And then the wind died and the stars were at their steeliest. Morbidly swaddled in my sleeping bag, an electric shock of panic kept me from unconsciousness; I was like a sentry who stabs himself awake to avoid the capital crime of sleeping on his watch.
27
The next day I lay dozing in the tent all morning in a pool of sweat. I woke up fuddled and airless and dehydrated. After drinking a pint of warm water with a taste of baked plastic, I climbed a small dune and tried to clear my mind.
What struck me was the spontaneous transparency of consciousness. Consciousness and experience are synonymous. When I feel the sun warming my face I know it for what it is, nothing needs to be added. I don’t have to tell myself a story: ‘The sun is warming my face.’ It is not a linguistic act. I don’t have to observe myself to know the content of my consciousness, that is precisely what I know already. I may not understand my experience because I am confused, but then the experience I am having is confusion. Understanding may require analysis, knowledge requires facts, but this knowing is given. In its essence consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental.
Having no argument with my experience, there was no such thing as a non sequitur. I was just watching the pattern unfold, like a child playing cat’s cradle with a piece of string. I was driven by local emotions into a freewheeling lateral association, or downwards in a potentially endless search for the anchor at the end of some chain of thought, or upwards into more and more denuded categories of categories.
And then, because this search can only find arbitrary resting places, it was the whole process, accepted with complete permissiveness, which became fundamental; its endlessness was its resting place: thoughts seemed to radiate from and collapse into the same source, as if the whole history of a star could be compressed into a single unimaginable image, a black hole as bright as the sun. This image disappeared into itself (because it was a thought within the process) and reappeared (because it was the image of the process in which it disappears) and there was no succession any more (because of its self-effacing appearance) and I was outside time (because there is no succession) and inside time (because I am a dying animal who has no reason to believe that he could have this experience without a living body).
And yet when I really accepted that I couldn’t be outside time if I wasn’t inside time, my whole being, and not just my identification with a particular aspect of my thoughts, was this speechless eloquence of still moving alpha omega part whole black light and I felt that I was participating in reality for once and not just hoping and moping, and all the oxymorons turned into paradoxes, all the watersheds into figures of eight, and I was as helpless as sand dancing on a beaten drum, but I was helpless from the strangeness of reality, not from some suburban despair induced by the insult of circumstance, and this helplessness was the greatest freedom I could know.
28
Six weeks have passed since I left the desert. My visionary moment curdled into loneliness and terror. I found myself cracking up, persecuted by all the little voices that were silenced by what I’d seen. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the wave which flings itself highest up the beach should make the noisiest retreat. But what had I seen? Without the feeling of insight there was nothing left, nothing portable. I couldn’t stay where I was, let alone go any further. All I wanted was to warm myself by the fake fire of reassurance. I didn’t care if it was fake. I didn’t want to think any more. I wanted to die in England. I wanted to see the crocuses in Hyde Park. I wanted to see my daughter one more time and hold her hand in mine.
Soon after arriving in London, I made an appointment with Dr Turner. I was hoping to get some painkillers that would catapult me into the only paradise for which there are any reliable witnesses. Instead, he greeted me with the disturbing announcement of an experimental treatment for my condition. If I volunteered for a trial at the King’s Liver Unit I could start using it straight away. Nobody knows the long-term effects, but the initial signs are promising. I felt my perfect despair prised open by this oyster knife of good news. I had been so set on the certainty of death that I couldn’t separate my tentative relief from some less obvious emotions. The luxury of knowing when I was going to die, unknown to the athlete and the health-store freak, was surprisingly hard to give up.
After leaving Turner’s surgery I stood on the corner of Pont Street, holding my breath so as not to absorb more than half the cloud of diesel pumped into my face by an accelerating taxi, opposite the hotel where Oscar Wilde was arrested, and a few hundred yards from the prep school which first taught me to hate education, searching for the secret glamour which is only vouchsafed to the reprieved, but I did not find it in the stony face of the jogger who hopped beside me at the zebra crossing, a mouse squeak of rock music leaking from the headphones clamped to his skull, or in the shimmering pelt which tottered across the road with the wrong animal inside it, the quick and the wild replaced by the contemptuous pallor of a powdered stick insect; and I began to suspect that it was not gratitude for extra time, but the incisiveness of approaching death which could cut through to the heart of the matter, and I felt the bathos of survival, the loss of dramatic tension, the disappointment of watching the pristine violence of a mountain torrent thicken into a bloated yellow serpent glittering its way slowly through the crowded plain.
Now I would have to start again, writing silly screenplays, negotiating a mortgage, fighting with my ex-wife, struggling to secure a place in the world. I dragged myself across Cadogan Square, under the nervous buds of the plane trees, feeling the nausea of spring. No wonder Henry James, falling down after a stroke, thought he heard a voice saying, ‘So, here it is at last, the Distinguished Thing.’ He was expecting to be released from the triumphant mediocrity of life, its vulgar insistence on the inessential.
Today I finally called Heidi, my nerves sliding over sandpaper as I dialled her number. She took the news pretty well and after some hesitation suggested I pick up Ton Len from school this afternoon. We agreed on the details and signed off more tenderly than we have for years. After our conversation I felt such a tangle of excitement and weariness that it was impossible to do anything practical, and so I wandered into the street, killing time until Ton Len’s school day ended. It was — is — one of those staccato spring days, sunburst and cloudshadow speeding overhead and underfoot, and in perfect harmony, simmering beatitude interlaced with the horror of watching the future wreathe itself around my attention.
I saw an advertisement for the Monet exhibition on the side of a bus and, with an impulsiveness I knew I would soon have to renounce, leapt on board and rode along Piccadilly to the Royal Academy. I hadn’t realized that Monet had become as popular as a Cup Final, and I had to buy a triple-face-value ticket from an art-lover loitering by the gates.
I could hardly see the early canvases through the thrusting crowd, but when I reached the final room the scale of the Grandes Decorations acted as a forcefield, holding the viewers at bay. I shuffled to the front and scanned the unframed lilac expanse of clouds hanging in water and waterlilies hanging in the sky. It drew me to its light-flooded centre only to diffuse me into the lilac pool, the pulse of ambiguity dilating into stillness. The water was a natural mirror for the mirror of art: once that dialogue of reflecting surfaces was set up, everything else — depth and surface, abstraction and representation, paint and painted — could enter into it, and when these compacted reflections reached their highest concentration there was a burst of freedom, the flashing moment when the eye perceives itself.