Raw Material by Alan Sillitoe
Geometry exists so that the fringes of chaos can be surveyed, and the remotest zones of confusion explored and classified. All mysteries are encountered, but few have their meanings revealed, and even then they cannot be understood. The route pencilled on the map is like a question mark upside down.
60
The conscious and the subconscious come twice in the same sphere, and Man’s soul is as complete as the zones and seasons of the earth.
There is a consciousness in the northern hemisphere hemmed in by the cold subconscious of the Arctic, and by the subconscious of the heat between Cancer and the Equator.
There is a consciousness in the southern hemisphere bounded by the subconscious of the Antarctic ice and the subconscious of the tropics between Capricorn and the Equator.
Thus there is more than one consciousness, and more than one subconscious. There is a consciousness trapped between the heat and cold of the northern hemisphere. There is a consciousness caught by the heat and cold of the southern hemisphere.
There is a consciousness and a subconscious in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the earth and of the soul.
Under this vast conscious-subconscious crust is the seething reservoir at the centre of man’s earth-soul that fuses both the conscious and the subconscious, and from which all the facets of the personality emerge—or do not, depending on how it is treated.
Consciousness holds itself between ice and heat, the Pole and the Equator in both north and south. My subconscious is of the ice and finally frozen too deeply to become tractable. My subconscious is of the tropics, and only rarely cools itself enough to be understood. The consciousness in both cases keeps the two walls of the subconscious apart. The subconscious in both cases wants to cross over the zones of the consciousness and meet, but the integuments of the consciousness prevent this. At the same time it wants to pull in the subconscious on to itself, but though it may wish to draw them together in a merging of the whole, this is impossible unless one’s consciousness has the equivalent in spirit of Samson’s superhuman strength—who was said to be so strong that he could uplift two mountains and rub them together like two clods of earth.
This is the universe of the shaman, the geography of fire and ice, the equating of strength in the arm with air that comes out of the mouth. The conscious zone between the borders of the subconscious is a region both turbulent and temperate, fragile and sensitive, prone to freeze with the ice or melt with the heat. The membranes of the heart can burst because of an increase of one degree, or split when it goes down a shade, the sensitive zone that draws all the subtleties of chills and fevers, fits and miseries, screams and dreams against it, tissues through which everything can be learned, and in which one feels the grail and mystery one clings to for fear of falling down the side of the earth and going still living into the blackness.
Thus the conscious, that which is supposed to be on top and in sight—the obvious; and the subconscious, that which is hidden and of which we are not often aware—the unknown and menacing. They have their own geography, not the normal top-and-bottom Freudian kind that I might have learned to live with if I had not been born to search after my own truth, but a more complicated, geopsychic flux of forces, of a globe whose maps show a constantly shifting tectonic surface.
This chart of the soul indicates that the ultimate truth will never show itself, no matter how long the search goes on. To penetrate one subconscious is difficult, but to cut a way into two is not feasible. One moment they help each other, the next minute they compete and intermix, hinder and pull apart.
The double meeting of ice and heat generate their own phosphorescence, a forked illumination from two batteries, twin sources of power. Though one light makes for clarity, two create confusion. They cross-dazzle and blind, and closing the eyes in order to escape it only sends you back into the dark, in which the heat fights the cold in an eternal battle of opposites.
From this prism of the soul grows understanding. This system of the conscious and the subconscious increases confusion. There is a purpose in everything. It is either an excuse for not being able to get at the truth, or it is done in the belief that truth can only be pulled from chaos, not from the false truths already in existence. Having a subconscious in the ice of the northern pole, and another in the intense heat of the Equator, I am able to draw on more than one consciousness, and be fed by more than one subconscious. One hemisphere of the conscious-subconscious is inhabited by the Sillitoe ethos, and the second contains that of the Burtons. The devils of both fight the angels of both.
This might be sure proof of madness—if I believed in madness, which I do not. It is said that someone who is mad has so many souls in the greater soul that he is unable to control them properly. They heave and push, like the hemispheres closing in, and one soul hasn’t the knack of playing off the other as it has in a person who can contain them.
The circle never breaks. It explodes from time to time and takes us forward, but constantly reforms. Chaos is the source of life and richness. Order is not possible without chaos. It is the combustible charge that energizes the arteries of the mind. Through such raw material one can travel back to anyone and any condition, and forward without fear into another chaos, to touch the heat of more raw material for a moment before returning laden with this loot of the spirit.
