Цитаты из книги The Black Book

In this dead night under a dead Greek myth I tell you finally that it is not death. It is life in her wholeness from which one draws this terrible system of love, of creation, of loss. In Cyprus under the trees, Athens, Sicily, the same long purifying tides throw up their pure lotion across statues, the robes, the eyes of the huddled philosophers who outfaced the truth. The churches are stiff with beards and candles, celebrating the dark mass of the spirit as it enters its absolute aloneness. In the cathedrals under the sea we tread the isles of weeds, and listen for the long chime of bells, bubbled under water for centuries, among the cargoes of grain and millet, raisins and fruit: argosies which are reckoned on no merchant's sheets. Cross over to Bethlehem. They will be able to tell you for certain whether something has been born from this discord of the elements, or whether the fiat has gone forth; whether this is a pre-nativity or a post-mortem!

Sitting here, on the prophetic black rock, where the Ionian comes in and touches, stealthy elastic, like a blue cat's-paw, I have seen Chamberlain lift that gun to his mouth a dozen times, always to drop it again. I have seen more than ever the modern disease looming in the world outside the sea, rock, water; the terrible disintegration of action under the hideous pressure of the ideal; the disease which made Gregory label the remaining days of life left to him, his death. The disease which... I examine my own face carefully in the mirror, finger the battered skull, consult the sunken orbits. It is not the first time in history that the gulf has opened up between the people and their makers - the artists. But the chasm has never been so vast, so uncrossable. The creator, terribly mauled and disfigured, has become the audience instead of the prime actor. He can do nothing. In the subterranean Hades of self, on the wet marsh flowering in great festering lilies and poppies, the delusions gather and hang, miasmic. The curative virtue is being turned to black bile, to poison, to corrosive. It is the Dark Ages opening again. We are going down, in a supreme Dance of Death to the terminus, among the extreme unctions of the violins. This is the going down into the tomb which Gregory experienced as a unit. "Ended. It is all ended. I realize that now, living here on the green carpet and living there in the mirror. So profound is the conviction that there is nothing I can do to reassure myself. I am a little aging man, gone bald on top, with not even a thumbed season ticket to salvation. What shall I do? I am falling apart, the delicate zygon of my brain is opened. I am rusting, my knees are rusting, the fillings in my teeth, the plate in my jaw is rusting. If I were only Roman enough to own a sword we should see some fine conclusions to this malady. Alas! Are there only dead left to bury the dead? It is the question not of the moment, but of all time. This is my eternal topic, I Gregory Stylites, destroyed by the problem of personal action."

A strange procession of symbols across the consciousness. I do not know any more what they mean. It is useless to interrogate my jailors - the mummies which line the corridor, the stiff-bearded winged gentleman who guards the bookcase. They live in the dimension of thought which is space. To speak they would have to inhabit time. Soon, I too will lose the power of time-speech. I can feel the heave bulk of barbaric words in my brain coiling up and dying for want of use^ the maggots of a large vocabulary eating each other for want of brain tissue to live on.

Faith, you are always saying to me, ultimately one must have faith - but what degree of it, of shining will, is necessary in order to give these relics a decent burial? And anyway, when you say "Faith", how do I know it is not one of the defunct idealisms under whose banner you are crusading? If I am foreign, it is because I am trying to accept the world, not deny its positivity; or build it up on the shaky armature of an ethic. I have quarreled on this subject not only with you , but with Alan, with Peters, with Lobo. I shall continue to quarrel until my own position becomes, not hypothetical, but definite. then vale^ the days are too empty and the nights too long. How can I spend the rest of my time here once I am convinced that life is really imagination.

All day long I pace the museums, inspecting the relics of our history, all carefully laid out and labeled in scholarly hands on post cards. At night I meditate on the quantities of the pure gold which we house so carelessly in glass cases, unaware that this same putrid stuff is decaying in our arteries. Is it possible to keep the vitality of the centuries in a bottle, with a post card on it to hint at an identity long since lost? My own history, my present, is confused by the death which I see gathered around me, here a jawbone. There a femur, here a wedding ring, there a pickax. I cannot live because the decomposing bodies of my ancestors dog me at every turn. They are not living in their myth, but dead, influencing my dying, not my life that is why the action is so erratic, so full of extremes, because the hypaethral universes which should live in us today are dead, and behind glass. Instead of nourishing us they are the umpires of our defeat, our decline and fall. The circuit is complete. We have put our myths in the cellar and must start building again with new implements, a new tongue.

