Babette's Feast

 

Perdido St Station - 25 years

 

Channel Firing By Thomas Hardy

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgment-day



And sat upright. While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds,



The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;

It’s gunnery practice out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be:



“All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christés sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.



“That this is not the judgment-hour

For some of them’s a blessed thing,

For if it were they’d have to scour

Hell’s floor for so much threatening....



“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed

I ever do; for you are men,

And rest eternal sorely need).”



So down we lay again. “I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,”

Said one, “than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!”



And many a skeleton shook his head.

“Instead of preaching forty year,”

My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”



Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,

And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Iso Tamriel

 

Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music For Airports (6 Hour Time-stretched Version)

Assassin's Creed: Shadows

 

Chinese sketches by Giles, Herbert, (1845-1935)

White Lotus - Season 3

 

868 Diamond Sutra

No one is sure who Wang Jie was or why he had The Diamond Sutra printed. But we do know that on this day in 868 A.D.—or the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong in Jie’s time—he commissioned a block printer to create a 17-and-a-half-foot-long scroll of the sacred Buddhist text, including an inscription on the lower right hand side reading, “Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents.” Today, that scroll is housed at the British Library and is acknowledged as the oldest dated printed book in existence.

Chances are you know a little something about the Gutenberg Bible, the first book made with moveable type, which came along almost 600 years later. Bibliophiles might also have a working knowledge of other famous manuscripts like the Book of Kells, The Domesday Book, and Shakespeare’s First Folio. Well, The Diamond Sutra should be in that pantheon of revered books, as well. Here’s why:


Origins

The text was originally discovered in 1900 by a monk in Dunhuang, China, an old outpost of the Silk Road on the edge of the Gobi Desert. The Diamond Sutra, a Sanskrit text translated into Chinese, was one of 40,000 scrolls and documents hidden in “The Cave of a Thousand Buddhas,” a secret library sealed up around the year 1,000 when the area was threatened by a neighboring kingdom.

In 1907, British-Hungarian archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein was on an expedition mapping the ancient Silk Road when he heard about the secret library. He bribed the abbot of the monastic group in charge of the cave and smuggled away thousands of documents, including The Diamond Sutra. The International Dunhuang Project is now digitizing those documents and 100,000 others found on the eastern Silk Road.

Content

The Diamond Sutra is relatively short, only 6,000 words and is part of a larger canon of “sutras” or sacred texts in Mahayana Buddhism, the branch of Buddhism most common in China, Japan, Korea and southeast Asia. Many practitioners believe that the Mahayana Sutras were dictated directly by the Buddha, and The Diamond Sutra takes the form of a conversation between the Buddha’s pupil Subhati and his master.





A full translation of the document's title is The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion. As Susan Whitfield, director of the Dunhuang Project explains, the sutra helps cut through our perceptions of the world and its illusion. "[W]e just think we exist as individuals but we don’t, in fact, we’re in a state of complete non-duality: there are no individuals, no sentient beings,” Whitfield writes.

Why did Wang Jie commission it?

According to Whitfield, in Buddhist belief, copying images or the words of the Buddha was a good deed and way of gaining merit in Jie’s culture. It’s likely that monks would have unrolled the scroll and chanted the sutra out loud on a regular basis. That’s one reason printing developed early on in China, Whitfield explains. “[If] you can print multiple copies, and the more copies you’re sending out, the more you’re disseminating the word of Buddha, and so the more merit you are sending out into the world,” she writes. “And so the Buddhists were very quick to recognize the use of the new technology of printing.”

What is one quote I should know from The Diamond Sutra?

It’s difficult to translate the sutra word for word and still catch its meaning. But this passage about life, which Bill Porter, who goes by the alias "Red Pine," adapted to English, is one of the most popular:


So you should view this fleeting world—
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Retiring in Japan

 

Shakespeare’s Influence on Karl Marx; The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism

THE DEBUNKING OF TORPENHOW HILL

The mathematics of games by John D. Beasley

What to do when the trisector comes January 1983The Mathematical Intelligencer

The Leopard by Lampedusa, Giuseppe Di

Leon Trotsky My Life (1930)

 https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/index.htm

Museum of All Things

 https://mayeclair.itch.io/museum-of-all-things

The Mind Landscape of Xie Youyu

 https://some-landscapes.blogspot.com/2011/01/mind-landscape-of-xie-youyu.html?m=1

Xie Youyu (or Xie Kun) was a Jin Dynasty scholar-official.  One day, the story goes, Emperor Ming asked him how he thought he compared with another official, Yu Liang.  Xie replied that he was no match for Yu Liang when it came to official duties, but he was superior when it came to 'a hill and stream' - imagining himself away from court and finding repose in nature.

About a century later, Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345 - ca.406) is said to have painted a portrait of Xie Youyu which was innovative in its use of a landscape setting.  Gu explained this in relation to Xie's statement and said "this gentleman should be placed among hills and streams."  Gu's painting (now lost) may have survived long enough to influence the handscroll painted by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) which is now in Princeton University's Art Museum.  Zhao was himself an official who would have empathised with Xie - though his family were descended from Song  Dynasty emperors, he reluctantly accepted various roles as an official at the new Mongol court. 

James Cahill explains in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Paintings (1997) that Zhao 'reconciled his career with his conscience by adopting the stance of chaoyin, "recluse at court," and expressing it in poems and paintings.  The concept of chaoyin was based on the belief that someone could be engaged in a political career in the outside world while preserving internally the mentality of the recluse, spiritually remote from the contamination of public life.'  Like Xie he could work for the government whilst inwardly inhabiting a 'mind landscape' where it was possible to sit alone and at peace, on a river bank among the trees.

The Stars Below by Ursula K. Le Guin

The wooden house and outbuildings caught fire fast, blazed up, burned down, but the dome, built of lathe and plaster above a drum of brick, would not burn. What they did at last was heap up the wreckage of the telescopes, the instruments, the books and charts and drawings, in the middle of the floor under the dome, pour oil on the heap, and set fire to that. The flames spread to the wooden beams of the big telescope frame and to the clockwork mechanisms. Villagers watching from the foot of the hill saw the dome, whitish against the green evening sky, shudder and turn, first in one direction then in the other, while a black and yellow smoke full of sparks gushed from the oblong slit: an ugly and uncanny thing to see.

It was getting dark, stars were showing in the east. Orders were shouted. The soldiers came down the road in single file, dark men in dark harness, silent.

The villagers at the foot of the hill stayed on after the soldiers had gone. In a life without change or breadth, a fire is as good as a festival. They did not climb the hill, and as the night grew full dark they drew closer together. After a while they began to go back to their villages. Some looked back over their shoulders at the hill, where nothing moved. The stars turned slowly behind the black beehive of the dome, but it did not turn to follow them.

About an hour before daybreak a man rode up the steep zigzag, dismounted by the ruins of the workshops, and approached the dome on foot. The door had been smashed in. Through it, a reddish haze of light was visible, very dim, coming from a massive support-beam that had fallen and had smoldered all night inward to its core. A hanging, sour smoke thickened the air inside the dome. A tall figure moved there and its shadow moved with it, cast upward on the murk. Sometimes it stooped, or stopped, then blundered slowly on.

The man at the door said: “Guennar! Master Guennar!”

The man in the dome stopped still, looking towards the door. He had just picked up something from the mess of wreckage and half-burnt stuff on the floor. He put this object mechanically into his coat pocket, still peering at the door. He came towards it. His eyes were red and swollen almost shut, he breathed harshly in gasps, his hair and clothes were scorched and smeared with black ash.

“Where were you?”

The man in the dome pointed vaguely at the ground.

“There’s a cellar? That’s where you were during the fire? By God! Gone to ground! I knew it, I knew you’d be here.” Bord laughed, a little crazily, taking Guennar’s arm. “Come on. Come out of there, for the love of God. There’s light in the east already.”
The astronomer came reluctantly, looking not at the grey east but back up at the slit in the dome, where a few stars burned clear. Bord pulled him outside, made him mount the horse, and then, bridle in hand, set off down the hill leading the horse at a fast walk.

