Pilgermann

by Russell Hoban

  Fields of grain and vegetables, herds of cattle must be grown to feed these ripening warriors. Wool of sheep, thread of flax, fur of fox and rabbit, hide of cattle must be grown to clothe and shoe the soldiers of Christ and Muhammad, and for this the sheep, the foxes and the rabbits, and the cattle must also couple tirelessly while the earth grows the sown seed in its belly. What chance would Mars have without the help of Venus? What hard breathing, what amorous sighing, what grunts of ardour and cries of joy sound in the gathered darkness of those soldier-making, soldier-feeding, soldier-clothing, soldier-shoeing nights!

  And the arming of them! While these boys ripen like peaches on the tree of war there are heard, first here, then there, then everywhere the clink of hammers and the windy breath of bellows. All through the Christian world and all through Islam rise and fall the brawny arms of smiths beating out the passing moments into days and weeks and years of swords, spearheads and arrowheads, lances, pikes, maces, axes, mail shirts and iron helmets, spurs, stirrups, bits, and horseshoes. Hammers and anvils of flesh, hammers and anvils of iron striking the years! Fires of war in forges east and west, their red coals purring! Red-hot iron, red-hot steel and a leaping up of golden sparks under the hammer blows! Hungry iron, hungry steel, hungering for flesh!

  And I too, Pilgermann! I too, with prayer-shawl, with fringes and phylacteries, with books and surgical instruments, I too have been ripening on this tree of war. But I am wrong to say ‘tree of war’; if one speaks of trees then there is only one tree: of war and peace and everything else; not only do soldiers ripen on it but all who live in this world; it is a wondrous tree and it bears different fruits in different seasons to be shaken down by the winds of necessity, plucked by the hand of circumstance. The dead Jews on the cobblestones before the synagogue, the dead girl with her skirt over her face, they too have grown on this same tree with the soldier-fruits. And my Sophias first and second. And these dead who walk with me. And my own young death as well. How difficult it is to speak of any single thing—one takes notice of a stone at the foot of a mountain, steps back to look at the mountain, walks far enough away to see the top of it, climbs another mountain to see the plain beyond the first one, and little by little widening the view sees from a very long way off our little cloud-wreathed planet swimming in the sea of space, and it is only one thing after all.

  Stones! When the hammers are heard on the anvils of war the stones will not be found unready; they will come to hand equally for those who besiege and those who defend. Built up into strong walls they await the rumble of the seige tower, the shock of the ram, the crash of the stone that comes whistling from the mangonel. War sets one stone against another, calls this one a missile, that one a stronghold. But the freemasonry of the stones is stronger than the temporary loyalties imposed on them; they do what is required of them but in their hardness they retain their one essential fact: they know that they are all one thing. What do the stones say? ‘We have no enemy.’ This I have not read in a book, this I have heard them say and I know it to be true. Muslims build them up and Christians knock them down or Christians build them up and Muslims knock them down; war and peace and the passage of what is called time shake and throw them like dice and in the throws read winning and losing. But the stones of Jerusalem laughed when the Temple was destroyed. ‘Full quittance!’ they shouted. ‘Full quittance for the sins of the Jews!’

  And what were the sins of the Jews? The graven images, the idols, the high places, the Baalim and the Ashtaroth, the adulteries of spirit and of flesh. And why did God rage so because of these acts, why were they not to be tolerated by Him? Because the insult was too monstrous to be borne. Because He had chosen the Jews for His vessel, He had chosen them to be the ark of the idea of Him and of It, the idea of the Unseen, the Ungraspable, the Unknowable, the idea never to be contained by the mind that is contained by it. He had chosen them to be mind-heroes, to open their minds to the idea that could not be held by any mind, and what did they do? They fouled themselves, they rolled in the dung and the degradation of the see-able, the knowable, the ordinary. They said to stocks and stones, ‘Be thou our God.’

  I do not forget thee, O Jerusalem. But what is Jerusalem but the seeable and the knowable? What is Jerusalem but the stones that have no enemy? The stones on which Christ walked, the stones over which he dragged his cross, the stones of that Western Wall that alone remain of the Second Temple, are they to be held sacred, are they to fill the eye with the seen? It is the Jerusalem of the heart that must not be forgotten because in the Jerusalem of the heart is the heart of the mystery where lives the idea of the Unknowable that is God.

  I say that now when I have been dead for centuries, I say it now that I am more or less full-grown. But in this time that I have been speaking of, in this time called A.D. 1096 when I trudged my road to Jerusalem I was going to a Jerusalem that lived in my mind as coarsely painted and as vividly coloured as an inn sign, a Jerusalem of blazing eastern sun and buzzing flies, of awninged blue-shadowed bazaars in the narrow streets walled in by tawny stone far, far away at the end of many days, many nights of perilous roads and long dusty approaches. When I thought of the gates of Jerusalem I thought of sunlight dazzling in its white brilliance, I thought of blue and purple shadows among which had moved the shadow of the very hand of God, a seen shadow. And it was a seen Christ that I was travelling towards, a Christ who had already appeared to me and had spoken to me.

