Tales and Imaginings (3 page)

‘Try another lot; you wasted that.’

‘But do I want to kipper my brains like this?’

‘Of course you do. A well-fumigated subconscious will procure you sanative sleep before tomorrow’s journey.’

‘Why, where am I going tomorrow?’

‘To visit my friend the sage on the mountain-tops, near the
religious
ruins. The train leaves at nine; meanwhile all your worries about waking up in time are already asleep in my watch-case. Come on now, deep breaths. Ten deep breaths make one pipe, then a cup of tea, and then I will join you in another pipe.’

As we smoked, Persimmon talked. The cyclic ritual of the pipes stirred a slow eddy in the passage of time. My eye found a mouse asleep on the narrow top of a partition opposite our bench. Perhaps it was carved out of wood. Was it the torpid air swaying above the lamp that made it seem to stir and settle? I tried to follow
Persimmon’s
sentences, which wound away from me into the darkness: ‘… to entrap one of the most ancient chimeras of science; he holds that since dream transformations are fully reversible, the dream,
thermodynamically
considered, is the perfect machine. If so, he claims, all that stands between him and a certain possibility too absurd to bear contemplation – the frictionless time-rewinder – is
the dreaminess of dreams, their drift and waver … I prefer another line of thought.’

Why is Persimmon bending over me, calling to me, the sound of his voice reaching me only after turning and turning in the coils of fragrant smoke? ‘You are floating. Your petals are closing. You are folding up into a pellet. You are sinking. Sink! Like a stone!’

Far above me, his other line of thought branched and budded. ‘More seriously, let us discuss the investigations he – or was it I? – made into the phenomenology of dreams, a region in which the concepts formed in waking life are like speechless foreigners

My left eye is a quiet pool. My right eye lies among the
unwinking
pebbles at the bottom, looking up through a green so tender and diffuse that only with an imperceptible trembling can its
invisible
skin support the sailing lilies of ideas unfolding overhead.

‘The material continuities, in the nature of the case, being absent, on what thread is strung the dream-object’s identity?
Suppose
for instance an eye becomes a pool …’

‘No, an eye is
like enough a pool; but suppose now an idea becomes a lily-pad, what is
the unity underlying that becoming?’

The pool flows calmly around the pale undersides of the
lily-pads
, expanding, losing its edges.

‘Imagine an opinion becomes a window; that’s a philosopher’s metaphor made concrete. And now the window in its wall becomes a lily leaf on the water’s surface; a geometry is
preserved. The
question
is, do such transformations form chains that hold?’

The windows pattern a wall that stretches out of sight, above, below, and on either side. An infinitude of Persimmons smile and bow to me from them.

‘… or the being we meet in dreams who is at once today’s friend and a long-dead schoolmaster; a “person”? The word falters. A
language
born in the world of wide-awake is a wooden tongue to the dream-teller. Our failures to describe are blessed with a paltry
adequacy
simply because, all failing alike, we recognize to what each other’s failures refer.’

The windows shift and flicker like sunlight on rippled water. They shatter silently into foam and flow in sheets around me.

‘But perhaps we can tell our dreams because our language is
not just built on the day’s stabilities; indeed how could it be? Consider
the child, his growing rationality heaped and squared each day like a sandcastle, only to be licked shapeless by a tide of dreams each night …’

Foam dances in a whorl on the seashore, A last few words, ‘Or, of course …’ and ‘Perhaps, though …’, drift down to drown in it. The bubbles are catching at my wrist. Something tender is hidden behind them.

‘The train doesn’t actually stop there, but it slows down, so be ready to jump.’

I waited, holding the carriage door half open, in a rush of mouldy jungle air.

‘Jump!’ they shouted.

By the time I had picked myself up, the train had disappeared down a tunnel of leaves. Two brown bodies pieced themselves together from scraps of shade under a flowering bush, and came forward carrying a pole.

‘To the temple?’

‘Yes, please.’

