Alie tells me she went to art school but has to admit that very little of what she learnt there is of any use in the passionless, two-dimensional, painting-by-numbers she's engaged in now. When I ask if she never longs to express her own vision she moves closer to her easel to concentrate on the execution of some finick line while murmuring something into the great wall of cloth about non-attachment to self. Her gaze becomes mousey and belittled by the resumed constraint of thick-lensed specs. There is nothing mousey, though, when she looks directly up at me a little later to say that she considers it necessary to relinquish artistic pride.

Alright, I'll concede her a hit with that. But I'm still unconvinced because, after recovering from the initial assault of so much plush, exotic complexity, all I can see are banners proclaiming wealth and authority.

The pride of institutions.

Oh, come away with me, Alie! Come away, and we'll make our own heath-en thangkas, and surely we can be freer than this. We'll use for colour the winterbrowned deergrass and the blue of distant hills. We'll have the merlin's cry and the fine whishing of wind through whin and heather. We'll have the suinty whiff of sheepwool and the cabbagey sand of powdered lichen. For deities we'll call upon flaxhaired goddesses who open doors among pillars of cloud and sweep out heaven's rinsings ^___rain and sunsplash on the fields below. Or baldynidded, flintknuckled, scaurfaced old demons who devour sheep whole and cool their black hooves in rock-strewn rivers. Do we need darker gods? We'll have them. And we'll go down to the fire where such images are forged. Then what?...we'll show the onward weigh of time, the forever sleep of hills, the view from the top of the tower of thought. And we'll do something I've never seen in any religious painting yet: we'll show the unsettling magic of Night's domain and the annihilating touch of space.

13. Traversing the Bardos

I recurred from sleep one time to find moonlight landing in an alien beam on the edge of the bed. It would soon have reached me, or had perhaps already explored my humpbreath form, dissolving a dayskin to leave me raw and cold. I had the sensation of something momentous having just happened that had weakened the physical fabric of the world. It must have been dreams, whose stalagmitic landscapes still subsided through the emulsive floor of consciousness. The knowledge gradually assembled that I was in the guest room of the old Farmhouse on one of my periodic visits.

On a feeling that large presences were on the move outside, I decided to dress and go out. After the moonlit room, the landing and stairs were pitch dark. I had to bump and feel my way along, blundering into every creaking trap, making so much noise that the other sleepers' nightsouls billowed through silent doors to see what invaded their holy concentration. With relief I at last got to the back door, where silversiren moonhands reached in to take me. The air outside hung as heavy and cold as slate, but the same urge that woke me also moved me away from the house and out, out, into the huge arena of the night.

The hills are high during the day, lying grizzleflanked beneath the busy sky, but how near they seemed that night! It was as though they had risen and crept towards the house, a closing circle of giants whose unreachable heights exchanged breath with the insensate void of space.

What a presence silence has; the close face of the eternal. But the silence was not complete: the moonlight had peeled the covers from other dream-burrows than mine and when I stilled my own steps on the moonfrozen avalanche of the track I heard a cautious, twitching rustle, and then another. From low-darkness the sound thrilled up the high escarpment of the night to be launched unseen as a deathstartled birdcry... solitary...winging on nothing.

And her old round scarface hung in the sky so hard, outlined by its own infolding palpability, fringing every sense with the frigid burn of madness. It drew, irresistibly force-minus, making me want to dump my body on the ground like a sack of shadows and fly up along its narrow ravine of influence. I had to look away for fear of becoming entranced.

As my eyes recovered from the slowdazzle of direct gazing it was as though I looked out over a forgotten archipelago on some unknown sea. At first only the river was recognisable, enriched and mercuric, a precious hovering fluid suckled at hillroot. Then gradually, like pale exposures on a coated plate, other features emerged: a patch of roofsheen; a lone, calcified pine; the ghostly aprons of surrounding hills. Above the faint rising aura of one ridge, as though a coldheaven hand reached down to brush the earth, I saw a single bright star and my attention was shifted to the infinite void of the sky.

The stars...their unapproachable aeons. Turning my back to the moon and gazing upwards, I at once felt lost. Lost in their slow, careless thoroughfares; adrift among vast, immobile dunes carved out by winds long since extinct. So immensely still are they that I felt I was having to run madly to keep my footing as the planet clattered foolishly round beneath me. I almost lost balance and when I looked down to steady myself, how warm and full the moonlight seemed by comparison. There is a chill exhilaration, though, in stargazing, and once again I made binoculars of my hands and trained them upwards.

My vision so disposed the random arrangement of the stars that I seemed to be staring directly up into an infinitely large but disused chimney; starbonded and empty. It might once have been densely functional with the smoky commerce of prayer and measure, but now the only movement is an occasional dislodgement; a brief, flaring drop into oblivion.

But something that night was moving. It would have been impossible to detect had I not been staring straight at it already, but there it was, a far reflective speck, not falling but elongating and then separating into two. It was too slow and steady to have been a plane so I decided it must be a satellite, drawing, like a patient, night-working spider, its metalthread orbit from star to star. I wondered how many of the lights I saw were only such counterfeit stars, and the thought occurred to me that such is the power of their computer-enhanced optics that perhaps it could also see me. To its infra-red eye I would be just a faint, guttering aura in the midst of absence, animal on cold rock, and it would relay such data back in its idiotic dribble to some blindly angled dish.

What a clamour there must already be of suspicion, fear and greed choking the ether as the old, decrepit world-mind keeps paranoid watch on its own divisions. Whether it is angels or satellites, Buddhas or bombs, how I wish I could scour and scour the cluttered sky till the stars burned again with their first fierce contagion.

14. Going down to the city to drink with the butchers

I have enjoyed talking to Alie, staying much longer than I intended, but I interrupted a long journey to make this frustrated visit and the many remaining miles nag at the back of my mind. We say goodbye.

After the toneless, sugar-bright colours of the thangkas, the exterior world barges against me in a rough, rudethriving texture of life; woolhide and stonebone, breezes and cloud-call, the hills with their strong, energising majesty rising to high brindlebacks of green and brown and shadow-mauves, unconcernedly shedding kinlove into the valley below. I got to the artroom through the main house, but I leave via the grounds and find them full of noise and activity, both human and mechanical. The monastery has always been managed with an expansionist ^___not to say imperialist^___ spirit; now, as well as taking over the old Farmhouse and buying many of the local cottages, they are building a large new meditation hall. It is to be a replica of some remembered place in Tibet, and while inside it will be stiflingly magnificent, with great golden statues bearing down from their mountains of guttering candles, outside it has a depressingly industrial look, all grey blocks and concrete baulks.

The dumb catarrhal mixers churn round and round, tirelessly masticating cement for the walls of religious silos.

I get into my car, but before starting the engine I roll down the window and listen. I can still just hear the cement mixers and the far-off bleating of a sheep, but overriding these is something different: the powerful magnetic glow of silence, pouring from every blade of grass, peeling off the hillsides like the birth of a wind.

© B R Mitchell 1997