Pilgermann

6

So. Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights? It isn’t. The barking of a dog, the cry of an owl, the distant burning of the stars, these are of every night. The departure? Also every night. Every night the departure softly closes the door of the house behind it and puts its foot to the dark road; there is a continual walking into the dark on the road away. Other nights I have lain in my bed; tonight I hear my footsteps on the road, tonight I put my feet into my footsteps and I go.

Night, night, night. The owl is the Jew-bird, I have been told. Because we are called the children of darkness. Why children of darkness? Because we clung to the so-called night of our old belief, we turned away in A.D. 30 from the new dawn of Jesus Christ. And who should know better than I that A.D. 30 is, along with everything else, the present moment. It’s all here and now, you can choose whatever line you like to follow through the space that is called time. Virtualities and actualities both. Look, here’s a virtual time-line entangled with the others. What does it say on it? ROMANS. Very good, I’ll follow it a little way, see where it goes. It looks quite interesting, things are altogether turned round: Rome is governed by Jews, Rome is an outpost of the far-flung Jewish Empire.

Rome with a Jewish governor! Maybe it’s Jairus, the father of that Eleazar who on another time-line commanded the Sicarii against the Romans at Masada. But on this time-line Masada won’t be happening, and in A.D. 30 Jairus is Governor of Rome. So they bring before him this fellow Jesus, he’s a wandering preacher from Arezzo or some place up in the hills. He’s been getting the people all stirred up with his teaching and his miracles, he’s been worrying senators and priests and officialdom in general, they don’t know what he might bring down on their heads and they think it would be much better for everybody if he could simply be got out of the way. Mind you, he’s no Jew, this Jesus; he’s an uncircumcised Italian, he’s one of theirs but they want no part of him, he’s too dangerous. When Jairus says to them, ‘What then may I do to Jesus called Christ?’ the assembled senators, officials, priests, and hangers-on all say, ‘Let him be crucified.’ Jairus is willing to let the Romans sort things out in their own way. He washes his hands before the crowd, he says, ‘Innocent am I from the blood of this man; ye will see to it.’ And the assembled Romans say, ‘On his own head let the blood of him be.’ I listen and I listen but no one says, ‘The blood of him on us and on the children of us.’

The Jewish legionaries scourge this Italian Jesus and they nail him to a cross on the Capitoline Hill. After his death I mingle with the crowd, I listen to what they are saying.

‘Lousy Christ-killers!’ says the man next to me.

‘Who?’ I say.

‘Who?’ says the man. ‘Those murdering Jews! Who else?’

‘I thought perhaps you meant the Romans who told the Jews to do it,’ I say.

‘Never mind that,’ he says. ‘Who’s governing Rome? Who put Jesus on the cross, eh? Who drove in the nails? It was those lousy Christ-killers, it was those murdering Jews.’

I turn to others in the crowd. ‘Those lousy Jews!’ is what they all say. ‘Those Christ-killers!’

Here I leave the Italian Jesus; I don’t know whether or not he rose up and made further appearances.

Night, night, night. Perhaps the only realities are night and departure. Everything else is illusion. Staying anywhere in the light of day is illusion. If there were no Jews they would have to be invented.

Yes, I am a child of the night, a child of departures. The barking of dogs is my signpost, the voices of owls mark my road into the darkness. Inside my head I have stopped talking, I am quiet. I give myself to the old, old night that waits within me, the old, old night in the old, old wood. In this night the charcoal-burners crouch listening by their hearths while the trees pray, the wind speaks, the leaves rustle like souls departing with the upward-flying sparks. Quiet, quiet, the mist is rising from the river, the bats are writing the names of darkness, the owl is teaching the mice: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’

I listen for my Bath Kol but I hear only the thumping of my heart and the sound of my footfalls. Why am I on this road through the dark wood? I am afraid. What have I to sustain me? Jesus has appeared to me but what have I to do with Jesus? I think of the tax-collector, perhaps he too has passed through this wood wondering what would sustain him. ‘Thou Jew!’ whispers the Bath Kol suddenly, whispers the Bath Kol in my ear in the dark wood. ‘My Jew!’ whispers the Bath Kol.

