a diary
We lay naked on the shore and gazed up at the night.
Mr Sole was diving in and out of the water, rescuing flotsam. Mr Monkfish had generously afforded me the surviving towel.
It was very rare for Monkfish to expose what he called his "misfortune". He would mock practitioners who went "skyclad" and mutter sarcastically about the effectiveness of energies that might be blocked by clothes. Sole, on the contrary, was indifferent about garments, and would frequently pad about our rooms, wherever we might be staying, as naked as a newborn, and as unashamed.
But our clothes were soaked and drying, strung up in front of the bonfire that Mr Sole had managed to assemble from driftwood and which Monkfish had somehow ingeniously set alight.
"Twice in one week!" I had said.
It was unnecessarily frosty, but I was haunted by the faces of the people we had left aboard the boat. Sixteen faces – a family of six, three generations, from the Hindu Cush; two young men from Albania, holding hands; an Imam, his wife, and daughters; a single black woman, bearing scars; three unaccompanied children from the Sahel. The inadequate rubber inflatables, which had been intended to slip them quietly ashore, had been appropriated by the crew when the coastguard had fired upon us, fired upon us!
I am not a strong swimmer. Monkfish and Sole got me away. I do not know if any of the others survived, or whether they were dragged down when the boat went under. Certainly, we saw no sign of them upon the English coast where we washed up.
Mr Sole had made efforts to placate me; Monkfish merely checked his jacket pockets – a letter in one; his tarot cards in another – and when he seemed satisfied that the contents had survived the submersion, he silently turned away.
"Nox ex Nihilo," rumbled Mr Monkfish, eventually. "Everything from nothing. The night is our first mother, our oldest goddess.
I somehow felt that he meant this as a eulogy, and so I said nothing, and let him continue.
"You feel it, don't you – the witch wound, the remembrance of persecution, the blood memory that all of us outsiders share. The witch blood that links us all to her.
"The Mesopotamians of Ur knew her as Lil, or Lila, and her symbol was the owl. The Epic of Gilgamesh claims she made her home in the willow tree until Gilgamesh slew the dragon and drove her out.
"That was the start of the patriarchy. The demands of kings, the demands of war, warping society, breaking the traditional family, turning boys into soldiers driven by adrenaline and testosterone, and girls into commodities for breeding more boys.
"That was when night was turned into an enemy. Because kings were afraid of the dark.
"They said she dwelt in the desert, in the wilderness, at the ends of the civilised world, moving across the night on hot winds. As the night mara, she would sit on men's chests to draw out their breath; she would steal children in the darkness.
"Her cult was carried by the Phoenicians into the Levant. There, the ancient Hebrews adopted her as Lilith, mother of demons, the first succubus – no doubt someone had to explain those male nocturnal emissions somehow.
"Lillith, in the story they told, was the first wife of Adam, the woman who would not submit, cast out for the crime of wanting to go on top during sex. I've shocked you; I can sense it. But why? Sex is natural. Sex predates scripture.
"But to the patriarchy, sex was always demonic. Everything queer or kinky, you can bet that there was a demon at the bottom of it. Sometimes literally.
"The Monks of the medieval church would list all the names of all the devils and all the sins with them. The Key of Solomon, the Malleus Maleficarum: demonologies and grimoires were quite the popular genre in the Middle Ages. Even James the sixth and first wrote one. Theological enough not to be heretical; titillating enough to be bestsellers. Biblical fanfic – in fifty shades of grace.
"Adam, they said, after the fall, the expulsion from Eden, and the murder of Able by Cain, went apart from his wife and son, disgusted by their sins. And in the wilderness, in the nighttime, Lillith came to him, seduced him, and by him spawned all of demonkind. The Lillim. The children of the night.
"So of course, it's all a woman's fault.
"But I get ahead of myself.
"In Egypt, she was Nut, goddess of the stary sky, and mother to Isis and Osiris, the first pharaohs, the lords of order, and to Nephthys and Sutekh, the gods of chaos.
"Sutekh murdered Osiris, and so brought death into the world. But by her magic, Isis, sweet Isis, brought Osiris back, wrapped in his funerary robes, and by him fathered Horus. So, Osiris became the King of the Dead, the first mummy, and the first undead.
"And then along came the Greeks, those cunning bastards, with their unspeakable vices, building their temples literally over the top of older, darker sacred spaces to the nameless, to the night. Their Olympian pantheon, led by Zeus with his phallic thunderbolts, burying the Chthonic gods – deeply Freudian – in the Tartarus of their imagination.
