One, two, three, four . . . The clock in the kitchen struck twelve. How irrelevantly, seeing that time had ceased to exist! The absurd, importunate bell had sounded at the heart of a timelessly present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance, of intensity, of deepening mystery.

“Luminous bliss.” From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids. “Luminous bliss.” That was as near as one could come to it. But it —this timeless and yet ever changing Event—was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey. It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things. But here, behind his closed lids, there was neither spectacle nor spectator. There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with oneness.

In a succession of revelations, the light grew brighter, the understanding deepened, the bliss became more impossibly, more unbearably intense. “Dear God!” he said to himself. “Oh, my dear God.” Then, out of another world, he heard the sound of Susila’s voice.

“Do you feel like telling me what’s happening?”

It was a long time before Will answered her. Speaking was difficult. Not because there was any physical impediment. It was just that speech seemed so fatuous, so totally pointless. “Light,” he whispered at last.

“And you’re there, looking at the light?”

“Not looking at it,” he answered after a long reflective pause. “Being it. Being it,” he repeated emphatically.

Its presence was his absence. William Asquith Farnaby—ultimately and essentially there was no such person. Ultimately and essentially there was only a luminous bliss, only a knowledgeless understanding, only union with unity in a limitless, undifferentiated awareness. This, self-evidently, was the mind’s natural state. But no less certainly there had also been that professional execution watcher, that self-loathing Babs-addict; there were also three thousand millions of insulated consciousnesses, each at the centre of a nightmare world, in which it was impossible for anyone with eyes in his head or a grain of honesty to take yes for an answer. By what sinister miracle had the mind’s natural state been transformed into all these Devil’s Islands of wretchedness and delinquency?

In the firmament of bliss and understanding, like bats against the sunset, there was a wild criss-crossing of remembered notions and the hangovers of past feelings. Bat-thoughts of Plotinus and the Gnostics, of the One and its emanations, down, down into thickening horror. And then bat-feelings of anger and disgust as the thickening horrors became specific memories of what the essentially non-existent William Asquith Farnaby had seen and done, inflicted and suffered.

But behind and around and somehow even within those flickering memories was the firmament of bliss and peace and understanding. There might be a few bats in the sunset sky; but the fact remained that the dreadful miracle of creation had been reversed. From a praeternaturally wretched and delinquent self he had been unmade into pure mind, mind in its natural state, limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful, knowledgelessly understanding.

Light here, light now. And because it was infinitely here and timelessly now, there was nobody outside the light to look at the light. The fact was the awareness, the awareness the fact.

From that other world, somewhere out there to the right, came the sound once more of Susila’s voice.

“Are you feeling happy?” she asked.

A surge of brighter radiance swept away all those flickering thoughts and memories. There was nothing now except a crystalline transparency of bliss.

Without speaking, without opening his eyes, he smiled and nodded.

“Eckhart called it God,” she went on. “ ‘Felicity so ravishing, so inconceivably intense that no one can describe it. And in the midst of it God glows and flames without ceasing.’ ”

God glows and flames . . . It was so startlingly, so comically right that Will found himself laughing aloud. “God like a house on fire,” he gasped. “God-the-fourteenth-of-July.” And he exploded once more into cosmic laughter.

Behind his closed eyelids an ocean of luminous bliss poured upwards like an inverted cataract. Poured upwards from union into completer union, from impersonality into a yet more absolute transcendence of selfhood.

“God-the-fourteenth-of-July,” he repeated and, from the heart of the cataract, gave vent to a final chuckle of recognition and understanding.

“What about the fifteenth of July?” Susila questioned. “What about the morning after?”

“There isn’t any morning after.”

She shook her head. “It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof—that’s a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.”

“This is better,” Will insisted.

“You mean, it’s more delicious. That’s why it’s such an enormous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a super-mango! God had been stuffing himself with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens , out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You’ve just eaten a slice of the original super-mango, so you can sympathize with Him.”

A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding.

“Super-mango to fruit of knowledge—I’m going to wean you,” she said, “by easy stages.”

There was a whirring sound. From the shallows, a bubble of recognition reached the surface of consciousness. Susila had been putting a record on the turn-table of a gramophone and now the machine was in motion.

“Johann Sebastian Bach,” he heard her saying. “The music that’s closest to silence, closest, in spite of its being so highly organized, to pure, one-hundred-degree proof Spirit.”

The whirring gave place to musical sounds. Another bubble of recognition came shooting up; he was listening to the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto.

It was the same, of course, as the Fourth Brandenburg he had listened to so often in the past—the same and yet completely different. This Allegro—he knew it by heart. Which meant that he was in the best possible position to realize that he had never really heard it before. To begin with, it was no longer he, William Asquith Farnaby, who was hearing it. The Allegro was revealing itself as an element in the great present Event, a manifestation at one remove of the luminous bliss. Or perhaps that was putting it too mildly. In another modality this Allegro was the luminous bliss; it was the knowledgeless understanding of everything apprehended through a particular piece of knowledge; it was undifferentiated awareness broken up into notes and phrases and yet still all-comprehendingly itself. And of course all this belonged to nobody. It was at once in here, out there and nowhere. The music which, as William Asquith Farnaby, he had heard a hundred times before, had been re-born as an unowned awareness. Which was why he was now hearing it for the first time. Unowned, the Fourth Brandenburg had an intensity of beauty, a depth of intrinsic meaning, incomparably greater than anything he had ever found in the same music when it was his private property.