One must do it without fear, and to get rid of fear one needs to find the truth. The nearer we get to the truth, the further away it is. Like trying to reach the most distant star of the universe, there will always be another beyond it. Our fingertips are not made of the right stuff to touch the end of all experience, nor our wide-open eyes to see it. We can only put forward stepping stones to extend the limits of our understanding into as many colours and complexities as it will take without being crushed in on itself, set a compass towards infinity, but not into it; go in the pursuit of truth but never get close enough to touch it.
61
I sit and write at a somewhat unstable table with one of Burton’s horseshoes in front of me, and Edgar’s open-faced Gommecourt watch to keep the time. The third and small hand on the dial of it pushes the seconds behind as it hurries on an endless donkey-like journey into the future. There’s no doubt about the truth of that.
The table is old and rickety, found in the garage among lots of rubbish abandoned by the last people who lived here, but I like its large rough surface on which I spread notebooks and papers, ashtray, inkwell, and bric-à-brac lavishly. It is dangerously active with splinters, but I can spill ink over it with impunity, and it stretches the whole length of the double window, to face trees and bushes beyond.
It is inevitable that I should wind back to my workroom in a quiet country house—not always silent when a gale blows as if to bump it flat. To spend the time while trying to write I have my playthings of gramophone and tape-recorder. On another table is a high-powered black and magic box of a wireless receiver that weighs 60 kilos and can barely be carried from the removal van at each change of house. An ex-service communications set, it brings in wonderfully clear and amplified morse so that I listen to wireless-telegraph stations, and write down telegrams from ships to see if any information suggests a story or poem.
It never does, of course, though it is a relaxing pastime. A 100-foot wire running up the side of the house and across the garden to a tree helps me to hear Peking or Australia, Japan or the Voice of Zion from Jerusalem—loud and clear—giving the illusion of being in touch with the world.
The mechanical effect of taking morse at telegraphic speed persuades me I could still be useful as a radio-operator. Even though trained for it over twenty years ago I read it as fast and accurately as ever. Perhaps I come from families where economy of sweat and effort was paramount, and nothing taken in as a trade or job should be wasted, because it might one day come in handy and show its value again. However it was, the basic morse rhythms never left my brain, and I don’t suppose they will, having been programmed on to it. The symbols for certain letters being absolut
e facts, maybe I am attracted by it for this reason. The alphabet has a sound rhythm, a drumbeat construction as it cuts through the ether and forces my brain to change it into words, makes my hand decipher it like a form of magic, which it is though, as with all magic, it is only the result of prolonged learning. At dusk, when birds send out territorial and mating calls, I hear their sounds as more signals. Each bird has its own set letter of the alphabet going like a superheterodyne spark among the long shadows.
After nightfall and the curtains are drawn I can switch on and listen to Mendelsohn or Prokofiev, Mozart or Shostakovitch or Elgar, or the rich and sombre voice of Chaliapin singing his peasant songs and arias. There is also a record given to me in Russia, with Tolstoy reading a few paragraphs of War and Peace, and Yesenin and Mayakovsky reciting their poems, and Maxim Gorki giving a speech. Though I only understand a few words, their spirits fill the room.
A small rack of treasured and personal books includes a copy of the Bible given to me before the assembled school for ‘proficiency in Biblical knowledge’. I was embarrassed at having to go up and get it, but it is a volume with a fine soft leather cover which I always have with me. Years ago I tore out the New Testament and threw it away, so that only the Masoretic text remains. I have read the old books several times, and prefer their poetry to the propaganda of the Christian part, leave myself with a thousand pages of great verse, from the awesome openings of Genesis to the ultimate words of the Prophets, an exaltation of life to comfort me through all existences.
Other titles in my bookcase of specialities are dictionaries by Skeat and Halliwell, Isaac Taylor and Bardsley; as well as Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and a couple of works on the history and topography of my home county. The dozen or so publications of my own I keep well away, not because I have anything against them, but I don’t want to be reminded of their existence while I’m writing something new, so that I can treat each book in progress as if it’s my first novel.
