The Space Within
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Tao Te Ching: XI
A long, long time ago, a long, long way from where you and I now eat, sleep, empty our bowels, make love and worry, there lived a race of people who also ate, slept, emptied their bowels, made love - and worried. But what made these people different from us was that although they ate, slept, emptied their bowels and made love in more or less the same way that we do today, they did not worry about the price of car insurance, about losing their job, about getting it up, about the hole in the ozone layer or about what their daughter got up to when she did not come home until after midnight. They worried about nothing.
They lived a simple, mutual back-scratching existence: Milly made sure that no one was short of flour, Clay kept everyone suppled with cooking pots, Tiley saw to it that nobody’s roof leaked and Woolly ensured that everyone had a shirt on his back. The gross national product of a country that sold nothing was nothing and most people seemed quite happy to earn nothing. This meant that no one had any money, but everyone had plenty of time at his disposal and, as we in our advanced and progressive civilization know only too well, time is money. They saw nothing wrong with spending their wealth, but it was considered a crime to waste, fritter away, lose or kill any of the time they had at their disposal, and as over the years they saved more time than they spent, the nation soon became and remained uncommonly prosperous.
In addition, everyone – and everything - was uncommonly beautiful, although they were unaware of this since they had not discovered the concepts of plainness and ugliness which we hold to be the antithesis of beauty. They were also blissfully unaware that they all loved everyone and everything, since they had not discovered the concepts of indifference, dislike and hate. If they were aware that life only required them to do what was right, it was not because of an awareness of what was right and what was wrong, it was simply because they knew instinctively what life required of them. They lived in a state of what the cynics in our world might call ignorant contentedness and the romantics innocent happiness, although no one ever said: “Gosh, I’m so happy!” any more than anyone thought to himself: “Oh dear, I feel really down today!”. As far as they were concerned they simply were. If they had not yet proved to themselves that they were because they thought, it was probably because they did not spend a great deal of time thinking. They had no gods and had not the slightest need to create one –in their own, or in anyone else’s image. They worshipped nothing.
However, knowing that their very existence depended on the warmth and light of the sun, on the water from the river, on the trees and other plants in the forest, on the animals and birds that shared their world, they loved, nurtured and held sacred the sun, the river, the trees and plants and the animals from the largest horned deer to the tiniest beetle. They rose with the sun and retired with the sun. During the long hot active days of summer they tended the crops to prepare for the long cold dormant nights of winter. They loved their world as they loved their own selves – hence they cared for the world as they cared for their own selves.
Although Milly, Clay, Tiley, Woolly and all the other inhabitants of this remote and distant land did not spend much of their time thinking, this did not mean that they were lacking in imagination. The stories they told bore witness to this. Their stories were short and simple – in fact it was accepted that the fewer the words, the better the story:
‘Once upon a time a young man set off alone into the forest. Seven moons later he returned carrying a wicker cage containing five sparrows. His neighbours marvelled, saying: “Never have we seen such a wondrous spectacle!” The next morning at sunrise the young man carried the cage to the top of the hill and released the sparrows one by one. As the last sparrow disappeared into the heavens, the young man said:
“Now my cage is useful and I am free.” ’
As no one among them had ever travelled more than a few thousand paces across the world that they called simply Here, most of the stories they told were about people travelling into the Not Here. There had been a few cases of people venturing into the Not Here, but not one of them had returned, inspiring parents to tell their children cautionary tales of people being swallowed by giant snakes, being swept away by rushing torrents or simply falling off the edge of the world. But, sitting round the fire under a full moon, the storytellers dismissed these as simply children’s fairy tales. Their own stories about the Not Here were more esoteric:
‘A young man returned from his travels and they asked him what he had seen.
“Honeycombs have five sides and the bramble flower five petals, the sun rises in the east and the nightingale makes its nest near the ground.”
Then they asked him how he felt.
“My legs are weary.” ’
‘While walking through the woods, a damsel came upon a beautiful lake. Feeling thirsty, she drank a few sips of the cool, clear water.
