Who am I writing for? Myself, of course. Doesn’t
everybody? That’s why I choose titles that mean something to me, but won’t to
anyone else, until I explain them. I’m not alone in that. Michel de Montaigne,
who chose to write about himself because, as he said, he was the subject he
knew best, called one of his essays “On some Lines of Virgil”, when it was
actually an account of his own attitudes towards the sexual act and included a
little boast (in a modified line from Ovid) about the frequency with which he
was able to perform it in his youth.
There isn’t that much sex in Hölderlin (there’s a
lot more in Goethe, some of it quite explicit) though there’s a lot of love, of
an intensely passionate but spiritually rarefied kind. There’s also quite a bit
of alienation, and some madness hovering – not your ordinary prosaic kind, but
the sort you find yourself lost in when you take a wrong turning in the
corridors of inspiration. As he did, when the Gods and Goddesses deserted him.
Even before their departure, he felt that he was
trapped between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and he
put it like this:
Every dull turn
of the world has such disinherited persons,
Once the divinities were gone, he sank into the madness in which he lived for another thirty-seven years, pacing his lodgings in a tower in Tübingen, where a carpenter saw to his bodily needs, and his moving shadow at the window inspired another poet, the young Eduard Mörike, to a vision of compassion and incomprehensible terror that moved from frenetic activity through flickering conflagration to the lightness of ash dispersed on the wind.
In his madness, Hölderlin still wrote occasionally, no longer in the complex classical metres and syntax of his earlier style, which he had used to wrestle with the contradictions he experienced, but in balanced rhymes, signing his products with fantasy names and dates. Here is one of them:
The Lines of Life
The lines of life
are varied, start and cease
As paths do, or
the mountain’s silhouette.
What we are here
a God can there complete
With harmonies, endless reward, and peace.
Who did he write this for? For the self lost in madness? For the other self, the one that didn’t go mad, but survived? For both of them? Crime stories are not written for criminals, nor ghost stories for ghosts – presumably...
Since my wife’s death, some two years before, I had been in the world, but not of it. I did things automatically. Everything was like walking the dog – that is to say, I knew what I was doing and did it without thinking about it, because it was always the same thing, the same walk in the same place. My mind was elsewhere, and I don’t know where. Lucy led me.
As I walked through the wood, I thought about the leaves around me. What had made one fall before another? Did it change the world? Were there as many different worlds as there were different orders in which the leaves could fall, in all the woods of the world? (It was Virgil, of course, who compared the souls of the dead to leaves blown by the wind, so numerous, so light.) Given how deeply I was immersed in my contemplation, it was not surprising that I missed my usual path. The clarity of winter was paradoxically more misleading than the fullness of foliage. Seeing too much can be worse than not seeing enough. The leaves would not have let me go astray.
As always, Lucy rescued me. She guided me out of the wood, in which I had walked twice every day for four years, but with which I was no longer familiar, by another path that she found under the leaves, and which I couldn’t see. Although it finished at a barbed wire fence, it was obviously used, because some kind person had twisted the three strands of wire into one at the gap that led out on to the asphalted footpath.
The village looked – different. Maybe it was the angle, that wasn’t the usual one. Maybe the dead tree that rose across the view had lost some small branch since I last looked closely at it. I turned for home, but Lucy had other ideas, and urged me, with nods of her silver-grey muzzle and black head, in the other direction, towards the churchyard. There was still enough daylight, so I gave in.
My wife’s grave was at the far side, no longer the last. After all, it had been over two years. I walked slowly towards it, Lucy, for once, obediently at my heel. A woman, who seemed vaguely familiar, was kneeling at it with her back to me. One of my wife’s friends from London, no doubt. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to tell her how I was coping – or not. I didn’t want to talk about my wife, to rediscover how much I had lost. I ignored her, and stopped a couple of graves away, just near enough to read the epitaph I had so carefully chosen.
The name on the stone was mine.
I could hear Lucy whimpering. It wasn’t my attention she was trying to attract, but that of the kneeling woman. That wasn’t like her. Lucy was far too self-possessed ever to fawn or beg from strangers, however demanding she might be with me. (On a night that was rich with the smell of fox, she had been known to disturb me five or six separate times.)
Lucy had given up whimpering, since it was achieving nothing. Instead, she was poking her muzzle between the woman’s left arm and her side, to make her turn round.
“Lucy!” I said, sharply. As usual, my voice had no effect on the dog, but it made the woman turn at once. She looked at the pair of us.
“You’re dead,” she said, “both of you.”
“On the contrary,” I replied, “you are.”