Apart from bookshelves, the wallspace shows maps like beds of flowers: a street plan of Nottingham, a large-scale trench-map of the Gommecourt salient in 1916, marked by the advancing death-lines of the Sherwood Foresters, a relief chart of Deception Island, and a topographical map of Israel flanked by the Mediterranean and the Jordan River—different regions I cannot shut my eyes to.
Books and life and maps and ink, and time to write and think and dip in my pen before pulling it across the paper with my left hand: can any truth come out of that? A writer writes what he likes, and it is vital that he does so—anything from theology to pornography, from politics and comics to sapphics and classics—no matter what world-system he lives under. Every man’s truth is his own secret, but the only secret he can afford to have is that he has no truth.
62
Feckless Celts wandered across the face of Europe from the Caspian over the Carpathians, from Bavaria to Brittany, only to be pounded into a dull and baffled astuteness when they reached Albion, from which they soon lost the will to get free but not the picturesque desire to do so.
I was surprised to read a recent newspaper article in which some true-blue English person was quoted as saying that as far as she was concerned all Celts were foreigners. Being more than half Celt I thought there might be some truth in it. Indeed I hoped there was, for such a way-out Little English idea could explain the yearning for travel I have often too plainly felt—the need to get away from it by rail, road, or even bicycle, to walk out on foot if the worst came to the worst.
The pictures reflected in the eyes of Joseph and his brothers were of landscapes not people. Their religion was freedom, but because society totally stamped on it they could only worship in secret, like a resistance movement that had lost all hope, as if realizing that direct access to the life they craved would blow them either to pieces or into paradise. When the raw material started to eat its own raw material they would move, but somehow their courage never allowed them to start chewing. Freedom pointed in the wrong direction, and their lack of courage became a means of self-preservation. They needed to communicate with themselves but had no way of achieving it.
The generous and lecherous spirit of the eighteenth century, crushed for more than a hundred years by the descending death-trap ceiling of tight-arsed Victorian hypocrisy and repression is at last trying to break free. It did not begin in Joseph’s life, though his melancholia came from thinking it was time to start pounding off the lid, but not being able to.
At school I was once taunted as a foreigner because my name was thought to be Italian. I did not mind this, though fought successfully against it since I refused to be humiliated for any reason. My father’s idea that the family way back in time had come from Italy was only another of his flights of fancy. How my surname originated I’ll never know or care about but, foreigner or not, if I were split down the middle by God’s axe the Celtic part of me might happily turn into the Eternal Wanderer and walk purposefully away, glad to get out of this island and into the world before all Celts were rounded up and marched off to the gas chambers.
In a way I was flattered by the woman’s remark. Having wanted to leave home and country almost from the cradle I nursed a secret ambition to be a foreigner, to become a man without nationality or passport but with the freedom to drift wherever I wanted. Shed of all ties and connections I would go my way alone on the travel-lanes of the world, a ghost of selfishness wallowing in so much land he eventually sees no people in it, and whom in turn nobody sees, a man so gripped by his infatuation for the form and smell of the earth that all love goes from him except inordinate fondness for himself.
It is an impulse to be resisted, though to desire such freedom is innocent enough because it keeps me imprisoned in an inner turmoil conducive to the act of writing. That is one way of doing it, after all. On the other hand, to actively pursue that vast and empty form of liberty would be an escape route into the death of the soul. Such a release from the anchored spirit could be done as a religious exercise perhaps, but since I am not one of the faithful it would turn it into an act of negation. My main purpose on earth is to be myself, which means getting closer to people, not away from them.
I circle around and spiral down, conjuring more dreams out of myself, numberless demons, becoming more empty, or more calm. If I believe my spirit is formed by my parents and their families—plus that alchemical mixing that can never be explained—the zig-zag switch-about for truth must go on, not to fill the emptiness of which I am not afraid, but so that the more void the emptiness becomes the more alive it gets with that potent electricity of the mind that keeps a person free of cant, lies, and tyranny.
When the different streams of my grandparents come flowing in I feel indeed that I am the product of a mixed marriage, the crux of two merging deltas, and if I ask in this white heat why I became a writer I say that the poetry comes out of the Burton side of the family, while the force that pushes it through is drawn from my father’s.
Everything which concerns these various relations has some truth, whether or not I was directly involved in it. To detail the sum of these items is a circuitous way of pointing out traits which might bear on my own half-buried character, and with this in mind it is impossible to say which particular person I favour or ‘take after’, though I plainly attached myself most to those who had some skill and knowledge to impart: to Frederick the designer and artist, and to Burton the farrier.
