The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [261]
No, I could not attach this ‘casting off’ to any ordinary or present cause. James’s decision belonged to a different pattern of being, to some quite other history of spiritual adventure and misadventure. Whatever ‘flaw’ had led, as James saw it, to his sherpa’s death belonged, it might be, to some more general condition. Religion is power, it must be, and yet that is its bane. The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. Perhaps James wanted simply to lay down the burden of a mysticism that had gone wrong, a spirituality which had somehow degenerated into magic. Had he been overwhelmed with disgust because he had had to use his ‘power’ to save my life, was that the last straw, and was it really all my fault after all? Had I proved to be, in the end, a thankless burden and a dangerous attachment? Here, and sadly, I understood the possible meaning of James’s last visit, James had come to make his peace with me, but it was for his sake, not for mine, in order to break a bond, not to perfect it. He knew it was our last talk, and that was why he was so relaxed, so open, so unprecedentedly frank and gentle. He came, not with any ordinary desire for reconciliation, but in order to rid himself of a last irritating preoccupation. Anxiety or guilt about his wretched cousin might cloud the conditions of the perfect departure upon which he had perhaps long been bent.
How did it go off, that severance, I wondered. Had he responded to the vision of ‘all reality’ which comes at the moment of death and by which one must instantly profit? Had he gone eagerly to that rendezvous and was he now, in what strange heaven of release, ‘set free’, whatever that might mean? Or else, aching and weak like the shade of Achilles, shut in some purgatory to expiate sins which I could not even imagine? Was he now wandering in a dark monster-ridden bardo, encountering simulacra of people he had once known and being frightened by demons? For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause. How did one get out of bardo? I could not remember what James had told me. Why had I never asked him to explain? Would he meet me there, in the shape of some persistent horror, a foul phantom me, the creation of his mind? If so I prayed that when he achieved his liberation he might not forget me but come, in pity and in compassion, to know the truth. Whatever that might mean.
As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.
I woke up and it was dawn. The billion stars had gone and the sky was a bland misty very light blue, a huge uniform over-arching cool yet muted brightness, the sun not yet risen. The rocks were clearly revealed, still indefinably colourless. The sea was utterly calm, glossy, grey, without even ripples,