The astronomer held the pommel with one hand. The other hand, which had been burned across the palm and fingers when he picked up a metal fragment still red-hot under its coat of cinders, he kept pressed against his thigh. He was not conscious of doing so, or of the pain. Sometimes his senses told him, “I am on horseback,” or, “It’s getting lighter,” but these fragmentary messages made no sense to him. He shivered with cold as the dawn wind rose, rattling the dark woods by which the two men and the horse now passed in a deep lane overhung by teasel and briar; but the woods, the wind, the whitening sky, the cold were all remote from his mind, in which there was nothing but a darkness shot with the reek and heat of burning.

Bord made him dismount. There was sunlight around them now, lying long on rocks above a river valley. There was a dark place, and Bord urged him and pulled him into the dark place. It was not hot and close there but cold and silent. As soon as Bord let him stop he sank down, for his knees would not bear; and he felt the cold rock against his seared and throbbing hands.

“Gone to earth, by God!” said Bord, looking about at the veined walls, marked with the scars of miners’ picks, in the light of his lanterned candle. “I’ll be back; after dark, maybe. Don’t come out. Don’t go farther in. This is an old adit, they haven’t worked this end of the mine for years. May be slips and pitfalls in these old tunnels. Don’t come out! Lie low. When the hounds are gone, we’ll run you across the border.”

Bord turned and went back up the adit in darkness. When the sound of his steps had long since died away, the astronomer lifted his head and looked around him at the dark walls and the little burning candle. Presently he blew it out. There came upon him the earth-smelling darkness, silent and complete. He saw green shapes, ocherous blots drifting on the black; these faded slowly. The dull, chill black was balm to his inflamed and aching eyes, and to his mind.

If he thought, sitting there in the dark, his thoughts found no words. He was feverish from exhaustion and smoke inhalation and a few slight burns, and in an abnormal condition of mind; but perhaps his mind’s workings, though lucid and serene, had never been normal. It is not normal for a man to spend twenty years grinding lenses, building telescopes, peering at stars, making calculations, lists, maps and charts of things which no one knows or cares about, things which cannot be reached, or touched, or held. And now all he had spent his life on was gone, burned. What was left of him might as well be, as it was, buried.

But it did not occur to him, this idea of being buried. All he was keenly aware of was a great burden of anger and grief, a burden he was unfit to carry. It was crushing his mind, crushing out reason. And the darkness here seemed to relieve that pressure. He was accustomed to the dark, he had lived at night. The weight here was only rock, only earth. No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty. The earth’s black innocence enfolded him. He lay down within it, trembling a little with pain and with relief from pain, and slept.

Light waked him. Count Bord was there, lighting the candle with flint and steel. Bord’s face was vivid in the light: the high color and blue eyes of a keen huntsman, a red mouth, sensual and obstinate. “They’re on the scent,” he was saying. “They know you got away.”

“Why . . .” said the astronomer. His voice was weak; his throat, like his eyes, was still smoke-inflamed. “Why are they after me?”

“Why? Do you still need telling? To burn you alive, man! For heresy!” Bord’s blue eyes glared through the steadying glow of the candle.

“But it’s gone, burned, all I did.”

“Aye, the earth’s stopped, all right, but where’s their fox? They want their fox! But damned if I’ll let them get you.”

The astronomer’s eyes, light and wide-set, met his and held. “Why?”

“You think I’m a fool,” Bord said with a grin that was not a smile, a wolf’s grin, the grin of the hunted and the hunter. “And I am one. I was a fool to warn you. You never listened. I was a fool to listen to you. But I liked to listen to you. I liked to hear you talk about the stars and the courses of the planets and the ends of time. Who else ever talked to me of anything but seed corn and cow dung? Do you see? And I don’t like soldiers and strangers, and trials and burnings. Your truth, their truth, what do I know about the truth? Am I a master? Do I know the courses of the stars? Maybe you do. Maybe they do. All I know is you have sat at my table and talked to me. Am I to watch you burn? God’s fire, they say; but you said the stars are the fires of God. Why do you ask me that, ‘Why?’ Why do you ask a fool’s question of a fool?”

“I am sorry,” the astronomer said.

“What do you know about men?” the count said. “You thought they’d let you be. And you thought I’d let you burn.” He looked at Guennar through the candlelight, grinning like a driven wolf, but in his blue eyes there was a glint of real amusement. “We who live down on the earth, you see, not up among the stars . . .”

He had brought a tinderbox and three tallow candles, a bottle of water, a ball of peas-pudding, a sack of bread. He left soon, warning the astronomer again not to venture out of the mine.



***



When Guennar woke again a strangeness in his situation troubled him, not one which would have worried most people hiding in a hole to save their skins, but most distressing to him: he did not know the time.

It was not clocks he missed, the sweet banging of the church bells in the villages calling to morning and evening prayer, the delicate and willing accuracy of the timepieces he used in his observatory and on whose refinement so many of his discoveries had depended; it was not the clocks he missed, but the great clock.

Not seeing the sky, one cannot know the turning of the earth. All the processes of time, the sun’s bright arch and the moon’s phases, the planet’s dance, the wheeling of the constellations around the pole star, the vaster wheeling of the seasons of the stars, all these were lost, the warp on which his life was woven.

Here there was no time.

“O my God,” Guennar the astronomer prayed in the darkness underground, “how can it offend you to be praised? All I ever saw in my telescopes was one spark of your glory, one least fragment of the order of your creation. You could not be jealous of that, my Lord! And there were few enough who believed me, even so. Was it my arrogance in daring to describe your works? But how could I help it, Lord, when you let me see the endless fields of stars? Could I see and be silent? O my God, do not punish me any more, let me rebuild the smaller telescope. I will not speak, I will not publish, if it troubles your holy Church. I will not say anything more about the orbits of the planets or the nature of the stars. I will not speak, Lord, only let me see!”

“What the devil, be quiet, Master Guennar. I could hear you halfway up the tunnel,” said Bord, and the astronomer opened his eyes to the dazzle of Bord’s lantern. “They’ve called the full hunt up for you. Now you’re a necromancer. They swear they saw you sleeping in your house when they came, and they barred the doors; but there’s no bones in the ashes.”

“I was asleep,” Guennar said, covering his eyes. “They came, the soldiers . . . I should have listened to you. I went into the passage under the dome. I left a passage there so I could go back to the hearth on cold nights, when it’s cold my fingers get too stiff, I have to go warm my hands sometimes.” He spread out his blistered, blackened hands and looked at them vaguely. “Then I heard them overhead . . .”

“Here’s some more food. What the devil, haven’t you eaten?”

“Has it been long?”

“A night and a day. It’s night now. Raining. Listen, Master: There’s two of the black hounds living at my house now. Emissaries of the Council, what the devil, I had to offer hospitality. This is my county, they’re here, I’m the count. It makes it hard for me to come. And I don’t want to send any of my people here. What if the priests asked them, ‘Do you know where he is? Will you answer to God you don’t know where he is?’ It’s best they don’t know. I’ll come when I can. You’re all right here? You’ll stay here? I’ll get you out of here and over the border when they’ve cleared away. They’re like flies now. Don’t talk aloud like that. They might look into these old tunnels. You should go farther in. I will come back. Stay with God, Master.”

“Go with God, count.”

He saw the color of Bord’s blue eyes, the leap of shadows up the rough-hewn roof as he took up the lantern and turned away. Light and color died as Bord, at the turning, put out the lantern. Guennar heard him stumble and swear as he groped his way.