63
Deception Island lies in a particularly eruptive area of the Antarctic Ocean and is all that remains of a volcanic cone suddenly pulled under by some insufferable whim of the earth. Most of it, except for whaling buildings and a scientific station, is composed of mountainous ash and ice, peaks, crevices, and sheer walls dropping into the sea.
The crater is not quite a full circle of land. It is broken at the mouth, part of its lip having gone with the general subsidence, leaving a gap so that its final shape is of a distorted horseshoe—a long way from the perfect specimen done by Burton in his pr
ime which presses down the pile of written sheets on my table.
As unpredictable as a volcano, Burton created a primeval shoe-tool for the sacred horse, with iron that had been scraped out of the earth itself. Taking his piece from the fire he pounded the burning ore and made sparks live and die, plying his weight over the shape it was going to be. As he gripped the tongs and held his hammer, no thought entered his mind to spoil the meeting of anvil and nascent horseshoe. They came together with the built-in skill of his craft, producing an object he would set against the finest of any other smith.
During the Great War, when meat was scarce, Burton would not eat the horse-flesh which was sold in the shops, nor allow it into the house. The idea of it horrified his family as well, as if to consume such meat was little different to cannibalism. He loved horses, having in his trade learned to control them more thoroughly than any woman. His hatred of the canine species (above all other animals) may have been because the dog was once a wolf, and the mythical enemy of both horse and man.
When man tamed the horse, blacksmiths made iron shoes for it, drove the nails in through seven holes for each foot, making twenty-eight all told—one for every day of the complete moon—that the horse pressed to the earth as a testament to man’s dependence on the soil and the glowing guardian of the night sky.
Blacksmithery was a deified trade, honoured by Vulcan and Tubal-Cain. When he made sparks fly a blacksmith was said to be in touch with the underworld, risking his soul by working in iron and having traffic with the Devil. Thus the blacksmith can be related to poets, who are also in thrall to moon, earth, and underworld, and consume themselves utterly by the medium of their work.
The horseshoe on my desk is a well-made artefact of seven holes for seven nails, and my consciousness tames the wild horse that the junction of the two disparate psyches lets loose in me. Seventy years later the horseshoe Burton made lies heavy and cold, its perfect form pressing down the phrenetic scrapings from the back of a brain that Burton would never have connected himself with—aphorisms, observances, slick clippings, stray poems, and fragments that could not have come anywhere but out of a Burton.
60
The conscious and the subconscious come twice in the same sphere, and Man’s soul is as complete as the zones and seasons of the earth.
There is a consciousness in the northern hemisphere hemmed in by the cold subconscious of the Arctic, and by the subconscious of the heat between Cancer and the Equator.
There is a consciousness in the southern hemisphere bounded by the subconscious of the Antarctic ice and the subconscious of the tropics between Capricorn and the Equator.
Thus there is more than one consciousness, and more than one subconscious. There is a consciousness trapped between the heat and cold of the northern hemisphere. There is a consciousness caught by the heat and cold of the southern hemisphere.
There is a consciousness and a subconscious in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the earth and of the soul.
Under this vast conscious-subconscious crust is the seething reservoir at the centre of man’s earth-soul that fuses both the conscious and the subconscious, and from which all the facets of the personality emerge—or do not, depending on how it is treated.
Consciousness holds itself between ice and heat, the Pole and the Equator in both north and south. My subconscious is of the ice and finally frozen too deeply to become tractable. My subconscious is of the tropics, and only rarely cools itself enough to be understood. The consciousness in both cases keeps the two walls of the subconscious apart. The subconscious in both cases wants to cross over the zones of the consciousness and meet, but the integuments of the consciousness prevent this. At the same time it wants to pull in the subconscious on to itself, but though it may wish to draw them together in a merging of the whole, this is impossible unless one’s consciousness has the equivalent in spirit of Samson’s superhuman strength—who was said to be so strong that he could uplift two mountains and rub them together like two clods of earth.
