Sauron Defeated (33 page)

'Shall I?' he asked, absentmindedly drinking the whiskey that Frankley had put at Dolbear's elbow.

'Of course!' we said. 'We are fortified now.'

'Well, seriously,' he went on, 'I don't think the marginal stuff is very interesting in normal people: it's so ravelled, and more bother to unravel than it's worth. It's very much like the idleness and foolery of the waking mind. The chief distinction is, I think, that when a man's awake he's attending more to the foolery; and when he's asleep his attention is probably already far away: so the foolery is less good of its kind. But as for his mind being busy, Arry: I only said, if you remember, that your life could contain a lot of dream-work or events. I don't think it usually does. Minds can be lazy on their own account. Even for the energetic ones sleep is largely a rest. But of course, for a mind rest is not oblivion, which is impossible for it. The nearest it can get to that is passivity: the mind can be very nearly passive, contemplating something worthy of it, or what seems worthy-Or it can take the kind of holiday we call "a change", doing something different to the work imposed on it by needs or duties when it is awake. If it has by nature, or has acquired, some dominant interest - like history, or languages, mathematics - it may at times work away at such things, while the old body is recuperating. It can then construct dreams, by no means always pictorial. It can plan and calculate.

'My mind, like many others, I imagine, makes up stories, composes verse, or designs pictures out of what it has got already, when for some reason it hasn't at the moment a thirst to acquire more. I fancy that all waking art draws a good deal on this sort of activity.(39) Those scenes that come up complete and fixed that I spoke of before, for instance; though some of them, I believe, are visions of real places.

'And that strong feeling of hidden significance in remembered fragments: my experience now, though it is still very imperfect, certainly bears out my guess, as far as my own dreams go. My significant fragments were actually often pages out of stories, made up in quieter dream-levels, and by some chance remembered. Occasionally they were bits of long visions of things not invented.

'If long ago you'd either read or written a story and forgotten it, and then in an old drawer you came on a few torn pages of it, containing a passage that had some special function in the whole, even if it had no obvious point in isolation, I think you'ld get very similar feelings: of hidden significance, of lost connexions eluding you, and often of regret.'

'Could you give us any examples?' asked Jeremy.

Ramer thought for a moment. 'Well,' he said, 'I could have done so. I've placed several of my fragments in their proper setting now. But the difficulty is that when once you've got the whole story, you tend very soon to forget which part of it was the bit you used to remember torn out. But there are a couple that I still remember, for I only placed them recently; and I still remember my disappointment. The whole stories are often not particularly good or interesting, you know; and the charm of the fragments is often largely in being unfinished, as sometimes happens in waking art. The sleeping mind is no cleverer than itself; only it can be less distracted and more collected, more set on using what it has.

'Here's one case: it's only interesting as an illustration.

A row of dark houses on the right, going up a slight slope.

Their backs had little gardens or yards fenced with hedges, and a narrow path behind them. It was miserably dark and gloomy. Not a light in the houses, not a star, no moon. He was going up the path for no particular reason, in a heavy aimless mood. Near the top of the slope he heard a noise: a door had opened at the back of one of the houses, or it had closed. He was startled and apprehensive. He stood still. End, of fragment.

What would you expect the emotion to be that this aroused?'

'Like going round to the back-door after closing-time and hearing that just being shut as well?' suggested Lowdham.

'It sounds reasonable enough,' agreed Ramer with a laugh.

'Actually it was a happiness that brings tears, like the thrill of the sudden turn for good in a dangerous tale; and a kind of dew of happiness was distilled that spilled over into waking, lasted for hours, and for years was renewed (though diminishingly) on recollection.