“Poor idiot” came up in a bubble of ironic comment. The poor idiot hadn’t wanted to take yes for an answer in any field but the aesthetic. And all the time he had been denying, by the mere fact of being himself, all the beauty and meaning he so passionately longed to say yes to. William Asquith Farnaby was nothing but a muddy filter, on the hither side of which human beings, nature and even his beloved art had emerged bedimmed and bemired, less, other and uglier than themselves. Tonight, for the first time his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed. Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevances to drown the music or make a senseless discord. Tonight’s Fourth Brandenburg was a pure datum—no, a blessed donum —uncorrupted by the personal history, the second-hand notions, the ingrained stupidities with which, like every self, the poor idiot, who wouldn’t (and in art plainly couldn’t) take yes for an answer, had overlaid the gifts of immediate experience.

And tonight’s Fourth Brandenburg was not merely an unowned Thing in Itself; it was also, in some impossible way, a Present Event with an infinite duration. Or rather (and still more impossibly, seeing that it had three movements and was being played at its usual speed) it was without duration. The metronome presided over each of its phrases; but the sum of its phrases was not a span of seconds and minutes. There was a tempo , but no time. So what was there?

“Eternity,” Will was forced to answer. It was one of those metaphysical dirty words which no decent-minded man would dream of pronouncing even to himself, much less in public. “Eternity, my brethren,” he said aloud. “Eternity, blah blah.” The sarcasm, as he might have known it would, fell completely flat. Tonight those four syllables were no less concretely significant than the four letters of the other class of tabooed words. He began to laugh again.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Eternity,” he answered. “Believe it or not, it’s as real as shit.”

“Excellent!” she said approvingly.

He sat there motionlessly attentive, following with ear and inward eye the interwoven streams of sound, the interwoven streams of congruous and equivalent lights, that flowed on timelessly from one sequence to another. And every phrase of this well-worn familiar music was an unprecedented revelation of beauty that went pouring upwards, like a multitudinous fountain, into another revelation as novel and amazing as itself. Stream within stream—the stream of the solo violin, the streams of the two recorders, the manifold streams of the harpsichord and the little orchestra of assorted strings. Separate, distinct, individual—and yet each of the streams was a function of all the rest, each was itself in virtue of its relationship to the whole of which it was a component.

“Dear God!” he heard himself whispering.

In the timeless sequence of change the recorders were holding a single long-drawn note. A note without upper partials, clear, pellucid, divinely empty. A note (the word came bubbling up) of pure contemplation. And here was another inspirational obscenity that had now acquired a concrete meaning and might be uttered without a sense of shame. Pure contemplation, unconcerned, beyond contingency, outside the context of moral judgments. Through the uprushing lights he caught a glimpse, in memory, of Radha’s shining face as she talked of love as contemplation, of Radha once again, sitting cross-legged, in a focused intensity of stillness, at the foot of the bed where Lakshmi lay dying. This long pure note was the meaning of her words, the audible expression of her silence. But always, flowing through and along with the heavenly emptiness of that contemplative fluting was the rich sound, vibration within passionate vibration, of the violin. And surrounding them both—the notes of contemplative detachment and the notes of passionate involvement—was this network of sharp dry tones plucked from the wires of the harpsichord. Spirit and instinct, action and vision—and around them the web of intellect. They were comprehended by discursive thought, but comprehended, it was obvious, only from the outside, in terms of an order of experience radically different from that which discursive thinking professes to explain.

“It’s like a Logical Positivist,” he said.

“What is?”

“That harpsichord.”

Like a Logical Positivist, he was thinking in the shallows of his mind, while in the depths the great Event of light and sound timelessly unfolded. Like a Logical Positivist talking about Plotinus and Julie de Lespinasse.

The music changed again, and now it was the violin that sustained (how passionately!) the long-drawn note of contemplation, while the two recorders took up the theme of active involvement and repeated it—the identical form imposed upon another substance—in the mode of detachment. And here, dancing in and out between them, was the Logical Positivist, absurd but indispensable, trying to explain, in a language incommensurable with the facts, what it was all about.

In the Eternity that was as real as shit, he went on listening to these interwoven streams of sound, went on looking at these interwoven streams of light, went on actually being (out there, in here and nowhere) all that he saw and heard. And now, abruptly, the character of the light underwent a change. These interwoven streams, which were the first fluid differentiations of an understanding on the further side of all particular knowledge, had ceased to be a continuum. Instead, there was, all of a sudden, this endless succession of separate forms—forms still manifestly charged with the luminous bliss of undifferentiated being, but limited now, isolated, individualized. Silver and rose, yellow and pale green and gentian-blue, an endless succession of luminous spheres came swimming up from some hidden source of forms and, in time with the music, purposefully constellated themselves into arrays of unbelievable complexity and beauty. An inexhaustible fountain that sprayed out into conscious patternings, into lattices of living stars. And as he looked at them, as he lived their life and the life of this music that was their equivalent, they went on growing into other lattices that filled the three dimensions of an inner space and changed incessantly in another, timeless dimension of quality and significance.

“What are you hearing?” Susila asked.

“Hearing what I see,” he answered. “And seeing what I hear.”

“And how would you describe it?”

“What it looks like,” Will answered after a long silence, “what it sounds like, is the creation. Only it’s not a one-shot affair. It’s non-stop, perpetual creation.”

“Perpetual creation out of no-what nowhere into something somewhere—is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re making progress.”

If words had come more easily and, when spoken, had been a little less pointless, Will would have explained to her that knowledgeless understanding and luminous bliss were a damn sight better than even Johann Sebastian Bach.

“Making progress,” Susila repeated. “But you’ve still got a long way to go. What about opening your eyes?”

