Chapter 34: A serpent in Paradise
Two days before at this hour Con had sat in the sanctuary on Overton hill; now he sat in the shade of a great sarsen stone, one of a pair that marked the opposite end of the Avebury complex; if the sanctuary was the serpent’s head then Con now sat at its tail, beside Adam, a small distance from Eve, the last remaining stones of what had been called the Beckhampton Avenue.
He had left Shen outside the museum. The memories of Melissa had upset him; he needed time alone to think, and so he had made his excuses and left.
The sun was high, and there was little breeze. The cool of the early day had lifted, and as he walked along the newly mown cornfields swifts screeched overhead. The main circle had been busy; a few tourist coaches had arrived, and Wolf’s pagan friends had continued their gathering – having eaten and drunk at the pub they had gathered in the southern half of the circle where the great obelisk had once stood and were drumming and singing. It was this that had driven Con to walk the opposite direction; the fields running along the former Avenue were deserted; save for Adam and Eve no single stone remained of this half of the avenue, hence its unpopularity with visitors; and to his shame Con in all his visits here had not made this particular trip.
Adam was the largest of the two stones, the last remaining of a four-strong rectangular cove of stones that had marked the end of the Avenue, while Eve, a smaller pillar, was part of the avenue – and ironically, thought Con, was of the male pillar type stone of which half the Avenue consisted, the other being the vulva-shaped diamond stones.
Man and woman, he though - that divine pairing, the great opposites in the perennial war, the battle of the sexes. It’s that war which dominates most people’s lives, he thought, nestling into the stone trying to get comfortable in its shade, not good and evil, life and death. Here, set in stone, walking, no, dancing along the avenue, it was celebrated: the great war of misunderstanding and the interplay of love and lust that drove the creation of the human species. Women on one side and men on the other.
He sat upright and rolled himself a cigarette.
Are the stones paired or opposites, he wondered. But how was he supposed to know how Neolithic man had thought? Were the great rows of stones humans or gods?
Con scrabbled round his pockets for his lighter – an ergonomic smooth silver one that had been a gift from his sister. He took a deep drag and exhaled. On the side of the lighter, engraved, was the word Puck.
‘You still in there, Puck?’
Her voice.
A lifetime ago.
And his grumbling return: ‘I told you not to call me that.’
Puck.
It had been a different Con. Yet here he was, walking the same places, seeing the same vistas, through the same eyes, yet not his. Theirs. Over twenty years before.
Stepping off the train at Bristol, with their rucksacks – his weighed down with their tent – hers with her mandolin strapped to the back; excitedly finding the bus that would take them to Glastonbury. Gods – it had been magical – that summer between their O and A level exams – 17 years old, and full of the promise that youth offered, and travelling – having picked out the sites that Melissa had identified as ‘magical’; Glastonbury first, then they’d go to Stonehenge and then Avebury.
It came to him now in flashes of memory – the first enchanting view of Glastonbury Tor rising like a pyramid over the slate-grey levels, faded with morning mist; the shops, heady with incense, and tie-die clothes – a strange aesthetic of east meets folk-soaked west, that Con found too rich for his tastes. Then to sit on the Tor, that castle of winds, back to the tower, watching the sun go down – long-haired hippies on each side, chanting, drumming; it felt almost laughable, like a joke – someone’s idea of a 60’s fancy-dress party…
‘The drums…’ one man had said to him, ‘just belong here, you know?’.
No. He didn’t know. He felt awkward; yet then the rhythmic thumping took him somewhere beyond thought, and he realised he did know. And the words of a poem Mel had taught him sang out in his head
I am a stag of seven tines
I am a flood across a plain
I am a wind on a deep lake…
The night before – having packed their gear, almost nauseous with excitement, she had spun on the spot, saying how they’d set up a shrine to Lord Frith (she’d been reading Watership Down) on the Tor… ‘and to Lady Moonlight… and you’ll be Puck and I’ll be Titania!’ she laughed.
‘The drums, Puck!’ she winked at him, just 24 hours later, gilded by the setting sun, ‘they just belong here, Man!!!’ and he could see she was in her element.
