The Game (22 page)

She found it, rather grimly, good to be alone. There ought to be more things
possible
to me, she told herself. I think too much about limitations, I’ve lost my sense of possibility. Not marriage, nor childbirth, was responsible; the roots of the failure were older and deeper. She grappled with this idea of possibility and limitations. Modern novels – her own, amongst others – concerned themselves too exclusively with limitations. They enjoyed glumly setting them out. A novel ought, ideally, to balance in a perpetual juggling trick the sense of real limitation against a real awareness of human possibility. Cassandra, now, was aware of the grandeurs of possibility but had refused to explore her limitations, realistically, at all.
It was all in the air. Cassandra
was
the solitary self. But if one could see – in the reality that restricted one – the nevertheless shining and extensive possibility.… Not sum up, or give in, too soon, above all.… There was a sense in which Cassandra’s pursuit of a sense of glory was right and proper, if only it were at all related to the real world.

Julia had rarely had so many consecutive abstract thoughts. They were exhilarating – releasing her from Thor, from Ivan, from the Bakers. I could have called that novel, she thought,
A Sense of Glory.
It could have been about the way Cass sees Simon – intensely meaningful, unreal. The telly does have that effect, anyway. I know that from my own feelings when I see Simon on it. He seems substantial, important, as I was never sure he was, in the flesh. An idol, with a whole, ungrasped, different reality depending from him. A world with another world contained in it.

Now, I could write this novel about a woman with a dream world that – extends her possibilities. And she introduces a real man into this world, and understands – really understands –
one aspect
of him, this way. Julia tripped over someone’s tricycle, smiled, apologized, hurried wildly on. And the dream world, which is beautiful, is quite shattered when she meets him again after a long time.

I’ve got to have a television idol, it’s such a good image for this sense of glory. I couldn’t use a naturalist.

She thought of Father Rowell, and Cassandra’s deference towards him, and then of Simon’s first television appearance and the priest who had preached the subsequent programme. I could make this man a television clergyman. Not a jolly one. Sententious – like Si – not simply chummy. Even God-like, until you knew him. He’d be clever, but not that clever. He wouldn’t understand her, of course, he’d subtly fail her.… He’d be, for her, absolute limitation and infinite possibility.

No, this is mine, she thought, and headed out of the square and down Southampton Row. She reached the public library in Theobald’s Road in a state of tense euphoria, and took a lift to the Reference Library. There, seated in reasonable
anonymity in a crowd of Afro-Asian students, she started on what was to be the most rapid and least altered piece of work in her life. It almost, eventually, wrote itself; she had much less work to do on it than on her more apparently artless and confessionally chatty pieces. She spent the next few weeks solidly working, closed away in the library in every spare moment.

Cassandra’s Journal.
April.

Tyranny of objects. There is a point beyond which the apparent antagonism of certain chairs, or paper-weights, if dwelt on, ceases to be ludicrous. As though they might crush or crowd out. This may also be true of human beings. I find myself assuming hostility in, for instance, Miss Barton, because of the configuration of her upper lip – somewhat swollen – taken in conjunction with the dark hairs at her mouth corners. Now, it is not these physical facts which menace, clearly – they must be simply a focus for my resentment of hostility that I assume is in her. There is, of course, real hostility. Yesterday she found it necessary to suggest that I had been too severe in refusing a reference to Gillian Sachur. A foolish girl. I had thought my decision out with care. She has a right to her view. But she expressed it with hostility, and concentrated her grim look on my hands in an obsessive way I could not like.

I must nevertheless keep in mind a distinction between Miss Barton, and chairs, or paper-weights.

It could be argued that I resent the simple idea of reality conveyed in the solid presence of chair and paper-weight. I am particularly disturbed by glass objects – increasingly, since that serpent has been in my possession – because they contain, being transparent, the suggestion that they are not simply solid.