This is the universe of the shaman, the geography of fire and ice, the equating of strength in the arm with air that comes out of the mouth. The conscious zone between the borders of the subconscious is a region both turbulent and temperate, fragile and sensitive, prone to freeze with the ice or melt with the heat. The membranes of the heart can burst because of an increase of one degree, or split when it goes down a shade, the sensitive zone that draws all the subtleties of chills and fevers, fits and miseries, screams and dreams against it, tissues through which everything can be learned, and in which one feels the grail and mystery one clings to for fear of falling down the side of the earth and going still living into the blackness.
Thus the conscious, that which is supposed to be on top and in sight—the obvious; and the subconscious, that which is hidden and of which we are not often aware—the unknown and menacing. They have their own geography, not the normal top-and-bottom Freudian kind that I might have learned to live with if I had not been born to search after my own truth, but a more complicated, geopsychic flux of forces, of a globe whose maps show a constantly shifting tectonic surface.
This chart of the soul indicates that the ultimate truth will never show itself, no matter how long the search goes on. To penetrate one subconscious is difficult, but to cut a way into two is not feasible. One moment they help each other, the next minute they compete and intermix, hinder and pull apart.
The double meeting of ice and heat generate their own phosphorescence, a forked illumination from two batteries, twin sources of power. Though one light makes for clarity, two create confusion. They cross-dazzle and blind, and closing the eyes in order to escape it only sends you back into the dark, in which the heat fights the cold in an eternal battle of opposites.
From this prism of the soul grows understanding. This system of the conscious and the subconscious increases confusion. There is a purpose in everything. It is either an excuse for not being able to get at the truth, or it is done in the belief that truth can only be pulled from chaos, not from the false truths already in existence. Having a subconscious in the ice of the northern pole, and another in the intense heat of the Equator, I am able to draw on more than one consciousness, and be fed by more than one subconscious. One hemisphere of the conscious-subconscious is inhabited by the Sillitoe ethos, and the second contains that of the Burtons. The devils of both fight the angels of both.
This might be sure proof of madness—if I believed in madness, which I do not. It is said that someone who is mad has so many souls in the greater soul that he is unable to control them properly. They heave and push, like the hemispheres closing in, and one soul hasn’t the knack of playing off the other as it has in a person who can contain them.
The circle never breaks. It explodes from time to time and takes us forward, but constantly reforms. Chaos is the source of life and richness. Order is not possible without chaos. It is the combustible charge that energizes the arteries of the mind. Through such raw material one can travel back to anyone and any condition, and forward without fear into another chaos, to touch the heat of more raw material for a moment before returning laden with this loot of the spirit.
One must do it without fear, and to get rid of fear one needs to find the truth. The nearer we get to the truth, the further away it is. Like trying to reach the most distant star of the universe, there will always be another beyond it. Our fingertips are not made of the right stuff to touch the end of all experience, nor our wide-open eyes to see it. We can only put forward stepping stones to extend the limits of our understanding into as many colours and complexities as it will take without being crushed in on itself, set a compass towards infinity, but not into it; go in the pursuit of truth but never get close enough to touch it.
61
I sit and write at a somewhat unstable table with one of Burton’s horseshoes in front of me, and Edgar’s open-faced Gommecourt watch to keep the time. The third and small hand on the dial of it pushes the seconds behind as it hurries on an endless donkey-like journey into the future. There’s no doubt about the truth of that.
The table is old and rickety, found in the garage among lots of rubbish abandoned by the last people who lived here, but I like its large rough surface on which I spread notebooks and papers, ashtray, inkwell, and bric-à-brac lavishly. It is dangerously active with splinters, but I can spill ink over it with impunity, and it stretches the whole length of the double window, to face trees and bushes beyond.
It is inevitable that I should wind back to my workroom in a quiet country house—not always silent when a gale blows as if to bump it flat. To spend the time while trying to write I have my playthings of gramophone and tape-recorder. On another table is a high-powered black and magic box of a wireless receiver that weighs 60 kilos and can barely be carried from the removal van at each change of house. An ex-service communications set, it brings in wonderfully clear and amplified morse so that I listen to wireless-telegraph stations, and write down telegrams from ships to see if any information suggests a story or poem.
It never does, of course, though it is a relaxing pastime. A 100-foot wire running up the side of the house and across the garden to a tree helps me to hear Peking or Australia, Japan or the Voice of Zion from Jerusalem—loud and clear—giving the illusion of being in touch with the world.