Puck and Titania. Two curly-haired teens, wide-eyed, one pair dark, the other blue, walking from sacred hill to sacred well; and ever, in her clutches, a copy of Robert Graves’s ‘The White Goddess’ – her Bible, as she called it. Her magical tome; a book of enchantments – a grimoire, and for him too – a much longed-for desire, a muse like those that had inspired Graves; teenage desires pent-up through shyness and insularity and channelled into an image of ideal femininity, and given voice as he looked skywards, neck cricked back, taking in the stars
Ceridwen; Inanna; Ishtar; Isis; Freyja; Danu
That night, in Avalon, the Tor now invisible against the darkness, she had sat by the gas-lantern and played a song she’d written to the lyrics of Graves’s translation of the Song of Amergin.
I am a stag of Seven Tines…
Three years later it was being played on Radio One. The White Goddess, her first properly recorded studio album, while not top ten, had, nevertheless, become a minor cult-classic. Con was in the final year of his University degree in astronomy; but things had changed. And to think there had been a time when he’d dreamed of a goddess and a river of milk and seen it as a sign from Her… Jesus! How fucking mad had that been?
When had it changed? There was the academic pressure, for a start. The prohibition against making a statement that couldn’t be considered a proven fact. Also the sense that he had no idea who he was as an individual, so that now, separated from Mel for the first time in their lives, he felt a need to mark out his own territory and to proclaim his individuality. He had always been ‘one of the twins’ and now the very mention of that sickened him. But mostly it was a sudden sense he had had, one evening, walking in the woods near his digs – a sense of despair, of feeling he was born thousands of years too late… of hating modernity; of feeling he didn’t fit – that everyone else was in life and he was just an observer. He felt a great yearning for a past he’d never lived. He felt such isolation, watching his contemporaries swagger about within life with no difficulty; talking about sport and music and films, and their conquests… and he felt mute; the poems he’d learned with his sister offered no currency in that world, offered no advantage in finding his own goddess of flesh and blood.
That awful night he thought about leaving – leaving university – perhaps even leaving life… but caught himself in the act; a cold sweat flooded his body and he suddenly saw himself as this pale, repressed nobody; as hovering on the edge of madness, and in an act of despair he threw his past from him as if it were a venomous snake. At the same time, he threw himself into life, into modern music and all the delights of materialism. Mel didn’t like the change, calling him an ‘angry young man’ but he felt solid, suddenly, like he had become visible, real. His old books locked away, replaced by books on science.
One evening of the summer holidays when they were back home, their many rows reached a head.
‘But it’s bollocks, Graves made it all up.’ Con was saying, wagging a finger at the booklet of notes that Melissa had had printed for the inside of her White Goddess CD.
‘You don’t know that.’ She retorted, hurt.
‘He did – it’s all misinterpretation and bullshit; he’s making his own myths. It doesn’t mean it’s not valid as a system… it’s just not true.’
‘What is truth?’ she pouted.
‘Not. This.’ He said.
‘Puck…’
‘Don’t fucking call me that.’
‘Why are you being such an arsehole?’ she shouted, hurt.
‘I’m not. I just don’t believe in all this poetic, mystic shit anymore. I’m not a kid. It’s all airy-fairy bollocks. It’s just not true. It’s like all this goddess rubbish…’
‘Have you forgotten your dream?’ she said.
‘It was just a dream, Mel. I read an article on the whole 60s goddess movement – Graves, Gimbutas, the works – it’s all based on a phoney premise – there’s no evidence for some Great Goddess. It’s feminist propaganda.’
‘Then what are all those Neolithic female figurines of?’ she countered.
‘They’re not all female – and they could be anything… dolls…I don’t know, prehistoric porn…’ despite his fervour he felt odd hearing these academic statements pouring out from his own mouth – statements he’d baulked against when first he’d read them. And here he was, their words coming out of his mouth. But surely they were better than lies, than false evidence?
‘Well maybe they’re gods and goddesses…shared, like Adam and Eve…’
‘Except Adam and Eve…’
‘I bloody know Con!’
Con shrugged. ‘It’s just that you look at Indo-European myth and it’s pretty much creator gods, all the way down.’
‘Well it would be, wouldn’t it? It’s HIS-story Con, written by the victors…’
Con raised his eyes at her comment. ‘Oh please, Mel…HIS-story, really?! So, they just erased the goddess from the old myths? That’s very convenient...’