In fear I go forward. The quietness of the Bath Kol draws itself together in the dark, becomes a point of silence from which a hugeness grows. In the hugeness I perceive this wood, this rising ground to be the Mount of Venus between the opened thighs of the mother-space that is time. The wood is clamorous with the silence of birds and demons and great wordless mouths full of sharp teeth. When I close my eyes I see the colour of the dark: it is a strong purple-blue, very luminous and vibrating like a crystal. In those crystalline vibrations I seem to see a pale green phosphorescence in the shape of a man hanging head downward by one leg. He is hung by one ankle, his other leg is bent, the bent leg crossing the straight to make an upside-down figure four. His arms are bent to make a triangle on each side, his hands are behind him. He fades with the purple-blue and I hear the low voice of a bell that nods to the walking of an animal. ‘Thou also,’ says the rough and broken voice of the bell, so I know it to be the bell hung from the neck of Death’s pale horse. I see Death on his horse, all luminous bones that look as if they would clatter but they move in perfect silence. Death beckons and I follow through the dark wood in which he moves like a lantern.

There is a stench of rotting flesh. I am standing in front of a tree; it is an oak tree. In the crystalline vibrations of the purple-blue I see the shapes of oak leaves trembling and I see the man hanging by one leg. He is naked. He has no head, his head has been cut off. Much of the flesh has been eaten off the bones by animals; what remains of the corpse is bloated and writhing with maggots. The swollen male member sticks out stiffly, uncircumcised and tumescent with rot. Death says to me in a low voice, ‘This is that man who saved your life when they cut off your manhood.’

I begin to cry with great wracking sobs that shake my whole body. In this stinking maggoty corpse I see a light like a candle in a tabernacle, within the stench I smell a sweetness. Inside the corpse I see Jesus Christ crucified, broken and twisted on his cross that is right-side up in the upside-down body. ‘No, no!’ I cry, ‘It mustn’t be like that! Stop it, thou Jew, stop being crucified! Come down off that cross!’ I claw at the rotting corpse, trying to pull the crucified Jesus out of the dead flesh so that I can get him off his cross. Jesus smiles and begins to fade. O God! what will there be now? Only the black spin of the universe, only eternal motion without face or voice when Jesus is gone. ‘Jesus!’ I cry, ‘Don’t go away!’

‘Hurry!’ whispers the Bath Kol, ‘Hurry to Jerusalem!’

Hearing that urgent whisper I become terribly, terribly afraid that I shall not be able to get to Jerusalem quickly enough, that no one will get to Jerusalem quickly enough to keep Christ from going away. How do I yearn for the haunting dread and joy of his voice in the echoing dark of the world inside me, the comfort and terror of his presence. How do I long for him the virtuality without limit, him the quickener, him the mystery. Remembering no prayer I howl in my fear and I begin to kick the maggoty corpse. ‘Jesus!’ I cry, ‘Come thou out of there! Thou Jew! Be with me!’ But there is only darkness and rottenness in the corpse, the light that was within it has gone and the sweetness. The corpse is too high for me to kick properly; kicking it I fall down. Lying there in the wet grass under the corpse I feel maggots under my fingers and among them a gold ring, I feel the goldenness of it in the darkness, it must have fallen from the headless man’s gullet when I kicked him.

It is of course the tax-collector’s wedding ring, the circlet of gold that proclaims his union with Sophia. There has been a day in the life of this headless carcass when it knelt beside that splendid woman, exchanged vows with her, put a ring on her finger, received this ring on its own finger that is now bloated and glistening. I feel in this dead man’s headless memory the touch of her hand, the scent of her breath, the softness of her mouth in the marriage kiss. In the memory of this rotting stump of flesh I hear the rustling of silk that slides away to reveal the dazzle of her naked flesh, the imperious and delicate scroll of her law. This golden circlet has dropped with the maggots out of the dead gullet because the pilgrim tax-collector before his death has swallowed his wedding ring, has renewed his covenant with his wife before being murdered and robbed. What am I to do with this ring from the finger of this maggot feast that was the lawful husband of my wife of one night?

Here I must speak of a particular phenomenon and to do so I must refer again to Hieronymus Bosch, that marvel among painters who never fails to notice the butterfly in Samson’s field of vision. Bosch is above all the master of what is seen out of the corner of the mind, the essential reality behind the agreed-on appearance of things. Sometimes I manifest myself as an owl painted by Bosch and in this way I fly through the skies of his paintings and observe what is happening. My owl-by-Bosch manifestation is not a superficial one, it follows virtual lines back to his pencil and charcoal sketches and forward from underpainting to varnishing.

A very good example of the accuracy of Bosch’s observation of the real behind the apparent is the upper left-hand side of the central panel of the Temptation of Saint Anthony’ triptych. It is not necessary to have seen this painting to recognize immediately what I am about to describe; I refer to it only as a convenient example.

