A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  Now, Avram, please treat my tapes responsibly. Please. I have to rely on you. Please let me know what you think about my interesting procedural problem.

  Till we meet again! Brenda.

  From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell

  It was good to see you, old friend. I felt briefly we formed a group-within-a-group, of anxious analytic minds, to whom it was both a credit, and yet a regret, that we cannot “let go” and abandon ourselves to prayer, or loss of self (consciousness). I am reporting, as we agreed, on the comportment and presumed comfort, of your two additions to our company.

  Neither of them has stirred very much. The analogy is peering into the reptile tank in the Zoo, watching coiled snakes for movement. I surprise myself—and may annoy you—with this image, but it sprang forcibly into my mind and it seems wrong to repress it. Everyone is of course watching them, waiting for them to make a move, and ostensibly looking the other way, in case he or she might be thought to be rude or intrusive. Lucy sits—always on a hardbacked chair, she eschews sinking into the pretty fauteuils, and always in a far corner. She presses her knees together, and she presses her lips together, and she clasps her hands together over her knees. One of the Quaker ladies brought her a little posy of flowers, and laid them in her lap, but this was not a great success. She gave them a nervous glance, but did not pick them up, and seemed to forget them. They fell to the ground when she stood up.

  Josh Lamb, on the other hand, speaks when he is spoken to. Minimally, with a somewhat vulpine polite smile. Much of what he says, I have noticed, simply returns the observation made to him, slightly recast, as though he was playing a language-game.

  “It’s a fine day.”

  “Certainly the weather is excellent.”

  “We are working towards spiritual renewal.”

  “There is indeed a sense of imminent change in the air.”

  “The end of the world is nigh.”

  “It appears that the world may come to an end fairly soon.”

  I invented the last one. But he does look as though that is what he would say.

  He did become more forthcoming—even vehement—oddly on the subject of television. There’s been a lot of debate—polite, and heatedly less polite—in the group, about whether a television should be allowed in the farmhouse at all.

  There are in fact, two at the moment, one in the Common Room, where we, in principle, relax together, and one in what is known as the “study room” where special groups meet irregularly on special topics. I don’t know if you got as far as that on your flying visit. Many of the Quakers feel that the box is an unnecessary distraction in the contemplative life. They use the words “trivial,” “commercial” and even “worldly” about it. This is not the view of Frank and Milly Fisher, the owners of Four Pence, who believe that religious people should be in the world, but not of the world, and that they will do better, more caring social work for being alerted to the “mental pap” their “clients” subsist on. Richmond Bly, the Blake man, goes into paroxysms of disgust at the “crass” level of discussion, and general vulgarity of the “satirical” programmes. I have to declare an interest—which I did most forthrightly in their debates—since I am to appear on a new sort of programme called Through the Looking-Glass. I am to discuss the concept of Creativity with Hodder Pinsky and the young woman who moderates these discussions. Her name is Frederica Potter, and she turns out to be the Freda or Francesca to whom John Ottokar, the twin brother of my Zag, is apparently attached. My programme is the third, and I am nervous and narcissistic enough to want to watch the earlier ones, which do take place at times when I am resident here at Four Pence. Zag too is pro the Box. He hopes to be able to sing and dance on it with his syzygy/ziggy Zy-goats, of course. It is possible that he envisages it as the medium for a global dionysiac orgy. Gideon Farrar is largely opposed. He says the Joyful Companions should be sufficient unto themselves, and find in each other’s eyes and speech all they need to engage their hearts and minds. They must work out their own salvation, which means avoiding distractions and snares etc. etc. I think Gideon was, at least to start with, in favour of a ceremonial unplugging of both Boxes and ritual shattering of both screens. (Ray tubes? Do you understand the mechanics of the thing?)

  Anyway, a heated democratic meeting was held to discuss the problem. Lucy came, and sat in her usual posture in her usual corner. Lamb came, with his look of grave concern. Some imp prompted me to ask his opinion, though I supposed he would not be an ally. I wanted to hear him speak.

