Introductory

Listen Titus. We are at the beginning of all things. Incipi-terre. Also at their end. Finnis-terre, a contradiction only to those who cannot understand. We lift the first page. The dark sun lowers behind invisible dunes. A silhouette of birds flies west. Silence.

Out of a sea of deepest mauve, so dark it has almost lost its colour entirely, pushed, sucked back and pushed again, is a pile of rags tied together at its centre by a piece of string or perhaps a rotten belt. After a long while or no time at all (we are speaking of an event before clocks) the sea falls back a little and then a little more to leave this bundle on the margin rocking. It is you, Titus. You have somehow reached this place and crawled or been washed from the sea like the rubbish on either side or like the first thing that drew breath in the beginning. Your back rises and falls with the rise and fall of the sea.

In this unholy landscape the flotsam of the past lies everywhere, cast up and left to rot along the shoreline and then sucked back as each wave lapses. No sound carries. A half drowned soul, you have dragged yourself or been pitched by chance out of the rolling sea and onto the beach to lie there soaked and gasping. You lie with your cheek against the hard round pebbles, your arm twisted under your side and a leg askew like a knuckle of mandrake twisted by its journey.

Here Titus the waters come together as on that first shore, perhaps later, perhaps that very day, floating on distant currents from the corners of other worlds, earlier imperfect worlds made and destroyed, bitter roots cast up alive yet fossilised, torn like skewered wood and tangled, sculpted by tides and whirlpools into a kind of soaked root contorted by its journey, rococo knotted, knurled into shapes hardly created yet that find themselves cast up on this shore’s strident singularity which circles all and watches as the waves swell, swell and break only towards its only heart that, granting time, credo in unum, to its soul self, can make solely its own appropriate heaven and hell washed up by uncreated fathoms and laid out as an alluvium in their lineage to turn and face the land and wait. To all of these this beach is host and you Titus, are here among them bringing with you, perhaps, secrets from before the flood. At the end. At the beginning.

How come you are here at this division between the waters and the land drawn by the swell of the last tide to this empty beachhead filled with pebbles and the weight of too much air? Maybe you came back from the gallows after they had pulled at your feet, hard, hard to save you suffering as the crowd cheered and the priest chanted. Or from the heat of battle cut down by a Turkish scythe still hearing, if only just, the enemy yell of, la ilaha ila Allah, ringing in your ears. Or from the hospital in Altendorf, sweating in the last ravages of plague, spitting blood and coughing phlegm. Or on the holy hill cut down at the gate of your temple. Or the spirit screaming as the fire licks at your feet. Or garrotted in a hole within earshot of another cheering crowd with your family already dead and a thousand leagues away. Or suffocated in a truck on a railway siding while children laugh and throw mud. There are these and countless other deaths and other resurrections, from the world of the klippoth that had fallen. All of these arrive at the frozen lake of blood and guilt before returning, a messenger to mankind to tell them of his other world. There are circles and circles within circles.

There are others with you here on this beach but they take no notice of the new arrival for there are always new arrivals. They are a part of the flotsam or soon become a part of it. They are half starved and, what is worse, although surrounded by water, have an unquenchable thirst. In the core of their throats. For some future. They come.

Time rolls its anthem. You open your eyes to the darkness and the sounds of an ancient world. The pebbles are rough against your cheek and hard against your ribs and against the sodden skin of a body that seems not yours but far away. The waves are warm and stroke your legs like a half forgotten memory of other skin. Your long lank hair falls, wet, over your eyes but you have no strength to brush it aside. Like the sea, the air is warm, even humid. But it is air against the gills that need it and you sense the lightness of its aura against the infinite weight of past waters. First on the lips and the tender edges of the tongue, then further back in the dryness of the throat, then where it is needed most. You shudder with the touch of it and move. Your first real move free of the oceans and the past – and you begin to take in that sacred air, at first unsure, then with more confidence, then with great gulps. You feel once again or for the first time, alive. As a sudden wave among the falling tide threatens to engulf your body and deny you the breath of new freedom, you drag yourself in pain a little further up onto the pebbles. For now there is desperation in your movements, the desperation of renewed life and deep down, deeper even than the ocean floor way behind, is the kind of hope that lies behind all our futures.

