by A. S. Byatt
Joshua Lamb read about St. Augustine’s misspent youth as a Manichee. The Manichees believed that evil was as powerful as, or more powerful than, the Good. They believed that the Ruler of Light, in a kingdom outside time and space, shone eternally to himself, until the forces of Dark and Matter invaded the borders and swallowed the particles of Light. The Light called up the First Adam, and sent him out to do battle. He was defeated, destroyed, and devoured by the demons, who confined the Light in Darkness, and created the world, including human beings, who did not know that they had Light in them, vainly trying to escape back to its own undifferentiated shining. The Suffering Jesus was another Messenger sent by the Light, and crucified, throughout the visible Universe. He was the fruit, on every tree, that was plucked and eaten. The Light had to be allowed to separate itself again completely from the dark. It had to flow back. To that end, the human children of Light had to forgo both procreation and the consumption of flesh and other solid creatures, both of which prolonged the entrapment of Light.
The Redeemer was in the very process of being redeemed, and the outcome was still very much in doubt. The same battle for the release of the light particles was taking place in every conscious human soul.
St. Augustine repudiated his Manichaean youth; he was a doughty, battling saint, and he came to feel that the Manichaean sense of the passivity, the quiescence, the acquiescence of the Good, was an insult to God the Father, as the Manichaean sense of an incorrupt scattering of light particles in the corrupt body and mind, was a wrong description of the Fallen Soul. All, all was Fallen; all that could be redeemed was redeemed by the powerful and terrible Son of the Father. He fought his old allies with passion and ferocity.
Joshua Ramsden read the Manichaean psalm about the violated divinity of which the individual mind was part.
I am in everything; I bear the skies; I am the foundation; I am the life of the world; I am the milk that is in all trees; I am the sweet water that is beneath the sons of matter.
His newly-acquired Christian faith was ecstatic and brittle, shining like a fine bubble of glass.
He ate little, and slept only in snatches. He lay awake in the dark, spreadeagled on his back, and the spiritual currents spun through his veins like shoals of lethal air-bubbles, or scattered sphericles of quicksilver. He was running with airiness and slippery brightness. He lay awake and listened to the humming. Whenever, briefly, he slept (or so he remembered) he would wake suffocating, with the sense of a heavy hand, clamped over his nose, bruising his mouth and nostrils. He would smell raw meat, and a faint rottenness. He would thrash around for freedom. And the particles of brightness in his blood would wheel in terror, turn back, drain his heart.
The night came, the night of the return of the other. He woke under the fleshy pad, and struggled free, and a voice told him to stand, and look out. So he went to his window. The moon was full, silver, platinum, etched with shadowy lakes and mountains, brimming over with brightness. The other stood outside in the dark and smiled at him, from under his own flowing white hair, which caught the moonlight. His face was blanched, its shadows a delicate blue-grey like the shadows on the moon. Come out, said the other, beckoning. The moon shines bright as day. Come out.
So he went out into the street, stopping only to put on a raincoat and slippers. He followed the other, who walked, gliding, along the Bailey, up Dun Cow Lane, on to Palace Green. And there, walking, dancing, on the Green between castle and cathedral, under a dark indigo bowl of space full of moonlight, were hundreds and thousands of creatures made of light, men, women, winged things and swimming things, like sea-serpents or sinuous fish, all dripping with brilliance as though they were phosphorescence rising from the deep, as though they were made of scaly coats of brilliance that shone in moony colours, green, blue, silver, violet. They swarmed up and down towards the moon, in great dancing columns like gnats on a river-surface, like clouds of starlings drained of black and made of brightness, like sparks from a fire. They melted into pillars and causeways and branching forests of undifferentiated light and then took form again as dancers, swimmers, soaring wings. He could have watched forever and never knew how long he stood. The other stood beside him, and said “Loose thy shoe from off thy foot, for the place whereon thou standest is holy.” So he took off his slippers, and his feet felt the cool light flowing over and through them, and the quiet life of the shorn grass and clover under them.
