The Great Bridge Builder

Part Five

Building the Bridge

 

Over the perpetual evolution of human consciousness, which is stamping itself upon the transformation of language, the spirit of poetry hovers, forever unable to alight. It is only when we are lifted above that transformation, so that we behold it as present movement, that our startled souls feel the little pat and the throbbing, feathery warmth, which tell us that she has perched. It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres.

 

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction.

 

 

 

Now that we have reached the end, for today, of our creative journey with the Inklings, can we begin, perhaps, to find a path to articulate what we have written so far? Is there a way in which the work that we have carried out in their company can be blended together to form what might, with time and luck, become a coherent, integrated whole?

 

It would be terrific, of course, if we could shout out an unreserved and uninhibited 'yes'. But what counts more is that our writing today gives us a springboard for further imaginative exploration and that it propels us along on our creative vocation, with the Inklings continuing to serve as exemplars and inspirations ...

 

"Julie shuddered and flung her head back to the sky, letting the rain and light flow through and over her. She shook her hair, breathed in the city for the last time and slung her bag over her shoulder. The voice of Edinburgh Waverley cut through the mist once more: "Polmont, Falkirk High, Glasgow Queen Street."

 

Julie smiled, turned up her collar and walked towards the station, her big brown eyes incandescent with invisible fire ... "



The Great Bridge Builder

Part Four

The Transfigured World 

 



 

"Over here," Jonathan said, and took his friend round to the other side of the room. A second easel was standing back to back with the first, also holding a canvas, but this uncovered. Richard set himself to look at it.

 

It was a part of London after a raid - he thought, of the city proper, for a shape on the right reminded him dimly of Saint Paul's. At the back were a few houses, but the rest of the painting was a wide stretch of desolation. The time was late dawn; the sky was clear; the light came, it seemed at first, from the yet unrisen sun behind the single group of houses. The light was the most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting and almost to dominate the room itself ...

 

It was everywhere in the painting - concealed in houses and in their projected shadows, lying in ambush in the cathedral, opening in the rubble, vivid in the vividness of the sky. It would everywhere have burst through, had it not chosen rather to be shaped into forms, and to restrain and change its greatness in the colours of those lesser limits. It was universal, and lived.

 

"It's far and away the best thing you've done," said Richard at length. "It's almost the only thing you've done. It's like a modern Creation of the World, or at least a Creation of London."

 

 

"Any object, intensely regarded," writes James Joyce in Ulysees, "may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods." The statement is quoted in the story by Buck Mulligan. Leopold Bloom, thinking of his domestic problem, is sitting in a pub looking intently at the red triangle on the label of a bottle of Bass ale. When someone starts to disturb Bloom, Mulligan stops him, saying, "Preserve a druid silence. His soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access, ... " etc.

 

*******

 

Upon arrival in the Otherworld, at the end of our long and arduous voyage to the West, it may actually turn out that we realise we haven't gone anywhere at all. We find ourselves back at home instead, where we've always been, but a home transfigured and transformed, a home seen with fresh, newly baptised (or re-baptised) eyes. What we thought was commonplace we now see for what it really is - miraculous. The beauty had been there all along, but our perception had become too dulled to recognise it ...

 

"I have been here all the time," says Aslan to Lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, "but you have just made me visible."

 

*******

 

In the above extract from Charles Williams' All Hallows' Eve, Richard sees London transformed - made magical and mysterious in Jonathan's painting. The picture is rooted firmly in the everyday, with houses and rubble, as well as a cathedral. Yet the scene is transfigured and made more than the sum of its parts by a rich, resonant inner light, charged with meaning, pattern and spiritual significance. In my own fictional meditation on this passage:

 

"The painting to the right centred on a mighty domed building crowned with a silver cross. Alongside it were clustered a variety of smaller constructions in red, brown and gold. Julie saw a river in the foreground. Men in flat caps were standing on boats. The sun was a small flat disc.

Julie felt enthralled by the quality of light in the picture, a light emanating not from the sun but from inside the painting itself. The artist had somehow woven it into the texture of the canvas, this wartime dawn pushing up from within, light pulsating through church and school, bank and shop, cathedral, sky and water."

 

*******

 

Do we think it possible then to imagine for ourselves a world where every brick, lamp-post and blade of grass might signify something, and where everything and everyone we see and meet possesses a deeper, wider resonance ("You have never met a mere mortal," as Lewis wrote), while at the same time continuing to be simply him, her or itself?

