Astonishing the Gods

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Astonishing the Gods
was written in the summer of 1993. It was a lovely summer and I was fasting at the time. The novel came out all of a piece, handwritten, in a black casebound notebook. Then it was carefully shaped afterwards.

Ever since I was a boy I wanted to write a book like this one. I never thought I actually would. There are certain books that have an oblique conception. Notions that have lived long in the mind emerge when the inner and outer worlds align for their births. The catalyst for this birth was a curious incident on the Edgware Road in London. That and a lingering sadness for the souls of black slaves re-dreaming the world at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. How to redeem that suffering. The Edgware Road incident itself is unimportant; it was the question I asked of myself because of it that was significant. The question passed into the inspiration, and a meditation persisted, a meditation on invisibility.

The theme of invisibility has been famously played in many keys. Invisibility as history, invisibility as the paradoxical condition of redemption, interested me. In a world blinded by the visible might not its opposite be fruitful as a contemplation of the human condition?

The philosophical fable, from Rasselas to Candide, reveals how much we dream of quests to unknown places.
Astonishing the Gods
is of that family. In it everything is allusive, indirect – something I learned from Giorgione. It is written with light but fringed with darkness.

The hero of this novel finds what he did not seek, and goes where he did not intend to go. As I did in writing it. I set out to find one thing, but found another. Maybe what seeks us is better than what we seek. Maybe accidental discoveries constitute the magic heart of creativity.

Little Venice, London

August 2014

It is better to be invisible. His life was better when he was invisible, but he didn't know it at the time.

He was born invisible. His mother was invisible too, and that was why she could see him. His people lived contented lives, working on the farms, under the familiar sunlight. Their lives stretched back into the invisible centuries and all that had come down from those differently coloured ages were legends and rich traditions, unwritten and therefore remembered. They were remembered because they were lived.

He grew up without contradiction in the sunlight of the unwritten ages, and as a boy he dreamt of becoming a shepherd. He was sent to school, where he learnt strange notions, odd alphabets, and where he discovered that time can be written down in words.

It was in books that he first learnt of his invisibility. He searched for himself and his people in all the history books he read and discovered to his youthful astonishment that he didn't exist. This troubled him so much that he resolved, as soon as he was old enough, to leave his land and find the people who did exist, to see what they looked like.

He kept this discovery of his recent invisibility to himself and soon forgot his dream of becoming a shepherd. But in the end he didn't have to wait till he was old enough. One night when the darkness was such that it confirmed his invisibility in the universe, he fled from home, ran to the nearest port, and stole off across the emerald sea.

He travelled for seven years. He did all the jobs that came his way. He learnt many languages. He learnt many kinds of silences. He kept his mouth shut as much as possible and listened to all the things that men and nature had to say. He travelled many seas and saw many cities and witnessed many kinds of evil that can sprout from the hearts of men. He travelled the seas, saying little, and when anyone asked him why he journeyed and what his destination was, he always gave two answers. One answer was for the ear of his questioner. The second answer was for his own heart. The first answer went like this:

‘I don't know why I am travelling. I don't know where I am going.'

And the second answer went like this:

‘I am travelling to know why I am invisible. My quest is for the secret of visibility.'

Those who worked with him in those years saw him as a simple man. Actually, they didn't see him at all.

After travelling for seven years he arrived at a strange port. The town seemed empty. The houses were silent. He disembarked and found himself in a great square patterned in black and white, as if it were a giant chessboard. The air was tinged with an orange glow. There was an eternal motionlessness about everything that made him feel he had wandered into a disquieting dream.

The town was empty, but he could feel that there were people all around. He fancied he heard an occasional whisper in the air. He was so disturbed by the strangeness of the town that he wandered deeper into its riddle. But the town was a riddle without an answer. Everywhere he heard tinkling bells. Happy voices laughed in the gentle wind. Even their laughter was a kind of secret. In the far corner of the square he heard sweet voices reciting the ineffable names of things. He was so overcome with the invisible enchantments of the town that he didn't want to leave.