Presently Guennar lighted one of his candles and ate and drank a little, eating the staler bread first, and breaking off a piece of the crusted lump of peas-pudding. This time Bord had brought him three loaves and some salt meat, two more candles and a second skin bottle of water, and a heavy duffle cloak. Guennar had not felt cold. He was wearing the coat he always wore on cold nights in the observatory and very often slept in, when he came stumbling to bed at dawn. It was a good sheepskin, filthy from his rummagings in the wreckage in the dome and scorched at the sleeve-ends, but it was as warm as ever, and was like his own skin to him. He sat inside it eating, gazing out through the sphere of frail yellow candlelight to the darkness of the tunnel beyond. Bord’s words, “You should go farther in,” were in his mind. When he was done eating he bundled up the provisions in the cloak, took up the bundle in one hand and the lighted candle in the other, and set off down the side-tunnel and then the adit, down and inward.

After a few hundred paces he came to a major cross-tunnel, off which ran many short leads and some large rooms or stopes. He turned left, and presently passed a big stope in three levels. He entered it. The farthest level was only about five feet under the roof, which was still well timbered with posts and beams. In a corner of the backmost level, behind an angle of quartz intrusion which the miners had left jutting out as a supporting buttress, he made his new camp, setting out the food, water, tinderbox, and candles where they would come under his hand easily in the dark, and laying the cloak as a mattress on the floor, which was of a rubbly, hard clay. Then he put out the candle, already burned down by a quarter of its length, and lay down in the dark.



***



After his third return to that first side-tunnel, finding no sign that Bord had come there, he went back to his camp and studied his provisions. There were still two loaves of bread, half a bottle of water, and the salt meat, which he had not yet touched; and four candles. He guessed that it might have been six days since Bord had come, but it might have been three, or eight. He was thirsty, but dared not drink, so long as he had no other supply.

He set off to find water.

At first he counted his paces. After a hundred and twenty he saw that the timbering of the tunnel was askew, and there were places where the rubble fill had broken through, half filling the passage. He came to a winze, a vertical shaft, easy to scramble down by what remained of the wooden ladder, but after it, in the lower level, he forgot to count his steps. Once he passed a broken pick handle; farther on he saw a miner’s discarded headband, a stump of candle still stuck in the forehead socket. He dropped this into the pocket of his coat and went on.

The monotony of the walls of hewn stone and planking dulled his mind. He walked on like one who will walk forever. Darkness followed him and went ahead of him.

His candle burning short spilled a stream of hot tallow on his fingers, hurting him. He dropped the candle, and it went out.

He groped for it in the sudden dark, sickened by the reek of its smoke, lifting his head to avoid that stink of burning. Before him, straight before him, far away, he saw the stars.

Tiny, bright, remote, caught in a narrow opening like the slot in the observatory dome: an oblong full of stars in blackness.

He got up, forgetting about the candle, and began to run towards the stars.

They moved, dancing, like the stars in the telescope field when the clockwork mechanism shuddered or when his eyes were very tired. They danced, and brightened.

He came among them, and they spoke to him.

The flames cast queer shadows on the blackened faces and brought queer lights out of the bright, living eyes.

“Here, then, who’s that? Hanno?”

“What were you doing up that old drift, mate?”

“Hey, who is that?”

“Who the devil, stop him—”

“Hey, mate! Hold on!”

He ran blind into the dark, back the way he had come. The lights followed him and he chased his own faint, huge shadow down the tunnel. When the shadow was swallowed by the old dark and the old silence came again he still stumbled on, stooping and groping so that he was oftenest on all fours or on his feet and one hand. At last he dropped down and lay huddled against the wall, his chest full of fire.

Silence, dark.

He found the candle end in the tin holder in his pocket, lighted it with the flint and steel, and by its glow found the vertical shaft not fifty feet from where he had stopped. He made his way back up to his camp. There he slept; woke and ate, and drank the last of his water; meant to get up and go seeking water again; fell asleep, or into a doze or daze, in which he dreamed of a voice speaking to him.

“There you are. All right. Don’t startle. I’ll do you no harm. I said it wasn’t no knocker. Who ever heard of a knocker as tall as a man? Or who ever seen one, for that matter. They’re what you don’t see, mates, I said. And what we did see was a man, count on it. So what’s he doing in the mine, said they, and what if he’s a ghost, one of the lads that was caught when the house of water broke in the old south adit, maybe, come walking? Well then, I said, I’ll go see that. I never seen a ghost yet, for all I heard of them. I don’t care to see what’s not meant to be seen, like the knocker folk, but what harm to see Temon’s face again, or old Trip, haven’t I seen ’em in dreams, just the same, in the ends, working away with their faces sweating same as life? Why not? So I come along. But you’re no ghost, nor miner. A deserter you might be, or a thief. Or are you out of your wits, is that it, poor man? Don’t fear. Hide if you like. What’s it to me? There’s room down here for you and me. Why are you hiding from the light of the sun?”

“The soldiers . . .”

“I thought so.”

When the old man nodded, the candle bound to his forehead set light leaping over the roof of the stope. He squatted about ten feet from Guennar, his hands hanging between his knees. A bunch of candles and his pick, a short-handled, finely shaped tool, hung from his belt. His face and body, beneath the restless star of the candle, were rough shadows, earth-colored.

“Let me stay here.”

“Stay and welcome! Do I own the mine? Where did you come in, eh, the old drift above the river? That was luck to find that, and luck you turned this way in the crosscut, and didn’t go east instead. Eastward this level goes on to the caves. There’s great caves there; did you know it? Nobody knows but the miners. They opened up the caves before I was born, following the old lode that lay along here sunward. I seen the caves once, my dad took me, you should see this once, he says. See the world underneath the world. A room there was no end to. A cavern as deep as the sky, and a black stream falling into it, falling and falling till the light of the candle failed and couldn’t follow it, and still the water was falling on down into the pit. The sound of it came up like a whisper without an end, out of the dark. And on beyond that there’s other caves, and below. No end to them, maybe. Who knows? Cave under cave, and glittering with the barren crystal. It’s all barren stone, there. And all worked out, here, years ago. It’s a safe enough hole you chose, mate, if you hadn’t come stumbling in on us. What was you after? Food? A human face?”

“Water.”

“No lack of that. Come on, I’ll show you. Beneath here in the lower level there’s all too many springs. You turned the wrong direction. I used to work down there, with the damned cold water up to my knees, before the vein ran out. A long time ago. Come on.”



***



The old miner left him in his camp, after showing him where the spring rose and warning him not to follow down the watercourse, for the timbering would be rotted and a step or sound might bring the earth down. Down there all the timbers were covered with a deep glittering white fur, saltpeter perhaps, or a fungus: it was very strange, above the oily water. When he was alone again Guennar thought he had dreamed that white tunnel full of black water, and the visit of the miner. When he saw a flicker of light far down the tunnel, he crouched behind the quartz buttress with a great wedge of granite in his hand: for all his fear and anger and grief had come down to one thing here in the darkness, a determination that no man would lay hand on him. A blind determination, blunt and heavy as a broken stone, heavy in his soul.

It was only the old man coming, with a hunk of dry cheese for him.

He sat with the astronomer, and talked. Guennar ate up the cheese, for he had no food left, and listened to the old man talk. As he listened the weight seemed to lift a little, he seemed to see a little farther in the dark.

“You’re no common soldier,” the miner said, and he replied, “No, I was a student once,” but no more, because he dared not tell the miner who he was. The old man knew all the events of the region; he spoke of the burning of the Round House on the hill, and of Count Bord. “He went off to the city with them, with these black-gowns, to be tried, they do say, to come before their council. Tried for what? What did he ever do but hunt boar and deer and foxen? Is it the council of the foxen trying him? What’s it all about, this snooping and soldiering and burning and trying? Better leave honest folk alone. The count was honest, as far as the rich can be, a fair landlord. But you can’t trust them, none of such folk. Only down here. You can trust the men who go down into the mine. What else has a man got down here but his own hands and his mates’ hands? What’s between him and death, when there’s a fall in the level or a winze closes and he’s in the blind end, but their hands, and their shovels, and their will to dig him out? There’d be no silver up there in the sun if there wasn’t trust between us down here in the dark. Down here you can count on your mates. And nobody comes but them. Can you see the owner in his lace, or the soldiers, coming down the ladders, coming down and down the great shaft into the dark? Not them! They’re brave at tramping on the grass, but what good’s a sword and shouting in the dark? I’d like to see ’em come down here . . .”

