Tales and Imaginings, page 1
Tim Robinson
TALES AND IMAGININGS
THE LILLIPUT PRESS
DUBLIN
Contents
Title Page
Preface
The Festival of Creation
So and Springrice
The River
The Ephemeron
Approaching the Glacier
Telling the Tale
Secret Meeting
Two Reminiscences of London 1970
Terminal Deity
The Heavens Fall
The Objective Reality of Purgatory
On the Edge
Visits to the Black Cliff
The Absence
Orion the Hunter
A Crystallography
Olwen Fouéré in The Bull’s Wall
Realism With a Human Face
If Undelivered Please Return
Three Notes on the Elgin Marbles
Notes
Copyright
Preface
Throughout most of my life, at intervals and very slowly, I have written pieces of fiction. Now that they have bulked up enough to be called a collection, it is a curious experience for me to read through them. Do I recognize their authors? I seem to enter a room of mirrors situated at various distances into the past. This young man aglow with the Orient, this dweller in European cities subject to metaphysical aftershocks, this Atlantic hermit with his mate, this word-logged pet-loving contemplative – none is exactly me, but I can see that each to a degree is responsible for me. And so I bear a reciprocal responsibility and want to take their shortcomings on my shoulders. Hence the decision to publish their works. Most of them are I-pieces, and their narrators are another source of anxiety, for I cannot totally disown them either, despite deploring their nihilistic tendencies. But because in the past I have published so much factual, celebratory, useful writing, I hope to be excused for giving rein to dark themes and dubious moods in some of these tales and imaginings – knowing, however, that once they leave my desk they are essentially on their own.
TIM ROBINSON
Roundstone, June 2002
The Festival of Creation
I
Persimmon despite his bulk went through the crowd like a blackbird through branches. Struggling in the confusion caused by his passage, I couldn’t catch his bellowed comments on the sights that flashed forth, evoked and dismissed by his potent gestures. I would have escaped from my self-appointed guide had he not already made himself indispensable by rushing me into this tangled quarter of the city. At one point an old woman curled up in a basket snapped at my ankle, and I lost sight of him; then the maze of frayed and patched dwellings parted to reveal him, momentarily static, at the foot of a great staircase leading up to the temples which hung over us like rosy evening clouds. ‘Young man‚’ he said, mopping his brow with his newspaper, ‘time is short; let us imagine we are at the top. The balustrade as you see is a huge snake that descends the hill in seven undulations, and shades us here with its seven heads. Up there, a last coil of its tail encircles a little viewing-platform, from which I now lean out so that my stomach broods over the city like a thundercloud, and by running my fingernail along the principal thoroughfares I elucidate what lies before your bewildered eyes.’
‘Wait‚’ I cried, ‘one fact please, just as an example. Back there we passed a man sitting by a coil of rope smouldering away at one end; why was that?’
Persimmon’s gaze rested heavily on me for a moment, and then was lifted towards the pinnacles above. ‘In comparison with my rich conception of this city, some fragments of which I may communicate during this morning, such queries dwindle into triviality; spare me them.’ He upended an empty oil-drum before me, and achieved an oratorical balance upon it. ‘Grasp the ground-plan first,’ he cried, turning himself into a declamatory, rotating signpost. ‘We are looking down upon a holy-mountain mandala-city, a simple and symmetrical structure of square within square extending both inwards and outwards beyond the limits of vision. It answers our enquiring eyes with a universal statement, qualified by the idiosyncrasies of millions, as if the Absolute had its portrait done in fingerprints.’ A small audience of naked children had gathered, and when Persimmon fell, very slowly and without disarticulating his syntax for a moment, they received his declining trunk into their arms, gathered up his scattered small change, and restored it to him with grave politeness. ‘The principal product of this propitious clime,’ he continued, supporting himself on half-a-dozen small springy bodies, ‘is symbolism, the consumption of which is strictly reserved for tourists.’
