The Other Side (17 page)

When I greeted them they solemnly bowed their shaven heads and continued imperturbably on their way. They were old men of distinctly Mongoloid type, swathed in robes of a dull yellowy-orange. Soon I saw others. Each was sitting outside his hut, motionless as a statue, apparently idle. One had pots of flowers in front of him, another was gazing at a sleeping dog, a third was engrossed in the contemplation of a few stones. ‘In Pearl they shake their heads at these people’, I thought. No one ever came here, they were viewed with what was almost contempt. In spite of that, the tribe was very proud, believing they were descended in a direct line from the great Genghis Khan, though, to tell the truth, there was nothing about them now that reminded one of the Asiatic despot. They were all old people living here, the few women hardly distinguishable from the rest, and all alike in bearing, dress and facial expression. Their most beautiful feature was the brilliant blue of their slightly slanting eyes. How everything here contrasted with conditions in the Dream Realm! There the haste, here the calm. But these old people must have had their struggles too, the deep furrows in their faces bore witness to that.

After my first visit I used to stroll across the bridge to the blue-eyed tribe quite often. Although no one invited me, nor did anyone ask me to leave. I became more and more aware of the sharp contrast. I came here to relax and quietly observe. Their serenity made a deep impression on me. I reflected on it and tried to integrate the results with my other experiences.

For the last six months now I had no longer been completely blind as regards Patera’s great mystery. The old professor was right about some things. The whole Dream Realm was under a spell; there was some connection between the fear and the undoubted comic element in our way of life. The Master really was behind everything and manifested himself in a mysterious way more frequently than was welcome. The idea that he was the guiding hand behind almost 65,000 Dreamers could not be denied, however monstrous it might appear to me. The precise extent of his power it was beyond me to determine, for I kept coming across proofs that he transmitted his impulses to all animal and vegetable life-forms as well. We were all subconsciously aware of this and calmly accepted it as our fate, signed, sealed and immutable. It was so tangled that not even the subtlest of minds could make sense of it. Patera remained unfathomable, just as no one could comprehend the power that turned us into puppets in the Dream Realm. We felt it at every turn. The Lord possessed our wills, he clouded our minds, he exploited his puppet-like subjects. But to what end? We had no taxes to pay, we didn’t bring anything in for him. The more one tried to think about it, the darker it became. What was certain was that this mysterious figure was ailing. He was an epileptic and we all shared his fits; that was the ‘Brainstorm’. He will grow older, he will die. What then? Will every spark of our own strength fizzle out with him. We need him for everything, just to stop ourselves collapsing. Where did he get these boundless energies from?

And then here were the survivors of an old, noble tribe whose habits and customs were the very opposite of ours. What connection did they have with the Master? The old men sat for hours, unblinking, staring into the distance or bent over some trifle, stones, feathers, bones. Never laughing, scarcely talking to each other, the blue-eyed tribe were the incarnation of complete equilibrium. That was shown by their measured gestures, the stamp of spiritual power on their furrowed faces. Their almost more-than-human detachment made them appear burnt-out. Unconcerned concern, that is the contradictory expression that always comes to mind when I think of them, and they cast a spell over me which I will not forget to my dying day. I found it impossible to decide how old individual members of the tribe were. Despite their ancient faces, with expressions which appeared impervious to all feeling, their looks seemed illuminated from within, and yet I could read nothing definite in them. Their teeth were perfect, the rest of their bodies lean, little more than skin and bones. It is unlikely there were more than fifty of them. Three times I saw them burying their dead, and those occasions revealed how far removed they were from both Christian and Buddhist anchorites. The corpses were wrapped in their robes, lowered into the ground and covered with moss and leaves, then the hole was filled with earth. They were buried beside the huts where they had lived. No signs were erected, the earth was levelled; there was no excitement, no prayers. I gained enormous benefit just from observing these customs.

At this point I am going to interrupt the progress of my narrative so that the reader can have some idea of the philosophy of the blue-eyed tribe, as far as I could understand it.

II: The Clarification of Understanding

What I learnt above all was to appreciate the value of indolence. For an active person it is the work of a lifetime to acquire it, but once you have grasped the sweetness of indolence you will hold on to it for ever, even if it is a constant struggle. I, too, tried to spend hours contemplating stones, flowers, animals and people. It sharpened my eye, just as my ear and nose had already been sharpened. And now came a marvellous time; I discovered a new side of the Dream world. My senses, now fully developed, gradually began to influence my thought processes and to transform them. A new sense of wonder opened up within me. Each individual object, torn from its relationship with other things, took on new significance. I felt a shudder of awe at the thought that such a form could reach me out of the vastness of eternity. I came to see mere being, things
being
the way they were and no other, as a miracle. Looking at a shell one day, it suddenly came to me with crystal clarity that the manner in which it existed was not as simple as I had assumed until then. Soon this was the way I saw everything around me. At first my strongest sensations came as I was falling asleep or directly I woke up, when my body was tired and the life-force within me comatose. A world that was not always living had to be created piece by piece, and it was a continual process.

More and more I felt the common bond uniting everything. Colours, scents, sounds and tastes were interchangeable. I came to see that behind the world was the power of the imagination:
imagination is power
. Wherever I went and whatever I did, I made every effort to intensify my joys and my sorrows while secretly laughing at both, knowing, as I did, that it is by swinging to and fro that the pendulum creates balance. And it is at the farthest, most violent swings that it makes itself most clearly felt.

