‘And you?’ Salzedo is saying.
‘I was going to Jerusalem,’ I say.
‘And will you still go to Jerusalem?’ he says.
‘Jerusalem will be wherever I am when the end comes,’ I say.
‘That could be soon,’ he says. ‘It could happen by Passover; Shavuoth at the latest. Yes, Shavuoth is probably when it’ll be, it’s a better time because Shavuoth celebrates the giving of the Torah to Israel at Sinai, the giving of the Law; yes, that’s why it’ll be Shavuoth: from Passover to Shavuoth is a development, it’s the coming to maturity of the children of Israel. At Passover they left their bondage in Egypt, they began their wandering; when they came to the mountain of God they were given the Law. Also Shavuoth is a harvest holiday, and this that is coming is certainly some kind of harvest.’
‘Of whose sowing?’ I say.
‘It doesn’t matter who does the sowing,’ he says. ‘Life is sown and Death comes to reap the harvest; when has it been otherwise? Have you ever seen this mountain where the children of Israel were given the Law?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘It isn’t the biggest mountain in the world,’ he says, ‘but you know it when you see it: it looks only like itself, like a lion of stone, this mountain whose name is Horeb; the Arabs call it Djebel Musa, the mountain of Moses. It is called Sinai because of the thornbush, seneh. This thornbush from which God first spoke to Moses was on that same mountain whereon God later gave Moses the tablets of the Law. Perhaps you already knew this?’
‘I didn’t remember that about the thornbush,’ I say.
‘Not everyone does,’ he says. ‘But it’s a good thing to keep in mind because God is such a thorny business and we shouldn’t expect him to be otherwise. But I’ll tell you one good thing about being a Jew — whenever your time comes you don’t have to worry that the day will be unmarked and forgotten because you can be sure that some really famous Jew has died on the same day, maybe even thousands of them. Akiba died around this time of year, it was sometime during the seven weeks of the Counting of the Omer. The Romans flayed him.’
‘His last words,’ I say, ‘were: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”’
Salzedo is content to let Akiba have the last word, and we resume our separate pacing. There comes to me then something that is both image and not-image. It has to do with a striking, a vast and not to be held in the mind striking of side-posts and a lintel beyond imagination, the striking of them with the hyssop that is the tree of the world, spattering the blood of all the world on the side-posts, on the lintel of the universe. And there must none of us go out of the house until morning, but will morning ever come? At such times as the not-image phases into image I see the right arm and shoulder and back of this striking. The spattering drops of blood fan slowly, slowly out, out, out, the drops of blood become the stars. Far and frozen the luminous drops of burning blood, far and frozen, drifting ever wider, wider, wider.
And there must none of us, none of us pass under the lintel, pass between the side-posts until morning comes, none of us beneath the spattered blood of the lamb without blemish, the word of blood to be read by the LORD in His aspect of Justice, the LORD in His aspect of Mercy passing in the night, passing with the destroyer.
I have described this that is both image and not-image as it comes to me and as it compels me to describe it. I describe what I do not understand because I am lived by it. Yes, that’s what it is, why I have no choice, why I am compelled. This that I have described is not an idea that I have had or a vision or a dream, it is not a means of expression for me as poetry might be. No, I am a means of expression for it, God as He or God as It knows why. That is why I have not the privilege and the pleasure of telling stories, of showing brightly coloured pictures of Samson and the lion. Not only is storytelling denied me but history also — I may well be reporting nothing more than spiritual mirages and metaphysical illusions. I can only tell what, as far as I know, happened or seemed to happen to what I recognize as myself with such recognition as has been borrowed from the darkness.
Very well then, I return to the walls of Antioch. I am there now and I smell these old strong stones that have no enemy. I smell their tawniness, their sweat of years, I smell the slow clinging of the lichens and the mosses on them. I smell the blood as well, the blood that has been and the blood that is coming. I smell the hotness and the dryness baked into the stones by centuries of summer sun, I smell the coldness and the wetness of the winter rains; the stones forget nothing.
I feel in this wall of stone something else that is happening; the idea of sorting comes into my mind. Walls by their nature do sort: by defining an inside and an outside they sort the insiders from the outsiders, they sort what is happening inside from what is happening outside. More than that: on this wall that girdles Antioch in the year 1098 I pick up a bit of broken stone and as I hold it in my hand I feel the sorting that goes on continually inside it: this way, that way, this way, that way, Christ in every stone with arms outspread, not raging as he judges between the elect on his right hand and the damned on his left; he has put himself into a state of perfect balance, he does not weigh with a scale, measure with a rule: he himself, abandoning all self, is the rule and the scale, the pointer that wavers on the beam. He is entranced, he makes no judgments although he is the judge: he is a necessary, an essential instrument in the sorting process and it is the process that has brought the instrument into being. I have seen this necessary instrument, this Christ-as-balance, carved in stone in the century after mine by Gislebertus on the tympanum of Autun Cathedral in Burgundy, that same Burgundy from where came some of those soldiers who sacked Barbastro and orphaned Salzedo in 1064. The sorting being necessary, the instrument appears.
I have understood so little in my lifetime! Now in the centuries of my deathtime I am just beginning to understand a little more but my consciousness is not continuous, I am only a mode of perception irregularly used by strangers. Perhaps there will never be the possibility for me to understand what Christ is. I understand that he was born from the idea of him — that he told me himself: ‘From me came the seed that gave me life.’ That he is essentially a sorter I also understand; the sorting of course follows on that disparity without which the universe could not maintain spin; I think that I knew that even before I read Plato’s Timaeus in which he says: ‘Motion never exists in what is uniform. For to conceive that anything can be moved without a mover is hard or indeed impossible, and equally impossible to conceive that there can be a mover unless there is something which can be moved — motion cannot exist where either of these is wanting, and for these to be uniform is impossible; wherefore we must assign rest to uniformity and motion to the want of uniformity.’
That good and evil should be sorted along with right and left, up and down, light and darkness and all other complementarities is clearly in the nature of things, and that Christ should be a medium of this sorting is also clearly in the nature of things; but the rest of what he is continually moves on ahead of my comprehension like a great whale cleaving cosmic seas; I try to grasp the essence of him but I grasp only the fading wake of his passage.
Where was I? The walls of Antioch, and we are waiting for news of the Turkish cavalry who took the Suwaydiyya road after the Franks. The question arises whether apparent consistency of manifestation is to be accepted as reality. May it not simply be the persistence of image in the eye of the mind? This Turkish cavalry, for example, this whole numerous appearance of horses, men, and weapons — does it in actuality remain the same from one moment to the next? May it not suddenly and without any noticeable change be a black dog, not numerous at all, just one single black dog trotting inseparable from its little black noon shadow, even in the twilight trotting with that same little noon shadow which is also the shadow of a small stone both moving and still? Or trees, not many, just a clump of trees in the stillness of the dawn. The roundness and solidity of the shadowed trunks like circling dancers under the tented leaves. Wine of shadows, shadow music fading, fading to the shout of day.