Briefing for a Descent into Hell Part 9

They clamber up; we, vigilant,

Let them learn the folly of their fright.

At that first venture, light stooped in salute,

Like to like, a shimmer in the mind,

And the beast thought it "angel"-as indeed we might.

One paw, earth-freed, held fast the slippery branch;

The other, freed, waited, while the eyes

Lifted at last to birds and clouds in flight.

And so he balanced there, a beast upright,

And the angel, saving what he'd hardly won

Jerked up that idle hand to guard his sight,

In that most common gesture that is done.

Man may not look directly at his sun.

I gotta use words when I talk to you. Probably that sequence of words, I've got to use words, is a definition of all literature, seen from a different perspective.

Enmeshed like a chord in Bach, part of a disc as exquisitely coloured as a jellyfish, all pulsing harmonies, the disc being a swirl or spiral, made up of sun and planets and baby planets and all their accretions, enmeshed, too, in Andromeda time, galaxy time, moon time (oh woe and alas) looking at the thing from any point of view but Earth Time, it is possible a change of emphasis from Saturn to Jupiter involving a change in all conditions on Earth and taking centuries (our time) may perhaps have had to find its message thus: That Jupiter fought Saturn (or Zeus, Chronos) fair and square in mortal (or immortal) combat and-not killed-but defeated him, and thereafter Jupiter was G.o.d to Earth. But here is a thought and not for the first time-of course not, there is no thought for the first time-why G.o.d? The vastest, most kingly and, so they say, most benign of planets whose rays envelop Earth in justice and equanimity (so they say) and touching certain sections of humanity, that grey mould struggling for survival in its struggling green sc.u.m, with more particularity than other sections. And on Mount Olympus bearded Jove, or Jupiter, lorded it over the subsidiary G.o.ds-not without a certain magnificent tetchiness. But why Father? Why Father of G.o.ds and Men? For who is our Father? Who? None other than the Sun, whose name is the deep chord underlying all others, Father Sun, Amen, Amen, as the Christians still pray. Why not Father Sun, as Lord on Olympus, why Jove, or Jupiter, Zeus? For on that mountain Phoebus Apollo was a G.o.d like others, among others-very odd, that! Of course, man cannot look directly at his Sun. G.o.ds go in disguise, even now, as then they were, or might be, Pillars of Fire-Forcefields, Wavelengths, Presences. It is possible that the Sun, like other monarchs, needs deputies, and who more suitable than Jupiter, who is like a modest little mirror to the Sun, being, like the Sun, a swirl of coloured gas, and having, like the Sun, its parcel of little planets. After all, Sun is an item in the celestial swarm on an equal basis with the other stars, chiming in key with them, and having its chief business with them-for this is nothing if not a heirarchical universe, like it or not, fellow democrats. Sun can probably be viewed, though for any mortal to think such a thought comes hard, a lese-majeste indeed, as an atom on a different time-and-motion scale, having comradeship with other, equal atoms, all being units of the galaxy, while galaxies are units and equals on another level, where suns are as tinily swarming as men (that broth of microbes) are to planets. Russian dolls, Chinese boxes!-and this is why it is not unreasonable to imagine the Great Sun, giving Jupiter a careless nod: "Be my deputy my son! I have other more important business to attend in my peer group!"

Why Jupiter at all, if Saturn once held that place?-or at least, so the old myths do suggest. But why is it unreasonable to suppose that planets, as indeed, stars-like people-change character; for a weighty, responsible old planet in its maturity may give a very different report of itself than the same creature in its skittish youth. Perhaps Jupiter grew into the post, Lord of the G.o.ds (as butlers are lord in the servants' hall, the Master and Mistress being too far out of sight to count), a deputy G.o.d, while Saturn got too bad-tempered for the position. After all Saturn ate his children. They do say that Saturn's rings are the smashed remnants of former planets.

