I turned off the main road and went into an area of narrow streets and tall, jumbled houses. Here there were piles of refuse and splintered wood and broken carts. Men stood by the broken carts. I thought — Could not the men use the wood to mend the carts and take away the litter? Then — But of course, one is not supposed to think like this now. There were smells. I thought — Humans have lost their sense of smelclass="underline" they once had a sense like that of hunting dogs, which made connections.
The men wore cloth caps and mufflers. The women had long thick skirts and shawls over their heads: some of them carried small children with dark furious eyes. There were older children in clothes and caps that were too big for them; it was as if they were involved in a game of dressing-up. It was these children who, as I walked through the streets, paid attention to me, followed me, mocked the way I walked. When I turned to them they would pretend to have been doing something different. I thought — It is this age, from five to eleven, that children still have a chance to do what they want to do.
I was on my way to the church of the clergyman who had asked for people to help build, or re-build, the recreational hall for the unemployed. He had found it difficult, apparently, to get local men and women to do this for themselves. They had felt that it would be some sort of defeat for them: they wanted work provided as part of what other people wanted to do.
I did not want to arrive at the church straightaway: I wanted to observe more of the strange landscapes in which besiegers and victims seemed reflections of states of mind.
I moved out of the narrow jostling streets into a more open area where the ground sloped down towards the river. Here there were long rows of low houses back-to-back like stitching. There were not many women and children visible here, and the men in cloth
caps seemed to have been swept into groups on street corners. The windows of shops on these corners were boarded up; the walls of houses at the ends of rows were falling down. I thought — This landscape is like clothing coming apart at the seams: a shroud that has been tied too tightly over the body of the earth, our mother.
Beyond the houses was a maze of railway lines that went down towards the river. The lines were raised on posts; they were where coal must once have been carried down to ships. Now the railway was not working; there were rows of stationary trucks like bumps on the spines of skeletons. Beyond the railway lines were the shipyards with tall grey cranes that were themselves like birds become skeletons, for want of anything to feed off.
I thought — These images are of a charnel house: these images are in my mind. If I am an anthropologist come to take notes of this strange tribe, what I should be doing is taking notes of states of mind.
The railway lines were like the tracks of baby turtles that had once run down towards the sea: the birds, the cranes, the crabs, the seagulls had got them.
I thought — But one or two get through?
— Or the town hall, the department store, the bank, the museum, has burned like a volcano and the lava has pushed human beings down towards the sea -
— But it is these images in my mind that go tumbling, jostling, like a crowd running down towards a river!
I had come to the edge of an area of wasteland that lay between the houses like stitching and the delta of railway lines on their wooden pillars. Beyond the railway lines were the cranes and the river: there were no ships on the river; there were some hulks on the mud that seemed part of the land, rotting. There was a group of children playing on the wasteland: they were on top of a small hill of slag and rubble. The children were playing a game of rolling old rubber tyres down this hill; the tyres rolled and bounced and span towards the railway lines at the bottom. There was a small embankment with a wire fence on top in front of the railway lines and when the tyres reached this they leapt and whirled in the air and then flopped down like dead fishes. There was one small opening in the embankment which consisted of an archway which gave access to the area under the railway lines beyond. The children did not seeem to be aiming the tyres particularly for this opening; the game seemed to be just to watch the tyres bounce and leap.
I thought — The children on that mound are like Napoleon and his marshals surveying a battlefield: they watched soldiers and cannon balls bounce and leap, flopping down like dead fishes.
— Or these children are rolling their tyres down the inner surface of the four-dimensional continuum of the universe to see what, at the end, will be the effects of light, of gravity.
There was one child who was smaller than the others who was pushing a large tyre up the hill. This child wore a cap and a coat down to its ankles. It was like a small Sisyphus just emerged from an egg, pushing its own shell up a hill.
I thought — Or this is like one of those experiments in which you bombard with particles a small aperture in a screen and it is according either to chance or to how you have set up the experiment what, if anything, gets through.
When the small child who was pushing the tyre up the hill reached the top the other children gathered round. I had sat down on my haversack at the edge of the wasteland at some distance from the hill. I thought — I will stay here and observe not only the customs of this strange tribe but myself observing -
— Out of the confusion of images, might something of myself get through?
The small child was climbing into the large tyre which the other children held for him: I mean he was getting himself wedged inside the tyre as if he were the centrepiece of a wheel. He had his head down, his knees against his chin, his arms around his knees. It was also, I suppose, as if he were within the casing of some seed; his small face peering out. Or was not this like an illustration to some sacred text — the microcosm and the macrocosm, the human within the circle, the part that is the whole. These images went spinning in my mind. Then I thought — But surely the child within the tyre cannot be rolled down the slope; those tyres went bounding, leaping, so violently: the child will die! The other children held the tyre while the small child settled himself in; then they gave the tyre a push and the tyre went off whirling, bouncing, down the slope. I thought — But the child's neck will be broken: you see why this is not possible! I stood up. I wanted to stretch out my hand against — what? — gravity? The tyre hit a projection, took off, landed, took off again. I thought — There is something so soft inside, like water bouncing against stone. This also is in my head. I picked up my haversack and began to move down the hill. The other children had turned and were running away down the far side. I thought — They
know, of course, that the child in the tyre may be killed. The tyre was heading for the low embankment with the wire fence on top; there was just the one small opening through to the area beneath the railway lines beyond. I thought — So now, come on, what is it in that experiment that makes the one particle get through: the condition set by the experimenter. The tyre with the child inside made a long low leap and then disappeared, yes, through the opening in the embankment: it went out of sight in the area beneath the railway lines. I had been running; I stopped; I said — Thank you. I thought — You mean, what if that particle were a seed, with a child inside? Then — This is ridiculous. I went on. There were puddles of oily water on the wasteland in which light was reflected like rainbows. I reached the archway in the embankment and went through; there was a maze of posts carrying the railway lines above my head. I thought — So, now, what am I learning about an anthropology of the mind! The maze of posts was like some dead forest; the ruins of an ancient temple; what had the temple been used for, the sacrifice of a child? But this child had got through! And was now back in the ruined temple. And so on. I was picking my way between the posts that were like the trunks of rotting trees. I thought — It is as if they, and these images, have been a long time under water. I could not see the tyre: it had found its way, presumably, some distance into the maze. Or had it gone right over the rim of the land, and back to its origins in water. There was a small clearing within the maze; the railway lines made a loop so that there was a patch of open sky above; within this clearing there was a half-collapsed hut and two small grey-and-green bushes. I thought — This is the home of some old hermit, perhaps; or that Garden, where now these bushes are the remains of those two trees. The tyre had come to rest half propped against one of the pillars at the edge of the clearing; there was a shaft of sunlight coming down towards the hut. I thought — This clearing itself is in the shape of an egg: the tyre with the child inside is like a seed that has come in by chance, by design, from outside to that old garden, that hut like a rotting tomb. Then — Stop thinking! There was an arm hanging out from the inside of the tyre; it was a small white arm which was, yes, like some shoot not so much from a seed as into it. I said to myself again — Stop thinking! I had been thinking that if the child were dead, then people might imagine I had murdered it. I went on into the clearing. Well there it was, this strange self-risking, self-sacrificing, self-immolation of a child. I went up to the tyre and