Achilles (9 page)

Yet the boy who took shelter in his body like an orphan was the bravest he'd ever reared. Quick too. Nothing stupid in his courage. Whatever Achilles did he did with the whole of himself. That was the power of it. If he stopped, he was still and the world fell upon his senses. When he moved, nothing restrained him. Other students were impatient of botany and biology in their longing to be heroes. The child Achilles loved the small life of the earth. He watched it, listened to it and applied himself to it. He who had little time or respect for the sons of Atreus honoured the kingdoms of termites and bees, was humble before the properties of plants.

Achillea:
an excellent vulnerary which Achilles discovered. Chiron named it after him.

Now he feels old, tired, ridiculous. Still to be lugging this hoofed and hairy body around when so much of what he has cherished and shaped has gone. As if, without knowing it, Achilles had been his own quick heart out there.

Curiosity used to be enough. There is always more to know and more to find. More plants, more minerals, more processes, more ways of doing. More stars, and more to come.

(He cannot know that Zeus will one day make stars out of him: send Night crashing through his body, cleansing and purging it as no vulnerary could; punching his flesh through till all that is left is the pegs from which his frame once hung: the stars he becomes, aiming his bow for ever in the Southern Hemisphere.)

He would like more than anything to die in the ordinary way: lie down because his back and his limbs are tired, the walls of his vessels eroded with use.

He is not even a proper immortal. He cannot change shape. He obeys the mortals' laws of time and unfolding. Patience – hardly a divine attribute – is what he knows best and what he has attempted to teach. He is simply a mortal unable to die.

And so he goes on as before. Doing what he does as well as he can: learning, teaching, making, healing.

Interest – a tiny, unextinguishable flame – quickens again.

Each day as he goes through the forest he examines the growing trees; sees what they may be:

A bow,

A spear,

A bowl,

A table,

A quiverful of arrows,

Sticks for his beans to climb up.

In spite of the wound he received from Heracles' arrow (an arrow made perfectly straight, perfectly fledged, just as he'd taught) he still makes bows and shows his pupils how.

What you need for a bow is wood, horn and sinew. Horn and sinew dress the skeleton of wood. You have to catch them, maybe using a bow made with parts of the creature's forebears. You will use the whole creature – eat the meat, cure the hide or the fleece, make glue from what's left. The glue you will use to attach the cut horn to the wood.

The more venturesome the animal, the tougher and better the sinew.

Once you have separated sinew from carcass you need to get rid of the fat and the bits of flesh that still adhere. Chiron scrapes these off with a blade and hangs what is left from a tree so birds can peck off the remaining fat.

You don't want to be handling greasy sinew.

Leave it to dry in the sun.

Now, take a wide mallet and beat the sinew, using a hard wooden block or a smooth rock as your anvil. Beat it until it has laid itself out in separate fibres, like coarse hair or the fibres of certain trees.

You can comb it, so the tangle of fibres lies orderly.

The best sinew for this job is the calcaneal tendon of any wild animal. Later called the Achilles.

Ash wood cleaves easily. It is both tough and elastic and has the capacity to absorb repeated shocks without communicating them to the handler's hand. Which makes it useful for oars, axe handles and bows. A good choice for a spear.

RELAY

Relay

‘I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds … According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily.'

‘I am afraid I shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.'

‘Nothing is so bad as want of health – it makes one envy Scavengers and Cinder-sifters.'

‘I cannot bear flashes of light and return into my glooms again.'

‘every man who can row his boat and walk and talk seems a different being from myself – I do not feel in the world –'

‘if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.'

*   *   * 

‘P
AY ATTENTION
gentlemen', says Astley Cooper, ‘I will show you. This specimen has been prepared already.'

The body lies on the table covered by a sheet, like a piece of best furniture to be protected from the sunlight.

Cooper nods to his assistant who obliges by turning back the top part of the sheet to reveal the grey and stubbled face of the dead man.

Keats leans forward. He doesn't want to miss a thing.

Cooper has taught that the physician should be possessed of the eye of an eagle, the hand of a lady and the heart of a lion.

He tips the head of the cadaver so that the chin touches the chest.

‘Would you hold him thus,' he asks the dresser.

He proceeds to lift the upper portion of the skull as if it were a lid. Placing his fingertips at the rim of the cut skull he begins to draw the brain out; tenderly, as if he were easing a child into the world.

The man has been dead for some days. Cooper had the latest batch delivered to his home where he sometimes prepares his teaching specimens. It is autumn, no longer hot, so it will last a bit longer before the smell becomes unbearable.

The lifted brain sits on the table, the delicate skins of the arachnoid and the pia mater holding its shape. A grayish pink; pasty; coiled like a trellis. Or a rope of uncooked sausages.

Not as fluid as the brains of his father when they leaked out onto Finsbury Pavement.

‘I could not have lifted the brain thus from the skull without careful preparation. I ask you to suggest why.'

A few answers are forthcoming.

‘The dural membrane, sir. You have to cut it away, remove the falciform and tentorial membranes from their attachment to the periosteal membrane lining the skull.'

‘Quite right sir. Anything else?'

Someone suggests that nerves and blood vessels would have needed to be cut.

‘Well done, well done. What else?'

Keats hesitates to speak. He has little confidence in his knowledge in this area but is prompted by an almost sympathetic sense of disturbance within his own brain.

‘The hypophysis sir,' he mumbles. Then, ashamed of himself for lack of boldness, he recovers his lion heart and speaks out, ‘The hypophysis. It sits in the
sella Turcica
– the Turkish saddle – of the
os sphenoidis
– you would need to sever the stalk before you could lift out the brain as you have done.'

‘Very good,' says Cooper genially. ‘Very good.'