Who knows but that our little system is an unfortunate one, and peculiarly vulnerable to visiting comets and intermittent visitors of various kinds? Or perhaps all stars, planets, planet's planets, are as subject to sudden calamity as men are, and the correct government and management of a star and its planets, or indeed, a galaxy and its suns, is a prudent balancing and husbanding of probabilities and substances? Who knows but that beings are not moved about among the planets, in one shape or another, as plants are moved about in a garden, or even taken indoors when frost is expected? When that comet came winging in from the dark beyond Pluto and went Bang! into poor Earth, perhaps there were warnings sent then from Jupiter (or Saturn, if it was his regency)-Take Care, Earth! the message might have gone. Or even: "Poor Earth, would you like to send us some of your inhabitants to live out a hundred or so generations as Our guests, until the unfortunate results of that Collision subside. Not on Us, of course: pure flame we are, burning Gas, like our Father, the Sun-but one of our planets would do nicely, with a little adaptation on your part." For we may suppose, I am sure, that Planets are altogether gentler and more humane than poor beast Man, lifting his b.l.o.o.d.y muzzle to his lurid sky, to howl out his misery and his exhaustion in between battles with his kind.

And who would convey these messages? (They have to use words when they talk to us.) For one may imagine that Hermes or Mercury (or Thoth or Buddha), the planet nearest to the Sun our Father, may transmit messages from the G.o.ds by the fact of his condition, the shifting and meshing of the planets causing him (at certain times) to shed substances on Earth as invisible to Earth's senses (though not to her new and her soon-to-be-invented or re-invented instruments) as the solar wind. But why Mercury-why Mercury messenger to Jupiter ... there is an idea of doubleness here, of subst.i.tution, like Jupiter with the Sun. For consider how Athene, Minerva, is as much a messenger as is Mercury, the Sun's nearest child. We may play with the idea-why not? Gnats may sing to kings, and their songs have to be guessing games. Gnats are sure they have a few ideas of their own, for the seconds their lives last. But perhaps Minerva, Jupiter's daughter, has the same position vis-a-vis Jupiter as Mercury with the Sun. Our great lump of cold gla.s.sily ringing Moon, planet to our planethood, is in intimate enough relation with us, what of Jupiter with his-is it now twelve, subsidiaries? Perhaps the largest of them, a healthy, bouncing, rather managing girl, but handsome enough with her flashing blue eyes, runs errands for her father. A pulse darts earthwards from Jupiter's child, a synchronising in the machinery of Jupiter, the other planets, his planets, makes an impulse that becomes thoughts in the minds of men.

Or, words having to make do for pulses, impulses, dartings, influences, star-stuff, star-winds, up she gets, that responsible elder Daughter, and says to Jupiter: "Father, isn't it about time you gave a thought to poor humanity in its plight, poor Odysseus pining there in the arms of the enchantress and wishing only to go home. Haven't you punished him enough?"

"I?" says her Father. "You are always so personal, my dear, so emotional. In the first place, I'm as bound by the cosmic harmonies as everyone else. And in the second place, it wasn't me at all-surely you remember it was Neptune who hated him? He fell foul of the sea, that favourite of yours."

Who was Neptune, when Homer lived and sung. Oh, the sea, of course ... but then, as now, seas like all the other forces and elements had their sympathetic planets. Neptune the planet is a new discovery, or so we think. However that may be, Odysseus the brave wanderer was hated by some force to do with the sea, the ocean in its drugged condition, its moon-madness, always tagging along after the moon. It was the ocean Odysseus displeased, could not remain in harmony with, the ocean, our moon's creature and slave.

Neptune had not been discovered, was discovered by us, modern man. So we know, quite definitely.

A hundred years or so ago (earth time), divines and historians and antiquarians of all kinds stated categorically that the world was created 4000 odd years ago, and anyone who did not go along with this thesis had a hard time of it, as the memoirs, biographies and histories of that period make so sadly clear. What a great step forward into sanity and true thinking has taken place in such a very short time: they'll concede now that the age of the physical world is longer than that-oh, quite considerably, by many millions. A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilisations; they can't even begin to concede that civilisations might have very old histories. The earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilisation is still set somewhere between two thousand and four thousand B.C., depending on the bias of the archeological school and the definition of civilisation. We, now, are civilisation, we are the crown of humanity, the pinnacle to which all earlier evolution aimed, computer man is the thing, and possessed of wisdom those earlier barbarians did not have: from our heights man dwindles back to barbarism and beyond that to apehood. They say (or sing) that writing was first invented in the third millennium B.C.; agriculture is so old; mathematics so old; and astronomy is dated exactly like the rest, having become scientific at that moment it divorced itself from astrology and superst.i.tion. And everything is dated and known by things, fragments of things: the children of a society that is obsessed with possessions, objects, have to think of previous civilisations in this way: slaves of their own artefacts, they know that the old barbarians were too.

