I dreamt, one night lately, that I walked out in the moonlight, down the street between the huts, hearing the little pigs grunting behind me, singing of their sucked bones, and out into the strange light of the marshes. The moon rode high over the reeds, its face halved by a line of cloud like a lidded eye -my own eye, half-waking, and open like an owl’s eye, half closed on the dark.
I walked on the river, which swirled like smoke under me, and I was moonlight. I came to the further bank. A vast plain stretched away, flat, flat, featureless, it was all dust, swirling beneath me, and out of the dust no creature stirred, not a serpent even. It was original.
Suddenly, not out of the dust of the plain but out of the swirling sky, a horde of forms came thundering towards me -men, yes, horses, yes, and I thought of what I do not believe in and know belongs only to our world of fables, which is where I found myself: the centaurs. But these were not the tamed creatures of our pastoral myths. They were gigantic, and their power, the breath of their nostrils, the crash of their hooves, the rippling light of their flanks, was terrible. These, I knew, were gods.
In whom I also do not believe.
I stood silent in the center of the plain and they began to wheel in great circles about me, uttering cries - not of malice, I thought, but of mourning. Let us into your world, they seemed to be saying. Let us cross the river into your empire. Let us into your lives. Believe in us. Believe.
Slowly they came to a halt.
Stood.
Breathing.
There was a silence, vast as the plain, and I heard my own heartbeats, like the faintest echo of their hooves, and my own breathing like theirs, only closer, tearing at my chest. And one of those creatures, out of the shadowy forces that blocked out the whole horizon above me, came slowly, putting its hooves down gently in the dust, towards me, and halted just a foot away, so that I felt its breath, its warmth, and thought I heard on the flow of its breath a sound whose syllables I could interpret. Once again, it was the tune that I recognized. As if, having no language of my own now, I had begun to listen for another meaning.
I put out my hand, touched it.
And something came out of the depths of my sleep towards the point where we stood facing one another, like a reflection rising to the surface of a mirror. It was there, outside me, a stranger. And something in me that was its reflection had come up to meet it.
I woke, cried out. And the word I uttered was not in my own tongue.
I have tried since to remember that word, but the sound has sunk back into my sleep. If I could recall that sound, and speak the word again, I think I would know what it is I have named, what it is that I have encountered. What it is out there that is waiting to receive me.
Called Naso because of the nose.
What my ancestor had a nose for I do not know. What I had a nose for was news - what was fashionable, what would go. I am essentially a social creature. Some poets, Vergil, for example, have an ear, perfect in every way. I have a nose. And noses are political, even when all you are putting them into are the most private places. Perhaps most political just then. Noses get you into trouble. I could sniff out too well what everyone wants to hear, has begun to think, and will think too, once I have said it.
After a century of war in which whole families had destroyed one another in the name of patriotism, we were at peace. I stepped right into it - an age of soft, self-indulgent muddle, of sophisticated impudence, when we all seemed to have broken out of bounds at last into an enlightenment so great that there was no longer any need for belief. "The gods are not quite dead" was my news from the universe, "since their names are on all our lips - not to mention the monuments to them that are dedicated daily by our beloved leader. But they too have ceased to be serious. They have entered the age of play. They have abandoned the holy places and taken up residence in fables that require only our amused detachment from disbelief. They would be embarrassed by anything so glum and humorless as our grandfathers' piety. We are free at last to believe in ourselves. Since there are no rules, we must make some. Let them be absurd! May they be perverse!…" And so on, in the same vein. I was discovering for my generation a new national style. No more civic virtues - since we all know where they lead. No more patriotism. No more glorification of men at arms. No more guides in verse to bee keeping and sheep drench and the loves of shepherd boys with a taste for Greek. My world was strictly personal, a guide, in good plain terms, to such country matters as can be explored in the two square meters of a bed. The emperor has created his age. It is called Augustan, as our historians, with their eye fixed firmly on the present, have already announced. It is solemn, orderly, monumental, dull. It exists in the eulogies that are made for him (to which I decline to contribute) and in marble that will last forever. I too have created an age. It is coterminous with his, and has its existence in the lives and loves of his subjects. It is gay, anarchic, ephemeral and it is fun. He hates me for it. Of course in the short run Augustus wins. And the short run is now. I have been relegated - that is our nice word for it - to the limits of the known world, and expelled from the confines of our Latin tongue.
But in the shadow of a portico dedicated by his sister to her faithful husband, someone tonight is being fucked; because in a poem once I made it happen, and made that particular act, in that particular place, a gesture of public defiance. Each night now Augustus thinks of it and bites his thumb. There are places closer than the Black Sea where the emperor’s power stops. The Portico of Marcellus is one of them.
But I am here, and all this, all of it, is far behind me. How foolish it now seems, my irony, my little impieties, my dancing on the tightrope over the abyss. I have smelled my way to the very edge of things, where Nothing begins. That’s where Nose gets you. I sniff and sniff and there is no news from out there, and no news from in here either. I am dead. I am relegated to the region of silence. All I can do is shout.
And that is what I am doing.
I walk up and down the stony shoreline under the cliffs, whose shadow divides the shingle into distinct segments of light and dark. I walk among the fishermen, shouting - watching them haul in their glittering surprises, their nameless catch, from out of the sea. Or I stride about in the underbrush on the cliff tops, flapping my arms against the cold, watching storms push up black out of nowhere, or great streams of thistle-down and flock travelling white on the wind, and I launch my shouts. It’s a long way to Rome. If they are ever to hear me again I must rais my voice and let these torrents of dark air that flow west over the plains carry me with them. I have been silenced. But will not be stilled.
How can I give you any notion - you who know only landscapes that have been shaped for centuries to the idea we all carry in our souls of that ideal scene against which our lives should be played out - of what earth was in its original bleakness, before we brought to it the order of industry, the terraces, the fields, orchards, pastures, the irrigated gardens of the world we are making in our own image. Do you think of Italy - or whatever land it is you now inhabit - as a place given to you by the gods, readymade in all its placid beauty? It is not. It is a created place. If the gods are with you there, glowing out of a tree in some pasture or shaking their spirit over the pebbles of a brook in clear sunlight, in wells, in springs, in a stone that marks the edge of your legal right over a hillside; if the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of you soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine. They are with you, sure enough. Embrace the tree trunk and feel the spirit flow back into you, feel the warmth of the stone enter your body, lower yourself into the spring as into some liquid place of your body’s other life in sleep. But the spirits have to be recognized to become real. They are not outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete, we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it.