Briefing for a Descent Into Hell Read online

  The earth hung in its weight, coloured and tinted here and there, for the most part with the blueish tint of water … the great oceans had become not more than a film of slippery substance covering part of the globe’s surface. Yes, all that drama of deep blue oceans that held their still unknown and secret life, and roaring storms and crashing restless waves, and tides dragged about by the moon had become a thin smear of slippery substance on a toughly textured globe of matter, and humanity and animal life and bird life and reptile life and insect life—all these were variations in a little crust on this globe. Motes, microbes. And yet—it was mostly here that the enclosing web of subtle light touched the earth globe. It was for the most part through the motes or mites of humanity. Which, viewed from the vantage point of the enclosing web of light (inner or outer as one chose to view it) was not at all a question of individual entities, as those entities saw themselves, but a question of Wholes, large and small, for groups and packs and troops and crowds made entities, made Wholes, functioning as Wholes. Bending closer in the web of understanding which was the nature of this enclosing bell of light I could see how the patterns of light, the colours, textures, pulses of faint or strong light, were not only similarity, but identity. All over the globe ran these pulses or lines, linking groups of individuals, which groups were not necessarily nations or countries—I saw at moments how a patch of mould or lichen glowed up in a burst of colour (or sound) and this was a civil war or a burst of national emotion, but more often, when an area of colour moved and concentrated, singing on its own note, it was composed of sections of nations or countries that had left or detached themselves from their parent groups and were at war with each other, and it was noticeable how a flare-up of a tiny area was so often the coming together of two fragments or pulses, which then became the same colour, the same sound. But the lines or pulses running and darting everywhere over this globe that were most consistent were not the flareups of war but those that were the different professions, so that legislators over the earth were not merely “on the same wavelength” they were the same, part of the same organ, or function, even if in warring or opposing countries, and so with judges and farmers and civil servants and soldiers and talkers and moneymen and writers—each of these categories were one, and from this vantage point it was amusing to see how passionate hatred, rivalries and competitions disappeared altogether, for the atoms of each of these categories were one, and the minute fragments that composed each separate pulse or beat of light (colour, sound) were one, so there was no such thing as judges, but only Judge, not soldiers, but Soldier, not artists, but Artist, no matter if they imagined themselves to be in violent disagreement. And on this map or plan that showed how myriads of ridiculously self-important identities were reduced to a few, was another, different, but, in some places, matching pattern, of a stronger, rarer light (or sound) that varied and pulsed and changed like the rest but connected direct, made a link and a bridge, a feeding channel, between the outer (or inner, according to how one looked at it) web of thought or feeling, the pulsating bubble of subtle surrounding colour, and the solid earthy watery globe of Man. Not only a link or a bridge merely, since this strand of humanity was open like so many vessels open to the rain, but part of the shimmering web of fluid joyful being, which was why the scurrying, hurrying, scrabbling, fighting, restless, hating, wanting little patches of humanity, the crusts of lichen or fungi growing here and there on the globe, the sea’s children, were, in spite of their distance from the outer shimmering web, nevertheless linked with it always, since at every moment the glittering tension of singing light flooded into them, into the earthy globe, beating on its own delicious pulse of joy and creation. The outer web of musical light created the inner earthy one and held it there in its dance of tension. And a scattering of people, a strand of them, a light webby tension of them everywhere over the globe, were the channels where the finer air went into the earth and fed it and kept it alive. And this delicate mesh imposed on (or stronger than) the other pulsing patterns had nothing to do with humanity’s ethics or codes, the pack’s morality, so that sometimes this higher, faster beat sang in the life of a soldier, sometimes a poet, sometimes a politician, and sometimes in a man who watched and mapped the stars, or another who watched and mapped the infinitesimal fluid pulses that make up the atom, which atom was as far from the larger atoms that make up that mould or growth, humanity, as humanity is from the stars. And the items of this connecting feeding mesh (like an electric grid of humanity) were one; just as there is no such thing as “soldiers” but only Soldier, and not “clerks” but Clerk, and Gardener, and Teacher. For since any category anywhere always beat on its own wavelength of sound/light, there could not be individuals in this nourishing web. Together they formed one beat in the great dance, one note in the song. Everywhere and on every level the little individuals made up wholes, struck little notes, made tones of colour. On every level: even myself and my friends whom the Crystal had absorbed into a whole, unimportant gnats, and my women and my children and everyone I had known in my life—even someone passed on a street corner and smiled at once—these struck a note, made a whole. And this was the truth that gave the utter insignificance of these motes their significance: in the great singing dance, everything linked and moved together. My mind was the facet of a mind, like cells in a honeycomb. Letting my mind lie dark there, quiescent, a mirror for light, I could feel or sense or recognise a pulse of individuality that I had known once as poor Charlie or Felicity or James or Thomas. Pulses of mind lay beating and absorbing beside my own little pulse, and together we were a whole, connecting within this wholeness with the myriad differing wholes that each of these people had formed in their lives, were continuously forming in every breath they took, and through this web, these webs, ran a finer beat, as water ran everywhere in the stone city through channels cut or built in rock by men who were able to grade the lift or the fall of the earth.

