The Great Fog (22 page)

At last, the process was self-completed. For it only confirmed my own inner realization—the wonderful agreement now established between inner instant expectancy and the outer event—when the voice said at my side, “So, and so only, can we unloose the tension, resolve the complex, unravel the knot of the self. Now you are nearly free, and your frame is almost ready to be your expression and not your limitation. These buildings, like all supreme architecture, are a therapy in stone. Here is wrought the static pattern, here is laid down the plotted course, which, if followed by the living creature, will set it free. The Greek, being less entoiled, could deliver the body-mind by sight alone, and he who brooded on the faultless proportions of the Parthenon might in a static silence know liberation—though when he moved it vanished from him, as he passed out of the bright sharp shadow that it cast into the confused twilight of a world of growths. But our race, which wrought the lancet arch, worked with it because it required a stronger therapy and also demanded a more radical and abiding change of life. We must move, if we are to be delivered, and we must aid ourselves in our escape not only by sight but by sound, not only by the written score but the heard melody. Gothic truly may be mocked and marked down, if judged only by the eye. There, perhaps, the Hellene is the highest. But pure sight can never deliver those more conscious of their captivity. If you would worship, and be saved by your worship, you must do so where your soul can work out its salvation, can draw itself up out of the pit of self-consciousness into which it has fallen by that threefold cord of the senses. Kinesthetic and full of conflict, auditory and longing for resolution of discord: you need to do more than to know by seeing: you must see, hear, and feel, and, so knowing, be able to act on your knowing. Then your knowledge will be a springing gnosis in your very body and its bones.”

Perhaps he spoke all that speculation in a single phrase; perhaps he said nothing—only thought what I was thinking; perhaps he did not think rationally but only held a frame of thought, a state of mind, while I filled in with an argument our actual experience. Perhaps it was necessary we should pause while I rationalized, soothed with a shift of logic the last questionings of my analytic mind. In any case, I know that after a few moments, which I have so to account for, my memory, and what we did, again becomes quite definite. He moved out into the nave, and I followed. But we did not walk down it. We started out, going northeast, so passing through the third arcade into the north aisle, then curving away from the north wall, repassing through the nave's north arcade, so, describing an arc, arriving at the entrance to the rood screen. Thence, turning westward, we repeated the pattern in reverse and on the south side, so finding ourselves once more back under the tower arch.

“So the great nimbus is described,” the voice said as we paused. “Now not only are you opened by the releasing rhythms which have unshackled you but you have taken on and endued yourself with the rhythmic form of this great place, and it is open to you.”

I understood enough to know that he was right. Again we set out on another stage of our vast journey, a journey so long that beside it all the traveling I have done in my entire lifetime has been merely shuffling from one room to another. We strode together silently; this time abreast and straight down the length of the nave, till again we were at the rood screen entrance. The gate was only latched, I think. It yielded to his touch and closed with a whisper behind us. The sweep of heavy curtain hanging behind also seemed only to indicate the silence lying ahead, as we passed into the sanctuary.

I have never heard such silence and I believe that it can never be brought about by relaxation or emptiness. The desert of sound, like the desert seen by the eye, is not a complete void or even an unrelieved level. Rather, they are randoms filled with irrelevant incident. The normal silence of the deserted place is, I might almost say, easygoing. It lies relaxed; and, in a great cathedral, when all contemporaries have gone (and I have been in many at such hours), there is an atmosphere of unvigilant carelessness. The great body, with its bones of masonry, its flesh of timber, its skin of lead and glass, lies relaxed and, as a man stretched in reverie will shift or sigh, off and on, so the giant frame will shift and creak. The silence in that sanctuary on that eve of September the thirtieth was not the absence of sound. True, no sound reached us. The small town pressed upon the narrow close. Granted that night had fallen, yet people would still be up and about, discharging that constant vibration of small penetrating noises which accompany human movement.