The other said he was the Syzygos, the Heavenly Twin. He was the Word. He had returned at the syzygy or conjunction of the bodies of light, the sun and the moon.
He put into the thin man’s arms the heavy weight of things, the almost unbearable sphere, but this time it was made of cold light, it was fluid and fluent, and simultaneously it was infinitely weighted and ready to float up and away with the spiring crowd of creatures. And his fingers dabbled in its liquid surface, where wavelets lapped as on a shore, and yet also it had the gloss, and sheen, and cold sliding of metal. And the young man staggered a little, and splayed his bare feet, to hold up better. He felt he himself was molten metal in the intense pleasure of the presence of the Syzygos, whose smiling lips mirrored his own, whose eyes were dark blue wells under springing white brows. And the Syzygos told him, quietly, as he stood there holding the weight of things, that he had been walking in a wrong direction (though his deepest inclinations had been true). He was chosen to follow the true prophet, who was Mani, who had been flayed and martyred for understanding that light was fragile and the dark was fanged and full of energy. Mani had known that there was no certain outcome, and the cruel God of the Old Testament was inhabited and controlled by the Dark. This god’s desire for flesh and blood sacrifice was inspired by, was part of, the loathsome greed and ogreish carnality of the Dark. Christ’s death in time and space had been in vain and had compounded the original evil and increased the horrible energy of the original invaders. In the days of Mani himself, the true believers had thought that the Light particles went back from pure men—who abstained from flesh and desire—into the moon, and from there into the sun. And from there, back to the closed-off kingdom of Light.
More he was told, as he stood there watching the play of colour and the spinning of threads and weaving of shimmering curtains of lovely light.
St. Cuthbert, who is buried here, said the Syzygos, saw the ascending spires of light also. But his description was partial, and darkened by the misguiding Book. You must read our books, which are scattered and fragmented, like our bodies and history, you must reweave our story and carry it forward, until the Light and the Dark are no longer involved in each other, until purity is pure and corruption is a bolus excreted, evacuated, eliminated.
And the thing in his arms shattered spontaneously, and took flight as a myriad splinters of brightness, like shooting stars, like arrows aimed at the full moon, where they vanished.
He walked home barefoot over the cobbles, which had rills of light and puddles of silver, eddying and flowing over them, as though they were the bed of a river.
After this, he heard more, more coherent voices, a chorus of guides, and instructors. He heard also demonic, tempting voices, which the guides and instructors told him must happen, as once the “pathways” were open, the dark creatures would try to swarm in. He must suffer, there was no help for it.
For an uncertain length of time, as he remembered, he hurried like a shadow between his bedroom, the Cathedral and the library. He ordered books about the Manichees and discovered the various cosmogonies of the Gnostics, Marcion, Bardasanes, the Egyptian Valentinus whose kingdom of Light was the Pleroma, made of twenty-eight Aeons arranged in Syzygia, or heavenly pairs.
Sophia, the youngest of these Aeons, envied God’s power to generate without partners, and brought forth an abortion, without form and void, since the male nous gives form to female matter. The abortion, ejected from the Pleroma, took form and was known as “Sophia Without,” daughter of heavenly Sophia. And Sophia Without made a psychic solid of her fear, grief, perplex
ity and entreaty—fear became a psychic essence, grief a solid material, perplexity a demon and entreaty a thread of repentance.
From this psychic substance the Demiurge created the solid cosmos, below the psychic sphere, and below that lay chaos and darkness. Joshua Ramsden read, and read. Light and dark flashed and clanged in the battlefield of his skull. Serpents coiled, and tusks and fangs struck. The fragile light shivered and retreated. He held on to the heavy pillars of the nave, to keep him upright in the storm where he staggered.
