When all these things are added together one begins to recognize the probably insuperable difficulties of the undertaking, which all the same can’t possibly be abandoned. The long patient hours of thought and study which serious-minded people have devoted to it all culminate in a longing for the time when the thankless task can be concluded and put away, like a difficult book the contents of which have been mastered. And for that reason the terminus clock is represented by students as being composed of sixty metal sheets, one for every minute of the hour, which fall and cover each other successively like turned book pages.
The Liaison Officer is seen for a second beneath a huge station time-indicator, closing his book, in the act of turning away, as the dream changes.
A harsh metronome clicking, getting gradually louder until it reaches the loudness of the snap of a medium-sized dry branch repeated at three-second intervals. Now with each crack a rectangular plane, describing an arc, rising, falling, horizontal, in the fashion of a series of loose leaves held together at their bases, or of the type of clock that marks each minute after the hour on changing indicators. All ephemerally exhibiting pictures of doctors, civil servants, professors, government officials; making reports bent over desks or tables. The high-heeled shoes of a typist and her rayon ankles twined round a chair leg; a group of white-coated workers comparing case notes.
With abrupt speed-up of clicks to one-second spacing the turning leaves distinguishable as college, hospital, government forms snowing into a pile. It is not possible to read what is on the forms (most of the printing is just a blur), but on one or two of them B’s name is legible, on others single printed nouns appear as: AGE; QUALIFICATIONS; CLASS; DESTINATION; ATTITUDE TOWARDS; RESULT: with the beginning (indecipherable) of a written comment.
Suddenly a precise disembodied voice asking coldly: Have you any statement to make at this stage? Followed, after slight hesitation, by the voice of invisible B; at first stammering, scarcely audible; gaining gradually force and tension until it breaks on an overtone of hysteria.
By what judgment am I judged? What is the accusation against me? Am I to be accused of my own betrayal?
Am I to blame because you are my enemies? Yours is the responsibility, the knowledge, the power. I trusted you, you played with me as a cat plays with a mouse, and now you accuse me. I had no weapon against you, not realizing that there was need for weapons until too late.
This is your place; you are at home here. I came as a stranger, alone, without a gun in my hand, bringing only a present that I wanted to give you. Am I to blame because the gift was unwelcome?
Am I accused of the untranslated indictment against myself? Is it my fault that a charge has been laid secretly against me in a different language?
Is my offence that I stood too long on your threshold, holding a present that was unsuitable? Am I accused because you, wanting a victim and not a friend, threw away the only thing which I had to give?
Immediately after B’s voice fading, the metronome click speeding up to crazy haste, papers storming down in frantic acceleration; men’s, women’s voices (some with foreign accents), pedantic voices, affected, bourgeois, professional, authoritarian, etc., voices; speaking all together, from all sides, in confused unrelated comment, all with somewhat derogatory tendency, from which only a few phrases emerge with any comprehensibility or consecutiveness. As
B does not concentrate… Does not adapt… Does not co-operate… Does not compromise… Not satisfactory… unsatisfactory… Does not… Un… Dis… Does not… Non… Un… Not… Non… No…
BY the time I went to the university I had become more skilful in my dealings with day. The secret the rain had whispered to me years before, the secret of living apart from the daylight world, had now taught me to avoid conflicts without endangering my seclusion. Working from my hidden base in the dark, I warily reconnoitred the territory of the light, and described what I found there.
In all the chaotic violence under the sun, I saw only more cause for distrust and withdrawal. But now I was stimulated by danger, changing my anxiety into written words. I relied on what I wrote to build a bridge which could not be cut down. It was my own self in which I trusted, not seeing self as that last cell from which escape can only come too late.
HAS THE blissful eye lost its clearness for once? Can it be suffering from an attack of migraine, or what? The outer fields of its vision still remain fairly clear, but the centre, where attention would normally tend to focus, is occupied by a dead spot, a blur of no special colour or shape. Extending and underlying the pathological suggestion, the outlying images are all of a nature to accent the ideas of confusion, danger, violence, chaos, strife.
The extreme periphery concerned with colossal cosmic disturbances, fiery birth-throes of planets and the cataractic dissolution of globed systems on a scale too shattering to be more than hinted. An angry pulsating miasma of bloody red suffuses all this as though the capillaries of the eye were deeply inflamed.
Drawing in somewhat, the scenes moderating to terrestrial proportions, but still uniformly disastrous, world-wars, ruinous sieges, plagues, famines, appalling contests of atomic weapons, vaporized and dissolving cities, whole continents exploding in flame, universal torture, destruction, death.
Contracting again, approaching the fringe of the central blur, certain pictures emerging in much greater detail. First, details of cracking, toppling masonry and structural damage so close as to resemble earthquake fissures; leading with more distant and now unequivocal view to the disintegration of a city after atomic bomb hit and to the presentation of the ultimate vaporizing preceded by its up-flinging a strange and fancy mushroom in the sky. Also establishing, beyond human destructiveness, the appalling blankness and the intense oppositional indifference of the cosmos.
Followed by glimpses of one and then of several abandoned cages of a travelling circus, and the stretched jaws and skeletal midriff of a starved tiger fighting the bars of the cage, the landscape behind rainswept, a road crammed with panic-stricken refugees, vehicles stogged in mud, overflowing the bounds of the road.
A sudden spuming oil-well, ignited, horrific flame fountain; another one blazes up; a mammoth warplane; a mischievous boy’s face grinning as he releases death; the smashed city; the current familiar pathos (whatever its up-to-minute form happens to be); domestic ruin, broken-up homes, toys, etc. A beautifully delicate and pure fan of water from a burst main spraying a bloodied arm-stump among avalanched paving blocks.
A few more eye views: they are conceptual rather than actual, symbols of global violence in the opening mind.
A high wicked barbed-wire fence in hard sunlight, the small mad eyes of the barbs glinting with murderous brightness. Close behind the fence, an undersized, emaciated, intellectual type man, no special race or persuasion, peering through the powerful elaboration of wire in which he is caged. He wears a ragged, collarless shirt and torn trousers; stands with the somehow irritating pathos, the masochistic, slightly stupid, sadism-provoking nervous defiance of the predestined victim, myopically peering through the inevitable badly cracked, clumsily mended spectacles. There is the inevitable large bruise on his jaw. The inevitable shout cracks out and he jumps violently, drops his defiance as a handkerchief drops, spins round, and shambles off at an awkward trot.