Word Document (draft of July 2008)

A Visitation

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OUR TOWN was sinking further and further into the chronic greyness of dusk; it sprouted at the edges with a lichen of shadow, downy mould, and moss with the colour of iron.
    Barely having emerged from the brown fumes and mists of dawn, the day at once lurched into a meagre, amber afternoon, and for a moment became as transparent and golden as dark ale, only to sink under the multifariously segmented and fantastic vaults of the vast and coloured nights.
    We were living on the market square, in one of those gloomy houses with empty and blank façades that are so difficult to tell apart.
    This gave rise to endless mistakes. For, having once stepped into the wrong hallway and onto the wrong stairway, one usually found oneself in a veritable labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments, porches, and unexpected exits into unfamiliar courtyards, having completely forgotten the original purpose of the expedition, returning only days later from the detours of strange and tangled adventures, to remember on some grey morning, amid pangs of conscience — the family home.
    Full of huge wardrobes, plush sofas, murky mirrors and cheap artificial palms, our apartment was sinking into an ever worse state of neglect, deserted by my mother, who kept at all hours to the shop, and untended by negligent, slim-legged Adela who spent her days languidly dressing in front of her looking-glasses, with no one to keep an eye on her, leaving her traces everywhere in the shape of combs, strewn hairs, discarded slippers, and corsets.
    No one knew how many rooms this apartment had, since no one could remember how many of them had been rented to foreign tenants. Sometimes one of those forgotten rooms was opened by chance end p.13 and found to be empty; its occupant had moved out long ago, and surprising discoveries were to be made in drawers left untouched for months.
    The shop assistants lived in the lower rooms, and we were often awoken by their groans in the night, stirred by their nightmares. In winter, it would still be hushed night-time outdoors when Father went down to those cold and dark rooms, frightening away herds of shadows with his candle, which fled to either side, across the floor and the walls — he went to rouse those noisy snorers from their fathoms deep slumber.
    In the light of the candle he left they would wriggle lazily out of their bedclothes and get up. Sitting on their beds, barefoot and ugly-legged, holding their socks in their hands, they surrendered themselves for one last moment to the pleasure of yawning — yawning drawn out to the point of voluptuousness, an aching contraction of the palate, as if with forceful retching.
    Huge cockroaches sat unmoving in the corners, made enormous by their own shadows — which the flickering candle imposed on them all, and which never left them, even should one of those flat, headless trunks suddenly begin to run with its eerie, spider-like steps.
    Those were the days when my father’s health began to decline. Already in the first weeks of that early winter he would be confined for days on end to his bed, surrounded by medicine bottles, pills, and the ledgers brought up to him from the office. A bitter scent of disease had settled at the bottom of his room, where the wallpaper thickened into a darker entanglement of its arabesques.
    In the evenings, when Mother came up from the shop, he would often be agitated and disposed to quarrelling; he reproached her for errors in her management of the accounts — his cheeks flushed and he flared up to madness. I remember that once, awoken end p.14 in the middle of the night, I caught a glimpse of him, barefoot and in his nightshirt, running back and forth across the leather sofa, attesting in this way to his irritation before my helpless mother.
    On other days he might be calm and composed, thoroughly engrossed in his books, far astray in labyrinths of intricate calculations.
    I picture him lit by smoking lamps, crouching amid his pillows, beneath his great sculptured headboard, the enormous shadow of his head on the wall nodding in silent meditation.
    Occasionally he raised his head from those calculations, as if for a breath of air; he opened his mouth and, with distaste, clicked his tongue, which was dry and bitter, and he looked around helplessly as if searching for something.
    At such times he would often scurry in silence from his bed to the corner of the room where his trusted instrument hung. This was a kind of water-glass or great retort, marked out in ounces and filled with dark fluid. My father attached himself to this instrument by means of a long, flexible tube, a kind of winding, painful umbilical cord — and thus connected to the wretched device he held himself still in concentration. His eyes grew dark, and to his pallid face there came an expression of suffering, or some illicit delight.
    Then the days of quiet and composed work came again, interleaved with his remote monologues. As he sat in the light of his table lamp, amid the pillows of his great bed, and as the room grew enormous above him in the shadow of the lampshade which united it with the great element of the town’s night outside the window, he felt, without looking, that an expanse was growing above him, full of whispers, hisses and lisps, in the pulsating thicket of the wallpaper. He heard without looking that conspiracy full of a solicitous and knowing fluttering of eyelids, uncoiling end p.15 amid flowers of ear auricles that listened and dark lips that smiled.