'All my waking mind could make of it was that the picture was sombre. It did rather remind me of - or rather, I identified it, in spite of some misfit, with a row of cottages near where I lived as a small boy. But that did not explain the joy. And, by the way, if it had really been a picture of that row, there should have been a pump just at the top of the slope. I put it in. I see it now in dark silhouette. But it was not there in my earliest recollection, not in the original version. Also, I was only the he of the scene in the way one does (or I do) identify oneself variably with this or that character in a tale, especially with regard to the point of vision. The scene was observed more or less from his point of view, though I (the producer) was just behind (and a little above) him - until he stopped. At the emotion-point I took his place.

'The story that scene came out of is known to me now; and it's not very interesting. Apparently it's one I made up years ago,(40) somewhere in the fifties, at a time when, while awake, I wrote lots of things of the sort. I won't bother you with it all: it had a long and complicated plot,(41) mainly dealing with the Six Years' War; but it wasn't very original, nor very good of its kind. All that matters at the moment is that this scene came just before a lovers' reunion, beyond the hope of either the man or the woman. On hearing the noise he halted, with a premonition that something was going to happen. The woman came out of the door, but he did not recognize her till she spoke to him at the gate. If he hadn't halted, they would have missed one another, probably for ever. The plot, of course, explained how they both came to be there, where neither of them had been before; but that doesn't matter now. The interesting thing is that the remembered fragment, for some reason, ended with the sound of the door and the halting; but the emotion left over was due to part of the story immediately following, which was not remembered pictorially at all. But there was no trace of the emotions of still later parts of the story, which did not finally have a happy

: ending.

'Well, there it is. Not very exciting, but suggestive, perhaps.

Do you want the other case?'

Dolbear gave a loud snore. 'Hark at him!' said Lowdham. 'I expect he's analysed you enough already, and doesn't want any more of your juvenilia to interrupt his slumber.'

'Oh go on, Ramer!' said Jeremy. 'Let's have it!'

'It's your evening, and we asked for it,' said Guildford. 'Carry on!'

'Well, here's another picture,' said Ramer.

A pleasant small room: a pre, a lot of books, a large desk; a golden light from a lamp. He is sitting at the desk. The dreamer's attention, from slightly above his head, is concentrated on the circle of light, but is vaguely aware of dim figures away in front, moving about, taking books from shelves, reading in corners. He is looking at an open book at his left hand, and making notes on a paper. General air of cheerfulness and quiet. He pauses and looks up as if thinking, knocking his pipe-stem between his teeth. He turns a leaf of the book - and sees a new light, makes a discovery; but the fragment ends.

What do you make of that?'

'He'd solved the acrostic with the aid of a dictionary?' said Frankley.

'Emotion: Jack-Hornerism, quiet bibliophilous gloating?'

said Lowdham.

'No!' said Ramer. 'Though you're getting warm, Arry. But the emotion associated was worry, with a heavy hang-over into waking hours of a dull sense of loss, as heavy as anything you felt in childhood when something precious was broken or lost.'

'Well, New Readers now go back to Chapter One,' said

Lowdham. 'What is it?'

'Rather more unusual than the first case, so I'll tell it more fully,' said Ramer. 'He was the librarian in a small university.

The room was his office-study: quite comfortable, but it had a glass wall on one side, through which he could overlook the main hall of the library. He was feeling cheerful, for a few years back a local magnate had left the university a splendid book-collection, and most of his money for the enlargement and upkeep of the library. The library had become important; so had he, and his salary as curator of the endowed collection was generous. And after a lot of delay a new wing had been built, and the books transferred. For some time he'd been carefully re-examining the more interesting items. The book to his left was a volume made up of various manuscript-fragments bound together, probably in the sixteenth century, by some collector or pilferer.

'In the remembered bit of the dream I knew I had been able to read the page before he turned over, and that it was not English; but I could remember no more than that - except that I was delighted, or he was. Actually it was a leaf, a unique fragment of a MS. in very early Welsh, before Geoffrey,(42) about the death of Arthur.