In single file, first the shorter carrier with one end of the pole on his shoulder, then myself hugging it with arms and legs, and last the taller carrier with the other end of the pole on his shoulder, we climbed a path of leaf-mould beneath the trees. Then, first the taller carrier, next myself, and last the shorter carrier (their statures being adapted to this route), we descended to the banks of a river. On the dazzling water stood an old man in a little boat; his parasol was a leaf as long as himself, resting on the crown of his head in a broken arch. The boat drifted gently to the bank, and we jumped in. The
boatman adjusted the rudder, and we immediately began to move out into the current. The two pole-men were already asleep in the bottom of the boat, piled together like cats; the old man sat motionless in the stern, under his leaf.

Was I expected to row?

No, the boat was swinging on a rope; far upstream the rope was attached to a ring sliding along a cable high across the river. The pole-men murmured softly to each other in their sleep, the old man sat and read his toes, the ring jerked and grumbled along the cable, the cable hummed against the sun; an effortless arc took us from one forest to another.

Shimdi and Sonra awoke in the act of jumping ashore. Their four eyes glinting in the shade watched me pay the boatman. I lay on the ground and embraced the pole with arms and legs, like a lover; Shimdi and Sonra swung it to their shoulders, and trotted deep into the shadowy jungle. Swinging, I looked up the dark
perspectives
of passing tree-trunks to lofty hollows of green and gold. Here and there the path opened out into the silent glades of a
distant
geological era, where grey moss muffled the boles of giant
tree-ferns
, and generations of cobwebs hung like vapour.

Shimdi and Sonra stopped; the taller lifted his end of the pole high in the air, the shorter placed his end on the ground, and I slid to earth.

We entered the temple where the masonry of a fallen tower lay locked among the tree-roots. An arcaded walk surrounded a
courtyard
filled with a dense thicket of bamboo, which murmured and flashed in the sunlight far above us. While the two pole-men drowsed in a shady corner, I picked my way across the uprooted flagstones of the cloister and examined, one by one, broken statues of the god, which stood or lay against the wall in the various
postures
of the other world: thumbs in the ears, and a foot missing; ten fingers in the mouth, and no nose; both hands cupping the paunch,
and a little white flower growing in an empty eye-socket.

When I was a quarter of the way round the arcade I found a narrow path hacked through the bamboo; it led me to a shrine in the centre of the courtyard. A net of creepers now held together the inverted bell-shape of crumbling brick and plaster which it had long ago split open to reveal an empty cavity. An incense-stick was burning in a tin can jammed into the crack. Striped like a tiger by the shadows of bamboo, I sat, listening to the creaking of the stems, watching the thread of blue scent rising slowly in the torn
brickwork
. When a third of the incense-stick had wilted into a fragile worm of ash, a green lizard appeared and sat up with its long forelegs straight, like a dog. The ash lengthened, the lizard by degrees turned brown. The ash fell, the lizard
ran off with its tail in the air.

The path, continuing across the courtyard, brought me out
facing
the arched doorway of the temple. The sunlight, full of golden dust, hung like a curtain across the door; I took one step into the chill darkness beyond. As my eyes adjusted to shades of black, I found myself facing the soles of two enormous feet, the toes of which formed an irregular battlement above my head. A noise behind me made me turn to see Shimdi and Sonra in the colour and heat outside the doorway, their teeth busy at the last shreds of
fruit-flesh
in great spiky segments of husk, their eyes vacantly towards me invisible to them in the darkness. They stepped in and
discovered
me with delight. On the soles of the giant feet they pointed out fragmentary remains of inlaid scenes from the life of the god. Only one episode was still comprehensible, and this they explained to me in gestures: after a day of observing foam on the seashore, comes the invention of the chiliagon.

We sidled along the narrow space between the wall and the great cylinder of the leg, until in the dusk of the furthest recesses the face of the god rose like a vast moon over the mountainous body, with
a dim glimmer of worn gold leaf. The head was bent forward and sideways to accommodate its crowning spire in the most distant corner of the roof. The clenched fist of the cramped god blocked our way forward; water trickling out from between the fingers had formed a dark pool at our feet.

A snake! We tumbled over each other until we were out in the
sunshine
. Shimdi and Sonra fetched the pole, and we set off immediately.

‘We go back now.’

I looked round the little clearing. ‘But how do I get to Dark’s house?’

