My normal methods seemed to work well enough
until I started to write about time and the planet Venus. Other planets, far
galaxies, Mars, Earth, the Moon were all harmless. Space-time was harmless
without Venus. Venus was safe so long as there were no simultaneous dealings
with space-time.
I wrote this story about the time-effects of a
visit to Venus and the story produced peculiar time-effects in my own case. I
use the word 'produced', with implications of time past, because although I
lost from my life, as far as I can gather, one whole day, at least I emerged
from the story when the story ended, and this is not the case now with another
story in which I am necessarily unable to distinguish between fact and fiction
and which seems unable to end.
Why one whole day? I am unable to answer that,
except to say that my story took four hours to write and was about events on
Venus which lasted less than the time it took me to write the story. When I
began the story it was Tuesday and when I finished it was Thursday. How do I
know it had taken me four hours to write? I know that I looked at my watch at
one point because I had not had my usual cup of tea, and was anxious to check
whether this was because the time for my usual cup of tea had passed, and I
know that I was conscious throughout the writing of the story of the sunshine
beyond my window.
Yet when I had finished the story, which in
this case I was able to do, it was Thursday and my wife recounted to me the
events that had occurred on Wednesday, telling me that I did this and that and
neither this nor that included application to the writing of a story about
Venus. I will not recount the events my wife related to me because so far as I
am concerned they did not exist.
The fact that I suffered some lapse of memory
or brain-storm does not concern me 'now' although it concerned me 'then'. It
doesn't concern me now because now has continued to happen. I say 'continued to
happen' because I am aware of the meaninglessness of the words 'happened later'
and no longer know the meaning of the words 'before' and 'after'. I know what
'now' means, and if someone were to say to me, 'Where were you before you were
born? 'I would reply 'Here.' And if someone were to say to me, 'What time is
it?' I would reply 'Now'. And if someone were to say, 'Explain the nature of
events and the relation of time to eternity', I would reply 'Here and now'. But
if someone were to say to me, 'What happened next?' I should be compelled to
query the use of the word 'next' and to wonder how to explain the total
irrelevance of any kind of sequence.
There is a close connection between tenses and
tension, and I am feeling the tension inevitably associated with the effort to
talk in terms of tenses and time, but I am trying to explain what is not
explicable, while smelling the flower, if smelling is what I am doing.
I have said that the idea of sequence is
totally irrelevant but because I am talking in tenses I have to relate that the
'next' story I wrote is the one that followed the story that lost me a whole
day. The 'next' story is therefore the story that is the real subject of this
story.
I did not normally write any story in which I
myself figured as a character. I do not mean 'in which I made use of the first
person singular'. You can write 'I' without meaning 'me'. In the story which is
the real subject of this story I was dealing. or am dealing, not only with
Venus and with space-time and was not and am not only using the first person
singular, but found myself immediately aware that the 'I' in the story was and
is me, myself, personally. insofar as I exist. It is difficult to explain how I
know this since people do not normally know themselves and are therefore
incapable of putting the whole of themselves into a story any more than they
are capable of keeping the whole of themselves out of a story. They are a
collection of parts and some of the parts are left out of the story and the
writer has very little control over this since only parts of the writer write
the story and other parts criticise it and other parts play games while all
this is going on.
The man in the story was, or seemed to be,
suffering from the peculiarities of the planet Venus. At this point I must
state that I know that it is impossible to land on Venus, for the place is
lethal to mankind, and that what I am writing is only a story. Nevertheless,
the total peculiarity of Venus in the story is that it is here, and when you on
'that' planet, or 'this' planet, you are here, even if it is imaginary. Why
then call the planet 'Venus'? To call the planet Venus was somehow necessary to
the story. I have never been anywhere except Venus, that is, here, since
beginning to write this story. But of course since writing this story I know
that 'since' is a word that demonstrates only the ignorance of its user
concerning the nature of what is real and what is not. No, I will try again.
There can be no purpose in using words except to explain the inexplicable. Very
well.
The man in my story is described as arriving
on the planet Venus. But as the vehicle which carries him enters the atmosphere
of Venus he begins to be aware of the nature of Venus in such a way that Venus
is here. This awareness grows excruciatingly as he grows into wider awareness,
so that a confusion of thoughts and sensations dissolves all former thoughts
and sensations into a continual explosion of now.
As the man in the story walks towards the huge
round roughness of what might have been a mountain pillar but because of its
ridged and vegetable warmth he takes to resemble a tree, he senses something
that does not enter by the eyes or nose or mouth or ears but through the whole
nature of his being and which can only be described as THIS. The consciousness
of being alive, and of being here, causes him to accept that Venus is real and
he himself is for the first time entirely real because he is on this planet,
which is surely entirely fictional because he imagines that he invented it.
In some way too immediate for analysis,
something between an itch and a realisation, the rugged warmth of the tree
decides for him his direction towards a richness which because it overwhelms
him with clarity he judges must be enormous in size, but when he steals
suddenly upon the deep well of a pool beside which it gently moves he discovers
the richness to be small and of a deep, vivid and gentle brightness. It is, so
far as it can be said to be anything recognisable, a flower, since it grows and
has a fragrance and the colour takes the form of a soft explosion of silence.
So I am bending my head to smell a flower on the planet Venus which is entirely
imaginary and the whole universe is present with the greatest simplicity at all
times, if the word 'times' has meaning. As I smell the flower the story becomes
actual.
Or, to put it as distantly as possible, the man in the story meets
with certain flowers and trees which are also ideas and thoughts and feelings
and emotions, so that I experience them as personalities which are here and now
as Im here and now writing this story. The consciousness of the man in
the story changes in such a way that what his consciousness has always been
becomes present to him and I am here.
It is difficult for me to relate, therefore,
whether I am writing this story on Earth or whether he is smelling the flower
on the planet Venus. But if I say I am doing both or he is doing both you will
no doubt question the nature of the consciousness from which this story is
being written. And of course, to revert to tenses, I am still writing the story
which is this story and which is the story that followed the one that lost me a
whole day and I am aware of the watch on my wrist and the sunshine beyond the
window and the flower which I am bending towards and what its nature is
establishing within me and I have not stopped doing so at any point and this
story is what is happening here and now and always.
If you do not wish to understand this then
avoid all use of the idea of the planet Venus associated with the idea of
space-time and so avoid also the journey which you have never ceased to make
since the world began.