happened to you, Richard?
RICHARD PELHAM : I was taken again.
LC : What was it took you?
RP : Agarith.
LC : Is Agarith a spirit?
RP : An angel.
LC : A fallen one?
RP : One who sometimes needs a home. A condition I understand. Perhaps thatâs how he acquired my address.
LC : You had been drinking.
RP : In preparation for his return, yes.
LC : How did you know he was coming?
RP : I was sent a letter.
LC : By whom?
RP : By you, my Lord.
LC : Where did you find this letter?
RP : In the drawer of your desk.
LC : What did it say?
RP : When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.
LC : I did not write those words, Richard. They are from scripture, I think.
RP : Maybe a manâs a window pane, however much the glass of his soul has been stained.
LC : I do not understand.
RP : I cannot be merely seen through, even Richard Pelham in his confinement canât. I am flesh too.
LC : You are referring to my attempt to analyse your condition?
RP : Your trek over my mind.
LC : I merely believe that the mind and the body are interconnected, Richard, so much so that the torments of the one must aggravate a torment in the other. An imbalance in the mind provokes disquiet in the body, and vice versa. I believe an excess of alcohol in the body might so affect the mind that it even believes itself to have visited hell.
RP : You cannot see the spirit that comes upon me with your enlarging lenses, so for you it is unreal. By your own confession you are a natural philosopher of the visible.
LC : And what are you, Richard?
RP : A sinful fellow, with my lusts and gluttonies on my head, visited at intervals by a spirit in need of a shelter for the night, in an age without words to welcome such visitations. Even in one of your palaces of healing, all they could do the last time that spirit arrived, was to hoist me up.
LC : Hoist you up?
RP : Fasten me to the tongue of the storm. Thatâs when they burned the mark into my brow.
LC : Do you know what it was that wrote on the skin of your chest, Richard?
RP : Agarith. If he was there inside me again.
LC : The writing was in your hand.
RP : The writer was in my body.
LC : Do you have anything to tell me about my wife, Richard?
RP : Only that she is a very beautiful woman, my Lord, but then you already know that. And now I believe you are to have a child. My congratulations.
Chilford was impatient with the centuries of superstition, for he could still hear the whispering clamour of all that liturgy behind him. He had, in fact, thought a great deal about bodies and the language in which they utter their imbalances, their trials, their queered and quirky messages. Too premature in the calculus to ponder the writing all over Queequegâs body, and how it announces that he is a visitation from another world, Chilford could see all the same that the writing on Richard Pelhamâs body seemed to proclaim that this man had been touched by a region elsewhere, but he could only remain unmoved by the utter lack of co-ordinates to establish such a worldâs location, using any compass reason might tolerate, let alone confirm or ratify. He was inclined therefore to situate the world inside the turbulence of his subjectâs mind, not outside in any grid of latitude and longitude.
As for Pelhamâs own great obsession, namely what it was that was written on the body of Jesus himself during the course of that passion which ended with his death on the cross (for that was the true theme of The Instruments of the Passion ), Chilford had also thought this subject through methodically enough:
1 That his hands, which had been said
RICHARD PELHAM : I was taken again.
LC : What was it took you?
RP : Agarith.
LC : Is Agarith a spirit?
RP : An angel.
LC : A fallen one?
RP : One who sometimes needs a home. A condition I understand. Perhaps thatâs how he acquired my address.
LC : You had been drinking.
RP : In preparation for his return, yes.
LC : How did you know he was coming?
RP : I was sent a letter.
LC : By whom?
RP : By you, my Lord.
LC : Where did you find this letter?
RP : In the drawer of your desk.
LC : What did it say?
RP : When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.
LC : I did not write those words, Richard. They are from scripture, I think.
RP : Maybe a manâs a window pane, however much the glass of his soul has been stained.
LC : I do not understand.
RP : I cannot be merely seen through, even Richard Pelham in his confinement canât. I am flesh too.
LC : You are referring to my attempt to analyse your condition?
RP : Your trek over my mind.
LC : I merely believe that the mind and the body are interconnected, Richard, so much so that the torments of the one must aggravate a torment in the other. An imbalance in the mind provokes disquiet in the body, and vice versa. I believe an excess of alcohol in the body might so affect the mind that it even believes itself to have visited hell.
RP : You cannot see the spirit that comes upon me with your enlarging lenses, so for you it is unreal. By your own confession you are a natural philosopher of the visible.
LC : And what are you, Richard?
RP : A sinful fellow, with my lusts and gluttonies on my head, visited at intervals by a spirit in need of a shelter for the night, in an age without words to welcome such visitations. Even in one of your palaces of healing, all they could do the last time that spirit arrived, was to hoist me up.
LC : Hoist you up?
RP : Fasten me to the tongue of the storm. Thatâs when they burned the mark into my brow.
LC : Do you know what it was that wrote on the skin of your chest, Richard?
RP : Agarith. If he was there inside me again.
LC : The writing was in your hand.
RP : The writer was in my body.
LC : Do you have anything to tell me about my wife, Richard?
RP : Only that she is a very beautiful woman, my Lord, but then you already know that. And now I believe you are to have a child. My congratulations.
Chilford was impatient with the centuries of superstition, for he could still hear the whispering clamour of all that liturgy behind him. He had, in fact, thought a great deal about bodies and the language in which they utter their imbalances, their trials, their queered and quirky messages. Too premature in the calculus to ponder the writing all over Queequegâs body, and how it announces that he is a visitation from another world, Chilford could see all the same that the writing on Richard Pelhamâs body seemed to proclaim that this man had been touched by a region elsewhere, but he could only remain unmoved by the utter lack of co-ordinates to establish such a worldâs location, using any compass reason might tolerate, let alone confirm or ratify. He was inclined therefore to situate the world inside the turbulence of his subjectâs mind, not outside in any grid of latitude and longitude.
As for Pelhamâs own great obsession, namely what it was that was written on the body of Jesus himself during the course of that passion which ended with his death on the cross (for that was the true theme of The Instruments of the Passion ), Chilford had also thought this subject through methodically enough:
1 That his hands, which had been said
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