suspect this and your suspicion has the texture and emotional presence of the colours green, blonde and yellow that filled you earlier, but if it is a colour its hue is unearthly since you cannot picture it, merely feel it in the emotional centre where colours move you. Madge leaves the room to get your clothes. You are most attracted towards the mirror that is out of your reach, the oval one above the wash-basin. You drag over a chair and stand on it and try to see your flesh behind the reflections of the swollen jug and the basin. Your look is scientific in its innocence. You lean forward to see yourself better behind the white curves of the jug but you canât and so you stare into the water in the basin. You are reflected there, from above. Your face looms over your own cream expanse, shimmering in the water, your blonde curls sticking to your crown. You hear a gasp behind you and turn to see Madge aghast in the doorway. The chair totters and you fall, bringing basin, jug and water with you. You land in the wet pool and your elbow scrapes on the enamel curve and spurts blood. It runs down your belly and thighs, turning pink with the water. Madge runs forward with a stream of prayers and admonitions and grabs a towel and wrings it in the water and wipes your thighs and wrings it continually. She blesses herself with her other hand.
11
I T MUST BE soon after this that you reach the age of reason which, like the age of the earlier maxims, makes the undifferentiated flow of your experience manifest and outward, placing it neatly in language and time, allowing others to say to you that you are different now from what you were then. And though you wonder how such a change could creep on you unawares, yet when you hear Sister Paul explain the metaphysics of reason to the class (though she seems to be speaking only to you) you accept that you must be different if only because you are being told so. You accept that your days and memories up to this moment are one thing and after that moment will be another. You suspect a cruelty behind this knowledge though and wonder whether if you hadnât been given it would the same be true? She tells you how up to that moment you could not sin because you were not aware of sin but how after that moment the awareness of sin that she is handing you like a gift will make it possible for you to sin. And you accept a further slice of knowledge which defines this sense of difference in you, the fact that now every action will have to be balanced and passed between the twin primaries of sin and virtue, and that between them there will be an expanse of medial tones and that, no matter how fragile this difference in tone, there will always come a point where white swings imperceptibly into
black, beyond which you will be able to say, Now I have sinned. You wonder whether this sense of sin is a gift to be developed, whether you must learn to sin as you once learnt to walk. You sense that these words she is imposing on the flow of your days are somewhat arbitrary, like the words she underlines, for obscure reasons, on the hymns she chalks on the blackboard. And yet there is comfort in the language and Sister Paul has after all impressed on you that knowledge can never be useless. You toy with this new knowledge, imagining some use for it while Sister Paul continues with an image of the soul as a droplet of pure water coming from God into the world, tarnished only by the fact of its birth. And you imagine God then to be a sea, remembering the water that splashed you from the falling basin, for a droplet must come from some larger expanse and a sea is the largest expanse you can imagine; you suspect that this sea is not the sea you know, always the lowest point in the landscape, but a sea that is placed somewhere above your experience, mirroring the sea that you know, permeating you with its backwards waves. But, Sister Paul continues, as our days multiply and as we progress from the age of
11
I T MUST BE soon after this that you reach the age of reason which, like the age of the earlier maxims, makes the undifferentiated flow of your experience manifest and outward, placing it neatly in language and time, allowing others to say to you that you are different now from what you were then. And though you wonder how such a change could creep on you unawares, yet when you hear Sister Paul explain the metaphysics of reason to the class (though she seems to be speaking only to you) you accept that you must be different if only because you are being told so. You accept that your days and memories up to this moment are one thing and after that moment will be another. You suspect a cruelty behind this knowledge though and wonder whether if you hadnât been given it would the same be true? She tells you how up to that moment you could not sin because you were not aware of sin but how after that moment the awareness of sin that she is handing you like a gift will make it possible for you to sin. And you accept a further slice of knowledge which defines this sense of difference in you, the fact that now every action will have to be balanced and passed between the twin primaries of sin and virtue, and that between them there will be an expanse of medial tones and that, no matter how fragile this difference in tone, there will always come a point where white swings imperceptibly into
black, beyond which you will be able to say, Now I have sinned. You wonder whether this sense of sin is a gift to be developed, whether you must learn to sin as you once learnt to walk. You sense that these words she is imposing on the flow of your days are somewhat arbitrary, like the words she underlines, for obscure reasons, on the hymns she chalks on the blackboard. And yet there is comfort in the language and Sister Paul has after all impressed on you that knowledge can never be useless. You toy with this new knowledge, imagining some use for it while Sister Paul continues with an image of the soul as a droplet of pure water coming from God into the world, tarnished only by the fact of its birth. And you imagine God then to be a sea, remembering the water that splashed you from the falling basin, for a droplet must come from some larger expanse and a sea is the largest expanse you can imagine; you suspect that this sea is not the sea you know, always the lowest point in the landscape, but a sea that is placed somewhere above your experience, mirroring the sea that you know, permeating you with its backwards waves. But, Sister Paul continues, as our days multiply and as we progress from the age of
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