Pilgermann

8

‘Jesus Christ how savoury’! Almost I said, ‘Jesus Christ our Saviour’, almost those words leapt out of my mouth. Strange, how eager those words are to be said, and stranger still how busy is the idea of being saved. As a boy I was told that there is a big book in which every deed is recorded; on the Day of Judgment one is shown this record, must examine it carefully and sign it. I was told that the righteous go to Gan Eden and the wicked to Gehinnom but even as a child I never believed it; even as a child I sensed that the arrangement of one place for the good souls and another place for the bad ones was simply not such a thing as would happen in a universe of sun and moon and stars, of night and day and the wheel of the seasons. God said a great many things in the time when it was manifesting itself as YHWH; some of them may well have been misunderstood or written down wrong. Or it may be that he put things in a very simple and vivid way so as not to require too much of the general understanding. Space and time have in them no Gan Eden and Gehinnom, no Heaven and Hell as what could be called places, and I cannot believe that anyone can now take seriously the idea of a soul that is simply righteous or wicked. Even the souls of such creatures as Torquemada and Hitler are not simply wicked although the weight of their actions is mostly in the gehinnom of things — I use the word as one might say right or left, up or down, plus or minus. It is in the rotation of eden and gehinnom that we feel the cosmic dance that is the motion of the universe, and in the play of these energies come punishment and reward. My punishment is that such evil as I have done has tuned me to the gehinnom frequency where I vibrate to the memories of all who have done evil; I share their being as well as their memories, and what I remember I remember as a doer remembers. My reward for being no worse than I am is that I remember no more than I do.

And what is this I that speaks now? Only a fiction, a name of convenience, a poste restante for whatever addresses itself to the persistence of memory and the force of idea: there is no Pilgermann distinct from anything else; why should there be? It is difficult for me now to understand why anyone should want a continuance of identity in a life after death. All those ancient mouldering kings entombed with their murdered wives, with their servants and soldiers and horses, with their weapons and chariots, their stone bread, their stony dregs of long-departed wine! Imagine the burial of a mouse with weapons, an ant with concubines! The arrogance, the greed of it! Even now the space all round me is thick with the fat globules of undissolved souls blinking and bleeping their greed for more! more! until the signals fade to silence and the lights go dark. More indeed! Not only human souls — the dying Earth itself moans like a stunned ox; the deeps of space are clamorous with its panting, its unwillingness to be absorbed into the allness from which it came. I have lost my humanity, I have been waves and particles too long to feel what humans feel. And yet, and yet … I remember with something like a pang how I wanted God to come back, how I wanted Jesus not to go away.

I am on the road again. Life is so strange! It is nothing I have ever been able to take for granted, just simply being alive with the world in front of my eyes and looking out through those eyes at the world. And when the eyes are closed, the colours, the patterns, the flashes and flickers; pictures even. How can it be that pictures can be seen with the eyes closed? Dreams! Maybe there were dreams before there was anything else; maybe there were dreams before there were people to dream them. Maybe dream life is the real living and our waking life is just the necessary exercising of our bodily functions in the time between dreams.

I am on the road again, trying to remember the last thing Jesus said to me. ‘From me came the seed that gave me life,’ he said.

He may be right. Look at what he does with stone, it sets time at naught completely; give him any stone and any stonecarver whatever and he can make it happen, he can make his living and his dying be Now, for ever this very moment. He has no need of flesh and blood, he can live in stone as others live in flesh and blood. Partly I understand it: what one thinks of as the hardness of stone is actually its memory, its retention, its capability of holding images and thoughts. That’s why Christ has always been so easy with stone, he comes to it so willingly because it goes with him so willingly; he likes to be long in stone, short in stone, likes to live out his story large and small in shapes of stone. Christ comes for any stonecarver who calls him with his chisel, calls him with his iron to the stone. He has no vanity, does not push himself forward, he takes his place modestly with the other figures, acting out his story as bidden. Because of this the stone is eager to please him, it’s always thinking of new little touches that will put something more into the story. In my drift through what is called time I have my favourites here and there, and as often as not they are after my own time. What an odd thing to say: my own time! That time during which I lived is what I mean, and that sounds equally odd because I have always been somewhere in one form or another; precision with words is impossible.

But I wanted to say something about a particular stone Christ-story, the one in Naumburg Cathedral in the west rood-loft. I believe that it was done in the twelfth or thirteenth century, I don’t know who the sculptor was. There are seven scenes in it: the first is the Last Supper, perhaps it is that moment when Christ is saying, in the Gospel of Mark, Take ye; this is the body of me.’ As Christ speaks these stone words — they are not cut into the stone but they are there in the air of that stone scene — he puts into the mouth of Judas a piece of bread while Judas still dips with his own hand in the dish. The stone and the carver are good with this scene as they are throughout: as Christ with his right hand puts the bread into the mouth of Judas he draws back with his left hand his right sleeve to keep it out of the gravy and in this way the eye is led from the bread to the hand, wrist, and arm of Christ that extend the bread, showing the oneness of the bread with the self of him who gives it. Or it may be — and I rather believe it is — that the moment shown is that one in the Gospel of John when Jesus, having been asked who will be the betrayer, answers, ‘That one it is to whom I shall dip the morsel and shall give him.’ And John goes on to say, ‘And after the morsel then entered into that one Satan.’ Yes, that for me is what is happening in that stone moment. Because all eucharists are double — this is what I know now, this is why I am easy now between the grinding of eden and gehinnom in the mill of the universe. When God was a he he never told us everything; where is it written that he told us all there was to tell? Nowhere. Nor did Jesus tell us everything. He never told — did he, is it written somewhere? I think not — that all eucharists are double; but they are. ‘Take ye; this is the body of me.’ ‘And after the morsel then entered into that one Satan.’

