a circular opening at the apex which let in a slanted column of light from the sky above. At the very centre of the rotunda under the opening stood a gigantic sarcophagus of black marble on a granite dais. It was highly polished and its shape was that of a giant bath with a dome-like lid on top of it. The walls were of polished marble and, at eye level, around the inner circumference of the building there ran a circular frieze in bas relief, crisply and exquisitely carved. The stone from which it was carved was grey, delicately veined with streaks of silver that seemed to heighten details.
The scenes depicted at first made no sense until he found that it was possible to read the sequence of events starting to the right of the door and working round in an anti-clockwise direction.
It began with a naked man lying apparently on his deathbed. Around him men and women in classical dress stood or knelt in traditional attitudes of mourning. The carving had the decorous correctness of a Flaxman, except for a figure to be glimpsed behind the others who was half hiding a laughing mouth behind his hand. Standing apart from this group to the left, a tall veiled figure beckoned a bony finger.
In the next tableau the same man who had been lying on his deathbed was being dragged down a rocky path by the veiled figure now stooping. Its face, half hidden was sunken and skull-like, the eye sockets empty.
As Jason moved round the frieze he saw that the man had now reached the banks of a river where a number of other naked souls stood disconsolately, waiting for the boat. This vessel, punted by a misshapen giant, was propelled through the turbulent waters of Styx in which indistinct figures swam or floundered. One of these clutched at the side of the boat with a weak arm, but it was clear that one of the men in the boat was about to strike at the arm with a stone.
On the other side of the water stood Cerberus, the three headed dog with his tail of snakes, and beyond this a group stood before two masked figures on thrones carved with their names, Minos and Rhadamanthus, the judges of the underworld. One held a pair of scales, the other a sword.
Up till this point, the carvings had been expressive in a somewhat detached way, but the sequence of events seemed orderly and comprehensible. A propriety had been observed. About half way round the rotunda, events depicted became increasingly chaotic and bizarre, even though the classical style of execution had not altered.
Behind Minos and Rhadamanthus a tight mass of people were being pushed into a tiny aperture between two great blocks of dressed stone. The people were being moved by strange creatures, human in the composition of their limbs but so thin and elongated they looked more like insects. These same beings were pushing the blocks of stone together to crush the people they had driven into the aperture. In another scene a group of men and women, emaciated and hungry-looking, sat around a stone table, staring in horror at a single plate. On the plate was an amorphous mass, out of which projected something like an arm which waved a podgy mocking hand at them. Then came a grove of trees through which naked men and women were running in fear pursued by creatures with human heads that went on all fours. Other scenes followed in which people were apparently being forced to enact futile and repetitive tasks. A scene that struck Jason with quite unreasonable horror was one in which a man and woman were being measured by birds with long arms instead of wings. Every intimate part of their bodies was being inspected. On their faces was a look of agonised resignation and despair.
In the last quarter of the relief there was more tranquillity. It was signalled by the depiction of a field of long grass, each blade sharply delineated on the stone, as thin as threads. A few tall plants of asphodel relieved the monotony of the landscape, and the carver had cunningly managed to indicate infinite distance, despite the monochrome of his material. One or two figures were walking through this field though most sat or reclined.
The walkers, predominantly male, wore classical armour and carried weapons. They seemed to represent enthusiasts for the active life, and their faces showed vigour and determination as they wandered about, all in different directions. Those seated or reclining wore flowing classical robes. There were senators in togas, matrons with their heads decorously covered. Their features were serenely regular, but maintained a tenuous individuality. A little apart, a group of bearded men sat on thrones disputing with each other; while a similar collection of women span, sewed and embroidered. Some figures seemed sunk in deep thought while others gazed about them vacantly. None of those depicted had anguish on their faces, but none seemed actively happy. Resignation and boredom were the predominant moods. Jason found the scene so lifeless and oppressive that he almost preferred the depictions of torment and chaos which had preceded it.
At the very end of the frieze near the door was a final figure in higher relief than the rest of the carvings. It was the image of a man seated on a stone and facing the viewer directly. He was elderly and clean-shaven, with hair almost down to his shoulders. He was not in classical dress like the rest, but wore a loose shirt with a wide collar, baggy breaches and buckled shoes. He looked like a skilled artisan of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. His stare was almost alive and Jason recognised a powerful similarity between it and the look of the figure on the path that he had met when he first ent
ered the painting. In the man’s lap lay a scroll on which four lines of Latin were written whose sound and rhythm alone were like the tolling of a melancholy bell:
Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium
versatur urna serius ocius
sors exitura et nos in aeternum
exsilium impositura cumbae.
‘All of us are thither compelled. Everyone’s lot tumbles in the urn, destined sooner or later to fall out, and then we are bundled onto the boat of eternal exile.’
Horace, Odes, thought Jason, wondering slightly that he had remembered his long forgotten Latin so well. But at that moment a noise distracted him, so loud and violent it sounded like the whole fabric of the world being torn apart.
It was the grating and screeching of stone grinding against stone. Jason turned and saw that the lid of the great sarcophagus in the middle of the temple was moving. He ran to the bronze doors which, with a sudden gust of evening wind from the landscape beyond, blew shut. No force could open them. Jason turned to face the dreadful noise which re-echoed round the building, high pitched, almost like human agony.
The lid of the sarcophagus had slid far enough to reveal a small black hole, but not what was moving it. Then a thing emerged that looked at first like a great metal worm, then another, and another, until he saw that they were the fingers of a huge hand covered in some dull pewter-like metal. The hand pushed aside the lid of the sarcophagus which crashed onto the floor and shivered into great sharp fragments. One of them shot across the floor and stopped a few inches away from Jason’s feet. The hand seemed to feel blindly about the edges of the sarcophagus. Jason could see now that it was like the hand of a medieval knight in plate armour. It groped vainly for a few more moments, then withdrew into the dark interior of its tomb. Jason stood transfixed, hardly daring to think, let alone move; then he remembered the passage from Horace Walpole’s letters about dreaming of the ‘gigantic hand in armour’, and it reassured him. It meant that whatever he was experiencing, at least some of it belonged to his own subconscious. If he was living through a peculiarly vivid ‘lucid dream’ experience, then he could presumably control it. And yet the reality of what he had experienced so far had seemed peculiarly unsubjective. Perhaps this was insanity. On balance, however, Jason was encouraged and he contemplated the image of the great hand and the broken tomb with less fear. He even speculated on its Jungian archetypal significance, as the iron fist of Romanticism breaking out of the classical sarcophagus, and he remembered how during a brief period of his life when he was under the spell of Jung he had started to have Jungian dreams.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 5
