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Authors: M. John Harrison
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the hard glass. Narcissism was hardly in it for you, your survival was so at stake! (By the same token there is endless despair at the center of every narcissistic self-portrait.)”
The phone starts to ring, then stops before she can answer it. She stands indecisively in the hallway, barefoot on the cold quarry-tiled floor. The old cat runs up and rubs its smelly head on her ankles. Having seen their furniture moved in, everyone else in the village believes she and Lucas are antique dealers. A rumor is already growing up that they have another house just like this one, in Ireland, piled up with valuable sofas and Japanese fire screens. Staring first at the paper in her hand and then out of the window at the mist on the other side of the valley, Pam tells herself aloud, “I must make a start.”
* * *
Shyly at first, each of them demarcated areas of interest: established a personality. Lucas was the creative one. From the start, his intention had been magical, calming. Pam was the critic. This enabled her to pretend for a long time that her interest in the Heart was archaeological, practical, cynical; she would, had she ever spoken openly, have claimed to be testing the theories of “Michael Ashman” rather than swallowing them. But they never spoke openly, Pam Stuyvesant and Lucas Medlar. Instead, they sat in that huge front room of theirs, plaiting the quotes on one side of Lucas’s postcards into the pictures on the other, until, by degrees, over the next year, perhaps two, they had extended Ashman’s researches and woven between them, while pretending it was someone else’s, a whole world. By two o’clock each afternoon, whatever time of year, twilight was already in the massive old sideboards and bits of pseudo-medieval art. Her prints of “Ophelia” and “The Scapegoat” glowed from the wall. He often looked across at his shelves of books by Alfred Kubin, Rilke and Alain-Fournier. The old cat sat first on his lap, then, yawning and straightening its arthritic legs, stepped cautiously over to hers.
What they believed separately about the Coeur when they began—to what extent, for instance, Lucas saw it as a useful fiction—I can’t say. But what they came to agree later, by a sort of sign language, seems to have been this: that somehow, and in special circumstances, the Pleroma breaks into ordinary existence, into political, social and religious life, and becomes a country of its own, a country of the heart.
For a time it blesses us all, then fades away again, corrupted or diluted by its contact with the World. Consequently we can detect its presence as a kind of historical ghost.
The myth of the Coeur was centered on its Fall:
FOUR
Dark Rapture
“In the beginning of course,” Lucas used to say, with a smile across the room at Pam, “it must still have been perceptible as a catastrophe, the World and the Coeur a great wreck burning in the fabric of the Pleroma like two lovers in the glorious wreck of desire, a funeral done in Byzantine colors on cloth-of-gold—blazing ships, breached walls, smoke towering over everything! If only one had been close enough to hear that huge cry of love and loss, echoing and re-echoing across Europe through the remainder of the fifteenth century (so that, for instance, even the wars of York and Lancaster must be seen as a response—however characteristically cold and sluggish—an unconsciously constructed metaphor not so much of the politics of the Coeur as of its inmost griefs) and well into the sixteenth. We should know much more!”
“We know nothing,” Pam would remind him shortly, opening another packet of cigarettes.
Lucas tried to teach her to be willing to guess instead, taking the whole of the Middle Ages as his resource and ranging in his analogies from the Field of Blackbirds to Duns Scotus and the pursuit of Nominalism; from Courtly Love to the ecstasies of le roi Tafur, that shadowy European knight who relinquished armor and horse to fight on
The phone starts to ring, then stops before she can answer it. She stands indecisively in the hallway, barefoot on the cold quarry-tiled floor. The old cat runs up and rubs its smelly head on her ankles. Having seen their furniture moved in, everyone else in the village believes she and Lucas are antique dealers. A rumor is already growing up that they have another house just like this one, in Ireland, piled up with valuable sofas and Japanese fire screens. Staring first at the paper in her hand and then out of the window at the mist on the other side of the valley, Pam tells herself aloud, “I must make a start.”
* * *
Shyly at first, each of them demarcated areas of interest: established a personality. Lucas was the creative one. From the start, his intention had been magical, calming. Pam was the critic. This enabled her to pretend for a long time that her interest in the Heart was archaeological, practical, cynical; she would, had she ever spoken openly, have claimed to be testing the theories of “Michael Ashman” rather than swallowing them. But they never spoke openly, Pam Stuyvesant and Lucas Medlar. Instead, they sat in that huge front room of theirs, plaiting the quotes on one side of Lucas’s postcards into the pictures on the other, until, by degrees, over the next year, perhaps two, they had extended Ashman’s researches and woven between them, while pretending it was someone else’s, a whole world. By two o’clock each afternoon, whatever time of year, twilight was already in the massive old sideboards and bits of pseudo-medieval art. Her prints of “Ophelia” and “The Scapegoat” glowed from the wall. He often looked across at his shelves of books by Alfred Kubin, Rilke and Alain-Fournier. The old cat sat first on his lap, then, yawning and straightening its arthritic legs, stepped cautiously over to hers.
What they believed separately about the Coeur when they began—to what extent, for instance, Lucas saw it as a useful fiction—I can’t say. But what they came to agree later, by a sort of sign language, seems to have been this: that somehow, and in special circumstances, the Pleroma breaks into ordinary existence, into political, social and religious life, and becomes a country of its own, a country of the heart.
For a time it blesses us all, then fades away again, corrupted or diluted by its contact with the World. Consequently we can detect its presence as a kind of historical ghost.
The myth of the Coeur was centered on its Fall:
FOUR
Dark Rapture
“In the beginning of course,” Lucas used to say, with a smile across the room at Pam, “it must still have been perceptible as a catastrophe, the World and the Coeur a great wreck burning in the fabric of the Pleroma like two lovers in the glorious wreck of desire, a funeral done in Byzantine colors on cloth-of-gold—blazing ships, breached walls, smoke towering over everything! If only one had been close enough to hear that huge cry of love and loss, echoing and re-echoing across Europe through the remainder of the fifteenth century (so that, for instance, even the wars of York and Lancaster must be seen as a response—however characteristically cold and sluggish—an unconsciously constructed metaphor not so much of the politics of the Coeur as of its inmost griefs) and well into the sixteenth. We should know much more!”
“We know nothing,” Pam would remind him shortly, opening another packet of cigarettes.
Lucas tried to teach her to be willing to guess instead, taking the whole of the Middle Ages as his resource and ranging in his analogies from the Field of Blackbirds to Duns Scotus and the pursuit of Nominalism; from Courtly Love to the ecstasies of le roi Tafur, that shadowy European knight who relinquished armor and horse to fight on
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