Later, as we stood on a mud-bank to watch the river changing its course millimetre by millimetre, we breathed more slowly; I told Persimmon about my missionary great-aunt, who had left her small savings to me on condition I spent it in coming here to see a festival commemorating the Creation, which had impressed her long ago.
‘And how long are you staying?’
‘Just five days; that’s another condition of the will.’
‘A lady of extraordinary wisdom!’ judged Persimmon, already in motion again, treading heavily from boat to boat across the crowded river. ‘The conditions of her will are the conditions of your vision; they are the magnifying glass through which, in your five days, you will discover a lifetime.’ His rhetoric bobbed and gleamed before me as I lurched after him, pushing through lines of washing, apologizing to the diminutive families that stared up at me from the bottom of each boat like the contents of trampled nests. ‘Five days! That calls for the concision of a novella; allow me to state its theme without preliminaries. The unique attribute of this city is to wear in the present the aspect of a memory; fragmentary, contingent, a temporal discontinuum of moments like pearls unthreaded by cause or purpose! Is this so? At first, certainly; and for reasons your commonsense will furnish. The daily life of the natives appears to you full of mysteries. Do not enquire; mysteries are hard to come by nowadays. Again, for you things lack names; and I will not provide them. One chooses between remembering an object or its name. I recommend that you preserve the pre-adamite clarity of your senses. The landscape of a memory, then; grasp that, and know where you are.’ Reaching the opposite bank, Persimmon stopped suddenly, the mud immediately closing over his shoes; he turned his face back to where I rocked on the brim of the last boat, and with a pedagogical look he demanded, ‘Now, what were your very first impressions, say at the airport?’
‘The lizards on the ceiling‚’ I said, momentarily suspended, and thinking fast, ‘and the spoons in the coffeebar each holding a minute reflection of the big electric fan overhead.’
‘Correct!’ cried Persimmon, uprooting himself with a great sucking convulsion, and wafting me ashore with a wave of his arm. ‘Quite correct! The reversal of gravity, in fact, as one might expect, everywhere being the antipodes of somewhere. In that case I will show you around; this evening we will visit the Happy World, which is a dance-hall, a fairground, a what-you-will, and where you may well meet a nice girl. After that what we old China hands call the opium parlour would be an instructive visit.’ He continued to plan as we clambered up crisscross timbers onto the busy road, and squeezed along between slow columns of lorries piled with some blackish rotting substance. He had to go sideways to allow his gestures the space they demanded; he coughed and wiped his eyes in the smoky crevices of the traffic, but his voice carried well over its roar. ‘I cannot mediate the surrounding jungle for you; that you must experience for yourself. However, I will arrange a trip for you to a friend of mine, a rubber-planter up in the hills near the temple ruins, which you can visit en route. Where are you staying, by the way?’
‘At the YMCA. It’s very cheap if you share a room.’
‘Then no doubt you have met young Midgley, who has been staying there for some months.’
‘In fact he’s my room-mate.’
Persimmon looked at me, and then through me down suddenly-opening vistas of speculation. ‘And how do you get on with that remarkable being?’
I hesitated; ‘Is he a friend of yours?’
‘You may speak evil of him to me‚’ answered Persimmon, sitting on the edge of an immense gutter in the middle of the road, and swinging his muddy shoes and socks in the swift clear water. The traffic groaned and rattled on either side of us.
‘Well, of course I only met him last night, when I was tired after the flight, but he’s not exactly the ideal room-mate …’
Persimmon interrupted: ‘He showed you his own method of erecting a mosquito-net, and left you shut in with a mosquito all night. From six in the morning until two in the morning, going the long way round the day, he hops like a molecule!’ – Persimmon combined a demonstration with capering in the sun to dry his footwear – ‘When you wake in the morning, the room is full of the dials of his diabolical engines; a hundred suns dazzle you; you rub your eyes, wondering which is Midgley’s expressionless face with its gloomy moustache; but he is under your bed taking by telepathy your temperatures oral and rectal; he computes the difference, divides by your intake, and in a trice he is in possession of the length of your gut! You ask me his history; we will lean against the shaded wall of this police station, the only building in this neighbourhood strong enough to support me, and I will gratify your curiosity. The person we speak of came out to a big firm here as an expert in time and motion; he soon demonstrated that the local supply of those commodities immeasurably exceeds the demand, and they sacked him forthwith. He then devoted himself to the automation of his own life story, bu
‘What is your business?’ I enquired, as Persimmon began to wave and shout in the direction of a group of rickshaw boys dozing in their vehicles on the other side of the road.
