AN UNEXPECTED CRISIS

 

"To be truly modern," Michael Reid was saying, "one must live in the city, preferably the metropolis, and thus cease to have regular contact with nature.  For the city does, after all, bear witness to the extent of contemporary civilization, being the focal-point, as it were, of human evolution to-date.  Beyond the city there is nothing higher, at any rate not on earth, whereas beneath it ... well, one finds a descending scale of town, village, farm, and country, with the most uncultivated country at the bottom."

     Tina Hewitt briefly turned her pretty brown face towards him in polite acknowledgement of these remarks and said: "Yes, I suppose so.  But, fortunately, there isn't that much uncultivated country around these days.  Most of it seems to have been quite pleasantly cultivated.  Like the fields round here, for instance."

     They each looked out through the car windows in opposite directions, in confirmation of the fact that the country through which they were currently driving was pleasantly cultivated.  On the left-hand side of the road an expanse of freshly-ploughed earth, whilst on the opposite side, nearest to Reid, a gleaming wheat field stood almost motionless in the noon-day heat.  Farther on, other fields and expanses of ploughed land could be discerned to either side, all of which attested to the agricultural mastery of man.

     Keith Shearer, who was driving, was less interested in looking at land, however, than in continuing the conversation with his back-seat passenger.  "Presumably those who don't live in the biggest cities are behind the times to varying extents, then," he remarked.

     "That's more or less my opinion anyway," Reid responded.  "Naturally, we all live in the current century so far as dates and the use of modern inventions are concerned.  But we don't all live in it on the same spiritual or evolutionary level.  A farmer lives in it on a different and, in my opinion, lower level than an avant-garde artist, whilst a small-town shopkeeper lives in it on a different level than, well, a metropolitan chain-store worker.  I mean, it isn't just a question of class or occupation.  We're also dealing with the varying influences of widely different environments on the lifestyles and mentalities of their respective inhabitants.  There have been farmers and farm labourers from virtually the very dawn of human civilization, but there haven't always been avant-garde artists.  The former still tend to live on a level not all that far removed, in certain respects, from primitives, whereas the latter are the fruit of thousands of years' civilized evolution and progressive sophistication.  One could have milked cows or tilled the earth three or four thousand years ago, but one couldn't have painted like Piet Mondrian or Wasily Kandinsky then, nor have composed music like Michael Tippett or Pierre Boulez, nor have written novels like Alain Robbe-Grillet or Lawrence Durrell."

     "Quite so," Shearer conceded, as he artfully steered his bright-red 2cv6 Citroën round a sharp bend in the road, to the slight displacement of his passengers.  "What you're in fact saying is that the modern artist only became possible because of the city, that the city gave birth to the contemporary artist."

     Michael Reid nodded his head at the reflection of Shearer's face in the driving mirror.  "Yes, I doubt if the bulk of contemporary art would have come about at all, had it not been for the continuous development of our towns and cities into ever-larger conurbations of the artificial, the man-made.  For abstract art reflects this development and therefore speaks directly to the intelligent man of the big city.  If it had to wait until the twentieth century to come about, that was only because until then none of the towns or cities was large enough to warrant it, not having expanded away from the sensuous influence of nature to an extent which made such a spiritual, transcendental art possible.  Man was still tied to dualism in a kind of balanced compromise between nature and civilization, and thus given to both sensual and spiritual kinds of representational art - the former issuing from the natural world, the latter from the civilized one, and embracing not only urban and domestic scenes but religious projections as well."

     Tina had listened more attentively to these remarks than her boyfriend, and now ventured to inquire of the controversial young artist whether such a dualism wasn't to be found in abstract art, too?  In other words, whether there wasn't both a sensual and a spiritual mode of it?