Mel shot him a glare ‘Yes, I think that’s precisely what happened. And why not?! You’ve managed it…’
He baulked at that, remembering three postcards of goddesses he’d bought on holiday in Greece, and put above his bed – long since removed and shoved into a cupboard, where he’d flinch each time he’d chance upon them, a twinge of shame, a reminder of a naive and wasted time.
She had lent forward and tried to touch his cheek, her own cheeks stained with her tears.
‘You still in there, Puck?’
Those times passed, and Mel and Con learned to get along again, at first by knowing what not to discuss, but later through accepting that their differences didn’t mean they didn’t still have that shared sense of ‘twinness’ they had always shared; one thing remained changed, though – she never called him Puck again. As he grew older, he mellowed. That anger that had been his attempt to grasp life with both hands, a life that had threatened to slip away unlived, faded as he felt more at home with normal modern life; he had relationships, jobs, and felt the easy mediocrity of his peers consume him. He no longer felt estranged, nor on some manic trajectory that would have set him among the stars, probably on antipsychotics or living in a shed in the woods with a gaggle of stray dogs.
Then came their visit to Bryn Celli Ddu. No longer irritated by her kookiness, he had, for a moment under that October sky, felt a glimmer of their early years, and instead of flinging it away from him like poison, had enjoyed the feeling, like one might linger over an old cherished photograph. But in the days that followed he had felt a change occurring; his own research, his beloved science, had started to illuminate facts about the site and the possible lore associated with it that seemed to open wider that faintest of cracks in his façade that had first appeared the night in Bryn Celli. Like the secret enjoyment of a guilty pleasure, akin to re-reading a favourite childhood book, he had allowed waves of old feelings to wash over him; and it was all okay, he told himself, because this was science… his research was based in fact – and if it suggested, somehow, Mel’s precious White Goddess may have been associated with these sites, then he was happy for her… though bemused for himself. For the first time in years he allowed himself to think of the dream – once a signpost of belief – now a signpost to provable fact – an alignment with the midwinter sun, the archaeologically proven link between sun and horse in prehistoric iconography… and the image of the Milky Way, suggesting an alignment he could validate using plans and computer software.
Last spring he’d come back – back to Avebury, where, following their journey to Glastonbury as teenagers, they had arrived that glorious summer of ’88, walking the Avenue to the circle, marvelling at its size, a site, prior to the internet, they had only seen in old books. There, aiming to sleep the night in the circle, they had walked and walked, until they found themselves on the north-east part of the great bank, looking out over the circle, under a spray of stars – the summer night warm and without even a breeze; the earth was hard and cracked under Con’s fingers; the grass thin and parched.
‘Somewhere out there some poor woman is destined for you, Puck.’ Mel had said.
‘Charming!’ he’d scoffed, but inside he’d felt as if he’d inhaled a ball of pure happiness, that fizzed and sparked, and he’d lifted his eyes heavenwards and felt like crying with the joy of it.
None more blessed than the triple goddess He mouthed.
Coming back last year had been like a pilgrimage; an admission that something within him had altered; that the frosty, flint-hard Con had begun to thaw – and that somewhere, deep within, the wild-haired, open-eyed Puck might re-emerge, no longer afraid of not fitting in. For, he now reasoned, had not his disgust at modern life, his feeling of being at odds with his peers, originated in a genuine value judgement of western living that had reckoned it as lacking? Was not his baulking at the dull everyday life of his peers a visceral qualitative judgement – one he could not help but feel? As a teenager it had troubled him greatly, and he had thought the fault had lain within himself – but had not Melissa and himself, through their love of the old poems, just chanced on a better way of seeing the world – one that was animistic in character – almost mystic in its vision in which all was Holy, the trees, the birds, the rivers and streams. And to come back here, having resumed after over a decade’s break, his old vegetarian lifestyle, willing to look about him at stone, stream and star and see reflected in it, no, present within it, some unseen pattern, the hand of not pure scientific chance, but the cool, white hand of that goddess who had been lost to him… and to find her, or so it had seemed, in Shen…brave enough, now, to follow the demands of his soul, and not to run scared from an internal voice that demanded he be different…
Melissa had died. And Con had found himself cast from one extreme to another. Wishing, above all, to feel they might have been connected, that the old ways of thinking might be true – but being thrown again and again upon the spear of misery and doubt; of ‘truth’ that said, no, there was no connection, no meaning; she had died and he was implicated, if not directly, then indirectly in her death through acts not done rather than done. And the dream and the pursuit of its meaning had been but pipe-dream; a childish game, allowing his objectivity to slip out of some misguided sense of nostalgia. He hated himself. Hated all that seemed to remind him of these mistakes. He had lost a sister; he had lost his love and now, for the second time, he had lost himself, his true self: Puck; the wild-eyed boy who might dance under the stars. Lost, but not forever, he reasoned. Just trapped again, imprisoned, like the sun; trapped in the cave; crushed under the stone – and any sense of life and joy, trapped, gagging, in the throat, unable to be released, kept captive by circumstance and fear. Trapped in the coils of the flint-hard persona that Con had become.
