The Moment of Eclipse Read online

  The Moment of Eclipse

  Brian W. Aldiss

  Contents

  The Moment of Eclipse

  The Day We Embarked for Cythera ...

  Orgy of the Living and the Dying

  Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

  The Village Swindler

  Down the Up Escalation

  That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art...

  Confluence

  Heresies of the Huge God

  The Circulation of the Blood ...

  . . . And the Stagnation of the Heart

  The Worm that Flies

  Working in the Spaceship Yards

  Swastika!

  Acknowledgements

  POEM AT A LUNAR ECLIPSE

  Thy shadow. Earth,, from Pole to

  Central Sea, Now steals along upon the Moon's

  meek shine

  In even monochrome and curving line Of imperturbable serenity.

  How shall I link such sun-cast

  symmetry With the torn troubled form I know

  as thine.

  That profile, placid as a brow divine, With continents of moil and misery?

  And can immense Mortality but

  throw So small a shade, and Heaven's high

  human scheme Be hemmed within the coasts yon

  arc implies?

  Is such the stellar gauge of earthly

  show, Nation at war with nation, brains that

  teem, Heroes, and women fairer than the

  skies?

  THOMAS HARDY

  Reprinted by kind permission of Macmillan & Co. Ltd.

  The Moment of Eclipse

  Beautiful women with corrupt natures - they have always been my life's target. There must be bleakness as well as loveliness in their gaze: only then can I expect the mingled moment.

  The mingled moment - it holds both terror and beauty. Those two qualities, I am aware, lie for most people poles apart. For me, they are, or can become, one! When they do, they coincide, ah ... then joy takes me! And in Christiania I saw many such instants promised.

  But the one special instant of which I have to tell, when pain and rapture intertwined like two hermaphrodites, overwhelmed me not when I was embracing any lascivious darling but when -after long pursuit! - I paused on the very threshold of the room where she awaited me: paused and saw ... that spectre....

  You might say that a worm had entered into me. You might say that there I spoke metaphorically, and that the worm per­verting my sight and taste had crept into my viscera in child­hood, had infected all my adult life. So it may be. But who escapes the maggot? Who is not infected? Who dares call him­self healthy? Who knows happiness except by assuaging his ill­ness or submitting to his fever?

  This woman's name was Christiania. That she was to provoke in me years of pain and pursuit was not her wish. Her wish, indeed, was at all times the very opposite.

  We met for the first time at a dull party being held at the Danish Embassy in one of the minor East European capitals. My face was known to her and, at her request, a mutual friend brought her over to meet me.

  She was introduced as a poet - her second volume of poetry was just published in Vienna. My taste for poetry exhibiting attitudes of romantic agony was what attracted her to me in the first place; of course she was familiar with my work.

  Although we began by addressing each other in German, I soon discovered what I had suspected from something in her looks and mannerisms, that Christiania was also Danish. We started to talk of our native land.

  Should I attempt to describe what she looked like? Christiania was a tall woman with a slightly full figure; her face was perhaps a little too flat for great beauty, giving her, from certain angles, a look of stupidity denied by her conversation. At that time, she had more gleaming dark hair than the fashion of the season approved. It was her aura that attracted me, a sort of desolation in her smile which is, I fancy, a Scandinavian in­heritance. The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch painted a naked Madonna once, haunted, suffering, erotic, pallid, gener­ous of flesh, with death about her mouth; in Christiania, that madonna opened her eyes and breathed!

  We found ourselves talking eagerly of a certain camera ob-scura that still exists in the Aalborghus, in Jutland. We discov­ered that we had both been taken there as children, had both been fascinated to see a panorama of the town of Aalborg laid out flat on a table through the medium of a small hole in the roof. She told me that that optical toy had inspired her to write her first poem; I told her that it had directed my interest to cameras, and thus to filming.

  But we were scarcely allowed time to talk before we were separated by her husband. Which is not to say that with look and gesture we had not already inadvertently signalled to each other, delicately but unmistakably.

  Inquiring about her after the party, I was told that she was an infanticide currently undergoing a course of mental treat­ment which combined elements of Eastern and Western thought. Later, much of this information proved to be false; but, at the time, it served to heighten the desires that our brief meeting had woken in me.

  Something fatally intuitive inside me knew that at her hands, though I might find suffering, I would touch the two-faced ecstasy I sought.

  At this period, I was in a position to pursue Christiania further; my latest film, Magnitudes, was completed, although I had still some editing to do before it was shown at a certain film festival.

  It chanced also that I was then free of my second wife, that svelte-mannered Parsi lady, ill-omened star alike of my first film and my life, whose vast promised array of talents was too quickly revealed as little more than a glib tongue and an over-sufficient knowledge of tropical medicine. In that very month, our case had been settled and Sushila had retreated to Bombay, leaving me to my natural pursuits.

  So I planned to cultivate my erotic garden again: and Christiania should be the first to flower in those well-tended beds.