'He turned to look at the back of the leaf - and he found, stuck between it and the next, a document. It turned out to be a will made by the Donor. This book of fragments was one of the last things the magnate had acquired, just before his death. The will was later than the proved and executed will by nearly two years. It was in form, and witnessed, and it did not mention the university, but directed that the books should be dispersed and sold, and the proceeds should go to found a Chair of Basic English in London; while the rest of the estate should go to a nephew, previously passed over.

'The librarian had known the magnate, and had often been to his house: he had helped in cataloguing his collection. He saw that the witnesses were two old servants that had died soon after their master. The emotions are easy to understand: the librarian was proud of his library, a scholar, a lover of real English, and the father of a family; but he was also an honest man. He knew that the Donor had disliked the new Vice-Chancellor very much; also that the nephew was the Donor's next of kin, and poor.'

'Well, what did he do with the will?' said Jeremy.

'On second thoughts he thought it best to stuff it in the old oak chest?' said Lowdham.

'I don't know,' said Ramer. 'Of course it would have been easy and probably quite safe to suppress the will. But I found I had never finished the tale properly, though plenty of sequels could be invented. I found one or two ideas, not worked out, floating at the end. One was that the librarian went to the Vice-Chancellor, who begged him to keep his discovery quiet; he gave way, and was later blackmailed by the Vice-Chancellor himself. But evidently that hadn't seemed satisfactory, or I'd lost interest in the whole thing beyond the recorded situation. I left a good many such yarns incomplete at that time.

'There's little merit in these stories, as you see. But they do illustrate one or two points about fragmentary memory, and about dream-storywriting. For it is not, of course, writing, but a sort of realized drama.'

'Elvish Drama,'(43) Jeremy interposed; 'there's something about it ...' But we had heard him on that topic before. 'Ramer has the floor! ' we cried.

'Well anyway,' Ramer went on: 'the whole story as it is told becomes visible and audible, and the composer is inside it -

though he can take his stand in some odd positions (often high up), unless he puts himself into the play, as he can at any moment.

The scenes look real, but are feigned; and the composition is not complete like a "slice of life": it can be given in selected scenes, and compressed (like a drama). Also it can, when you're working over it again or merely re-inspecting it, be reviewed in any order and at varying speeds (like re-reading or reconsidering a book). I think that is one, though only one, of the reasons why the memory of such dreams, when any survives at all, is so often dissolving or jumbled. The dreamer is aware, of course, that he is author and producer, at any rate while he is at work asleep; but he can get far more absorbed by his work than a waking man is by any book or play that he is either writing or reading; and he can feel the emotions very strongly - excessively sometimes, because they are heightened by the excitement of combining authorship with an acting part; and in memory they may be exaggerated still more through getting dislocated, abstracted from the sounds and scenes that would explain them.

'The cases I've cited are without any symbolism. Just plain emotional situations. I can't say much about symbolic or mythical significances. Of course they exist. And really I can only put them back one stage. For the dreamer can work on myth, and on fairy-tale, quite as much as on novelette. I did. I do. And with a more complete text, so to speak, the excerpted scenes are often much easier to understand, and the functions of the symbols are plainer - but their final solution recedes.

'There are good dreams, apparently of the sort I mean, quoted in books. My own were not so good: the ones I used to remember when awake, that is; they were only significant fragments, more statically pictorial, seldom dramatic, and usually without figures of humane shape.(44) Though I sometimes retained the memory of significant words or sentences without any scenery: such as I am full of sovereign remedies. That seemed a wise and satisfactory utterance. I have never yet found out why.

'Here are some of my fragments of this kind. There is the empty throne on the top of a mountain. There is a Green Wave, whitecrested, fluted and scallop-shaped but vast, towering above green fields, often with a wood of trees, too; that has constantly appeared.(45) I saw several times a scene in which a wide plain lay before the feet of a steep ridge on which I stood; the opposing sky was immense, rising as a vertical wall, not bending to a vault, ablaze with stars strewn almost regularly over all its expanse. That is an omen or presage of catastrophe.