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Names remain. The passing years pile up and give them tales and weight, or bleed them white and take out all significance. When you can't tell one name from another all men look the same. The more people there are, the more you know them by their names or not at all. An increase in breeding broadens the tongue. We must know one from another—man and name—if civilization is to take hold and properly accumulate true richness.

When the wild and conquering hordes settled down to their fields they contemplated each other and gave out names that would last. A cycle is complete and now expands. Poets take over. Tillage and metre rule. The seasons and the moon dominate utterly when every place and person has a name—some of which eventually ride by on coal trucks through disordered childhood dreams.

58

When I told my father I was going to have a novel published he said: ‘That's bloody good. You'll never have to work again'—as if I'd been given a million pounds in exchange for colic on the heart. A dozen books later I still see what he means. ‘You've got an aim in life now,' he added, though with more truth than before.

But to write books is not to have an aim in life. It is a camouflage under which a real aim can wither before it is even understood. By blind chance I became a writer, and unknowingly sidestepped a career which might have turned out more useful and satisfying. It is a futile thought that occasionally flashes in, but as long as my proper fate stays with me—as it presumably does—I shan't complain.

Any true aim perished in the blinding light of emptiness when I tried to understand it, and so my spirit withdrew from the struggle as if it were burned, and took refuge in the greater comfort of the periphery, where the process of writing begins. And if in spite of this I still mull on it and wonder why I became a writer, I'm careful not to make the mistake of driving straight to the empty middle and search for the truth there.

Having sorted among the aborted tributaries of my family it is no use coming back into the core of myself to get at the truth. It would be a sentimental head-on clash, to be avoided at all costs. It is better to chase the indirect and apparently unimportant as being more worth while, to keep my thoughts clear and insignificant, rather than boringly definitive.

In someone of low intelligence sentimentality is pathetic. In those of high intelligence it is obnoxious, even dangerous. I will not decide which of these categories I fit into, but state them so as not to get entangled—and send each one into that great central fire of emptiness where they can burn into gas and ashes, while I stay on the rich outside.

A writer is born without God, and his centre has been taken over so that he is a god. It could be that he then spends his life writing in order to hold off the fear of dying and death, and keeps writing so as not to expose himself to the danger of having his questions answered and therefore of having to accept God.

The ultimate aim is to phrase questions, not to solve them, for if you show people what to ask, they will soon find their own solutions. A question is not a question unless it contains the seeds of its answer, and when this phenomenon occurs to a primitive or uneducated person he overcomes his fear of the world and makes a fundamental break with his past. For a writer, another sort of fear comes with the questions, because he is afraid that the questions may desert him. It also stays because fear is a birthmark of life. Those who do not have it are not yet born. Whoever says ‘I am not afraid' has grown old before his time. Who cannot suffer morally, perishes physically. Lack of fear bursts the heart, which is the worst of diseases. If the bravest of the brave replies that fear makes the face ugly, and takes all honest beauty from it, and that the earth will despise the fearful and pull him more quickly to his death, he is wrong. To be fearful is to be able to love. To lie three days in no-man's-land as Edgar did, with every minute full of terror from the rats, men, and unseen dismemberment, was a feat of adoration for the scarred earth he clung to. It was a love that drove him almost out of his mind, a state of question without answer he chose to live with for the rest of his life.

The soil also pulls you under out of love, and since death is the end it is better for it to be welcoming than ward you off. It will cool and cushion those who are hot from dying, or merely warm you if the chill of crossing that terrible barrier is still present.

59

A simple man is a person who cannot express his complexities. A writer expresses them for him and still lets him keep the illusion of his simplicity. The Burtons are the simple men in me, but they had illusions of complexity that could never break out. The Sillitoes are the complex men, but they had illusions of simplicity that could not prevent the complexities from tormenting them.

The qualities of one family shift onto the other. They merge and cross-fertilize, become a running sore, ruining memory in a sea of psychic pain—which I distrust. Truth is like the tip of an iceberg: one-tenth of it based on nine-tenths lie. When I am out walking I sometimes feel the sallow Sillitoe blackness gaining the upper hand over the optimistic, energetic, easy-going Burton lot. At such times the two forces separate, and leave me in the middle of an expanding emptiness.

The past is fiction, what bits of it can be remembered. The present is illusion, what pains of it can be felt. Only the future exists, because it is yet to happen. When it does, it also is full of flickering uncertainties impossible to latch on to, so that with necessary speed it fades into the fiction of the past. Yet out of this past which has become fiction I fish for the truth, and even knowing a great deal about my grandparents, it is impossible to say for certain where I come from, or where I belong. A man only knows he comes out of his mother, and has to be satisfied with that. To dispute it and want to believe otherwise means to accept the maxim that emotion is tempered by reason—before conclusions can be drawn.

But emotion tempered by reason is a perfect excuse for pride of place and faint-of-heart. Emotion, it is true, smothers reason. And reason emasculates emotion. The uneasy combination, if ever it is achieved, is the very body of reaction. If reason goes forward like the patrols of an advancing army, emotion in full body catches up to wield its destructive victory. If the emotional vanguard goes on ahead, reason eventually overtakes and robs it of any achievement. Sooner or later, reason and emotion rend each other, and leave a desert. They are terms of mutual annihilation. Is this emotion? Or is it reason? A jointure of the two makes it no better. Both reason and emotion are too near the surface to be properly controlled and matched.

As if born in a state of spiritual decapitation a writer wants to join his head back on to his body, the Scipio on to the Africanus, the first name on to the second, to sew the soul into the stomach and throw them together into the river of life, there to rend each other, to sink or swim. Perhaps he only succeeds in unifying himself when he is about to die, by which time it is too late. He fears death because it means that his life as an earthly god will come to an end. And if after life there is still more life, there can be no more final death for a writer.

