The Stones of Camelot, page 32
On his first excursion into the Dark Land, Tom hadn’t stayed long enough to learn to speak to the shadow folk. Even in the course of his second sojourn, he made little enough progress with their prosaic language, because he was too much occupied with the songs he had imported for their delectation, and the songs he had come to learn.
It was different for me. The only person I had ever met with a worse singing voice than mine was Mother Leocadia. Tom had tried to teach me in Cokaygne, but I had shown little or no improvement. Tom hadn’t minded that, of course; musicians need an audience, and he was quite satisfied with my ability to listen. When he had tried to explain, in his admittedly stumbling fashion, why our adventure into the Dark Land would need two of us instead of one, he had thought of our partnership in terms of strict inequality, of the opposite but necessary pairing of performer and audience, actor and witness. He hadn’t been wrong to do that, given his own nature and viewpoint, but it wasn’t the whole story.
I became a storyteller in the Dark Land, as I had become a storyteller in Cokaygne and am now a storyteller in your world—but I wasn’t just a performer in search of an audience, or a listener in search of a performance. I think I learned more about the nature of shadows than Tom ever would have, and more about the nature of starlight, because I became far better attuned to the subtle conversations of the shadows, the authentic dialogues of the dead.
I can’t translate them as easily as I can translate the conversations I had with Merlin or Morgana, whose language was different from yours but fundamentally similar, not merely in the range and substance of its references but in the ambition of its metaphors and the polite insistence of its linearity. Someone cleverer than me might be able to make a stab at it, but the gross distortions involved would still create all kinds of false impressions. I’m not being evasive when I say that you can get a far better impression of the Dark Land from earthly music than you can from earthly prose. Some of what I learned can be restated, though, and I’ll do that as best I can.
According to Tom’s theory, the fair folk had been human once. Whether they were products of their own world or migrants from ours, they’d originated as beings indistinguishable from us. The magic-soaked world of Cokaygne had allowed them to transform themselves by the power of their own desire and will, into what they thought of as a far better state of being—and they had transformed their world, too, in order to make it even more hospitable to the kind of creature they were ambitious to be.
But they hadn’t all agreed as to the kind of creature they were ambitious to be. Their uncertainties had polarized, drawing them apart into two camps. Why two rather than three or ten or a thousand? I’m not sure—but I don’t think it was a mere fluke of chance. I think there’s a sense in which uncertainties of that kind may start out as networks of winding paths, heading anywhere and everywhere, but they have an inbuilt tendency to harden into roads as they’re trodden down by traffic and remade to support heavier vehicles. The ultimate extreme to which that process leads is the Roman road: the straight course that people may think of as a road to Camelot, or as a road to the west, but which must, by logical necessity, also be a road away from Camelot, and a road to the east.
Desire and goals do tend to polarize; they do tend to settle down into patterns of either-and-or, plus-and-minus, light-and-dark, body-and-mind.
The party of Cokaygne had preferred daylight to darkness, as humans generally do, so they had stopped the sun in its tracks, and held it steady in the sky, not too high and not too low, half-risen or half-set.
The party of Cokaygne had been keenly aware, as humans generally are, of their affliction by disease, pain and death, hunger, thirst and toil, so they had fortified their bodies with magic and made their world abundantly fruitful. They had become immune to disease, capable of controlling and easing pain, and as resistant to death as any creature of flesh could possibly be. They hardly ever went hungry or thirsty, and such labor as they had still to invest in supplying their various needs became a source of pleasure and fascination to them rather than a punishment.
They were, of course, required to pay a price for all these achievements, but they considered it more than fair.
You might think of their inability to make and feel love, or to bear and rear children, as a kind of penalty, exacted by way of compensation for their other rewards, but they didn’t. They lost the ability to love because it wasn’t something they wanted to hang on to—and once they’d sacrificed that, the rewards of sexual intercourse, and of bearing and raising children became too meager to justify the inherent difficulties and embarrassments—unlike, for instance, cooking, cleaning, digging, weaving, mining....and all the other activities which worked to more tangible and enduring ends.
Inexorable logic also requires that wishing away the ability to love disposes, too, of the opportunity to be loved, which is quite a different thing and seemingly far more desirable, but even that, I suspect, did not seem a heavy price. Many of the fair folk, I dare say, found even that easier to get along without—but just as humans vary, so do elves. Those elves who still cherished the notion of being loved, at least for a little while, retained the opportunity to be loved by humans while the gates to the human world were easy to pass through, at least in one direction. Those who retained a vestigial fascination with children had the opportunity to steal changelings.
By the same token, those elves who eventually found the elvish condition unbearable retained other options. They still had ability to become human, if they only cared to live long enough in the human world—just as humans who contrived to live long enough in Faerie, according to Tom’s hopeful theory, might become elves. And they still had the ability to turn right around, and head back in the opposite way towards the other pole: to join the shadow folk.
