Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris Lessing

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a necessity, as it were a menace only just held at bay by humanity, and always waiting there, the crocodile’s jaws always there, just under the water. It was a grief and a fear too ancient for me, it was a sorrow bred into the essence of the race. I saluted it, and passed on, for like the early all-pervading nausea, this was part of my living, kneaded into my fibres, a necessity like breathing and associated with it: this cold, this weight, this pulling and dragging and compelling. It was too old a lodestone for any individual to fight, or even accurately to know and place. It was there.

      The world was spinning like the most delicately tinted of bubbles, all light. It was the mind of humanity that I saw, but this was not at all to be separated from the animal mind which married and fused with it everywhere. Nor was it a question of higher or lower, for just as my having drunk blood and eaten flesh with the poor women had been a door, a key and an opening, because all sympathetic knowledge must be that, in this spin of fusion like a web whose every strand is linked and vibrates with every other, the swoop of an eagle on a mouse, the eagle’s cold exultation and the mouse’s terror make a match in nature, and this harmony runs in a strengthened pulse in the inner chord of which it is a part. I watched a pulsing swirl of all being, continually changing, moving, dancing, a controlled impelled dance, held within its limits by its nature, and part of this necessity was the locking together of the inner pattern in light with the outer world of stone, leaf, flesh, and ordinary light.

      In this great enclosing web of always changing light moved flames and tones and thrills of light that sang and sounded, on deeper and higher notes, so what I saw, or rather was part of, was neither light nor sound, but the place or area where these two identities become one. The pulsing ball of light or sound was fitted to the earthy world it enclosed, and as I had seen before with the buildings of the city and with the troops of animals, those poor ravaging beasts, everywhere in the earthy world lay the cracks and seams of higher substance, a finer beat in time, or light, or sound, which formed channels for the higher enclosing sphere to feed itself into the lower. Lying there out in space, I could see through the coloured spinning membrane, as one can see through the spinning walls of a soap bubble as it hangs growing from a fine tube held in lips that blow air into it, and I saw how the coloured world we know, seas and soil, mountains and desert, was all in a spin of pressure of matter, and this creature hanging there in space, surrounded by its delicate outer envelope, was at a first and a very long look, empty, for mankind was not visible until one swooped in close, where his evidence, cities and conglomerations and workings showed as lice show in seams and crevices. Mankind was a minute grey crust here and there in the Earth. Within patches that seemed stationary, motionless, minute particles moved, but in set patterns, so that looking down at one fragment of this crust of matter, smaller than the tiniest of grains of sand or dust of pollen, it seemed that even the curve made by a journey of a group of such items from one continent to another was a flicker of an oscillation in a great web of patterning oscillations and quiverings.

      The Earth hung in its weight, coloured and tinted here and there, for the most part with the bluish tint of water … the great oceans had become not more than a film of slippery substance covering part of the globe’s surface. Yes, all that drama of deep blue oceans that held their still unknown and secret life, and roaring storms and crashing restless waves, and tides dragged about by the moon had become a thin smear of slippery substance on a toughly textured globe of matter, and humanity and animal life and bird life and reptile life and insect life—all these were variations in a little crust on this globe. Motes, microbes. And yet—it was mostly here that the enclosing web of subtle light touched the earth globe. It was for the most part through the motes or mites of humanity. Which, viewed from the vantage point of the enclosing web of light (inner or outer as one chose to view it), was not at all a question of individual entities, as those entities saw themselves, but a question of Wholes, large and small, for groups and packs and troops and crowds made entities, made Wholes, functioning as Wholes. Bending closer in the web of understanding which was the nature of this enclosing bell of light, I could see how the patterns of light, the colours, textures, pulses of faint or strong light, were not only similarity, but identity. All over the globe ran these pulses or lines, linking groups of individuals, which groups were not necessarily nations or countries—I saw at moments how a patch of mould or lichen glowed up in a burst of colour (or sound) and this was a civil war or a burst of national emotion, but more often, when an area of colour moved and concentrated, singing on its own note, it was composed of sections of nations or countries that had left or detached themselves from their parent groups and were at war with each other, and it was noticeable how a flare-up of a tiny area was so often the coming together of two fragments or pulses, which then became the same colour, the same sound. But the lines or pulses running and darting everywhere over this globe that were most consistent were not the flare-ups of war but those that were the different professions, so that legislators over the earth were not merely ‘on the same wavelength’, they were the same, part of the same organ, or function, even if in warring or opposing countries, and so with judges and farmers and civil servants and soldiers and talkers and moneymen and writers—each of these categories were one, and from this vantage point it was amusing to see how passionate hatred, rivalries and competitions disappeared altogether, for the atoms of each of these categories were one, and the minute fragments that composed each separate pulse or beat of light (colour, sound) were one, so there were no such things as judges, but only Judge, not soldiers, but Soldier, not artists, but Artist, no matter if they imagined themselves to be in violent disagreement. And on this map or plan that showed how myriads of ridiculously self-important identities were reduced to a few, was another, different, but in some places matching, pattern, of a stronger rarer light (or sound) that varied and pulsed and changed like the rest but connected direct, made a link and a bridge, a feeding channel, between the outer (or inner, according to how one looked at it) web of thought or feeling, the pulsating bubble of subtle surrounding colour, and the solid earthy watery globe of Man. Not only a link or a bridge merely, since this strand of humanity was open like so many vessels open to the rain, but part of the shimmering web of fluid joyful being, which was why the scurrying, hurrying, scrabbling, fighting, restless, hating, wanting little patches of humanity, the crusts of lichen or fungi growing here and there on the globe, the sea’s children, were, in spite of their distance from the outer shimmering web, nevertheless linked with it always, since at every moment the glittering tension of singing light flooded into them, into the earthy globe, beating on its own delicious pulse of joy and creation. The outer web of musical light created the inner earthy one and held it there in its dance of tension. And a scattering of people, a strand of them, a light webby tension of them everywhere over the globe, were the channels where the finer air went into the earth and fed it and kept it alive. And this delicate mesh imposed on (or stronger than) the other pulsing patterns had nothing to do with humanity’s ethics or codes, the pack’s morality, so that sometimes this higher faster beat sang in the life of a soldier, sometimes a poet, sometimes a politician, and sometimes in a man who watched and mapped the stars, or another who watched and mapped the infinitesimal fluid pulses that make up the atom, which atom was as far from the larger atoms that make up that mould or growth, humanity, as humanity is from the stars. And the items of this connecting feeding mesh (like an electric grid of humanity) were one; just as there is no such thing as soldiers but only Soldier, and not clerks but Clerk, and Gardener, and Teacher. For, since any category anywhere always beats on its own wavelength of sound/light, there could not be individuals in this nourishing web. Together they formed one beat in the great dance, one note in the song. Everywhere and on every level the little individuals made up wholes, struck little notes, made tones of colour. On every level: even myself and my friends whom the Crystal had absorbed into a whole, unimportant gnats, and my women and my children and everyone I had known in my life—even someone passed on a street corner and smiled at once—these struck a note, made a whole. And this was the truth that gave the utter insignificance of these motes their significance: in the great singing dance, everything linked and moved together. My mind was the facet of a mind, like cells in a honeycomb. Letting my mind lie dark there, quiescent, a mirror for light, I could feel, or sense, or recognize, a pulse of individuality that I had known once as poor Charlie, or Felicity, or James or Thomas. Pulses of mind lay beating and absorbing beside my own little pulse, and together we were a whole, connecting in this wholeness with the myriad differing wholes that each of these people had formed in their lives, were continuously forming in every breath they took,

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