FOUR MEN - PROGRAMME FORASYMPHONY

FOUR MEN

PROGRAMME FOR A SYMPHONY

I

First Movement Don McCullin in Cambodia

II

Second Movement Edward Morgan Forster at Cambridge III

Third Movement Iain Clough on Annapurna IV

Fourth Movement Camilo Torres Restrepo of Colombia

I

Bandages swaithe my shattered legs The sheet is cool on my chest Everything is white now A red memory persists Suddenly consciousness became chaos shrapnel sounded in my legs the pain flashed for an instant and went black

A white sheet hides the damage that was me

I am an object One of the unlucky ones at last

They are photographing me as an item of interest to the casual viewer aesthetically satisfying in the contrast of surfaces

The smooth whiteness of the sheets

The tanned expanse of chest patterned with dark hair The bottles of blood the looping rubber tubes all the paraphernalia of the field hospital The dull eyes heavy with too much pain

I am the victim that is all

It was inevitable

A camera shutter clicks out the moments of my life and this time I am in focus

Tomorrow I shall be living again or dead again while other subjects move to the centre of the picture Other hands will operate the shutter It does not matter

The sheet is cool on my chest Alone again now they have gone am I alive with no camera to capture the minutes of my life Only my eyes revealed the pain I had suffered The eyes like the lens cannot lie

I have tried to behave well to fulfill my obligations The danger of my profession always with me if not in me resolved itself into an enigma Like Constable with his notebook I sketched out scenes in the notebook of my camera The landscapes of battle Then alone in the positive dark I sought to transform the horror into beauty Crucifixion into art

As the Rembrandt etching and drypoint achieves its last transfigured state in the highlights and shadows of the final picture I tried to capture the aesthetic of violent death

I have travelled with it for years Now it has visited me briefly and withdrawn again It is waiting at a distance by the foot of my bed just beyond my field of vision out of focus

Each photograph I take will bring it back to me clear and sharp I have seen it and recognised it One day it will come again and claim me for its own

Perhaps in some unknown May Or even tomorrow

But having lived with it for so long now it has visited me I know I can accept it Whatever my eyes may have shown my body has learned to accept The crystal plasma hangs above me feeding into my arm the life that seeps out from my legs The sheets are stained covering my wounds at my chest they are cool and white The pain will never stop Jesus Jesus all the suffering I have witnessed in my lifetime of moments all the pain and the death in the still calm newspaper prints I can record it all every blind atrocity can never alleviate any of it Nothing Nothing

There was a day when the sun shone when the sky was blue then a wind carrying clouds ruffled the empty grass-slope to a different texture in the moving shadows at my feet lay a drowned fledgling bony and fragile its feathers still wet with the night’s rain The pain will stop when I sleep In these cool white sheets oblivion takes one more print from my negative and fixes it

The red dream is over

White bandages cover my eyes Sleep creeps over me The real horror can begin

II

A clean white sheet lies before me on the desk

A clean white sheet

I cannot write

They visit me the young of three generations those who admire me usually admire me for the wrong reasons but they visit me and we talk in the soft Cambridge twilight When they ask me why I never wrote another novel I answer them obliquely I tell them to read the essays the political essays and the introductions

Seeing the impossibility of artistic development I speak of the importance of achievement the irrelevance of advance or decline

Do I know the answer myself There was a mountain ahead of me a mountain I could not find my way over could discern no pathway around discover no passage across The hoped for Arctic Summer did not come My heart sank in silence

When they leave me I sit alone with the empty sheet before me and watch the night filling the page Devils are of the north and poems can be written about them Novels can be written about them

It is peaceful in this secular retreat

Occasionally I can even forget The things for which I am admired the things I have so often said the liberal ideals I have propounded are only the things that all civilised men must feel there is nothing singular about them I have said them that is all

Yet they revere me as an infinitely wise old man They do not see the cul-de-sac Cambridge on a delightfully warm afternoon

The page remains empty I should not have written that word I should have known what Mahler knew should have understood what his rescoring of the sixth symphony tells me

Three blows of fate are tragic and music can be written about them

Novels can be written about them

But what was there left for me to say

after

boum

Seeing something vaguely beyond the echo of the ancient earth I was unable to say

exactly what Could not find my way past that dead sound

the

boum

boum

boum alive in the dark Cambridge night

the

still walking the town streets at midday

the

in the questions in the students’ eyes I would not lie

I wrote of the darkness that I saw

Yet not betraying my friends did I betray perhaps myself did I betray the echo of the boum reverberating still in the caves of my skull where it can never escape Not onto any paper

Did I betray the pale young son of Mrs. Moore The clean white sheet lies before me on the desk

Night has almost covered it

The unwritten corner remains unwritten

No flame enters my pen compelling it to write lighting the page I have done all they I could do gone as far as I could go I cannot do more

My soul is in the balance My life was of little importance so I hazarded my soul I have put my soul at risk Now the dark is here the night is upon me And I shall know