Do the shadow folk have a similar option? Could they, if they wished, put on flesh again? I’m not entirely certain—but I suspect so, if they really wanted to. Reincarnation, into the human world or Faerie, could probably be contrived, though not without difficulty. In practice, of course, no shadow desires to be an elf any more than any elf desires to be a shadow; both parties made their choices in a past so distant that it is almost beyond the reach of legend, let alone mere memory—and the last waverers made their eventual commitment long ago.
The shadow folk had preferred transcendence of the flesh to its preservation. They’d taken a different route in avoiding its many afflictions. Light—bright light, at any rate—had become unnecessary to them. Did they actually prefer darkness to light? Yes, they did—but in accepting that, we must bear in mind that they didn’t experience darkness as we do, as an absence of the solar source of all fleshy life; they still had stars of a sort, fainter by far than distant suns, so they had eyesight of a kind as well as second sight, but it was a different kind of sight than ours.
That must seem less peculiar to you than it did to me, because you know, even without ever having visited the Dark Land, that the visual spectrum is only a part of a much vaster whole, which other creatures might experience very differently. You can easily imagine that nocturnal creatures might be more sensitive to infrared wavelengths—and perhaps you can imagine too, how creatures of shadow might have senses of shadow, whose perceptions deal with other entities than mere “light”, so cleverly that the merest radiance is all they need.
Tom had thought himself incapable of explaining to me in words how he had established rudimentary communication with the shadow folk. Poet though he was, he had been unable to translate what he had “seen” or “felt” or “heard” during his first excursion into terms that I might find understandable, although he had made a valiant attempt even before he had set out to educate me by example, taking me with him so that I could find out for myself.
Can I do better? I don’t know, but I’m trying.
The shadow folk have more senses than we do; they retain some sensitivity to the vibrations of sound and electromagnetism, but that sensation has to be muted because they have so many others. I’m tempted to talk of “other vibrations”, and perhaps I wouldn’t be entirely wrong to do so, but it’s too narrow a perspective.
I’ve read in your books that what you think of as “empty space” or “void” is actually a seething mass of potential phenomena: “particles” or “waves” that might be evident, but aren’t, at least for the present.
In the Dark Land, such potentials are evident, to the senses of the shadow folk. In the Dark Land, there is no void. However empty it may seem to human or elvish visitors, at least until they become acclimatized, it’s fuller than any human or elf could possibly imagine—fuller than the sea to a fish, or flesh to a parasite worm, or rock to a vein of ore.
Trying to explain it is, to borrow another phrase I’ve read in your books, “like trying to explain sight to a blind man”—but much more complicated. I’m trying anyway.
Like Cokaygne, the Dark Land was built by the desire and will of human-like creatures, operating in and on a world more amenable to such manipulation than ours. Like Cokaygne, the Dark Land is a kind of paradise, not a kind of hell or a kind of oblivion, forged to be as hospitable as possible to the kind of creatures its makers wanted to be.
We have other desires than those of the flesh. Yes, there’s something in us that would like to live in Cokaygne: a world without darkness or evil, hunger or need, pain and old age. We are creatures of flesh and sensation; we know what health is, we know when it fails, and we know what unhappiness comes with its failure. How can we help but dream of a world in which we would always be healthy and always happy? Happiness is, admittedly, a relative thing; if we were never unhappy, we should never know how happy we were when we were not. How much more pleasant it would be, though, to live in a world where happiness was the everyday norm and unhappiness the rare exception, always available by choice but never compelled. How much more pleasant it would be to live in a world that was separated by gates from a world of misery, which we could visit as and when we wished, savor as and when we wished, play with as and when we wished, whose produce we could allow into our world by chance as well as by choice, but always in a manageable flow. All perfectly understandable. But we have other desires than those of the flesh.
I don’t know whether we unremade humans are really anything more than flesh and sensation, but I do know that it’s not the way we see and feel ourselves, and it’s not the only way we can imagine ourselves.
Whether we have souls or not, we can certainly imagine that we do, and it’s hard to imagine otherwise. Whether or not we’re ghosts, temporarily housed in fleshy machines, we imagine ourselves that way, and it difficult to do otherwise. Fantasy or not, the intangible self has to be accommodated within our spectrum of desire—and if we had the power to make our wishes come true, some of us, at least, would follow the road in that direction rather than the other.
Cokaygne isn’t the only other world we unremade humans dream of. Cokaygne is where our selves of flesh and sensation may live in a dream of perpetual but not-quite-uninterrupted happiness, but it has no room for our other selves—our shadow selves—which have to be forgotten there, or soothed away.
The world of the shadow folk isn’t a place of exile, or a cosmic prison; it is itself a kind of shadow, a world within and beyond ours, but by no means separate from it. It’s a place to which our dreams can lead us, although what we find there is far more difficult to add to the store of memory than the land of Cokaygne. It’s a place where we might wish to be, even though we can’t describe or articulate it.