The next time he came another man was with him, and they brought an oil lamp and a clay jar of oil, as well as more cheese, bread, and some apples. “It was Hanno thought of the lamp,” the old man said. “A hempen wick it is, if she goes out blow sharp and she’ll likely catch up again. Here’s a dozen candles, too. Young Per swiped the lot from the doler, up on the grass.”

“They all know I’m here?”

“We do,” the miner said briefly. “They don’t.”

Some time after this, Guennar returned along the lower, west-leading level he had followed before, till he saw the miners’ candles dance like stars; and he came into the stope where they were working. They shared their meal with him. They showed him the ways of the mine, and the pumps, and the great shaft where the ladders were and the hanging pulleys with their buckets; he sheered off from that, for the wind that came sucking down the great shaft smelled to him of burning. They took him back and let him work with them. They treated him as a guest, as a child. They had adopted him. He was their secret.

There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.

There was the silver, to be sure. But where ten crews of fifteen had used to work these levels and there had been no end to the groan and clatter and crash of the loaded buckets going up on the screaming winch and the empties banging down to meet the trammers running with their heavy carts, now one crew of eight men worked: men over forty, old men, who had no skill but mining. There was still some silver there in the hard granite, in little veins among the gangue. Sometimes they would lengthen an end by one foot in two weeks.

“It was a great mine,” they said with pride.

They showed the astronomer how to set a gad and swing the sledge, how to go at granite with the finely balanced and sharp-pointed pick, how to sort and “cob,” what to look for, the rare bright branchings of the pure metal, the crumbling rich rock of the ore. He helped them daily. He was in the stope waiting for them when they came, and spelled one or another on and off all day with the shovel work, or sharpening tools, or running the ore-cart down its grooved plank to the great shaft, or working in the ends. There they would not let him work long; pride and habit forbade it. “Here, leave off chopping at that like a woodcutter. Look: This way, see?” But then another would ask him, “Give me a blow here, lad, see, on the gad, that’s it.”

They fed him from their own coarse meager meals.

In the night, alone in the hollow earth, when they had climbed the long ladders up “to grass” as they said, he lay and thought of them, their faces, their voices, their heavy, scarred, earth-stained hands, old men’s hands with thick nails blackened by bruising rock and steel; those hands, intelligent and vulnerable, which had opened up the earth and found the shining silver in the solid rock. The silver they never held, never kept, never spent. The silver that was not theirs.

“If you found a new vein, a new lode, what would you do?”

“Open her, and tell the masters.”

“Why tell the masters?”

“Why, man! We gets paid for what we brings up! D’you think we does this damned work for love?”

“Yes.”

They all laughed at him, loud, jeering laughter, innocent. The living eyes shone in their faces blackened with dust and sweat.

“Ah, if we could find a new lode! The wife would keep a pig like we had once, and by God I’d swim in beer! But if there’s silver they’d have found it; that’s why they pushed the workings so far east. But it’s barren there, and worked out here, that’s the short and long of it.”



***



Time stretched behind him and ahead of him like the dark drifts and crosscuts of the mine, all present at once, wherever he with his small candle might be among them. When he was alone now the astronomer often wandered in the tunnels and the old stopes, knowing the dangerous places, the deep levels full of water, adept at shaky ladders and tight places, intrigued by the play of his candle on the rock walls and faces, the glitter of mica that seemed to come from deep inside the stone. Why did it sometimes shine out that way? as if the candle found something far within the shining broken surface, something that winked in answer and occulted, as if it had slipped behind a cloud or an unseen planet’s disc.

“There are stars in the earth,” he thought. “If one knew how to see them.”



***



Awkward with the pick, he was clever with machinery; they admired his skill, and brought him tools. He repaired pumps and windlasses; he fixed up a lamp on a chain for “young Per” working in a long narrow dead end, with a reflector made from a tin candleholder beaten out into a curved sheet and polished with fine rock-dust and the sheepskin lining of his coat. “It’s a marvel,” Per said. “Like daylight. Only, being behind me, it don’t go out when the air gets bad, and tell me I should be backing out for a breath.”

For a man can go on working in a narrow end for some time after his candle has gone out for lack of oxygen.

“You should have a bellows rigged there.”

“What, like I was a forge?”

“Why not?”

“Do ye ever go up to the grass, nights?” asked Hanno, looking wistfully at Guennar. Hanno was a melancholy, thoughtful, softhearted fellow. “Just to look about you?”

Guennar did not answer. He went off to help Bran with a timbering job; the miners did all the work that had once been done by crews of timberers, trammers, sorters, and so on.

“He’s deathly afraid to leave the mine,” Per said, low.

“Just to see the stars and get a breath of the wind,” Hanno said, as if he was still speaking to Guennar.



***



One night the astronomer emptied out his pockets and looked at the stuff that had been in them since the night of the burning of the observatory: things he had picked up in those hours which he now could not remember, those hours when he had groped and stumbled in the smoldering wreckage, seeking . . . seeking what he had lost . . . He no longer thought of what he had lost. It was sealed off in his mind by a thick scar, a burn-scar. For a long time this scar in his mind kept him from understanding the nature of the objects now ranged before him on the dusty stone floor of the mine: a wad of papers scorched all along one side; a round piece of glass or crystal; a metal tube; a beautifully worked wooden cogwheel; a bit of twisted blackened copper etched with fine lines; and so on, bits, wrecks, scraps. He put the papers back into his pocket, without trying to separate the brittle half-fused leaves and make out the fine script. He continued to look at and occasionally to pick up and examine the other things, especially the piece of glass.

This he knew to be the eyepiece of his ten-inch telescope. He had ground the lens himself. When he picked it up he handled it delicately, by the edges, lest the acid of his skin etch the glass. Finally he began to polish it clean, using a wisp of fine lambswool from his coat. When it was clear, he held it up and looked at and through it at all angles. His face was calm and intent, his light wide-set eyes steady.

Tilted in his fingers, the telescope lens reflected the lamp flame in one bright tiny point near the edge and seemingly beneath the curve of the face, as if the lens had kept a star in it from the many hundred nights it had been turned toward the sky.

He wrapped it carefully in the wisp of wool and made a place for it in the rock niche with his tinderbox. Then he took up the other things one by one.

During the next weeks the miners saw their fugitive less often while they worked. He was off a great deal by himself: Exploring the deserted eastern regions of the mine, he said, when they asked him what he did.

“What for?”

“Prospecting,” he said with the brief, wincing smile that gave him a very crazy look.

“Oh, lad, what do you know about that? She’s all barren there. The silver’s gone; and they found no eastern lode. You might be finding a bit of poor ore or a vein of tinstone, but nothing worth the digging.”

“How do you know what’s in the earth, in the rock under your feet, Per?”

“I know the signs, lad. Who should know better?”

“But if the signs are hidden?”

“Then the silver’s hidden.”

“Yet you know it is there, if you knew where to dig, if you could see into the rock. And what else is there? You find the metal, because you seek it, and dig for it. But what else might you find, deeper than the mine, if you sought, if you knew where to dig?”

“Rock,” said Per. “Rock, and rock, and rock.”

“And then?”

“And then? Hellfire, for all I know. Why else does it get hotter as the shafts go deeper? That’s what they say. Getting nearer hell.”

“No,” the astronomer said, clear and firm. “No. There is no hell beneath the rocks.”

“What is there, then, underneath it all?”

“The stars.”

“Ah,” said the miner, floored. He scratched his rough, tallow-clotted hair, and laughed. “There’s a poser,” he said, and stared at Guennar with pity and admiration. He knew Guennar was mad, but the size of his madness was a new thing to him, and admirable. “Will you find ’em then, the stars?”

“If I learn how to look,” Guennar said, so calmly that Per had no response but to heft his shovel and get back to loading the cart.