  But yet, while I observed this, felt this, understood at last, I was conscious always of that old, that very ancient weight, the cold of grief I had become aware of so early on after my absorption into this new area of being. There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punishing, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. There it was, close, always—I acknowledged it and in doing so moved out and on, since now everything was open to me and I floated deliciously, like a bubble in foam or as if lying at ease between a bird’s stretched wings.

  The corporal earth, like a round boulder, lay revolving erratically at about the distance it would take a shout or a hail to carry. It spun slowly about, wobbling badly. This spinning made a system of streaks, brown, blue and white, show on the surface of the globe, but I knew that these streaks were the seas and continents and icecaps in motion. The globe lay surrounded by its envelope of pulsing light, through which, however, I could see, as if I were peering through a thin opalescent cloud. I was seeing this earth spinning in a time that was not humanity’s time. Somewhere behind me, or to one side, was the vast white blaze of the sun, and in this steady blaze the earth spun. I lay steady, a minuscule planet of the sun, watching the earth in its spin. Day and night were not visible except as a soft flicker, and the violent rocking back and forth that makes our seasons, seemed like a green flush that passed in a wink, and a momentary thickening of the white streaks at North and South poles. At this speed all I could see was a whizzing around on its axis and a whirling around the sun—and there was the weight of cold grief present here too, the compulsion, but I did not now attend to this, for as I thought of the speed of the planet, it began to slow, and now it was turning no faster than needed for me to take in a pattern of earth and water before the pattern turned out of sight. Since I was now further away than before, when the chart of darting impulses had shown itself to me, I could examine in less detail but in more perspective how the illuminated envelope about the earth thrilled and glowed and changed and shivered in its dance, and I could see very clearly how this envel
ope which clung to the earth’s surface like a white summer fog on a warm morning matched and spoke to the areas beneath. A continent, I saw, gave off the same subtlety of shade—not absolutely uniform all over, of course not, but enough to be a recognisable basis to whatever other currents then ran and danced over it in their netting of sympathetic movement. It seemed as if there was something, but I could not see what, which made, let’s say, that mass of land which we call Russia, European Russia, give off a glow which did not change, and this shade was different from that shade which pervaded the mass we call Asia, and these were different, but steadily different, from other areas of the world. Each part of the globe’s surface of course had its own distinctive physical shade, that was its vegetation (or its lack of it), its plant setting for its animal life, but as distinctive, as clearly differentiated as jungle and desert and swamp and highland was the light that lay above in the aerial map that was its mirror and its sister—its governor. In this map of the currents of the mind and sympathies and feelings, countries—that is, nations—were marked out, and held what was necessary and appropriate to them, and it mattered very much whether a concept “nation” matched with the physical area beneath it, and where these were in discord then there was a discord of light and sound. I had an old thought, or rather, an old thought was transplanted upwards into the keener swifter air of this realm, that no matter what changes of government or what names were given to a nation’s system of organisation, there was always the same flavour or reality that remained in that place, that country, or area—and seen from where I was, where time was speeding so that one revolution of the globe was like a slow human breath, so that I was watching great movements of human events, but as I might, as a human, watch for an hour the change, growth, and sudden destruction of an anthill. I looked close in at little England, catching a quick glimpse as it turned past, and saw how it kept its own pulse, which was a colour, a condition, a note of sound—for all countries, every one, every crust of mould, or part of humanity, were held in laws that they could not change or upset. They were manipulated from above (or below) by physical forces that they did not even as yet suspect—or that they did not suspect at this moment of time because it was part of this little organism’s condition to discover and forget and discover and forget—and this was a time when they had forgotten and were about again to discover. But their terrible bondage, the chains of necessity that grasped them—it was this thought that came in again, bringing the dreadful breath of cold, of grief.

  As I thought that I would like to see the earth speed up a little, but not as fast as before, when a year’s turn around the sun seemed like the spin of a coin, it did speed up—and now I saw other patterns of light, or colour, deepen and fade and marry and merge and move, and as I thought that all these patterns were no more than a composite of the slower individual pulses and currents I had seen earlier, and that they were making up the glowing coloured mist that was the envelope of the globe, it came into my mind that the glowing envelope of the globe seemed to be set, or held, by something else, just as it, in its place, held the rhythms of the earth, our earth. My mind made another outwards-going, outswelling, towards comprehension, and now I saw how lines and currents of force and sympathy and antagonism danced in a web that was the system of planets around the sun, so much a part of the sun that its glow of substance, lying all about it in space, held the planets as intimately as if these planets were merely crystallizations or hardening of its vapourous stuff, moments of density in the solar wind. And this web was an iron, a frightful necessity, imposing its design.

