Brian W. Aldiss - The Moment of Eclipse.pdf - Brian W. Aldiss - margozap

The Moment of Eclipse

Brian W. Aldiss

Contents

The Moment of Eclipse

The Day We Embarked for Cythera ...

Orgy of the Living and the Dying

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

The Village Swindler

Down the Up Escalation

That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art...

Confluence

Heresies of the Huge God

The Circulation of the Blood ...

. . . And the Stagnation of the Heart

The Worm that Flies

Working in the Spaceship Yards

Swastika!

Acknowledgements

POEM AT A LUNAR ECLIPSE

Thy shadow. Earth,, from Pole to

Central Sea, Now steals along upon the Moon's

meek shine

In even monochrome and curving line Of imperturbable serenity.

How shall I link such sun-cast

symmetry With the torn troubled form I know

as thine.

That profile, placid as a brow divine, With continents of moil and misery?

And can immense Mortality but

throw So small a shade, and Heaven's high

human scheme Be hemmed within the coasts yon

arc implies?

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly

show, Nation at war with nation, brains that

teem, Heroes, and women fairer than the

skies?

THOMAS HARDY

Reprinted by kind permission of Macmillan & Co. Ltd.

The Moment of Eclipse

Beautiful women with corrupt natures - they have always been my life's target. There must be bleakness

as well as loveliness in their gaze: only then can I expect the mingled moment.

The mingled moment - it holds both terror and beauty. Those two qualities, I am aware, lie for most

people poles apart. For me, they are, or can become, one! When they do, they coincide, ah ... then joy

takes me! And in Christiania I saw many such instants promised.

But the one special instant of which I have to tell, when pain and rapture intertwined like two

hermaphrodites, overwhelmed me not when I was embracing any lascivious darling but when -after long

pursuit! - I paused on the very threshold of the room where she awaited me: paused and saw ... that

spectre....

You might say that a worm had entered into me. You might say that there I spoke metaphorically, and

that the worm per-verting my sight and taste had crept into my viscera in child-hood, had infected all my

adult life. So it may be. But who escapes the maggot? Who is not infected? Who dares call him-self

healthy? Who knows happiness except by assuaging his ill-ness or submitting to his fever?

This woman's name was Christiania. That she was to provoke in me years of pain and pursuit was not

her wish. Her wish, indeed, was at all times the very opposite.

We met for the first time at a dull party being held at the Danish Embassy in one of the minor East

European capitals. My face was known to her and, at her request, a mutual friend brought her over to

meet me.

She was introduced as a poet - her second volume of poetry was just published in Vienna. My taste for

poetry exhibiting attitudes of romantic agony was what attracted her to me in the first place; of course she

was familiar with my work.

Although we began by addressing each other in German, I soon discovered what I had suspected from

something in her looks and mannerisms, that Christiania was also Danish. We started to talk of our native

land.

Should I attempt to describe what she looked like? Christiania was a tall woman with a slightly full figure;

her face was perhaps a little too flat for great beauty, giving her, from certain angles, a look of stupidity

denied by her conversation. At that time, she had more gleaming dark hair than the fashion of the season

approved. It was her aura that attracted me, a sort of desolation in her smile which is, I fancy, a

Scandinavian in-heritance. The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch painted a naked Madonna once,

haunted, suffering, erotic, pallid, gener-ous of flesh, with death about her mouth; in Christiania, that

madonna opened her eyes and breathed!

We found ourselves talking eagerly of a certain camera ob-scura that still exists in the Aalborghus, in

Jutland. We discov-ered that we had both been taken there as children, had both been fascinated to see

a panorama of the town of Aalborg laid out flat on a table through the medium of a small hole in the roof.

She told me that that optical toy had inspired her to write her first poem; I told her that it had directed my

interest to cameras, and thus to filming.

But we were scarcely allowed time to talk before we were separated by her husband. Which is not to

say that with look and gesture we had not already inadvertently signalled to each other, delicately but

unmistakably.

Inquiring about her after the party, I was told that she was an infanticide currently undergoing a course of

mental treat-ment which combined elements of Eastern and Western thought. Later, much of this

information proved to be false; but, at the time, it served to heighten the desires that our brief meeting had

woken in me.

Something fatally intuitive inside me knew that at her hands, though I might find suffering, I would touch

the two-faced ecstasy I sought.

At this period, I was in a position to pursue Christiania further; my latest film, Magnitudes, was

completed, although I had still some editing to do before it was shown at a certain film festival.

It chanced also that I was then free of my second wife, that svelte-mannered Parsi lady, ill-omened star

alike of my first film and my life, whose vast promised array of talents was too quickly revealed as little

more than a glib tongue and an over-sufficient knowledge of tropical medicine. In that very month,our

case had been settled and Sushila had retreated to Bombay, leaving me to my natural pursuits.

So I planned to cultivate my erotic garden again: and Christiania should be the first to flower in those

well-tended beds.

Specialized longings crystallize the perceptions along the axes concerned: I had needed only a moment in

Christiania's pres-ence to understand that she would not scruple to be unfaithful to her husband under

certain circumstances, and that I myself might provide such a circumstance; for those veiled grey eyes

told me that she also had an almost intuitive grasp of her own and men's desires, and that involvement

with me was far from being beyond her contemplation.