  He said, as near as I can recall—I wish I had a tape-recorder:

  “This device does indeed make seen the unseen, and transport eidolons of bodies from one place to another. Its sendings pass through walls and join minds to minds. It is not a trivial thing, though trivial people choke it with trivial chatter, and meaningless material concerns. It is not trivial, but terrible. It will change the nature of our consciousness, that of the wise, as much as that of the ignorant and foolish. It will show our world to us. When our world ends we shall watch with it the towering advance of the last tidal wave, or the red roar of the final fire, until its eyes drown, or melt, with the rest of us. We cannot and should not ignore it. We may even, in time, be able to use it for good. It is a neutral, electrical thing. We should learn what it is and does, not shun it. This is what I think.”

  Such a speech, written down, is on a knife-edge between the ludicrous and the impressive. I can assure you—after the logic-chopping, and little stabs at reasonable, or tolerant positions—he spoke like a knife to the heart. Everyone looked at him, and Gideon murmured thoughtfully that it was indeed a power that could be used for good or evil. I could see him seeing himself preaching on the box, extending his congregation through the English-speaking world. So the boxes are to stay, and Mr. Lamb—who has returned to his normal courteous silence—is being looked at like an unexploded bomb that might go off. What will he say next? What is he preaching? (He sounds like a preacher.)

  Josh Lamb, Joshua Ramsden watched the first Through the Looking-Glass in the attic lecture-room, with a group consisting of Elvet Gander, Canon Holly, Richmond Bly, Daniel Orton, Ellie and Paul-Zag. The Joyful Companions watched, as they did everything, companionably in the relaxation room. They included Brenda Pincher, and all the Quakers. It was dark and sparsely furnished in the lecture-room. The ceiling sloped, and a new moon was visible through the uncurtained skylight.

  No two people step in the same river, and no two people watch the same television programme. Richmond Bly kept making comments about the cleverness of the graphics, and of those of his students who had helped to draw them. Canon Holly leaned back and smoked his yellow cigarettes. Ellie remarked that Alice had always frightened her as a little girl. Elvet Gander leaned forward, intently studious, noting the styles of conversation. Paul-Zag jigged and jerked to unseen, unheard music, occasionally stabbing a painted fingernail at the screen (each finger had a different circular mandala) and saying “Ha!” with more and more excitement. “That’s her,” he said at one point to Gander. “Her very self. Butter wouldn’t melt. You’d think butter wouldn’t melt. Well I can tell you it creams and froths.”

  The mirror-images, the discussion of twins, Tweedle and Tweedle, overexcited him. He said again to Gander, stabbing him in the ribs with a sharp forefinger “Hey, there’s a lyric in that. Tweedle dark and Tweedle light, on the one hand sweet, on the other hand sour, two is one and one are two ...”

  Josh Lamb turned his dark eyes to him and put his own finger to his lips.

  Paul-Zag fell silent.

  Daniel felt concern for Frederica. Was she about to embarrass herself again? When he saw that his concern was misplaced, that she was bright and shining between the clever men and the mirrors, he allowed his thoughts to drift, leaned back, stared up into the dark. He did not say: that is my dead wife’s sister. They did not need to know.

  Josh Lamb’s mind engaged slowly with the concrete world, and found it hard to take in fast-moving ob
jects or rapid speech. In this case, the concrete world itself, the brown plastic box and grey screen were full of humming electric currents which perturbed, and darted between, the electric threadings in his brain. He found it hard to seize the exploding and vanishing creatures that infested the inner glass box. He saw worms and lizards and did not know if they were emanations from himself, or from in there. He saw, as he was used to seeing, drops and sheets of blood. The hand-mirror with the silver fruit that Frederica brandished was brimming with blood before Richard Gregory described Aristotle’s connection between the vision of menstruating women and mirrors.

  Later, others were to say they had seen these things.

  Unsurprised, he heard Richard Gregory mention that the Manichees used mirrors. Of course, that would have been so, and would be so. Unsurprised, he heard Jonathan Miller describe Lewis Carroll’s games of Syzygies, unaware in the mundane world of the message he was transmitting to its true hearer. He began to see wild flashes and his head began to buzz dangerously. With an effort, he kept still. The screen was emitting a great gold cloud of light, in whose brilliance the monstrous fleshy nature of the humans beside him was painful. Holly’s stained teeth and spittle, Daniel’s belly, Gander’s lurid cranium, Ellie’s cotton-wool foaminess, Richmond Bly’s inanely drooping grin, above all perhaps the painted fish-eyes, the glittering claws, the oily blond hair of Paul-Zag, showed up in the luminescence as caricature and distortion, failure and sin.