What chance has Judas? He eats the bread of Christ as would a dog given a crust by his master, and with the bread comes Satan. There sits Christ, stolid and stocky in the Naumburg stone, solid as the stone itself. There is no fault to be found in him, he will betray no one. Ay! Judas, Adam and Eve, the Jews — what was to be expected of them? What did God as He, God as Logos, God as Christ, want of any or all of them? How were Adam and Eve to resist the fruit that God had created irresistible? How were the Jews to be other than imperfect and deviant from the will of that same God who created them imperfect and deviant from his will? How were they not to make a golden calf in the shadow of that holy, that terrifying and untouchable mountain of the Law? How was Judas not to betray Jesus after Satan had entered him in that double eucharist? Jesus was the one who could withstand Satan, he was the strong one; he required of Judas that betrayal that Judas, powerless to do otherwise, already a dead man and Satan-entered; enacted as his necessary part of the story.

What are we but creatures of the God who made us as we are? Either God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent or he isn’t. If he isn’t then he must take his chance with the rest of us and not demand special treatment; if he is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present then he has nothing to complain of except that the universe would come to a halt without the dynamic asymmetry of Adam and Eve’s original sin, of the Jews’ whoring after false gods, of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, of Pilgermann’s adultery and every other act of wrongdoing since the human race first took upon itself the task of maintaining universal spin and motion according to the will of God. Try to conceive of things as other than they are — it can’t be done. While humankind exists there can only be the rotation of God’s impossible requirements and humankind’s repeated failures. Indeed, what is God but an impossible requirement? Any possible requirement would not be God.

So. Stone Judas, fed by his stone master, eats his stone bread while dipping his hand into the stone meats of the last supper. The stone, friend and brother to Christ and stonecarver and all of us alike, remembers this because the iron has told it to remember and it obeys.

In the next scene of the Naumburg stone story Judas gets his thirty pieces of silver from the high priest. Here we see the full power of that stone memory, that stone retention. This stone knows what it knows: Judas, his face that of a stunned brute, is not his own master, and this is not forgotten by the stone. But if Judas is thus sold even as he sells Jesus, what of this high priest through whose listless fingers slide the clinking silver coins into the fold of the cloak Judas holds out to catch them. Is this Caiaphas? It must be he. And what is in his face, this face that seems of all of them to be the most thoughtfully observed? Does Caiaphas choose to be Caiaphas? Why does he look out at us like this from the stone? Such a tired face. There is left to me only this!’ says that face.

Why? Why only this? What words of Caiaphas does John give us, what has Caiaphas to say of Jesus? ‘If we leave him thus, all men will believe in him, and will come the Romans and will take away both the place and the nation.’ What else does Caiaphas say to the council of the chief priests and the Pharisees? ‘Ye know not anything, nor reckon that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people and not all the nation perish.’ And this, John tells us, Caiaphas ‘from himself he said not, but being high priest of that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but that the children of God having been scattered he might gather into one From that day therefore they took counsel that they might kill him.’

So. Judas is entered by Satan, Caiaphas is doomed by reason and prophecy. How much freedom of choice has Caiaphas? He, like the rest of us, is free within the limits of his understanding. As I have said before, a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action. Vulgar tradition, like a painter who does not know how to render shadows, has filled in the sparseness of the Gospels with a sugary muck that makes the empty spaces dark and sticky. In the coloured picture cards in which Jesus now lives he and his twelve disciples move softly in their marzipan robes but the Jesus I saw was not a soft mover, and Caiaphas’s concern indicates that Jesus’s following was such as could well have moved Rome to take away both place and nation from the Jews.

Thus Caiaphas, acting for the good of his people, ensures their everlasting infamy. God as He, God as It has done this, has shown in this the never-to-be-understood mystery of his action in which Judas must betray Jesus and Caiaphas his people. All we can know is that there must be betrayal. Is not life betrayed by death? Is not up betrayed by down? Is not space-time betrayed by that recurrent contraction to the singularity from which it must burst anew? The Jesusness of Jesus cannot live without the Judasness of Judas, the Caiaphasness of Caiaphas, the Pilateness of Pilate. Ponderous wheel!

In the next scene Judas kisses Jesus while Peter with a sword cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Christ stares out in perpetual innocence from the stone while the guilty betrayer, submissive to the forces moving him, presses close like a dog to his master. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says to Judas, ‘Comrade, do that on what thou art here.’ In Mark he says nothing. In Luke he says, ‘Judas, with a kiss the Son of man betrayest thou?’ In John again he says nothing. There it is: the Gospels say what they say and the stone remembers what it is told. Very good. Who is this Pilgermann, this drifting wave-and-particle vestige of a castrated Jew, who is this Pilgermann to have an opinion on the matter? From where I am now I see the universe isotropically receding in all directions. I am, equally with all other waves and particles, its centre. From that centre I speak as I find, and I find that I have questions for which neither the Gospels nor the Holy Scriptures offer answers. Theologians and fathers of the Church cannot confound me, they have no firmer ground on which to stand than I. So. Here is Christ, the one who makes the blind see, makes the crippled walk; here is Christ, the one who raises the dead, walks on the water, feeds the thousands with his loaves and fishes. Christ the Word made flesh, Christ the Son of God. And what says he to this mortal lump, this uncorrected sinner, this strayed sheep and Satan-entered? What says Christ, the Good Shepherd? ‘Judas, with a kiss the Son of man betrayest thou? Comrade, do that on what thou art here.’ Because Christ will have, must have his betrayal. ‘Comrade, do that on what thou art here.’ Do it that the cosmos may uncoil its onward energy, that the wheel may go on turning: night and day, plus and minus, eden and gehinnom, matter and anti-matter, Jesus and Judas.

