Shikasta (33 page)

There is something else, and stronger than anything: the well-being, the always renewing, regenerative,
healing force of nature; feeling one with the other creatures of Shikasta and its soil, and its plants.

The lowest, the most downtrodden, the most miserable of Shikastans, will watch the wind moving a plant, and smile; will plant a seed and watch it grow; will stand to watch the life of the clouds. Or lie pleasurably awake in the dark, hearing wind howl that cannot – not
this
time – harm him where he lies safe. This is where strength has always welled, irrepressibly, into every creature of Shikasta.

Forced back and back upon herself, himself, bereft of comfort, security, knowing perhaps only hunger and cold; denuded of belief in ‘country', ‘religion', ‘progress' – stripped of certainties, there is no Shikastan who will not let his eyes rest on a patch of earth, perhaps no more than a patch of littered and soured soil between buildings in a slum, and think: Yes, but that will come to life, there is enough power there to tear down this dreadfulness and heal all our ugliness – a couple of seasons, and it would all be alive again … and in war, a soldier watching a tank rear up over a ridge to bear down on him, will see as he dies grass, tree, a bird swerving past, and know immortality.

It is here, precisely here, that I place my emphasis.

Now it is only for a few of the creatures of Shikasta, those with steadier sight, or nerves, but every day there are more – soon there will be multitudes … once where the deepest, most constant, steadiest support was, there is nothing: it is the nursery of life itself that is poisoned, the seeds of life, the springs that feed the well.

All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.

She reaches for the child that plays on the floor but as she holds its fresh warmth to her face she knows that it is for the holocaust, and if by a miracle it escapes, then the substance of its inheritance is being attacked as the two of them stand there, close, the warmth of their mortality beating between them as the child laughs.

He looks at the child, thinking of nature, the creative fire spawning new forms as we breathe. He has to, for he knows that the species dwindle everywhere on Shikasta, the stock of gene patterns is being destroyed, destroyed, cannot come back … He cannot rest in thoughts of the great creator, nature, and he looks out of the window at a landscape seen a thousand times, in a thousand different guises, but now it seems to thin and disappear. He thinks: Well, the ice stretched down as far as here, not so long ago, ten thousand years, and look it has all remade itself! But an ice age is nothing, it is a few thousand years – the ice comes, and then it goes. It destroys and kills, but it does not pervert and spoil the substance of life itself.

She thinks, but there are the animals, the noble and patient animals, with their languages we don't understand, their kindness to each other, their friendship for us – and she puts down her hand to feel the living warmth of her little cat but knows that as she stands there they are being slaughtered, wiped out, made extinct, by senselessness, stupidity, by greed, greed, greed. She cannot rest in her familiar thoughts of the great reservoir of nature, and when her cat gives birth, she crouches over the nest and peers in, looking for the mutations which she knows are working there, will soon show themselves.

He thinks, as the loneliness of his situation dazzles him, standing there and whirling among the stars, a
species among myriads – as he has only recently come to know – that these thoughts are too grand for him, he needs to put his arms around his woman and to feel her arms around him, but as they turn to each other, there is tension, and fear, for this embrace may breed monsters.

She stands as she has done for millennia, cutting bread, setting out sliced vegetables on a plate, with a bottle of wine, and thinks that nothing in this meal is safe, that the poisons of their civilization are in every mouthful, and that they are about to fill their mouths with deaths of all kinds. In an instinctive gesture of safety, renewal, she hands a piece of bread to her child, but the gesture has lost its faith as she makes it, because of what she may be handing the child.

When he is at his work – if he has any, for he may be one who is being merely kept alive, not being used, or stretched, or developed through his labour – he, at his work, again and again, because the need is so old, renews himself in the thought that this work of his benefits others, that it links him with others, he is in a creative mesh and pulse with all the labourers of the earth … but he is checked, is stopped, the thought cannot live on in him, there is bitterness and anger, and then a weariness, disbelief: he does not know why, she does not know why, but it is as if they are pouring away the best of themselves into nothingness.

She and he, making order in their living place, tidying and cleaning their home, stand together among piles of glass, synthetics, paper, cans, containers – the rubbish of their civilization which, they know, is farmland and food and the labour of men and women, rubbish, rubbish, to be carried away and dumped in great mountains that cover more earth, foul more water. As they clear and smooth their little rooms, it is with a rising, hardly controllable irritability and disgust. A container that has held food is thrown away, but over vast areas of Shikasta it would
be treasured and used by millions of desperate people. Yet there is nothing to be done, it seems. Yet it all happens, it goes on, nothing seems to stop it. Rage, frustration, disgust at themselves, at their society, anger – breaking out against each other, against neighbours, against the child. Nothing they can touch, or see, or handle sustains them, nowhere can they take refuge in the simple good sense of nature. He has seen once a pumpkin vine sprawling its great leaves and yellow flowers and sumptuous golden globes over a vast rubbish heap, where flies sizzle and simmer – at the time he hardly noticed it, and now it is an image for his imagination to find rest in, and comfort. She watches a neighbour trying to burn bits of plastic on a bonfire, while the chemical reek poisons everything, and she shuts her eyes and thinks of a broken earthenware bowl swept out of a back door in a village, to crumble slowly back into the soil.

In all of man's history he has been able to restore himself with the sight of leaves in autumn that will sink back into the earth, or with the look of a crumbling wall with sun on it, or some white bones at the edge of a stream.

These two stand together, high above their city, looking out where the machines that are destroying them rush and grind, in the air, on the earth, under the earth … they stand breathing, but the rhythm of their breath shortens and changes, as they think that the air is full of corrosion and destruction.