Will shook his head emphatically.

“It’s time you gave yourself a chance of discovering what’s what.”

“What’s what is this ,” he muttered.

“It isn’t,” she assured him. “All you’ve been seeing and hearing and being is only the first what . Now you must look at the second one. Look, and then bring the two together into a single inclusive what’s-what . So open your eyes, Will. Open them wide.”

“All right,” he said at last and reluctantly, with an apprehensive sense of impending misfortune, he opened his eyes. The inner illumination was swallowed up in another kind of light. The fountain of forms, the coloured orbs in their conscious arrays and purposefully changing lattices gave place to a static composition of uprights and diagonals, of flat planes and curving cylinders, all carved out of some material that looked like living agate, and all emerging from a matrix of living and pulsating mother-of-pearl. Like a blind man newly healed and confronted for the first time by the mystery of light and colour, he stared in uncomprehending astonishment. And then, at the end of another twenty timeless bars of the Fourth Brandenburg, a bubble of explanation rose into consciousness. He was looking, Will suddenly perceived, at a small square table, and beyond the table at a rocking chair, and beyond the rocking chair at a blank wall of whitewashed plaster. The explanation was reassuring; for in the eternity that he had experienced between the opening of his eyes and the emergent knowledge of what he was looking at, the mystery confronting him had deepened from inexplicable beauty to a consummation of shining alienness that filled him, as he looked, with a kind of metaphysical terror. Well, this terrifying mystery consisted of nothing but two pieces of furniture and an expanse of wall. The fear was allayed, but the wonder only increased. How was it possible that things so familiar and commonplace could be this ? Obviously it wasn’t possible; and yet there it was, there it was.

His attention shifted from the geometrical constructions in brown agate to their pearly background. Its name he knew, was ‘wall’; but in experienced fact it was a living process, a continuing series of transubstantiations from plaster and whitewash into the stuff of a supernatural body—into a god-flesh that kept modulating, as he looked at it, from glory to glory. Out of what the word-bubbles had tried to explain away as mere calcimine, some shaping spirit was evoking an endless succession of the most delicately discriminated hues, at once faint and intense, that emerged out of latency and went flushing across the god-body’s divinely radiant skin. Wonderful, wonderful! And there must be other miracles, new worlds to conquer and be conquered by. He turned his head to the left and there (appropriate words had bubbled up almost immediately) was the large marble-topped table at which they had eaten their supper. And now, thick and fast, more bubbles began to rise. This breathing apocalypse called ‘table’ might be thought of as a picture by some mystical Cubist, some inspired Juan Gris with the soul of Traherne and a gift for painting miracles with conscious gems and the changing moods of water-lily petals.

Turning his head a little further to the left he was startled by a blaze of jewelry. And what strange jewelry! Narrow slabs of emerald and topaz, of ruby and sapphire and lapis lazuli, blazing away, row above row, like so many bricks in a wall of the New Jerusalem. Then—at the end, not in the beginning—came the word. In the beginning were the jewels, the stained glass windows, the walls of paradise. It was only now, at long last, that the word ‘book-case’ presented itself for consideration.

Will raised his eyes from the book-jewels and found himself at the heart of a tropical landscape. Why? Where? Then he remembered that, when (in another life) he first entered the room, he had noticed, over the book-case, a large, bad water-colour. Between sand dunes and clumps of palms a widening estuary receded towards the open sea, and above the horizon enormous mountains of cloud towered into a pale sky. “Feeble,” came bubbling up from the shallows. The work, only too obviously, of a not very gifted amateur. But that was now beside the point, for the landscape had ceased to be a painting and was now the subject of the painting—a real river, real sea, real sand glaring in the sunshine, real trees against a real sky. Real to the nth, real to the point of absoluteness. And this real river mingling with a real sea was his own being engulfed in God. “ ‘God’ between quotation marks?” enquired an ironical bubble. “Or God(!) in a modernist, Pickwickian sense?” Will shook his head. The answer was just plain God—the God one couldn’t possibly believe in, but who was self-evidently the fact confronting him. And yet this river was still a river, this sea the Indian Ocean. Not something else in fancy dress. Unequivocally themselves. But at the same time unequivocally God.

“Where are you now?” Susila asked.

Without turning his head in her direction, Will answered, “In heaven, I suppose,” and pointed at the landscape.

“In heaven— still ? When are you going to make a landing down here?”

Another bubble of memory came up from the silted shallows. “Something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of something or other.”

“But Wordsworth also talked about the still sad music of humanity.”

“Luckily,” said Will, “there are no humans in this landscape.”

“Not even any animals,” she added with a little laugh. “Only clouds and the most deceptively innocent-looking vegetables. That’s why you’d better look at what’s on the floor.”

Will dropped his eyes. The grain on the floorboards was a brown river, and the brown river was an eddying, ongoing diagram of the world’s divine life. At the centre of that diagram was his own right foot, bare under the straps of its sandal, and startlingly three-dimensional, like the marble foot, revealed by a searchlight, of some heroic statue. ‘Boards’, ‘grain’, ‘foot’,—through the glib explanatory words the mystery stared back at him, impenetrable and yet, paradoxically, understood. Understood with that knowledgeless understanding to which, in spite of sensed objects and remembered names, he was still open.

Suddenly, out of the tail of his eye, he caught a glimpse of quick, darting movement. Openness to bliss and understanding was also, he realized, an openness to terror, to total incomprehension. Like some alien creature lodged within his chest and struggling in anguish, his heart started to beat with a violence that made him tremble. In the hideous certainty that he was about to meet the Essential Horror, Will turned his head and looked.

