Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [40]
have a light in them. And this did not seem to match with any quality of group or pack morality. For instance, one sad little blob of faintly pulsing light which nevertheless was brighter than most in its constellation, belonged to a beast I was able to recognise—and he was one of the most violent, energetic and busy of them all; and another brave little pulse belonged to a clowning, jesting ape. And yet another marked an ape quite different from either, one much obsessed with her twin apelets, a fussy nagging nattering little animal, yet her star shone as bright as the two assertive male animals. These flocks of moving lights, or lit drops, like globules of gleaming wet in the swirl of a luminous mist, moved out and away. I understood that if I were to move out there now on my ordinary gravity-subjugated legs, the city would be clear and clean again. The warring and killing beasts had moved away beyond the suburbs of the city and beyond even the forest where I had seen the orgiastic women. This forest I now explored with the tentacles of my new senses and found a paradise of plant, leaf and pattern of branch all structured in light. A scene in the ordinary world nearest to it would be that in a forest after a light snowfall when it is the essential shape of branch and tree that is presented in white shimmering outline to eyes used to a confusion of green, lush, loving, lively detail. In this paradisical forest Felicity and Constance and Vera were not represented at all, yet as my thoughts hung over the memory of what had been there, a compulsion or pressure or need grew into them: a demand from the excluded, a claim. The memory of the nights I had drunk blood and eaten flesh with the women under the full moon struck my new mind, and there was a reeling and then a rallying of its structure, while I accepted and held the memory, and then I had moved out and beyond, but now the women were lodged in my mind, my new mind. I knew, though dimly enough at that time—for so many “knowings” began then, that those frightful nights when I had been compelled away from the city’s centre to the murdering women had become a page in my passport for this stage of the journey. As this thought came in, so did another—or, as I’ve said already, the beginnings of one, these were all beginnings, that the women were now faceted in my new mind like cells in a honeycomb, gleams of coloured light, and that my comrades, whom I had seen flickering, flaming and flowing inside the greater white blaze of the Crystal were also faceted with me, as I with them, in this inner structure, and that I had understood this from the moment the Crystal had swept me up into itself, which was why I had forgotten my search for them. In that dimension, minds lay side by side, fishes in a school, cells in honeycomb, flames in fire, and together we made a whole in such a way that it was not possible to say, Here Charles begins, here John or Miles or Felicity or Constance ends. And so with us all. But while this new swelling into understanding was taking place in my mind, a move outwards into comprehension, only possible at all because of my fusion with the people who were friends, companions, lovers and associates, a wholeness because I was stuck like a bit of coloured glass in a mosaic—there was somewhere close all this time a great weight of cold. I realised that all the time there had been this weight, this pressure of freezing cold, but that I had not been aware of it as I had not been aware to begin with of my griping nausea. That had been total, and not to be isolated away from my overall condition. This terror of cold was like that. That was when I first became aware of it, or I think it was, for as I’ve said, in those early explorations of my new mode of feeling, it was only afterwards that I was able to trace strands back to a particular bud or start in my thought. But there was no doubt that about that time this knowledge became firmly lodged in me: the cold weight, a compulsion, a necessity, as it were, a menace only just held at bay by humanity, and always waiting