 

Can we imagine a solid, tangible world filled with what Joyce called 'Epiphanies' and freighted with an underlying sense of mystery and magic? What would such a frame of things look like? What would be its sights? Its sounds? Its smells?

 

 

 

 An image from Andrei Tarkovsky's film, 'Nostalghia' (1981)

 

The Great Bridge Builder

Part Three

Only Connect

 

 

 

 

What they were seeing may be hard to believe when you read it in print, but it was almost as hard to believe when you saw it happening. The things in the picture were moving. It didn't look at all like a cinema either; the colours were too real and clean and out-of-doors for that. Down went the prow of the ship into the wave and up went a great shock of spray. And then up went the wave behind her, and her stern and her deck became visible for the first time, and then disappeared as the next wave came to meet her and the bows went up again. At the same moment an exercise book which had been lying beside Edmund on the bed flapped, rose and sailed through the air to the wall behind him, and Lucy felt all her hair whipping round her face as it does on a windy day. And this was a windy day; but the wind was blowing out of the picture towards them. And suddenly with the wind came the noises - the swishing of waves and the slap of water against the ship's sides and the creaking and the overall high steady roar of air and water. But it was the smell, the wild, briny smell, which really convinced Lucy that she was not dreaming.

 

C.S Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

 

 

 

 

The picture on the wall, in this passage, serves as a bridge between the everyday world of the house and bedroom and the Otherworldly locale of Narnia.

 

Reflecting on this, can we begin to think of people, places and things in our own lives that might, or might once have, performed a similar function? How can we start to forge a connection and rapport between our day to day lives and jobs, and our imaginative, creative and spiritual aspirations?

 

Aslan, at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, refers to himself as the 'Great Bridge Builder'. What, who and where are our own bridges?

How might we set about finding those magic, intuitive keys that straddle both inner and outer worlds? Is there anything or anyone close at hand that could possibly span both levels of experience and bridge the chasm that David Gascoyne, and so many other sensitive men and women, have found such a source of distress?

 

*******

 

In the passage above, the children enter Narnia through the modus operandi of a painting on a wall. What paintings, frames or doorways might we bring to imaginative life to restore the connection between the separate parts of ourselves, as well with the Divine? It's far from easy, as we know, to harmonise the material and the spiritual worlds so that they work in concert rather than chafing against each other. But this is where the gift of imagination can and does help.

 

Maybe we could visualise something like the entrance to an underground train station - prosaic and mysterious at the same time. Or the strange, suggestive arches formed by poplar trees swaying together in the wind. It could be a wardrobe door, of course. Or a cubby-hole. Or an unexpectedly discovered flight of stairs, spiralling down before you, a glimmer of golden light peeping up around the corners from the bottom far away. Or it might be a person. Someone you know well. Or a total stranger. Or an in between person - a stranger who seems somehow familiar, someone who reminds us of something in ourselves and in the world that we think we have forgotten ...

 

Until our vision is cleansed. And we know that the Otherworld has been with us all the time.

 

A bridge with a wider realm of depth, meaning, pattern and purpose has been established. Our senses and imaginations blossom anew - out of the depths - and the world feels so much more nuanced and multi-layered than we had previously imagination. 

 

This transformation doesn't make things easy. Far from it. The possibilities opening up to us now are liberating - undoubtedly - but frightening as well. Especially when we've been living in Plato's cave for a while. But a corner has been turned. The wasteland has been re-animated. Things will be different from now on. In short, as Julie finds in The Red Diamond, we have come alive ...

 

"And Julie's soul was filled with sadness.'It's all my fault. There's nothing I can do. Nowhere I can go. Oh, it's all so hopeless.'

 

Then came a change; sharp and subtle. A girl of around her own age appeared to her left, springing almost supernaturally from the far wall, looking left and right with darting glances like a mythical hind. Her hair was short and brown. Her red jacket and black skirt were striking in the slow-burn slumber of the street-lights. Julie smelt the Chanel No. 5 in the damp air. Something stirred and quickened in her throat as the strange apparition sprinted for the station in long, graceful strides.

 

Julie watched her slip away from sight, up the wet and shiny stairway, into the station's bottomless depth and mystery ... "

 

*******

 

Once we have our bridge, or our 'wood' between the worlds, can we then go on to think of ways we can combine and interfuse the two, so that this, supposedly 'mundane' level of reality, becomes as freighted with the numinous as Tir-na-Nog, the Isles of the Blessed or Avalon itself?

 

With the help of C.S Lewis's friend, Charles Williams, this is exactly what we will be exploring in the Part 4 of 'The Great Bridge Builder'.