     "Indeed, there certainly is," Reid replied, shifting his attention from the driving mirror to the dark-haired young woman who sat in front beside the driver.  "Impressionism was a mode of sensual abstraction to the extent that it primarily dealt with the natural world, including animals and men.  However, it rendered that world not in concrete representational terms but in abstract and, hence, impressionistic terms.  And after Impressionism of one sort or another had run its dreary course, well, there was Expressionism to take over and focus not so much on the external or natural world ... as on the transformations such a world underwent through the influence of emotions, especially the strongest and most negative.  This, too, was a kind of abstraction, for it dispensed with literal concrete representations, preferring to distort external reality under pressure of internal reality.  However, since they were still partly representational, one might describe these art-styles as transitional between sensual representation and the sensual abstraction that was to follow in the guise of Abstract Expressionism, where a depiction of the feelings, or the effects of external reality upon the self rather than vice versa, was attempted.  Such an art-style, largely focusing upon strong emotions, may indeed be described as sensual abstraction, in contrast to the spiritual abstraction which was to materialize in the guise of Neo-Plasticism and the genius, most especially, of Piet Mondrian.  Now since the path of evolution tends away from the sensual towards the spiritual, it follows that intellectually-biased subjective art signifies a superior development to emotionally-biased subjective art, and accordingly has more relevance for our time, as indeed for the future.  It's the higher abstraction, being religious as opposed to secular, insofar as whatever pertains to the spirit stands in opposition to whatever pertains to the senses, the sensual, the worldly.  So, in following the overall tendency of evolution towards the spirit, one might claim that it was and remains the fate of sensual abstraction to give way to spiritual abstraction, which is the ultimate art."

     They were still passing fields as Michael Reid spoke and, from time to time, would glance to either side of the road in order to feast their nature-starved eyes upon the scene before them.  It was over a year since any of them had actually been out of London and, despite their sophisticated urban sentiments, they were privately grateful for a change of scenery, especially Tina, who lived in a more built-up part of the metropolis than her two companions, and had a greater need of vegetation in consequence.  She was particularly looking forward to the afternoon walk they were intending to take across the Sussex Downs.  It would be agreeably refreshing, she thought, being in such close contact with relatively-uncultivated nature again, acquiring a strong dose of more concentrated plant life to replenish her languishing soul in some measure.  For although she had regular sex with Keith and ate and slept relatively well, there was still room for something better than mere walks in the local park from time to time - room for an altogether different mode of sensuality such as could only be gleaned, as it were, from a rural environment.  She felt that a good long walk in open spaces would help her fulfil a basic human need, and freshly equip her to deal with prolonged confinement in the city.  Admittedly, she was familiar enough with Michael Reid's thinking by now to know that he was pretty Mondrianesque in his almost Manichaean contempt of nature and determination to remain as dedicated to the progress of the spiritual in life as was humanly possible, without, of course, unduly jeopardizing his integrity as a human being.  But she wasn't quite as ardent a believer in spiritual progress herself, nor nearly so dedicated to its furtherance.  She didn't subscribe to that reasoned consistency of Reid's which, amongst other things, led him to indulge in sensual matters as though unwillingly and with an attitude which suggested that, whilst a certain amount of sensual indulgence was obligatory, one was simply paying one's dues to the Devil in consequence of one's basic humanity.  No, she wasn't that spiritually advanced, being fairly complacent, as a rule, where the satisfaction of bodily needs was concerned.  And, as she had noted on a number of occasions, even Michael Reid wasn't as spiritually consistent as he would probably like to have been or in fact made himself out to be.  He certainly ate with a healthy appetite anyway, and had never said anything to her which suggested that he ate with reluctance, a reluctance born of his spiritual aspirations.  He may not have been the most highly-sexed of people, but he was still human enough to find eating a generally agreeable occupation, not to mention the weekly strolls he took through the small local park.  He wasn't quite the most spiritually-advanced of men on those counts, even if certain of his actions and attitudes marked him out as a being-apart from the common herd of worldly hedonists - actions, for instance, of a scholarly and intellectually creative order, but attitudes such as his loathing of dogs and hope that, one day, when people had advanced to a more spiritual level than a majority of them were at currently, such creatures would be done away with, banned from the metropolis and other large cities on the grounds that urban man had become sufficiently spiritual to wish to minimize contact with beasts as much as possible, and thus rid himself of their physical presence.

     According to him, dogs were altogether too subconsciously-dominated to be acceptable companions of people who had evolved to a radical level of superconscious affiliation, and were therefore unworthy of incorporation into any truly-advanced civilization.  Already, he was looking on them from a kind of advanced viewpoint himself, suffering from the gross noise they made every time they barked, suffering from the excretory filth they left behind in the street which not only looked bad but smelt bad, suffering, above all, from the fact of their subconscious orientation, which led to their spending so much time every day either dozing or sleeping, cocooned, as it were, in sensual torpor.  A dualistic people inevitably tolerated dogs because, being balanced between the subconscious and the superconscious in the ego at its prime, they took a large amount of the evil in life for granted, deeming it indicative of the nature of reality.  But a transcendental people would increasingly come to look upon all forms of evil, including the beastly, as subject to human control and, ultimately, elimination.  They would not claim that good was dependent on evil for its existence but, on the contrary, that the less evil there was in life, the more room would there be for good, to the benefit of the living.  These big-city people would inevitably set about increasing the sum-total of good in life at the expense of evil, and gradually reduce the latter to negligible proportions, eventually doing away with it altogether ... as they transcended the body for the realm of pure spirit.