The mechanical effect of taking morse at telegraphic speed persuades me I could still be useful as a radio-operator. Even though trained for it over twenty years ago I read it as fast and accurately as ever. Perhaps I come from families where economy of sweat and effort was paramount, and nothing taken in as a trade or job should be wasted, because it might one day come in handy and show its value again. However it was, the basic morse rhythms never left my brain, and I don’t suppose they will, having been programmed on to it. The symbols for certain letters being absolut
After nightfall and the curtains are drawn I can switch on and listen to Mendelsohn or Prokofiev, Mozart or Shostakovitch or Elgar, or the rich and sombre voice of Chaliapin singing his peasant songs and arias. There is also a record given to me in Russia, with Tolstoy reading a few paragraphs of War and Peace, and Yesenin and Mayakovsky reciting their poems, and Maxim Gorki giving a speech. Though I only understand a few words, their spirits fill the room.
A small rack of treasured and personal books includes a copy of the Bible given to me before the assembled school for ‘proficiency in Biblical knowledge’. I was embarrassed at having to go up and get it, but it is a volume with a fine soft leather cover which I always have with me. Years ago I tore out the New Testament and threw it away, so that only the Masoretic text remains. I have read the old books several times, and prefer their poetry to the propaganda of the Christian part, leave myself with a thousand pages of great verse, from the awesome openings of Genesis to the ultimate words of the Prophets, an exaltation of life to comfort me through all existences.
Other titles in my bookcase of specialities are dictionaries by Skeat and Halliwell, Isaac Taylor and Bardsley; as well as Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and a couple of works on the history and topography of my home county. The dozen or so publications of my own I keep well away, not because I have anything against them, but I don’t want to be reminded of their existence while I’m writing something new, so that I can treat each book in progress as if it’s my first novel.
Apart from bookshelves, the wallspace shows maps like beds of flowers: a street plan of Nottingham, a large-scale trench-map of the Gommecourt salient in 1916, marked by the advancing death-lines of the Sherwood Foresters, a relief chart of Deception Island, and a topographical map of Israel flanked by the Mediterranean and the Jordan River—different regions I cannot shut my eyes to.
Books and life and maps and ink, and time to write and think and dip in my pen before pulling it across the paper with my left hand: can any truth come out of that? A writer writes what he likes, and it is vital that he does so—anything from theology to pornography, from politics and comics to sapphics and classics—no matter what world-system he lives under. Every man’s truth is his own secret, but the only secret he can afford to have is that he has no truth.
62
Feckless Celts wandered across the face of Europe from the Caspian over the Carpathians, from Bavaria to Brittany, only to be pounded into a dull and baffled astuteness when they reached Albion, from which they soon lost the will to get free but not the picturesque desire to do so.
I was surprised to read a recent newspaper article in which some true-blue English person was quoted as saying that as far as she was concerned all Celts were foreigners. Being more than half Celt I thought there might be some truth in it. Indeed I hoped there was, for such a way-out Little English idea could explain the yearning for travel I have often too plainly felt—the need to get away from it by rail, road, or even bicycle, to walk out on foot if the worst came to the worst.
The pictures reflected in the eyes of Joseph and his brothers were of landscapes not people. Their religion was freedom, but because society totally stamped on it they could only worship in secret, like a resistance movement that had lost all hope, as if realizing that direct access to the life they craved would blow them either to pieces or into paradise. When the raw material started to eat its own raw material they would move, but somehow their courage never allowed them to start chewing. Freedom pointed in the wrong direction, and their lack of courage became a means of self-preservation. They needed to communicate with themselves but had no way of achieving it.
The generous and lecherous spirit of the eighteenth century, crushed for more than a hundred years by the descending death-trap ceiling of tight-arsed Victorian hypocrisy and repression is at last trying to break free. It did not begin in Joseph’s life, though his melancholia came from thinking it was time to start pounding off the lid, but not being able to.
At school I was once taunted as a foreigner because my name was thought to be Italian. I did not mind this, though fought successfully against it since I refused to be humiliated for any reason. My father’s idea that the family way back in time had come from Italy was only another of his flights of fancy. How my surname originated I’ll never know or care about but, foreigner or not, if I were split down the middle by God’s axe the Celtic part of me might happily turn into the Eternal Wanderer and walk purposefully away, glad to get out of this island and into the world before all Celts were rounded up and marched off to the gas chambers.