Now I wonder, yes I wonder, on whom is it to forgive whom? Who is the sacrifice, the one for the many, the ransom, the redeemer? Who is to represent us all? Is it Jesus the betrayed, the crucified, or is it Judas the betrayer and his own hangman? Or is it the binary entity of Jesus/Judas alternating and inseparable? How the thunder rolls when certain words are put together! When certain mysteries are named! Not to be understood, not to be attempted even! Roll, thou eden and gehinnom of the rolling universe! Hurry on, thou road to Jerusalem, thou road returning! A rushing and a plodding, a palimpsest of footsteps rising from the ground under my feet up into the air high over my head so that I feel myself to be drowning in the going and the ghosts of going of those footsteps, footsteps upon footsteps and ghosts upon ghosts, a madness of going that moves both ways on this road. This road is the treadmill on which we walk day into night and night into day, eden into gehinnom into eden, Jesus into Judas into Jesus.

Jesus does not tell us everything but he has much to show us. In the next scene of the Naumburg stone story we see Peter on the left-hand slant of the roof of the porch of the rood-screen doorway. He is turning away from the high priest’s maidservant who questions him; he is making one of the three denials he will make before the cock crows. Ah! the genius of that Naumburg stone, that Naumburg master! Look at the face of that maidservant, the eternal directness of the soul behind the stone eyes that are turned away from Peter as she looks towards what is not carved in the stone, towards Jesus brought before the high priest, chief priests, elders and scribes. She looks away from Peter but she stretches out her left hand, it is almost touching Peter’s shoulder as she says, ‘And thou with the Nazarene wast — Jesus.’ Peter says, ‘Neither I know nor understand what thou sayest.’ What is meant by this triple denial of Christ? Is not each part of the Holy Trinity being denied once in it? As if Christ is telling us: ‘Look at this mortal lump, this thrice-denier; yet will he be my rock.’ Because mortal lumps are all humanity can offer, and if rocks are needed these must suffice. Having only mortal lumps to choose from, Christ will use this one for a betrayer, that one for a rock. Just as his father before him used this one to receive the tablets of the Law, that one to make a golden calf. Matter and anti-matter, yes and no of the treadmill that walks the rolling earth from night to day. Here stands in the stone Peter the rock in baffled recognition of what he is and what he is not in the numbers of eden and gehinnom. That the stone and the carver could produce these two faces, the maidservant and Peter, that is certainly in the eden side of the balance for all of us. Such a brutal innocence, that maidservant! An innocence not possible for Jesus, the innocence of the pure lump of mortality with no connexions in high places. And Peter! that face of his! The light of understanding that floods the stone of him!

Peter and the maidservant are on one side of the roof of the porch of the rood-screen doorway; on the other side are two soldiers of the watch. Underneath them in the rood-screen doorway and twice as large as they is Christ crucified, Mary on one side of him and John on the other.

After the maidservant and Peter and the soldiers of the watch here is Jesus before Pilate. Oh! that meekness of Jesus, that stone meekness. It is the meekness of plutonium. He is so very docile, like some absent-minded celebrity asked to pose in a group photograph. ‘Here? Is this all right, is this where you want me to stand?’ Waiting patiently for the time when he will explode himself upon the world. Pilate holds out his left hand while a servant pours water over it into a basin. Pilate is thunderstruck and so is the servant; to both of them at once has come the realization that this moment is what it is for ever — it has never been before, it will never be again; it is Now and they are living it, never in life, never in death to escape from it. Pilate’s mouth is open wide, it is as if a great thick invisible vine is growing out of it; or a snake. ‘Innocent I am from the blood of this man,’ he says; ‘ye will see to it.’ Of the two faces that of the servant shows the deeper feeling; Pilate’s perception of this moment is confused by his official identity but the servant can take it in just as it is and he knows that never in the history of the human race will there be any going back from this moment. Here is the hump of the story, here is the last of the uphill part; after this it rolls like a monstrous and implacable wheel through the ages, crushing everything in its path and preparing the way of the Lord, the gone, the never-again-coming.

Christ is scourged then, and in the next and last scene of the rood-loft reliefs he goes off dragging his cross. These last two scenes, like the Crucifixion below, are not from the hand of the master who carved the first five scenes; it was the destiny of the original stone of the last two scenes not to endure with those other faces and gestures that are fixed for us upon the mirror of time. These last two scenes and the Crucifixion, all of them in wood and by a centuries-later hand, have not the power of the original stone. As I have said, Christ has a special way of being with stone and the Naumburg master knew how to let that special way of being happen.

I am on the road, this road through time and space to Jerusalem, but I am no longer alone: the sow I killed and her peasant master now walk with me; they are my new colleagues, and not only they: the bear who was slain by his worshipper also walks with me; Udo the relic-gatherer whom I killed in the wood is here, and the tax-collector. Yes, the tax-collector — how not?

The sow is walking upright, she minces on her trotters like a heavy woman in tiny shoes, her flesh shaking and wobbling erotically, her flesh that is naked among us; there is a scarlet necklace of beaded drops round her throat and a thin trickle of blood from her mouth. She is confused by her present condition and shakes her head as she walks. ‘Little love!’ she says to her peasant master. ‘O my treasure!’ she says, pressing close to him, ‘What gives it here?’