And then, from behind the shadows on the beachhead where all the monsters of the dark can hide, from somewhere under or beyond the swelling earth and the beating seas, out of the past that is yet to come, appears a maiden glimmer of light which brings a trace of colour to the darkness; first mauve, then blood, then cobalt, then the colour of sweat on skin, then ultramarine, then beyond blue to gold and then to life itself, separating the dark from the darkness, rising a glimmer beyond he hills as a disk that hurts the eyes and drinks the world into the lightland of the sky. Creating the heavens and the earth. And it was morning. And time.

Titus lay silent on his belly, his arm still useless under him. Numb. But the light brought with it warmth and strength. It had divided the waters from the land. Slowly the life grew in him and the numbness of the sea faded. As the sun rose higher in the heavens, the sea retreated backwards, from his neck, from his breast, from his loins and finally from his legs and feet leaving him stranded between the wet and the dry. He craned his neck to look ahead and knew now that the sun’s bright disk was too strong. From high above it hurt his eyes and began to burn his back, covered as it was in a multitude of scratches and clinging weeds. The dark rose and fell and rose again and each day it seemed to him to be hotter and higher in the sky. It was indeed a powerful god. He placed his good arm in front of him and began, slowly and in some pain, to drag himself upward towards the dunes with their scattering of rough grasses and the occasional small flower. Breathing was difficult as he had been used to the struggling gasps among the waves but it came by degrees easier as his lungs got used to the blue air with its taste of worlds and warmth. At first his other arm was useless and had to be dragged along and up with the rest of his body but, little by little, the sun and the movement had their effect and he began to regain sensation first higher up and then downwards until there was a tingling in the hand and fingers and he could feel the pebbles and the roughness of the scree. The journey from sea to land was endless. Its slowness penetrated the centuries. There were still no signs in the dark heavens, only the lone moon howling. The sun rose and fell in its courses, its strength in all the colours of the rainbow. The blood rose and the flood fell back.

And it was morning. The whole beach rose and fell and rose again full of the multiple changes of millennia. The seas fell back and the land appeared divided from the waters. Below him the ocean sucked and pulled but high on the dunes he was safe. He could feel his legs and feet grow blood and muscle and the power in them drove him to press his hands upon the soil for the last time and he rose upon his hind quarters and found that he could walk and from his new height saw his dominions and strode from the rolling land into the light and into the darkness.

In the stillness and dark of his footsteps, he glanced at the night sky, at the lesser light. The dark world of the old moon rose from its bed below the treeless plains, cradled in a slim crescent of pale gold and all around it signs appeared. The moon howled in the sign of the dog and comets flew down towards his future. This way he directed his steps towards the greater light that, falling, had vanished from the sky but later would rise again. He was given life by the death and birth of this wonder that circled the heavens.

The light fell and the light rose and his footsteps took him to the widest places on the earth to where the light is highest in its heavens, to where there is land and no land shimmers amongst it. Where the trees grow in water and are refracted also, where the very air hovers alongside itself below the hum of the heavens. Don’t go there, Titus, for it is a sign of the devil and the very sand will drown you in its waters.

But O the beauty of this oasis after so much dryness and sand, after so much scavenging among the hard grasses and drinking of brackish slime. There even the air was changed. There were seed-bearing plants and fruit trees bearing fruit. And the place was teeming with living creatures that came from out of nowhere; birds flying above the earth and cattle upon it There were reptiles and every kind of wild beast. And he felt secure among all creation.

And in his sleeping he dreamt of a woman who would be the wonder of creation. He dreamt of her olive skin and her black eyes and hair, of the way she would move and of her smile which would entice without lust and her lips, and he awoke with a start and found her by his side. Berenice, your skin is as pale as the summer clouds, the colour of young olives, to the touch as the softest peach, your eyes as full of colours and unlikely movement as the butterfly, your mouth made from the reddest petals opening in our garden.

And there they lived under the sun, the eye and soul of this great world, creator, crossing the moon and circle of fixed stars called from the void of darkness to make a man and a woman and to make them happy.

Yet we are as we are in our very being. And that being, with swift wings, resting on a pyramid of fire, crossed the gates of hell in solitary flight, soared over the broad and beaten wild expanses of the deep, flying to lands it never thought to visit yet must. To arrive where he already was, he flew across the night until he could approach the broad and glimmering dawn; the Aten he could ride with easier wings and, climbing on its chariot, followed it up through the morning mists and on into the broader heavens from whence he could see the pendant earth floating in a garden beneath. Again he spread his wings and took himself down landing on the welcoming lawns as the dew lifted, as a dull butterfly of lost colours comes to rest on dung.