‘Genuine relics of fake holy men, fake fountain-pens of genuine makes. Imports and exports, you might say; also transistor radios, for which the girls here have neat fingers. I’m a busy man, always sprinting over the roofs of cars in the traffic jams, even jumping from housetop to housetop in areas where I am unlikely to be recognized. Now, as you see, all these rickshaw boys have slipped off down various alleys at the sight of me, so I will walk with you as far as your YMCA, which is just round the corner, and then I must take wing. As we go, I will summarize your morning’s findings. In a word, the very structure of your experiences renders them time-resistant; when you come to write them up you will not have to wait like the early-to-bed Parisian memoirist for some flimsy secondary quality to recall them all. An observer less analytical than you might have said, the structure of a dream – and would have been mistaken. One person or thing does not become another, as seems unremarkable, natural even, in a dream. No, here as elsewhere ‘each thing is what it is‚ and not another thing’. To the natives of course it is just another city, another Bangkok, Penang, Malacca. I have been here thirty years, and so to me too its main aspect is that of a traffic problem. There is your YMCA; lunch awaits you, and an afternoon nap. I will collect you at sundown tonight. You have no time to thank me, as I am already running for that tram. Farewell!’
*
The clinging rosy wraps of a daylight drowse began to tatter under the intrusive thought-processes of Midgley’s number-machines; through a wispy hole his angular image was admitted into the reluctant depths of my sun-drenched darkness. A little bubble of awakeness formed around this irritant particle; the pearly sphere swelled until it enclosed me.
Mellow sunlight winked around the edges of the drawn curtains. Midgley was explaining one of his instruments. I sat up and shook my head; the morning came back like a flock of bright birds looking to be fed. I decided to speak rather than listen.
‘An acquaintance of yours rescued me from a band of robbers today.’
Midgley opened a notebook and asked, pencil poised, ‘What was his name?’ When I answered ‘Persimmon’, he sighed, and shut his notebook. Then he opened it again: ‘And the robbers?’
‘A crowd of kids swarming round me; naturally I don’t know their names. They were waving newspapers in my face, and under the newspapers their hands were diving into my pockets. Then this stout gentleman appeared and beat them off with the airmail Times. He’s going to show me round a bit.’
Midgley looked solemn. ‘Although Persimmon is a very good friend of mine, I should warn you that he is methodologically unsound.’
‘Then I’d better not mention him in my letters home. What form does this unsoundness take?’
A little pool of sunshine came into being on Midgley’s apparatus. He poked at it with his finger; it trembled and fled.
‘Let me give you an example. When I first came here he tried to persuade me he could predict all my actions. I naturally set out to disprove his claim by doing unexpected things, but he would never admit that they were unexpected. I’m a very methodical person, and I found it very difficult to think of new things to do, or find time to do them in. I decided to do one peculiar thing every day. I kept it up for a month; that’s how I lost my job. Then Persimmon told me he had only done it to exercise my imagination. I don’t need imagination, as it happens; this device I’ve been working on will make imagination obsolete. I only need to buy a battery for it, and it’s ready for testing. However, I won’t trouble you with an explanation of it, because you wouldn’t take it seriously.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ An explanation seemed inevitable. In the meantime I decided to get up.
‘Because you’ve been talking to Persimmon. He tells such lies about my work that nobody takes it seriously; I don’t know why he does it, because my experimental work complements his intellectual investigations perfectly. This device is an example; it’s based on an idea he threw out, and which he encouraged me to develop to the point of applicability. But his way seems to be to turn the unbelievable into reality, and make the reality appear so fantastic that nobody believes it.’
