Possession

by A.S. Byatt

may we not, in some circumscribed way—briefly, perhaps, probably—though it is Love’s Nature to know itself eternal—and in confined spaces too—may we not steal some—I almost wrote small, but it will never be that—some great happiness? We must come to grief and regret anyway—and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities. All of which casuistry is only to say, my very dear, come back to the Park, let me touch your hand again, let us walk in our decorous storm together.

What a page of prose to lie like some bomb in the Poste Restante. I am become, in the last two days, a restless Anarchist. I shall wait under the trees—from day to day, at your time—and look out for a woman like a steady upright flame and a grey hound poured along the ground like smoke—

Were you happy I came? Were we godlike as you promised? Two earnest pacers, pointing diligent toes in the dust.

I have a wife, and I love her. Not as I love you. Now, I have sat for half-an-hour, having written those bleak little sentences, and quite unable to go on. There are good reasons—I cannot discuss them, but they are good, if not absolutely adequately good—why my love for you need not hurt her. I know this must sound bald and lame. It must, most probably, be what many men, philandering men, have said before me—I do not know—I am inexperienced in these matters and never thought to find myself writing such a letter. I find I can say no more, only aver that I believe what I have said to be true and hope that I shall not lose you by this necessary uncouthness.

I have now a new word in my vocabulary, much hated, to which I am enslaved—it goes “And if—” “And if—” And if we had time and space to be together—as we have allowed ourselves to wish to be—then we would be free together—whereas now—caged?

I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest—“I love you for yourself alone”—“I love you essentially”—and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by “you essentially”—lips hands and eyes. But you must know—we do know—that it is not so—dearest, I love your soul and with that your poetry—the grammar and stopping and hurrying syntax of your quick thought—quite as much essentially you as Cleopatra’s hopping was essentially hers to delight Antony—more essentially, in that while all lips hands and eyes resemble each other somewhat (though yours are enchanting and also magnetic)—your thought clothed with your words is uniquely you, came with you, would vanish if you vanished—

These were strange And yet were forms of life, as I was too (With a soul superadded, understood) And kin to me, or so I thought, when young. For all seemed fashioned from the self-same stuff, Mythic gold yolk and glassy albumen Of ancient Egypt’s fabled Mundane Egg, Laid in the Void by sable-plumaged Night. From which sprang Eros, all in feathered light Who fecundated Chaos, wherein formed Germens of all that lives and moves on Earth. The Orphic fables in their riddling wit Pointed us there, perhaps, towards a truth.

That glass of water you hold to my lips, Had I my lenses, would reveal to us Not limpid clarity as we suppose— Pure water—but a seething, striving horde Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe. The optic lens is like a slicing sword. It multiplies the world, or it divides— We see the many in the one, as here, We see the segments of what once seemed smooth, Rough pits and craters on a lady’s skin, Or fur and scales along her gleaming hair.

The more the Many were revealed to me The more I pressed my hunt to find the One— Prima Materia, Nature’s shifting shape Still constant in her metamorphoses. I found her Law in the successive Forms Of ant and butterfly, beetle and bee. I first discerned the pattern of the growth From egg to simple grub, from grub encased, Shrinking in part, in other putting forth New organs in its sleep, until it stir, Split and disgorge the tattered silk, which fast Trembles and stiffens and then takes the air Unfurled in splendour, tawny, sapphire blue, Eyed like the peacock, tiger-barred, or marked Between its wings with dark death’s eyeless head.

Strange narrow-chested sheep bound away, scattering stones, and swaying their woolly integument in the air like banks of weed in the sea-water—heavy and slow—They stare from crags—I was about to write inhumanly—but that goes without saying—they have a look almost daemonic and inimical, for domesticated animals. You would be interested by their eyes—yellow with a black bar of a pupil—horizontal, not vertical—which gives them their odd look.

Even the air is somehow both ancient and fresh—fresh with salt and heather and a kind of absolute biting cleanness, resembling the taste of the water here, which has bubbled deliciously from perforated limestone, and is more surprising than wine—after

It is odd, when I think of it, that in chess the female may make the large runs and cross freely in all ways—in life it is much otherwise.

Randolph had reached what we crudely call a “mid-life crisis,” as had his century. He, the great psychologist, the great poetic student of individual lives and identities, saw that before him was nothing but decline and decay, that his individual being would not be extended by progeny, that men burst like bubbles. He turned away, like many, from individual sympathies with dying or dead men to universal sympathies with Life, Nature and the Universe. It was a kind of Romanticism reborn—gemmated, so to speak, from the old stock of Romanticism—but intertwined with the new mechanistic analysis and the new optimism not about the individual soul, but about the eternal divine harmony of the universe.

Maud decided she intuited something terrible about Cropper’s imagination from all this. He had a peculiarly vicious version of reverse hagiography: the desire to cut his subject down to size. She indulged herself in a pleasant thought about the general ambiguity of the word “subject” in this connection. Was Ash subject to Cropper’s research methods and laws of thought? Whose subjectivity was being studied? Who was the subject of the sentences of the text, and how did Cropper and Ash fit into Lacan’s perception that the grammatical subject of a statement differs from the subject, the “I,” who is the object discussed by that statement?

Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist.

“In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight—whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose—to imagine—he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely—but not in the large plan—”

There are two constituent brooklets of the Mirk Esk, the Eller Beck and the Wheeldale Beck, which have their juncture at a place called Beck Holes—and along these Becks are many fine fosses—the Thomasine Foss, Water Ark and Walk Mill Fosses—and then the Nelly Ayre Foss and Malyan’s Spout—a particularly impressive hundred-foot fall into the sylvan ravine.

a man might think that here, in this rough north was, if not Paradise, the original earth—rocks, stones, trees, air, water—all so solid and immutable, apparently—and yet shifting and flowing and fleeting in the race of light and the driving cloaks of shadow, that alternately reveal and conceal, illuminate and smudge its contours.

Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone’s primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place.

They walked down through flowering lanes. The high hedges were thick with dog-roses, mostly a clear pink, sometimes white, with yellow-gold centres dusty with yellow pollen. These roses were intricately and thickly entwined with rampant wild honeysuckle, trailing and weaving creamy flowers among the pink and gold. Neither of them had ever seen or smelled such extravagance of wildflowers in so small a space. The warm air brought the smell of the flowers in great gusts and lingering intense canopies. Both had expected one or two flowers at most, late modern survivors of thickets seen by Shakespeare or painted by Morris. But here was abundance, here was growth, here were banks of gleaming scented life.

Fergus had a long patch of lecturing me on Penisneid. He’s one of those men who argue by increments of noise—so that as you open your mouth he says another, cleverer, louder thing. He used to quote Freud at me at six in the morning. Analysis Terminable and Interminable. He got up very early. He used to prance around the flat—with nothing on—quoting Freud saying that ‘at no point in one’s analytic work does one suffer more from a suspicion that one has been preaching to the winds than when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis’—I

He was a poet greedy for information, for facts, for details. Nothing was too trivial to interest him; nothing was inconsiderable; he would, if he could, have mapped every ripple on a mudflat and its evidence of the invisible workings of wind and tide. So now his love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information. He learned her. He studied the pale loops of hair on her temples. Their sleek silver-gold seemed to him to have in it a tinge, a hint of greenness, not the copper-green of decay, but a pale sap-green of vegetable life, streaked into the hair like the silvery bark of young trees, or green shadows in green tresses of young hay. And her eyes were green, glass-green, malachite green, the cloudy green of seawater perturbed and carrying a weight of sand. The lashes over them silver, but thick enough to be visibly present. The face not kind. There was no kindness in the face. It was cut clean but not fine—strong-boned rather, so that temples and slanting cheeks were pronounced and solid-shadowed, the shadows bluish, which in imagination he always touched with green too, but it was not so. If he loved the face, which was not kind, it was because it was clear and quick and sharp.

She watched him as a bird watches, the sort that is chained to a stand, some bright-plumed creature of tropical forests, some gold-eyed hawk from northern crags, wearing its jesses with what dignity it could muster, enduring man’s presence with a still-savage hauteur, ruffling its feathers from time to time, to show both that it tended itself with respect, and that it was not quite comfortable. So she pushed back the wrists of her sleeves, so she held herself in her chair. He would change all that. He could change all that, he was tolerably certain. He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings.

“I have an idea for a poem about necessity. As you said in the train. So seldom in a life do we feel that what we do is necessary in that sense—gripped by necessity—I suppose death must be like that. If it is given to us to know its approach, we must know we are now complete—do you see, my dear—without further awkward choices, or the possibility of lazy denial. Like balls rolling down a smooth slope.” “With no possibility of return. Or like armies advancing, which could in fact turn back, but cannot believe it, have wrought themselves to a pitch of singleness of purpose—” “You may turn back at any point, if—” “I have said. I cannot.”

This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.” “Poetic, but not comfortable doctrine.” “You know, as I know, that good poetry is not comfortable, however. Let me hold you, this is our night, and only the first, and therefore the nearest infinite.”

It is you who are the life of things. You stand there and draw them into you. You turn your gaze on the dull and the insipid to make them shine. And ask them to stay, and they will not, so you find their vanishing of equal interest. I love that in you. Also I fear it. I need quiet and nothingness. I tell myself I should fade and glimmer if long in your hot light.”

They had come across summer meadows and down narrow lanes between tall hedges thick with dog-roses, intricately entwined with creamy honeysuckle, a tapestry from Paradise Garden, she said, and smelling so airily sweet, it put you in mind of Swedenborg’s courts of heaven where the flowers had a language, and colours and scents were correspondent forms of speech.

The stone was a peculiar gunmetal slate, striated and flaking, dull with no sheen, except where water dripped and seeped from above, bringing with it ruddy traces of earth. The layers of grey were full of the regularly rippled rounds of the colonies of ammonites that lay coiled in its substance, stony forms of life, living forms in stone.

he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference.

