The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 by Doris Lessing
‘And what did you remember of that occasion, what stayed with you most strongly? Was it the unlikeable sight of the bloody organs spilled out on the ground, and your pity for the beast?’
‘No, it was how you taught us to look for the charm and quickness of the animal everywhere – in the movement of water, or the patterns flocks of birds used to make as they swirled and darted and flowed about the sky.’
Alsi came sliding quickly into the shed, opening the door as little as she could. She was heavy and clumsy in her carapace of skins. She smiled at the two of us, though, and went about her work of pushing the heathers and lichens and bark through the openings into the pens of the snow animals. It took a long time, and I was remembering how quick she had once been. When she had finished she stood in front of us and opened the front of her coat, and we saw there the little confiding face of one of her pets, with its bright blue eyes, and she stroked it, in a way that said how she needed this contact with aliveness, with trust, and she said: ‘The Representatives for the Lake say that there are few creatures left in it.’
‘Do not worry,’ I said, as Johor did not speak. ‘We shall not be needing much more food.’
She nodded, for she was already beginning to understand what was happening. She said: ‘News comes in from many towns and villages now that the people have decided not to eat, but to let themselves die.’
Johor said: ‘Please collect together as many of you as have the will for it, and go to these places and say to them, Canopus asks you to stay alive for as long as you can. Say it is necessary.’
‘It is necessary?’
‘Yes.’
‘Although we shall all die very soon?’
This was only the breath of a reproach, and she found it hard to look at him. But she did, and there was such a bewilderment there he felt it strike him – I could see how he shifted his limbs about inside the skins, as if he were adjusting himself to take on a physical burden. She was such an honest direct creature, so strong, so fine – and she had not let herself go at all into the general lassitude and indifference.
‘There is more than one way of dying,’ he said gently.
He looked straight into her eyes. She looked back. It was a moment when invisible doors seemed to want to open, want to let in truths, new knowledge … I could feel in myself these pressures. I was watching her eyes, so bravely searching Johor’s. Meanwhile she stroked and stroked the head of her little friend, who looked up at her with such trust.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I will see that the message gets to them all.’
And Johor nodded, in a way that said: Yes, I can count on you, and she slid out again, letting in the roar of the storm outside, and a flurry of white flakes that did not melt, but lay in a patch on the stone of the floor near the door.
I said to Johor: ‘It is easier to bear the news of the death of a million people than to think that Alsi will die of starvation inside a heap of stinking furs. And I hate that in me, Johor. I have never been able to accept that partiality in us.’
‘You are complaining that we constructed you inadequately,’ he remarked, not without humour.
‘Yes, I suppose I am. I cannot help it. I have never been able to see someone weep and agonize because of the death of someone close, yet respond not at all to some general ill or danger, without feeling I am in the presence of some terrible lack, some deep failure.’
‘You forget that we did not expect for you such ordeals.’
‘Ah, Canopus, you do indeed expect a lot of us poor creatures, who are simply not up to what is needed.’
‘And yet when Alsi stood there just now, and took on so well and so bravely what I asked her, it seemed to me that as a species you are proving to be very capable of what is needed.’
‘Again, one person, one individual is made to represent so many!’
And, as I spoke, I felt now familiar pressures, the announcement deep in myself of something I should be understanding.
And that was when I let myself go away into sleep, having taken in what I could for that time. And when I woke Johor was sitting patiently, waiting for me to resume. I had not done much more than register: Here I am! – and add to it the thought: But the ‘I’ of me is not my own, cannot be, must be a general and shared consciousness – when Johor said: ‘Doeg, tell me what you all learned during that long time when you studied the material of your planet through the new instruments.’
It was very quiet. The raging of the wind had stopped. I imagined how outside the snow would be lying in billows of fresh white. Through the snow Alsi would be pushing her way, waist high, accompanied by those she had been able to rouse, and others would be trudging to the near towns and villages wondering if they would get there before the storm came again and crowded the air with white, white, white …
‘We learned that everything is made up of smaller things. And these of the smaller and finer … these organs of ours, a heart or a liver, which we don’t think of at all, but know are there, doing their work, are composed of all sorts of parts, of every kind of shape– strings and lumps and strips and layers and sponges. And these bits and pieces are made up of cells of all kinds. And these – every one of which has an energetic and satisfactory life of its own, and a death too, for you can observe these deaths, like ours – are composed of clusters of smaller living units, and molecules, and then these are made up again of just so many units, and these, too …’
My eyes, which had in fancy been dissecting a lump of flesh, a heart, seeing it dissolve into a seethe of tiny life, now again perceived Johor, a mound of skins, from which a pallid face showed. But even so, it was unmistakably Johor who sat there, a presence, a strength – a solidity.