"That is where the Minds come from. Night, and her children: Erebus, darkness; Moros, fate; Thanatos, death; Oneiros, sleep; Eros and Eris, love and spite; Nemesis, judgement, and Zagreus, in the end. All the things we don't want to think about, thrust down into the dark places of the inside.
He fell quiet again, brooding on the black surface of the waves.
In his silence, my thoughts went back to the night in Montignac, after visiting the Lascaux caves, after what we had seen in the Seventh Gallery, when I asked Monkfish to explain what he meant by Minds.
"Conceptual entities dwelling in ideas," he had told me. "A gestalt from our planetary psyche, maybe. A synergy, somewhere in the observation/awareness matrix, perhaps. A pooling of our racial id. All those things we struggle with, and so label our collective unconscious. As though labels help.
"Sometimes they seep into stones: from genius loci, spirits of place, to national personifications, Britannia, Columbia, Mother Russia. Sometimes they are embedded in words: abracadabra, avertus amen, the prayers of protection. Most often they inhabit ideas, reproducing as memes: collective identities of ideology, or nationalism, or religion. Anything we can believe in.
"Humans are tribal as well as individual, y'know. Sometimes we move as one. Sometimes frighteningly so. The madness of crowds, the mood of the mob. Sometimes it's just easier to surrender.
"The supporters in the stadium when their team scores. The flock in the church when the preacher moves them. The audience in the theatre when the orchestra plays the perfect chord. The stormtroopers at the rally when the Fuhrer leads them. The riot in the streets when everything gets out of hand.
"Have you never felt yourself moved to be part of something larger? To add your voice to the sound of the crowd?
"Those are the places the Minds live. Hauntings and lynchings."
My thoughts went to a night even further back, back to that first meeting in the little attic room.
I had sighed and interrupted his flow.
"Mr Monkfish," I had said, "is any of this true? Is it real?"
"What is truth? What is real?"
"I meant your stories."
"Flickering shadows in the darkness, my dear; that's when we tell ghost stories.
"We try to deny the night. With our electric lights and our twenty-four hour news. With our real. With our true. We are the masters of our own destiny; there are no triple-goddesses weaving our fortunes. But it's only a hundred miles to space and the all-encompassing embrace of the black."
"And the stories, Mr Monkfish?"
"True lies. Real doubt. How can you be sure of any of it?"
"I am quite sure that you are trying to distract me. I believe in what I've seen with my own eyes. Of that I am certain."
"Ah, but are you though? Are you? Follow me down this path.
"Suppose some spirit of the night had you bound to a pillar in a pitch-dark cave, and you could see nothing, but played out in front of your eyes only a flickering shadowplay in reflected firelight? Suppose you could sense nothing, but it could play upon your skin with breath of air to make you feel any sensation, could you trust to your experience then?"
"I am familiar with Plato."
"Of course you are. Of course. Well then, we have spoken of Frankenstein: suppose the good doctor had you as a brain in a jar in his laboratory, playing you galvanic impulses to stimulate your senses. Or imagine we exist only as a simulation in some vast cyclopean difference engine at the end of time. You rely upon your memories, but what if it is all just a dream? In short, how can we be sure that anything is real?"
"Mr Monkfish, if I recall, you began by saying everything was real. Now you say nothing is real? Which is it to be?"
"Exactly, you have it exactly. And I will tell you. Cogito ergo sum."
"Descartes, now."
"Indeed. Indeed. Dear René. Oh, how I would crush him to my bosom.
"His first principle – "I'm thinking so I must exist" – is the basis for hundreds of years of philosophical thought, the herald of the Enlightenment, the end of what we used to call, in unenlightened times, the Dark Ages, the age of night.
"Of course, his second principle – "god is not a bastard so everything else exists" – is a little less sound. His inference that god has left his thumbprint in all of us is certainly questionable – never mind what if that god is Norse trickster Loki or Zoroastrian antagonist Ahriman – one must challenge the notion that the idea of god is somehow intrinsic, and not merely present because we exist in a culture that is already steeped in god. And then, his argument that anyone who disagrees with him must be arguing from bad faith, does make him a bit of an arse…"
"Mr Monkfish, I think you are straying from the point again."
"You're right of course. But let me set the scene: Descartes retires to his castle for six years to think. He wants to light the candle of reason against the endless night. Like any of us in the dark, he is suffused by nocturnal fears: the settling of a floorboard, the creak of a stair, the tapping of a branch at a window, the rushing of the wind, the distant shriek of an owl… it is so easy to imagine demons and gods. What is real? That, he realises, must be his foundation: remove anything of which he has doubts.
"But think, think: by trying to eliminate all doubt, Cher René places doubt at the centre of existence. You may doubt that you exist, but the act doubting, thinking, means something exists because something is thinking, doubting. If you did not exist there would be no question of whether you existed."