In a way I was flattered by the woman’s remark. Having wanted to leave home and country almost from the cradle I nursed a secret ambition to be a foreigner, to become a man without nationality or passport but with the freedom to drift wherever I wanted. Shed of all ties and connections I would go my way alone on the travel-lanes of the world, a ghost of selfishness wallowing in so much land he eventually sees no people in it, and whom in turn nobody sees, a man so gripped by his infatuation for the form and smell of the earth that all love goes from him except inordinate fondness for himself.
It is an impulse to be resisted, though to desire such freedom is innocent enough because it keeps me imprisoned in an inner turmoil conducive to the act of writing. That is one way of doing it, after all. On the other hand, to actively pursue that vast and empty form of liberty would be an escape route into the death of the soul. Such a release from the anchored spirit could be done as a religious exercise perhaps, but since I am not one of the faithful it would turn it into an act of negation. My main purpose on earth is to be myself, which means getting closer to people, not away from them.
I circle around and spiral down, conjuring more dreams out of myself, numberless demons, becoming more empty, or more calm. If I believe my spirit is formed by my parents and their families—plus that alchemical mixing that can never be explained—the zig-zag switch-about for truth must go on, not to fill the emptiness of which I am not afraid, but so that the more void the emptiness becomes the more alive it gets with that potent electricity of the mind that keeps a person free of cant, lies, and tyranny.
When the different streams of my grandparents come flowing in I feel indeed that I am the product of a mixed marriage, the crux of two merging deltas, and if I ask in this white heat why I became a writer I say that the poetry comes out of the Burton side of the family, while the force that pushes it through is drawn from my father’s.
Everything which concerns these various relations has some truth, whether or not I was directly involved in it. To detail the sum of these items is a circuitous way of pointing out traits which might bear on my own half-buried character, and with this in mind it is impossible to say which particular person I favour or ‘take after’, though I plainly attached myself most to those who had some skill and knowledge to impart: to Frederick the designer and artist, and to Burton the farrier.
63
Deception Island lies in a particularly eruptive area of the Antarctic Ocean and is all that remains of a volcanic cone suddenly pulled under by some insufferable whim of the earth. Most of it, except for whaling buildings and a scientific station, is composed of mountainous ash and ice, peaks, crevices, and sheer walls dropping into the sea.
The crater is not quite a full circle of land. It is broken at the mouth, part of its lip having gone with the general subsidence, leaving a gap so that its final shape is of a distorted horseshoe—a long way from the perfect specimen done by Burton in his pr
As unpredictable as a volcano, Burton created a primeval shoe-tool for the sacred horse, with iron that had been scraped out of the earth itself. Taking his piece from the fire he pounded the burning ore and made sparks live and die, plying his weight over the shape it was going to be. As he gripped the tongs and held his hammer, no thought entered his mind to spoil the meeting of anvil and nascent horseshoe. They came together with the built-in skill of his craft, producing an object he would set against the finest of any other smith.
During the Great War, when meat was scarce, Burton would not eat the horse-flesh which was sold in the shops, nor allow it into the house. The idea of it horrified his family as well, as if to consume such meat was little different to cannibalism. He loved horses, having in his trade learned to control them more thoroughly than any woman. His hatred of the canine species (above all other animals) may have been because the dog was once a wolf, and the mythical enemy of both horse and man.
When man tamed the horse, blacksmiths made iron shoes for it, drove the nails in through seven holes for each foot, making twenty-eight all told—one for every day of the complete moon—that the horse pressed to the earth as a testament to man’s dependence on the soil and the glowing guardian of the night sky.
Blacksmithery was a deified trade, honoured by Vulcan and Tubal-Cain. When he made sparks fly a blacksmith was said to be in touch with the underworld, risking his soul by working in iron and having traffic with the Devil. Thus the blacksmith can be related to poets, who are also in thrall to moon, earth, and underworld, and consume themselves utterly by the medium of their work.
The horseshoe on my desk is a well-made artefact of seven holes for seven nails, and my consciousness tames the wild horse that the junction of the two disparate psyches lets loose in me. Seventy years later the horseshoe Burton made lies heavy and cold, its perfect form pressing down the phrenetic scrapings from the back of a brain that Burton would never have connected himself with—aphorisms, observances, slick clippings, stray poems, and fragments that could not have come anywhere but out of a Burton.