Tales and Imaginings (11 page)

‘Took them out of one rocky place and put them in another. And I cut the seed-potatoes and I put them in a sack, and I caught the donkey and I got my spade

‘And did you milk the cow and cook yourself a rasher?’

‘I did, I did, and I weaned the calf and I castrated the bull …’

‘And did you wash your bawneens and put them to whiten on the wall, and did you make a jug of buttermilk by putting three potatoes to soak in water with a pinch of flour?’

‘I did, woman, I tell you I did every damn thing! Oh, it’s hard for a man on his own, with the stony land and the lonely house and the terrible weather that was in it since I was but seven years old, and the weasels spitting poison at you and the rats perishing with cold in the winter and coming down the chimney on you …’

‘And how could the rats be coming down the chimney and it stuffed with jackdaw nests for many a year?’

‘Oh, they’re cute, the rats, I’m telling you: and once they’re in the house it’s damn hard to get them out again!’

‘You’re wandering from the point.’

‘Playing for time, actually. I know what happens now though.’

He spat on his hands and rubbed them together. ‘I went down to the garden, I spat on my hands, and I took up my spade. And I hadn’t but put the spade into the scraw when I felt a weight on it. I looked, and what should be sitting on the blade of the spade but that same stone! I said to myself, I said, “You’re still shook from that dream. Pay it no heed,” and I threw it down by the wall and put my spade to the work again. And do you know now what it was that was on the spade this time? Nothing but that very same stone I was after throwing down by the wall a moment since!’

‘That was a remarkable fact, then, Seamus.’

‘Oh, it was, it was. A very remarkable fact. ‘That’s not the doing of man or God,’ says I to myself, ‘and if it’s the other fellow that’s
in it, I’m thinking he’s put a curse on me!’ So I took my spade and my sack of seed-potatoes and my donkey, and I went back up to the house considering what was to be done. And it’s little good that considering did me at all at all, and whatever I tried, like charms and prayers and the priest foostering about with holy water, it was all one. Every morning from St Patrick’s Day out, for seven weeks but a day, I took my spade and my sack of seed-potatoes and my donkey, and I went down to try to set that garden.’

‘I’ll say this much for you, Seamus, you’ve got persevatience.’

‘Persevatience? I’ve never heard anyone here use such a word; have you?’

‘No, it was a man from the Gas Board when we were living in Camden Town. You must have been out when he came. He had a lovely soft accent. He spent an hour struggling with a bolt on the back of the stove, and when it came off at last he said, “I may not have much, but if there’s one thing I do have, it’s persevatience.’”

‘Well, I’m reluctant to admit persevatience to the canon, not having heard it with my own two ears, as they might say. It’s not part of the speech of this island, I’m sure.’

‘Oh, all right then, it’s your story. Do you mean you’ve heard every phrase you’ve used from an islander, then?’

‘I think so. I’ve piled them up rather, but that’s your fault,
leading
me on into parody. Now we’re nearly at Dara’s, so let me get on and bring it all to a good round conclusion. Every day I went down and I tried to set that garden, but every time I put my spade into the earth the stone came and lay on it so heavy I couldn’t hardly lift it, and every time I stooped to put a seed-potato on the ground the stone popped up just in the place I was intending to put the potato. And if I should stop for a moment to take my rest and straighten myself up to look around me as you know a man does when he’s working in the fields, just looking to see what kind of appearance might be on the sky, wouldn’t that same stone be leaning against my
ankle and trying to break it on me! And in the latter end I knew I would never have those potatoes in, and that I was driven out of my own bit of land, to be a man of the road, from that day out.’

‘Well timed! Here we are.’ They had arrived at the foot of the path leading up to Dara’s house. ‘And his light’s still on; shall we go in?’ But the light went out as they paused at the gate, and the house seemed to withdraw into the vague hillside. The woman folded her arms on the top of the gate and rested her chin on them, looking up at the silent house.

‘Something about this place makes one quite pious,’ she said. ‘I feel like calling out “God between us and all harm!” like Dara does.’

The man leaned his back against the gate, facing the sea, his shoulder against hers. He gave her a nudge. ‘Come on then, what do you think of the story?’

‘Pretty good; where did you get it?’

‘I made it up as I went along. Don’t you believe me?’

‘You must have had some idea, when you introduced the stone.’

‘In the back of my mind, maybe. When I was up on the hill this morning trying to photograph all the little fields and crooked walls, I was thinking that this landscape is the result of one act, endlessly repeated: picking up a stone and putting it aside.’

‘Or throwing it, or rolling it, or levering it, or breaking it up with wedges, or working round it and piling other stones on it if it’s a big one, or carving a gravestone out of it, or giving up and going to live in Boston.’

