My Time in Space (14 page)

We heard a peregrine falcon’s exultant shouting to its young far up on those cliffs as we turned away and began to follow the golden-brown stream in its tumbling descent. It was still only the middle of the afternoon when we reached the road and houses. A few people were leaning on their cars outside the school waiting for the children to come out; a man recognized John’s face from a recent TV programme, and we stopped to talk. John told them where we had been. ‘But we didn’t go beyond the rowan tree,’ he said, ‘and do you know why?’ – in the booming rhetorical mode he sometimes adopts to cover a shyness – ‘Because it’s holy ground!’ The man inspected him for a moment, and then in a voice that gave no clue as to the presence or absence of irony, replied, ‘There’s a lot of holes in it, right enough.’

Which brought us down to earth again – the worn and torn old Earth through which shows, according to John, the Divine Ground, and according to me, nothing.

‘In the high mountains of our fatherland there is a little village.’ It lies in the middle of a wide valley, and at its centre is the church with its pointed spire. To the south rises a snowy peak, an object of pride to the villagers and of admiration to the occasional
visiting
climber or artist. A path from the village crosses a high neck or col between this peak and another, and leads to a little town in the next valley. The village shoemaker has brought the daughter of a wealthy dyer of the town back home as his bride. The couple have a boy child and then a girl, who at the period of this story (it is Adalbert Stifter’s ‘Bergkristall’; I came across it when trying to learn German once and it has remained with me as a puzzle and a challenge) are old enough to be allowed to take the path over the col to call on their grandparents. One Christmas Eve, the weather being fine, they are given permission to make the journey. On the way they find that a post marking the highest point of the pass has fallen, but this is of no consequence since they are so familiar with the route. Their grandmother and grandfather welcome and make much of them, but then, mindful of the shortness of these
midwinter 
days, pack them off homewards early in the afternoon. As the children climb towards the col snow begins to fall, and they wonder if the post will be covered. Soon they are wandering in a ‘white darkness’. The boy presses on like someone who feels he has to reach a turning-point, the little girl follows with perfect trust. Precipices rise on either side of them; they clamber among huge boulders of ice. When it is too dark to go on they creep into a house-like recess among piled rocks and they eat the food they find in the parcels their grandmother has given them to carry home. The boy insists that the little girl not fall asleep. The snow has ceased, the sky is clear and starry. They hear the glacier crack three times with a terrible sound as if the earth had broken in two. In the middle of the night they watch the sky fill with
shimmering
colours, ‘a discharging of electrical tensions caused by the snowfall, or some other manifestation of nature’s mysteries’. At dawn they set off again, but can find no way out of the ice fields. Then they see a red flag waving far off and hear a note from a shepherd’s horn. Soon they are in the safe hands of searchers from the village, and are brought back to the pass, where a sleigh awaits them, and so home, with rejoicing. They have missed the
ceremonies
of Christmas Eve, the coming of the Christchild, but the girl is able to tell her mother that they saw Christ the Saviour
during
the night when they were sitting on the mountain. And when they have rested and recovered a little they are allowed to get dressed to receive the presents He has brought them.

So the story is brought softly down from perilous heights to a tender and pious domesticity. Stifter is regarded as the
quintessence
of the mid-nineteenth-century literary value-system rather derogatorily called
Biedermeier
, a bourgeois quietism, a
universalization
of propriety. According to his preface to
Bunte
Steine
,
the
collection that includes this story, Creation is ruled by a ‘gentle law’, to which we can accommodate ourselves through stillness of mind. But one is left to feel that the outcome of the story could have been otherwise; the law of the ice fields is not usually gentle. Stifter meticulously describes both the topographical and the social setting of the incident in their unchanging consonance. But most of all he lavishes detail on the place – if it is a place – on which the story pivots, the summit of the pass. The wooden post
marking
it is called the
Unglücksa
ü
le
,
the accident-post or pillar of
misfortune,
and bears a picture of a baker who died there, which the children are delighted to be able to examine closely when they find the post fallen – not a mountaineer or a woodsman on his way to the upper slopes, but a baker, a representative of the
community’s
warm, nurturing heart. It is to this ambiguous, treacherous, disconfirming spot that my mind, like the story, keeps returning.

The top of a pass is a strange specialization of nowhere, like a crossroads; it is nothing in itself but choice of ways and the
possibility
of going astray. The route from valley to valley, briefly ascending out of the everyday of life, drawing breath for a moment and then descending into it again, crosses another route that goes from peak to peak, clambering down dangerous slopes, striding out on an easy stretch, and mounting again into
extremity
. Around the saddle-point itself the lie of the land may be quite ambivalent; if visibility is limited there may be no clues from the trends of slopes as to which is the right way. Geometrically it is a point of zero curvature, where the curvature of the mountain route is cancelled out by the opposite curvature of the home route. Dynamically it is a point of unstable equilibrium; on a
surface
of this form, a ball could rest here but the slightest disturbance will send it rolling down one way or the other. Emblematically it
is the destabilization of Stifter’s tale and the certainties it
propounds
. (If these observations amount to a deconstruction of the story, they are not intended as an exercise in a criticism that prides itself on being deeper than its subject, but rather as exemplifying the fact that all true writing undermines itself, is deeper than itself. Were it not so, why would we attempt such writing? For we already know what we know, and hope always for more.)

