R f nelson, p.3
R. F. Nelson, page 3
“Urizen.”
They had completed one more unsuccessful attempt to get Kate to see something, anything, in the fire, and now sat side by side in their rocking chairs, watching the glowing embers.
“You’ve been seeing more than usual lately, have you not, Mr. Blake?”
He nodded soberly. “The gift, like a muscle, grows stronger with use.
Now it is not only my mind, but my body as well that travels through time.”
“And where have you been traveling?”
“To the future, when men will build cities on distant worlds, and to the past, when a land vaster than England sank into the Atlantic Ocean.” She could tell by his voice he was troubled. “I’ve taught myself Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but I’ve been to places where those languages, and good old English, are forgotten, or not yet thought of.”
“Is something wrong?”
He glanced at her from furrowed brows. “I am not the only traveler. I thought I was, but I’m not. I thought only I, among living men, could move through time the way the dead do, but then I saw a man. I saw him in the future, then I saw him again in the past.”
“Are you sure it was the same man?”
“If it was a man. I spoke to him, you see. I introduced myself to him, shook hands with him. There can be no mistake. In the future we stood and talked while riding in a flying machine that flies forever around the earth without falling, then, in the past, we spoke together again in the few minutes before the earthquakes began that destroyed the Atlantic continent.”
“Then you know his name?”
“Urizen.” He spoke it with a touch of awe.
“What did he look like?”
“Tall, white-bearded, muscular, naked.”
“But that’s what you told me God looked like!”
William was startled. “That’s right. You don’t suppose… Yes, now I remember! That face I saw at my window as a child… It was Urizen!”
“Then you shook hands with God?” At last she could not keep a note of disbelief from her voice.
“I don’t know. I must have been wrong. Urizen was only a man. He chatted like a man, passed the time of day as if he was my neighbor passing me on the street.” William was bewildered. “Is that the way a God acts?”
“Tell me what he said. Let me be the judge.”
“He welcomed me to some kind of exclusive club, open only to that one person in a billion who can escape the bounds of his own time. He invited me to voyage with him, share some great work with him. I refused.”
She took his hand. “Because of me, Mr. Blake?”
“Because of fear, Kate.”
“Fear? But if he was just some naked man running around…”
“I don’t know what he is! You might have been right about him, don’t you see? He might be… the ‘Other Fellow’!”
*
CHAPTER THREE… 1789
Blake did just one job this year, three engravings for John Casper Lavater’s “Essays on Physiognomy,” including a tail-piece. The work was handed in late and the publisher had not been pleased with the way the work was done.
Kate had delivered the finished plates and passed on to William the publisher’s objections.
“He didn’t like your little vignette, Mr. Blake.”
“And why not?”
“It was supposed to be a hand holding up a candle.”
“And that is what it was!”
“But you added some moths flying into the flame.”
“The design was so tame. I thought it needed something.”
“And he was angry at having the job finished a week late.”
“A week? Was it that long?”
“Yes indeed, Mr. Blake.”
“I hope you told him what I said to tell him.”
“That you had other more important work to do? Thank God I didn’t have to tell him anything. He didn’t press me, you see. It goes against me nature to lie, it does.”
William angrily turned back to the plate he was preparing for his own book, “The Songs of Innocence.” Eventually there would be thirty-one of these plates, each prepared by the same slow and painstaking process.
The writing and drawing was done in etcher’s ground on a sheet of paper which had been soaked in a solution of gum arabic and allowed to dry. The paper was then spread, face down, on a heated copper plate and run through a press or rubbed down with the back of a spoon. The plate, with the paper stuck to it, was submerged in a pan of water until the gum softened and the paper floated free, leaving the design, in reverse, adhering to the copper. The plate was placed in a bath of nitric acid where it lay for about eight hours, the acid eating away the copper so the drawing stood out in low relief. It was this part of the process that worried Kate most. The acid was dangerous and gave their rooms a funny smell.
After the plate had been washed, prints could be made from it by inking it from another plate (blank) pressed against it, then rubbing the bookpaper against the design with the back of a spoon.
That night, after supper, he went immediately to work. She watched him a while, then picked up that odd souvenir of the future, the flashlight, and idly switched it on and off a few times.
“Mr. Blake, you can pick up something in one time and carry it with you into another, can you not?”
“Quite so, Mrs. Blake,” he answered absently, concentrating on his work.
“Tell me then, could you go back to yesterday and get that set of engravings you did late for the Lavater book?”
“I suppose so.”
“Could you then take those plates back a week and hand them in on time?”
“How can you plague me with such trivial matters? Can’t you see I have more important things to do?”
“No, wait. Could you go back to when you were cutting the plate of the hand holding the candle and tell yourself to leave out the moths?”