     And so a day would eventually come when they decided to rid themselves of dogs and thereby minimize or eliminate contact with the beastly.  When that day would come for certain, and in what form, Michael Reid didn't of course know.  But he hoped, anyway, that it wouldn't be too far into the future, since he was hopeful that such a 'Judgement Day', as he liked to think of it, should come about in his own lifetime and thus grant him the satisfaction of dying with the knowledge that the world had extended its progress over evil and consequently become, for succeeding generations, a better place in which to live.  However, he didn't expect small-town, village, or country people to sacrifice their dogs together with city people or, indeed, be required to do so at exactly the same time.  To his way of thinking, they generally lived on a lower evolutionary plane in closer contact with nature, and therefore weren't subject to the same pressures as city people.

     To be sure, it was a point he had touched upon earlier that morning, as they drove out of Surrey, and now Tina took-up the thread again and, partly for her boyfriend's benefit, asked him to clarify the matter a little.  After all, if we were to a large extent conditioned by the nature of our environments, then what applied to people in one type of environment could scarcely be considered applicable to those in a radically different type.  For instance, abstract art would be to some extent out-of-place in a rural setting.

     "Yes, I absolutely agree," said Reid, grateful for an opportunity to expand on his contentions.  "For it's the product of large-scale urban civilization and consequently isn't likely to win much support in the country, where people are, for the most part, less spiritually evolved, since more under nature's sensual sway.  An abstract or biomorphic sculpture stuck-out in the middle of a field or on the brow of a hill somewhere - what can it possibly mean?  What relationship can it have with its surroundings?  One might as well transplant a modern skyscraper to the country ... for all the applicability such a work would have there!  For abstract art is essentially an anti-natural or transcendental phenomenon and, as such, one can hardly expect it to harmonize with nature!  Its proper place is in the city, not in the wilderness.  Likewise, the proper place of the abstract artist is in the city, not in the country, village, or small town.  For it's the artist's duty to relate to his environment and further the cause of progress by being in the creative vanguard of his time.  Such, at any rate, is the case for any genuine, truly great artist, who functions as a kind of psychic antenna, or reflector of the extent of evolutionary progress in the world at any given time, and who may even anticipate progress by being a step or two ahead of his contemporaries.  Like Mondrian, he lives in the city and relates to the artificial nature of his environment by producing a correspondingly artificial, non-figurative art.  But if he learns the tricks of his trade in the city and then goes to live in the country, where he continues to produce abstractions - well, to some extent he is a sham, a hypocrite, and not a genuine or great artist, because creating out-of-context with his rural environment.  He may even find himself relapsing, after awhile, into some form of representational art in consequence of its sensuous influence, which would simply result in works of, by city standards, a largely anachronistic order.  This would automatically lead to his becoming a minor artist, because all the major ones would be producing work which stemmed from or owed something to contemporary urban civilization."

     "Is all this intended as an oblique criticism of the estimable likes of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Ben Nicholson?" asked Shearer on a faintly reproachful note.  They were passing through Crawley now and to either side of them the familiar sight of shops and houses had usurped the place of fields.

     "Not really," Reid replied, blushing slightly in spite of his back-seat immunity from the driver's quizzical gaze.  For he knew that Keith Shearer was a great admirer of these three artists.  "Though I'm convinced it must have some relation to them, insofar as they lived and worked outside London and were much given to nature and the countryside in general.  Nicholson even dedicated some of his creative energy to landscape drawing, albeit in a suitably modern technique, which simply sketched-in the outlines of the countryside in linear fashion."

     "And would the fact of his dedication to landscape detract from claims to true artistic greatness in your eyes?" Shearer asked him.