‘Clever girl, how keenly you feel the poetry of my conception! One elemental gesture, then, ever renewed, against the dogged
resistance
of the land.’

‘Ah, now I understand your fable, oh Master Storyteller! And the rain has got into my boots, so let’s go home the quick way.’

As she led the way up the path to the main road, she asked, ‘Didn’t you say you tried to set the garden for seven weeks but one
day? Was that just a fine phrase or did something happen on that day?’

‘Ah, yes, I’d forgotten that bit. Let me think. On that day, do you know now what I did? I put the stone in a sack, and me and a couple of the lads we took a currach and we rowed across to St MacDara’s Island. Look, that’s it over there.’

He made her stop and turn round to peer into the rain towards the shapeless gloom of the Connemara coast. ‘And I made the pij-, the pigil-, the piligrimage, to the church, and I left the stone on the bed of the saint. Then we rowed back, me thinking that the stone would be happy to rest there and the lads drinking a sup of poteen they had in a jar. There was no wind, but the rowing was hard, for as you know the sea is stiff-like till the May storms come and stir it up’ – miming a great mixing process with two clenched fists – ‘and it got harder and harder till it was plain to me at any rate we were nearly stuck fast in the water, and what with the lads passing the jar between them and me crossing myself, we weren’t making much of a fist of the rowing. So between the hops and the jumps it was dark by the time we reached the strand. The two lads leaped out and were off to the pub, and I started to pull the currach up onto the sand and it getting heavier and heavier on me. Then what should hop out of it and run off along the shore but that same stone I’m after telling you about for many an hour now. And when I heard the rattle it made and it climbing the wall into my garden, I knew that the saints in heaven have no power over the devil, in this parish at any rate. And that was the day I left my home, etcetera, etcetera. And another thing I’ll tell you about them seven weeks: all that time it never got any lighter than that!’ – pointing up into the impending night.

‘Really? Didn’t the neighbours complain?’

‘They didn’t, to give them their due. I suppose that was on account of the darkness being a kind of a subjective phenomenon
pertaining to myself, like.’

‘And the mysterious rider, was he a subjective phenomenon too? Or was he really the Devil?’

‘An evil spirit anyway. Evil, that is, from the point of view of the man with the spade, of Dara, let’s say.’

‘Well, do you know who it was? You must; you made up the story.’

‘I can only guess.’ He stopped, and raised his hand in a
mysterious
gesture that bade her hear the sighing of the rain across the bare hillside. Then he announced solemnly:

‘It was the insulted, dispossessed, inconsolable and unforgiving Spirit of Aboriginal Wilderness!’

And they both fell silent on that phrase.

Something invisible is filling the street. The buses go through it without even making it tremble. Something is hiding in the air between you and the evening sunlight on the shopfronts opposite. Wait upon it. The air, the moment, has become – what? an asking? For an instant you almost have it: a word. Can you read it? A name, even. No, not a name, a feeling. Familiar as your coat, as your skin. But coming from another direction, seen from another point of view; that’s why you didn’t recognize it – a sense of yourself, your own closest awareness of your own existence – but coming from elsewhere?

Turn away from your place in the bus-queue – and it is as if everything else had turned slightly away from you. The pavement no longer meets you openly; the distance between you and the
bus-stop
has come adrift from you and is
floating loose in the air, wavering down the alley between the camera-shop and the
tobacconist’s
. Follow it. The trace is clearer down here. But it’s not a scent, not in the nose or the mouth, eyes or ears. Closer than skin, but not in the head. Now you are among crowds of people again, outside a cinema, but it doesn’t lose you for a moment. Certain beyond thought, as your hands when you join them have no need to fumble for each other. Go into the pub. It persists, through the cigarette-smoke and beer smell and the air tangled with
conversations
.
Your usual pub; it is entirely usual for you to drop in on the way home. You stand at the bar, get your half, turn to your usual corner. But someone is just sitting down there. Put your beer down on the same little table and sit down opposite him. You both immediately get up again and take off your coats; you both fold them and place them beside you in the overcautious way you have often smiled at yourself for.

Your jackets are the same colour.

For no reason you both look up and around as if someone had called your name, or as if a window had blown open and a
different
air had brought an elusive memory. He is left-handed like you. He smokes the same cigarettes. Even his matchbox is the same as yours lying opposite it. Suddenly you want to go. You are reaching out for your cigarettes and matches with one hand, and gulping at your beer; your eye stares straight into his eye; his other eye like yours is hidden by the beer-glass, his hand is frozen in the act of grabbing his cigarettes and matches. You are both rigid with fear.

You are identical. Clothes, face, ways of sitting, standing,
looking
– the visible likeness is so complete you want to beat your fists against it, smash open its hollowness. But from this man’s fingernail you could, you know it, read that his name is the same as yours; his parents, schoolteachers, friends, colleagues, wife even, are yours.

