‘Why is that?’ I said.
‘Because in this case the ideal is the maximum effort possible,’ he said, ‘and the horizon is the outer limit of how much of the pattern can be taken in by the eye.’
‘It wouldn’t do to draw it on a piece of paper to hold in the hand?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘As you must know in your heart, it is not only the apparent quantity of a thing that changes with the degree of effort, the manifest character of it changes also as Thing-in-Itself reveals more of itself.’
‘Is that what the pattern is for?’ I said: ‘To show Thing-in-Itself?’
‘You know as well as I do,’ he said, ‘that Thing-in-Itself is not to be seen nor is it to be sought directly. My desires are modest; there are simply one or two things I should like to observe, one or two things I should like to think about.’
‘Can you tell me what they are?’ I said.
‘Motion is one of them,’ he said. ‘There is transitive motion and there is intransitive motion: the motion of a galloping horse is transitive, it passes through our field of vision and continues on to wherever it is going; the motion in a tile pattern is intransitive, it does not pass; it moves but it stays in our field of vision. It arises from stillness, and I should like to think about the point at which stillness becomes motion. Another thing I should like to think about is the point at which pattern becomes consciousness.’
‘Does it?’ I said. ‘Can this be proved?’
‘I know in my innermost being that it does,’ he said, ‘and I know that we ourselves are the proof of it, but whether this proof can be demonstrated I don’t know. It may well be that the proof is being demonstrated constantly but in our ignorance we cannot recognize it.’
‘This design that you want me to make,’ I said, ‘how should it look?’
‘That will come from you,’ he said. ‘It will come from your hand at the moment when you begin to draw. Try not to think about it beforehand, don’t let your mind become busy with it.’
‘My mind is already busy with it,’ I said. ‘How could it not be?’
‘In that case you should do it now,’ he said, ‘and we must go to the place where it is to be done.’ From a cabinet he took a straight-edge and a large wooden compass fitted with a piece of chalk and we left the house.
Through the darkening murmurous evening, past the lamps of evening and the smells of cooking we made our way to the paved space at the foot of Mount Silpius near the Tower of the Two Sisters. The town was still murmurous but all the voices of the day that had been close were now distant. Before us Mount Silpius gathered itself into night. The lamplight in the windows of the towers made the stone around them bulk darker against the sky. Someone was playing an oud, someone was singing; it was a woman’s voice rising and falling in a pattern of repetition contiguous with infinity. Warm and sad the voice, a woman of flesh and bone, contiguous with infinity! On Bembel Rudzuk’s paved square some boys were kicking a blown-up bladder that rasped with a skittering rush across the stone, each thump of the kicking like the unsequent beat of a disembodied heart; the voices of the boys appeared at sudden places in the gathering night, now near, now far; their feet scuffled mysteriously on the stone.
That evening Bembel Rudzuk and I felt ourselves to be inside the walls of Antioch, how could we not? There were the walls of stone all strong and thick and guarded by soldiers, there were the towers with their lamplit windows girdling the city in the encircling night. Yet even then, so contiguous was my mind, is my mind, with infinity that my thoughts found themselves here in this present space in which only broken remnants of those strong walls stand and the inside is seen to be one with the outside. My consciousness that evening in 1096 came forward to the present and the toothless broken stones of now, and my present consciousness goes back to the great thick towered walls forty feet high and paced by weaponed men.
Strong walls, always have strong walls been walked by weaponed men. And those who came and took Antioch, such stones they captured in their strong places up and down the land, such stones they put together in their Latin Kingdom, those strong men and those who came after them! As Pilgermann the owl I fly on silent wings above them looking down. Lion-stones, warrior stones, now they have peace. How they sing in their silence, how they are easy, the great strong stones, the lion-stones, the tawny. Even they, the strong stones of the great Jew-killers, even they have longed for ruin and the stillness, for the wind sighing over them, for the grass growing on roofless walls and alone-standing arches. Even when the arrows hissed from the loopholes the stones were singing the stillness to come, the clopping of cows’ hooves up and down the stone steps where those iron-ringing men walked in their time. Now the stones have arrived at the strong life of the stillness of them, their strong song, their stillness dancing in the sun.
Warrior lords, those great and fierce men, recruiters of stone, of walls and towers on high ground, of strongholds commanding borders, river crossings, approaches. They said to the stones, as other warrior lords before them had said to the stones of Antioch, ‘Be thou firm against the enemy.’ And what did the stones say? The stones said, ‘We have no enemy.’ Lying in the sun they sing the stillness; toppling and rolling they shout, ‘God is motion!’
So. Bembel Rudzuk and I in the deepening night in Antioch. Bats fretting the darkness into little points and the woman’s voice rising and falling in her song as we stood on the stone paving that was waiting for my design.
The centre of the square was marked by a wooden rod standing upright in the stone. It seemed to me that I could feel the power of the centre there, feel the radii going out from it and coming into it. There was no moon, there were no stars but we could see well enough for our purpose. We had brought no lantern nor did I want one; it seemed right that the design should come out of obscurity, and I wanted to be unobserved, I wanted the shelter of the dark.
Bembel Rudzuk was saying very quietly in Arabic:
‘Labbaika, Allahumma, labbaika.’
Then he said to me in Greek, ‘What I said was: “At Thy service, O Lord, at Thy service.” These words are to be spoken only on pilgrimage to Mecca but I could not refrain from saying them.’ He took the rod out of its socket, inserted a wooden plug that he had brought with him, and stepped back.
I opened the legs of the compass, stuck the point of the centre leg into the plug and swept the outer leg round to make my first circle. It went just like that; I had no hesitation in deciding on the length of the radius; one action followed another, and as the compass leg swept round there followed it obediently through the darkness a white chalk line that closed itself into a circle as if the impulse had been already there waiting in the stone until, now summoned by the compass, it rose up to the surface.
Keeping the same radius I made the overlapping circles that divided the circumference of my first circle into six parts and produced a flower of six petals luminous in the white chalk. Connecting the points of the petals made a hexagon. From the six points of the hexagon came the two interlocking triangles of the six-pointed star within the hexagon. Connecting the points of intersection divided the two interlocking triangles into twelve small triangles. Extending the lines of the hexagon made the two large interlocking triangles of a second six-pointed star that contained the hexagon containing the first six-pointed star. Lines balanced on the points of the outer star gave an outer hexagon in which eighteen equilateral triangles enclosed the inner hexagon. This completed the unit that would repeat itself in my tile pattern.
‘What is the name of this design?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.