And he was called first deceiver, rebel against the heaven and creation who, placing his nose on the ground and his eyes amid the greenery and the still waters at the margins of the oasis, he sought a beast he might enslave with power and deceit. An eel, a wily one, climbing out of the water on his small legs into the lowest herbs of the oasis garden. Seeking, like all, to rise above himself and view the further horizon. The evil one rustled the leaves around him to draw the attention of his slimy ally and the eel turned and saw him, another beast of the wetness and the forest, seeking him out for his own salvation.

The eel knew Berenice and was shaped thus for his purpose. He knew her from the depths of the ice. From a great distance he saw her on the grass and desired her. He came, sidelong, askew, careful, and erect, his eyes like carbuncles, his head of burnished gold and held aloft. A human voice, with human tones and subtle tongue that moved as it spoke. Rustling the leaves to turn her head who heard it, fawning, glad to have her eye, speaking. Thus and thus, be not surprised I speak man’s language with a brute’s tongue. Thy beauty calls it forth and Titus cannot see beings, like you, as I can as a shadow of angels among his kind.

The closer he got the more lovely she became. And her beauty made him cunning also. And handed her the fruit that, once in her hand and close, it claimed her senses. Its smell and juices were more than fennel or ewe’s milk and those flavours that were before taste touched her tongue like a new language. But she dared not for it was forbidden. And the poison eel again, Are you not lords of all the air, you and your husband. Why should you not eat of this tree which gives life to knowledge and will grant knowledge to your lives and cannot kill? I have eaten of it and live and have been granted voice to praise the heavens and speak to you. When he stood by her, sleek and knowing and subtle, how could she not succumb? How could she not want to? And she resolved to take it and eat. She plucked. She ate. Hunger and thirst of all the senses at once were satisfied. Earth felt the wound. Nature and all its works sighed and Berenice knew it. The eel slunk guiltily away.

And so he entered and spewed his venom into her womb so that she brought forth thoughts of vipers. And once deceived, cunning in her simplicity. She showed the fruit to Titus, placing it between her thighs and he saw it there and could not resist for this was as a new thing which would fracture the delicate tracery of her innocence and of his too and he took her and ate of the fruit where she had already been taken and he know at once that it was not as before. That she had been changed. And, in taking her, he took also an exchange of fire and dominance and a sort of hatred and disgust. For now she was not like the garden or even like herself but as a thing doomed to die who was struggling for life even if only another life, his other life. His.

As Titus grew slowly out of the exquisite dream of his knowledge he understood that he would be as a wild beast and would climb up upon the belly of his being all the days of his life and that he would yearn for his woman increasingly and his respite would be but for a moment and a moment. And she also, as she lay beside him, understood that she would suffer the pains of bearing children and would yearn for her man as often as the sun turns and as often again. And she understood also that their children and their children’s children would eat of thistles and brambles and would return to the soil from whence they came and that their return would be eternal.

And as this knowledge came to Titus, he saw her suddenly, her beauty translated, as the object of all objections in the world, as another, outside himself, always to be rejoined so as in the very act of union never again to be made whole, to be forced by his own will to be subjected and always to be desired again and again as the sun rises in its heavens by day only to fall. If this was revelation then so be it. He saw her then as a part of the other, her lips suddenly blooming, a yearning tulip like other opening lips calling to the insects they needed. The fruit, her body, outstretched towards him, calling, needing. And then the garden became rank with weeds and he saw that she was on her knees, smelling around in its corners, leaving her mark here and there, panting in all the heat of her desire and the horror was that to him she was thus irresistible. Her smell overpowered his nostrils and entered into the subtle channels of his brain and from there through the branches of his nerves it reached down through all his other dungeons to the pit of his loins and death in generation. And a snake arose in his loins and coiled across his belly and spoke those terrible words, You have done this to yourselves. Very nature had been changed by you, being what you are, mortal crying has been changed by you.

And she, knowing the change, sensing her degradation from the butterfly to the dung, losing sight of the sun between the branches and its shimmering pattern on the grass, began to howl and her howling was heard throughout all creation and all time. Titus heard it and shrank away and the eel heard it and cowered as he had not cowered before and it echoed through the tree of the knowledge they had granted each other and the tree shrivelled and never properly grew again and the sound rippled on through the ether where none could here it until it came to the edge of the heavens and angels shuddered and then to the ear of the archangel Gabriel who knew what he had to do. He flew down to the gate which was at the east of their oasis and drew his mighty sword with its flaming blade and waited.