It tasted like nectar.
Next day, the damsel returned to the lake, taking with her a clay pot which she filled to the brim. She returned home, to share the water with her neighbours.
It tasted dank and bitter.’
‘After travelling over hills, through forests and across rivers for seven days and seven nights, a man found himself in a village where he was welcomed and given food, drink and rest. After he had refreshed himself the villagers offered him bread and water to sustain him on his journey home. He refused it, saying:
“An oversharp blade soon becomes blunt.” ’
“What have you seen?” they asked the traveller on his return.
“The world,” was his reply.
“What is the world like?” they asked.
“It isn’t,” was his reply.
Since no one owned anything, no one coveted and no one stole; since no one was praised or exalted above others, no one was jealous; since no one had hopes or ambitions, no one was disappointed; since no one held opinions, no one disagreed or quarrelled with anyone. Also, since no one craved to be able do what they wanted to do, but genuinely wanted to do what they were able to do, everyone was free. There being no right and no wrong, the concept of government and laws was unknown and the only education was example; the young learnt from the example of the old and the old were vivified by the example of the young.
The institution of marriage did not exist and sexual relations started with puberty. The sexual act, like urinating and defecating, was an act of nature and, as such, was performed freely and openly. It was always performed gracefully, athletically and imaginatively and was as much a religious ritual as an expression of mutual affection or sexual desire. No man ‘possessed’ – or even desired to possess – one particular woman, and usually no man knew – or even wanted to know – whose child he had fathered. ‘Families’ consisted of groups of several men and women living together with their joint offspring. Mating between siblings or close relations was not forbidden simply because it was unheard of. A sexually mature boy or girl knew instinctively if a prospective mate was biologically suitable; thus, although by our standards the gene pool was relatively shallow, cases of genetic deformities were very rare. Most pregnancies involving deformed or handicapped foetuses ended naturally in miscarriage; in cases that did not, infanticide was the natural solution. The result was a race of what we should probably call ‘normal’ individuals, each of whom displayed naturally our ideals of mental and physical excellence.
Of course, in this world nobody and nothing were excellent. They simply were. People accepted life as it was and never wanted it to be any different. Mother Nature loved and provided for all equally and without favouritism, without requiring anything in return, except that all her children did the same one to another. Which they did.
Since no one who had dared to venture into the Not Here had returned, no one in the village knew for certain whether anyone actually lived in the Not Here, and if they did, what they looked like, until a certain day in early spring when a young man, clad loosely in mud-spattered deerskin, staggered out of the forest and collapsed exhausted in front of the hut that contained what was left of the winter mushroom, fruit and nut supply. He was tall, with long matted hair and scratches on his face, arms and legs. His skin was considerably fairer than that of his hosts and saviours – for that was what they immediately became. They carried him into the nearest hut, which happened to be the one where Aconite and Loquat lived with Aconite’s three daughters, and laid him gently on the largest bearskin sleeping rug. Loquat removed the man’s dirty clothing and Aconite gently washed the congealed blood from the scratches. She could not help noticing how unlike Loquat he was – and how unlike all the other men in the village, for that matter. As well as having unusually fair – and smooth - skin, he had remarkably little hair on his slim but strong-looking body and his hands were soft and delicate, with long slender fingers that looked as though they could never have grubbed for roots and insects or grappled with a struggling boar in the wood.
“He must stay here until he is whole,” said Aconite.
“Yes, of course he must,” agreed Loquat. “I shall sleep at Deodar’s.”
And so the stranger, whom they called Sycamore, since he had flown to then from afar like a sycamore seed, remained with Aconite and her three daughters. For three days and three nights he was barely conscious. Aconite did not leave his side and could be seen constantly bathing her patient’s face and chest with an infusion of wild orchid and acacia bark and moistening his lips with cool spring water of which he occasionally took gentle sips – just enough to preserve him from dehydration and certain death. On the morning of the fourth day Sycamore opened his eyes, looked up at Aconite, smiled and said something she could not understand but which could be described as a blend of relief, joy, gratitude and love.