"You mean," I said slowly, "the question itself is the proof: 'do I exist?' means something exists to ask the question."
"Quite so, quite so, and thus we have a proof of identity, of what we might call 'oneness'. One thought, all alone in the night."
Against my instincts, I smiled. He had succeeded in distracting me.
"So, you are saying we have nothing, we have something, we have everything: you have discovered the trinity."
"Hmm. God may or may not exist, but numbers do.
"From nothing and one we have duality, and so two, and thus, as you say, nothing one and two makes three, and so we deduce four, and from four we deduce five and then six and then seven, and so on, repeating and repeating, by what the mathematicians call induction, ad infinitum."
"And thus, voila, mathematics is real."
"And if something is real, then everything is real."
"That is quite the leap of faith."
"Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps it is all down to god after all. Perhaps it's just the numbers holding the whole system up. Perhaps we are all just made of maths. But it gives me comfort. Thought, we know, at least is real. And thought is where the Minds live."
Mr Sole returned, padding up the beach towards us. He was still naked, and was carrying the ears of the crew who had so cruelly abandoned us.
"And the outsiders?" asked Monkfish.
"There was, uh-huh uh-huh, no sign, I'm sorry, Messer Monkfish…"
Monkfish stood. His clothes were dry enough, so he began to dress himself.
"And where were the Order?" he fulminated, "Where were the Ministry?"
"Our friends on the boat, were they different? Different skin, perhaps, different faith, different in who or how they loved. Labelled as 'the other'. As though labels help. They were fleeing persecution, only to find persecution waiting for them here in England, a land grown rich on taking from other countries, steeped in blood of Empire.
"Throughout history, the greatest empires were the ones that welcomed strangers. What made Rome unique in the ancient World? Anyone could become a citizen, that's what.
"Empires grow on open doors. Oh, you need some spark of native dynamism; a misplaced sense of destiny; not a small share of undisguised avarice. But for any success Empire needs people.
"From Mongolia to Britannia to America and those huddled masses.
"But then the spark goes out. The destiny lies unfulfilled. Empire withers and dies. But still the avarice remains, and, with it, wounded pride, and confusion and frustration and anger.
"That is when they turn inward and selfish, roll up the drawbridge, slam the gates, blame the other. Keep out the very people who made you great in the first place. The same lies coming around again – be afraid, they are coming for your country, they are coming for your children, they are coming for you."
"Mr Monkfish," I was moved to speak, "is there not anything we can do?"
"Would you have me tear down the temples of the Ministry? Be the end of their World? Say but the word and 'tis done."
Settling his jacket, he drew out the tarot deck once more, cut once, and turned over the Tower Struck By Lightning.
All at once, I realised that I was weeping. And Monkfish stepped over at once, wiping my tears with his thumbs.
"Oh, my dear…" he began.
But I pushed him aside, and snatched up my dress, trying to cover my nakedness.
"Just look at me," I said, angry, humiliated, bitter, "I look a sight. It's shameful."
"Shame? No," he demurred. "Shame was the weapon they used against her, against the Queen of the Night.
"Shame is a stain on your purity. Oh, so many ways to be impure. Particularly for a woman. Every thought, every glance, every touch, every month when the bleeding comes. And impurity, impiety, that requires forgiveness, forgiveness which lies in the hands of the priest. That is the power of the patriarchy.
"They use shame to label us outsiders. They teach us that our bodies are shame; that our sex is shame; that sex for pleasure is shame; that our skin or our beliefs or who we love is shame. They use shame to make us weak.
"Shame is the first thought-crime. So much easier to control us when we police our own prisons inside our own heads.
"Keep the population labouring so hard for redemption that they have no time for revolution; blame the outsiders, whom the rest are taught to fear, on whom the rest can take revenge.
"Love… love cannot be allowed…
"Deviate in any way from the norm, and you are labelled a deviant. As though labels help. Step outside the rules of master and servant, pious and pagan, man and woman, one man one woman, what is a man, what is a woman, as dictated by the priest at birth, and you are – in memory of those medieval monks – demonised.
"We are ruled by the shameless, who would use shame to rule over us. And shame is a poor master. Never surrender to shame."
"Oh, Mr Monkfish," I said, "however can I not?"
"Brave heart, dear Pandora. Remember Lillith. Lillith would not submit. The night covers all sins. The night is when we take revenge.
"We need no priests to forgive. We need no gods, no first movers, no creators to whom we are beholden. Remember 'cogito ego sum'. We can deduce it all from nothing. Ex nihilo.
"The night is mother to us all."