     "To a certain extent it would," Reid admitted, "since the highest art of the age is decidedly anti-natural and/or pro-spiritual, like Mondrian's and Kandinsky's, particularly the latter's late work.  It's obviously less good to preoccupy oneself with trees, fields, hills, etc., than with abstractions, no matter how linear one's technique may happen to be.  It's less good, but, there again, if one's insufficiently spiritually-advanced to be capable of concentrating solely on non-figurative work, then it's virtually inevitable, and must be accepted.  Nicholson's best work is, I believe, his abstract reliefs, of which there are many choice examples, all of them a silent testimony to his transcendental capability.  But bearing in mind his penchant for the figurative and natural, it's only fair to conclude him a lesser artist than, say, Mondrian or Kandinsky, who were more consistently and systematically transcendental.  I mean, the fact that he lived in such relatively small places as St Ives and the Ticino for so long would seem to suggest a desire to be closer to nature, which can only be out-of-keeping with the greatest artists' urban opposition to it.  Okay, he may not have liked city life, but that's only another reason for considering him a comparatively minor or, at any rate, lesser artist.  All truly great artists should like the city, should see in it the sum of our evolutionary progress to-date.  It's our passport, if you like, to ultimate salvation in the millennial Beyond, the future culmination of human evolution.  Without it we would be lost, remaining in some kind of dualistic twilight between nature and civilization in small towns and villages.  Needless to say, a lot of people do remain in that state and will doubtless continue to remain in it until their environments are changed and, thanks to the expansion of their towns or villages, they become more cut-off from nature and thus correspondingly more civilized - biased towards the spirit.  Ultimately, you can only be what your environment permits or encourages you to be.  But if, because of its proximity to nature, it doesn't permit or encourage you to be particularly transcendental, well then, you can only be dualistic or perhaps even pagan, as I'm sure a fair number of real country people effectively are, despite appearances to the contrary.  Which brings us back to what I was saying earlier, about the evolutionary differences between people, differences moulded, over and above class, by environment."

     "And presumably the fact that we don't all live in the same time," Shearer remarked, recalling the gist of the previous topic of conversation.

     "Quite so," Reid responded, casting the driving mirror an emphatic nod.  "The provinces are always more traditional or, depending on your viewpoint, less advanced than the cities.  Indeed, in some respects, they hardly seem a part of the current century at all, even given all the modern trappings to be encountered there.  For whatever is truly modern stems from the big city, and although small-town people may to some extent be influenced by it, they remain moored, as it were, to the relatively conservative influence of their dualistic environments and therefore aren't in a position to appreciate it properly.  This applies, I believe, as much to religion and politics as to, say, science and art.  For there are undoubtedly a great many people in the provinces for whom Christianity and parliamentary democracy have more relevance than some of our metropolitan progressives would like to believe!"

     "Yes, I'm quite sure that's true," Tina conceded, smiling a shade maliciously.  "And it must go some way towards explaining why such countries as Eire and Spain, for instance, are given to Catholicism, since largely rural and thus more natural."

     Michael Reid nodded his head again, albeit this time less emphatically.  He had already come to a similar conclusion some months ago, having equated Catholicism with a lower, quasi-pagan form of Christianity and Protestantism, by contrast, with a higher, quasi-transcendental form of it which signified, in his estimation, a kind of transition to transcendentalism-proper.  Catholic countries, he had noted, were generally or traditionally less urbanized and industrialized than their Protestant counterparts, altogether closer to nature.  Like everything else, religion and environment hung together, the one couldn't be completely dissociated from the other.  Overlappings and exceptions there undoubtedly were, but, basically, the big city wasn't a Catholic phenomenon.  On the contrary, it was decidedly transcendental, and could only become more so the further it expanded.

     Yes, he was quite proud of the fact that he was a city man and, as he stared through the car's side windows at the Sussex countryside, he felt a contempt for the world rising in his soul, a good healthy Christian contempt for the natural status quo which, at this juncture, appeared in such rural profusion.  Oh yes, the contempt he felt was justified all right, even in this day and age!  Nietzsche had never been able to understand the Christian contempt for the world and had consequently castigated it, deeming it symptomatic of decadence.  But Michael Reid understood it all right, and was able to reinterpret it in contemporary post-Christian terms.... Not that one had to feel it all the time, or indeed could do so.  Still, it was reassuring to note that evolution was a fact, and that its goal in spiritual bliss was what ultimately mattered.  We knew the future would be far superior to the present, and so we avoided the error of systematic complacency in the present, as though this was the best of all possible worlds which could never be improved upon.  Sure, the world had made considerable progress over the past two-thousand years, and many of the things currently to be found in it were quite admirable and pleasant.  Yet there was still room for contempt.  There was still reason to think: 'The world is undoubtedly better now than it has ever been, but, by God, that's no excuse for believing it can't become even better in the future, or that what we see before us is the best that can be done!'