“What? Go back in time and meet my own self?” He turned and looked at her, frowning. “Well, why not, I ask you?”
“Don’t you see? It would be like creating a whole new world. The world with the plate with the moths on it would vanish and be replaced by a world where there was a plate with no moths on it.”
“What’s the harm in that?”
“I might change something else as well… who can say what? It’s too dangerous.”
“Such a little thing… and you and your friend Urizen are going back and forth in time so much anyway.”
“But we never interfere. The spirits travel in time too, but since they can neither touch anything nor speak to anyone that doesn’t cause any problems. The flesh and blood time voyager must try to be as much as possible like a ghost.”
“Were you like a ghost when you took this thing here?” She held up the flashlight.
“Urizen gave it to me.”
“I didn’t see him do it.”
“I left, visited the future and saw Urizen, then returned to the same instant I’d departed from. That’s why it seemed to you, I suppose, that the flashlight appeared by magic.”
“Lord help us!”
“But even that little thing made the others angry.”
“What others?” This was something new. Others?
“Urizen and I are not the only time travelers. There are quite a few others, but they stay mostly in the far future. They call themselves the League of the Zoa. Zoa is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘beasts’. Urizen is one of their leaders. There are three others, Tharmas, Luvah and Los. It is Los who warned me against changing the past. There’s an argument…
Urizen changes the past and Los goes back and changes it again, back to what it was.”
“So Urizen does change the past! Then so can you!”
“No, you don’t understand. He doesn’t make any major changes, and Los always corrects whatever he does.”
“But this flashlight…” She held it up. Suddenly it vanished. She gave a little scream.
“You see?” he said reasonably.
*
Another evening a month later, they sat in their rockers before the fire.
Kate had tried once again and once again failed to see any “visions” in the flames.
Pouting, she picked up her knitting and began working with rigid angry movements.
“Mr. Blake, will I ever see them?”
“Who, Kate?”
“The Zoas. You visit them every day, but I never see nothing. It’s a man’s world, right enough.”
“Perhaps you are the lucky one.” His voice was more than usually sombre.
“How can you say that? Your life has ever so much adventure in it, while mine…” She shrugged.
“What good is experience without understanding? I tell you, Mrs.
Blake, the more I see the less I understand. At first I thought—yes, I’m serious—I thought Urizen might be Satan, but now that I see he shares power with three other Zoas, I don’t know what to think. Have you ever heard of four Satans?”
“There’s never been but one, so far as I know.”
“I talk to these Zoas. I shake hands with them, touch them. But what are they, Kate? I don’t even know that. Are they angels? Sometimes they wear wings, but now I know there’s a time in the future when everyone will wear wings and fly. Are they demons? They don’t seem really evil, not even Urizen, though the others warn me against him. Urizen’s only crime, so far as I can tell, is a passion for knowledge. He must always know the why of everything, and the how. It seems to me he’d be willing to take the universe apart to see how it works.”
“And if he couldn’t put it together again?”
“That wouldn’t matter to him. Once we stood together at dawn in the fields outside Jerusalem in 30 BC and watched a shepherd tending sheep.
Urizen saw a sheep straying toward us and I thought he’d give the signal for us to slip out of that time, but instead he knelt before the sheep and whispered to it, ‘Who made you?’ As if the sheep could talk.”
“Well, the Good Lord made the sheep of course. I hope you told Urizen that. God made the sheep and everything else.”
“I told him, but he only smiled at me with that faint mocking smile he has, and said, ‘After all you’ve seen, does that word still mean anything to you?’ ”
“Heavens, Mr. Blake!”
“I wrote a song about it and tried to sing it to him, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“I’ll listen, Mr. Blake.”
William cleared his throat and began singing, rocking in his chair in time to the music. The melody was his own, but it had the quality of an old English folksong.
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bade thee feed,
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek and He is mild.
He became a little child.
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee.
Little lamb, God bless thee.
There was a long silence in the room, then Kate’s rocker creaked as she leaned toward him and said softly, “That’s very pretty, Mr. Blake.”
*
She had been dreaming of lambs and of herself as a shepherdess when she felt someone gently shaking her. She grumbled and turned over. The shaking came again.
“Let me sleep, Mr. Blake,” she muttered.
Silently he shook her again, and this time she opened her eyes.
“Look, Kate,” William whispered. She saw he was pointing toward the foot of the bed.
Slowly, numbly, she became aware of a tall motionless figure standing there, just beyond the bedstead.
“Oh my God,” she murmured.
The figure was naked, muscular, bearded… the beard was long and white and seemed to glow faintly in the dark, or perhaps the feeble light that filtered in from some unseen moon was fooling her.
“Is that… ?” she began.
“Yes, it’s Urizen.” William, too, sounded frightened. But why? Wasn’t Urizen his good friend and traveling companion?