I have forgotten how to just be me. And when I do feel him rising, I fight against it as one would fight down nausea; scared of what might emerge. I pull down the stones on my own head.
Suddenly he thought of the roughly clad men in the print in the restaurant, pulling ropes muddy with slimy dirt; sweating and cursing against the crude stones; it was an image at odds with the name of the two stones by which he sat – Adam and Eve; Eden, the place of creation, where the divine substance poured into the world – where the serpent bought wisdom, and where god walked in the cool of the day… paradise.
Con looked at Eve leaning in the afternoon haze. And I would have my Eve if ever she would want me; oh life! Sometimes the opposites were hard to bear; he imagined Shen dancing between himself and Hayden, in a long white robe, flowers in her long dark hair, flitting between the opposites; Hayden representing all that he previously had been, his words that night at the pub so easily could, just a couple of years ago, have been Con’s own. But which, amongst these opposites, Con asked, is the god, and which the demon? I see him as the bastard, the evil one – the serpent in paradise, but it is I who are static, whose life lies dead in me like a dried husk.
I, thought Con, am the serpent; I am Vritra.
Two days before at this hour Con had sat in the sanctuary on Overton hill; now he sat in the shade of a great sarsen stone, one of a pair that marked the opposite end of the Avebury complex; if the sanctuary was the serpent’s head then Con now sat at its tail, beside Adam, a small distance from Eve, the last remaining stones of what had been called the Beckhampton Avenue.
He had left Shen outside the museum. The memories of Melissa had upset him; he needed time alone to think, and so he had made his excuses and left.
The sun was high, and there was little breeze. The cool of the early day had lifted, and as he walked along the newly mown cornfields swifts screeched overhead. The main circle had been busy; a few tourist coaches had arrived, and Wolf’s pagan friends had continued their gathering – having eaten and drunk at the pub they had gathered in the southern half of the circle where the great obelisk had once stood and were drumming and singing. It was this that had driven Con to walk the opposite direction; the fields running along the former Avenue were deserted; save for Adam and Eve no single stone remained of this half of the avenue, hence its unpopularity with visitors; and to his shame Con in all his visits here had not made this particular trip.
Adam was the largest of the two stones, the last remaining of a four-strong rectangular cove of stones that had marked the end of the Avenue, while Eve, a smaller pillar, was part of the avenue – and ironically, thought Con, was of the male pillar type stone of which half the Avenue consisted, the other being the vulva-shaped diamond stones.
Man and woman, he though - that divine pairing, the great opposites in the perennial war, the battle of the sexes. It’s that war which dominates most people’s lives, he thought, nestling into the stone trying to get comfortable in its shade, not good and evil, life and death. Here, set in stone, walking, no, dancing along the avenue, it was celebrated: the great war of misunderstanding and the interplay of love and lust that drove the creation of the human species. Women on one side and men on the other.
He sat upright and rolled himself a cigarette.
Are the stones paired or opposites, he wondered. But how was he supposed to know how Neolithic man had thought? Were the great rows of stones humans or gods?
Con scrabbled round his pockets for his lighter – an ergonomic smooth silver one that had been a gift from his sister. He took a deep drag and exhaled. On the side of the lighter, engraved, was the word Puck.