As I pulled on my trousers I looked at the little pyramid of metal and glass; four legs, three switches, two dials, and a flexible tube sprouting from the top. I tried to wash my slight irritability away in a basin of tepid water. ‘Please tell me what it is‚’ I said, lying down on the bed again.
‘I have already told you; you must have been asleep. It’s a device for recording dream-images. I expect that sounds a little far-fetched to you.’
‘No, on the contrary, I find the idea reassuringly unoriginal. What’s the little tube on top for?’
‘That is to be inserted into the sleeper’s ear.’
‘Really? Now if I take that seriously, I am led to ask if you couldn’t plug another tube into the other ear, and so get a stereoscopic picture?’
Midgley turned away and stood peering out through the gap between the curtains for a moment. Then he started again: ‘The suggestion shows your complete misapprehension of the principles involved. Let me begin at the beginning.’
‘No, wait, a more profound question occurs to me. Surely anyone sleeping with that thing plugged in his ear is going to have rather odd dreams?’
At this, Midgley became incomprehensible to the layman; his squeezed fingers and closed eyes indicated the tiny germ of doubt with which the experimenter unavoidably infects the experiment, the grain of subjectivity on which the pearl of knowledge forms itself. His brow bowed to Heisenberg, who, it appeared, if he knew where he was, didn’t know how fast he was going, and vice versa. Above, Einstein revolved on a disc in space, tracing the trajectory of a moonbeam. Not all Midgley’s million meters could masticate to exactitude the stubborn quantum-nut; so much at least condensed for me from the fog of mathematics he raised around us. By the time it had cleared, my mind had turned to other things. ‘What time is it, and what time is sundown?’ These questions were within the scope of Midgley’s instruments; the difference between the two answers was a mere five minutes. When I told him that Persimmon was taking me to the Happy World and then to an opium den, Midgley began to fill his pockets from drawers and trays of handily-sized implements. ‘I’ll accompany you to the Happy World, but not the opium house; it’s full of smoke, and I hate blurred things. The old Chinaman who runs it is very persuasive, too; he has a First in mathematics. I should be careful if I were you.’
I drew the curtains. The day’s sunshine had baked the city into a fragrant golden cake. ‘Hurry up then, if you’re coming; my hair is brushed, my tie is straightened, the world like a roulette ball is about to plop into one of various nights; adventure sings in the streets. Let’s go!’
‘You’re already talking like Persimmon,’ Midgely sighed, and as we rattled down the stairs he offered advice: ‘Don’t be led astray by your enthusiasm for the oriental. Preserve the objective viewpoint always.’
‘The objective viewpoint?’ I said. ‘I’ll try it!’
II
Down a capillary vesicle of a phosphorescent leaf three microbes hurry. From a mile above, Persimmon, Midgley and another, each in his own way, watch themselves pursue dwindling ramifications of the street-plan; Persimmon as final cause of all he surveys, Midgley plotting his world-line with due regard to relativities special and general, the other, through wide eyes and categories indeterminate as yet. There they are, temporarily baulked where the street ends abruptly at the foot of a cliff. The leader of the pack is casting about to find the little archway leading to a flight of steps up through the darkening foliage. On closer examination, Midgley, the rearmost of the three, is a miracle of conscious coordination, his muscles and tendons answering to the readings of his visual cortex with a scarcely perceptible time-lag. It appears he wishes to communicate with his companions; his mouth opens; ‘Wait, I must wind up my pedometer!’ Persimmon fills the arch, peering up the stairway Why does he pause? The wind is rising, the shadowy tangles of creeper that mask the cliff-face shift and rattle. The stairway with its wattle roof forms a little tunnel through limply flapping leaves, leading up and round a dark shoulder of rock. Against each roof-post lies a bundle, sprouting a hand like a sickly flower. Persimmon shouts ‘Have your small change ready!’ and sets off at a great pace, dealing out a coin to every second beggar. The second member of the party, myself a long time ago, follows, doing the same for those Persimmon passes over.