‘Johor,’ I said, ‘I sit here feeling myself solid, a weight of matter, dense, with a shape I know every slope and surface of, and my mind is telling me that this is nothing – for I know that through what we have seen with your devices.’
‘What then was there when you came to the minutest item that we can see?’
‘There is a core – of something. Yet that dissolves and dissolves again. And around it some sort of dance of – pulsations? But the spaces between this – core, and the oscillations are so vast, so vast … that I know this solidity I feel is nothing. A shape of mist, I am, a smear of tinted light, as when we see – or saw, for we see only snow now, filling the spaces of sunlight – a spread of light with motes floating there. I am, from a perspective of vision very far from my own proper eyes, not dense or solid at all … But Johor, while I can see what it is you have been leading me to say to you, that this heaviness … for I am so heavy, so heavy, so thick and so heavy I can hardly bear it – this heaviness is nothing at all. A shape of light that has in it particles slightly denser in some places than in others. But what my mind knows is of no use to my lumpishness, Johor. What you see of me, with those eyes of yours that belong to another planet, a differently weighted star – I can imagine, for I have seen cells and molecules disappear into a kind of dance, but …’
‘A dance that you modify by how you observe it. Or think of it,’ he remarked.
The silence that is a listening deepened around us. But the claims of my discomfort and my impatience made me break it. ‘And yet this nothingness, this weight and labour of matter that lies so painfully on us all, is what you work with, Johor, for you sit here, you sit in this freezing place, and what you say is, Don’t let yourselves die yet, make the effort to keep alive – and what you are wanting to keep alive are these bodies, the flesh that disappears when you look at it with different eyes, into a something like motes with the sun on them.’
Yes, I did sleep then, dropped off, went away, and came back remarking: ‘I have often wondered, when I looked at the tiny oscillations and pulsations that compose us, where, then, are our thoughts, Johor? Where, what we feel? For it is not possible that these are not matter, just as we are. In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with ever
‘I watch myself, Johor … I feel myself … inside this mass of liquids and tissues and bones and air which is so heavy, so very heavy, but which is nevertheless nothing, scarcely exists – when I feel anger, does anger blow through the interstices of the mesh and web which is what I know myself to be? Or when I feel pain, or love … or … I say these words, and everyone knows what I mean by anger, by wanting, by loss, and all the rest, but do you have instruments on Canopus that can see them? Can you see them, Johor, with those different eyes of yours? Do you see me sitting here, this poor beast Doeg, as a smear of tinted light, changing in colour as rage or fear sweeps through me? Where from, Johor? The substance of our flesh, the matter which makes us, dissolves into – vast spaces, defined by the movements of a dance. But we have not yet put fear or loneliness under instruments.’
I went off to sleep again – into a dream so vivid and satisfying and detailed that it was a world as strongly defined as anything I had known in waking life, on our planet or on any other. The landscape I moved through had something of our planet about it, and yet was not; events, people, feelings – all were known to me, yet not in ordinary life. And I had dreamed this dream before, and recognized it, or rather, the setting of the dream. As I entered the dream I was saying to myself, Yes, I know this place, because I know its flavour. And I woke after some sort of interval, long or short, and the atmosphere of the dream was so strong that I brought it with me, and it lay shimmering in beguiling colours that were the stuff of memory to us now since colour had been taken from our world, over the frosty greys and browns of the inside of the shed. And then the dream faded, and I said: ‘I have been dreaming.’
‘Yes, I know. You have been laughing and smiling, and I have been watching you.’