‘You still in there, Puck?’
Her voice.
A lifetime ago.
And his grumbling return: ‘I told you not to call me that.’
Puck.
It had been a different Con. Yet here he was, walking the same places, seeing the same vistas, through the same eyes, yet not his. Theirs. Over twenty years before.
Stepping off the train at Bristol, with their rucksacks – his weighed down with their tent – hers with her mandolin strapped to the back; excitedly finding the bus that would take them to Glastonbury. Gods – it had been magical – that summer between their O and A level exams – 17 years old, and full of the promise that youth offered, and travelling – having picked out the sites that Melissa had identified as ‘magical’; Glastonbury first, then they’d go to Stonehenge and then Avebury.
It came to him now in flashes of memory – the first enchanting view of Glastonbury Tor rising like a pyramid over the slate-grey levels, faded with morning mist; the shops, heady with incense, and tie-die clothes – a strange aesthetic of east meets folk-soaked west, that Con found too rich for his tastes. Then to sit on the Tor, that castle of winds, back to the tower, watching the sun go down – long-haired hippies on each side, chanting, drumming; it felt almost laughable, like a joke – someone’s idea of a 60’s fancy-dress party…
‘The drums…’ one man had said to him, ‘just belong here, you know?’.
No. He didn’t know. He felt awkward; yet then the rhythmic thumping took him somewhere beyond thought, and he realised he did know. And the words of a poem Mel had taught him sang out in his head
I am a stag of seven tines
I am a flood across a plain
I am a wind on a deep lake…
The night before – having packed their gear, almost nauseous with excitement, she had spun on the spot, saying how they’d set up a shrine to Lord Frith (she’d been reading Watership Down) on the Tor… ‘and to Lady Moonlight… and you’ll be Puck and I’ll be Titania!’ she laughed.
‘The drums, Puck!’ she winked at him, just 24 hours later, gilded by the setting sun, ‘they just belong here, Man!!!’ and he could see she was in her element.
Puck and Titania. Two curly-haired teens, wide-eyed, one pair dark, the other blue, walking from sacred hill to sacred well; and ever, in her clutches, a copy of Robert Graves’s ‘The White Goddess’ – her Bible, as she called it. Her magical tome; a book of enchantments – a grimoire, and for him too – a much longed-for desire, a muse like those that had inspired Graves; teenage desires pent-up through shyness and insularity and channelled into an image of ideal femininity, and given voice as he looked skywards, neck cricked back, taking in the stars
Ceridwen; Inanna; Ishtar; Isis; Freyja; Danu
That night, in Avalon, the Tor now invisible against the darkness, she had sat by the gas-lantern and played a song she’d written to the lyrics of Graves’s translation of the Song of Amergin.
I am a stag of Seven Tines…
Three years later it was being played on Radio One. The White Goddess, her first properly recorded studio album, while not top ten, had, nevertheless, become a minor cult-classic. Con was in the final year of his University degree in astronomy; but things had changed. And to think there had been a time when he’d dreamed of a goddess and a river of milk and seen it as a sign from Her… Jesus! How fucking mad had that been?
When had it changed? There was the academic pressure, for a start. The prohibition against making a statement that couldn’t be considered a proven fact. Also the sense that he had no idea who he was as an individual, so that now, separated from Mel for the first time in their lives, he felt a need to mark out his own territory and to proclaim his individuality. He had always been ‘one of the twins’ and now the very mention of that sickened him. But mostly it was a sudden sense he had had, one evening, walking in the woods near his digs – a sense of despair, of feeling he was born thousands of years too late… of hating modernity; of feeling he didn’t fit – that everyone else was in life and he was just an observer. He felt a great yearning for a past he’d never lived. He felt such isolation, watching his contemporaries swagger about within life with no difficulty; talking about sport and music and films, and their conquests… and he felt mute; the poems he’d learned with his sister offered no currency in that world, offered no advantage in finding his own goddess of flesh and blood.