     Yes, a little contempt every now and again for the status quo, especially in its natural manifestation, was by no means a bad thing!  For the world man had made was, by and large, a more admirable or, depending on your standpoint, less contemptible thing than the subconsciously-dominated world of nature and, as such, it was fitting that one's greatest contempt should be reserved for the latter and, needless to say, its principal upholders, whether literary or otherwise.  Admittedly, the man-made world was still a material, and hence imperfect, phenomenon.  But at least it was a means of getting us, or our future descendants, to the climax of evolution in transcendent spirituality.  Without the big city, we would always be nature's playthings.

     But the big city, being of the world, wasn't an end-in-itself, and accordingly it was worthy of at least some contempt every once in awhile.  For beyond and above the highest civilization on the planet would come the formation, in Michael Reid's considered opinion, of the highest possible development in the Universe - namely the development of pure spirit, which, in its transcendence, would not be of the world or anything in it.  This ultimate manifestation of divinity would certainly constitute a beyond, nay, the Beyond that Christian man had long believed in, albeit in his own necessarily narrow, personal, and egocentric way, with particular reference to posthumous salvation.  This would be above any 'happiness on earth' or 'happiness of the greatest number' that modern socialists believed in and strove after, since the logical development beyond it.  Not so much a millennial climax to evolution, then, as a transcendental climax, issuing in the Omega Point, de Chardin's term for Heaven.

     Yes, not so much a 'happiness on earth', stuck in front of the most sophisticated ultra-modern television with the ultra-modern furniture of a state-subsidised apartment all around one, and regular food, drink, sex, sleep, perhaps even work (assuming such an activity hadn't been exclusively entrusted to the machine by then), to prevent one from feeling underprivileged.  No, not so much all these constituents of a 'happiness on earth' but, as the eventual outcome of socialist progress, a happiness far superior to the earthly, in which the spirit reigned supreme and only the Holy Ghost or the Omega Point, as you prefer, prevailed ... as ultimate divinity.  A perfect happiness in spiritual bliss rather than an imperfect happiness in material comfort.  All Becoming having been resolved in perfect Being, all Becoming having achieved the calm beingfulness of Eternity.

     Such, he believed, would be the final outcome of evolution, for which, in the meantime, a material comfort was necessary, if only to prepare the ground, as it were, for the spiritual impetus that would take us on the last lap to Heaven.  A comfort strictly regulated, however, always kept within certain carefully-prescribed bounds for fear that a reaction to excessive materialism should set-in and thereby impede evolutionary progress.  Not materialism in any feudal or capitalist sense, then.  Only the materialism necessary to a society bent on launching itself into the millennial Beyond through the systematic practice of transcendental meditation.  A lesser materialism, by all accounts, than anything that had preceded it in the overall development of civilization.  The socialist materialism appertaining to the ultimate civilization!

     Yes, and as Michael Reid continued to stare through the windows of Shearer's small red Citroën at the predominantly rural environments through which they were driving, he felt his contempt of nature giving way to an admiration for human progress and the admirable creature that man in fact was, especially higher or progressive man.  To be sure, man had done brilliant things in the world and even beyond it, in space.  He had written truthful books, composed lovely music, painted beautiful paintings, fashioned graceful sculptures, erected enduring monuments, invented sophisticated machines, built impressive buildings, launched fantastic ships, acted breathtaking parts, climbed prodigious mountains, designed superb costumes, won important victories, sustained ingenious systems, etc. etc., to the greater glory of man!  But all that, no matter how brilliant, was as nothing compared with what he had still to do and, if fortune favoured him, undoubtedly would do in establishing the Omega Point in the Universe and thus becoming ultimate divinity.  All that he had done would pale to insignificance by comparison with what he would become at the climax of evolution.  Only the Holy Spirit that evolved out of man's spirit would live for ever.  Everything else, including the stars and planets, would eventually fade away, leaving the Universe to its ultimate perfection in true divinity.  Even the greatest works man had ever fashioned would fade away, be destroyed as the stars burnt themselves out and collapsed into nothingness.  And all of it - works, nature, planets, and stars - was contemptible in relation to the Omega Point.  Not just the world of which we were a part, but the material universe as a whole, especially that part of it which may be deemed the original creative force behind all the habitable planets, and which Reid regarded as synonymous with the Devil.