So it was without hesitation that I wrote to her and described how, for my next film, I intended to pursue

the train of thought begun in Magnitudes and hoped to produce a drama of a rather revolutionary kind to

be based on a sonnet of the English poet Thomas Hardy entitled 'At a Lunar Eclipse'. I added that I

hoped her poetic abilities might be of assistance in assembling a script, and asked if she would honour me

with a meeting.

There were other currents in my life just then. In particular, I was in negotiation through my agents with

the Prime Min-ister of a West African republic who wished to entice me out to make a film of his

country. Although I nourished an inclination to visit this strange part of the world where, it always seemed

to me, there lurked in the very atmosphere a menace compounded of grandeur and sordidness which

might be much to my taste, I was attempting to evade the Prime Minister's offer, generous though it was,

because I suspected that he needed a conservative documentary director rather than an innovator, and

was more concerned with the clamour of my reputation than its nature. However, he would not be

shaken off, and I was avoiding a cultural attache of his as eagerly as I was trying to ensnare - or be

ensnared by - Christiania.

In eluding this gigantic and genial black man, I was thrown into the company of an acquaintance of mine

at the university, a professor of Byzantine Art, whom I had known for many years. It was in his study, in

the low quiet university buildings with windows gazing from the walls like deep-set eyes, that I was

introduced to a young scholar called Petar. He stood at one ofthe deep windows in the study, looking

intently into the cobbled street, an untidy young man in unorthodox clothes.

I asked him what he watched. He indicated an old newspaper-seller moving slowly along the gutter

outside, dragging and be-ing dragged by a dog on a lead.

'We are surrounded by history, monsieur! This building was erected by the Habsburgs; and that old man

whom you see in the gutter believes himself to be a Habsburg.'

'Perhaps the belief makes the gutter easier to walk.'

'I'd say harder!' For the first time he looked at me. In those pale eyes I saw an aged thing, although at

the start I had been impressed by his extreme youth. 'My mother believes - well, that doesn't matter. In

this gloomy city, we are all surrounded by the shadows of the past. There are shutters at all our

windows.'

I had heard such rhetoric from students before. You find later they are reading Schiller for the first time.

My host and Ifell into a discussion concerning the Hardy sonnet; in the middle of it, the youth had to take

his leave of us; to visit his tutor, he said.

'A frail spirit, that, and a tormented one,' commented my host. 'Whether he will survive his course here

without losing his mental stability, who can say. Personally, I shall be thankful when his mother, that

odious woman, leaves the city; her effect on him is merely malevolent.'

'Malevolent in what respect?'

'It is whispered that when Petar was thirteen years old - of course, I don't say there's any truth in the vile

rumour - when he was slightly injured in a road accident, his mother lay beside him - nothing unnatural in

that - but the tale goes that unnatural things followed between them. Probably all nonsense, but certainly

he ran away from home. His poor father, who is a public figure - these nasty tales always centre round

public figures —'

Feeling my pulse rate beginning to mount, I inquired the family name, which I believe I had/not been

given till then. Yes! The pallid youth who felt himself surrounded by the shadows of the past was her son,

Christiania's son! Naturally, this evil legend made her only the more attractive in my eyes.

At that time I said nothing, and we continued the discus-sion of the English sonnet which I was

increasingly inspired tofilm. I had read it several years before in an Hungarian transla-tion and it had

immediately impressed me.

To synopsize a poem is absurd; but the content of this sonnet was to me as profound as its grave and

dignified style. Briefly, the poet watches the curved shadow of Earth steal over the moon's surface; he

sees that mild profile and is at a loss to link it with the continents full of trouble which he knows the

shadow represents; he wonders how the whole vast scene of human affairs can come to throw so small a

shade; and he asks himself if this is not the true gauge, by any outside standard of measurement, of all

man's hopes and desires? So truly did this correspond with my own life-long self-questionings, so nobly

was it cast, that the sonnet had come to represent one of the most precious things I knew; for this reason

I wished to destroy it and reassemble it into a series of visual images that would convey precisely the

same shade of beauty and terror allied as did the poem.

My host, however, claimed that the sequence of visual images I had sketched to him as being capable of

conveying this mys-terious sense fell too easily into the category of science-fiction, and that what I

required was a more conservative approach -conservative and yet more penetrating, something more

inward than outward; perhaps a more classical form for my romantic despair. His assertions angered me.

They angered me, and this I realized even at the time, because there was the force of truth in what he

said; the trappings should not be a distraction from but an illumination of the meaning. So we talked for a

long time, mainly of the philosophical problems involved in representing one set of objects by another -

which is the task of all art, the displacement without which we have no placement. When I left the

university, it was wearily. I felt a sense of despair at the sight of dark falling and another day completed

with my life incomplete.

Halfway down the hill, where a shrine to the virgin stands within the street wall, Petar's old news-vendor

loitered, his shabby dog at his feet. I bought a paper from him, experiencing a tremor at the thought of

Brian W. Aldiss - The Moment of Eclipse.pdf

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