There’s no more love in the Dark Land than there is in Cokaygne. None are born there, though some occasionally die. It’s timeless—even more timeless, if that admittedly absurd phrase can make any sense at all, than Cokaygne. There’s no happiness there either, to the extent that happiness is part of the weather of the flesh, but the shadow folk have their own kinds of contentment, which they would not trade for happiness or for the world. It is not a joyful world, but it’s a world that has its rewarding substitutes for joy. It’s not an undesirable place to be, although it stands at the opposite end of the spectrum of desire to Cokaygne.
When the shadow folk welcomed us, they did so more generously and less contemptuously than the fair folk of Cokaygne. Mother Leocadia would probably say that they were merely more accomplished agents of diabolical temptation, but it’s possible—isn’t it?—that they were simply more comfortable with their state of being.
The world of the shadow folk is the soul of Cokaygne, in which everything abstracted from Cokaygne and negated in Cokaygne is set aside. That doesn’t mean, though, that it’s a place to which the evils extirpated from Cokaygne have been banished; it isn’t a miserable place, let alone a place of torment. The Dark Land is a quiet and insubstantial place, to which such fleshly afflictions as hunger, disease, pain and death are utterly irrelevant; they have no more presence there than they do in Cokaygne, but nor are they conspicuous by their absence.
There’s music in Cokaygne, but it’s only important to its hearers while it’s being played, while they can dance to it. Were the shadow folk to listen to the very same music, they’d experience it very differently. The shadow folk sing, as the legendary Acemites sang, but they don’t dance. They don’t need to, because the music they play and the music that is played to them are part of them forever.
The people of Cokaygne like stories, and like to re-tell the stories they have heard, but they only experience the story in the hearing and the telling, in terms of the sensations it provides. The shadow folk draw little immediate amusement from stories, but all the stories they hear and tell echo within them, transforming and recomplicating the stories that they are. To be a storyteller in Cokaygne is by no means a poor thing, especially for a servant, but to be a storyteller in the Dark Land is something else. In the Dark Land, every storyteller makes a difference, in a way that Merlin, the despiser of legend and parchment, could never have understood.
I don’t mean to imply by this that Cokaygne is an empire of pure sensuality and the realm of the shadow folk an empire of pure mentality. There’s no sensation without thought and no thought without sensation, and no matter how powerfully we reimagine ourselves there can be no such thing as mind without body, any more than there could be body without mind—but there’s a sense in which the mind can consign the flesh to darkness, and to forsake solidity—to set it aside—just as there’s a sense in which the body can set the mind aside by going to sleep. There’s a great deal of sleep in Cokaygne, whose shadow is a particular kind of consciousness—an alertness exaggerated by the suppression of the senses. That, too, is an object of desire, common if not universal among humans. That, too, would give rise to an entire world of desire, if we humans had magic enough to make our wishes come true.
I couldn’t explain this to an elf—but I hope that a human might be able understand it. I did, while I was there, and the memory will, survive a little longer here than it would have in Cokaygne.
Tom Rhymer and I had escaped the grip of time before we had even arrived in the realm of the shadow folk, and we remained free. We ate and we drank, for an interval, while the pangs of our difficult passage still disturbed us, but the need passed. We never stepped out of our flesh, but it ceased to inhibit us.
When Tom had done with singing and playing, for a while, I told stories, and when I had done with telling stories, we listened. I can’t imagine that we heard as the shadow folk heard, or that the stories transformed our own life-stories as they had transformed their tellers, but they didn’t leave us undernourished.
Little by little, we became shadows ourselves, setting our bodies aside—for an interval.
Being a shadow is being other than solid—or liquid or gas—without being other than material. Being a shadow is being other than present, without being absent—or perhaps it would be better to say that it is an absence, but an absence as full of potential as the hardest vacuum, the most absolute void. Being a shadow is like being a creature of abstract ideas, fluid and elastic and intangible but seething all the while with ambition and hope and curiosity. Being a shadow is never to have the possibility of loneliness, because a shadow can only function as part of a whole host of competing and contesting shadows, ceaselessly bringing forms out of chaos whose very essence is transience.
Some expeditions, as Tom Rhymer had wisely said, have to be undertaken by more than one individual. In the Dark Land, all expeditions have to be undertaken by everyone.
All this must seem difficult to grasp—as shadows inevitably are—but I hope it doesn’t sound boring. My time in the Dark Land wasn’t in the least boring. There was nothing to see, because it was dark, but there was also everything to see, by the faintest starlight imaginable. As Tom and I faded into shadows we moved further and further away from fleshy sensation, but further and further towards other kinds of experience. Our innate magic had space in which to play that it had never enjoyed in Cokaygne.
We didn’t stay there as long as we could have stayed. To have stayed forever would have required us to sever all ties to our former flesh, but even to have stayed there for a much shorter time than forever would have made those ties distinctly problematic. We’d have gone mad.
By the standards of Cokaygne, of course, we did go mad—but not as mad as we might have. Even by Cokaygne’s standards, we didn’t make any choices that would have made it impossible to change our minds. We didn’t make any commitments. That wouldn’t have been possible, if we hadn’t spent a long time in Cokaygne before we went into the Dark Land, but I think we were able to get the best of both worlds.