One morning when the miners came down they found Guennar still sleeping, rolled up in the battered cloak Count Bord had given him, and by him a strange object, a contraption made of silver tubing, tin struts and wires beaten from old headlamp-sockets, a frame of pick handles carefully carved and fitted, cogged wheels, a bit of twinkling glass. It was elusive, makeshift, delicate, crazy, intricate.

“What the devil’s that?”

They stood about and stared at the thing, the lights of their headlamps centering on it, a yellow beam sometimes flickering over the sleeping man as one or another glanced at him.

“He made it, sure.”

“Sure enough.”

“What for?”

“Don’t touch it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Roused by their voices, the astronomer sat up. The yellow beams of the candles brought his face out white against the dark. He rubbed his eyes and greeted them.

“What would that be, lad?”

He looked troubled or confused when he saw the object of their curiosity. He put a hand on it protectively, yet he looked at it himself without seeming to recognize it for a while. At last he said, frowning and speaking in a whisper, “It’s a telescope.”

“What’s that?”

“A device that makes distant things clear to the eye.”

“How come?” one of the miners asked, baffled. The astronomer answered him with growing assurance. “By virtue of certain properties of light and lenses. The eye is a delicate instrument, but it is blind to half the universe—far more than half. The night sky is black, we say: between the stars is void and darkness. But turn the telescope-eye on that space between the stars, and lo, the stars! Stars too faint and far for the eye alone to see, rank behind rank, glory beyond glory, out to the uttermost boundaries of the universe. Beyond all imagination, in the outer darkness, there is light: a great glory of sunlight. I have seen it. I have seen it, night after night, and mapped the stars, the beacons of God on the shores of darkness. And here too there is light! There is no place bereft of the light, the comfort and radiance of the creator spirit. There is no place that is outcast, outlawed, forsaken. There is no place left dark. Where the eyes of God have seen, there light is. We must go farther, we must look farther! There is light if we will see it. Not with eyes alone, but with the skill of the hands and the knowledge of the mind and the heart’s faith is the unseen revealed, and the hidden made plain. And all the dark earth shines like a sleeping star.”

He spoke with that authority which the miners knew belonged by rights to the priests, to the great words priests spoke in the echoing churches. It did not belong here, in the hole where they grubbed their living, in the words of a crazy fugitive. Later on, one talking to another, they shook their heads, or tapped them. Per said, “The madness is growing in him,” and Hanno said, “Poor soul, poor soul!” Yet there was not one of them who did not, also, believe what the astronomer had told them.

“Show me,” said old Bran, finding Guennar alone in a deep eastern drift, busy with his intricate device. It was Bran who had first followed Guennar, and brought him food, and led him back to the others.

The astronomer willingly stood aside and showed Bran how to hold the device pointing downward at the tunnel floor, and how to aim and focus it, and tried to describe its function and what Bran might see: all hesitantly, since he was not used to explaining to the ignorant, but without impatience when Bran did not understand.

“I don’t see nothing but the ground,” the old man said after a long and solemn observation with the instrument. “And the little dust and pebbles on it.”

“The lamp blinds your eyes, perhaps,” the astronomer said with humility. “It is better to look without light. I can do it because I have done it for so long. It is all practice—like placing the gads, which you always do right, and I always do wrong.”

“Aye. Maybe. Tell me what you see—” Bran hesitated. He had not long ago realized who Guennar must be. Knowing him to be a heretic made no difference, but knowing him to be a learned man made it hard to call him “mate” or “lad.” And yet here, and after all this time, he could not call him Master. There were times when, for all his mildness, the fugitive spoke with great words, gripping one’s soul, times when it would have been easy to call him Master. But it would have frightened him.

The astronomer put his hand on the frame of his mechanism and replied in a soft voice, “There are . . . constellations.”

“What’s that, constellations?”

The astronomer looked at Bran as if from a great way off, and said presently, “The Wain, the Scorpion, the Sickle by the Milky Way in summer, those are constellations. Patterns of stars, gatherings of stars, parenthoods, semblances . . .”

“And you see those here, with this?”

Still looking at him through the weak lamplight with clear brooding eyes, the astronomer nodded, and did not speak, but pointed downward, at the rock on which they stood, the hewn floor of the mine.

“What are they like?” Bran’s voice was hushed.

“I have only glimpsed them. Only for a moment. I have not learned the skill; it is a somewhat different skill . . . But they are there, Bran.”

Often now he was not in the stope where they worked, when they came to work, and did not join them even for their meal, though they always left him a share of food. He knew the ways of the mine now better than any of them, even Bran, not only the “living” mine but the “dead” one, the abandoned workings and exploratory tunnels that ran eastward, ever deeper, towards the caves. There he was most often; and they did not follow him.

When he did appear amongst them and they talked with him, they were more timid with him, and did not laugh.

One night as they were all going back with the last cartload to the main shaft, he came to meet them, stepping suddenly out of a crosscut to their right. As always he wore his ragged sheepskin coat, black with the clay and dirt of the tunnels. His fair hair had gone grey. His eyes were clear. “Bran,” he said, “come, I can show you now.”

“Show me what?”

“The stars. The stars beneath the rock. There’s a great constellation in the stope on the old fourth level, where the white granite cuts down through the black.”

“I know the place.”

“It’s there: underfoot, by that wall of white rock. A great shining and assembly of stars. Their radiance beats up through the darkness. They are like the faces of dancers, the eyes of angels. Come and see them, Bran!”

The miners stood there, Per and Hanno with backs braced to hold the cart from rolling: stooped men with tired, dirty faces and big hands bent and hardened by the grip of shovel and pick and sledge. They were embarrassed, compassionate, impatient.

“We’re just quitting. Off home to supper. Tomorrow,” Bran said.

The astronomer looked from one face to another and said nothing.

Hanno said in his hoarse gentle voice, “Come up with us, for this once, lad. It’s dark night out, and likely raining; it’s November now; no soul will see you if you come and sit at my hearth, for once, and eat hot food, and sleep beneath a roof and not under the heavy earth all by yourself alone!”

Guennar stepped back. It was as if a light went out, as his face went into shadow. “No,” he said. “They will burn out my eyes.”

“Leave him be,” said Per, and set the heavy ore-cart moving towards the shaft.

“Look where I told you,” Guennar said to Bran. “The mine is not dead. Look with your own eyes.”

“Aye. I’ll come with you and see. Good night!”

“Good night,” said the astronomer, and turned back to the side-tunnel as they went on. He carried no lamp or candle; they saw him one moment, darkness the next.



***



In the morning he was not there to meet them. He did not come.

Bran and Hanno sought him, idly at first, then for one whole day. They went as far down as they dared, and came at last to the entrance of the caves, and entered, calling sometimes, though in the great caverns even they, miners all their lives, dared not call aloud because of the terror of the endless echoes in the dark.

“He has gone down,” Bran said. “Down farther. That’s what he said. Go farther, you must go farther, to find the light.”

“There is no light,” Hanno whispered. “There was never light here. Not since the world’s creation.”

But Bran was an obstinate old man, with a literal and credulous mind; and Per listened to him. One day the two went to the place the astronomer had spoken of, where a great vein of hard light granite that cut down through the darker rock had been left untouched, fifty years ago, as barren stone. They re-timbered the roof of the old stope where the supports had weakened, and began to dig, not into the white rock but down, beside it; the astronomer had left a mark there, a kind of chart or symbol drawn with candle-black on the stone floor. They came on silver ore a foot down, beneath the shell of quartz; and under that—all eight of them working now—the striking picks laid bare the raw silver, the veins and branches and knots and nodes shining among broken crystals in the shattered rock, like stars and gatherings of stars, depth below depth without end, the light.

© 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Testimony of Oscar Wilde on Cross Examination (April 3,1895)

Edward Carson--You stated that your age was thirty-nine. I think you are over forty. You were born on 16th October, 1854?