The upper right-hand side of the central panel shows a daytime sky; extraordinary things are to be seen in it but none the less it is an ordinary daytime sky; the left-hand side of the central panel shows the night that is always waiting within the day and the fire that is always waiting within the night. It is in this night within the day, this fire within the night, that what I am going to talk about is to be seen. Bosch gives us burning farms and churches, falling steeples and gibbets, winged creatures (one of them with a ladder) flying through the air, companies of horsemen, sundry peasants and animals, and a woman washing clothes in the river by the light of the burning. One sees at once that this fire has not spread gradually from a small beginning; no, it has from its waiting state exploded into being, has burst the skin of night and time that could no longer contain it. On the right-hand edge of this night with the fire in it, in the space between the night on the left and the day on the right, the illumination is like that of a twentieth-century sports stadium in which a night game is being played; only there does one see light of such preternatural brilliance as that through which the creature (is it an angel or a devil?) with the ladder flies. Bosch could have seen such light and shadow only in a flash of lightning. But the light in this picture, this light between the night on the left and the day on the right, is not the flash that is gone in a fraction of a moment, it is lightning sustained and steady. This shows Bosch’s virtuality as well as his virtuosity; I have flown beside that creature with the ladder (always uncertain as to its allegiance; it has a tail but I cannot be sure it’s a devil) and I can testify that Bosch experienced that sky by quantum-jumping to the strange brilliance of total Now.

This condition of total Now manifests itself in a number of ways and one of them is that extraordinary lucence that I have just described, that epiphany of light immanent in our being and experienced in certain heightened states as the light-as-bright-as-day within the night, the light as bright as lightning. Now as I lie in the darkness on the wet and maggoty grass under the headless naked body of the tax-collector it is not darkness that I see but the crystalline vibrations of the purple-blue. These vibrations I recognize as being of the spectrum of total Now, that moment without beginning or end in which all other moments are contained.

I have spoken before this of the Now of Sophia’s nakedness in my mind but it is not with Sophia nor with Jesus that I have seen the light of total Now. No, the headless naked body of the tax-collector has been the first thing that I have seen in this unearthly light. Now lying on the ground under his hanging body I hear in the purple-blue the multitudinous leaves whispering Now in the rising wind.

The purple-blue withdraws, the sky goes black; the thunder rolls, the lightning crashes and the jagged black doors of the sky jump apart to reveal the purple-blue multiplied, intensified to unbearable brilliance. Now I see that the life of humankind, the life of the world even, fits easily into the space of that lightning-flash. And how many lightning-flashes have there been, will there be. It is with the dead tax-collector that I have seen this and I begin to pray for him. The words come into my mind:

What is man that thou art mindful of him …

But no more words come; I don’t know to whom or to what I pray. I perceive that what is receiving my prayers is nothing with whom one speaks in words, nothing of whom one asks anything, nothing to whom one tells anything.

The thunder crashes where I am, the lightning cleaves the tree to its roots, the stinking maggoty corpse falls on me. I jump up and run through the dark wood, and as I run I hear the bell that had been nodding slowly now ringing fast, I hear the clatter of bones, the neighing of the pale horse, the low chuckle of Gevatter Tod, Goodman Death himself. The Bath Kol hisses wordlessly in my ear; I stop running and walk forward slowly, feeling with my hand in the darkness before me. My hand finds a wire, a man-snare.

I draw my dagger and go on. In the air on my face I feel the approach of something, I step to the right, a blade rips through my left sleeve, someone grunts as with my left arm I get him in a neck-grip and with my right hand I strike with the dagger. ‘O my God!’ cries a man’s voice. Again and again I strike, there is gurgling, gasping, coughing, he falls to the ground and is silent. I move back off the path into the trees and wait to see if anyone else is coming. I am not afraid and this surprises me; I think: When I had balls I didn’t have this much balls.

While I lean against a tree, panting in the dark of that dire wood and listening to the hooting of an owl, the world is full of domes: golden domes and leaden ones; domes with crosses, domes with crescents, great domes and small ones; broken domes and whole ones; domes in Jerusalem, domes in Constantinople. The biggest dome of course is that of the heavens, one can’t in this world have a bigger one than that; but there is a human urge to enclose domes of air as large as possible, to shape lesser heavens in domes of human manufacture. So many domes!