And then we were all three of us in a kind of muddled and muddy heap on the ground, hugging and kissing each other for all we were worth, with Lucy licking anyone she could get her tongue on. It wasn’t very dignified, I’m afraid. Certainly not the kind of display you expect in a churchyard in a respectable village during the hours of daylight. Fortunately, nobody came along before we’d picked ourselves up.
“Your place or mine?” I said.
“Ours,” said my wife, “though actually it’s in my sole name now. Where on earth have you come from?”
“I got lost in the wood,” I said.
“Dante!” said my wife, with a slight tone of irritation. “Do you always have to quote things? I expect Virgil led you out.”
“No,” I said, “it was Lucy.”
My wife bent down, picked up the surprised dog bodily and carried her home like a babe in arms, flat on her back and having her tummy tickled all the time, which she rather likes.
As we walked, I began to notice slight differences between this village and the one that I lived in: hedges clipped differently, doors painted in other colours, a roof renewed here, a conservatory missing there, and the parked cars varied, too.
By the time we reached the house, I had made up my mind.
“I’m not going back, you know,” I said.
“Too bloody right you’re not!” said my wife, as she dropped Lucy rather unceremoniously in the hallway and dragged me inside. “Why would you want to?”
“I might have left the gas on,” I said.
“There isn’t any in the village,” she said, “and even if there were, let it blow up, let it burn down. Who cares? I don’t. I’ve got you back, and that’s all I want, it’s all I ever wanted.”
“Me too,” I said. And we hugged each other again.
I believe that good writers should not spell everything out, but leave space for the audience to use their own imaginations. This is that space, OK?
The house my wife lived in was certainly neater and cleaner than the one I’d left behind. Some of that could be put down to the absence of a dog, but not very much. My wife’s house still contained all my books, which was wonderful, and all my clothes, which was convenient. Naturally, I checked the books first, and was surprised to find some there which I knew I didn’t have – ones I’d not bought because I’d thought they were too expensive, or ones I’d hesitated over, only to find someone else had bought them in the meantime. I wondered if the me who had lived in this world had been that little bit more decisive – but I didn’t feel like asking.
I certainly didn’t ask how Lucy and I had died. Nor did I tell my wife about her death. They weren’t things that either of us needed to know. Instead, we refreshed our memories – and I found out that some of our holiday destinations had been different, and that details of our courtship varied, nothing important, you understand, nothing that looked as though it might have been vital in changing the course of events that had led to – whatever it had led to.
When we were in bed, my wife said, “Of course, you’ll have to be the long-lost brother from Australia, you know that.”
I said I didn’t mind, provided I didn’t have to do the accent or drink the lager, and we just lay there, holding each other. After a while, I felt my wife beginning to tremble violently, and I asked her, in some alarm, what was wrong.
“I’m scared,” she said, “that if I fall asleep I’ll wake up.”
“Sorry?” I said, not understanding.
“I mean, I’ll wake up and find I’ve just been dreaming.”
Nothing so dreadful and convoluted had occurred to me, and I was a bit ashamed of that. I’d simply been accepting our good fortune as something that people deserved to have happen to them once in a while, given how dreadful most of what happens is.
We can imagine things better than they are. That’s
our blessing and our curse. In fact, it’s probably the knowledge that came out
of the apple. God can’t have been too pleased when we said, “The peach would be
pleasanter to eat if it wasn’t so fuzzy.” He didn’t just create the nectarine
in response to market research: we did that. Maybe that’s what we all need to
do: let our imaginations take over more, and reality take over less. Or maybe
we should just let our dogs run our lives. As if we didn’t do that anyway.
My wife reminded me about a science fiction story we
both loved, where a couple handcuff themselves together at night, in case these
people slip into the house through the mirrors and steal away the wife, as they
did once before. I told her I wasn’t into bondage, and we didn’t have any
handcuffs anyway, but I gave in to the extent of tying our hands together with
an old pair of tights, “just in case”, as my wife said. It was pretty
uncomfortable, but it must have done the trick, because my wife fell asleep at
once, leaving me in pain and wide awake, listening to Lucy snoring at the foot
of the bed. In the morning, Lucy was still there, snoring away, and so was my
wife, so it must have worked.
And it’s still working – with some precautions. We
agreed that we would avoid the wood as far as possible, and only go in there
together, tied at the wrist, in case of accidents. The villagers have swallowed
the Australian story – it’s so much more plausible than the truth. The only
thing that worries us is the fact that Lucy’s not getting any younger. But
we’ve got a plan, if the worst comes to the worst.
We’ll go up the asphalt footpath to the gap in the
wood’s edge, where the three strands of barbed wire are twisted into one, and
call and whistle and whistle and call until another Lucy comes.
18.30-22.00 26.iii.2002