Oscar Wilde--I have no wish to pose as being young. I am thirty-nine or forty. You have my certificate and that settles the matter.
C--But being born in 1854 makes you more than forty?
W--Ah! Very well
C--What age is Lord Alfred Douglas?
W--Lord Alfred Douglas is about twenty-four, and was between twenty and twenty-one years of age when I first knew him. Down to the time of the interview in Tite Street, Lord Queensberry was friendly. I did not receive a letter on 3rd April in which Lord Queensberry desired that my acquaintance with his son should cease. After the interview I had no doubt that such was Lord Queensberry's desire. Notwithstanding Lord Queensberry's protest, my intimacy with Lord Alfred Douglas has continued down to the present moment.
C-- You have stayed with him at many places?
W--Yes.
C--At Oxford? Brighton on several occasions? Worthing?
W--Yes.
C--And in various hotels in London?
W--Yes; at one in Albemarle Street, and in Dover Street, and at the Savoy.
C--Did you ever take rooms yourself in addition to your house in Tite Street?
W--Yes; at 10 and 11 St. James's Place. I kept the rooms from the month of October, 1893, to the end of March, 1894. Lord Alfred Douglas has stayed in those chambers, which are not far from Piccadilly. I have been abroad with him several times and even lately to Monte Carlo. With reference to the writings which have been mentioned, it was not at Brighton, in 20 King's Road, that I wrote my article for The Chameleon. I observed that there were also contributions from Lord Alfred Douglas, but these were not written at Brighton. I have seen them. I thought them exceedingly beautiful poems. One was "In Praise of Shame" and the other "Two Loves."
C-- These loves. They were two boys?
W--Yes.
C-- One boy calls his love "true love," and the other boy calls his love "shame"?
W--Yes.
C-- Did you think that made any improper suggestion?
W--No, none whatever.
C-- You read "The Priest and the Acolyte"?
W--Yes.
C-- You have no doubt whatever that that was an improper story?
W--From the literary point of view it was highly improper. It is impossible for a man of literature to judge it otherwise; by literature, meaning treatment, selection of subject, and the like. I thought the treatment rotten and the subject rotten.
C--You are of opinion, I believe, that there is no such thing as an immoral book?
W--Yes.
C--May I take it that you think "The Priest and the Acolyte" was not immoral?
W--It was worse; it was badly written.
C--Was not the story that of a priest who fell in love with a boy who served him at the altar, and was discovered by the rector in the priest's room, and a scandal arose?
W--I have read it only once, in last November, and nothing will induce me to read it again. I don't care for it. It doesn't interest me...
C--Do you think the story blasphemous?
W--I think it violated every artistic canon of beauty.
C-- I wish to know whether you thought the story blasphemous?
W--The story filled me with disgust. The end was wrong.
C--Answer the question, sir. Did you or did you not consider the story blasphemous?
W--I thought it disgusting.
C--I am satisfied with that. You know that when the priest in the story administers poison to the boy, he uses the words of the sacrament of the Church of England?
W--That I entirely forgot.
C--Do you consider that blasphemous?
W--I think it is horrible. "Blasphemous" is not a word of mine.

[Carson then read from "The Priest and the Acolyte."]:

Just before the consecration the priest took a tiny phial from the pocket of his cassock, blessed it, and poured the contents into the chalice.
When the time came for him to receive from the chalice, he raised it to his lips, but did not taste of it.
He administered the sacred wafer to the child, and then he took his hand; he turned towards him; but when he saw the light in the beautiful face he turned again to the crucifix with a low moan. For one instant his courage failed him; then he turned to the little fellow again, and held the chalice to his lips:
"The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life."

C--Do you approve of those words?
W—I think them disgusting, perfect twaddle....I strongly objected to the whole story. I took no steps to express disapproval of The Chameleon because I think it would have been beneath my dignity as a man of letters to associate myself with an Oxford undergraduate's productions. I am aware that the magazine may have been circulated among the undergraduates of Oxford. I do not believe that any book or work of art ever had any effect whatever on morality.
C--Am I right in saying that you do not consider the effect in creating morality or immorality?
W—Certainly, I do not.
C--So far as your works are concerned, you pose as not being concerned about morality or immorality?
W—I do not know whether you use the word "pose" in any particular sense.
C--It is a favorite word of your own?
W—Is it? I have no pose in this matter. In writing a play or a book, I am concerned entirely with literature—that is, with art. I aim not at doing good or evil, but in trying to make a thing that will have some quality of beauty.
C--Listen, sir. Here is one of the "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young" which you contributed: "Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others." You think that true?
W—I rarely think that anything I write is true.
C--Did you say "rarely"?
W--I said "rarely." I might have said "never"—not true in the actual sense of the word.
C--"Religions die when they arc proved to be true." Is that true?
W—Yes; I hold that. It is a suggestion towards a philosophy of the absorption of religions by science, but it is too big a question to go into now.
C--Do you think that was a safe axiom to put forward for the philosophy of the young?
W--Most stimulating.
C--"If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out"?
W—That is a pleasing paradox, but I do not set very high store on it as an axiom.
C-- Is it good for the young?
W—Anything is good that stimulates thought in whatever age.
C--Whether moral or immoral?
W—There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
C--"Pleasure is thc only thing one should live for"?
W—I think that the realization of oneself is the prime aim of life, and to realize oneself through pleasure is finer than to do so through pain. I am, on that point, entirely on the side of the ancients—the Greeks. It is a pagan idea.
C--"A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it"?
W—Perfectly. That would be my metaphysical definition of truth; something so personal that the same truth could never be appreciated by two minds.
C--"The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth"?
W—Oh, yes; I think so. Half of it is true. The life of contemplation is the highest life, and so recognized by the philosopher.
C--"There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession"?
W—I should think that the young have enough sense of humor.
C--You think that is humorous?
W—I think it is an amusing paradox, an amusing play on words....
C--This is in your introduction to Dorian Gray: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written." That expresses your view?
W—My view on art, yes.
C--Then, I take it, that no matter how immoral a book may be, if it is well written, it is, in your opinion, a good book?
W—Yes, if it were well written so as to produce a sense of beauty, which is the highest sense of which a human being can be capable. If it were badly written, it would produce a sense of disgust.
C--Then a well-written book putting forward perverted moral views may be a good book?
W—No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
C--A perverted novel might be a good book?
W--I don't know what you mean by a "perverted" novel.
C--Then I will suggest Dorian Gray as open to the interpretation of being such a novel?
W--That could only be to brutes and illiterates. The views of Philistines on art are incalculably stupid.
C--An illiterate person reading Dorian Gray might consider it such a novel?
W—The views of illiterates on art are unaccountable. I am concerned only with my view of art. I don't care twopence what other people think of it.
C--The majority of persons would come under your definition of Philistines and illiterates?
W—I have found wonderful exceptions.
C--Do you think that the majority of people live up to the position you are giving us?
W—I am afraid they are not cultivated enough.
C--Not cultivated enough to draw the distinction between a good book and a bad book?
W—Certainly not.
C--The affection and love of the artist of Dorian Gray might lead an ordinary individual to believe that it might have a certain tendency?
W—I have no knowledge of the views of ordinary individuals.
C--You did not prevent the ordinary individual from buying your book?
W—I have never discouraged him.