     Yes, the stars!  Especially were they contemptible in all their infernal heat and manifold separateness!  Not quite consummate evil though, at least not these days.  For time had eaten into them and rendered them less hot and powerful than they used to be in their cosmic youth, so to speak.  If the Devil was still alive he or, rather, it wasn't as evil as formerly, but had devolved a fair way along its diabolic life-span of so many billion years.  Yet it was still evil enough, and no matter for human complacency!  Stellar devolution had quite some way to go before the Devil reached old age and eventually died.  In the meantime, we could only do our best to further the cause of God, continue human evolution along the most transcendental lines, extend the realm of civilization over nature, and so become ever more civilized.

     The European nations, reflected Reid, were on the whole pretty good at this and had a worthy tradition of civilized evolution behind them.  Britain, in particular, had played a leading role in extending civilization, especially in the nineteenth century, when its colonial power extended across four continents.  A year ago, Reid would have been anti-colonial.  Now, however, he understood that the soldier who was facing-up, in some hostile African or Asian terrain, to native opposition ... symbolized the cause of good and not, as might at first appear, the reality of evil.  In the context of colonial war, it was the British who symbolized good because closer, in evolutionary terms, to our projected omega culmination of evolution than were the natives.  The fact that evolution is effectively a journey from the Devil to God, as from alpha to omega, inevitably implied, in Reid's view, that those further up its ladder were morally superior to those beneath them and therefore closer, in a manner of speaking, to the ultimate creation of God.  They might not be entirely good, but, in comparison to their pagan opponents, they were certainly symbolic of progress, light, change, etc., and consequently worthy of greater respect.  Their overriding task is to bring the primitive to a higher level of evolution by imposing superior criteria upon him, and if they achieve this, the struggle, no matter how costly, will have been worthwhile.  They are friends of the primitive in disguise - hard, cold, merciless friends, it may be, but friends nonetheless!  For in the long run they deliver him from his backwardness and coerce him into something better, drag him up by the scruff of the neck, as it were, to a higher stage of evolution.  This, to Reid, was good and necessary, and Britain had done more than its share of dragging up primitives, over the centuries, to deserve a rest and perhaps even the gratitude of those now profiting from its example.  The responsibility of leading the way in this respect had now passed, it seemed, elsewhere, to hands no less capable, one imagined, of achieving their objectives.  But the new world leaders, while they may be to some extent justified in dealing with Europe, weren't perhaps the most relevant influence in places like Africa, whose historical and environmental precedent would suggest that Christianity and democracy have a future there which it would be foolish to deny.  After all, Africa isn't on the same evolutionary level as Western Europe, having only comparatively recently been dragged out of its primitive past.

     To be sure, as the car sped towards the Sussex Downs, it occurred to Reid that what applied to Africa and to a variety of other Third World regions also had some applicability to the country folk of European countries, where the contrast between rural and urban life presupposed different levels of evolution within society as a whole.  No use expecting someone in regular contact with nature to espouse anti-natural sentiments in the manner of a sophisticated Manichaean city-dweller.  No use expecting him to turn against nature with a transcendental contempt.  No use preaching higher spiritual standards to him, as though words alone were sufficient to bring them about.  Words were fairly powerless before the forces of nature.  The only words to which he could be expected to relate would be written by someone like John Cowper Powys, himself a long-term country-dweller, whose work blended-in, so to speak, with his rural surroundings and accordingly reflected nature's sensuous influence.  Viewed from a higher transcendental vantage-point, Powys might not be the finest of writers, but at least he was generally at one with his environment, not a countryman play-acting at transcendentalism or a transcendentalist striving to become a countryman!  If he denounced such essentially post-dualistic writers as Huysmans, the de Goncourts, Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde, one needn't be surprised or offended.  He could hardly be expected to eulogize works like À Rebour or Les Fleurs du Mal, under the circumstances.

     Yet, then again, one could hardly expect a sophisticated big-city person to eulogize such obviously rural-inspired works as In Defence of Sensuality or A Philosophy of Solitude, which have the ring of another age about them, an age when nature played a far greater role in most people's lives than it did today.  Naturally, there are people for whom Powys would be more relevant, but they're a dwindling minority confined, for the most part, to small towns and villages scattered around the country.  By far the largest number of people are city dwellers and, if sophisticated, more likely to find the sort of authors Powys denounced to their taste.  That, at any rate, was what Michael Reid found to be the case for himself, since he hadn't touched a Powys tome or any kindred rural-inspired work in years, fearing that it could have a negative influence on his transcendentalism and accordingly weaken his resolve to look upon nature with a kind of Mondrianesque disdain.