That awful night he thought about leaving – leaving university – perhaps even leaving life… but caught himself in the act; a cold sweat flooded his body and he suddenly saw himself as this pale, repressed nobody; as hovering on the edge of madness, and in an act of despair he threw his past from him as if it were a venomous snake. At the same time, he threw himself into life, into modern music and all the delights of materialism. Mel didn’t like the change, calling him an ‘angry young man’ but he felt solid, suddenly, like he had become visible, real. His old books locked away, replaced by books on science.
One evening of the summer holidays when they were back home, their many rows reached a head.
‘But it’s bollocks, Graves made it all up.’ Con was saying, wagging a finger at the booklet of notes that Melissa had had printed for the inside of her White Goddess CD.
‘You don’t know that.’ She retorted, hurt.
‘He did – it’s all misinterpretation and bullshit; he’s making his own myths. It doesn’t mean it’s not valid as a system… it’s just not true.’
‘What is truth?’ she pouted.
‘Not. This.’ He said.
‘Puck…’
‘Don’t fucking call me that.’
‘Why are you being such an arsehole?’ she shouted, hurt.
‘I’m not. I just don’t believe in all this poetic, mystic shit anymore. I’m not a kid. It’s all airy-fairy bollocks. It’s just not true. It’s like all this goddess rubbish…’
‘Have you forgotten your dream?’ she said.
‘It was just a dream, Mel. I read an article on the whole 60s goddess movement – Graves, Gimbutas, the works – it’s all based on a phoney premise – there’s no evidence for some Great Goddess. It’s feminist propaganda.’
‘Then what are all those Neolithic female figurines of?’ she countered.
‘They’re not all female – and they could be anything… dolls…I don’t know, prehistoric porn…’ despite his fervour he felt odd hearing these academic statements pouring out from his own mouth – statements he’d baulked against when first he’d read them. And here he was, their words coming out of his mouth. But surely they were better than lies, than false evidence?
‘Well maybe they’re gods and goddesses…shared, like Adam and Eve…’
‘Except Adam and Eve…’
‘I bloody know Con!’
Con shrugged. ‘It’s just that you look at Indo-European myth and it’s pretty much creator gods, all the way down.’
‘Well it would be, wouldn’t it? It’s HIS-story Con, written by the victors…’
Con raised his eyes at her comment. ‘Oh please, Mel…HIS-story, really?! So, they just erased the goddess from the old myths? That’s very convenient...’
Mel shot him a glare ‘Yes, I think that’s precisely what happened. And why not?! You’ve managed it…’
He baulked at that, remembering three postcards of goddesses he’d bought on holiday in Greece, and put above his bed – long since removed and shoved into a cupboard, where he’d flinch each time he’d chance upon them, a twinge of shame, a reminder of a naive and wasted time.
She had lent forward and tried to touch his cheek, her own cheeks stained with her tears.
‘You still in there, Puck?’
Those times passed, and Mel and Con learned to get along again, at first by knowing what not to discuss, but later through accepting that their differences didn’t mean they didn’t still have that shared sense of ‘twinness’ they had always shared; one thing remained changed, though – she never called him Puck again. As he grew older, he mellowed. That anger that had been his attempt to grasp life with both hands, a life that had threatened to slip away unlived, faded as he felt more at home with normal modern life; he had relationships, jobs, and felt the easy mediocrity of his peers consume him. He no longer felt estranged, nor on some manic trajectory that would have set him among the stars, probably on antipsychotics or living in a shed in the woods with a gaggle of stray dogs.
Then came their visit to Bryn Celli Ddu. No longer irritated by her kookiness, he had, for a moment under that October sky, felt a glimmer of their early years, and instead of flinging it away from him like poison, had enjoyed the feeling, like one might linger over an old cherished photograph. But in the days that followed he had felt a change occurring; his own research, his beloved science, had started to illuminate facts about the site and the possible lore associated with it that seemed to open wider that faintest of cracks in his façade that had first appeared the night in Bryn Celli. Like the secret enjoyment of a guilty pleasure, akin to re-reading a favourite childhood book, he had allowed waves of old feelings to wash over him; and it was all okay, he told himself, because this was science… his research was based in fact – and if it suggested, somehow, Mel’s precious White Goddess may have been associated with these sites, then he was happy for her… though bemused for himself. For the first time in years he allowed himself to think of the dream – once a signpost of belief – now a signpost to provable fact – an alignment with the midwinter sun, the archaeologically proven link between sun and horse in prehistoric iconography… and the image of the Milky Way, suggesting an alignment he could validate using plans and computer software.