You must speak first; you dare not think why that is
so
essential
, but you must. You put down your glass, so does he, and before you can get your throat to form a sound, he speaks. That seems so terrible to you that you miss what he says. Ask: ‘Do you know what I’m going to say?’ The answer is all-important.

‘You must answer my question first,’ he says.

‘What was it? I didn’t hear.’

He leans back in his chair. ‘So you don’t know my thoughts?’

He smiles, he appears confident, relaxed; but his hand is
trembling
. You seem to have lost an advantage, though. Grip the
situation
before it slides into chaos.

‘Listen,’ you begin, ‘we have to find an explanation. I want to prove you’re an illusion but I know already that you are trying to prove the same thing about me. So really I accept that you’re not an illusion, that I’m not mad.’

He laughs almost hysterically. ‘If you can accept that I’m not an illusion you must be mad. Two identical persons? Who would believe us? I accept that you are mad – you’re a mad illusion!
Hallucinations
like you should be locked up! Dodging in here,
grabbing
my place …’

‘But you’re in my place!’ you cry. Then you begin to laugh with him. Immediately you wonder if you can ever stop. This person opposite you is shaken by the sounds leaping in his throat; listen to your own laughter in his body, frightened, crying for mercy, so that you have to stop. He was watching you through his laughter and stops as soon as you do. He puts a knuckle up to his eye; your hand is moving up too; make it fall back on the table. Say: ‘No, you were joking. That’s my impulse too. Mental shock, it sends up the dust and makes me sneeze. No, of course, we, that is
I, don’t have a “usual place” here. As often as not I sit somewhere else. “The usual place,” I say to myself, as I sit down at whichever table happens to be empty …’

‘An odd little flag put out by the idea of self, I suppose. Now that I’m calmer, I …’

‘… you see how much we learn about ourselves so soon!’

‘Ourselves, such trivialities?’

‘So the situation will have its uses …’

‘… even if it does end with one of us committed to an asylum and the other to bottomless unbeing. But the wind from that pit blows cold even here; I think our “idea of self” is going to need all the flags and rags it can clutch around itself! Explanations, can we get through this without them?’

‘A word would be steadying: Madness? Schizophrenia?

‘Not that, at any rate. A waste of labour, to bring forth oneself again.’

‘And in any case I don’t feel any loss of substance in my
personality
. Rather the opposite. So we rule that out; we are left with brute numerical contradiction. But wait a minute, did you accuse me of sneaking in here before you? In fact you were first, by a few seconds.’

‘Was I? If so, I’m a little reassured. I’m in the lead, if only by a moment or two. You are the shadow and I the substance. You play function to my variable, that’s it; you are a determinate being, your action is only response; mine is freely creative, unforeseeable even by myself.’

‘You think free will is perpetual improvisation? Then perhaps I’m the theme you improvise on, and where does that leave you? No, stop improvising these metaphysical escape-clauses. If the
situation
is unbearable let’s end it simply. There’s a girl over there I know slightly. We’ll ask her to tell us if there are in fact two of us here, and if not, which of us two is here. What about it?’

‘You would trust a third person to make that judgment? It seems a desperate step to take. But as you say, the situation is
unbearable, so go on, tip it over into farce; go and ask her to have a drink with us.’

‘Why then, you admit I know her better than you do?’

‘Not at all, but I do think your readiness to involve a third
person
isn’t as characteristic of me as my reluctance.’

‘You’re right. The argument did occur to me, just a second too late.’

‘So you’re the one who’s running slow now! But I shan’t
capitalize
on it; a clock’s a clock for a’ that. And neither will I try to
abolish
you with the fact of your having uncharacteristic impulses, that you are not a clock in fact, fast or slow. No, this isn’t the terrain for
easy victories. We have to accept that our story is true, we can’t
reason
each other away; there are two of us, in the most material sense. And on second thoughts

‘Yes, the acid test of external reality can be applied any time we feel equal to it or feel it’s relevant. Your second thoughts are that we shouldn’t run away from this extraordinary situation. We should explore it as far as we dare. So let me buy you a drink – since I’ve got just as much money in my pocket as you. Or are you afraid?’

‘Of course I’m afraid. But anyway we can’t both go home and present Mary with two husbands, so I’ll have to stay till you wear off, or vice-versa. You know how she hates unexpected guests.’

‘And you’ve forgotten the chops she asked you to get on the way home. I’ll have to get ham or something from the shop on the
corner
.’