     No, he wasn't going to run the risk of becoming a nature-monger himself, no matter how depressed the city made him feel at times.  If Tina and Keith wanted to indulge in a bout of Elementalism, or nature-worship, from time to time, good fucking luck to them!  But he wouldn't allow himself to be dragged into such a venture on a regular basis if the idea caught on.  Oh, no!  Once in a while was okay, provided one kept a relatively straight face about it and didn't convey the impression, like Tina, that one was only too keen for an opportunity to flounder about amid so much plant life, as though it were a matter of life-and-death to one!  Tina being a woman, Reid supposed that she probably had greater need of the elemental than him.  And it wasn't as though she was one of the most spiritual of women, either!  On the contrary, there was a fair amount of flesh on her - enough, at any rate, to make her more sensual than himself.  A year or two ago he might have fancied her.  Now, by contrast, he was quite resigned to her being Shearer's girlfriend.  She was insufficiently slender for him.  He had acquired other standards.

     "Not much farther now, is it?" he thoughtfully inquired of the driver, feeling it was time he said something again.

     "Almost there actually," Shearer replied, half-looking over his shoulder.  "Just another mile or two."

     Tina's face appeared to acquire a new lease-of-life with these words.  "We could certainly do with some exercise, being cooped-up in here for so long," she affirmed.  "My legs have gone all stiff."

     "Yeah, well I'm sure we'll have plenty of opportunity to stretch our legs," her boyfriend rejoined with a reassuring smile.  "Let's hope the weather stays fine."

     There were a few, thin, innocent-looking clouds in the sky, but nothing to excite undue alarm or pessimism.  The sun shone down brightly in front of them, and it was an altogether very warm day, even with the breeze that had sprung-up, causing sporadic fluctuations in temperature.  The car's interior was rather stuffy though, despite the half-open status of the driver's window.

     "I do hope there won't be too many other people there," said Tina, following a conversational pause.  "It would be so nice to have most of the place to ourselves."

     Shearer smiled sympathetically.  "I rather fear, from the amount of traffic on the road, that there'll be no shortage of like-minded people about," he declared.  "Unless, of course, most of them are going to the coast.  However, let's not jump to conclusions.  Even if there are a lot of others there, it'll still be relatively deserted by comparison with London, won't it?"

     "Yes, I guess so," Tina conceded with a forced sigh.  "As long as we can find somewhere nice to picnic in peace.  I'm quite famished now."

     "So am I," Shearer said.

     "Me too," Reid admitted, though he was also beginning to feel a shade apprehensive, as they approached their destination, and more concerned about his spiritual integrity than the well-being of his stomach.  He hadn't set foot on the land of a large open space in over a year and wasn't particularly confident that he would like the experience.  On the contrary, he was becoming more pessimistic the nearer they got to the Sussex Downs.  So much so that, by the time they actually arrived at their journey's end, his heart was beating twice as fast as normally and he had virtually broken into a cold sweat, much as if he were afraid of turning into a cat or something.

     "Here at last!" Tina exclaimed with obvious relish, as the car drew to a stop on the near side of a large parking area, with the spectacle of open grassland looming before them.  "And not too crowded either, by the look of it."

     "No, I think we'll find plenty of space to wander about in and act the part of 'noble savages' all afternoon," Shearer confirmed humorously.

     They got out of the car and stood for a moment gazing intently about them, breathing-in the fresh Downs air which the breeze wafted hither and thither with wilful ease.  Then Tina attended to the picnic hamper, lifting it from the boot, while Shearer, having secured his window, locked the doors.  Only Michael Reid continued to stand where he was and survey his new surroundings - not, however, with pleasure but with mounting horror!  For the prospect of having to walk across the space before them and thereby abandon himself to the vegetation there quite chilled him, making him feel strangely faint.  How could he, the disciple of Mondrian and staunch advocate of transcendentalism, possibly allow himself to be surrounded and well-nigh swamped by so much raw nature, so much subconsciously-dominated sensuality?  How could he possibly set foot across the Sussex Downs in order to sit and have lunch amid the Devil's own creations, when he was a man of God, a pioneer of the spirit in Manichaean disdain for the sensual?  The question arose in his mind and fairly tormented him.  He hadn't bargained for anything like this when he set out with Tina and Keith earlier that day, not having been confronted by such a dilemma before.  He hadn't realized just how spiritually earnest he had become over the past year, how much a man of the city.  Now that he found himself confronted by so much untamed nature, it seemed as though his very existence as a spiritual leader was being not merely threatened, but called into question.  He scarcely heard what his companions were saying to each other, as they came up alongside him with the hamper.  He was far too engrossed in his thoughts.

