"Of course. So are all the others, in one way or another, I suppose. Not Blanche Glover, exactly."
"The Actinia 's withdrawing. It doesn't like me poking it." The Actinia presented the appearance of a rubbery navel, out of which protruded two or three fleshy whiskers, in the process of being tucked away. Then it was there, a blood-dark, fleshy mound, surrounding a pinched hole.
"I read Leonora Stern's essay 'Venus Mount and Barren Heath.' " Maud hunted for an adjective to describe this work, rejected "penetrating" and settled on "very profound."
"Of course it's profound. But. It worried me."
"It was meant to."
"No, not for that reason, not because I'm male. Because."
"Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects-all the time-and I suppose one studies-I study-literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful-as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes-mediaeval gloves, giants' gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac's gloves, the sea-anemone's ovaries-and it all reduced like boiling jam to-human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body-and language-all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair."
Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness."
"Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested.
"I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn't the point. We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we're imprisoned in ourselves-we can't see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor-"
"You are very cross with Leonora."
"She's very good. But I don't want to see through her eyes. It isn't a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don't."
Maud considered. She said, "In every age, there must be truths people can't fight-whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose-to imagine-he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely-but not in the large plan-"
Roland wanted to ask: Do you like that? He thought he had to suppose she did: her work was psychoanalytic, after all, this work on liminality and marginal beings. He said instead, "It makes an interesting effort of imagination to think how they saw the world. What Ash saw when he stood on perhaps this ledge. He was interested in the anemone. In the origin of life. Also in the reason we were here."
"They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures-"
"And we don't?"
"At some point in history their self-value changed into-what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. Now or then."
She closed The Great Ventriloquist and leaned over the ledge on which she was curled, and extended a hand.
"Shall we move on?"
"Where? What are we looking for?"
"We'd better start looking for facts as well as images. I suggest Whitby, where the jet brooch was bought."
My dearest Ellen,
I have found much that is curious in the town of Whitby, a prosperous fishing village at the mouth of the river Esk - it is a sloping town, crowding down in picturesque alleys or yards and flight after flight of stone stairs to the water - a terraced town, from the upper layers of which you seem to see, above a moving sphere of masts and smoking chimneys all about you, the town, the harbour, the ruined Abbey and the German Ocean.
The past lies all around, from the moorland graves and supposed Killing Pits of the Ancient Britons to the Roman occupation and the early daysof Christian evangelism under St Hilda - the town in those days was called Streonshalh and what we are accustomed to think of as the Synod of Whitby, in 664, was of course the Synod of Streonshalh. I have meditated among calling gulls in the ruins of the Abbey and have seen older darker things - the tumuli or houes on the moors, and temples perhaps druidical, including the Bridestones, a row of uprights at Sleights, thought to be one side of an avenue of a stone circle, such as Stonehenge. Certain details may bring these long-vanishedfolk suddenly to life in the imagination. Such are the finding hereabouts of a heart-shaped ear-ring of jet in contact with the jawbone of a skeleton; and a number of largejet beads cut in angles,found with a similar inmate of a barrow, who had been deposited in the houe with the knees drawn upward to the chin.
There is a mythical story which accounts for the standing stones which appeals to my imagination, as suggesting the liveliness of ancient Gods in comparatively modern times. Whitby has its own local giant - a certain fearsome Wade, who with his wife Bell, was given to tossing about casual boulders on the moors. Wade and Bell were, like the Hrimthurse who built the wall of Asgard, or the fairy Melusina, builders of castles for ungrateful men - they are creditedwith the constructionof the Roman Road across the moor to the delightful town of Pickering - a regularroad, built of stoneson a stratum of gravel or rubbish from the sandstone of the moor. I intend to walk this road, which is locally known as Wade's Causey, or Causeway, and was believed to have been built by Wadefor the convenienceof his wife Bell, who kept a giant cow on the moors, which she travelled to milk. One of the ribs of this monstrous ruminant was on show in Mulgrave Castle and was in fact the jawbone of a whale. The tumuli or houes on the moorland are heaps of boulders carried by the diligent Bell in her apron, whose strings occasionally broke. Charlton believes that Wade is simply a name for the ancient God Woden. Thor was certainly worshipped in Saxon times at the village ofThordisa which stood at the headof the Eastrow beck. So the human imagination mixes and adapts to its current preoccupationsmany ingredients into new wholes - it is essentially poetic - here are a Whale and Pickering Castle and the old Thunder God and the tombs of ancient Briton and Saxon chieftains and the military greed of the conquering Roman armies, all refashioned into a local giant and his dame - as the stonesof the Roman road go to the construction of the dry stone walls, to the loss of archaeology and the preservation of our sheep - or as the huge boulder on Sleights Moor, thrown by Bell's giant child and dented by her iron ribcage - was broken up for road-mending - and I came along that road. I have been visiting the local jet industry here, which flourishes and has produced work of a high standard of craftsmanship. I have sent you a piece - with a little poem to accompanyit - with my great love, as always. I know you like well-made things; you would be truly delighted, for the most part, by the curiousmanufactures that go on here - adornments may be made from many things - ancient ammonite worms find new lives as polished brooches. I have been interestedalso by the reformationof fossil remains into elegant articles - a whole burnished tabletop will display theunthinkably ancient coils of long-dead snail-things, or the ferny stone leaves of primitive cycads as clear as thepressed flowers and ferns that inhabit yourprayer-book. If there is a subject that is my own, my dear Ellen, as a writer I mean, it is the persistent shape-shifting life of things long-dead but not vanished. I should like to write something so perfectly fashioned that it should still be contemplated as those stone-impressed creatures are, after so long a time. Though I feel our durance on this earth may not equal theirs.