“It’s one of Tom Krishna’s pet lizards,” she said reassuringly. The light was as bright as ever; but the brightness had changed its sign. A glow of sheer evil radiated from every grey-green scale of the creature’s back, from its obsidian eyes and the pulsing of its crimson throat, from the armoured edges of its nostrils and its slit-like mouth. He turned away. In vain. The Essential Horror glared out of everything he looked at. Those compositions by the mystical Cubist—they had turned into intricate machines for doing nothing malevolently. That tropical landscape, in which he had experienced the union of his own being with the being of God—it was now simultaneously the most nauseating of Victorian oleographs and the actuality of hell. On their shelves, the rows of book-jewels beamed with a thousand watts of darkness visible. And how cheap these gems of the abyss had become, how indescribably vulgar! Where there had been gold and pearl and precious stones there were only Christmas tree decorations, only the shallow glare of plastic and varnished tin. Everything still pulsed with life, but with the life of an infinitely sinister bargain basement. And that, the music now affirmed, that was what Omnipotence was perpetually creating—a cosmic Woolworth stocked with mass-produced horrors. Horrors of vulgarity and horrors of pain, of cruelty and tastelessness, of imbecility and deliberate malice.

“Not a gecko,” he heard Susila saying, “not one of our nice little house lizards. A hulking stranger from outdoors, one of the bloodsuckers. Not that they suck blood, of course. They merely have red throats and go purple in the face when they get excited. Hence that stupid name. Look! there he goes!”

Will looked down again. Praeternaturally real, the scaly horror with its black blank eyes, its murderer’s mouth, its blood-red throat pumping away while the rest of the body lay stretched along the floor as still as death, was now within six inches of his foot.

“He’s seen his dinner,” said Susila. “Look over there to your left, on the edge of the matting.”

He turned his head.

“ Gongylus gongyloides ,” she went on. “Do you remember?”

Yes, he remembered. The praying mantis that had settled on his bed. But that was in another existence. What he had seen then was merely a rather odd-looking insect. What he saw now was a pair of inch-long monsters, exquisitely grisly, in the act of coupling. Their blueish pallor was barred and veined with pink, and the wings that fluttered continuously, like petals in a breeze, were shaded at the edges with deepening violet. A mimicry of flowers. But the insect forms were undisguisable. And now even the flowery colours had undergone a change. Those quivering wings were the appendages of two brightly enamelled gadgets in the bargain basement, two little working models of a nightmare, two miniaturized machines for copulation. And now one of the nightmare machines, the female, had turned the small flat head, all mouth and bulging eyes, at the end of its long neck—had turned it and (dear God!) had begun to devour the head of the male machine. First a purple eye was chewed out, then half the blueish face. What was left of the head fell to the ground. Unrestrained by the weight of the eyes and jaws, the severed neck waved wildly. The female machine snapped at the oozing stump, caught it and, while the headless male uninterruptedly kept up his parody of Ares in the arms of Aphrodite, methodically chewed.

Out of the corner of his eye Will glimpsed another spurt of movement, turned his head sharply and was in time to see the lizard crawling towards his foot. Nearer, nearer. He averted his eyes in terror. Something touched his toes and went tickling across his instep. The tickling ceased; but he could sense a little weight on his foot, a dry scaly contact. He wanted to scream; but his voice was gone and, when he tried to move, his muscles refused to obey him.

Timelessly the music had turned into the final Presto. Horror briskly on the march, horror in rococo fancy dress leading the dance.

Utterly still, except for the pulse in its red throat, the scaly horror on his instep lay staring with expressionless eyes at its predestined prey. Interlocked, the two little working models of a nightmare quivered like wind-blown petals and were shaken spasmodically by the simultaneous agonies of death and copulation. A timeless century passed; bar after bar, the gay little dance of death went on and on. Suddenly there was a scrabbling against his skin of tiny claws. The bloodsucker had crawled down from his instep to the floor. For a long life-span it lay there absolutely still. Then, with incredible speed, it darted across the boards and on to the matting. The slit-like mouth opened and closed again. Protruding from between the champing jaws, the edge of a violet-tinted wing still fluttered, like an orchid petal in the breeze; a pair of legs waved wildly for a moment, then disappeared from view.

Will shuddered and closed his eyes; but across the frontier between things sensed and things remembered, things imagined, the Horror pursued him. In the fluorescent glare of the inner light an endless column of tin-bright insects and gleaming reptiles marched up diagonally, from left to right, out of some hidden source of nightmare towards an unknown and monstrous consummation. Gongylus gongyloides by millions and, in the midst of them, innumerable bloodsuckers. Eating and being eaten—for ever.