Two days later it was the night of the full moon and Aconite decided that Sycamore was well enough to sit with them round the fire and listen to their stories. Perhaps he could be even persuaded to tell a story himself, in spite of his language being strange and unintelligible. All they had managed to glean from him so far was that he had travelled a great distance, had had an unpleasant experience with some wild animals and that his name was Osier but he was happy to be called Sycamore while he was with them. However, when Aconite went to her hut after supper to collect Sycamore she was horrified to find that he had disappeared. Surely he would not just leave without saying farewell? He was certainly not well enough to undertake a long journey through the forest and he had not touched the boar’s trotter broth she had brought him earlier. Aconite rushed to tell the others and a decision was immediately made to form a search party.
“The ground is soft after the rain – we will follow his tracks through the forest,” said Mespil, a tall, broad-shouldered man who usually led the hunting parties.
Their task was made easier when one of the children, Purslane, said that she had thought she had seen someone disappearing into the forest just before supper.
“He went that way – at least I think he did.”
The young girl proudly led the search party into the forest and the clear trail of male footprints in the rain-soaked earth confirmed that she had not been mistaken. The trail reached a sudden end near the river at the foot of a tall white willow tree; drawing the obvious conclusion, they looked up and were surprised to see Sycamore sitting astride a branch about half-way up the tree, staring at the full moon and muttering something under his breath.
“He’s talking to the moon!” giggled Purslane.
“Shhh! Yes, it does seem so,” whispered Mespil, “We must not disturb him.”
“But he’s still weak. He must rest. Please tell him to come down,” pleaded Aconite.
“He climbed the tree. Weak men do not climb trees. He will come down when he is ready. We must leave him.”
“Then I shall stay here to show him the way home,” said Aconite.
“As you wish,” said Mespil, “but perhaps he would prefer to be alone. He is not one of us.”
The children were making so much noise that Sycamore must have been aware of what was going on below him, but he did not show it and continued his discourse with the moon, stroking the trunk of the tree as he did so. Mespil succeeded in persuading everyone except Aconite to return home – and it was not long before she wished she had joined them. Until now, she had been fascinated by Sycamore’s behaviour up on the willow branch. The moon played an important role in their lives, most notably as a calendar, but no one had ever talked to it. And the tree was a symbol of life and regeneration; it provided shelter from the elements, food and medicine from its fruit and leaves, clothing from its bark, tools, building materials and heat from its wood – it was natural that one should revere trees and that was how she had interpreted Sycamore’s stroking of the willow trunk. But was it not going a little too far to lean forward and kiss it? And when Sycamore stood up on the branch and began to hug the tree tightly she began to have serious doubts about his motives. Her doubts were more than justified when he began to move his body up and down, rubbing it against the tree. Suddenly she realized what he was doing and a strong, strange feeling swept over her. Horror and embarrassment were emotions completely new to Arcite – but the tingling feeling she suddenly felt between her legs was not. She was confused. She had learnt to accept life as it was and not to want it to be any different. But this was nothing like anything she had experienced before and she found she could not accept it as it was. Letting out a little cry of bewilderment, she ran. She ran until she saw the others ahead of her, still some way from home. What was she to do? She could not tell them what she had seen. Why not? Everybody told everyone else everything and always had done. But this was different. Different. Sycamore was different from them. Not only did he look different, he came from a different world. From now on, everything would be different.
Sycamore returned soon afterwards. His friendly smile indicated that he had been totally unaware of the audience beneath the willow tree and nobody in the village gave him the slightest reason to believe that they had witnessed his communion with the full moon and the willow tree. It was quite obvious that his health and strength had returned and Aconite’s concern was now that Sycamore would now leave them. But what worried her more was that she had not told anyone about what she had seen that night; for the first time in her life she felt unable to share her thoughts with the others.