Space sets its traps not only in the wild but in the most banal of places. Because I can only think through sensations and argue by memories, I’ll recount a trivial and absurd incident from a time when I had a holiday job with a firm of office cleaners. Sometimes my mates and I had to work in the small hours scrubbing walls and ceilings in the deserted typing pools and corridors of international corporations. On one such occasion I happened to enter a huge washroom, a sterile neon-lit hall, symmetrical in layout, with a row of cubicles down each long wall, and down the centre a low
partition
with washbasins backing onto it on either side. The upper part of this partition was clad with mirror-glass, and as I crossed obliquely towards one of the basins I was probably half aware of my reflection approaching from the other side. Having washed my hands I glanced up at myself in the mirror – and there I wasn’t! There were the taps, the basin, the tiled floor, the row of cubicle doors, but I myself was missing. It only took a moment for me to realize that the section of partition above this particular basin had for some reason been removed and that I was looking not into a reflection of my side of the room but into the real space of the other side. A minor contretemps (or
contre-espace
) – but it shook me, to see the mirror-image of my own body-world untenanted, to see absence grinning like a skull and saying, ‘As I am, so shall you be!’ – a mere prank of geometry, a reminder that space is compact
of hiding-places in full view, ambushes in open ground,
oubliettes
under familiar floors. Although it is the framework of my being, and perhaps because it is such, I do not trust space an inch.

What the ultimate cause of my sense of the precariousness of space is I do not know; it feels as old in me as the ability to walk, although my life has been relatively cushioned and sheltered from falls. But I read it everywhere in what I write, in all those images of bilocation and existential twinning, of standing on the upturned soles of one’s reflection in a calm sea, of groping
blindfold
across fissured crags. And I find it in others’ writing, even where surely no such sense is intended; in fact I believe the
origin
of my imagery of the step, which informs the whole of
Stones
of
Aran
and which I sought to explicate in
The
View
from
the
Hori
zon
,
is a misremembered passage in a rather obscure treatise, read in my usual snatching forgetful way when I was at university:
Foundations
of
Inductive
Logic
,
by the economist Roy Harrod.

Harrod’s venture into philosophy, in the no-nonsense
tradition
of his heroes J.S. Mill and J.M. Keynes, aims to supply a sound basis for what one might call the unspoken working hypothesis of all our lives: ‘the fact that things have been found in experience to be thus and thus gives, in and by itself, a valid
reason
for holding that they will continue to be thus and thus for the time being’. This ‘Principle of Experience’ can only give
probabilities
, not certainties, of things continuing ‘thus and thus’. But, with this limitation, Harrod purports to show, by a neat bit of probability theory, that it is valid; also, that it is the basis of
induction
in general, i.e. the formation of general laws and expectations on the basis of observed instances. Whether he is successful or not is irrelevant here (I remember that A.J. Ayer reviewed the book positively even though he thought that a proof of the Principle of
Induction was neither necessary nor possible). What mattered to me were some scenarios Harrod used to illustrate his argument.

The general idea is that if one is experiencing some sort of continuity – whether it be a series of observations of a repeated event like sunrise, or a uniformity of colour or pattern in a
surface
– the latest instance of it is statistically unlikely to be the last, and this unlikelihood increases as the series continues:

And to clarify this notion of ‘extreme edge’:

These likelihoods are to be understood in terms of frequencies:

Out of this conjunction of blind man’s buff, a desert
wandering
, and the almost obsessive repetition of ‘the extreme edge’, my mind put together a false memory. Until I dug the book out again
recently I could have sworn that Harrod illustrated his argument with a dramatic and unnerving image of a blindfolded man
walking
on a bare cliff-edged plateau. Imagine oneself snatched out of the normal course of life and set down one knows not where, in utter darkness. Eventually one risks a step forward, out of one’s perfect nescience, and finds firm footing. Another step, and then another, add to one’s tentative belief that the ground underfoot, whatever its nature, is supportive. Each step is progressively less likely to bring one to the edge; in fact one comes to imagine that there may not be such an edge. Soon one is striding out
confidently
, towards the silently waiting precipice … Thus, out of
Harrod’s
offer of rational comfort for our thoughtless sense of security, I had fashioned a nightmare of insecurity.

I could find nominal support for such a perception of reality in Harrod, for in his concluding chapter I note this remark: ‘Even what we claim to know must be taken for probable only; we may awake tomorrow to find that the reign of the vaunted laws of physics is over…. We wander about on our own little surface, pleased with our knowledge only because we cannot see the edge of its domain.’ But this extrapolation beyond the empirical world leads him only into some rather bloodless speculations on truth, goodness, beauty and love, his rationalist-Anglican temperament paving the void beyond the edge with these sustaining categories. However, as he says, ‘It is not inappropriate that there should be certain rites and places set aside and consecrated persons devoted to such
speculation
.’ Perhaps religious places by their very form propose some comforting mediation between us wanderers and the beyond.

I explored this idea once when M and I, fleeing Connemara, were spending the hottest part of one summer in Aix-
en-Provence.
In temporary asylum from a countryside to which the
great centuries of Christian architecture had dispensed only a
handful
of roughly-built oratories, we were savouring the grandeur, the elaboration, the sonority, of the city’s churches. From the
sky-lantern
-lit cupola above the dim baptistery of the Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur we daily drank down great draughts of space. Looking up at the last of the sunset caught by the masonry of the Augustinian church climbing above the lamplit
place
where we were dining one evening, I thought of a knifeblade dug into
tape
nade
or some other of those ochreous, Provençal taste sensations we were sampling for the first time. Leaning against a cool,
shadowed
wall and staring up at the midday-glorified tower of
Ste-Esprit
, I appreciated the high definition of the few trefoil handholds it offered for visual rock-climbing, relished its fierce, orange, materiality stamped out flat on a sky of azure, abstract, joy. These towers and spires do not point to the world above, but penetrate; they probe and sample space and light. From memories of the towers of Chartres shepherding the vast plain of La Beauce, and even from the spires of Kilburn, Neasden and Cricklewood glimpsed in my London rambles, which I used to identify with Proust’s three church towers, I knew that in distant views they would be nodes and reference points in the fields of possible
journeys
, turning travel into pilgrimage.