And all the while—fiddle, flute and harpsichord—the final Presto of the Fourth Brandenburg kept trotting timelessly forward. What a jolly little rococo death-march! Left, right; left, right . . . But what was the word of command for hexapods? And suddenly they weren’t hexapods any longer; they were bipeds. The endless column of insects had turned abruptly into an endless column of soldiers. Marching as he had seen the Brown Shirts marching through Berlin, a year before the War. Thousands upon thousands of them, their banners fluttering, their uniforms glowing in the infernal brightness like floodlit excrement. Numberless as insects, and each of them moving with the precision of a machine, the perfect docility of a performing dog. And the faces, the faces! He had seen the close-ups on the German news reels, and here they were again, praeternaturally real and three-dimensional and alive. The monstrous face of Hitler with his mouth open, yelling. And then the faces of assorted listeners. Huge idiot faces, blankly receptive. Faces of wide-eyed sleep-walkers. Faces of young Nordic angels rapt in the Beatific Vision. Faces of Baroque saints going into ecstasy. Faces of lovers on the brink of orgasm. One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insect-like column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror-music. Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death! And suddenly Will found himself looking at what the marching column would become when it had reached its destination—thousands of corpses in the Korean mud, innumerable packets of garbage littering the African desert. And here (for the scene kept changing with bewildering rapidity and suddenness), here were the five fly-blown bodies he had seen only a few months ago, faces upwards and their throats gashed, in the courtyard of an Algerian farm. Here, out of a past almost twenty years earlier, was that old woman, dead and stark naked in the rubble of a stucco house in St John’s Wood. And here, without transition, was his own grey and yellow bedroom, with the reflection in the mirror on the wardrobe door of two pale bodies, his and Babs’s, frantically coupling to the accompaniment of his memories of Molly’s funeral and the strains, from Radio Stuttgart, of the Good Friday music out of Parsifal .

The scene changed again and, festooned with tin stars and fairy lamps, Aunt Mary’s face smiled at him gaily and then was transformed before his eyes into the face of the whining malignant stranger who had taken her place during those last dreadful weeks before the final transformation into garbage. A radiance of love and goodness, and then a blind had been drawn, a shutter closed, a key turned in the lock, and there they were—she in her cemetery and he in his private prison sentenced to solitary confinement and, one unspecified fine morning, to death. The Agony in the Bargain Basement. The Crucifixion among the Christmas tree decorations. Outside or in, with the eyes open or with the eyes closed, there was no escape. “No escape”, he whispered, and the words confirmed the fact, transformed it into a hideous certitude that kept opening out, opening down, into depth below depth of malignant vulgarity, hell beyond hell of utterly pointless suffering.

And this suffering (it came to him with the force of a revelation) this suffering was not merely pointless; it was also cumulative, it was also self-perpetuating. Surely enough, frightfully enough, as it had come to Molly and Aunt Mary and all the others, death would come also to him. Would come to him, but never to this fear, this sickening disgust, these lacerations of remorse and self-loathing. Immortal in its pointlessness, suffering would go on forever. In all other respects one was grotesquely, despicably finite. Not in respect to suffering. This dark little inspissated clot that one called ‘I’ was capable of suffering to infinity and, in spite of death, the suffering would go on for ever. The pains of living and the pains of dying, the routine of successive agonies in the bargain basement and the final crucifixion in a blaze of tin and plastic vulgarity—reverberating, continuously amplified, they would always be there. And the pains were incommunicable, the isolation complete. The awareness that one existed was an awareness that one was always alone. Just as much alone in Babs’s musky alcove as one had been alone with one’s ear-ache or one’s broken arm, as one would be alone with one’s final cancer, alone, when one thought it was all over, with the immortality of suffering.

He was aware, all of a sudden, that something was happening to the music. The tempo had changed. Rallentando. It was the end. The end of everything for everyone. The jaunty little death-dance had piped the marchers on and on to the edge of the cliff. And now here it was, and they were tottering on the brink. Rallentando, rallentando. The dying fall, the fall into dying. And punctually, inevitably, here were the two anticipated chords, of consummation, the expectant dominant and then, finis , the loud unequivocal tonic. There was a scratching, a sharp click and then silence. Through the open window he could hear the distant frogs and the shrill monotonous rasp of insect noises. And yet in some mysterious way the silence remained unbroken. Like flies in a block of amber, the sounds were embedded in a transparent soundlessness which they were powerless to destroy or even modify, and to which they remained completely irrelevant. Timelessly, from intensity to intensity, the silence deepened. Silence in ambush, a watching, conspiratorial silence incomparably more sinister than the grisly little rococo death march which had preceded it. This was the abyss to whose brink the music had piped him. To the brink, and now over the brink into this everlasting silence.

“Infinite suffering,” he whispered. “And you can’t speak, you can’t even cry out.”

A chair creaked, silk rustled, he felt the wind of movement against his face, the nearness of a human presence. Behind the closed lids he was somehow aware that Susila was kneeling there in front of him. An instant later he felt her hands touching his face—the palms against his cheeks, the fingers on his temples.

The clock in the kitchen made a little whirring noise, then started to strike the hour. One, two, three, four. Outside in the garden a gusty breeze whispered intermittently among the leaves. A cock crowed and a moment later, from a long way off, came an answering call, and almost simultaneously another and another. Then an answer to the answers, and more answers in return. A counterpoint of challenges challenged, of defiances defied. And now a different kind of voice joined in the chorus. Articulate but inhuman. “Attention,” it called through the crowing and the insect noises. “Attention. Attention. Attention.”

“Attention,” Susila repeated; and as she spoke, he felt her fingers starting to move over his forehead. Lightly, lightly, from the brows up to the hair, from either temple to the mid-point between the eyes. Up and down, back and forth, soothing away the mind’s contractions, smoothing out the furrows of bewilderment and pain. “Attention to this .” And she increased the pressure of her palms against his cheek bones, of her fingertips above his ears. “To this ,” she repeated. “To now . Your face between my two hands.” The pressure was relaxed, the fingers started to move again across his forehead.

“Attention.” Through a ragged counterpoint of crowing the injunction was insistently repeated. “Attention. Attention. Atten . . .” The inhuman voice broke off in mid-word.

Attention to her hands on his face? Or attention to this dreadful glare of the inner light, to this uprush of tin and plastic stars and, through the barrage of vulgarity, to this packet of garbage that had once been Molly, to the whore-house looking-glass, to all those countless corpses in the mud, the dust, the rubble. And here were the lizards again and Gongylus gongyloides by the million, here were the marching columns, the rapt, devoutly listening faces of Nordic angels.