‘Johor, I could tell you the story of my dream, for it had a structure, a beginning and a development and an end, just like the tales of Doeg, the storyteller, and I could describe the incidents and the adventures and the people in it, some of them I know and some unknown – but I could never describe the atmosphere of the dream, although it is an atmosphere so strong, and unique to this dream, and to this cycle of dreams, that I could never mistake it. From the first moment I enter this particular landscape of dream, or even as I approach it from another dream, I know it, I know the air, the feel, the taste of it. I could not describe to you or to anyone what this atmosphere is. There are no words for it. And yet the realms of emotions and of thoughts are analogous to those of dreams. For an emotion has a flavour and a taste, a feel to it, that is not describable in words, but you can say to anyone “love” or “longing” or “envy” – and they will know exactly what you mean. And the emotions in you that are of the class of “love” will have the same quality, and will be the same to everyone else, so the word “love” is a communication, we know what we mean. And when a thought, which is properly colourless and tasteless, is tinged with grief, or vindictiveness, it has a taste, its own being, so, experiencing this grief-laden or joy-bringing thought, first there is the experience and then the word and I say to you, or to Alsi, “I am thinking a thought that has the quality of joy,” and you and everyone shares my experience. And this flavour or taste is a substance, is matter, is material, for everything is, everything must be; for if the minute dance that dissolves at the core which is no core at the heart of an atom is material, then so must be passion or need or delight. Can you, Johor, see where the pulses of the atom dissolve into patterns of movement of which you can say: This is envy, this is love?
‘How does the material or substance of love modify that minuscule dance? How relate? For it is the physical substance of our bodies, our hearts, that breeds love or hate, or fear or hope – is that not so? – and cannot be separate from it. The wind that is love must arise somewhere in those appalling spaces between the nub of an atom and its electrons that dissolve, like everything else, into smaller and smaller, and become a fluid or a movement – or a door into somewhere else?
‘I can ask you this question, knowing I share this with you, saying love, saying fear – and then I come back to the realm of dreaming, in which I spend a third of my life, which is soaked through and through with emotions, but also with sensations and feelings that have nothing to do with emotions, but are more to be described or suggested as colours suffusing a thing or a place – I can say, “Johor, I have been dreaming,” coming back to this world here, and my dreams will have been more vivid than my waking, and the atmosphere I have spent my sleep-journeyings in will be one I have known all my life, since babyhood, and I cannot find a word that will convey this feel, or taste, or colour, or sensation to you or to anyone else. This is the ultimate solitude, Johor … and yet I wonder, when you say, “I have been watching you sleep – watching you dream –” if you, with those eyes of yours that are made in the planet of a star weighted differently than ours, can say as you watch: “Doeg is moving in that landscape of sleep, that place, meeting these and these people – Doeg is partaking of the substance of that place – I know he is, because I can see the substance of that other place, or time, or pulse, moving in the spaces of the subatomic particles, or movements” … and if this is so, Johor, then it lifts a little of the loneliness of knowing that there is nothing I can say, even to my closest friends, that will convey to them the flavour of a dream.’
‘When you dream, do you imagine you dream for yourself alone, Doeg? Do you think that when you enter a realm in your sleep it is familiar only to you? That you alone of the peoples of this little planet of yours know that particular realm? You may not be able to find a word to describe it so that others may know where you have been, but others know it, because they too move there as they dream.’
And that is where that colloquy ended, because Alsi came in, with Marl and with Masson, and Zdanye, and with Bratch and with Pedug who had had the care of the Education of the Young before The Ice.
While Johor and I had sat there in that cold shed, waking and dreaming, around the pole that still was free of the snow and the ice, had come the slight movement towards warmth that we now called summer. In a space it would have taken us twenty of our days to walk across was an area of growth, and for the first time a kind of plant we did not know. It was very quick-growing, springing up into its full height in a few days, a frail sappy bush, aromatic, laden with blue flowers – and it covered the whole of this part of our globe, perhaps an eighth or a tenth of it. Klin, who usually worked down there through the year, had been visiting a valley nearer to the middle of the planet, which had been very warm and productive, hoping that it still might be mild enough to grow something, even if only heathers and brackens. But it was not; it was filled with snow, and so he had left it to go back to the polar regions, and had been met by messengers saying that herds of our great beasts were converging from everywhere to reach fields and hillsides covered with a new plant, which filled the air with scents new to us all. And by the time Klin reached ten days’ walking distance from the pole, where tundra and greyness met this brief summer land, he saw that these herds, multitudes of them, covered everything, trampling and rearing and lowing, and making the earth shake with their delight, their intoxication at this marvel – fresh sappy aromatic food. They were drunk with it all, were lumbering around, and tossing up their enormous heads as if the weight of horns there was nothing, and roaring and even prancing, and it broke the heart, said Klin, to see these desperate hungry beasts released there, into a happiness and lightness – if one could call these heavy chargings and buttings light – yet, if you had become used to seeing a landscape filled with heavy melancholy animals, heads drooping, sniffing at the earth fodder with dislike, yet eating it; animals that seemed hardly able to move, and that slid and slipped