    At such times he would be, to all appearances, even more deeply engrossed in his work — tallying and totalling, afraid to betray the anger rising inside him, fighting the urge to fling himself blindly around and, with a sudden scream, seize whole handfuls of those curly arabesques, those tufts of eyes and ears that the night had dreamed up out of itself, which sprouted and grew multifarious, dreaming up ever newer shoots and branches from the maternal umbilicus of the darkness. And he was placated only with the ebbing of the night, when the wallpaper sagged and curled up, dropping its leaves and flowers, and thinned autumnally, letting in the distant sunrise.
    Then, in the yellow winter dawn, amid a twittering of wallpaper birds, he succumbed to a few hours of deep, dense slumber.
    For days, for weeks, while he had seemed to be engrossed in the complicated running accounts, his mind had secretly been venturing into the labyrinths of his own entrails. He would hold his breath and listen intently; and when his gaze, faded and hazy, returned from those depths, he placated it with a smile. He did not yet believe, and rejected as absurdity, those claims and propositions which were advancing upon him.
    By day something akin to negotiations and persuasions would take place — long, monotonous deliberations conducted in an undertone, full of witty interludes and playful repartees. But at night those voices resounded more vehemently. Again and again a demand was made, each time more emphatic and portentous, end p.16 and we could hear him disputing with God — pleading, and seeming to refuse something that was urgently demanded, insisted upon.
    Until one night that voice rose menacingly and irresistibly, demanding that he submit a deposition both in words and with his very entrails. And we could hear the spirit possessing him, could hear him rising from his bed, elongated and swelling with prophetic anger, choked up with raucous words which he spluttered out like a machine gun. We heard the clamour of the struggle and Father’s groans, the groans of a Titan with a broken hip, who goes on cursing.
    I have never seen the Old Testament prophets, but at the sight of that man floored by divine anger, widely straddling his enormous porcelain chamber pot and shielded by the tornado of his arms, a cloud of desperate contortions over which his voice rose even higher, alien and hard, I understood the divine anger of holy men.
    It was a dialogue as menacing as the speech of thunderbolts. The contortions of his hands rent the heavens to pieces, and the face of Jehovah loomed in the fissures, swelling with anger and spitting curses. Without looking, I could see him, the menacing Demiurge^*, lying on the shadows as if upon Sinai — with his powerful hands resting on the wooden pelmet, he pressed his enormous face to the upper panes of the window, onto which his monstrous, fleshy nose was flattened.
    I heard his voice in the pauses between my father’s prophetic tirades; I heard those powerful snarls from his swollen lips, rattling the window panes and mingling with my father’s outbursts of entreaties, lamentations and threats.
    At times, their voices were hushed and snarled as quietly as the prattling of the wind in the night-time chimney, or else they burst out end p.17 in a great tumultuous din, a storm of confused sobs and curses. Suddenly, my window opened with a dark yawn, and a sheet of darkness drifted across the room.
    In a flash of lightning I caught a glimpse of my father in his billowing underwear, as he tossed — with a terrible curse and a powerful swish into the casement — the contents of his chamber pot out into the night, which roared as if in a seashell.

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Notes

* Demiurge/Demiurgus: the ‘creator’ or ‘artificer’ of the material universe. In a succession of emanations from God, such as Mind and the Word, the last of them, Sophia (Greek, ‘wisdom’), attempts to accomplish a creation on her own, producing the Demiurge, an inferior emanation who is ultimately responsible for the creation of the material, essentially evil, universe in which human souls (originally of the spiritual realm) are imprisoned.
In Plato’s Timaeus, an account is given of the generation of the world, down to the creation of man — beginning by asking, has heaven and the world always existed, or was it all at some time created? Timaeus claimed that it was:

Created, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation and created.

From this, the notion of a maker naturally ensued:

Which of the patterns had the artificer in view when he made the world — the pattern of the unchangeable, or of that which is created? […] Every one will see that he must have looked to the eternal; for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes.

In the philosophies of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, the product of a process of ‘emanation,’ an overflow of His superabundant greatness was distinguished from the supreme God.
The term ‘Demiurge’ originates in Hellenistic Jewish works of the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, in particular in The Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus wrote in emanational terms in his cosmological speculation, and Valentius, founder of one of the most important sects of Gnosticism, postulated a spiritual realm consisting of a succession of emanations that evolved out of an original divine being. [RETURN]

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