When I listened for them, I was aware of the positiveness of the silence. It was around us like a wall. It was as emphatic as though someone had plugged the ear with a finger or, rather—and this, I believe, may come near to the actual truth of this intense experience—as though the place had become a breathable vacuum in which a man might live, but into which and across which no sound wave could move. Once again there occurs to me the analogy of the two light waves meeting and resulting in apparent darkness. The place was holding its breath in some tremendous expectancy and, by an intensity of attention toward some approaching event, was holding off every possible present interruption. Some supersonic intensity was here, in the presence of which no auditory sound could be sustained. We ourselves seemed to make no suspicion of stir as we moved forward.

I could see the tall shade of my companion move to the right. I followed closely. We had passed into the stalls. The choir is not large. Now that the console of the new organ has been brought down into the stalls, the organist's bench almost abuts at right angles on to the dean's. I felt a hand raise me into this east-facing stall. I was aware that my companion was moving on to take his place at the keyboard. Then the immense atmospheric pressure of positive silence seemed, not to lift (for no other sound of any sort was audible), but, rather, to fissure, and through this momentary cleavage, as in a midnight thunderstorm the line of the lightning will slit the blackness, I could hear the words, “Remember, all is movement, all is sound. If the Living Word becomes too insistent, join your hands, and you will be able to sustain it.”

I had not the faintest intellectual notion of what was about to take place. But I realized, subconsciously—perhaps more with my body than with any part of my mind—that now I had been, as it were, not only “wound up” within my own frame; that all its wandering, streeling impulses and swayings, all my divagations, chatterings and skiddings, had been brought into perfect spin like a sleeping top, but, also, that in the process of so preparing me I had been moved toward the heart of the energy—whatever it might be—into which I should, when my revolutions were sufficiently high, find myself ready to be engeared. I repeat, I do not know whether this was in any way a mental, or a conscious, or a paraconscious notion. My whole memory of this is, I believe, far closer to animal memory than to human, and by that I mean that as, for example, an elephant is not always thinking over the wrong a cruel keeper did it, forty years ago, biding the time when it may attack him, but, on the contrary, suddenly seeing him again the two times link up, the years of forgetting are forgotten, the wrong is as fresh as on the day of its infliction, and the keeper is trampled, though meanwhile he may have become kind and have no fear, so I, if I am to remember what took place, I can do so as clearly, but only if I also dive into the physical mood I then felt going below the surface sequence of my normal memory.

So I stood as though waiting for a service to begin. I can, however, remember that I did feel a slight halt of surprise when, after a few moments during which I drew myself to attention, my guide, whom I could sense rather than see in front of me, did not, as I had come to expect, sound a note. I strained my ears, but they only sang their own inner high-pitched hiss under my effort. And this was stopped suddenly, not by sound or by sight, but by feeling. A violent pain shot through my palms. I snatched up my hands from the broad smooth desk on which they had been resting. They were stung as though by a hornet. I could have wrung them with the keenness of the pang. I can best describe the pain by saying it was the kind of sting a bat which has failed to give “drive” to the ball that has been struck gives to the hands which are wielding it, and makes the wielder drop it as though it were a live terminal. In my pain I clasped my hands involuntarily, as one holds an injured limb. Immediately the atrocious stinging left them. Then I recalled my guide's counsel.