  When the transmission was over, he made an excuse to stay there, with the box. This was made easier because Elvet Gander was distracted by the overexcitement of Paul-Zag. When they were all gone, he sat down again, in the thick fug of Gander’s pipe-smoke and Holly’s more acrid cloud, and turned the thing on again. It was late. There was nothing but silver snow, fragments of the world of light spinning in chaos, coming in and out of being like arrowheads.

  He went close. So close, his breath made the thing fizz, and he felt its power run into his finger-tips and hair follicles. His white hair stood up. His many-coloured beard fanned. He saw his ghost-face over the light-splinters, and then he saw the Other, speeding towards him. The Other burst the surface of the storm in the screen like a diver in reverse, plunging up from the deep.

  He stood on the carpet in the attic. His naked white feet were beautiful. His face was Ramsden’s face, but also made beautiful. He wore a garment of light that was all colours and no colour, white.

  “It will begin, now,” he told Ramsden. “Here, now, is where it will begin.”

  “I am afraid.”

  “Of course. It is a hard thing. Take it and hold it.”

  He held out his arms, expecting the dark or the bright globus. What he was given was small. It was small, and spherical, and lay in his palm intensely cold and intensely heavy.

  It looked as though it should have been warm. It looked like an eyeball of flesh, covered with a living, pulsing web of bloody threads of veining. Looked at, it throbbed. To the touch, it was freezing and still.

  He was told that when the eye of the flesh was clean, the eye of the spirit would see clearly.

  When the flesh of the people was clean, they would appear light, and symmetrical, and ugliness would flake away from them like scales.

  “You will tell them the messages. You will clean them. You will separate the light from the dark.”

  He had a vision of what he was to lose, or had lost. It went back to the last “normal” day of the eleven-year-old with the pitiful fat thighs, eating normal food, laughing normal laughter.

  He was told that those things were not real things, were seen wrongly, were lumps, and disgusting.

  He was shown his own face, crowned with a huge crown of woven bones, or thorns, of light. He stared up at the fingernail of moon, and the slivers of light danced out of the transmission, through him, into it so that sky and thick atmosphere were all glittering with it, like a shoal of fishes.

  “You will tell them,” said the Syzygos, as it mixed its substance into the light, and he fell, frothing and jerking like a puppet.

  Daniel came back, and found him there, and fetched help, and got him to his room, and into his bed.

  Daniel didn’t know why he went back. It simply occurred to him to do so. He knew about clearing air-passages, holding down tongues.

  Later, he thought he might have saved his life, but was not given to interpreting things in terms of special providences.

  From Brenda Pincher to Avram Snitkin

  I do wish you would acknowledge receipt of my tapes. There is so much irretrievable good material in them. I would keep them here, but it would be extremely embarrassing if they were discovered, and it would, of course, put a stop to this project. I imagine you for some reason lying on your back in your caravan seeing indescribable visions on the ceiling. Please use a bit of imagination and send me some reassuring message. Please, Avram, bestir yourself. I have to confess I should also like to hear a sociological voice. I feel a bit lonely and beleaguered here. Keeping up appearances, so to speak, is very tiring and can even become disorientating.

  The material is so rich, that is part of the problem. I can’t resist the temptation to give you an unscientific picture of what is going on—including a few hypotheses, untested until I’ve meticulously analysed the data on the tapes I hope you are keeping safe for me. Part of the richness is the different uses everyone makes of what I think of as a disintegrating, incoherent set of religious terms and references. Most of this of course is to do with Gideon Farrar. Canon Holly is what is called a Death of God theologian. I do not understand his language well enough to know what it means. If anything, I sometimes tartly think to myself. There are no images in my mind to correspond to the Creation of Nothing, or the Genesis of Absence. I’m too pragmatic. I suppose.

  Farrar, however, I do have a grip on. Yesterday’s Meeting for Worship, of which I enclose the tapes, is typical Farrar. Whereas the Quakers (whom I like) know how to confine their spiritual and ethical Messages to manageable lengths, which respect others, Farrar has not really learned not to deliver sermons. I shall need to do some serious scientific analysis of my data, but I do think I am getting an intuitive grasp of what he is up to, and intuitive perceptions have to be a part of ethnomethodological fieldwork.