‘He killed you, this one,’ says the peasant. ‘Smell him. Is he a Jew?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I can tell the difference any more.’ She turns to me. ‘Ay!’ she says, ‘how the life rushed out of me on to your blade, it was like an orgasm. Such a knifeman are you, such a thruster!’

‘Such a sow are you,’ I say. ‘Such a Jew-finder, such a leaver-behind of dead bodies.’

‘How sweet she is!’ This is Bruder Pförtner, he too is with us. ‘How I love her!’ He throws himself upon the dead sow, forcing her down on all fours and entering her zestfully.

‘Ah!’ cries the sow to Pförtner, ‘you were always the best, you were always the most man of them all!’

‘Get off her,’ says the peasant to Pförtner. ‘She’s mine.’

‘There’s enough of her for everybody,’ says Pförtner contentedly. ‘She’s inexhaustible. You must be patient and wait your turn.’ He reaches orgasm quickly, screams with joy as the sow squeals under him, then falls off her and lies snoring in the road behind us as we go on.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ I say to the sow. ‘Tell me your story.’

‘Ah!’ she says. ‘There’s so much to tell! There’s more to tell than even I myself know. You know of course that I’m descended from the Moon Goddess, from Diana herself; yes, everyone knows that. That’s why, you see, I’m so eternally desirable — I have that quality of virginity. Every time a man takes me it feels to him as if it’s my very first time; it makes him feel so outrageous, so naughty, so triumphantly and impeccably male. Why don’t you have me, you’ll see what I mean.’

‘Not just now,’ I said. ‘I want to hear more about you.’ Wondering at the same time whether a penis and testicles might have such a thing as a ghost, and whether a live eunuch might couple with a dead sow by means of the ghost of a penis. Never in my life had there been so many sexual invitations as now when I was castrated.

‘My sowhood,’ said the sow, ‘has not been like that of other sows. I am fecund, I am fertile, but I have never farrowed. I have not multiplied, have not increased myself; my essential virtue is intact, I have not gone beyond the original limits of myself. Only men have known me, I have never felt upon me the rough and bristly weight of a boar.’

‘How was that?’ I said, remembering suddenly that it was probably she who had eaten the lost parts of me. There she was mincing beside me on her little trotters, looking at me sidelong from under her blonde eyelashes. The trickle of blood from her mouth and the red line round her throat made her seem a creature enslaved by lust.

‘I seen to that,’ said the peasant. He was a big man, dirty, tattered, patched, and unshaven. In his face was a darkness other than the dirt and beard. The darkness of his eye sockets was such that his eyes could not be distinctly seen. I thought of all the years of his life in which he had looked at the world from out of that darkness. ‘I seen to that,’ he said. ‘I kept her safe. I made for her a harness with spikes on it. I knowed early on I weren’t never going to have no wife, I knowed I’d have to provide for myself the best I could. I seen her when she were only a little thing and I fancied her.’

‘Fancy!’ said the sow with a snort. ‘It was more than fancy, it was love; it was the same as what the high-born folk make songs about and play on lutes. Say it right out: it was love. Ah! what a little enchantress I was in those first days!’

‘But you became a huntress,’ I said. ‘You became a smeller-out of Jews.’

‘How that happened,’ said the peasant, ‘it were like this: it were three or four year back the spring crop failed and the autumn as well. We run out of grain and beans, we run out of everything. Bodwild here, I had to keep her hid or she’d have been ate sure. There been a little girl went missing from the next village and folk were saying one thing and another, most of them thought that girl been ate. Such things been heard of before and it were always Jews done it. Sacrifices, you see. They drunk them children’s blood for their rituals. A dog in our village dug up some bones, they was from a human child.’

‘There were folk in our village looking at my little Konrad and muttering this and that,’ said Bodwild. ‘He’d always lived alone and kept to himself. They knew we were in love and they begrudged us our happiness.’

‘Like I said,’ said Konrad, ‘I had to keep Bodwild hid or she’d have been turning on someone’s spit. I found a hole in amongst some big rocks it were in the wood by the common. I put some straw in there for her, I done my best to keep her comfortable. Mind you, I weren’t too comfortable myself what with people pointing the finger at me like they was because of them bones and some said they seen me burning that little girl’s clothes. There’s always people will try to take away your good name but they couldn’t prove nothing.’

‘How well I remember that time!’ said Bodwild. ‘How well I remember a particular November evening: it was dusk, it was raining; I remember the smell of the rain on the dead leaves, I remember the smell of the damp straw. Suddenly there came a fresh smell: it was strong, it was sharp, it excited me, it made me want to nip and cuddle, it made me quiver with lust. There crept into the hole with me a man, such white skin he had, such black hair, such red cheeks!’

‘He were a clipcock,’ said Konrad. ‘He were some kind of Jew magician, he had papers on him with that kind of secret writing they do. He weren’t from our part of the country; some of them in our village they seen him sneaking through the wood and they begun to chase him.’

‘It was his fear I smelt,’ said Bodwild. ‘So strong and sharp it was, almost like doppelkorn, almost like schnapps. It made me wild with desire. I kissed him and called him sweet names, I pressed close to him and offered myself, my pinkness and the sugar of me, I was like marzipan; who could refuse me?’

‘They won’t get near pork,’ said Konrad, ‘them children of darkness, them Jewish devils. They call up Asmodeus, they drink the blood of Christian children, they say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, them Christ-killers. He pushed her away.’