He came to grant a lesson to our ever tumescent, ever dying moment. He stood at the gate of our once beautiful oasis with a burning sword in one hand while the other pointed out towards the east. And they went hand in hand under the flame, ahead of them the white sun under its white sky welcoming them into their new prison.

As they passed beneath the arc of the great archangel’s sword who stood astride the eastern gate. As they set out they before them all the turning world, and all the curses out of the mouth of the archangel came to pass, May you know that all your sins will be with you; painted into your skin and hair as a film that no rain will wash away. May you know perpetual lust and feel its sinfulness after every satisfaction May you know that this luxurious circle kills first the eye of the mind so that nothing can be seen in the truth of its being. May you live in the world as in a dungeon from which the only escape is into an incognito as terrifying as desired May you come to desire like lust what you most fear and may it be denied you, may you float forever on the sea of your sins and blessings until another angel comes to the gate of your prison to release you. And a scribe came out of the angel’s vestments and set all this down in a scroll which he deposited on the dry earth.

They stood, the pair, at the gates of their oasis, behind them green and the sound of rippling water, ahead the dust. And Titus turned to Berenice, What there is, I know not but it is our destiny to seek. This cannot be the end of the world. Beyond these sands lie other oases and beyond those, maybe other waters and beyond those, greater seas, who knows what lies in the open yonder. Surely this small patch of green is not the only thing created. Perhaps there are other valleys and rocks and trees and beasts where plants may be gathered for our nourishment. We should not be so despondent as to die here without having made the round of this, our prison. Berenice, we are the first pilgrims that go out from Eden to seek our fortunes in the wide spaces of creation. We are the only pilgrims so to do and our loss will be hidden in the consummation of our bodies down the generations. The way may be long but we are young and must essay it. She answered, I see only our small horizon and am afraid. And Titus answered, why did the creator make me desire so much if there is no fulfilling of desires? Let us go forward in hope for out there, somewhere in that great cosmos, I sense that there is someone waiting for me that I must seek. And she asked, Who, for there is no one but ourselves. And he answered, I, myself. And Titus took the scroll up from the dust where the angelic scribe had left it and placed it next his heart and took the hand of Berenice his wife in his and they directed their steps to where the raised hand pointed. And they set out from Eden hand in hand.

Titus knew Berenice and she conceived and bore a child and called him Cain and he took her again as the desire came upon him and she conceived a second time and gave birth to another son and called him Abel. These two stepped out across the wide flatness of the plains beyond the gates of Eden; Cain went out further and built a plough and tilled the soil and brought forth crops, Abel kept closer and became a shepherd of flocks.

Abel made sacrifice of pure white and first born perfection. he made it in fresh blood at the Tel of Arabith where he returned to graze his herds at the start of each year and God accepted it. But the smoke from Cain’s offering, although smelling of the perfumes of his bread, was dispelled by the lower winds as they blew across the lands he had cared for all year. And Cain became jealous of his brother who had sat on the hillside all summer long and dreamt slow dreams while he had ploughed and sown and reaped and bound into sheaves and threshed and winnowed and ground and kneaded and baked to bring his produce to the sacrifice. Why should the winds of heaven blow it back again around his head?

So was Cain angry and downcast and Abel said to him at the side of the altar they had built, If you are ill disposed, is not sin waiting like a crouching beast hungering for blood? So Cain took the sickle from his plough, the sickle which had cut the earth and had cut the corn and, avoiding the eyes of his brother, smote him about the heart and his brother fell at his feet with a sigh.

And Titus fell and fell again and again. He suffered many deaths and many deaths and more again that are hidden. Face down with a bullet through his skull on a small redoubt, the cannons still echoing in his ears, his friends falling around him. Mud and more mud. And little glory. Thrown from his horse in the battle for the eastern capital under a flaming scythe by the hosts of Allah. Surprised by an arrow atop a wall at Joppa. These for glory and the fatherland. And others unchosen, dismal. The child collapsed from overwork and hunger, his stomach extended and resignation in his eyes. The young man sitting in the garrotting chair in rags and the crowd around him not knowing why. Hung by the neck until dead. Shot. Starved. Murdered by the state or for the state or for the fatherland or for god. Worked to death in all the silent frozen gulags and camps of all the centuries. And all of these who might have but for fate or the will of god or his own undoing.