“Speak to him, Mr. Blake,” she whispered.
“Urizen, old chap. Good to see you again, sir. And to what—ahem—to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”
Urizen did not answer, only smiled faintly and vanished.
It took her a moment to recover, but when she did she turned to William with a joyful cry. “I saw him! I saw him!”
She could see William’s visions at last!
But William was sober, disturbed. “And he saw us. Now he knows where to find us.”
“But where’s the harm in that? He’s your friend, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know what he is! I never told him exactly what time and place I came from, because I wanted to be sure first that… that he wouldn’t harm you.”
“Harm me? Why would he harm me?”
“I don’t know, Kate, but I do know this. Now he can appear whenever he likes and do whatever he likes to us, and there’s no policeman in the world can catch him or protect us. If he likes he can even go back into the past and do some little thing and we, you and I, will cease to exist!”
*
Kate had never seen William really afraid before now, but she could tell that was what drove him into an orgy of work, as if work could provide him with at least the illusion of safety.
And she knew he had, for the moment, given up time-voyages.
“The Songs of Innocence” was soon engraved and printed; making no attempt to sell copies of it, he immediately started on a new project, to be called “The Book of Thel”, and he often stayed up late at night laboring on it.
Kate read what he had written and commented, “Well, Mr. Blake, this is quite a change from the tone of your lamb poem, I must say.”
“My lamb poem? That was sentimental garbage!”
“Garbage you say? I rather liked it myself, I did.”
“The world is not like that, Mrs. Blake. Behind the mask of smiling religion there is a skull.”
“A skull, Mr. Blake? Dear me.” It was morning and bright sunlight filled the little apartment. It seemed absurd to talk of skulls at such a time.
“If there was any truth in religion, the Bible would tell us about Urizen, explain who and what Urizen is and how we should deal with him.”
William’s eyes were no longer calm and grave.
“Perhaps the Good Lord never meant us to learn about such things.”
This interchange pointed up a difference in their attitudes toward religion that had been there from the start, but now was becoming more pronounced. She had never read the Bible, but she went to church every Sunday; he had read the Bible from cover to cover not once, but many times, yet he never went to church, had not been inside a church of any kind since his wedding day.
She picked up the manuscript and reread the last few lines. “It’s a grim business you have here, Mr. Blake. I can’t say I understand what you’re driving at. You have this young girl named Thel wandering about asking a flower, a cloud, a worm and a dirt clod, ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ Well, that’s clear enough, but this girl, if I follow you, visits the Land of the Dead, and there she finds her own grave.”
“That’s right.”
“And a ghostly voice says, ‘Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction?’ ”
“Yes.”
“And then this girl runs screaming back to the Land of the Living.”
“Correct.”
“A grim business indeed, if you’ll pardon me saying so. Not like you at all. Can you explain the symbolic meaning to me? There’s always a symbolic meaning in a poem, an upliftin’ moral of some sort.”
“Not in this one. It means what it says and nothing more.”
“This girl Thel isn’t just a girl, is she? Isn’t she a symbol of something or other? Curiosity? Youth? Innocence?” She lowered her voice. “Virginity?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Come along there! Who is she, really?”
“If you must know, she is me.”
“You? But you ain’t no young lady! At least not unless you’ve been fooling me all these years.” She laughed but he didn’t. He never laughed.
Instead he quoted, ” ‘A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.’ ”
“So now you’re a prophet, are you?”
“I can see the future.”
That silenced her, but she did understand the poem’s symbolic meaning. William had visited the past, dwelling place of the dead, and returned, terrified, because someone in that land had spoken to him, invited him to stay.
And then had followed him home.
Writing the poem brought William no relief. As the weeks passed with no more sign of Urizen, Kate watched her ordinarily calm and self-possessed husband grow more and more nervous and distraught.
If he sang, it was “Why art Thou silent and invisible, Father of Jealousy?”, as if Urizen was God. In the evenings, when he had been used to teaching her things, he muttered endlessly about how Urizen might be “the spectre of our sins.”
And more and more often he would gaze at her with vacant blue eyes and demand, “Kate, am I insane?”
Her answer was always the same.
“No indeed, Mr. Blake. I saw him too!”
*
CHAPTER FOUR… 1790
The lessons had begun again, and Kate had spent night after night with William at her side, gazing into the glowing embers in the fireplace. She wanted to stop, but she had made a vow and she was a woman who did not vow lightly. She wanted to stop because the lessons had begun to produce results.
Now and then, quite clearly, she had seen faces form in the dim redness, mad Ogre faces that leered up at her mindlessly, other faces that were impossibly beautiful yet rilled with a demonic delight and a cruelty that terrified her, yet others that looked at her with concern, kind faces that seemed worried about her.