“Attention,” the mynah bird began to call again from the other side of the house. “Attention.”

Will shook his head. “Attention to what?”

“To this .” And she dug her nails into the skin of his forehead. “ This. Here and now. And it isn’t anything so romantic as suffering, or even pain. It’s just the feel of finger nails. And even if it were much worse, it couldn’t possibly be for ever or to infinity. Nothing is for ever, nothing is to infinity. Except, maybe, the Buddha Nature.”

She moved her hands, and the contact now was no longer with nails but with skin. The finger tips slid down over his brows and, very lightly, came to rest on his closed eyelids. For the first wincing moment he was mortally afraid. Was she preparing to put out his eyes? He sat there, ready at her first move to throw back his head and jump to his feet. But nothing happened. Little by little his fears died away; the awareness of this intimate, unexpected, potentially dangerous contact remained. An awareness so acute and, because the eyes were supremely vulnerable, so absorbing that he had nothing to spare for the inner light or the horrors and vulgarities revealed by it.

“Pay attention,” she whispered.

But it was impossible not to pay attention. However, gently and delicately, her fingers had probed to the very quick of his consciousness. And how intensely alive, he now noticed, those fingers were! What a strange tingling warmth flowed out of them!

“It’s like an electric current,” he marvelled.

“But luckily,” she said, “the wire carries no messages. One touches and, in the act of touching, one’s touched. Complete communication, but nothing communicated. Just an exchange of life, that’s all.” Then, after a pause, “Do you realize, Will,” she went on, “that in all these hours we’ve been sitting here—all these centuries in your case, all these eternities—you haven’t looked at me once? Not once. Are you afraid of what you might see?”

He thought over the question and finally nodded his head. “Maybe that’s what it was,” he said. “Afraid of seeing something I’d have to be involved with, something I might have to do something about.”

“So you stuck to Bach and landscapes and the Clear Light of the Void.”

“Which you wouldn’t let me go on looking at,” he complained.

“Because the Void won’t do you much good unless you can see its light in Gongylus gongyloides. And in people,” she added. “Which is sometimes considerably more difficult.”

“Difficult?” He thought of the marching columns, of the bodies in the mirror, of all those other bodies face downwards in the mud, and shook his head. “It’s impossible.”

“No, not impossible,” she insisted. “ Sunyata implies karuna . The Void is light; but it’s also compassion. Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion. Merely good people try to be compassionate and refuse to bother about the light. As usual, it’s a question of making the best of both worlds. And now,” she added, “it’s time for you to open your eyes and see what a human being really looks like.”

The finger tips moved up from his eyelids to his forehead, moved out to the temples, moved down to the cheeks, to the corners of the jaw. An instant later he felt their touch on his own fingers, and she was holding his two hands in hers.

Will opened his eyes and, for the first time since he had taken the moksha -medicine, found himself looking her squarely in the face.

“Dear God,” he whispered at last.

Susila laughed. “Is it as bad as the bloodsucker?” she asked.

But this was not a joking matter. Will shook his head impatiently and went on looking. The eye sockets were mysterious with shadow and, except for a little crescent of illumination on the cheek bone, so was all the right side of her face. The left side glowed with a living, golden radiance—praeternaturally bright, but with a brightness that was neither the vulgar and sinister glare of darkness visible, nor yet that blissful incandescence revealed, in the far-off dawn of his eternity, behind his closed lids and, when he had opened his eyes, in the book-jewels, the compositions of the mystical Cubists, the transfigured landscape. What he was seeing now was the paradox of opposites indissolubly wedded, of light shining out of darkness, of darkness at the very heart of light.

“It isn’t the sun,” he said at last, “and it isn’t Chartres. Nor the infernal bargain basement, thank God. It’s all of them together, and you’re recognizably you, and I’m recognizably me—though, needless to say, we’re both completely different. You and me by Rembrandt, but Rembrandt about five thousand times more so.” He was silent for a moment; then, nodding his head in confirmation of what he had just said, “Yes, that’s it,” he went on. “Sun into Chartres, and then stained glass windows into bargain basement. And the bargain basement is also the torture chamber, the concentration camp, the charnel house with Christmas tree decorations. And now the bargain basement goes into reverse, picks up Chartres and a slice of the sun, and backs out into this—into you and me by Rembrandt. Does that make any sense to you?”

“All the sense in the world,” she assured him.

But Will was too busy looking at her to be able to pay much attention to what she was saying. “You’re so incredibly beautiful,” he said at last. “But it wouldn’t matter if you were incredibly ugly; you’d still be a Rembrandt-but-five-thousand-times-more-so. Beautiful, beautiful,” he repeated. “And yet I don’t want to sleep with you. No, that isn’t true. I would like to sleep with you. Very much indeed. But it won’t make any difference if I never do. I shall go on loving you—loving you in the way one’s supposed to love people if one’s a Christian. Love,” he repeated, “ love . . . It’s another of those dirty words. ‘In love’, ‘make love’—those are all right. But plain ‘love’—that’s an obscenity I couldn’t pronounce. But now, now . . .” He smiled and shook his head. “Believe it or not, now I can understand what it means when they say, ‘God is love’. What manifest nonsense! And yet it happens to be true. Meanwhile there’s this extraordinary face of yours.” He leaned forward to look into it more closely. “As though one were looking into a crystal ball,” he added incredulously. “Something new all the time. You can’t imagine . . .”