Here is the paradox of all vision. But let it be remembered that these objects have weight, as well as transparency. Not only surface, and heaven beyond the surface, but ponderous
weight. I do not express this clearly. There are degrees of reality to be apprehended in all objects, at any given time, and degrees of capacity, in ourselves, to apprehend them.

‘All objects,
as objects
, are essentially fixed and dead.’ It is this fixed, dead weight that makes them hostile.

Forms of glass. The pane of glass, for instance, through which I see the garden from inside my room. Last night, looking out from a lighted room, I saw the moon. The pane of glass reflected the yellow glitter of the lamplight; it was thus seen to be solid. But when I stood between the lamp and the glass, the dark circle of the shadow of my head contained the pale sliver of moon. Here is an image of vision – a chain of alternating light, reflected light, and darkness. One sees, through a darkness which is a shadow of oneself – a reflection of one’s absence – this pale light, which is itself after all, visible almost always only in darkness, a partial reflection – off another dead, dull, solid surface – of the sun’s vital unseen light. One creates an emptiness, a darkness, in which to see it, by interposing one’s own solidity between the bright lamplight and the apparently solid glass surface which reflects it. And thus negates all solidity. It is all in the head, in my head.

Another form of glass. Mirrors, of course, are not transparent; they are on the contrary, an assurance of solidity. There is an absolute difference between the recessive caverns or corridors of mirror reflected in mirror, with my face repeated idiotically on the perpetuated thresholds, and the receding open space my shadow, as it were, illuminates through plain glass. I do not need, or like, the reassurance of mirrors; they do not reflect the hollow in the skull; they close off ways. Mirrors are partial truths, like certain putative works of art. Like almost all works of art.

The television screen is a form of mirror. Mirror of our desires, of our ways of seeing.

J., last night, spoke on the screen about the relationship between art and life. I do not consider her an authority on the subject. The screen emphasizes the bones on her skull; overemphasizes; she appears more clear-cut, less soft, less fleshy
and speaks more decisively, although with little gestures of appeal to the invisible audience. A mirror-image of myself – a certain nod we have in common is emphasized, also certain tricks of speech, which have persisted and are more easily remarked in magnification.

‘Why do you write, Miss Corbett?’ they asked her. ‘What drives you?’ She replied, after some encouragement, as I understood her, with much smiling, that she did not write either to ‘express herself’, or to persuade her readers of any social or moral truth, or ‘to put forward a view of life’. She wrote, she said, compulsively, in order to understand events, in her own life, or others’. ‘Would you say that your novels were autobiographical, Miss Corbett?’ they asked her. ‘They have been. The book on which I am working at present is not autobiographical.’ I suppose this may be the usual response. They asked if it helped her to control her life; she replied that it did not. They continued: ‘And when you have finished a book do you feel triumph – satisfaction – or disappointment?’ None of these, apparently. J., facing the camera squarely, honest eyes blazing, ‘No, no, something much more neutral. A sense of release. And renewed vigour. I feel ready to start all over again on something else.’

I thought of Deborah, and her complaint that she is disposed of. She has cause.

With J’s television appearances I have a sense of a diminishing reflection. With his, on the other hand, I have the illusion of a world infinitely extended through dissolving glass, the Looking Glass. This must be untruth, and dangerous. Somewhere, in an unseen jungle, across an ocean and a continent, a real man, Simon, whom I love, is at this moment paddling through real water, or grubbing in real dirt, or losing real red blood from hands scraped, or cut, or sucked by flies. Here, now, I walk through unreal creepers, I study unreal dirt and water.

What I see on the screen is an image, but an image, not only of myself, but of a real man. And some of my thoughts about him are not fantasy, but knowledge. What he says, what he shows, I am occasionally, by careful attention, able to
know and predict. I can accurately describe plants he must see that the screen does not show and I do not see. More than that, I know to a certain extent what he is afraid of – how well I know it I shall never tell – and what he thinks. Love is attention, though that is only a part of the truth. Between fantasy and reality are infinite degrees, and I bring myself, occasionally, to the illusion (or more) that we do share an experience or a thought. If, by denying my own solidity, I could see him as he is? Even so, the glass barrier is solid; screen, window or looking-glass. If it were not solid? No. Solidity is fact, is fact, it cannot be translated into pure threat.