He did not write his essay on St. Augustine’s corruption of the origin of evil. He tried to write what he had been shown, the world of Aeons and demons, and became entangled in networks of interconnecting, interrelating, contrarily similar, reinforcing, contradicting, systems of names and names and names and qualities. As though theologians generated the language of proper names as easily as demons generated flesh, blood, sinews, plasma, piss, shit.
The Syzygos told him that the plethora of words and names were snares of the demons, for language was man-made, it belonged to the veil of flesh which separated him from the Light. It told him to do as Mani said. To eat no meat, to thwart and constrain no vegetable, to abstain from sex, to kill nothing. To respect the light particles in the whole of the creation. To try assiduously to set them free, to separate them from the dark.
Father Burgess said his essay on Gnostic cosmogony was incomprehensible, and advised him to desist from that course of study. It splinters the mind, like the Book of Revelation, he told the thin young man. Both are temptations, at certain points in a spiritual journey. Both are psychic mirrors for wild thoughts, both make circles of self-reference and echo chambers. It is normal to be seduced by these ideas, at a certain point along the way, he told the young man. The young man was desperately offended by the word, “seduced.” He imagined fleshy fingers, lips and juices, the exact opposite of the bright threads and ribbons that made both the maze he was in, and the clue to the way through, simultaneously.
The voices told him the moment had come when he must speak. He must speak on the Green, where he had seen the pathway of light. He must tell people of the division of the Light and the Dark, of the things needful for the good life.
When he stood up to speak, his voice seemed to him a ghostly wail, a thin fluting. It was a grey day, with a cold wind, which ruffled his white hair, and seemed to him to blow through him, as though he had become merely a bone-cage. A few people gathered, of whom a few mocked, and a few shuffled. He felt the great earth-bound bulk of the Cathedral reared against him to hurt him. He stared up at it, faltered, and seemed to see its stones falling, heavy, heavy, to crush him. He choked. He fell on his hands and knees, he shielded his head from the blows of falling matter. They took him gently to the hospital again. When they let him out, they said, it was clear that the course of study was stressful to him, and possibly inappropriate. He should go home, they said, meaning, he should return to Agnes Lamb, and reconsider his vocation. Father Burgess put him on a train to Darlington. He said “You overtaxed yourself, with too much enthusiasm—in the old sense of that word. You are a spiritually violent man. I am sure a way will be given to you to use your power for the best. I am sure you must now try and be peaceful, eat and sleep and do ordinary human things—go to the pictures, play football, make friends, drink beer—anchor yourself to the earth, and wait until your strength is renewed.”
“I am not a Christian,” said Josh Lamb. “I am a Manichaean.”
“All of us have Manichaean moments,” said Father Burgess with unjustified blandness, as the train drew out in a cloud of soot and smoke and flying pellets of burning ash.
Josh Lamb got out at the next station. He packed a satchel of essentials, from the suitcase he left on the platform, and set out, on foot, into the countryside.
He was set against Agnes Lamb and her grey armchairs, her bowl of dripping and her thick curtains against the light.
He walked. He did bits of gardening. He found seasonal work on farms. He walked, he wandered into libraries and sat amongst stinking tramps. He looked after vegetables and fruit. Now and then he vanished from himself and found himself in hospital. He saw blood running, and great brimful seas of moonlight. Sometimes he thought he was nothing, flotsam, jetsam, a scarecrow. Sometimes, he knew his time had not yet come.
The gardens at Cedar Mount were closed, of course, inside a high wall, with spikes, and shards of glass. Inside, there were winding paths, and hedged alcoves, and lawns both expansive and enclosed. On fine days those inhabitants who could be trusted were encouraged to walk on the gravel paths, or to sit out on the stone seats and wooden benches that were disposed around the grounds. In one corner, at some distance from the main hospital building, was a mound with a kind of tufted grove of evergreens, and a swing, creaking on ropes from what looked like a scaffold between the yews and laurels, under the single imposing cedar, which might have given its name to the place.