He remembers the
os sphenoidis
from Bell's engravings. It reminded him of a giant butterfly with ragged, opulent wings. He touches his temples to feel the furthest reach of the wings that span his head. Feels –
Already with thee
– his own capacity for flight. The
sella Turcica
where the little bulb of the pituitary sits snug for its ride is well named. It also resembles an altar: a small table to bear a holy object.

At the centre of the brain, a sanctuary.

That night Keats dreams he is riding a pale stallion. He is galloping recklessly along a high ridge which overlooks a plain outside Troy.

He is seated securely in his fine Turkish saddle.

Like a saddle.

Like an altar.

(That euery like is not the same, O Caesar,

The heart of Brutus earnes to thinke vpon!)

The cold sac of coiled, dampish tissue was once a brain very like his own. In structure at least. His own warm hand – with which he writes, eats, ties his cravat, clasps other hands, pleasures himself etc. – is like the hand of him there, the cadaver whose right upper limb they'd seen displayed: nerve, muscle, tendon, bone. There are differences of course – variations in thicknesses, curves, placements – there was the man whose stomach had sagged right down into his pelvis. Differences in size. But even that great fellow who had gone to such lengths to ensure he wouldn't be made an anatomy of when they hung him – even his huge bones were of the same number, the same design, the same function as his own.

… the same and not the same.

‘It is very unlike you my dear Keats to be so peevish.' How can I be unlike myself?

I was not myself at the time.

*   *   * 

T
HEY SAID
he must hurry down to the new picture gallery at Dulwich to see his likeness. Charles Cowden Clarke his old schoolmaster was the first to see it. Soon it was an established joke among his friends – ‘Go to Dulwich to see Keats done by Rembrandt.' Keats went and looked.

It looked like a self-portrait though not, to him, a portrait of himself. Eyes facing directly ahead as they would to meet a mirrored gaze; nothing formal about the subject, though the auburn curls look newly washed and brushed (you can almost feel their softness). They lie like a fur collar against the russet jacket, giving it an air of richness. The jacket only a touch more red than the hair.

A study in reds.

The red of the jacket is picked up by the red of the parted lips. The subject seems to be breathing through them. The eyes are lustrous and dark (the same colour as the beret which stands as a smoky halo against the varying browns behind). The lines below them suggest tiredness and, perhaps, delicacy.

Hazlitt says, ‘It is one of those portraits of which it is common to say “that it
must
be a likeness”.'

Keats is conscious of not being tall. At one dismal gathering he heard someone say, ‘O, he is quite the little Poet.' Insufferable.
‘You see what it is to be under six foot and not a lord.'

Severn observes that Keats is ‘called up into grave manliness at the mention of anything oppressive'; seems ‘like a tall man in a moment'.

Not a tall man. Like one.

‘I never feel more contemptible than when I am sitting by a good looking Coachman – One is nothing.'

The only time Keats appears small is when he is reading.

The large Achilles (on his prest-bed lolling)

From his deepe Chest, laughes out a lowd applause

As Keats reads these lines he feels a little flood of satisfaction. He strokes them appreciatively with his thumb. The way the accents fall, on ‘large', on ‘prest-bed' – you can feel the weight of the man sinking into his bed, the words pressing, like the printer's ink, into the page. He takes his pencil to underline, to
double underline
this place. His chest eases, as if it were his own deep chest freeing itself.

‘Ah,' he breathes in a low voice, ‘that's nice.'

He triple scores the margin too, making this place, this book, his own.

*   *   * 

M
ID
S
EPTEMBER
. A day so balmy and sweet it would be a crime to stay indoors. Keats has been walking on the Heath for about an hour. Walking and composing go well together, the one rhythm feeding the other, imagination stretching and strengthening with his limbs. Often he sets out on a walk with a particular problem or sticking place in his mind and he thinks he will work on it as he goes. Then as he walks his mind empties and he becomes a window for what's around him, the problem he'd set out with forgotten.

This morning he has stopped walking to sit for a while on a hospitable hummock. Leaves are falling and he watches them: the way the air holds them as if reluctant to let them drop. A lock of hair hangs there too. Like another leaf, red-gold. And because the air itself is gold in this light, and warm and comfortable as exhaled breath, it falls slowly.

Keats watches it float and fall, fascinated by the way the sun catches the various strands and the way in which they are obviously separate yet still adhere together. By friction? Habit? Attraction? The lock, made of so many independent entities, has itself an identity.

He holds his hand out, waiting for the lock to fall onto it, which it gently does – unlike leaves which often elude him at the last minute. How nearly weightless it is. He can hardly feel it (though he could feel it if it moved – if a girl were to brush his cheek, his lips, with a little tuft of her own hair). He takes from a pocket a small book – a volume of Cary's Dante – slips it in between the leaves for safe-keeping.

He forgets about it until later that day when he takes out his Cary again and it falls open at the same place. It is the passage where Dante sees Achilles in Hell. In the second circle, with Paolo and Francesca. With the lovers.

Keats runs to Brown's desk and seizes a pair of scissors; tugs down a piece of hair from over his brow and cuts it. He places the two side by side. They appear exactly the same: the same deep auburn. The floating hair looked lighter in the sunlight as Keats' hair will sometimes flash gold in the sun.

… the same and not the same.

Whose head shed this? Whose vital force gave body and colour to this hair so like his own? Hunt surprised him the other day with a real authenticated lock of Milton's hair. Keats wrote an ode on it.

When I do speak, I'll think upon this hour,

Because I feel my forehead hot and flush'd –

Even at the simplest vassal of thy Power –

A Lock of thy bright hair – sudden it came,

And I was startled when I caught thy name

Coupled so unaware –

Yet at the moment, temperate was my blood –