The shorter carrier parted spiny branches and showed me a
little
path leading downhill. I looked along it doubtfully; it was very steep and muddy. Shimdi and Sonra were already running away, crashing through clouds of blossom, leaping and skipping over
tangled
roots; the jungle swallowed up the sound of their retreat
almost as soon as they were out of sight. All around, large leaves presented blank faces to me, waiting to see which I would press aside.

I reopened the mouth of the path and stepped down into the dank cellarage of the forest. Coiling roots formed a dislocated
spiral
staircase round a gigantic tree trunk which vanished just above my head into a tangle of crooked poles and hairy bundles of rope. A muddy sediment of light drifted down from where a few dazzling scraps of sun hung in this motionless web, which completely hid the upper layers of the forest. These rippling, murmurous, sunlit levels hanging above, full of laughter and weeping and dreamy
conversations
, weighed with a stifling pressure on the region of
excrement
and death in which I was struggling. The path became a series of footholds kicked in a slide of poisonous green mud; the branches towards which I reached for balance were all covered in rows of
squat hooks or hair-like spines. Something falling brushed the back of my neck; when I whirled round, barbed creepers swung silently at my face.

Some way further down, quick triangles of blue and silver came and went in the crevices of the undergrowth. I tore my way through, and eventually fell out of the net of creepers onto the gold-dust bank of a little stream. A row of fish that had been sitting on a fallen tree plopped into the water and swam away, their eyes above the surface like pairs of bubbles. I bathed my scratched face and hands, and then sat with my feet in the idling flow and looked up a funnel of shadow to where the sunlight flickered in the treetops round a ragged circle of fading sky. Up there were hanging gardens of dusky purple, and a dancing golden cloud of insects. The babble of the canopy had faded to a drowsy hum. Great black butterflies came spiraling down towards me, and slipped sideways into the obscurity of the undergrowth. The coming night was welling up in the forest.

From the other side of the stream a clear path led upwards. I scrambled across by the fallen tree, and almost ran up the slope. Round one bend from the stream, the silence started. A firefly drifted up the tunnel of leaves before me. The path divided; I took the wider branch, which after a time ended in a tangle of barbed thongs. As I turned back, the silence above me started to howl, and then held its breath again.

The other path was darker. At its entrance a loop of sticky creeper caught me under the chin. I began to run again, but the track eventually dwindled into diamond-shaped gaps in a bamboo thicket, and then failed completely. I turned back again, and found a yet narrower way which someone had hacked out of the cage of branches. After a few steps I wasn’t sure if it was a path at all. I stopped and listened. There were little noises like the muffled
tickings
, whirrings and chimings of buried clocks coming from all
directions. When I tried to shout, my voice wouldn’t come out, but all the tiny sounds stopped dead. Then I shouted at the top of my voice, again and again; the night closed round me like a trap; I burst through into a place full of black feathers and muddy snakes, I slipped and fell into a clinging bed of fungus.

I was rigidly still. I strained my eyes into the blackness and held my breath. The silence was absolute. Then someone started to tear the jungle apart, slowly, leaf by leaf.

‘When I heard you crashing about at the bottom of the garden last night, I just threw a bottle and hoped whatever it was would go away. The forest folk say that at night the space between two twigs becomes another twig; it’s the only explanation for your getting lost between the stream and here. Tomorrow I’ll go and see if a tree is down across the path. Anyway, how are you feeling now?’

‘Much better, thanks. I must have slept all day.’

‘We’ll take our beers out onto the verandah, and watch the sun set. Would you like the long chair, to rest your ankle? You should be all right by tomorrow; I’ll drive you down to the station, and you’ll be back in time for the Festival.’

‘I didn’t know there was a road up here.’

‘Oh, there definitely is a road. I wonder if it wasn’t a little
careless
of Persimmon to send you round the back way so late in the day? However that may be, I have your company for an evening. It’s some time since Persimmon arranged a visitor for me; I realized that last week when I began re-numbering my rubber-trees. I talk to myself too much. And now talking to someone else gives me the sensation of walking too fast on stilts; I can only avoid falling flat by lurching on with increasing strides. So if you get tired please go to sleep; any other way of stopping me would be too abrupt. Would
you like another beer?’