A service path for gardeners ran to a compost heap behind a copper beech hedge between mound and wall. It was gloomy and overshadowed, but someone had nevertheless put a seat there, under the mound, with no view but the woven beech-twigs and the wall beyond. This dark place had always provided a refuge for the solitary, which was perhaps why it was there. Possibly some gardener even knew about the importance of hiding-places in closed communities. Lucy Nighby sat there whenever they were allowed out. She sat and stared at the dead beech-leaves, which were a drained gold, and rattled, and at the jagged edge of glass that glinted at the top of her horizon. It was almost winter, with a frosty brightness. She had her coat on; it was stained with the moss of the wet wooden seat.
She had decided to die, and had been secreting and saving pills to that end, without really knowing what the pills were, or what effect they would have. She had them in one pocket, in an envelope. She had a plastic bottle of water. Her practical concern was whether she had enough pills. And for that matter, enough water to get them all down. It was the end of the afternoon. A pale-blue sky was becoming thicker, greyer, rosy. She looked at everything very intently, because it was the last time, noting the slow diminishing of the greenness and the sharp brightness of the broken glass as though it was important to do so, noting too the smell of leaf-mould, of resin, of cold and damp. Her hands were cold. She fumbled with the bottle and the envelope. She would put herself out, like a candle, only it was more difficult.
She ate a pill, and sipped, and ate another.
There was a faint movement in the leaves behind her, a step no heavier than a bird disturbing a twig. She turned a little, her chill fingers holding the emerald and scarlet capsule to her lips. He was stepping silently down from the top of the mound, and his crown of white hair appeared to be giving out light in the gloom of the yew-branches. He appeared to be all white, his beard, his shirt, even his pale trousers. He wore no overcoat. He said
“I have been sent to fetch you.”
She didn’t speak. She had found life simpler (at least) though not better, since she stopped speaking. The white figure formed and reformed before her eyes; it had rainbow edges, which might have come from her own tears, and it shimmered.
“Something told me,” he said. “Not them, a voice I heard. To look for you here, now. I know how it is. I know where you are because I walk there. We have things to do, before we can—take ourselves out of the world. You must help me. And I will help you. I can help you.”
She sat there, the small woman, hunched in her camel coat. And felt herself coming back to herself, her untidy bunch of hair, her face pink with cold, her tired eyes, her heavy feet, her finger with the capsule arrested at her dry, cracked lips. A small wind rattled in the beech-leaves. The earth exhaled mild vegetable decomposition. The man looking down on her had the wind in his white hair and shirt and seemed to shine cold and white.
“Look,” he said “there is the full moon, in the end of daylight. I shall tell you about the light. You know, and I know, about light and dark and what it is to be outsi
de, where both are strong. We have things to do, but you don’t know what they are, because you haven’t yet been told. But I shall tell you. And you will listen.”
She held the capsule to her lips. Her eyes were wet. She knew—how?—he was a man who hated touching other people. But when he saw no help for it, he came, and with bright cold fingers took the capsule from her red ones, and folded her two hands in his. The sky darkened slowly. The round disc of the moon brightened. He sat down next to her and told her to look at the moon. In the moonlight, the glass spikes looked like a flowing beck of water over stones.
“We must be wise as serpents,” he said. “We must go in now, and find a way out of here, and I will tell you what I know, and how we must live. Do you have more of those pills?”
She held out the envelope.
“No, I shan’t take them. I have my own store, too. Keep them, in case the need is too strong. Because I know that if you and I know we have the means to go, we can find the courage to stay. Put them away.”
She made, now, one little gesture towards him, like a child asking for an embrace.
She felt him overcome his reluctance, give up his distance. Briefly and gracefully, he took hold of her, held her to him, put his cool lips to her brow.
“I am here,” he said. “Remember, I am here, I know, I am watching for both of us.”
“Who are you?” she said.
“I shall take my name, later, when I am told.”
Chapter 9
Leo said “Thano said, I saw your mum on telly.”
“He should have been in bed,” said Frederica defensively. They were walking back from school into Hamelin Square.