[Carson read from The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the painter Basil Hallward describes to Lord Henry Wooton his first meetings with Dorian Gray.]:

". . . The story is simply this. Two months ago I went to a crush at Lady Brandon's. You know we poor painters have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not Savages. With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. Well, after I had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious Academicians, I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me. I turned half-way round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious instinct of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. I did not want any external influence in my life. You know yourself, Harry, how independent I am by nature. My father destined me for the army. I insisted on going to Oxford. Then he made me enter my name at the Middle Temple. Before I had eaten half a dozen dinners I gave up the Bar, and announced my intention of becoming a painter. I have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray. Then--but I don't know how to explain it to you. Something seemed to tell me that I was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life. I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. I knew that if I spoke to Dorian I would become absolutely devoted to him, and that I ought not to speak to him. I grew afraid, and turned to quit the room. It was not conscience that made me do so: it was cowardice. I take no credit to myself for trying to escape."
"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."
"I don't believe that, Harry. However, whatever was my motive-and it may have been pride, for I used to be very proud-I certainly struggled to the door. There, of course, I stumbled against Lady Brandon. 'You are not going to run away so soon, Mr. Hallward?' she screamed out. You know her shrill horrid voice?"
"Yes, she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said Lord Henry, pulling the daisy to bits with his long, nervous fingers.
"I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to Royalties, and people with Stars and Garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and hooked noses. She spoke of me as her dearest friend. I had only met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me. I believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. We were quite close, almost touching. Our eyes met again. It was mad of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him. Perhaps it was not so mad, after all. It was simply inevitable. We would have spoken to each other without introduction. I am sure of that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we were destined to know each other."
". . . Tell me more about Dorian Gray. . How often do you see him?"
"Every day. I couldn't be happy if I didn't see him every day. Of course sometimes it is only for a few minutes. But a few minutes with somebody one worships means a great deal."
"But you don't really worship him?"
"I do."
"How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything but your painting--your art, I should say. Art sounds better, doesn't it?"
"He is all my art to me now. I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the history of the world. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antino?s was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, model from him. Of course I have done all that. He has stood as Paris in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms, he has sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, looking into the green, turbid Nile. He has leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland, and seen in the water's silent silver the wonder of his own beauty. But he is much more to me than that. I won't tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. There is nothing that art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done since I met Dorian Gray is good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious way—I wonder will you understand me? —his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before. 'A dream of form in days of thought'—who is it who says that? I forget, but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of this lad-for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty—his merely visible presence—ah! I wonder can you realize all that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in itself all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is bestial, an ideality that is void. Harry! Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price, but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me."
"Basil, this is quite wonderful! I must see Dorian Gray."

C--Now I ask you, Mr. Wilde, do you consider that that description of the feeling of one man towards a youth just grown up was a proper or an improper feeling?
W—I think it is the most perfect description of what an artist would feel on meeting a beautiful personality that was in some way necessary to his art and life.
C--You think that is a feeling a young man should have towards another?
W—Yes, as an artist.

[Carson continued reading from the book.]

"Let us sit down, Dorian," said Hallward, looking pale and pained. "Let us sit down. I will sit in the shadow, and you shall sit in the sunlight. Our lives are like that. Just answer me one question. Have you noticed in the picture something that you did not like? —something that probably at first did not strike you, but that revealed itself to you suddenly?"
"Basil!" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with trembling hands, and gazing at him with wild, startled eyes.
"I see you did. Don't speak. Wait till you hear what I have to say. It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I have never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really 'grande passion' is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country. Well, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you, you were still present in my art. It was all wrong and foolish. It is all wrong and foolish still. Of course I never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it; I did not understand it myself. One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. It was to have been my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece. But, as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much. Then, it was that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. You were a little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to me. Harry, to whom I talked about it, laughed at me. But I did not mind that. When the picture was finished, and I -sat alone with it, I felt that I was right. Well, after a few days the portrait left my studio, and as soon as I had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I had said anything in it, more than that you were extremely goodlooking and that I could paint. Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour—that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. And so when I got this offer from Paris I determined to make your portrait the principal thing in my exhibition. It never occurred to me that you would refuse. I see now that you were right. The picture must not be shown. You must not be angry with me, Dorian, for what I have told you. As I said to Harry, once, you are made to be worshipped."

C—Do you mean to say that that passage describes the natural feeling of one man towards another?
W—It would be the influence produced by a beautiful personality.
C--A beautiful person?
W—I said a "beautiful personality." You can describe it as you like. Dorian Gray's was a most remarkable personality.
C--May I take it that you, as an artist, have never known the feeling described here?
W—I have never allowed any personality to dominate my art.
C--Then you have never known the feeling you described?
W—No. It is a work of fiction.
C--So far as you are concerned you have no experience as to its being a natural feeling?
W—I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.
C--But let us go over it phrase by phrase. "I quite admit that I adored you madly." What do you say to that? Have you ever adored a young man madly?
W—No, not madly; I prefer love-that is a higher form.
C--Never mind about that. Let us keep down to the level we are at now?
W—I have never given adoration to anybody except myself. (Loud laughter.)
C--I suppose you think that a very smart thing?
W—Not at all.
C--Then you have never had that feeling?
W—No. The whole idea was borrowed from Shakespeare, I regret to say—yes, from Shakespeare's sonnets.
C--I believe you have written an article to show that Shakespeare's sonnets were suggestive of unnatural vice?
W—On the contrary I have written an article to show that they are not." I objected to such a perversion being put upon Shakespeare.
C--"I have adored you extravagantly"?—Do you mean financially?
W--Oh, yes, financially!
C--Do you think we are talking about finance?
W—I don't know what you are talking about.
C--Don't you? Well, I hope I shall make myself very plain before I have done. "I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke." Have you ever been jealous of a young man?
W—Never in my life.
C--"I wanted to have you all to myself." Did you ever have that feeling?
W—No; I should consider it an intense nuisance, an intense bore.
C--"I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry." Why should he grow afraid that the world should know of it?
W--Because there are people in the world who cannot understand the intense devotion, affection, and admiration that an artist can feel for a wonderful and beautiful personality. These are the conditions under which we live. I regret them.
C--These unfortunate people, that have not the high understanding that you have, might put it down to something wrong?
W--Undoubtedly; to any point they chose. I am not concerned with the ignorance of others....

[Carson continued reading from The Picture of Dorian Gray.]

". . . I think it right that you should know that the most dreadful things are being said about you in London—things that I could hardly repeat to you."
"I don't wish to know anything about them. I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty."
"They must interest you, Dorian. Every gentleman is interested in his good name. You don't want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded. Of course you have your position, and your wealth, and all that kind of thing. But position and wealth are not everything. Mind you, I don't believe these rumours at all. At least, I can't believe them when I see you. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk of secret vices. There are no such things as secret vices. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. Somebody—I won't mention his name, but you know him—came to me last year to have his portrait done. I had never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the time, though I have heard a good deal since. He offered an extravagant price. I refused him. There was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated. I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied about him. His life is dreadful. But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth—I can't believe anything against you. And yet I see you very seldom, and you never come down to the studio now, and when I am away from you, and I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I don't know what to say. Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs? You used to be a friend of Lord Cawdor. I met him at dinner last week. Your name happened to come up in conversation, in connexion with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the Dudley. Cawdor curled his lip, and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant. He told me. He told me right out before everybody. It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fateful to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent's only son, and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with him? Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous. . . ."

C—Does not this passage suggest a charge of unnatural vice?
W—It describes Dorian Gray as a man of very corrupt influence, though there is no statement as to the nature of the influence. But as a matter of fact I do not think that one person influences another, nor do I think there is any bad influence in the world.
C--A man never corrupts a youth?
W—I think not.
C--Nothing could corrupt him?
W—If you are talking of separate ages.
C--No, sir, I am talking common sense.
W--I do not think one person influences another.
C--You don't think that flattering a young man, making love to him, in fact, would be likely to corrupt him?
W—No.
C--Where was Lord Alfred Douglas staying when you wrote that letter to him?
W—At the Savoy; and I was at Babbacombe, near Torquay.
C--It was a letter in answer to something he had sent you?
W—Yes, a poem.
C--Why should a man of your age address a boy nearly twenty years younger as "My own boy"?
W—I was fond of him. I have always been fond of him.
C--Do you adore him?
W—No, but I have always liked him. I think it is a beautiful letter. It is a poem. I was not writing an ordinary letter. You might as well cross-examine me as to whether King Lear or a sonnet of Shakespeare was proper.
C--Apart from art, Mr. Wilde?
W—I cannot answer apart from art.
C--Suppose a man who was not an artist had written this letter, would you say it was a proper letter?
W—A man who was not. an artist could not have written that letter.
C--Why?
W—Because nobody but an artist could write it. He certainly could not write the language unless he were a man of letters.
C--I can suggest, for the sake of your reputation, that there is nothing very wonderful in this "red rose-leaf lips of yours"?
W—A great deal depends on the way it is read.
C--"Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry." Is that a beautiful phrase?
W—Not as you read it, Mr. Carson. You read it very badly.
C--I do not profess to be an artist; and when I hear you give evidence, I am glad I am not—
Sir Edward Clarke—I don't think my friend should talk like that. (To witness) Pray, do not criticize my friend's reading again.
C—Is that not an exceptional letter?
W—It is unique, I should say.
C--Was that the ordinary way in which you carried on your correspondence?
W—No; but I have often written to Lord Alfred Douglas, though I never wrote to another young man in the same way.
C--Have you often written letters in the same style as this?
W—I don't repeat myself in style.
C--Here is another letter which I believe you also wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas. Will you read it?
W—No; I decline. I don't see why I should.
C--Then I will.