Aconite’s first concern was soon dispelled. Sycamore had not the slightest intention of leaving them. In spite of not being to communicate verbally, he made it quite plain that he wanted to remain as an active member of the community and quickly indicated the contribution he would make by demonstrating his skill at weaving baskets out of willow cane and carving miniature sculptures out of oak twigs and branchlets. He surprised everyone by building a small hut entirely out of oak and willow without using so much as a handful of mud and then living in it entirely by himself, although anyone was welcome to visit him at any time and he mixed freely with everyone in the village. He was adored by the children with whom he had a special rapport and it was the children who spontaneously accepted the task of teaching their new uncle to speak to them in their language. He found it remarkably easy; their vocabulary was on the whole much simpler than his, although certain things confused him. That there were five words for rain, four for wind and as many as seven for the sun did not surprise him - after all, he had six words for the moon. It was in the field of possessive pronouns that he became completely lost. When one of the children left Sycamore’s hut clutching a wooden carving of a lizard he was particularly fond of he wanted to say:
“Sorry, you can’t take that. It’s mine.”
But he was left speechless. There was no word for my or mine, any more than there were words for his, hers, theirs or yours – everything here belonged to everybody – everything was ours. The child simply wanted to share the joy he had experienced holding, touching and feeling the wooden lizard with his mother and sister. Then he would return it whence it had come. He was confused when Sycamore gently removed it from his hand and replaced it on the tree stump table, but said nothing and went home with a feeling he had not experienced before. We would probably call it disappointment.
As Sycamore’s mastery of the language developed, he was able to unravel some of the mysteries of his relationship with the moon.
“The moon gives birth, stimulates growth and determines decline to all life - animal, plant and human. Each phase has its part to play. The first full moon of spring is the most important - in spring everything is born again. The moon makes everything fertile. That is why we must worship the moon and offer it our seed in the spring.”
Aconite wondered why she found herself looking down when Sycamore spoke of offering seed to the moon. Now things were growing a little clearer. She knew that life came from the sun, not the moon, but Sycamore seemed to believe so fervently in was he was saying, that she began to wonder whether there might be something in it.
“The rays of the moon have the power to cure sickness and prolong life. So do trees. In spring, the white willow especially. The white willow is female and and it is to the white willow that men must offer their seed under the spring moon. The willow will then give birth to thought, to healing and to love – and women will give birth to healthy children.”
Sycamore’s audience was fascinated, if not entirely convinced – although Chondrilla, who had never managed to maintain a pregnancy for longer than a few months, thought it might not do any harm for her Rauli to offer his seed to a willow tree this year.
“The strongest of all trees in the forest, the oak, should also be our close friend. It protects us and the birds that rest in its branches bring messages from the moon. The oak also takes the gift of fertility from the moon – eating the seed of the oak makes men potent and the woman who conceives beneath an adult oak tree when the moon is full will give birth to a strong, healthy child.”
Some greeted this new and unfamiliar knowledge with scepticism – after all, everything they knew they had learnt from their parents who had learnt from their parents and this everything was quite simply what was. Nobody had ever thought of changing what was or even considered the possibility that something other than what was existed. Others, however, listened to the wisdom Sycamore had brought from somewhere out there in the Not Here with a sense of wonder. Chandrilla, who had always accepted her infertility as part of the unchangeable what was, started thinking of it as something that was but need not be. Rauli would now have to eat acorns with every meal, and she knew exactly under which oak she would next lie with him. It was tall, strong and masculine – just like Sycamore. Suddenly an unfamiliar thought struck her. Perhaps it was Sycamore with whom she should lie under the oak tree. By the time the rising sun had extinguished the light of the following full moon, there was scarcely an oak tree in the vicinity beneath which the ground had not been disturbed by the whirl and flurry of human union. Whether Sycamore had been under one of the oaks, no one knew – or perhaps simply no one was saying.