     "Now then, let's get going, shall we?" Shearer suggested, smiling confidently at the vast expanse of green scenery that stretched away before them.

     "I say, are you alright, Michael?" asked Tina, noticing the worried expression on the artist's thin face.  He was also quite pale and appeared to be on the verge of some kind of nervous crisis.

     "Well, as a matter of fact, I'm feeling a bit queasy," he confessed, becoming shamefaced and slightly embarrassed.

     "Good heavens! I hadn't noticed you were ill," Shearer declared with an expression of spontaneous concern on his handsome face.  "Was it the journey or something?"

     "Possibly a combination of that and something I ate for breakfast," Reid impulsively lied.  He couldn't very well tell them the truth!

     Tina looked genuinely concerned and suggested to her boyfriend that perhaps Michael ought to return to the car and rest there awhile.  She had half-divined his problem.

     Shearer looked puzzled.  "I'd have thought a little fresh air and exercise the best remedy," he opined, casting the artist a slightly quizzical glance.  "Come on, he'll soon be feeling better once we get under way."  And without further ado, he started off across the grass, almost dragging Tina along with him.

     Automatically, if somewhat reluctantly, Reid followed suit and accompanied them in the general direction they were heading.  But it was as though he had entered a realm that was hostile to him, a realm where civilization counted for nothing and spiritual aspirations were negated.  The further away from the car he walked, the more hostile the environment seemed to become, and he began to feel that he was suffocating in some foreign element, growing estranged from his normal rhythms.  All around him the thick stubbly grass assumed a deeply menacing aspect, as though contact with it was slowly sucking the spirit out of him, draining him of life energy, mocking and undermining him.  He shuddered with disgust and came to a sudden halt.  He felt on the point of throwing-up, so vertiginous had he become.  Already the car was some 80-90 yards behind them.  It looked somehow remote and abandoned, almost betrayed.  How could he go on?

     Responding to his hesitation, Tina halted beside him, obliging her hamper-carrying companion to reluctantly do likewise.  She could plainly see how distressed he was by the situation.  "Would you rather return to the car?" she asked on a note of unfeigned concern.

     He stared apologetically back at her for an instant, then quickly nodded his head.

     Realizing the situation was beyond his control, Shearer dipped into his pocket and handed Michael Reid the keys to the car.  "I'm sorry you're not well enough to come with us," he murmured, frowning gently.  "But I hope you'll soon get over whatever has upset you."

     "Thanks," the artist responded, making a brave attempt at smiling.

     "You'd better take a couple of sandwiches and a carton of milk with you," Tina advised him, opening the hamper and dipping her hand into it for the items in question.  "Here.  We can't let you starve to death while we're away."

      As he took the proffered provisions, Reid thought he could detect in her expression an intuitive comprehension of his predicament.

     "If you become well enough to join us later-on this afternoon, don't hesitate to do so," Shearer suggested innocently.

     "Assuming you can find us, that is!" Tina joked.  "Though I don't suppose we'll stray too far away.  We'll probably be back by half-five or six at the latest."  It was now nearly half-past one.

     "I'm sincerely grateful to you both," Reid managed to say, "and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you."

     "No problem," Tina affirmed, smiling reassuringly.

     So it was that, with provisions and keys in hand, Michael Reid quickly returned to the Citroën and gratefully let himself in.  He was still feeling somewhat dizzy and embarrassed, but gradually, adjusting himself to its 'civilized' interior, this gave way to a feeling of relief, as though he had actually been sick and thus unburdened himself of an upset stomach.  Never had the interior of a car seemed so pleasant to him as now, and it wasn't long before he was able to avail himself of the food and drink which Tina had so thoughtfully and generously given him.  Here at least he would be relatively safe from the Downs, surrounded by a protective shell of civilization.  Later, for want of something to do, he would read the novel he had brought with him and possibly listen to the car radio for a while.  Maybe he would take a walk round the parking area after he had visited the nearby public conveniences.  And later still, when they all got back to London, he promised himself that, to compensate his sensual side for the indulgences he had just denied it, he would eat a large dinner, take a stroll round the local streets, and go to bed an hour early.  But never again would he allow himself to be cajoled into setting foot on the Sussex Downs!