As milky roses at the end of day In some deserted bower seem still alight With their own luminous pallor, so she cast A softened brightness and a pearly light On that wild place, in which she sate and sang. She wore a shift of whitest silk, that stirred With her song’s breathing, and a girdle green As emerald or wettest meadow-grass. Her blue-veined feet played in the watery space Slant in its prism-vision like white fish Darting together. When she stretched them out The water made her silver anklet-chains Glancing with diamond-drops and lucid pearls Which shone as bright as those about her neck Carelessly cast, a priceless brilliant rope Of sapphire, emerald, and opaline.

Her living hair was brighter than chill gold With shoots of brightness running down its mass And straying out to lighten the dun air Like phosphorescent sparks off a pale sea, And while she sang, she combed it with a comb Wrought curiously of gold and ebony, Seeming to plait each celandine-bright tress With the spring’s sound, the song’s sound and the sound Of its own living whisper, warm and light So that he longed to touch it, longed to stretch If but a finger out across the space That stood between his blood-stained, stiffened self And all this swaying supple brilliance, Save that her face forbade.

It was a face Queenly and calm, a carved face and strong Nor curious, nor kindly, nor aloof, But self-contained and singing to itself. And as he met her eyes, she ceased her song And made a silence, and it seemed to him That in this silence all the murmuring ceased Of leaves and water, and they two were there, And all they did was look, no question, No answer, neither frown nor smile, no move Of lip or eye or brow or eyelid pale But all one long look which consumed his soul Into desire beyond the reach of hope Beyond the touch of doubt or of despair, So that he was one thing, and all he was, The fears, the contradictions and the pains, The reveller’s pleasures and the sick man’s whims, All gone, forever gone, all burned away Under the steady and essential gaze Of this pale Creature in this quiet space.

nothing was in fact dull in itself, nothing was without its own proper interest. Look, she said, at your own rainy orchard, your own terrible coastline, with the eyes of a stranger, with my eyes, and you will see that they are full of magic and sad but of beautifully various colour. Consider the old pots and the simple strong platters in your kitchen with the eyes of a new Ver Meer come to make harmony of them with a little sunlight and shade. A writer cannot do this, but consider what a writer can do—always supposing the craft is sufficient.

I am now full of a kind of aesthetic love of my countrymen and of our wind. I would go on, if I were a poet, to write the poem of its keening. Or if I were a novelist I could go on to say that in sober truth its monotonous singing can drive you half mad for silence, in the long winter days, like a man thirsting in a desert. The psalms sing with praise of the cool shelter of rocks in the hot sun. We here are athirst for a drop or two of dry, bright silence.)

I have much to learn about the organisation of my discourse. I wanted, when I was writing about my father’s bed, both to describe my mother’s bed, which followed on, and to construct a disquisition or digression on box-beds and the borderland between fact and fancy which also followed on. I have not been wholly successful—there are awkward gaps and hops in the sequence, like too-great holes in the drystone wall. But something is done, and how interesting it all is, seen as craftwork which can be bettered, or remade, or scrapped as an apprentice piece.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

A figure of speech may get hold of your imagination even when its appositeness is worn away.

I think uncertainty is maybe more painful than any other emotion, it both drives one on and disappoints and paralyses, so that we went on in a mounting kind of suffocation and bursting.

Dust falls from us daily as we walk, dust of us, lives a little in the air and is Trodden—we sweep away—Parts of Ourselves—and shall all these—jots and omicra—cohaere? O we die daily—and there—is it all reckoned and gathered, husks restored to gloss and bloom?

A positive mind entering a circle or seance for the investigation of spiritualism is like introducing a ray of light into the dark compartment of the photographer when not wanted; or like taking up a seed from under the ground to see if it be growing; or like any other violent intervention in the processes of nature.

Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, which would, of course, being a good postmodernist principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the “free,” but structuring, but controlling, but driving, to some—to what?—end.

One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud’s bed, where they had been sharing a glass of Calvados. He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Roland stared at sleek Val, who had the shine of really expensive and well-made clothes, and more important and unmistakable, the glistening self-pleasure of sexual happiness. She had had her hair done in a new way—short, soft, shaped, rising when she tossed her head and settling back to perfection. She was all muted violets and shot-silk dove-colours, all balanced and pretty, stockings, high shoes, padded shoulders, painted mouth. He said, instinctively, “You look happy, Val.”

“What would I do without you, my dear? Here we are at the end, close together. You are a great comfort. We have been happy.” “We have been happy,” she would say, and it was so. They were happy even then, in the way they had always been happy, sitting close, saying little, looking at the same things, together.

Most of what they shared, after all, after all was done, was silence.

When did he begin to know that however gentle he was, however patient, it was no good, it would never be any good? She did not like to remember his face in those days, but did, for truthfulness, the puzzled brow, the questioning tender look, the largeness of it, convicted of its brutality, rejected in its closeness. The eagerness, the terrible love, with which she had made it up to him, his abstinence, making him a thousand small comforts, cakes and tidbits. She became his slave. Quivering at every word. He had accepted her love. She had loved him for it. He had loved her.

He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, an unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes. There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind’s eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind’s ear hears them sing and sing. Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.