  Now help me, Memory! Let me find again that road of youth and pain, let me hear again the tramp of thousands to Jerusalem:

  Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise—

  Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust—

  For Thy dew is as the dew of light,

  And the earth shall bring to life the shades.

  Marzipan. Manticore. Mazery. Manzikert. Manzikert, yes. And the name of that pope isn’t Unguent VII, it’s Urban II. But I was saying Manzikert. Nobody can deny that after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 Byzantium was no longer what it had been. The Emperor Romanus, taken prisoner at Manzikert, was blinded; and it was a Jew who was forced to perform this office. I hear the voices of Romanus and his Jewish executioner mingled in a constant faint murmur barely audible among the stronger transmissions in the hum and crackle, the roar and whine and whistle of the cosmos; it’s astonishing how many individual voices can be distinguished in what one would think of as a general uproar.

  Any sequence of events is interesting because of its positive and negative shapes. Take a pair of scissors and cut something out. Anything. Why not a devil with horns and a tail and cloven hooves. So. There is your paper with a devil-shaped hole in it. Two devil-shapes, one positive, one negative, and both of them made at the very same moment. Was the Battle of Manzikert the shape of the paper or the shape of the hole? It’s as I’ve said before: there is always a twoness in the oneness, and for this reason it’s almost impossible to know what is happening in the space-time configuration. Not only that: as soon as an effort is made to look at any particular thing the aspect of that thing becomes other than what it was—that event that happened in full view when unlooked-at covers itself when observed, spins around itself one of those wonderful encrusted eggs with a peephole in one end of it; I the observer, receding reactively from the gaze that proceeds from my eyes, find myself shot into the distance thousands of miles away from the peephole. Inch by inch I think my way back; closer, closer, closer I come and here it is all tiny—the tiny, tiny Battle of Manzikert. Closer still and I am in the dust and the trampling of it, hearing the grunts and the shouts of the living and the sighs of the dying.

  How nothing is simply one thing! There comes to mind unaccountably an order of the day from Jenghis Khan to his horsemen at some distance from 1071, a century or two perhaps. In this order he commands his men to leave their horses unbridled on the march—they are to have their mouths free, they are not to be galloped on the march.

  Where was I when the Battle of Manzikert was fought in 1071, Anno Mundi 4
831 in the Jewish calendar? That was the year of my birth; on some frequency still sounds my birth-cry in the hum and crackle, the roar and whine and whistle where lives the mingled murmur of Romanus and his Jewish executioner. Questions arise continually, everything must be kept in mind at once—at least one must try, must do one’s best. Because everything is with us. Even now the fading heat of the universe’s explosion into being warms the deeps of space, still it fades there, the echo of that first blind bursting shout of beginning. I note that everything that has ever happened is imprinted on me. I can feel it even though I cannot by my own volition recall most of it. With the bursting of the original explosion in me I am again in the year 1096, moving with the many, moving with the thousands towards the fall of Jerusalem, that golden city that I never lived to see. The fall of Jerusalem is at the centre of its space-time; the centre of anything is the centre of everything; how may it be looked at? Could the siege of Jerusalem have been painted by Vermeer? Can such a thing be looked at in such a way? Can the sunlight on mail shirts and blood and severed limbs be looked at as one looks at the daylight from a neat Dutch window in which a quiet woman weighs gold? A better painting to think of is the ‘Head of a Young Girl’: the look that looks out from the face of that young beauty, such asking is there in that look! ‘Are you love? Are you death? Are you the beginning of everything, are you the end?’ Not only does this young girl with her look see all of these but all of these look out at us from her face.

  And the look with which Vermeer looked upon her face, that is the look with which everything must be seen; yes, even the severed limbs. Everything that is, everything that happens must be seen with the eye that is in love with seeing. All must be seen with a willing look. From the face of Vermeer’s young girl looks out at us the heart of the mystery, the moving stillness in which again and again explodes, in which even now at this very moment explodes the beginning of all things. From her eyes the unseen looks out at us, and through our eyes looking back into hers also looks the unseen.

  This unseen that sometimes we call God, has it a purpose or a destiny? What is its present work? Elephants, whales, mice, cockroaches, humans—from a single cell of any of them can be made the whole creature complete; there is in the cell that reservoir of potentiality. With what we call time the potentiality is unlimited: each moment has in it the matrix of all moments, the possibility of all action. Is it God’s destiny to turn the wheel until every potentiality has become an actuality? For this has God come to hate the world? For this does God weep and curse continually as the wheel turns and there approach him over and over again popes, Jews, warriors, idiots, kings, queens, beggars, lepers, lions, dogs, and monkeys, each busy with its tiny mortal history and each tiny mortal history different from all the others. Even if each one were to try to live out that history exactly the same as the one before it can’t be done; variations and permutations will always come into it.