Dear Alan. I am alone again. This book is not a statement of a path, but a quarrel with destiny, that is why it is necessary for you to understand it. The summer is largely responsible - not to mention the little death. I was thinking tonight of those summer days in the shadow of the priory. They seem to belong to another world - a world of shapes which included such colors of warmth, charity, love etc. A whole dormant Platonic principle which, in its essence, is England - the marrow and bone of England. This is a very necessary valediction, not only to England, but, if you like, yo the world. It will hurt you, but it is the truth. I have looked into my account - the account that seemed so full and heavy with new cash - and found hardly a coin that will ring properly om wood. There was nothing for it but to empty my wallet into the dust and take the road again: without dramatics this time, without heroics - not to mention lymphatics. It is queer to remember that this decision was already shaping itself that afternoon, when we stood on the southern tower of priory, hanging in the breeze, breathless and exulting like sea birds. All that was the island then, was represented in that humorous razored profile of yours - the predatory nose of the Middle Ages, the Goth singing in your blood, the music you gathered up in those nervous fingers and transmitted, crazy with your own enthusiasm. Southward, like a green beating heart, the flats stretched away into the mist. The myth weathering softly on the corbels, the fragile spines of the windows with their armorial bearings, the buttresses flying into an eternity of childish history. We were hanging up there, like flies, over Saxon river, watching the tonsures cross the leads in meditation. Irrational thoughts and feelings wheeling up over me, whewing like gulls, somber. It was in that time that I began dimly to see the equation which was finally printed in my brain here, over Ionian. It was the temptation of the devil, the vision of the cities offered to me from an immense mountaintop. The devil! What should be more plausible than that you should be the Black Saint himself - panurgic, long-nosed, calculating bastard that you are! You were offering me, in your oblique way, the whole of England - the masques, the viols, the swans, the mists, the doom, the fogs: you were offering me a medieval death in which I could live forever, stifled in the pollen of breviaries: split silk and tumbrils, aesthetic horses and ruined Abbeys. The lament for Dido opening up such pits of emotion in my brain that I fell upon my knees, and shattered in little pieces in the hearth. The forest opening its eyes of frost, the unborn morning of the world, the dew in a sheet, the trees stifled in feathers. The great orchestra hymning gruffly among its ants, gathering and breaking in time to sea. The hot lick of the winter rain, blinding us all from coast to shabby coast, Or Pat going quietly mad among the sprained spires of Oxford. Your room, with the gramophone like a broken womb emptying Beethoven on us, This is the world which was implicit in our extravagant gust, our laughter, our tears, our poems. That is why, when I tell you I have rejected it, I want you to understand clearly the terms of that rejection. That is an England I am going to kill, because by giving it a quietus once and for all, I can revive it! This is not a flashy paradox, but something I have experienced, something that I have suffered. Understand me. It is not very difficult. The gulls are wheeling again, in their soft terror, the rooks are uneasy. In the gloom down below they light the candles and begin - the soft elegant litanies of religion. It is an apocalyptic moment, between heaven and earth. We are hanging over the minute, crawling town, while the bells open up. Under our feet the tower rocks at each impact of the vesper bell. A train snores outward, along the hills, into the past. The decision is made. I am no longer softened by tears or doubts. I have become as hard as a bronze medal. What it cost me to maintain this terrible equilibrium, to become responsible only to myself for what I am - that is not an important thing. The important thing is this: if I succeed, and I will succeed, then I shall become, in a sense, the first Englishman. I tell you this in confidence, because afterward, when the great struggle is over, and the whole psyche of our nation - our world - is thrown back into gear - then there will be plenty of time for understanding, analyzing, wondering. It is now, while the duel is on, that your understanding is valuable. This all I can say. From that rare latitude. which I carry with me wherever I go, under the Equator or over the Poles, I write you this valedictio and greeting. Affectionately Yours, Hamlet's little godchild.

To your romantic, whose mind is clouded over by his face values , the final tragedy of love is death. Not so. I protest immediately against this idea. Life is the one force which has power to suck tragedy from us - and however untimely the end, we may be sure it is not too soon. Life has always finished with us when we forsake it; death is merely the aesthetic convention which the sardonic playwright bows to. The final touch which shapes the piece - too absolute and perfect to have any relation to the play itself. What book is different for the word Finis on its last page? De Gourmont is right when he says that he who weeks for Ophelia has no aesthetic spence. True. What tears one has are stifled in the spectacle of her madness. Life had finished with her, poor wretch, before death dragged her downstream, a sopping lily among lilies. I leave Rimbaud to follow her downstream to the shallows, the white wretch among lilies, with the white lily-face turned up pointless under a thatch of flowing hair. The imagination is shocked numb by this vision of her floating away. Analyze it, and you will see this is still the reflection of her madness.