Between fantasy and reality are the dreams. Things we touch, involuntarily, in dreams; things we possess there; untrodden paths we tread. This changes us. This changes also our relation to the dead weight of objects. Occasionally – I do not speculate how – what I have dreamed, and written down, he has afterwards said. I have dreamed other things he has not said. He spoke, tonight, about a moulting snake; I had heard it before, I knew it. He connected this release, as in my dream, with vision.

First he showed the animal lying torpid; then the splitting of the skin; then the animal leaving the skin – like oiled silk, like a length of live water. He was left with the stiff, semi-transparent husk, on which the scales seem harsher and larger. He said, ‘If we had to depend on markings alone it would be impossible to distinguish snakes by their exuviae.’

During the period immediately before the shedding of the skin the colour of the snake changes; there is no gleam; he showed this, and pointed out that the black areas on this particular snake were a ‘dead blue’ and the creamy under-surface and olive rounds were as though covered with an opaque, milky skin. He showed the eyes, covered with a hardened slightly flaking film. They were expressionless, simple surface, reflecting nothing. He said it was not true that snakes were completely blind when moulting. The eyes are covered with a raised lens, which is also shed. ‘Normally,’ he said ‘snakes have very fine vision. This is a stumbling block to those
who believe they lost their limbs, eyelids and ear openings as a result of burrowing, since most burrowing animals have their vision greatly impaired. Moreover this snake is a climber, and sees acutely.’

He related this torpor and partial blindness to the connection of the snake’s moulting with myths of renewal and rebirth. ‘Before any new life, or achievement, or insight,’ he said, ‘I have found there is a necessarily dull and stupid period.’ I hate these simple analogies; he would have made a good florid preacher and his snake an admittedly excellent
exemplum
– but the preaching specification destroyed the resonance of the complex image. Our life
is
, but not in that tone of voice, an image for something greater than its simple facts.

He watched the animal move away in silence. It is as though each coil were separately impelled from behind, and the whole body, contracting and driving, a series of interconnected, fluid, uncertainly purposeful, tentatively directed movements after the searching head. I watched him feel and fold the discarded skin. I know what he felt. We die in pieces and patches, and dry up and are renewed – for a time, for a time only. He said, ‘This wet, glistening sheen won’t last long, of course, the skin dulls and hardens.’ There is a new contusion just below his left ear, or at least, so I think: it is possible, but unlikely, that he did not present his left profile last time.

All facts, all facts, all solid facts and objects of our life are always themselves and more than themselves. And so I pursue, professionally, self-indulgently, any metaphor to the death, fantastical or truth-revealing, who knows which. I am driven to confess, the Church seems to me (to its discredit) to diminish him and his serpents, and the threads of thought I had believed securely fastened to feel along seem suddenly loose, floating wild and unattached. I connect and connect, meaninglessly, J’s ‘sense of release’, his rebirth platitude, the hostility of the objects round me, and my need for release from them. Is this a game, or an action? Is that a real question?

I live in two worlds. One is hard, inimical, brutal, threatening,
the tyranny of objects where all things are objects and thus tyrannical. The other is infinite: heaven, through the pane of glass, the Looking Glass world. One dreams of a release into that world of pure vision and knows that what would be gained would be madness; a single world, and intolerable.

Simon’s embrace (if not impossible) is a function in this world of what has happened, what is misunderstood, other embraces. In that world, a release.

All I know is that at all costs the pane of glass between the worlds must not be broken. It serves, maybe, the function of the lens over the snake’s eye. It seems, ideally, that the two worlds should run into each other; but practically, one knows this would be destructive. I must remain isolated.

Enclosed by light in a glass cage, outside a glass box containing light:

An image for myself? An animal formed probably by burrowing, without ears, limbs, or eyelids, deaf, unable to gesture, with acute, unvaried vision?