Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [11]
PATIENT: Why make me sleep if you keep waking me up?
NURSE: You aren’t really supposed to be sleeping quite so much. You are supposed to be relaxed and quiet, but you do sleep.
PATIENT: Who supposes? Who gave me the pills?
NURSE: Yes but—well never mind. Drink this.
PATIENT: That’s foul.
NURSE: It’s soup. Good hot soup.
PATIENT: Let me alone. You give me pills and then you keep waking me up.
NURSE: Keep waking you? I don’t. It’s like trying to wake a rock. Are you warm?
PATIENT: The sun’s out, the sun …
Who has not lain hollowed in hot rock,
Leaned to the loose and lazy sound of water,
Sunk into sound as one who hears the boom
Of tides pouring in a shell, or blood
Along the inner caverns of the flesh,
Yet clinging like sinking man to sight of sun, Clinging to distant sun or voices calling?
NURSE: A little more, please.
PATIENT: I’m not hungry. I’ve learned to breathe water. It’s full of plankton you know. You can feed your lungs as you feed your stomach.
NURSE: Is that so dear? Well, don’t go too far with it, you’ll have to breathe air again.
PATIENT: I’m breathing air now. I’m on the rock you see.
See him then as the bird might see
Who rocks like pinioned ship on warm rough air,
Coming from windspaced fields to ocean swells
That rearing fling gigantic mass on mass
Patient and slow against the stubborn land,
Striving to achieve what strange reversal
Of that monstrous birth when through long ages
Labouring, appeared a weed-stained limb,
A head, at last the body of the land,
Fretted and worn for ever by a mothering sea
A jealous sea that loves her ancient pain.
NURSE: Why don’t you go and sit for a bit in the day room? Aren’t you tired of being in bed all the time?
PATIENT: A jealousy that loves. Her pain.
NURSE: Have you got a pain? Where?
PATIENT: Not me. You. Jealously loving and nursing pain.
NURSE: I haven’t got a pain I assure you.
PATIENT: He floats on lazy wings down miles of foam,
And there, below, the small spreadeagled shape
Clinging to black rock like drowning man,
Who feels the great bird overhead and knows
That he may keep no voices, wings or winds
Who follows hypnotised down glassy gulfs,
His roaring ears extinguished by the flood.
NURSE: Take these pills dear, that’s it.
PATIENT: Who has not sunk as drowned man sinks,
Through sunshot layers where still the under-curve
Of lolling wave holds light like light in glass,
Where still a jewelled fish slides by like bird,
And then the middle depths where all is dim
Diffusing light like depths of forest floor.
He falls, he falls, past apprehensive arms
And spiny jaws and treacherous pools of death,
Till finally he rests on ocean bed.
Here rocks are tufted with lit fern, and fish
Swim shimmering phosphorescent through the weed,
And shoals of light float blinking past like eyes,
Here all the curious logic of the night.
Is this sweet drowned woman floating in her hair?
The sea-lice hop on pale rock scalp like toads.
And this a gleam of opalescent flesh?
The great valves shut like white doors folding close.
Stretching and quavering like the face of one
Enhanced through chloroform, the smiling face
Of her long half-forgotten, her once loved,
Rises like thin moon through watery swathes,
And passes wall-eyed as the long dead moon.
He is armed with the indifference of deep-sea sleep
And floats immune through searoots fed with flesh,
Where skeletons are bunched against cave roofs
Like swarms of bleaching spiders quivering,
While crouching engines crusted with pale weed,
Their shafts and pistons rocking through the green…
NURSE: Now do come on dear. Oh dear, you are upset, aren’t you? Everybody has bad times, every one gets upset from time to time. I do myself. Think of it like that.
PATIENT: Not everyone has known these depths
The black uncalculated wells of sea,
Where any gleam of day dies far above,
And stagnant water slow and thick and foul …
NURSE: It’s no good spitting your pills out.
PATIENT: Foul,