They turn taps and handles and water runs out willingly from the walls, but as they bend to drink or to wash they find their instincts reluctant and have to force themselves. The water tastes flat, and faintly corrupt, and has been already ten times through their gut and bladders, and they know that the time will come when they will not be able to drink it, and setting out containers for rainwater, will find that, too, undrinkable from chemicals washed from the air.

They watch a flight of birds, as they stand together at their windows, and it is as if they are sorrowfully saying goodbye, with a silent corrosive, tearing apology on behalf of the species they belong to: destruction is what they have brought to these creatures, destruction and poisoning is their gift, and the swerve and balancing of a bird does not delight and rest, but becomes another place from which they learn to avert their eyes, in pain.

This woman, this man, restless, irritable, grief-stricken, sleeping too much to forget their situation or unable to sleep, looking everywhere for some good or sustenance that will not at once give way as they reach out for it and slide off into reproach or nothingness – one of them takes up a leaf from the pavement, carries it home, stares at it. There it lies in a palm, a brilliant gold, a curled, curved, sculptored thing, balanced like a feather, ready to float and to glide, there it rests, lightly, for a breath may move it, in that loosely open, slightly damp, human palm, and the mind meditating there sees its supporting ribs, the myriads of its veins branching, and rebranching, its capillaries, the minuscule areas of its flesh which are not – as it seems to this brooding human eye – fragments of undifferentiated substance between the minute feeding arteries and veins, but, if one could see them, highly structured worlds, the resources of chemical and microscopic cell life, viruses, bacteria – a universe in each pin-point of leaf. It is already being dragged into the soil as it lies there captive, a shape as perfect as a ship's sail in full wind or the shell of a snail. But what is being looked at is not this curved exquisite exactness, for the slightest shift of vision shows the shape of matter thinning, fraying, attacked by a thousand forces of growth and death. And this is what an eye tuned slightly, only slightly, differently would see looking out of the window at that tree which shed the leaf on to the pavement – since it is autumn and the trees need to
conserve energy against the winter on it – no, not a tree, but a fighting seething mass of matter in the extremes of tension, growth, destruction, a myriad of species of smaller and smaller creatures feeding on each other, each feeding on the other, always – that is what this tree is in reality, and this man, this woman, crouched tense over the leaf, feels nature as a roaring creative fire in whose crucible species are born and die and are reborn in every breath … every life … every culture … every world … the mind, wrenched away from its resting place in the close visible cycles of growth and renewal and decay, the simplicities of birth and death, is forced back, and back and into itself, coming to rest – tentatively and without expectation – where there can be no rest, in the thought that always, at every time, there have been species, creatures, new shapes of being, making harmonious wholes of interacting parts, but these over and over again crash! are swept away! – crash go the empires, and the civilizations, and the explosions that are to come will lay to waste seas and oceans and islands and cities, and make poisoned deserts where the teeming detailed inventive life was, and where the mind and heart used to rest, but may no longer, but must go forth like the dove sent by Noah, and at last after long circling and cycling see a distant mountaintop emerging from wastes of soiled water, and must settle there, looking around at nothing, nothing, but the wastes of death and destruction, but cannot rest there either, knowing that tomorrow or next week or in a thousand years, this mountaintop too will topple under the force of a comet's passing, or the arrival of a meteorite.

The man, the woman, sitting humbly in the corner of their room, stare at that indescribably perfect thing, a golden chestnut leaf in autumn, when it has just floated down from the tree, and then may perform any one of a number of acts that rise from inside
themselves, and that they could not justify nor argue with or against – they may simply close a hand over it, crushing it to powder, and fling the stuff out of the window, watching the dust sink through the air to the pavement, for there is a relief in thinking that the rains of next week will seep the leaf-stuff back through the soil to the roots, so that next year, at least, it will shine in the air again. Or the woman may put the leaf gently on a blue plate and set it on a table, and may even bow before it, ironically, and with a sort of apology that is so near to the thoughts and actions of Shikastans now, and think that the laws that made this shape must be, must be stronger in the end than the slow distorters and perverters of the substance of life. Or the man, glancing out of the window, forcing himself to see the tree in its other truth, that of the fierce and furious war of eating and being eaten, may see suddenly, for an instant, so that it has gone even as he turned to call his wife: Look, look, quick! – behind the seethe and scramble and eating that is one truth, and behind the ordinary tree-in-autumn that is the other – a third, a tree a fine, high, shimmering light, like shaped sunlight. A world, a world, another world, another truth …

And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago – and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.

This, then, is the condition of Shikastans now, still only a few, but more and more, and soon – multitudes.

Nothing they handle or see has substance, and so they repose in their imaginations on chaos, making strength from the possibilities of a creative destruction. They are weaned from everything but the knowledge that the universe is a roaring engine of
creativity, and they are only temporary manifestations of it.

Creatures infinitely damaged, reduced and dwindled from their origins, degenerate, almost lost – animals far removed from what was first envisaged for them by their designers, they are being driven back and back from everything they had and held and now can take a stand nowhere but in the most outrageous extremities of – patience. It is an ironic, and humble, patience, which learns to look at a leaf, perfect for a day, and see it as an explosion of galaxies, and the battleground of species. Shikastans are, in their awful and ignoble end, while they scuffle and scrabble and scurry among their crumbling and squalid artefacts, reaching out with their minds to heights of courage and … I am putting the word
faith
here. After thought. With caution. With an exact and hopeful respect.
   JOHOR
continues
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