Last spring he’d come back – back to Avebury, where, following their journey to Glastonbury as teenagers, they had arrived that glorious summer of ’88, walking the Avenue to the circle, marvelling at its size, a site, prior to the internet, they had only seen in old books. There, aiming to sleep the night in the circle, they had walked and walked, until they found themselves on the north-east part of the great bank, looking out over the circle, under a spray of stars – the summer night warm and without even a breeze; the earth was hard and cracked under Con’s fingers; the grass thin and parched.
‘Somewhere out there some poor woman is destined for you, Puck.’ Mel had said.
‘Charming!’ he’d scoffed, but inside he’d felt as if he’d inhaled a ball of pure happiness, that fizzed and sparked, and he’d lifted his eyes heavenwards and felt like crying with the joy of it.
None more blessed than the triple goddess He mouthed.
Coming back last year had been like a pilgrimage; an admission that something within him had altered; that the frosty, flint-hard Con had begun to thaw – and that somewhere, deep within, the wild-haired, open-eyed Puck might re-emerge, no longer afraid of not fitting in. For, he now reasoned, had not his disgust at modern life, his feeling of being at odds with his peers, originated in a genuine value judgement of western living that had reckoned it as lacking? Was not his baulking at the dull everyday life of his peers a visceral qualitative judgement – one he could not help but feel? As a teenager it had troubled him greatly, and he had thought the fault had lain within himself – but had not Melissa and himself, through their love of the old poems, just chanced on a better way of seeing the world – one that was animistic in character – almost mystic in its vision in which all was Holy, the trees, the birds, the rivers and streams. And to come back here, having resumed after over a decade’s break, his old vegetarian lifestyle, willing to look about him at stone, stream and star and see reflected in it, no, present within it, some unseen pattern, the hand of not pure scientific chance, but the cool, white hand of that goddess who had been lost to him… and to find her, or so it had seemed, in Shen…brave enough, now, to follow the demands of his soul, and not to run scared from an internal voice that demanded he be different…
Melissa had died. And Con had found himself cast from one extreme to another. Wishing, above all, to feel they might have been connected, that the old ways of thinking might be true – but being thrown again and again upon the spear of misery and doubt; of ‘truth’ that said, no, there was no connection, no meaning; she had died and he was implicated, if not directly, then indirectly in her death through acts not done rather than done. And the dream and the pursuit of its meaning had been but pipe-dream; a childish game, allowing his objectivity to slip out of some misguided sense of nostalgia. He hated himself. Hated all that seemed to remind him of these mistakes. He had lost a sister; he had lost his love and now, for the second time, he had lost himself, his true self: Puck; the wild-eyed boy who might dance under the stars. Lost, but not forever, he reasoned. Just trapped again, imprisoned, like the sun; trapped in the cave; crushed under the stone – and any sense of life and joy, trapped, gagging, in the throat, unable to be released, kept captive by circumstance and fear. Trapped in the coils of the flint-hard persona that Con had become.
I have forgotten how to just be me. And when I do feel him rising, I fight against it as one would fight down nausea; scared of what might emerge. I pull down the stones on my own head.
Suddenly he thought of the roughly clad men in the print in the restaurant, pulling ropes muddy with slimy dirt; sweating and cursing against the crude stones; it was an image at odds with the name of the two stones by which he sat – Adam and Eve; Eden, the place of creation, where the divine substance poured into the world – where the serpent bought wisdom, and where god walked in the cool of the day… paradise.
Con looked at Eve leaning in the afternoon haze. And I would have my Eve if ever she would want me; oh life! Sometimes the opposites were hard to bear; he imagined Shen dancing between himself and Hayden, in a long white robe, flowers in her long dark hair, flitting between the opposites; Hayden representing all that he previously had been, his words that night at the pub so easily could, just a couple of years ago, have been Con’s own. But which, amongst these opposites, Con asked, is the god, and which the demon? I see him as the bastard, the evil one – the serpent in paradise, but it is I who are static, whose life lies dead in me like a dried husk.
I, thought Con, am the serpent; I am Vritra.