But she could imagine. “Don’t forget,” she said, “I’ve been there myself.”

“Did you look at people’s faces?”

She nodded. “At my own in the glass. And of course at Dugald’s. Goodness, that last time we took the moksha -medicine together! He started by looking like a hero out of some impossible mythology—of Indians in Iceland, of Vikings in Tibet. And then, without warning, he was Maitreya Buddha. Obviously, self-evidently Maitreya Buddha. Such a radiance! I can still see . . .”

She broke off, and suddenly Will found himself looking at Incarnate Bereavement with seven swords in her heart. Reading the signs of pain in the dark eyes, about the corners of the full-lipped mouth, he knew that the wound had been very nearly mortal and, with a pang in his own heart, that it was still open, still bleeding. He pressed her hands. There was nothing, of course, that one could say, no words, no consolations of philosophy—only this shared mystery of touch, only this communication from skin to skin of a flowing infinity.

“One slips back so easily,” she said at last. “Much too easily. And much too often.” She drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

Before his eyes the face, the whole body, underwent another change. There was strength enough, he could see, in that small frame to make head against any suffering; a will that would be more than a match for all the swords that fate might stab her with. Almost menacing in her determined serenity, a dark Circean goddess had taken the place of the Mater Dolorosa. Memories of that quiet voice talking so irresistibly about the swans and the cathedral, about the clouds and the smooth water, came rushing up. And as he remembered, the face before him seemed to glow with the consciousness of triumph. Power, intrinsic power—he saw the expression of it, he sensed its formidable presence and shrank away from it.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

She looked at him for a moment without speaking; then gaily smiling, “Don’t be so scared,” she said. “I’m not the female mantis.”

He smiled back at her—smiled back at a laughing girl with a weakness for kisses and the frankness to invite them.

“Thank the Lord!” he said, and the love which had shrunk away in fear came flowing back in a tide of happiness.

“Thank him for what?”

“For having given you the grace of sensuality.”

She smiled again. “So that cat’s out of the bag.”

“All that power,” he said, “all that admirable, terrible will! You might have been Lucifer. But fortunately, providentially . . .” He disengaged his right hand and with the tip of its stretched forefinger touched her lips. “The blessed gift of sensuality—it’s been your salvation. Half your salvation,” he qualified, remembering the gruesomely loveless frenzies in the pink alcove, “ one of your salvations. Because, of course, there’s this other thing, this knowing who in fact you are.” He was silent for a moment. “Mary with swords in her heart,” he went on, “and Circe, and Ninon de Lenclos and now—who? Somebody like Juliana of Norwich or Catherine of Genoa. Are you really all these people?”

“Plus an idiot,” she assured him. “Plus a rather worried and not very efficient mother. Plus a bit of the little prig and daydreamer I was as a child. Plus, potentially, the old dying woman who looked out at me from the mirror the last time we took the moksha -medicine together. And then Dugald looked and saw what he would be like in another forty years. Less than a month later,” she added, “he was dead.”

One slips back too easily, one slips back too often . . . Half in mysterious darkness, half mysteriously glowing with golden light, her face had turned once again into a mask of suffering. Within their shadowy orbits the eyes, he could see, were closed. She had retreated into another time and was alone, somewhere else, with the swords and her open wound. Outside, the cocks were crowing again, and a second mynah bird had begun to call, half a tone higher than the first, for compassion.

“Karuna.”

“Attention. Attention.”

“Karuna.”

Will raised his hand once more and touched her lips.

“Do you hear what they’re saying?”

It was a long time before she answered. Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip. “Thank you,” she said and opened her eyes again.

“Why thank me? You taught me what to do.”

“And now it’s you who have to teach your teacher.”

Like a pair of rival gurus each touting his own brand of spirituality, “Karuna, attention,” shouted the mynah birds; then, as they drowned out one another’s wisdom in overlapping competition, “Runattenshkarattunshon.” Proclaiming that he was the never impotent owner of all females, the invincible challenger of every spurious pretender to maleness, a cockerel in the next garden shrilly announced his divinity.

A smile broke through the mask of suffering; from her private world of swords and memory, Susila had returned to the present. “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” she said. “How I love him! Just like Tom Krishna when he goes around asking people to feel his muscles. And those preposterous mynah birds, so faithfully repeating the good advice they can’t understand. They’re just as adorable as my little bantam.”

“And what about the other kind of biped?” he asked. “The less adorable variety.”

For all answer she leaned forward, caught him by the forelock and, pulling his head down, kissed him on the tip of his nose. “And now it’s time you moved your legs,” she said. Climbing to her feet, she held out her hand to him. He took it and she pulled him up from his chair.

“Negative crowing and parroted anti-wisdom,” she said. “That’s what some of the other kind of bipeds go in for.”

“What’s to guarantee that I shan’t return to my vomit?” he asked.

“You probably will,” she cheerfully assured him. “But you’ll also probably come back again to this.”

There was a spurt of movement at their feet.

Will laughed. “There goes my poor little scrabbling incarnation of evil.”

She took his arm, and together they walked over to the open window. Announcing the near approach of dawn, a little wind fitfully rattled the palm fronds. Below them, rooted invisibly in the moist acrid-smelling earth, was a hibiscus bush—a wild profusion of bright glossy leaves and vermilion trumpets, evoked from the double darkness of night and over-arching trees by a shaft of lamplight from within the room.

“It isn’t possible,” he said incredulously. He was back again with God-the-fourteenth-of-July.

“It isn’t possible,” she agreed. “But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact. And now that you’ve finally recognized my existence, I’ll give you leave to look to your heart’s content.”

