Piranesi(38)

Myers said that at one point he had seen the lips of Marepool III move but he had not heard any words.

Myers was not prosecuted.

Arne-Sayles himself never wrote about the ritual he used with Marepool III. In the late seventies he was in any case changing his ideas. He was less concerned with the content of lost beliefs and powers and more interested in where they had gone. Based on his earlier idea that the lost beliefs and powers constituted a sort of energy, he said this energy could not have simply winked out of existence; it must have gone somewhere. This was the beginning of his most famous idea, the Theory of Other Worlds. Simply put, it said that when knowledge or power went out of this world it did two things: first, it created another place; and second, it left a hole, a door between this world where it had once existed and the new place it had made.

Picture it, said Arne-Sayles, like rainwater lying on a field. The next day the field is dry. Where has the rainwater gone? Some has evaporated into the air. Some has been drunk by plants and animals. But some has seeped down into the earth. This happens over and over again. For decades, centuries, millennia, the water, seeping down, makes a crack in the rock under the earth; then it wears the crack into a hole; then it wears the hole into a cave entrance – a kind of door in fact. Beyond the door the water keeps flowing and it hollows out caverns and carves out pillars. Somewhere, said Arne-Sayles, there must be a passage, a door between us and wherever magic had gone. It might be very small. It might not be entirely stable. Like the entrance to an underground cave it might be in danger of collapse. But it would be there. And if it was there, it was possible to find it.

In 1979 he published his third, most famous book, The Half-Seen Door, in which he discussed these ideas of other worlds and described how, after a certain amount of struggle, he entered one of them.

Extract from The Half-Seen Door by Laurence Arne-Sayles

Once you have found the door, it is always with you. You simply look for it and there it is. Finding it the first time is where the difficulty lies. Following the insights that Addedomarus had given me, what I eventually concluded was that it was necessary to cleanse one’s vision in order to see the door. To do this one must return to the place, the geographical location where one last believed the world to be fluid, responsive to oneself. In short one must return to the last place in which one had stood before the iron hand of modern rationality gripped one’s mind.

For me this was the garden of the house where I grew up in Lyme Regis. Unfortunately by 1979 the house had gone through several hands. The then-owners (dull exemplars of the prevailing mediocrity) were unsympathetic to my request to be allowed to stand in the garden for several hours performing an Ancient Celtic ritual. No matter. I discovered from a friendly milkman when they would be taking their holiday, returned at that time and ‘broke in’.

The day I entered the garden was cold, rainy, grey. I stood on the lawn in the pouring rain, surrounded by the roses my mother had planted (though now forced to share their beds with flowers of insufferable vulgarity). Behind the rain were masses of colour – white, apricot, pink, gold and red.

I focussed on my memory of being a child in that garden, of the last time when both the world and my mind had been unfettered. I had stood before the roses in my blue wool romper suit. I gripped a metal soldier in my hand, his paint somewhat peeling.

To my surprise I discovered that the act of remembering was extremely potent. My mind was immediately freed, my vision cleansed. The long, complicated ritual that I had prepared became completely unnecessary. I no longer saw or felt the rain. I was standing in the clear, strong sunlight of early childhood. The colours of the roses were supernaturally bright.

All around me doors into other worlds began appearing but I knew the one I wanted, the one into which everything forgotten flows. The edges of that door were frayed and worn by the passage of old ideas leaving this world.

The door was perfectly visible now. It was in a gap between the Antoine Rivoire and the Coquette des Blanches. I stepped through.

I was standing in a vast chamber with stone floor and walls of marble. I was surrounded by eight massive statues, each one different, each depicting a minotaur. A great marble staircase rose up to a great height and descended to an equally disorientating depth. A strange thundering – as of a sea – filled my ears …

I remain calm

THIRD ENTRY FOR THE NINETEENTH DAY OF THE NINTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS

The description of Laurence Arne-Sayles’s theories contained in my Journals corresponds closely to what the Prophet himself said. (More evidence that they are one and the same person!) I was pleased to rediscover the name Addedomarus, and to have its correct spelling. This was the name that the Other called on in his ritual three months ago! I feel certain that the Other learnt of Addedomarus from Laurence Arne-Sayles. (‘All his ideas are mine,’ the Prophet said.)

One sentence puzzles me: The world was constantly speaking to Ancient Man. I do not understand why this sentence is in the past tense. The World still speaks to me every day.

I believe I am better at reading these Journal entries than I was at first. I remain calm even when faced with the most obscure language. Words and phrases that pulsate with mysterious energy – words such as ‘Manchester’ and ‘police station’ – no longer discompose me. I seem, almost unconsciously, to have fallen into a habit of treating these entries as if they were the writings of an oracle or seer, someone in a frenzied or inspired state who imparts knowledge, albeit in a strange and not easily processed form.