‘Look, we’re a long way from home, from anywhere we
recognize
, even. We’re at an extremity, or beyond one, of what is
conceivable
. So why

‘Why cling to my shopping list, you’re going to say? I should throw away the inessentials, stop worrying about being home for dinner, stop this defensive joking, face the dangers of the uncanny region I find myself in? But that would be to falsify the strangeness of the situation. If I had made some epic journey outwards or inwards from the commonplace, to wherever it is that parallel lines are said to meet, and had there met you, then perhaps I would be strengthened by the march to the point of being able to take this confrontation as a fulfillment, an achievement even. But in fact you are an interruption, an irruption, into the everyday itself.’

‘The “midst of life” in fact. Yes, you are right. And equally you shouldn’t make me forget where I am or why; all I have towards an answer for the question you “interrupt” with is my hidden
assumptions
. So this desperate grasping at the threads that lead back into yesterday and forward into tomorrow – that’s not just a panicking
away from the crevasse that has opened up in today; it’s our only hope of locating that crevasse in relation to our everyday selves. We have to remain ourselves; we have to recognize our everyday voices again, a little heightened by the occasion perhaps, and understand their trembling.’

‘Right, but that “everyday” needn’t be the common day we share with everyone else. In these circumstances it can be the most inward of our “everydays”. But doesn’t it strike you as odd that we do recognize each other’s voices? I didn’t recognize a recording of my own voice, once, because it came to my hearing by a different route. One would expect it to be the same with any sort of
awareness
of oneself.’

‘You think the fact we so readily admit we are identical really proves we are not? For my own tape-recorded voice might
conceivably
sound to me less like my true voice than does someone else’s recorded voice; is
that your argument?’

‘That was going to be it. But I would counter it by admitting that I do listen to my voice as it comes back to me from things; it’s part of my way of life. I would define myself as being, in my better moments, or at least my more defined moments, my own
experiment
; as using my life as a tool of my understanding of life.’

‘You might define yourself to me like that, not to anyone else. You would be afraid of life’s revenge! But it’s true enough. And that “voice”, my attempts at exhorting things to clarify themselves, which I listen to so intently as it rings back, cracked and cloudy, off the world – now it is turned back on its source; I hear all its
hesitations
and evasions. And so, that question you interrupt with?’

‘Wait a minute; let’s just trace back one of those threads first, back to the material world, part of it we know or thought we knew, simply charting our courses as physical entities. Now, you said that I arrived first …’

‘No, you said it. Or did we both? If someone were recording
this conversation we could count back the alternations of the
dialogue
, odd, even, odd, to find out if
“the present speaker” or “his interlocutor” said it. But the “somebody recording the dialogue” – reality’s legal representative – in this case doesn’t appear.’

‘… which makes it tempting to override the rights of reality now the pressure is on. Nevertheless we’ll try to honour our
commitments
. So, one or other of us came through that door first, bought half a pint of bitter first, paid, turned and sat down first. Then we saw each other. At that moment we were quite separate, but identical, persons, and have been all the time since. Now when did this twinning take place? Only one of us left home this
morning
; we were alone, that is I was alone, in the office all day. Same in the bus queue. What then?’

‘You know what then. That welling-up of uncertainty, that strange averted face on everything – as if one impossibly saw how things look when one isn’t looking at them. That emptying feeling that all the radii along which my world flows in to me were
suddenly
converging elsewhere; as if my centre of gravity had been stolen away, and I was falling out of myself towards it. Of course it often happens that I suddenly decide to have a drink before going home and I dodge down here; but never before, that turning-
inside-out
of space; it pulled me down like a whirlpool.’

‘Yes, that was it. But I was still alone all that time – or maybe I felt that too was inside-out, and everyone else was collectively “alone from me”, if that makes sense.’

‘And things only came to rest in some precarious equilibrium when we saw each other …’

‘… as if that stabilized the falling apart.’

‘It all rests on the knife-edge of our seeing each other?’

‘And if we turn away from each other again?’

‘Dare you try the experiment? Of course we are no longer so naïve as to think that one of us would disappear, and that it could
be me, flung into the dustbin of nothingness. No, but we – I speak for myself – we would feel a sense of loss, and now I want to delay it.’

‘We get on well then, you and I, at least under the liberating drug of impossibility. We have a lot in common; everything, in fact. All our friends are mutual friends. A pity the condition of us
seeing
each other is
that we don’t see anyone else or let anyone see us.’

‘Clearly it’s doomed to be the most secret of friendships. We meet in a ruin; I mean the ruin of our everyday logic – though it is amazing how much of the system stands even after the
foundation-stone
, the concept of identity, has been wrenched out. Or does that just show that the whole structure is
as flimsy as theatrical canvas anyway, and we had never noticed? So we meet in a ruin of some sort; it stands, but a glance from an outsider would bring it down.’

‘And it halves us in its fall.’

‘… which means, at present we are doubled? By taking thought a man can double his stature?’