‘Me!’ said Bodwild. ‘He pushed me away. Men have paid good money to sleep with me, but he pushed me away.’

‘They haven’t paid money but they’d give me a sausage or maybe a chicken or some doppelkorn,’ said Konrad.

‘I was outraged,’ said Bodwild. ‘I had never been insulted like that, I wept bitterly.’

‘She were squealing her head off,’ said Konrad. ‘I heard her half a mile away and I come running. We burnt the Jew that night, there were human child bones found in his pouch.’

‘Clever little Konrad!’ said Bodwild. ‘It all worked out so well, everyone was satisfied. How he writhed and crackled in the flames, his bones cracked and the marrow boiled out. I remembered the smell of his fear as I saw him twisting in the flames, it was almost better than making love. Watching him burn I came again and again.’

‘I had you under my cloak and I was playing with you,’ said Konrad. ‘I could feel how you loved it, how hot you were.’

‘Did you smell the Jew’s fear when he was burning?’ I asked Bodwild.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I had to remember it from before to call up my excitement. He was singing but that did nothing for me.’

‘He were trying to save his self with his Jew magic what they call up devils with,’ said Konrad. ‘There’s a spell they sing, it’s called “Schemmah Yisrowail”; I’ve heard it often when I’ve caught Jews. They sing it when they’re burning but it never puts out the fire.’

‘Do you remember when you smelled me out?’ I said to Bodwild. ‘Do you remember when you told the others to castrate me?’ I said to Konrad.

‘I thought it were you!’ said Konrad. ‘I thought I remembered your ugly Jew face looking up at me when we had you spread out on the ground. Well, you won’t be making no more little Jew brats, will you.’

Bodwild came close to me, nuzzling and sniffing me. At her touch I felt the ghost of an erection spring up, I felt myself rocking like a chip on the torrent of lust that flowed through the first Sophia, the second Sophia, and this sow with her scarlet necklace of blood. Even now as I have these words in my mind I am confused by the presence among them of my lost God, my remembered Christ. How I am flooded with the humming and the roaring of great waters, with the music of the great currents in which rock and dance the Great Mother, the Father, the Son, the Virgin and the Lion! Unseen! Chosen I am, chosen are my people to be the thrall of the multitudinous, of the humming and roaring unseen manyness that whirled the Jews like a bull-roarer round the head of its manifestation as YHWH, made of them a sounding of the unseeable, the unknowable, the utterly ungraspable. How it raged, that idea, when it was YHWH and the Jews whored after stocks and stones and golden calves! How it would not tolerate any limitation of form, of image, of substance! How the everythingness of it commands every flash and glimmer of the mind, how all thoughts that ever were or ever will be run beneath its hand like sheep beneath the hand of the shepherd! Lion-sheep, star-sheep, ocean-sheep! ‘Now I remember you!’ murmured Bodwild with her snout brushing my ear. ‘Now I remember the smell of your fear, it was dark and full, it was like music and strong drink to me. I didn’t smell it when I saw you in the inn yard just before you killed me; you had no fear then, I smelled nothing.’

‘So it was the fear you smelled when you hunted Jews,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t the Jewishness.’

‘It’s all the same,’ said Konrad. ‘When you’re hunting Jews and you smell fear that’ll be a Jew sure enough.’

‘If they don’t know you’re hunting them they won’t be afraid,’ I said.

‘They know that a time will come when they will be hunted,’ said Bodwild; ‘that was what I could always smell.’

‘It doesn’t seem to bother you any more that I’m a Jew,’ I said.

‘Everything seems different now that I’m dead,’ she said. ‘I feel as if I’m letting go of things. And I’ve told you I wanted to make love with that first Jew; I’ve wanted to make love with all of them but I’ve had to content myself with their dying. I’m just like anyone else, I take my pleasure where I can.’

‘Here we’re talking like old friends,’ I said, ‘and yet you must be full of rage because I killed you.’

‘Why should I be full of rage more than you?’ she said. ‘I sniffed you out, they castrated you and I ate your male parts. So you killed me, that’s reasonable. A little time one way or the other, it seems a big thing when you’re alive but when you’re dead you wonder what all the fuss was about. When I was alive we hunted you down; now we’re dead and you’re alive and already we’re friends. Very soon you’ll be dead also and you too will wonder why it ever mattered so much who was what and who did what.’

‘And you?’ I said to Konrad. ‘You were the master of this sow, it was you who used her to sniff out the Jews that you tortured and killed. What have you to say for yourself?’

‘What have I to say for myself?’ said Konrad. ‘You lousy Jew eunuch with your soft white hands, in your whole life you probably never done nothing heavier than count your money. You’re all usurers, the whole filthy lot of you, trying to get the whole world in your pocket. Knights going to Jerusalem, they have to pawn their castles to you. Many’s the Christian lady you’ve crept into bed with, I’ll bet, and her lawful husband gone to fight the heathen. Not that it don’t serve them right, they’re nothing but thieves and murderers and their foot on the neck of the poor from the time we’re born till the time we die. Look at my hands next to yours, eh? Mine are more like hooves, ain’t they. They’re that hard. Here I am dead from your Jew magic and how much did I ever have in these hands. Tools to work another man’s land with mostly. Heavy soil and a heavy plough and a six-ox team, you probably wouldn’t have the strength in them white hands of yours to turn a plough like that. How much Christian blood have you drunk?’

‘I wonder what makes Christians think that anybody would want to drink their blood,’ I said.