It must be borne in mind that one is part of a vast picture the whole of which can never be seen; in this picture, as in Bosch’s ‘Temptation of Saint Anthony’, night and day are side by side — I have seen this myself. The world is two domes put together, the night curves round it, fading into day. Somewhere, while I lean against this tree in the dark, it is already broad day. This little wood of night with its tiny figures, its owls and mice, its rotting corpse, its luminous Death on his pale horse with its nodding bell, its river running beside it humming in the starshine, is a background detail; in the foreground of the central panel flash the gold, the domes, and among them none greater than that one enclosing its vasty heaven of silvery lucence, blue and golden dimness in Constantinople, decked with jewels and hung with lamps and lustres, starred with glimmering suspended candles burning in the air that is smoky with incense: the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia. This dome that I have never seen has because of its name and the mystery of itself incorporated itself with Sophia in my mind.

Now, however, in my little wood in this little night part of the background, I see nothing of domes, I see only the darkness, hear only the owl, listen for Death, listen for my Bath Kol. I hear nothing for a long time but when I move away from the tree I do hear something; I throw myself to the side, hear a knife smack into the tree. Before I can make a move with my dagger a powerful female voice bellows, ‘Don’t hurt me! I’m only a poor widow woman, I meant no harm!’

I grab her arm; even as she begs for mercy she is pulling with all her might to get the knife out of the tree for another try. ‘Meant no harm!’ I say. ‘You tried to kill me!’

‘Where’s the harm in that?’ she says, gripping my wrist with her free hand. ‘You’re a gentleman, aren’t you? I wasn’t doing anything but sending you early to Heaven.’

‘How do you know you’d be sending me to Heaven?’ I say. As I say it she twists suddenly and, still gripping my wrist, bends smoothly and throws me over her shoulder to the ground.

I land heavily on my back but I bring her down with me and in the struggle that follows I end up sitting on top of her. She’s a well-built woman and I think longingly of times that will never come again. ‘Why are we fighting?’ she says. ‘We’re all God’s children, aren’t we? We’re all brothers and sisters in Christ.’

‘Not me,’ I say. ‘I’m a Jew.’

‘So was Christ,’ she says. ‘It makes nothing. Are you just going to sit there, aren’t you going to have me?’

‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I’m a eunuch.’

‘Yet God be thanked!’ she says.

‘For what?’ I say.

‘That they didn’t cut out your tongue as well!’ she says.

Thus, in our little dark wood in our tiny bit of background on the night side of the picture.

The night is far gone when she takes me to a little hut deep in the wood and well off the travelled path. Hanging from a tripod over the embers of a fire is the head of the tax-collector, somewhat shrivelled and smoke-darkened. ‘God in Heaven!’ I say.

‘Pontius Pilate,’ she says. ‘He’s not quite done but he’ll certainly fetch twenty pieces of gold when he’s ready. You won’t get a Pilate like that anywhere for less than fifty; a Pilate like that will make any church rich, it’s really unusual.’

‘Why Pilate?’ I say.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘That’s just how it is. When I saw him I said, “Pontius Pilate”.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but why would a church want the head of Pontius Pilate?’

‘How could they not want him?’ she says. ‘What kind of relics have they got? They’ve got Christ’s foreskin and Mary’s afterbirth and three hairs from Joseph’s arse but what about the man who made Christianity possible? What if Pilate hadn’t washed his hands? What if he’d turned Jesus loose and let him go on preaching, what then, hey?’

I ponder this.

‘Why were you coming through this wood?’ she says.

‘I’m going to Jerusalem,’ I say, suddenly remembering that I’m in a hurry.

‘What for?’ she says.

‘To keep Jesus from going away,’ I say.

‘He’s already gone,’ she says. ‘If Jesus had stayed buried in Jerusalem he’d have been divided up amongst all the churches in Christendom by now. You must know he was resurrected even if you are a Jew.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’ve seen him.’

‘Did you get any relics of him?’ she says.

‘I’m not joking,’ I say.‘I really saw him.’

‘How?’ she says. ‘Had you a vision?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘ wasn’t quite myself at the time. I was leaning on him, he was holding me up.’

‘Did he have a smell?’ she says.

I put my mind back to when I was with Jesus. ‘He smells of stone and sweat and fire,’ I say.

‘Then Jesus he wasn’t,’ she says. ‘Jesus wouldn’t have a smell, that’s how you’d know him.’

‘Everybody has some kind of a smell,’ I say.

‘Well I know it,’ she says. ‘That’s just why Jesus would be different; he’s the Son of God, isn’t he? Do you think things came out of him like out of ordinary people when he was on earth? Do you think he made turds?’