Savoy Hotel,
Victoria Embankment, London.

Dearest of all Boys,
Your letter was delightful, red and yellow wine to me; but I am sad and out of sorts. Bosie, you must not make scenes with me. They kill me, they wreck the loveliness of life. I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted with passion. I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me. I would sooner—than have you bitter, unjust, hating. . . . I must see you soon. You are the divine thing I want, the thing of grace and beauty; but I don't know how to do it. Shall I come to Salisbury? My bill here, is £49 for a week. I have also got a new sitting-room. . . . Why are you not here, my dear, my wonderful boy? I fear I must leave-no money, no credit, and a heart of lead.

YOUR OWN OSCAR.

C—Is that an ordinary letter?
W—Everything I write is extraordinary. I do not pose as being ordinary, great heavens! Ask me any question you like about it.
C--Is it the kind of letter a man writes to another?
W—It was a tender expression of my great admiration for Lord Alfred Douglas. It was not, like the other, a prose poem.

Attalus - Greek and Roman history 323 - 30 B.C.

 https://www.attalus.org/index.html

SLUM: The Shadow Library Uptime Monitor

 https://open-slum.org/

Bruce Dawe: homo suburbensis

One constant in a world of variables
A man alone in the evening in his patch of vegetables,
and all the things he takes down with him there


Where the easement runs along the back fence and the air
smells of tomato-vines, and the hoarse rasping tendrils
of pumpkin flourish clumsy whips and their foliage sprawls


Over the compost-box, poising rampant upon
the palings …
He stands there, lost in a green
confusion, smelling the smoke of somebody’s rubbish


Burning, hearing vaguely the clatter of a disk
in a sink that could be his, hearing a dog, a kid,
a far whisper of traffic, and offering up instead


Not much but as much as any man can offer
time, pain, love, hate, age, war, death, laughter, fever.

Buddha Machine SE

Rundle on Les Murray

Les, old Les is he dead then? Les Murray, Australia’s greatest poet, gone at 80. The news came over the wires just as the sideshow debate was beginning on 7TWO, sandwiched between a Get Smart episode and a Shark Rotator ad.


A tsunami of articles followed — long and pre-written pieces on our greatest poet, national institution, living treasure, etc. That he was writing to the end leaves us with a vast body of work. He identified his own expansive form with the wider world in one of his most striking works, ‘The Craze Field’:



These lagoons, these watercourses,
streets of the underworld.
Their water has become the trees that stand along them.

For all the honours and accolades, few of the obits and features do or can say what Les Murray actually did with poetry, his mind-bending transformation of what it was possible to do with words. Murray’s greatness lies in his ability to undo relations of word and thing, to draw vibrant being out of dead abstractions, to recast relations between the visible and invisible parts of the world.

That wasn’t the sort of thing people whistled to themselves, but to read the funeral lays you’d think some much-loved but conventional poet — a latter-day Lawson — had passed on. Because his “politics” were of the right, Les’ fate was to be taken up by the right; some of whom never read his poetry, or any poetry, beyond ‘Invictus’.

The people who read Les Murray for pleasure are those who wanted the world exploded in a sentence, the constituents of being laid bare. That wasn’t for everybody, and “getting” such poetry isn’t a question of intelligence per se, but rather a being-turned-towards the deep poetic encounter with the mute world.

I can’t imagine how I would see the world if I’d never encountered a poem like ‘Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands’ — but trying to teach Les Murray to Year 11 and 12 kids, as a by-the-hour tutor was murder. Kids who would never read poetry again, and had no interest in it, could “get” Yeats or Dickinson or Plath because their work remains at the level of the discursive, of the pronouncement. For a while, Murray’s ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’ — which was first and foremost an imagist defamiliarisation of what a broad bean plant looks like, before pushing on to a more theological point — was on the high school syllabus. For students and teachers alike, it was mostly incomprehensible. Yet it was on such deep work that his global reputation was founded.

Les might have had a shot at being that national poet once. He got an early start, coming to Sydney Uni in the late ’50s (“a time of picking your nose/while standing at attention in civilian clothes”) from a modest northern NSW farming family. By his own account — made tedious through repetition — he was an awkward country boy, bullied at school by mean girls, subsisting through uni on a commonwealth scholarship.

Then, and in the first phase of his career, he wrote in a plain style, Robert Frost-influenced. This was when he wrote the sole poem of his to have purchase on the public consciousness: ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’, about a weeping man bringing a city to a halt:


The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man

Had he stuck to this approach — which evinces a very clear desire to be the public poet, body forth the unsung spirit of our etc — he would have gone nowhere much. It was only when he started to poke and prod at the constituted nature of the world, and the fixed character of nouns and verbs, and using each, words and things, to deconstruct the other, that he created something that has few parallels not merely in English, but in language itself.

It’s this mature work that was the making of him; it finally reached the high-table of global culture. Feted by Susan Sontag, Derek Walcott and a host of others, Murray was a late modernist producing hard stuff that required a knowledge of the global poetic heritage to understand. That was the paradox he would live for the rest of his life: singing the country into being for a population who didn’t want it, adored by a global elite for whom the Australianness was simply a pretext for the exploration of being in general.

This split produced a clownish tension: he railed against elite and condescended multiculture, while spending half his life in planes and hotels, bouncing around the global festival circuit. Having returned to his childhood home of Bunyah, he convoked a largely imaginary version of the place, and the country, at variance with the mass cultural, globalised rural ‘burb that it, and everywhere, has become. He turned a not-unusual, put-upon childhood into an agon on par with Dante’s Inferno.

Murray was as performative as any right-wing culture warrior summoning a vanished world to ground their politics of resentment. His late support for Pauline Hanson was simultaneously a knowing extension of the yokel brand, and an appalling misperception of Hanson as the voice of the nation.

He wrote and published too much in the end, as all full-time poets do — the style at times tripping into a self-parody. It was never less than good, but it had long ceased to be to any purpose. In the ’80s and ’90s he reverted to rhyme and occasionally tried his hand at political verse (“Hey True Blue, they are slipping one to you”, protesting Labor’s 1983 attempt at an ID card).

He was a poet who reached across the aeons to Homer, yet he lived in a land which has not taken a single poem to its heart willingly; most Australians know only what was required to pass Year 12, a process designed to turn mere indifference to poetry into active hatred of it. The only Australian poetry Australians seem to enjoy and endure is ‘Flame Trees’, a few Oils songs, and ABBA.

Les never drew the universal presence of mass culture into his work and thus much of his social poetry remained at the faux-naif level. If we have a poet laureate, it’s John Forbes, who could get an ode to beauty and desire out of a torn copy of Who magazine on a plastic chair in a doctor’s waiting room.

That’s possibly the ultimate paradox of all. One reason why I think Les soared above Heaney, Walcott, and, oh, let’s throw in Anne Carson, is that the national tradition was so light (A.D. Hopes’ ‘Australia’ is, let’s face it, a Qantas ad) that he could regard it as a null set, present but empty, and use the energy of that vacuum to produce stuff that no one had ever done before anywhere.

He was our gift to the world and its to us, and the awe one has at his achievement is secondary to the feeling of it, beyond pleasure. Not into your bones; deeper than that. Les o Les he is dead then. To the glory of dog.