‘If you don’t drink it you do other things with it,’ said Konrad. ‘Everybody knows about Jew magic.’

‘You’re a Christian, are you?’ I said.

‘What else would I be, you Jew Antichrist-worshipper,’ he said, ‘I been baptized, haven’t I.’

‘And died with your sins heavy on you,’ I said. ‘Died all unshriven.’

‘What difference does that make,’ he said. ‘I ain’t burning in Hell nor nothing like that, am I.’

‘Maybe your Hell will be to walk to Jerusalem with the Jew you castrated,’ I said.

‘Whatever I have to do,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it like a man, I’ve nothing to fear. It’s yourself you’d better be worrying about; the Last Days are coming and then you’ll see what burning is. There’s been signs in the sky, you know — great flaming clouds in the shape of Christ with a sword in his hand fighting the Jewish Antichrist with three heads and seven horns.’

‘Who won?’ I said.

‘You’ll see soon enough, clipcock,’ he said. ‘I forgot, you ain’t even that no more, you’re a no-cock clipcock.’

‘I’m so sorry you’re dead,’ I said. ‘It’s a great loss to me that you could only die once; it would be such a pleasure to kill you.’ Thinking, as I said it, that these dead ones were already like a family to me.

‘It means nothing at all,’ said the bear, ‘whatever you see in the sky.’ The arrows that had killed him were still in him, they nodded as he walked upright with the others. ‘There’s been a Great Bear in the sky all these years and even a Lesser Bear as well and nothing’s come of it, nothing at all.’

‘Did you think anything would come of it?’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why should I. You can see anything you like in the sky, anything at all. And what it means is anything at all.’

‘That man who killed you,’ I said. ‘What do you think he’s doing now?’

‘He’s looking for another bear,’ said the bear. ‘He’s hopeless, he’s incapable of learning.’

‘You think you’re quite the thing, don’t you,’ said Udo the relic-gatherer to the bear. ‘You think you’re better than us. I seen you slipping through the woods now and again when you been alive. You wouldn’t say nothing to us then, you wouldn’t stop and pass the time of day, you were too good for us.’

‘If I’d stopped you’d have shot me full of arrows,’ said the bear.

‘Yes I would,’ said Udo. ‘Yes I would just because you wouldn’t stop and talk. If you’d talked with me we could have been friends, you could have showed me where the honey trees were.’

‘Another one,’ said the bear.

‘Don’t take that tone with me,’ said Udo. ‘How much honey have you had in your life and how much have I had in mine?’

‘Whatever I’ve had I’ve found for myself,’ said the bear.

‘Oh yes,’ said Udo. ‘Naturally. The wood is your village, isn’t it. So you know where to find things the same as I did in my village. If you’d come to my village looking for the well or the inn or whatever I’d have shown you where to find it, I’d have had time to stop and talk, wouldn’t I. But when I come to your wood a runaway and a stranger trying to stay uncaught for my year and a day it’s not a word from you I get, is it. It’s nothing, nothing, nothing I get from everybody. The lord and his lot they treat you like an animal till you run off and you think at least if the animals will treat you like an animal that’s not so bad, you’ll be a brother to them. But they won’t, they turn their backs on you. Die, serf! Die, slave! Into the ground with you and give the maggots what they’re waiting for.’

‘Excuse me,’ said the headless tax-collector. A thrill ran through me when I heard his voice, the voice of my brother in Sophia, the voice of my brother pilgrim whose temple I had destroyed, whose world I had blackened and made empty. These new colleagues of mine, these dead men and animals, all of them appeared to me as I had last seen them. So the tax-collector was of course naked and headless and writhing with the terrible swift energy of the maggots that continually consumed him but never diminished his dreadful corpse. I couldn’t bear to look at him but my eyes were again and again magnetically drawn to the horror of him while in my mouth I tasted writhing maggots.

‘Excuse me,’ said the tax-collector to Udo. ‘I don’t want to offend a respectable murderer but when you talk of giving the maggots what they’re waiting for, then I really must say something, I really must put in a word, must mention that you were eager enough to give me to the maggots. You seem to feel very sorry for yourself but you didn’t feel sorry for me when you caught me with your wire and took my head off with your sword.’

‘That were business,’ said Udo. ‘I never wished you nothing ill. Anyhow what’s one pilgrim more or less; you’ve died on the road but here’s Herr Keinpimmel will go to Jerusalem for you; he’ll make the journey for you and say however many prayers you like. So there’s nothing lost, you’ve give the world up for Jesus and I say well done and Amen.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said the tax-collector. ‘My good friend Herr Keinpimmel, the illustrious Jew adulterer. The one takes my wife and the other takes my life. And my head will bear the name of that one who washed his hands and said that he was innocent of the blood of Christ. What more could I ask for? I am happy, I am content to dance with the maggots until …’

‘Judgment Day?’ I said. I couldn’t keep silence, I had to speak to his absent face, I had to look at where his face would have been if he had had a head.

‘Ah!’ he said, ‘At last! The first words spoken by you to me! And it is the Day of Judgment about which you speak to me. It is with this thought, this question, that you break your silence. You cannot look me in the eye because my head is elsewhere but I think that even if my head were here you might not be able to look me in the eye, isn’t that so?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s true enough. But might not you also find it difficult to look me in the eye? Me and a few other Jews who lost their lives to the soldiers of Christ.’

‘I have already begged your forgiveness, have I not,’ said the tax-collector. ‘In front of your synagogue under the open sky in the sight of God have I humbled myself to the Jews.’