  Now I watched, as the earth turned fast, but still so that I could see the change and growth and dying away of patterns, how as the planets moved and meshed and altered and came closer to each other and went away again, exerting a pressure of forces on each other that bound them all, on the earth the little crusts of matter that were men, that were humanity, changed and moved. Just as the waters, the oceans (a little film of fluid matter on the big globe’s surface) moved and swung under the compulsion of the sun and the moon, so did the life of man, oscillating in its web of necessity, in its place in the life of the planets, a minute crust on the surface of a thickening and becoming visible of the Sun’s breath that was called Earth. Humanity was a pulse in the life of the Sun, which lay burning there in a vast white explosion of varying kinds of light, or sound, some stronger and thicker, some tenuous, but at all forces and strengths, which fluid lapped out into space holding all these crumbs and drops and little flames in a dance—and the force that held them there, circling and whirling in their dance, was the Sun, the energy of the Sun, and that was the controlling governor of them all, beside whose strength, all the subsidiary laws and necessities were nothing. The ground and soul and heart and centre of this little solar system was the light and pulse and song of the Sun, the Sun was King. But although this central strength, this majestic core of our web, was an essence to the whole system, further out and away from the centre, where poor dark Pluto moved, perhaps it might be that the tug and pull and pressure of the planets seemed more immediate; perhaps out there, or further, the knowledge that the Sun is still the deep low organ note that underlies all being is forgotten—forgotten more even than on earth, spinning there so crooked and sorrowful and calamitous with its weight of cold necessity so close. And perhaps, or so I thought as I saw the dance of the sun and its attendants, Mercury the Sun’s closest associate was the only one which could maintain steadily and always the consciousness of the sun’s underlying song, its need, its intention, Mercury whose name was, also, Thoth, and Enoch, Buddha, Idris, and Hermes, and many other styles or titles in the earth’s histories, Mercury the Messenger, the carrier of news, or information from the Sun, the disseminator of laws from God’s singing centre.

  Yes, but farther out, on the third crookedly spinning planet, it is harder to keep that knowledge, the sanity and simplicity of the great Sun, and indeed poor Earth is far from grace, and so it was easy to see, for at that tempo of spin that enabled me to watch clearly the marrying of events on earth and in the rest of its fellow planets, I watched how wars and famines, and earthquakes and disasters, floods and terrors, epidemics and plagues of insects and rats and flying things came and went according to the pressures from the combinations of the planets and the sun—and the moon. For a swarm of locusts, a spreading of viruses, like the life of humanity, is governed elsewhere. The life of man, that little crust of matter, which was not even visible until one swooped down close as a bird might sweep in and out for a quick survey of a glittering shoal of fish that puckered a wave’s broad flank, that pulse’s intensity and size and health was set by Mercury and Venus, Mars and Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto, and their movements, and the Centre of light that fed them all. Man, that flicker of life, diminished in numbers and multiplied, was peace-loving or murderous—in bondage. For when a war flared up involving half the earth masses of the globe, or when the earth’s population doubled in a handful of years and for the first time in known history, or when in every place that men lived they rioted and fought and scuffled and screamed and killed and wept against their fate, it was because the balance of the planets had shifted, or a comet came too close—or the moon spoke, voicing the cold, the compulsion; and now, bending in as close as I dared to watch, I saw how the earth and its moon cycled and circled and how both earth and water pulsed and swelled and vibrated on Earth, as matter swelled and moved and vibrated on the Moon, on the cold moon, on the cold dead moon, the warm Earth’s cold sister, the stepchild, the terrible moon who sucks and leeches and clutches on to the warm earth that was alive, for the moon wanted to live, the moon would live, the moon was like a poor sad still-born babe, but the baby would live, it fought to live, as eggs drag lime from hen’s bones, and foetuses pull life from their mothers, the moon sucked and leeched and was like a dragging magnet of need that was the earth’s first metronome in the dance of the planets, for it was nearest, it was the deprived and half-starved twin, th
e earth’s other self, the Necessity.

  Here was the frightful cold weight of sorrow that had lain on the edge of my mind since I had first been absorbed into the Crystal—the knowledge of the moon and its need. So close was the moon, so much part of earth, that it was earth—for seen even from that short distance they looked like a pair of brothers always in movement about each other. The moon was so very close, the always present force that is easiest overlooked when the tiny human mind looks for reasons and answers. Much easier to look out—right out, beyond even the furthest orbits of Uranus and Pluto, out to Riga, even to that other mirror, far Andromeda and beyond that to …