Landscape with Figures 40 – Fraser · Verses Across
Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 40Chapter 39
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Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 40
Chapter 39
FraserEnglish
Yuan was away in the mountains, and as day after day passed without him Lychnis sank deeper into doubt and misery. Then at last he came back, sought her out, spent all his time with her, and they began to weave their lives into one strand. They spent days and nights in the Flying Dragon, often at great distances from the valley; or sometimes they sought strange experiences among the neighbouring forests and crags; and the summer wore on to its full splendour. Afterwards she gave Ambrose some account of these various experiences, and he chose three or four to illustrate the progress of her relations with Yuan.
She began to be influenced increasingly, it appears, by the silent and deliberate guidance of his mind. He had means of conveying his thoughts to her without speech, and this means he used more and more effectively as their intimacy deepened. One afternoon of serene and golden beauty they were strolling, steeped in this conversation, through a birch-wood among the hills. They came upon three Rishi, or mountain wizards, contemplating the smoke of incense in a green circle under the trees. Behind the Rishi was a porcelain image, shrined among leaves, a thing of infinite stillness. The two friends silently joined the group; Yuan leaned against a birch trunk, chin in hand. Lychnis lay prone. But from time to time she looked round at Yuan, for he seemed to have withdrawn his mind from her, to have plunged himself, without thought for her, in the contemplation of the smoke of incense. And the three Rishi were of the most repulsive ugliness—the first huge and sensual, with a belly that burst through filthy rags, distended ears, and the face of a demon of wrath; the second small and thin, with the face of a froward newt; the third deformed in the spine, crab-armed, lascivious and cruel. They took no notice whatever of the newcomers, and sat for so long in a tremendous immobility, like that of the brooding porcelain figure, that the flap of a leaf overhead reverberated through the forest and seemed to echo down long passages in the mind. Their foul and repulsive appearance began to be more incongruous with so profound a stillness; their ugliness was so clearly not the sign of any present passion that they seemed to grow unreal. They might be about to vanish. She suddenly perceived in their faces the signs of immortal, worldforgetting youth. Then came a solitary message from Yuan, that these were men who had left behind them the passions of the world and given themselves to the experience of reality. “It is the presence of reality,” he said to her mind, “that displays the unreality of the outward world.” The wrathful one stirred faintly at the passage of thought from mind to mind; his wrinkled eyelids perceptibly twitched.
Yuan returned to the contemplation, and Lychnis found herself being drawn in—wandering, rather, in a world of fancies on the edge of what was too cold and uncongenial for her to enter. At first the sensations in her body intensified. There was an itch for movement in legs and fingers. She was acutely aware of the thrust of her chin in her hand, the strain of the muscles at waist and abdomen, a fly buzzing in her hair, a pebble under her knee. But a gentle wind played on her calves and head. Discomforts faded. She became aware of the beautiful lines and relations of her body. She relaxed, and the tree-roots on which she was lying seemed to embrace her, to gain contact with her; the life of the tree gained contact with her life. She turned on her back in the embrace of the birch-tree, and began pondering on the delicate tracery of leaves, swaying and glowing in the peaceful sky. She was in a world of trees—birch, poplar, chestnut and ash; tall silver trunks, brown twisted trunks, smooth boles, tender shoots, branches carrying a weight of ivy; green tranquil leaves, broad, flat leaves hanging on long stems, white fluttering leaves like clouds of butterflies; in a world of pale green and misty substance, and deep green with dark, lucid caves, splashes of golden yellow, blurs of red-brown. There was an imperceptible, infinite rustling, an unseen flitting of birds, sometimes a note; a tranquil diffused light, and beyond the tree-tops an immense pure well and medium of light, a warm sun-drenched region of inter-stellar space, longed for by the senses. The roots under her body stretched up to a silver trunk that lifted its weight of foliage into the world of foliage and light, lifting her spirit with it. She was among myriads of leaves, exulting, whispering choirs. It seemed to her that the spirits of those who have loved the light of the sky dwelt in them, tasting the sun and the warm winds, saturated with light, with air, with the unseen medium of life and being. A profound calm, a strength of reposed, victorious soul, pervaded the leaves, a dignity of that which fears neither life nor death, not subject to them. Sometimes a bevy of young leaves fluttered with a gust of angelic laughter, or there was a vast stir of passionless conversation, a communion of those who are beyond passion, reposing in the myriad forest leaves. She felt, certainly, a presence. It was what she had perceived in the hideous faces of the Rishi. A presence that was not a presence; a presence seen in the structure of beauty, but yet it was not beauty; she found it also in music, in a formula, in the valley, in the eyes of Yuan, but it was not any of these; not happiness or unhappiness, nor life or death, but pre-existent and yet non-existent—such phrases from Yuan’s conversation came to her mind. She turned her gaze to the serene and smiling face of the porcelain figure among the leaves. It was a thing of great stillness. It was inactive, but it seemed charged with activity. “It lives,” was her first thought; and pat came the silent answer from Yuan: “It more than lives. There is more than life.” A vista was opened to her. The presence in the life of the trees, in the not-life of the figure, in the unreal faces of the Rishi, was the same presence—the intangible, the unnameable. She perceived a reality outside thought, unhuman and without the warmth and pleasure of thought, a reality that she could not grasp with mind or senses; but the experience of it brought joy.
And dimly, only dimly, she felt Yuan beside her in the sea of forest thoughts, leaf thoughts, as if he guided her where she floated. In the apprehension of him, in that realm of experience, there was no distaste. She felt closer to him when her senses were submerged. She was where there are no distinctions of this and that.
Her thoughts were broken into by spoken words. The Rishi were coming to the end of their contemplation, and they returned to the world in a state of unhuman gaiety. There still sounded in them the mirth of the Paradise where they had been.
Their gaiety abruptly came to an end. “There are two imperfect beings in contemplation with us,” said the demon of wrath.
“One,” added the newt, “is very imperfect, being full of half-thoughts, and even whole thoughts, and long pauses of irrelevant dreaming. Those who have thoughts in their minds should not gather round the smoke of incense.”
“The other,” contributed the third, “is nearly thoughtless, nearly unconscious; but he impedes the flow of reality into himself and among us by some attachment to the passions and desires of men.”
“A brother!” piped the newt, with a gurgle of newt-like laughter, “an immortal, has drowned the never-ending merriment of the immortals in a draught of red and serious desire!”
Yuan did not change countenance, but he drew her away, and they were followed as they went down the rocky path among the birches by sounds of immense hilarity. This is the life he is destined for by family tradition, reflected Lychnis, and he is to become like these, though not so ugly.
His conversation on the way down was somewhat of that which is more important than desire and life, beside which human pleasure is insignificant. “Those,” he said, explaining the point of view of his three acquaintances, “who have once found the satisfaction of non-being desire it, and they shun the things that belong to existence, as, for example, friendship and love.”
That might not be inconvenient, in some circumstances, was the thought that presented itself to her attention. It came forcibly at first, then faded in a myriad quivering forest thoughts, at the heart of which, in a radiation of light and power, through a wisp of the smoke of incense, the image of the porcelain saint eternally smiled. An unearthly smile, it was, without scorn and without pity—a smile that made all human experience seem irrelevant, and all human language conceited.