I stood like this, in the silence, a little while—enjoying, I suppose, the warm relief that follows a spasm of agony. Then my attention began to leave my hands for my feet. My soles were experiencing a gradually increasing crepitation—a “pins-and-needles” effect. It was not until then that I realized that the whole framework of the massive stalls must be vibrating intensely. Before I was able to think about this, and to wonder whether I was in any danger, I heard a whisper, “Now it is safe. The note has climbed past the danger point.” Again I put my hands on the desk before me. Only a pleasant, curiously invigorating warmth flowed up through my arms and down through my feet. I realized that a tide of ordered sound must be pouring out from the organ, a supersonic melody that, passing the ear, spoke directly to one's whole physical frame. I was awere of a steady surge of harmonic vitality running through the whole structure of the building—as an electric current, finding no resistance in a coil, rushes smoothly in a completed circuit. Gradually the surge seemed to become a pressure. I felt it go deeper into me, as it were, as though, before, it had been only a surface tide or, at most, a foreign fluid which made its way through my body alongside my own human currents. It became a beat—faster than the wave beat of sound and pulsing behind the ear drums. It was a ripple that flowed faster than the arterial flood. A warmth that seemed to dilate them glowed in my hands and feet. I felt framed and held in my own massivity. I could not be sure I was holding the desk and standing on the floor. Something solid but fluid, flowing but firm and encompassing—as strong and undeflectable as a jet of water thrust with ten thousand tons' pressure—seemed not merely holding me but, equally, containing and contained by me.

I gave myself up to the sensation—the feeling of being no more than an eddy in a vast stream which formed, sustained, and would elucidate me.

Self-consciousness, however, reasserted itself. I found myself becoming perceptive, visually perceptive—I was experiencing that separation of the sense of sight, the human dominant sense which gives rise to “my point of view,” from the undifferentiated sensum into which I had been swept. I saw the whole choir—not outlined in light—rather the shafting, arcading, capitals, spandrels, the springers, ribs, vaulting, bosses, were all transparent and, like an immense phosphorescent billow, glowing with an inherent flush that shone throughout the translucent mass. But this effect, though strangely wonderful, could not hold my attention against the invasion of another discovery, smaller but more personally startling. I was looking at the choir, there could be no doubt, but whence? Equally, there was no doubt—from some level little short of the capitals themselves—in fact, some twenty feet from the choir floor, above the canopies of the stalls.

My misgiving did not, however, become fear, for no sooner did apprehension begin to be felt by me than (as though a lowering of some psychic temperature checked the exultant current flowing through me and bearing me up) I began to settle, subside still further down until I could feel the hard floor under my soles again, and the burden of my weight upon my feet. That this was the explanation of the flow and ebb I felt, that it was an objective experience, I could gauge further. For no sooner did I feel this physical reassurance (and so my momentary fear left me) as I felt it go, once again I was raised in this current of energy. Now, too, I began to be aware of another sense responding. As I was already seeing—or, rather, some apprehension, which is above and beyond sight, was responding to the energy which was now informing every stone and timber around me—so, in the same enhanced or extended way, I now began to hear.

I was listening to a note which was running through the whole vast building's structure, and to which the great hollow place was responding like a struck bell. I was not reaching out to sense it, as though it were a note at the very limit of my apprehension. On the contrary, it was closer to me than the marrow of my bones: my bones were flutes through which the note was being blown. It was a diapason so pervasive and profound that one realized it must underlie all silence, were one but put in key to apprehend it. Terrible and fascinating, one felt that all one's wish was only to continue listening to it, though it was like a stanchless tide sweeping away, moment by moment, the poor sand and silt of one's personality. It resembled, in some way, a long exultant cry—an unending exclamation.

I know how banal
that
sounds; but let one who has heard that inexhaustible exultation say which was the stronger passion of the two it roused—fear or desire. No other feeling, no surprise, no critical detachment was left. Does a man overwhelmed by a simoom remark that the shriek of the rent atmosphere is a trifle off-pitch? If there had been about it the least hint of possible exhaustion, fluctuation, weakness, resignation, or even content, it would have seemed, perhaps, a sigh or moan as of the whole universe in travail. If it had had the slightest overtone of unsatisfied longing, it would have become the voice of an annihilating agony. But it had in it no trace of human weakness—either of the weakness of hunger or of that of satiety—the longing for a goal or the satisfaction in finding it. It forged forward, insatiable and inexhaustible, in the tide of its outpouring. It was, though certainly not a blind thing, the great dark wind that blows ceaselessly through the kindling stars, which are the blown embers which the primal Breath moves and makes glow.