If anything exists in the burning middle it is an alchemical brazier of the soul, driven white by a salt wind coming from the sea. Both gale and blaze thrive on each other and never let go. In the storm's centre I ask myself what I am, but cannot say. Forty days or forty years can be spent in the attempt, but if one doesn't know without even asking, then all further tries are bound to collapse.

Yet the more unsuccessful, the fuller in spirit one becomes, the greater the overall richness of life will be. If I look in a mirror and ask this question I get a blank look, or enough of a shocked expression to remind me that it is not a question but a riddle. The half-smile that lingers in the mirror after I have turned my head tells me that I still have a sense of humour, which is the last defence against the truth.

To go bull-headed at the riddle means I'll never get an answer. I am a writer because I do not know what or who I am, though in trying to find out I may by a fluke help others to know who they are. If so I trust it will persuade them to go on living and not despair about the fate of the world or themselves.

You have to go beyond the limits of despair to reach the truth. Certainly you cannot get close to it by standing still, or by locking yourself into an idiot-gaze against the warm and comforting fireplace. You move a finger, stare at the hand and lift it with a movement of the arm, and then you stand up and feel the pressure of the ground in both legs, and you shift across the room and look through the window and go to the door and open it and walk outside to smell the sky and let the wind into the brain. The senses waken as the odour of fields and marshes rushes in. While gleaning for the truth, despair calls from one side and hope beckons at the other, and they try and draw you apart. When such horse-mares struggle for your inner vision you manage to walk, or take a spade and dig the soil over.

To be without hope, in the belief that nothing is worth living or working for is an act of murder against the human spirit, self-willed or not. One must learn to suffer without taking to despair, for despair is a killer, a suicide-monger, the mongrel-devil who does not hand out any consolation, even in death. Yet if those who fall into this trough have no control against being brought to it, they are in a state of grace and waiting to be saved. The axis of the world's goodness depends on them, and upon those with the strength and will to help.

The sphere of white fire spins, an illumination of truth which can never be reached simply by wanting to. I use it to see by. It dazzles and blinds when I reach out and try to use it: it uses me. Art is order made out of chaos; false art is chaos made out of the false order already in existence.

If I am to go forward I must switch round and get free of the cul-de-sac, otherwise I do violence to the soul. There is a part of every book which turns out to be a dead-end, and you need sooner or later to reverse from it. I entered this one on a trip into the past, and to reach clear space once more I must fight against all the purples of the spectrum.

Geometry exists so that the fringes of chaos can be surveyed, and the remotest zones of confusion explored and classified. All mysteries are encountered, but few have their meanings revealed, and even then they cannot be understood. The route pencilled on the map is like a question mark upside down.

60

The conscious and the subconscious come twice in the same sphere, and Man's soul is as complete as the zones and seasons of the earth.

There is a consciousness in the northern hemisphere hemmed in by the cold subconscious of the Arctic, and by the subconscious of the heat between Cancer and the Equator.

There is a consciousness in the southern hemisphere bounded by the subconscious of the Antarctic ice and the subconscious of the tropics between Capricorn and the Equator.

Thus there is more than one consciousness, and more than one subconscious. There is a consciousness trapped between the heat and cold of the northern hemisphere. There is a consciousness caught by the heat and cold of the southern hemisphere.

There is a consciousness and a subconscious in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the earth and of the soul.

Under this vast conscious-subconscious crust is the seething reservoir at the centre of man's earth-soul that fuses both the conscious and the subconscious, and from which all the facets of the personality emerge—or do not, depending on how it is treated.

Consciousness holds itself between ice and heat, the Pole and the Equator in both north and south. My subconscious is of the ice and finally frozen too deeply to become tractable. My subconscious is of the tropics, and only rarely cools itself enough to be understood. The consciousness in both cases keeps the two walls of the subconscious apart. The subconscious in both cases wants to cross over the zones of the consciousness and meet, but the integuments of the consciousness prevent this. At the same time it wants to pull in the subconscious on to itself, but though it may wish to draw them together in a merging of the whole, this is impossible unless one's consciousness has the equivalent in spirit of Samson's superhuman strength—who was said to be so strong that he could uplift two mountains and rub them together like two clods of earth.

This is the universe of the shaman, the geography of fire and ice, the equating of strength in the arm with air that comes out of the mouth. The conscious zone between the borders of the subconscious is a region both turbulent and temperate, fragile and sensitive, prone to freeze with the ice or melt with the heat. The membranes of the heart can burst because of an increase of one degree, or split when it goes down a shade, the sensitive zone that draws all the subtleties of chills and fevers, fits and miseries, screams and dreams against it, tissues through which everything can be learned, and in which one feels the grail and mystery one clings to for fear of falling down the side of the earth and going still living into the blackness.

Thus the conscious, that which is supposed to be on top and in sight—the obvious; and the subconscious, that which is hidden and of which we are not often aware—the unknown and menacing. They have their own geography, not the normal top-and-bottom Freudian kind that I might have learned to live with if I had not been born to search after my own truth, but a more complicated, geopsychic flux of forces, of a globe whose maps show a constantly shifting tectonic surface.

This chart of the soul indicates that the ultimate truth will never show itself, no matter how long the search goes on. To penetrate one subconscious is difficult, but to cut a way into two is not feasible. One moment they help each other, the next minute they compete and intermix, hinder and pull apart.

The double meeting of ice and heat generate their own phosphorescence, a forked illumination from two batteries, twin sources of power. Though one light makes for clarity, two create confusion. They cross-dazzle and blind, and closing the eyes in order to escape it only sends you back into the dark, in which the heat fights the cold in an eternal battle of opposites.