‘We were under the open sky because there was no roof to stand under,’ I said. ‘The synagogue had been burnt to the ground, and there were many Jews who could not attend because they were busy dancing with the maggots.’

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Please, please forgive me. I would do it again if I had the chance.’

‘Do what?’ I said.

‘What I did,’ he said.

‘Ah!’ I said, ‘Do you now tell me that you brought those peasants to our town?’

‘Naturally I did,’ he said. ‘How was I not to do it?’

‘It was because of you that there were all those dead Jews on the cobblestones!’ I said, listening with dread and with fascination for the words that I knew must come next.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Because of me and because of you.’

Hearing this I found that my throat was affected in such a way that I could not swallow. My mouth was so dry, my tongue so thick that I could scarcely speak. ‘Because of what I did,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are that Jew who finished me off. You are the last in a long succession of Jews who took away my life. Do you shake your head? No, you don’t, you know what I’m talking about. I was already dead some little while before this lout here took my head off, dead and Jew-killed. I saw you hanging about in the Keinjudenstrasse, I knew what was in your mind, I knew what would happen when I rode away. I made my arrangements, and once you were on that ladder death was on its way to the Jews of our town.’

‘Why the others?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you just kill me?’

‘Killing you alone wouldn’t have been enough,’ he said. ‘Did you think you were the only one? There were always Jews, they were like owls that one hears calling in the dark: one close by, one farther away; you never see them but they know where you are. They smelt out Sophia the way Bodwild smelt you out, they smelt her lust and her appetite for the other, for the circumcised, for the lurking Jew. Could you possibly have thought you were the first one?’

Looking at that headless mass of maggots I felt the stare of his absent eyes, I began to see in the empty air the eyes of the dead man, his desperate eyes looking into my desperate eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I thought that I was the first one.’

‘You weren’t,’ he said. ‘I could smell them always, smell them on her skin and on the silk she wore next to her skin, I could smell them in the bedclothes and in the folds of curtains, I could smell them in the passages of my house. They required no words, she and they, they made their wants known without language, like animals that go on all fours. Only a look, only a smell and they followed, like dogs running to mount a bitch in heat. A bitch in heat or a wild ass:

‘A wild ass used to the wilderness,

That snuffeth up the wind in her desire;

Her lust, who can hinder it?

All they that seek her will not weary themselves;

In her month they shall find her.’

That desperate man with no head had found the right words, the words that with a rush made Sophia freshly real in my mind, the desert animalness of her in the hidden flesh, the covered nakedness. Gone from me for ever, I knew that I was never to see her again. For a moment the loss of her closed in upon me so crushingly that I thought I might kill myself on the spot; it seemed all at once that there was no space, no time for me to live in. Yet here before me was her husband: he too had lost her and death had given him no rest; the memory of her was a wheel on which he was broken again and again. When was there an end of pain, I wondered. Never. The cup was golden and it would not pass from me. While I was alive I should have to drink it empty and when I was dead it would be there to drink afresh. And still I drink it now, newly bitter after all the centuries. But the pain is the life, the pain is what separates the animate from the inanimate, the human from the stone. What is human may long for the stone of its innocence, the stone of its ease, of no pain; but the pain is the life. Even after death the pain is the life. This pain is not a simple one, it is complex.

Was there pain before there was a world? Was the world brought forth in pain? Yes, I am sure of this, I am convinced that it is so. What knowledge can there be of this? As these words come on to the paper by way of what goes by the name of Pilgermann I note that theoretical science has worked its way back deductively to the very first moments of the universe and the bursting forth of everything from the time-space singularity which had contained it just before that moment. All of this is imprinted on the waves and particles of me, it is in the mystical black letters that rise above all flames, it is the Word that is at once the birth-scream and the death-cry of the cosmic animal that is God, the It that is both creator and created. How should there not be pain? One has only to listen to music run backwards to sense the reversing cycles of consummation and creation, the continual ordering and reordering of the disturbance that is the endless idea that continually thinks itself into and out of the manyness of its being.

It is not from the loss of Sophia, the loss of Christ and the loss of God as He that the pain comes, no. It is from the pain that God comes, that Christ with his lion-eyes comes, that Sophia in all her beauty, her splendour, and her passion comes. It is from the cosmic intolerable of the nothing-in-everything alternating with the everything-in-nothing that all things come. This great pain, this ur-pain, swims its monstrous bulk in deeps far down, down, down below that agony of loss in which I grind my teeth remembering the golden bell of Sophia’s nakedness and the sharpness of the knife of joy.

Knife of joy. At this thought almost do the waves and particles of me laugh. Perhaps this almost-laugh is seen somewhere as the shaking of a leaf in the evening wind, the shaking of a leaf seen in the light of a street lamp under a humpbacked moon in a modern place where the few trees speak to the dry stone. ‘Knife of joy,’ I said, and immediately there came to mind the knife of unjoy, the knife that drew the line for me. Now of course I know what I did not know then: I know that the pain waits in the joy as the dragonfly waits in the nymph. Almost I sense that the joy, as the nymph to the dragonfly, is a necessary stage in the development of the pain.

With my dead colleagues I was on the road to Jerusalem: with the sow Bodwild and her peasant master Konrad; with the bear shot full of arrows by his worshipper; with Udo the relic-gatherer; with the tax-collector the husband of Sophia, and with us was Bruder Pförtner in his appearances and his disappearances. And now I became aware of perhaps someone else, it was only the faintest light and shadow as it were sketched on the air, a ghostly chiaroscuro walking familiarly with the rest of us as if by right. This sketchy figure was in truth familiar, uncertain of feature as it was: it was immediately recognizable to me as an early state of my death. I felt drawn to it as a father to a son. This simulacrum was in no way childlike, it was a fully-grown duplicate of me but not yet fully defined, not yet fully realized, and therefore it was to me as a child to be looked after.