I say, ‘Well, he ate and he drank and he bled so I suppose he must have done the rest of it as well the same as anyone else.’

‘There you show your heathen ignorance, thou child of darkness,’ she says. ‘If Jesus had made turds they’d never have corrupted like ordinary ones and they’d be in little golden jewelled caskets in churches.’

This also I ponder.

‘Maybe I should come with you,’ she says. ‘It isn’t safe to travel alone these days.’

I look at her. She’s not at all a bad-looking woman, she’s certainly strong enough to be a helpful companion on the road and she’s good company as well. It’s true that she’s a murderess but in these times that’s perfectly acceptable to me as long as she’s murdering for me and not against me.

‘You owe me something, you know,’ she says. ‘After all, it was you that widowed me.’

‘And it was you that almost made me a relic,’ I say. I want her to come with me but it would be a kind of holding on; my pilgrimage requires to be a solitary journey; it is a private matter between Jesus and me and the tax-collector. ‘I can’t take you with me,’ I say, ‘I’ve made a vow.’

‘Of what?’ she says. ‘Chastity?’

‘A vow to go alone,’ I say. ‘You won’t be without a man long, a woman like you. You can find yourself a real man instead of a eunuch.’

‘Give me that ring on your finger then,’ she says. ‘For remembrance.’

I look at my hand. There it is, the tax-collector’s wedding ring. I put it on her finger.

‘If you had your proper parts you’d have taken me,’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t have been able to do without me once you’d had me.’

When she says that it comes to me suddenly that if I had my proper parts I’d not be in this wood, I’d not be on this pilgrimage. If I’d been more careful about what streets I walked in I might still be climbing that ladder while the tax-collector completed his metamorphosis into Pontius Pilate. It occurs to me then that it might have been my castration as much as anything else that started him on his penitential pilgrimage.

The poor maggoty stump of his corpse is still lying on the ground by the lightning-blasted tree while his head hangs from the tripod in the hut. That the head is either assuming or re-assuming the identity of Pontius Pilate seems to me a destiny that is not for me to interfere with. To the body, however, I surely owe a burial.

‘Why was he hung up like that?’ I say.

‘I don’t know,’ says the woman. ‘Udo did that, the one you killed. He didn’t like the look of him.’

The woman has of course a shovel among the tools and implements of her trade and with it I dig the grave. We put the body into the grave and I hear the words of the Kaddish coming out of my mouth, I see the black Hebrew letters rising in the morning air: ‘Yisgaddal v’yiskadash sh’may rabbo … Magnified and sanctified be his great name ’

Hearing the words, seeing the black letters rising in the air, I find myself paying attention to what I am saying, paying attention to the first words of the prayer:

Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world which he hath created according to his will.

As I say these words I am looking at a spider’s web pearled with the morning dew; the morning sunlight shining through it illuminates every droplet and every strand of the web; the spider, like an initial letter, witnesses the prayer and the fresh morning darkness of the oak leaves above it. My partnership with the tax-collector makes continual astonishment in me: it seems to me that never before have I noticed how much detail there is in the world which he hath created according to his will. That this headless stump with the absent face of Pontius Pilate should lie writhing with maggots under the freshly turned earth while each perfectly-formed drop of dew shines on the purposeful strands of the spider’s web and the spider itself is a percipient witness and the oak leaves tremble in awareness of the morning air — all this is as the hand of God upon my eyes even though I know that God will never again limit its manifestation to any such thing as might have a hand to lay upon my eyes.

In the mounded earth of the tax-collector’s grave I plant his pilgrim staff and to the staff I tie a sprig of oak leaves. I find myself wondering about the boundaries, the limits of the tax-collector. I find myself wondering whether his face might appear on more than one person. I go to the body of the man I killed, Udo. He is lying on his face where he fell. I turn him over and have a good look. It is not the face of the tax-collector.

‘You want to remember him?’ says the woman.

‘I want to remember everything,’ I say.

‘You want to remember me also?’ she says.

‘You also,’ I say.

‘Here,’ she says, giving me her knife and taking Udo’s knife for herself. ‘It’ll bring you luck.’

We stand looking down at Udo. ‘What about him?’ I say. ‘John the Baptist maybe? The prophet Elijah?’

She shakes her head. ‘He never was any good for anything but being Udo,’ she says.

We bury him and I go. As I’m walking away into the morning I turn and look at her. A big strong murdering woman, but alone.

‘What’s your name?’ I say.

‘Sophia,’ she says.