Every time a new city is dug up, the boundaries (in time) are grudgingly shifted back-a couple of hundred years perhaps, half a millennium. On a plateau in Turkey part of a top layer of a city has been laid bare, which takes a high form of human living (one dare not say civilisation) back ten thousand years, and underneath that layer are many other layers, still unexcavated ... but do the specialists say: We cannot make any p.r.o.nouncements at all about human history, because our knowledge (or our guesses) is limited to the last site we have (partly) dug? No, no, not at all, what their present knowledge is-is knowledge, for this is how they always go on, it seems they have to, it is how their unfortunate brains are formed.

Well, it is at least possible that astronomers of ten thousand, or even twenty thousand, or even thirty thousand years ago were as clever as ours are; it is at least possible that the evidence for this lies easily available in easily excavated cities-available to people whose minds are less bound by the prejudices of our time.

We may suppose that ancient astronomers did not necessarily believe that the world was created on a certain day four thousand odd years before their own time, and by G.o.d in person. That they understood that words had to be used for their benefit-and understood what the words were symbols for.

That long before the Roman G.o.ds and the Greek G.o.ds and the Egyptian G.o.ds and the Peruvian G.o.ds and the Babylonian G.o.ds, astronomers listened to Jupiter and his family, or to Saturn, and knew that Thoth (however he was called then) served Amen the Father, (and here again comes in the idea of deputy, of subst.i.tution, for Thoth created the world with a word); and that there were names for planets, suns, stars, and crumbs, blobs, and droplets of earth and fire and water; and that their patterns and sounds and colours were understood, and tales were told of them, instructive of Times and Events-why not? For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world's great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times Man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the Sun's being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets-and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity's resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance.

"Father," says Jupiter's efficient and bossy daughter, "why don't you send down Mercury to do something about that poor voyager, stranded there on his drugged island? He could ask Neptune to let up a bit. It's not fair, you know. It's not just."

"Well you see to it then, daughter," says Jupiter, a busy man, Sun's deputy, and with all those bounding children, tugged this way and that like a busy housewife and mother with her large brood. "You just see what you can do, but mind you, don't forget that We, Jupiter, are not the only influence on the traveller's journey. No, it's a harmony, it's a pattern, bad and good, everything in turn, everything spiralling up-but yes, it's the right moment for a visit to Mercury. It is the exact time-thanks for reminding me."

"Timing is everything," murmurs Minerva the Flashing-Eyed, bustling off to find Thoth, or Hermes, and finding him speeding around the sun in an orbit so dazzling and so lively and so gay and above all so many-sided and accomplished that it was hard to keep up with him.

"Ah," says he, "it's time again, is it? I was thinking it must be."

"You sound reluctant," said Minerva.

"I've just been visiting Venus."

"Everyone always likes her best," says Minerva, drily. "As everyone knows, she and I don't get on. She's so silly-that's what I can't stand. People say I'm jealous-not at all. It's that d.a.m.ned stealthy dishonesty I can't tolerate-that appalling hypocrisy. I've never been able to understand how it is that intelligent men can put up with it-but there you are. And I didn't come to talk about Aphrodite. I'm here about poor Earth, poor traveller!"

"Your kind heart does you credit. But don't forget, it was partly their fault."

"Stealing the fire?"

"Of course. If that fellow hadn't stolen the fire, then they would never have known what a terrible state they are in."

"You, Mercury, G.o.d of letters and of music and of-in a word, progress, complaining about that! You wouldn't want them still in that dark and primitive state, would you?"

"They don't know how to use it."

"That remains to be seen."

"All I'm saying is that knowledge brings a penalty with it-of course, it was enterprising of him-what's his name, Jason, Prometheus, that fellow-in his place I might have done the same. Eating the fruit when I was told not to ..."

"Stealing the fire," says Minerva, always with a tendency towards pedantry.

"Come now, don't be so literal-minded, that's to be like them," says Mercury.