  Will there ever be an end to it all, is the end one of the possibilities? God doesn’t know. God created all the possibilities of variation and permutation but he cannot calculate them. How can this be? Is not God omniscient and omnipotent? Yes, and being so he was able to conceive and create possibilities beyond his understanding and beyond his capability to deal with as agent, as doer. If he were not able to do this he would be less than all-powerful. There is of course a paradox here: if God has not the power to understand everything he is not omniscient, and equally if he has not the power to create something beyond his understanding he is not omnipotent. It is my belief that God is of an artistic temperament and has therefore chosen to let his own work be beyond his understanding; I think this may well be why he has abandoned the He identity and has moved into the It where he is both subject and object, the doer and the done. God is no longer available to receive or transmit personal messages; he has been absorbed into process and toils ignorantly at the wheel with the rest of us.

  In this general process some potential actions are actualized, some not. In the channel of action where I moved with the thousands towards Jerusalem there moved also the unlived action of earlier popes who were unsuccessful in their attempts at what is now called a Crusade, Kreuzzug in German. The most direct translation of this word is Cross-pull, and indeed the Cross did exert a pull. Pope Sergius IV in 1011, Leo IX in 1053, Gregory VII in 1074 had tried but had not been able to set these thousands moving towards Jerusalem. Time after time had violent men sharpened the cross into a sword and made their silken vestments into banners; time after time had they spat out the wafer and the wine and shouted for real blood and real bodies. Again and again had this moment tried to come into being; blown out each time like a candle its light sprang up again whenever any flame approached the smoking wick.

  Looking at it all from where I am now, looking at faraway events from this great distance I see them as if jumbled together or dancing in a ring, unseparated by time: Crusades, plagues, massacres of Jews, dancing madness, peasant revolts—a dance of life and a dance of death. A dance of life that spins itself into death like gold being spun into straw. Life cannot tolerate itself, life wants to become death. Almost one might say that the function of life is to manifest death. Perhaps death is the gold, life the straw. Death is the natural expression of life. See the swift and fluent dance of maggots in a dead mouse, such a relief, as when a smoking log bursts into flame. And of course it was in my country that the Dancing Madness arose, following hot on the heels of the Black Death which followed on the Crusades.

  Because of what happened, because of what was done in the name of Christ, Jerusalem ceased to exist. What remained was not Jerusalem, it was an image fixed on a dead retina. An image retained on the dead retina of an idea. An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.

  I must be more precise: Jerusalem has not ceased to exist any more than bread has ceased to exist; the bread that has been eaten is gone, now there is more bread. The Jerusalem that was is gone, now there is more Jerusalem, other Jerusalem. One assumes that the world simply is and is and is but it isn’t, it is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again.

  With the ear of the mind I hear the army of the Franks on the march, I hear the massed clinking of their tread, I hear the horses snort and whinny, the rattling of leaves of iron. With the eye of the mind I see spokes of sunlight revolving through marching figures, I see the night gleam of armour, I see the Orontes River. As I recall life now I sometimes think of it as a sort of raisin-cake with vast distances between the raisins. As I send the idea of my being questing back it is from raisin to raisin that it makes its way, like the line connecting the dots that make the constellations of the Virgin and the Lion on the star charts. Or the route of the Franks across plains and mountains as they headed, with the harmless migrant storks high above them, for the water-crossing at the Bosporus. The line seeks the image, it smells out the image-making dots as a salmon returning from the sea smells out the river of its birth, swims upstream, spawns and dies. So with the line: it swims upstream, spawns a dot, and dies. The action of the spawning and the death make a dot; what was smelled was the place wanting the dot. Why did the place want a dot, how could a place want a dot, what was the need of the place, whose need? The line’s? The place’s? God’s?

  No. We assume always too much, we assume what cannot be assumed. We see dots so we connect them with lines and we claim to know what the lines and dots signify. There is a marching, there is a galloping, there is a hissing of arrows, a clashing of swords; or it may be that there is simply a stretching forth of the neck to the sword, there is a wrapping in the Torah scroll, there is a burning alive and we assume (always the assumptions) that these things are happening to different people. We assume that the Frank is distinct from the Jew who is distinct from the Turk but I cannot now think of it as being like that. It seems to me now that that busy line, th
at motion in the circuitry, did not leap from one dot to another: from the leap of its original impulse its being continued on its way to flash into Christian, Jew, Muslim, fortresses, rivers, dawns, full moons, battles, crows, the wind in the trees, anything you like. Mountains in the dawn; the shock of Thing-in-Itself, the enormity of Now. So it is that although my being is in one way or another continuous I cannot present to you Pilgermann as continuous, only flashes here and there.

  How there are vortices in the space-time! My mind keeps spinning down to Manzikert where in actuality I as Pilgermann never have been. It was one of the big dots, one of the juicier raisins. The dust! So much dust stirred up by those hooves, by those feet that trampled out, that trod the grapes of mortality into the wine of history for the Byzantine Empire. Wine! Wine and dust at the same time, at the same time the hot and dry and the cold and wet.

  No. Not Manzikert. I mean to tell of Antioch. Yes, where the walls undulated like a serpent on the mountains, where the four hundred towers waited for the line to flash into a dot. Four hundred towers!