Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [61]
Having relived these memories I saw that the path from the sunlit roses to the grey void had been inevitable, yet I was not content. I was appalled at having nothing to do but remember a life like that. I wanted madness to blot out the memories with the strong tones and colours of a delusion, however monstrous. I had a romantic notion that madness was an exit from unbearable existence. But madness is like cancer or bronchitis, not everyone is capable of it, and when most of us say, “I can’t bear this,” we are proving we can. Death is the only dependable exit, but death depends on the body and I had rejected the body. I was condemned to a future of replaying and replaying the tedious past and past and past and past. I was in hell. Without eyes I tried to weep, without lips to scream, and with all the force of my neglected heart I cried for help.
I was answered. A sullen, determined voice—your voice—asked me to describe his past. My experience of void had made me able to visualize things from very slight cues, and that voice let me see you as you were. From the pebble and shell in your hands I deduced the shore where you grasped them, and from the shore I saw a path stretching back through mountains and cities to the house where you were born. You know now why I am an oracle. By describing your life I will escape from the trap of my own. From my station in nonentity everything existent, everything not me, looks worthwhile and splendid: even things which most folk consider commonplace or dreadful. Your past is safe with me. I can promise to be accurate.
Lanark thought for a while, then said, “Your story contains a contradiction.”
Oh?
“You said money can no more exist without objects than mind without body. Yet you exist without body.”
That puzzles me too. Sometimes I think my body is in the world where I abandoned it, lying in bed in some hospital, kept going by infusions into my veins. If so, I have hope of coming alive one day or dying utterly. And now I’ll tell you about Duncan Thaw.
Rima stirred slightly and murmured, “Yes, go on.”
The oracle began speaking. His voice sounded so far inside the head that the story seemed less narrated than remembered. It was not delayed by eating, or going to the lavatory, or sleeping: at night Lanark dreamed what he could not hear and woke with no sense of interruption. All the time they saw through the window people moving in the rooms and streets of a city, though sometimes there were glimpses of mountains and sea, and at last huge waves moving slowly at the foot of a cliff.
CHAPTER 12.
The War Begins
Duncan Thaw drew a blue line along the top of a sheet of paper and a brown line along the bottom. He drew a giant with a captured princess running along the brown line, and since he couldn’t draw the princess lovely enough he showed the giant holding a sack. The princess was in the sack. His father looked over his shoulder and said, “What’s that you’re drawing?”
Thaw said uneasily, “A miller running to the mill with a bag of corn.”
“What’s the blue line supposed to be?”
“The sky.”
“Do you mean the horizon?”
Thaw stared dumbly at his picture.
“The horizon is the line where the sky and land seem to touch. Is it the horizon?”
“It’s the sky.”
“But the sky isnae a straight line, Duncan!”
“It would be if you saw it sideways.”
Mr. Thaw got a golf ball and a table lamp and explained that the earth was like the ball and the sun like the lamp. Thaw was bored and puzzled. He said, “Do people fall off the sides?”
“No. They’re kept on by gravity.