  The strange shufflings and snufflings you will hear at the beginning of the tape are the touching-feeling greetings which have been instituted as the required opening to each meeting. That is, you don’t have the option of not touching everybody. Farrar’s clothes, which I can’t record, become more and more resplendent, and less and less C. of E., as time goes by. At the Meeting on this recording he wore a kind of white woollen robe/shirt, open at the neck, and somehow billowing. It was embroidered with Aztec or Peruvian motifs in very brilliant colours—a lot of puce, a lot of turquoise, bitty bits of black and yellow. Under that he wore ordinary blue jeans. He wears them (I should think) slightly too tight for comfort. Indeed, Avram—and this is significant—the zip of his fly is under strain, and various stitches are bursting. He has amplish buttocks. He wears quite a few chains round his neck now—well, bronze chains, and leather thongs—from which dangle various symbols, of which the cross—that kind with a twist at the top—is only one. Suns, and moons, and male and female () and what I think are astrological signs too, round his wrists. Fishes and twins and arrows and pitchers and so on. (OK. I’ll make a precise list. But I don’t like getting near him, and they’re all tangled up in his hair and beard and so on.)

  The touching and feeling was complicated (almost amusingly) by our new members. Neither of them are at all at ease with it. The man, Josh Lamb, had an epileptic fit a week or two ago. He deals with Farrar’s “greeting” by laying his fingers against the side of your (well, anyone’s, my, Farrar’s) cheek. The woman, Lucy Nighby, is mute. I’ll come back to her. Bits of her story filter through in gossip. There’s a history of domestic violence, and she’s apparently been mute since her children and husband were seriously injured. They a
re trying to make her speak in order to resolve the case. She looks dreadfully meek, as though she couldn’t hurt a fly. She really can’t bear to be touched. On the whole, the group respects that. It keeps its distance. She shudders if anyone gets in three feet of her. Gideon Farrar strokes her hair, like a horse-wrangler taming a mare. She doesn’t stroke back.

  I think Farrar sees Lamb as a rival. This isn’t a scientific observation, but it is an observation. He watches the effects of his words on him, and he’s got more flamboyant since Lamb came.

  On the tapes—after one of the Quakers talking about Blake and tigers and lambs, and another talking of desirable quietness, you get a long, typical Gideon Farrar exhortation. I’ve decided one of his favourite words is fellowship. Another is welcome. Another is boundless . He’s always talking about breaking down boundaries.

  I’ve had the thought that a lot of these modern religious movements, zealously breaking down boundaries between the religious institution, and the “normal” everyday world, are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Religion thrives on mystery and distance and ceremony. Farrar was once the robed untouchable beyond the altar rails—which he’s now symbolically torn down, with the rood-screen, and burned. He used to hold a symbolic wafer up before a sacred altar. Now, because he’s demystified and demythologised the rails and the table and the bread and wine and himself he has to work a lot harder for his effects and his flock’s enthusiasm. He talks a lot—you’ll hear it on the tape (please make a copy, please acknowledge receipt, I do feel jittery) about the old monasteries, and how they kept open house, and fed all comers abundantly, and provided a constant open door between the spiritual world and the everyday. His love-feasts consist of great crusty sandwiches made from bread he slices with a flourish, and boiled ham he carves with a flourish. (Query. Did he choose ham because he’s deliberately breaking the Jewish tabu on unclean pig-meat?) He is a kind of Mine Host. He does tend to identify with his own God, such as that is. He likes to quote “Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” and it’s not at all clear who the “me” is, Jesus Christ or Gideon Farrar. He also talks a lot about openness. “Lay yourself open” he says, and I see his fly straining. (OK, that’s naughty.) And “The truth will make you free.” His idea of “the truth” is that everybody should make a full public confession of their sins—well, he pussyfoots round the word “sin” as you’ll hear, and uses locutions like “grievous faults,” “errors,” “mistakes” and even “misfortunes.” Fellowship will heal. “I will make your burden light,” “I will cast out fear and shadow and you shall live in the clear.” (That is a direct quotation.)