One thing was certain – Sycamore had come to stay and he was soon more or less universally accepted as a man with special powers who had been sent to them by Mother Nature as a reward for their unfailing love and respect, even though until the stranger’s arrival they had not thought of their relationship with nature in those terms. Being a part of nature themselves, they had always simply done what was natural – but Sycamore, while wholeheartedly accepting their way of life, explained to them why most of what they did was good and advised them as to how they could do things even better – once he had helped them to choose words to describe the hitherto unknown concepts of good and better.
“Crops that come from the part of the plant above the ground, like beans, corn and herbs, should be planted while the moon is waxing, and root vegetables should be planted while it is waning.”
An unusually successful crop that summer seemed to confirm the wisdom of this, but the true and indisputable power of the moon was revealed the following winter, when Chandrilla gave birth to a strong healthy boy, whom she called Osier.
The moon was now more than just revered and respected. People began to have the feeling that perhaps things did not necessarily simply happen but were set into motion by the moon and so to make certain that things were set into motion as they wanted them to be, they started praying to - even worshipping – the moon. Sycamore helped them formulate what they said to their new god – and what to do while they were saying it. He also showed them how to organize their everyday activities so that they could do so much more between sunrise and sunset. So that all these improvements might function efficiently, he suggested that a group of the older villagers, advised by him, should draw up a set of guidelines for the daily life of the villagers and ensure that everyone followed them. In addition, it should not be forgotten that, as Sycamore’s appearance had shown, there were people out there in the Not Here, and they may not all be as benevolent as Sycamore. The manufacture of wooden spears used for hunting wild boar should be increased so that everyone had the means of defending himself if the situation arose.
Nor did Sycamore forget his faithful friends, the children. He joined in their games and showed them how to improve their time-honoured pastime of tossing stones into a hole in the ground, which involved twelve children each trying to throw six stones into the hole to see how many of the seventy-two stones would reach their target. The record of sixty-five stones was many hundreds of moons old, but each generation of children lived in the hope of being the one that reached the seemingly unattainable target of sixty-six. Sycamore suggested the game would be so much more enjoyable and stimulating if they divided into two groups of six to see which group could throw more of their thirty-six stones into the hole. Thus he introduced them to the hitherto unknown joys of competition – with the thrill of winning and the disappointment of losing. He left them to discover for themselves the motivation for future improvement that these two emotions provided.
Life in the village became so much more exciting – and challenging. When they awoke in the morning, instead of just letting things take their course – eating when they were hungry, resting when they were tired, making a pot or mending a roof when a pot needed to be made or a roof to be mended – the villagers met in groups to decide how best to use the time available to them between sunrise and sunset. They quickly discovered the limitations of their time-honoured understanding that there was only one path to travel along, only one way to follow. There were always several ways of doing things and each way had its advantages and disadvantages. The challenge was to decide which – and this inevitably meant whose - way was the right one. When they had only had one way to follow, they had had no alternative – now, thanks to Sycamore, they possessed that blessing that future generations were to sacrifice their lives to achieve – freedom of choice.
One morning, forty moons after Sycamore had arrived, the villagers woke up to find that he had disappeared. The moment they discovered his tracks they realized he had not left alone. Alongside his firm, broad footprints were those of a much smaller, more delicate creature. It was not long before they realized that Purslane was missing. Purslane, who had seen no more than a hundred and seventy moons, but whose breasts were as round as pomegranates and as soft as a deer’s thigh, whose sleek black hair flowed down her slender back as far as her waist and whose long legs could run faster than those of most boys of her age. Everyone knew that Purslane was ready to lie with a young man; no one had even considered the possibility that it would be with Sycamore. In fact, as no one had ever seen Sycamore lying with anyone, most people assumed he did not have a sexual life. They followed the two sets of footprints – they led past the willow tree, deep into the forest, coming to an end on the bank of the river. Sycamore and Purslane had left for the Not Here.
The villagers returned home to life without Sycamore. To eat, sleep, empty their bowels, make love and worry - without Sycamore. But if Sycamore would no longer be amongst them in person, he would still be with them in spirit. After all, thanks to Sycamore they no longer had nothing to worry about…
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