Once I saw the world as a kind of carpet, a riot of colour in which the most surprising contrasts merged into a greater harmony. Another time I was looking down onto an immeasurable filigree of shapes and forms. In the darkness I was engulfed in a sonorous symphony in which natural sounds, from the gentlest to the most grandiloquent, combined in clearly intelligible chords. Even quite new sensations I grasped with instinctive assurance. I remember one morning when I felt as if I were the centre of an elementary numerical system. I felt abstract, as if I were a fluctuating point of equilibrium, a feeling I have never experienced again.

Now I understood Patera, the Lord, the colossal Master. Now I was one of those who laughed loudest at the great farce, without losing my ability to tremble with the tormented victims. I was a tribunal that observed everything, and I realised that basically nothing happened. Patera was everywhere, I saw him in the eyes of friend and foe alike, in animals, plants and stones. His imagination, the pulse of the Dream Realm, throbbed in everything that was. And yet I still found things foreign within me. To my horror I found that my ‘self was composed of countless ‘selves’, each one lurking behind the other, each one seeming bigger and more taciturn than the one in front. The last ones disappeared in the shadows, beyond my comprehension. Each of these selves had ideas of its own. From the point of view of organic life, for example, the concept of death as the end was correct, but on a higher plane of understanding the individual did not exist, so that there was nothing to come to an end.

The rhythmic throb of Patera’s pulse was everywhere. Insatiable in his imaginative power, he wanted everything at once: the thing and its opposite, the world and the void. That was why his creatures swung to and fro as they did. The world they created by their imagination had to be wrested from the void and then serve as a base from which to conquer the void. The void was unyielding and resisted, but the imagination started to hum and buzz, shapes, sounds, colours, smells emerged in all their variety and the world was there. But the void returned to eat up all creation, the world turned dull and pale, life fell silent, rusted away, disintegrated, was dead once more, a lifeless void. Then it all started from the beginning again. That explained how everything fitted together, how a cosmos was possible. It was all terribly shot through with pain. The higher one grew, the deeper the roots one had to have. If I want joy, that means I want sorrow too. Nothing, or everything.

The primal source must lie in the imagination and in the void; perhaps they are one. Once you have grasped its rhythm, you can work out more or less how long your torment or sorrow might last. Unreason and contradiction have to be accepted as part of life. When my house burns down it is both flame and calamity. The victim can comfort himself with the thought that both are imagined. It was the same for Patera, who won on both sides.

Through their related pulse I also came to understand lower forms of life. I could tell: this cat has had a poor night’s sleep, that goldfinch is thinking nasty thoughts. Now these reflections within me governed everything I did. The noise of the outside world had kept on lashing my nerves until they were sensitised and ripe for my experiences in the Dream Realm.

At the end of this development man as an individual disappears, is no longer needed. This path leads to the stars.

III: The Confusion of the Dream

That night I went to sleep with momentous thoughts in my mind. Rather less momentous was the dream I had, but it was so strange I feel I must recount it here. I saw myself standing by the great river, looking across longingly at the Outer Settlement, which appeared more extensive and picturesque than it was in reality. As far as the eye could see was a confusion of bridges, towers, windmills, jagged peaks, all interspersed and interconnected, as in a mirage. Large and small, fat and thin figures were moving around in the chaos. As I looked across, I could sense the miller standing behind my back. ‘
I
killed him’, he whispered and tried to push me into the water. To my astonishment my left leg lengthened until I could step into the seething throng on the other side with no trouble at all. Now I heard ticking all round me and saw a large number of flat clocks of all sizes, from a clock for a tower, to a kitchen clock and right down to the tiniest pocket-watch. They had short, stumpy legs and were crawling all over each other in the meadow like tortoises, ticking excitedly. A man dressed in soft green leather and wearing a cap like a white sausage was sitting in a tree bare of leaves, catching fish in the air. Those he caught he hung on the branches and they dried in an instant. An old fellow with an abnormally large trunk and short legs approached; apart from a pair of grubby drill workman’s trousers, he was naked. He had two long vertical rows of nipples; I counted eighteen. With a great deal of huffing and puffing he filled his lungs full of air, now the left side of his breast swelling up, now the right, and then, with his fingers running up and down the eighteen nipples, he played the most delightful accordion pieces. At the same time he moved in time with the rhythm like a dancing bear as he let the air out. Finally he stopped, blew his nose on his hands and threw them away. Then he grew an enormous beard and disappeared in the tangle of hair. In a thicket nearby I disturbed some fat pigs. They ran away from me in single file, getting smaller and tinier until, with loud squeals, they disappeared in a mouse-hole by the road.

Behind me”- it made me feel uncomfortable–the miller was sitting by the river studying a huge sheet of newspaper. After he had read it and eaten it up, smoke came pouring out of his ears. He turned the colour of copper, stood up and clutched his sagging paunch with both hands, all the time tearing up and down the bank, sending fierce looks in all directions and emitting shrill whistles. Finally he fell in a heap on the ground, turned pale, his body growing light and transparent so that one could clearly see two little railway trains whizzing round his entrails. Each seemed to be trying to catch the other as they shot like lightning round one loop of his gut after another. With a shake of the head and somewhat taken aback, I was about to offer to help the miller when my words were cut off by a chimpanzee planting out a circular garden round me at top speed from which thick clusters of fat, apple-green steins like giant asparagus shot up out of the damp ground. I was afraid I was going to be trapped within this living fence, but before I really knew what was happening, I was liberated. In his convulsions, the dead miller, now no longer transparent, had laid a ring of hundreds of thousands of little milky white eggs, from which legions of slugs emerged and at once devoured their procreator. A pungent smell of smoked meat spread, causing the fleshy stalks to decay and collapse. In the distance the Outer Settlement disappeared in a web of shimmering violet threads.