"And there's the other thing," says Minerva, rather stern-at her tone Mercury began to look irritated. For Minerva was also a bit of blue-stocking; her feeling of justice and fair play (regarded as childish by some of the G.o.ds who regarded themselves as more advanced, philosophically) usually led her to the question of women's rights, and men's vanity.

"All right," says Mercury, "understood."

"But is it?" says she, severe. "His mother was an earth-woman, certainly, but who was his father? Well?"

"Oh don't start, please," says Mercury. "You really are a bore, you know, when you get on to that."

"Justice," she says. "Fair play. I'm my father's daughter. And who was his father? With such blood, or rather, fire, in his veins, he was not to be expected to live like a mole in earth knowing that Light existed, and yet never reaching out after it."

"There was reason to believe," says Mercury, "that he was in it all the time. He walked in the Garden with G.o.d."

"And then he ate what he should not have done. He stole the Apple, dear G.o.d of Thieves. And paid for it."

"And in short everything is going as was expected, and according to plan, and with Our a.s.sistance."

"Progress has to be seen to be made."

"All right, I'm ready to leave when the Time is Ripe."

"Are you quite sure of your mandate?"

"Dear Minerva! Is it any different this time?"

"It is always the same Message, of course ..."

"Yes. That there is a Harmony and that if they wish to prosper they must keep in step and obey its Laws. Quite so."

"But things are really very much worse this time. The stars in their courses, you know ..."

"Fight on the side of Justice."

"In the long run, yes. But what a very long run it must seem to them, poor things."

"Partly through their own fault."

"You sound very severe today. Sometimes we even seem to change roles a little? You must remember that you are G.o.d of Thieves because you inspire, if not provoke, curiosity and a desire for growth, in such actions as stealing fire or eating forbidden fruit or building towers that are intended to reach Heaven and the G.o.ds. Punishable acts. Acts that have, in fact, been punished already."

"Perhaps it isn't always easy to take responsibility for our progeny? Is it, dear Minerva? For acts can be our children ... tell me, is it easy for your Father, or for you, to recognise as kith and kin acts of justice that are in fact the results of your influence-can in a sense be regarded as you, though in extension of course? Justice is Justice still, in the sentencing of a thief to prison-and the thief has stolen books because he has no money to buy them. In such a drama both you and I are represented-and there's little doubt which of us appears more attractively? Are you sure you aren't finding my celestial role rather more attractive than yours, and it is that which accounts for your concern-which I very much value, of course."

"I should have known better," says Minerva. "Only an idiot gets into an argument with the Master of Words. Well, I can't really wish you an enjoyable visit, when things have never been so bad."

"But one hopes, and indeed expects, that they have a potentiality for good in proportion to the bad-for that is how things tend to balance out."

"The sort of remark that I usually make, if I may say so-and which tends to irritate you, dear Messenger. But you are right. This particular combination of planets will be really so very powerful-the equivalent of several centuries of evolution all in a decade or so. I don't think I am exceeding my mandate if I say there is anxiety. After all, no one could say they have ever been distinguished by consistency or even ordinary common sense."

"I am sure the anxiety is justified. But I expect there'll be the usual few who will listen. It's enough."

"So we must hope, for everyone's sake."

"And if the worst comes to the worst, we can do without them. The Celestial Gardener will simply have to lop off that branch, and graft another."

"Charmingly put! Almost, indeed, rea.s.suring, put in such a way! But so much trouble and effort have already been put into that planet. Messengers have been sent again and again. The regard of Our Father (as of course it comes down to us through his Regent, my own Father) is surely expressed by the long history of Our concern? And there was that Covenant-the fact they continuously disregard it, is not enough reason to abandon them altogether. After all, when all is said and done ..."

"You are tactfully referring to that ancestry business again? Well, whatever the stark and dire nature of the shortly-to-be-expected celestial configurations, and whatever man's backslidings, the fact that I am about to descend again (yes, I grant that I say that with a bit of a sigh) shows that our respective fathers are well aware of the situation. And more-that there is confidence in the outcome."

"I'm glad I find you in such good heart."

"Dear Minerva, do come out with it. You want to give me some good advice, is that it?"

"It's just that-well, after all, there are a dozen or so of us, Jupiter's children, and it is an enlarging family, and some of us are not unlike Earth, and as the oldest sister you must see that I have had so much experience and ..."