Child! Looking at my immature death, feeling protective towards it as if it were my son, I found myself thinking: What if Sophia and I have made a child! What if in her womb is growing new life from our sin, our adultery, our triumph! I laughed aloud as this thought leapt up in me. I looked sidewise at the tax-collector, my brother in Sophia. ‘In her month they shall find her,’ I said.

Strange, talking to a headless dead man. No face to look at, but from somewhere he was staring at me hard. ‘Judgment Day,’ he said. ‘You spoke of it just a little while ago. You must know in your heart, as I knew in my heart while I was alive, that the Day of Judgment is the only day there is. In our mortal life we play at dividing this one everlasting day into many tiny days and we say, “Tomorrow I shall perhaps do better.” But there is only this one day in which we live our whole lives and from which we fade as consciousness fades. It is where I am now but in a little while I shall fade out of it and be gone while you for as long as you live must remain in it.’

‘Is that why you told those peasants to let me live?’ I said. ‘So that I could suffer it continually?’

‘I told them to let you live because I felt myself judged in that moment when I looked down at you lying in your blood and vomit,’ he said.

We said nothing more. Bruder Pförtner was with us again, he was walking close beside my young death and fondling it from time to time.

Walking the road to Jerusalem I find myself weeping. This is because my mind has shown me a connexion that it was just beginning to perceive when I was leaning against the tree in the little dark wood after I killed Udo the relic-gatherer. It was then that there came into my mind the great dome that I had never seen, the dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Ah! now as I walk I know that there is no separateness in the world, I know that the souls of things and the souls of people are inextricably commingled; I know that the dome and the woman both are manifestations of something elemental that is both beauty and wisdom and it is for ever in danger, for ever being lost, torn out of our hands, violated. It is impossible to keep it safe. That heaven shapen by human hands, that blue dome hung with lights and lustres, starred with flames and dim with incense, that spirit-bowl, that God-mother and Mother Goddess, that Wisdom of stone and gold, how should it not be violated, how should rough hands not be laid upon it, how should the holy silence not be broken by the thudding of hooves, how should war horses not be ridden up to that altar, how should the altar not be smashed? Altars are made for smashing. That thing in us that waits to jump up and smash, it stands looking over our shoulder as we build the altar. It rages, it smiles, it laughs deep in its belly, it dances on cloven hooves at the consecration of the altar, it looks ahead to the time of the smashing. More, more is there in this: that of which the dome is a visible aspect, the great Wisdom, golden Wisdom itself, is the mother of both the altar and the thing that smashes the altar. The Wisdom in its wisdom thus provides that beauty and wisdom shall never be within our grasp, shall only be a light upon our eyes and passing.

Passing, passing! Echah! O how! O how is the beauty passing, how is it departed, gone, gone! It is gone because the Wisdom in its wisdom has ordained that beauty is that which passes, it is that which will not stay; beauty is a continual departing, a continual going away. Sophia is one with the dome in my mind that arches over me like the Egyptian sky goddess arching over her earth-god brother who penetrates her and must be separated from her.

In the making of Sophia’s beauty was the violation of it by separation, by departure, by shouts of impiety under the great dome of it, by the castration of its consort and the beheading of its protector. The great dome echoes with the clatter and the clamour of the horsemen, with the smashing of the altar, the tearing of the silken hangings. Listen, listen to the trampling of impious feet on sacred books, listen to this trampling that is the most constant road in history, the trampling of murderous feet on sacred books. In the writing, in the copying, in the binding of the books, in the very ink and paper, in the blood and bones of the original writer and in the blood and bones of every copyist thereafter lives coevally the trampler and the burner of the books of God and the God of books, lives the trampler and the burner of books and people, of beauty and domes.

I am on the road to Jerusalem with my dead colleagues, with Bruder Pförtner, with my death that is not yet ripened to term. The year is 1096 in the Christian calendar, Anno Mundi 4857, two thousand, four hundred and eight years since Moses brought down from the mountain the second tablets on the tenth day of Tishri. It will not be until A.D. 1204 that violent men mouthing Christ will sail from Venice to sack Constantinople. In the adzes and hammers of Venetian shipwrights not yet born, in their blood and bones, in the blood and bones of their mothers who will bear them waits to be born the sack of Constantinople and the fall of an emperor unborn, and all of this is under the dome of that Sophia who is or is not carrying my child, that Sophia who revealed her nakedness to me, gave it splendidly and lavishly to me, that Sophia, that nakedness that I shall no more see. Echah!

The above is my kina, my dirge, my lament that is suddenly in my mind as I recall walking with my colleagues on the road to Jerusalem. In my mind at the end of my lament on the inseparability of Sophia and Hagia Sophia is another thought: the enemy matters nothing; truly it is not the apparent enemy that sacks Constantinople, it is that which crouches always at the feet of beauty and in its season leaps up to destroy. It is the impulse that leaps up, and it gathers to itself whoever comes to hand whether it be Christians or Muslims; it clothes itself with whatever costume it finds. The fall of Constantinople that begins in 1204 with the French and the Flemings is consummated by the Turks in 1453; what is required is not that a particular enemy shall attack the dome, only that by sword and fire beauty shall be brought low, only that the holy books shall be trampled. Echah!