And Cain yelled into the wide mouth of the angel and his yell contained all the deaths of all the worlds by all the cunning means yet to be devised, and the sound slid between the angel’s gleaming teeth, over its smooth tongue and down its gaping throat. AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER? And the angel swallowed this in a gulp and, holding it in his wrenching gizzard, flew up to the most high and spewed it up at his feet and the most high smelt its stench and at this time knew not the answer.

Thus, out of the still point at the centre of the whirlwind, He shall be a fugitive and a wanderer over the earth and a mark shall be placed upon his forehead to prevent whoever might come across him from slaying him so that even the relief of death be denied. And Cain returned the body of his brother to the earth and set off east of Eden travelling on the byways and unknown paths of the world and the sun set upon his journey every day for ever.

His sheep were scattered and eaten by wolves and he moved further off from Eden. And the oasis became a part of the structure of his dreams and daydreams and of the dreams of his generations. No longer looking back with longing over his shoulder for a mirage but forward, scanning the high horizons for the walls of a new Zion that he knew would never come.

The inner voice they had known before their wandering footsteps took them to new landscapes and was drowned out by the demands of their new lives. The old that would never be replaced by the new, like some pitiful primeval dream of swimming from a safe shore where the sea looked calm and welcoming into dangerous currents, dark with the risk of loss, with the certainty of loss. Little by little desperately trying to find the right way, they discovered against their will that they were giving up past regret for future hopes as they moved on eastwards towards Babylon and, as they scattered over the face of the earth, their speaking became confused so that they no longer understood one another. The old words atrophied on tongues which could no longer pronounce them. They sounded strange even as they were spoken. The new one still ringing in the ear like the wind cutting loose round the corner of the tent, still carrying deep-seated fear. So they lived among words that no longer understood, could no longer speak love nor doubt nor desire to one another. The thread of before had been cut away leaving the living trunk to dwell among dead branches so, as they assimilated new words in their new places the dreams of their oasis slowly vanished into a dead mist and was lost entirely.

Exile. Thrown out of heaven like Satan, out of Eden like Titus, beyond good and evil like Cain the first exile, He who wandered over the earth, the last exile, beyond glory, beyond those green trees and transparent water. To have known Eden is to lose it, to live with its loss for ever at the base of one’s heart and to wait forlorn for its restoration. The exile lives in the subtle absences of such a special loss. Outside, beyond, apart, there is only loss not obvious, not visible, not an absence of the senses but a hidden thunder welling up ready to strike down at each beat of the pulse. And this comes not from afar, one is not afraid of it, is not looking about like some alert falcon for fear of spotting it and averting harm. It is always already with us at the centre of what we are. The harder we run from it, the more likely is it to appear ahead. Thus do we try to ignore it and carry on in each day to day keeping busy, sowing, weeding, guarding our flocks, anything to keep busy and to lay it to rest, avoid the thought of it. And yet we still meet the death we flee and to dust returneth. Our being is mortality; is what we are. The proof is in our fleeing for we cannot flee something we know not of. It is this alone that is the knowledge of good and evil that the fruit gave in the very scent of its skin. What we wanted and feared and had to possess. And thus is he revenged on that first theft. What they had not understood was that the fruit would give only the knowledge of absence; of the lack of knowledge, for we could never know the time of our ending or its form, could never see into the future and thus had to live it all the more intensely. Ignorance attracts us like nothing else. If only. It was. Paradoxically it was just this that made the fruit so tasty; not knowing what knowledge we might have attained to. Shame is only the smallest part of it. More powerful was the sudden certainty that the future was mere absence and that absence is so powerful that it took over our days and destroyed them. If only. And thus we live in need and poverty and pain. Not because we are afraid of what lies after death but because of the ‘if only’, because of what might just be, because of hope.

Thus they made their way from the safety of that parent of creation to be parents of their own creation, from one kind of protection to another made to live in tents carried on their backs from place to place seeking to lie down by those cool, limpid waters so that slowly but with deadly inevitability it becomes another dream, the same dream they know not whether past or future, in that Eden they hardly remember or that heaven they hardly dare perceive. Responsibility for all creation. Impossibility. And that oasis in its half forgotten wonder, its impossible waters too limpid to be true would so easily become another and future, its very distance to become its being. All dreams, hopes, expectations, loves projected into it leaving these new parents bereft of them, an oasis now unreachable. But certainly not now, not here. Thus alienated from the possible, the uncertain, the impossible ideal, they wander the earth for ever.