He had been following the musical voices of young girls whispering unseen beneath the flavoured moonlight of that mysterious town, when he heard the blasts from the ship calling him to return. The moonlight, glowing on the chessboard patterns of the town's magnificent square, filled his heart with a beautiful solitude that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

As he turned to go, tearing himself unwillingly from the limpid voices of the girls, he was suddenly touched with the scent of honeysuckle. He started to weep. A haunting sonata, yellow and lilac amongst the dazzling illusions of the quivering chessboard, started up far behind him. He wept as he listened to the flute melodies piping out forgotten moments of his life.

He was still weeping when a gentle voice, out of the fragrant air, said:

‘Why are you crying?'

He started. Not seeing who was addressing him, but not overly disturbed by it, he replied:

‘I am weeping because I don't understand the beauty of this island.'

‘Then why don't you stay?'

‘But how can I stay? I can't see the inhabitants. I don't even know where I am.'

‘You shouldn't worry. The inhabitants can't see you either. At least most of them can't. You are just a voice to me. But everything is in your voice. Besides, you are seeking something that you've already found, but you don't know it. Such are the causes of unhappiness.'

‘Where is this place?'

‘It doesn't have a name. We don't believe in names. Names have a way of making things disappear.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘When you name something it loses its existence to you. Things die a little when we name them. I am speaking only of this island. I cannot speak for anywhere else.'

‘So if you don't want things to disappear what do you do?'

‘We think of them. We dwell in them. We let them dwell in us. You ask many questions: if you are so interested why don't you stay and live with us and learn our mysteries?'

‘Thank you, but my ship is calling me. I must set sail, or I will never find the things that made me leave my homeland.'

‘You may learn much here.'

‘But I may never catch another ship again. I don't know how frequently they come here. And then I would miss the sea and the journey.'

‘The sea is always there, ships come when they will, the journey always continues, but this island is discovered only once in a lifetime – if you're lucky.'

The ship's blast sounded again, calling three times in stern warning. He shuddered at the sound. When the third blast fell silent, he listened to the plaintive wind. He listened to the flute choruses threading the cypress trees. He listened to the sound of water flowing among the wreaths of acanthus leaves in the marble fountain.

Lost in wonder, he stared at the white harmonic buildings round the square. He noticed their pure angles, their angelic buttresses, and their columns of gleaming marble. He inhaled the fragrance of childhood, of sweet yellow melodies, and of ripening mangoes. When a woman's voice began singing from the spire of the blue temple of that land, the wind itself became silent. He noticed how all things invisible seemed to become attentive to the glorious singing which poured a golden glow into the limpid moonlight. He found himself smiling. When the singing stopped, and a new happy silence lingered, he decided to stay.

The ship set sail without him. He watched as it rocked its way over the green waters. The port was still deserted and all over that island the silence became deeper. As the ship disappeared over the horizon, time changed around him. Slowly, he ceased to be aware of himself. One moment he was in the middle of the shimmering chessboard square, and the next moment he found himself wandering over streets of polished glass, wandering through alleys paved as if with stained-glass windows. Light poured upwards from below, as if the island's relationship with the moon and sky had become inverted.

The voice that was his guide was silent; it was only the instinct of another presence which calmed him as he walked through the serenity of the island.

He was struck by the buildings. They were magnificent; they were bold; they had astounding facades, with stately columns and conch-shell capitals and graceful entablatures. The pedestals displayed a lofty and balanced sense of proportion. The buildings, all apparently empty, loomed everywhere. They attracted the lights, they gave off an air of grandeur and majesty, and yet they seemed to hang in mid-space. They appeared to rest on nothing, suspended. Even the great churches, with their golden domes and their moody spires, seemed to be made of an ethereal substance. The buildings, in their perfection, looked like some kind of dream-created illusion. He was puzzled by the monumentality of things and their apparent lightness.