  Specialized longings crystallize the perceptions along the axes concerned: I had needed only a moment in Christiania's pres­ence to understand that she would not scruple to be unfaithful to her husband under certain circumstances, and that I myself might provide such a circumstance; for those veiled grey eyes told me that she also had an almost intuitive grasp of her own and men's desires, and that involvement with me was far from being beyond her contemplation.

  So it was without hesitation that I wrote to her and described how, for my next film, I intended to pursue the train of thought begun in Magnitudes and hoped to produce a drama of a rather revolutionary kind to be based on a sonnet of the English poet Thomas Hardy entitled 'At a Lunar Eclipse'. I added that I hoped her poetic abilities might be of assistance in assembling a script, and asked if she would honour me with a meeting.

  There were other currents in my life just then. In particular, I was in negotiation through my agents with the Prime Min­ister of a West African republic who wished to entice me out to make a film of his country. Although I nourished an inclination to visit this strange part of the world where, it always seemed to me, there lurked in the very atmosphere a menace compounded of grandeur and sordidness which might be much to my taste, I was attempting to evade the Prime Minister's offer, generous though it was, because I suspected that he needed a conservative documentary director rather than an innovator, and was more concerned with the clamour of my reputation than its nature. However, he would not be shaken off, and I was avoiding a cultural attache of his as eagerly as I was trying to ensnare - or be ensnared by - Christiania.

  In eluding this gigantic and genial black man, I was thrown into the company of an acquaintance of mine at the university, a professor of Byzantine Art, whom I had known for many years. It was in his study, in the
low quiet university buildings with windows gazing from the walls like deep-set eyes, that I was introduced to a young scholar called Petar. He stood at one of the deep windows in the study, looking intently into the cobbled street, an untidy young man in unorthodox clothes.

  I asked him what he watched. He indicated an old newspaper-seller moving slowly along the gutter outside, dragging and be­ing dragged by a dog on a lead.

  'We are surrounded by history, monsieur! This building was erected by the Habsburgs; and that old man whom you see in the gutter believes himself to be a Habsburg.'

  'Perhaps the belief makes the gutter easier to walk.'

  'I'd say harder!' For the first time he looked at me. In those pale eyes I saw an aged thing, although at the start I had been impressed by his extreme youth. 'My mother believes - well, that doesn't matter. In this gloomy city, we are all surrounded by the shadows of the past. There are shutters at all our windows.'

  I had heard such rhetoric from students before. You find later they are reading Schiller for the first time.

  My host and I fell into a discussion concerning the Hardy sonnet; in the middle of it, the youth had to take his leave of us; to visit his tutor, he said.

  'A frail spirit, that, and a tormented one,' commented my host. 'Whether he will survive his course here without losing his mental stability, who can say. Personally, I shall be thankful when his mother, that odious woman, leaves the city; her effect on him is merely malevolent.'

  'Malevolent in what respect?'

  'It is whispered that when Petar was thirteen years old - of course, I don't say there's any truth in the vile rumour - when he was slightly injured in a road accident, his mother lay beside him - nothing unnatural in that - but the tale goes that unnatural things followed between them. Probably all nonsense, but certainly he ran away from home. His poor father, who is a public figure - these nasty tales always centre round public figures —'

  Feeling my pulse rate beginning to mount, I inquired the family name, which I believe I had/not been given till then. Yes! The pallid youth who felt himself surrounded by the shadows of the past was her son, Christiania's son! Naturally, this evil legend made her only the more attractive in my eyes.

  At that time I said nothing, and we continued the discus­sion of the English sonnet which I was increasingly inspired to film. I had read it several years before in an Hungarian transla­tion and it had immediately impressed me.

  To synopsize a poem is absurd; but the content of this sonnet was to me as profound as its grave and dignified style. Briefly, the poet watches the curved shadow of Earth steal over the moon's surface; he sees that mild profile and is at a loss to link it with the continents full of trouble which he knows the shadow represents; he wonders how the whole vast scene of human affairs can come to throw so small a shade; and he asks himself if this is not the true gauge, by any outside standard of measurement, of all man's hopes and desires? So truly did this correspond with my own life-long self-questionings, so nobly was it cast, that the sonnet had come to represent one of the most precious things I knew; for this reason I wished to destroy it and reassemble it into a series of visual images that would convey precisely the same shade of beauty and terror allied as did the poem.

  My host, however, claimed that the sequence of visual images I had sketched to him as being capable of conveying this mys­terious sense fell too easily into the category of science-fiction, and that what I required was a more conservative approach -conservative and yet more penetrating, something more inward than outward; perhaps a more classical form for my romantic despair. His assertions angered me. They angered me, and this I realized even at the time, because there was the force of truth in what he said; the trappings should not be a distraction from but an illumination of the meaning. So we talked for a long time, mainly of the philosophical problems involved in representing one set of objects by another - which is the task of all art, the displacement without which we have no placement. When I left the university, it was wearily. I felt a sense of despair at the sight of dark falling and another day completed with my life incomplete.