He stood there motionless, gazing, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever profounder significances. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last on to his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away.

“I can’t help it,” he apologized.

He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness. Thankfulness for the privilege of being alive and a witness to this miracle, of being, indeed, more than a witness—a partner in it, an aspect of it. Thankfulness for these gifts of luminous bliss and knowledgeless understanding. Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures.

“Why should one cry when one’s grateful?” he said as he put his handkerchief away. “Goodness knows. But one does.” A memory-bubble popped up from the sludge of past reading. “ ‘Gratitude is heaven itself’,” he quoted. “Pure gibberish! But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact. It is heaven itself.”

“And all the more heavenly,” she said, “for being heaven on earth and not heaven in heaven.”

Startlingly, through the crowing and the croaking, through the insect noises and the duet of the rival gurus, came the sound of distant musketry.

“What on earth is that?” she wondered.

“Just the boys playing with fireworks,” he answered gaily.

Susila shook her head. “We don’t encourage those kinds of fireworks. We don’t even possess them.”

From the highway beyond the walls of the compound a roar of heavy vehicles climbing in low gear swelled up louder and louder. Over the noise, a voice at once stentorian and squeaky bellowed incomprehensibly through a loud speaker.

In their setting of velvet shadow the leaves were like thin shavings of jade and emerald, and from the heart of their gem-bright chaos fantastically sculptured rubies flared out into five-pointed stars. Gratitude, gratitude. His eyes filled again with tears.

Snatches of the shrill bellowing resolved themselves into recognizable words. Against his will, he found himself listening.

“People of Pala,” he heard; then the voice blasted into amplified inarticulateness. Squeak, roar, squeak, and then, “Your Raja speaking . . . remain calm . . . welcome your friends from across the Strait . . .”

Recognition dawned. “It’s Murugan.”

“And he’s with Dipa’s soldiers.”

“Progress,” the uncertain excited voice was saying. “Modern life . . .” And then, moving on from Sears Roebuck to the Rani and Koot Hoomi, “Truth,” it squeaked, “values . . . genuine spirituality . . . oil.”

“Look,” said Susila, “look! They’re turning into the compound.”

Visible in a gap between two clumps of bamboos, the beams of a procession of headlamps shone for a moment on the left cheek of the great stone Buddha by the lotus pool and passed by, hinted again at the blessed possibility of liberation and again passed by.

“The throne of my father,” bawled the gigantically amplified squeak, “joined to the throne of my mother’s ancestors . . . Two sister nations marching forward, hand in hand, into the future . . . To be known henceforth as the United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala . . . The United Kingdom’s first prime minister, that great political and spiritual leader, Colonel Dipa . . .”

The procession of headlamps disappeared behind a long range of buildings and the shrill bellowing died down into incoherence. Then the lights re-emerged and once again the voice became articulate.

“Reactionaries,” it was furiously yelling. “Traitors to the principles of the permanent revolution . . .”

In a tone of horror, “They’re stopping at Dr Robert’s bungalow,” Susila whispered.

The voice had said its last word, the headlamps and the roaring motors had been turned off. In the dark expectant silence the frogs and the insects kept up their mindless soliloquies, the mynah birds reiterated their good advice. “Attention, Karuna.” Will looked down at his burning bush and saw the Suchness of the world and his own being blazing away with the clear light that was also (how obviously now!) compassion—the clear light that, like everyone else, he had always chosen to be blind to, the compassion to which he had always preferred his tortures, endured or inflicted, in a bargain basement, his squalid solitudes, with the living Babs or the dying Molly in the foreground, with Joe Aldehyde in the middle distance and, in the remoter background, the great world of impersonal forces and proliferating numbers, of collective paranoias, and organized diabolism. And always, everywhere, there would be the yelling or quietly authoritative hypnotists; and in the train of the ruling suggestion-givers, always and everywhere, the tribes of buffoons and hucksters, the professional liars, the purveyors of entertaining irrelevances. Conditioned from the cradle, unceasingly distracted, mesmerized systematically, their uniformed victims would go on obediently marching and counter-marching, go on, always and everywhere, killing and dying with the perfect docility of trained poodles. And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, remain everywhere—the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil-worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.

There was the sound of a single shot; then a burst of shots from an automatic rifle.

Susila covered her face with her hands. She was trembling uncontrollably.

He put an arm round her shoulders and held her close.

The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night. And yet the fact remained—the fact of the ending of sorrow as well as the fact of sorrow.

The starters screeched; engine after engine roared into action. The headlamps were turned on and, after a minute of noisy manœuvring, the cars started to move slowly back along the road by which they had come.

The loud speaker brayed out the opening bars of a martial and at the same time lascivious hymn tune, which Will recognized as the national anthem of Rendang. Then the Wurlitzer was switched off, and here once again was Murugan.

“This is your Raja speaking,” the excited voice proclaimed. After which, da capo , there was a repetition of the speech about Progress, Values, Oil, True Spirituality. Abruptly, as before the procession disappeared from sight and hearing. A minute later it was in view again, with its wobbly counter-tenor bellowing the praises of the newly united kingdom’s first prime minister.

The procession crawled on and now, from the right this time, the headlamps of the first armoured car lit up the serenely smiling face of enlightenment. For an instant only, and then the beam moved on. And here was the Tathagata for the second time, the third, the fourth, the fifth. The last of the cars passed by. Disregarded in the darkness, the fact of enlightenment remained. The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptable insects, out came the mynah birds.

“Karuna. Karuna.” And a semi-tone lower, “Attention.”