CAMBRIDGE 1970

III

Climbing onto my first wall as a child I knew that I should die somewhere high up in the mountains This distant grave this lonely sort of peace was already there invisibly in the rocks I clambered over

Tripping grazing my knees running crying home to my mother to be comforted not knowing I had stumbled over my own grave The winds blow high above me whistling on the mountains at night singing to my soul in a wild high language Carry indistinguishable words from the flapping cotton prayer-flags of the villages below that mutter in the darkness around me as they journey on to the distant peaks and the strange gods of their destination The snow lies always on the slope a soft white sheet that will never be trampled into mud The stones are piled on me A single cross Few people pass

Wreaths of blue mountain flowers wither in the sharp morning air This is how I wanted it or rather how I always knew that it would be lying here at peace with the souls of the mountain dead high high far from the murmuring crowd who shiver in cities huddled at the foot of every cliff counting out the minutes of their lives afraid of landslide of rockfall or avalanche

Afraid of every Act of God

Fear drove me to the mountains

The fear twisting their life-sick faces The fear in my mother’s eyes as she called to me to come down

Begging me not to go any higher Yorkshire became too constricting even high in the mountains too near the ground In Scotland the most challenging climbs grew mellower with the years less satisfactory The faces of the people were unhappy and tight

Only on the mountains looking down at the earth as from Olympus’ heights mankind appeared to be softer and happier less afraid

The men striding god-like beside me seemed to open out as we climbed their faces grew broader and clearer their eyes reflected the snow and the sky Even back in the world their eyes retained some glance some recognisable distance a glacial freedom I chose this death when I chose this life I chose this wild singing grave The streets of the town were heavy with slush I tramped in the muddy footprints of others following the chartered streets squelching in the disfigured snow remembering pure whiteness The road became a path and then a track and finally disappeared altogether The slope grew steeper Foothills turned slowly to mountains grass vanished amid broken stones patches of snow formed between the rocks White untrodden snow that will never be trampled into mud The air became thin and sharp Something called to me from above

I strained my neck looking up trying to see Climbing hand over hand feeling carefully for each secure foothold I thought of every step that I had taken in my lifetime of mountains how each had really been the last one yet somehow the first I closed my eyes All the blinding peaks were there ranged before me the climbed the unclimbed the never-to-be climbed I had conquered them all in the shutting of an eyelid The murmuring below had ceased The wind was singing in my ears The voice from above calling had become clearer

For the first time I could hear something I had half-heard all my life The mountain itself was talking to me When I fell with the avalanche I was once again a little boy knees grazed who would pick himself up and run crying home to his mother

To be comforted

IV

Where my body lay bleeding does not matter if an epitaph was written is of little importance my burial place immaterial

My body is of the earth of South America I am carried on the silk of spiders my soul travels like an underground stream to every corner of the land All injustice all evil and corruption feeling it shaking beneath their feet will tremble knowing it must spring from the cracks in the earth like a fountain in the desert

There can be no looking back My life was simple uncomplicated my death in itself equally so Together they rumble like distant thunder cannot be forgotten only occasionally ignored must one day break sweeping the earth in a violent storm directly overhead The house of the sun has been opened huge black birds carry forth the light

My life and death were unexceptional many men have travelled the same path before me each of us can only testify to the truth The truth of our Gethsemane

The Devil when he came came with no great miracles whispering of death in the desert of the self

I could turn no stones to bread could not save myself nor rule the earth in glory But in my moment of agony when the whole world seemed asleep unable to keep vigil beside me I prayed only that the cup might pass His prayer mine at last And accepting it freely rose from the ground in that first action already crucified As Jesus a child in the temple about His Father’s business was already crucified Afterwards it was easy the act of dying once begun moving in total surrender until the consummated gesture

History cannot falsify an image I was crucified in the jungle like Guevara with Christ beside me

Even the Church itself trembled

The death of the body a small sacrifice many men have offered their lives without Christ with Christ my forfeit there was little merit

My soul I had grown used to risking in the hazards of my vocation When suddenly in the night a light shone on my face between the leaves of the blowing branches and I knew that a man can only live risking body and soul both in every movement every gesture every moment of his life Only in this can the darkness be averted

Even my mother crying seemed far away I died for the future

Many men have died for the old order reconciled in the flesh

It is joyful to die for the life of the world that must come

For those people who trembling on the brink are given the Grace to drink by my death For the unborn grandchildren If they find my grave in some future age they will not find the debris of my mortal body My body I bequeathed to the earth They will discover only the clean white sheet that had been my shroud soaked with the blood of my wounds stained with the earth of my country If a wind billows it into the air let it be the mortal flag not of any earthly nation but emblem of our common immortality

If it is venerated by a world rejecting the violence of its own unspeakable conception remembering that all birth involves terror and blood let it conciliate humanity in its seamless red and black folds

If it is found

Remember the Tomb was empty And that my life was not lost