  Halfway down the hill, where a shrine to the virgin stands within the street wall, Petar's old news-vendor loitered, his shabby dog at his feet. I bought a paper from him, experiencing a tremor at the thought of how his image, glimpsed from the deep-set eye of the university, had been intertwined in my cogi­tations with the image of that perverted madonna whose greeds, so hesitatingly whispered behind her long back, reached out even to colour the imaginings of dry pedants like my friend in his learned cell!

  And, as if random sequences of events were narrative in the mind of some super-being, as if we were no more than parasites in the head of a power to which Thomas Hardy himself might have yielded credulity, when I reached my hotel, the vendor's newspaper folded unopened under my arm, it was to find, in the rack of the ill-lit foyer, luminous, forbidding, crying aloud, silent, a letter from Christiania awaiting me. I knew it was from her! We had our connection!

  Dropping my newspaper into a nearby waste bin, I walked upstairs carrying the letter. My feet sank into the thick fur of the carpet, slowing my ascent, my heart beat unmuffled. Was not this - so I demanded of myself afterwards! - one of those supreme moments of life, of pain and solace inseparable? For whatever was in the letter, it was such that, when revealed, like a fast-acting poison inserted into the bloodstream, would con­vulse me into a new mode of feeling and behaving.

  I knew I would have to have Christiania, knew it even by the violence of my perturbation, greater than I had expected; and knew also that I was prey as well as predator. Wasn't that the meaning of life, the ultimate displacement? Isn't - as in the English sonnet - the great also the infinitely small, and the small also the infinitely great.

  Well, once in my room, I locked the door, laid the envelope on a table and set myself down before it. I slit the envelope with a paper knife and withdrew her - her! - letter.

  What she said was brief. She was much interested in my offer and the potential she read in it. Unfortunately, she was leaving Europe at the end of the week, the day after the morrow, since her husband was taking up an official post in Africa on behalf of his government. She regretted that our acquaintance would not deepen.

  I folded the letter and put it down. Only then did I appreci­ate the writhe in the serpent's tail. Snatching up the letter again, I re-read it. She and her husband - yes! - were taking up residence in the capital city of that same republic with whose Prime Minister I had been long in negotiation. Only that morn­ing had I written to his cultural attache to announce finally that the making of such a film as he proposed was beyond my abilities and interests!

  That night, I slept little. In the morning, when friends called upon me, I had my man tell them I was indisposed; and indis­posed I was; indisposed to act; yet indisposed to let slip this opportunity. It was perversity, of course, to think of following this woman, this perverted madonna, to another continent; there were other women with whom the darker understandings would flow if I merely lifted the somewhat antique phone by my bedside. And it was perhaps perversity that allowed me to keep myself in indecision for so long.

  But by afternoon I had decided. From a lunar distance, Europe and Africa were within the single glance of an eye; my fate was equally a small thing; I would follow her by the means so easily awaiting me.

  Accordingly, I composed a letter to the genial black attache, saying that I regretted my decision of yesterday, explaining how it had been instrumental in moving my mind in entirely the opposite direction, and announcing that I now wished to make the proposed film. I said I would be willing to leave for his native country with camera team and secretaries as soon as pos­sible. I requested him to favour me with an early appointment. And I had this letter delivered by hand there and then.

  There followed a delay which I weathered as best I could. The next two days I spent shut in the offices I had hired in a quiet part of the city, editing Magnitudes. It would be a satis
­factory enough film, but already I saw it merely - as is the way with creative artists - as pointing towards the next work. Images of Africa already began to steal upon my brain.

  At the end of the second day, I broke my solitude and sought out a friend. I confided to him my anger that the attache had not condescended to give me a reply when I was so keen to get away. He laughed.

  'But your famous attache has returned home in disgrace! He was found robbing the funds. A lot of them are like that, I'm afraid! Not used to authority! It was all over the evening papers a couple of days ago - quite a scandal! You'll have to write to your Prime Minister.'

  Now I saw that this was no ordinary affair. There were lines of magnetism directed towards the central attraction, just as Remy de Gourmont claims that the markings on the fur of certain luxurious female cats run inescapably towards their sexual quarters. Clearly, I must launch myself into this forceful pattern. This I did by writing hastily - hastily excusing myself from my friend's presence - to the distant statesman in the distant African city, towards which, on that very evening, my maligned lady was making her way.

  Of the awful delays that followed, I shall not speak. The dis­grace of the cultural attache (and it was not he alone who had been disgraced) had had its repercussions in the far capital, and my name, becoming involved, was not sweetened thereby. Fin­ally, however, I received the letter I awaited, inviting me to make the film in my own terms, and offering me full facilities. It was a letter that would have made a less perverse man extremely happy!

  To make my arrangements to leave Europe, to brief my secre­tary, and settle certain business matters took me a week. In that time, the distinguished film festival was held, and Magnitudes enjoyed from the critics just such a reception as I had antici­pated; that is to say, the fawners fawned and the sneerers sneered, and both parties read into it many qualities that were not there, ignoring those that were - one even saw it as a retell­ing of the myth of the wanderings of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden! Truly, the eyes of critics, those prideful optics, see only what they wish to see!