‘Fantastic, Mutable, Illusory’
June 24, 2009
James M. writes:
Your piece on clouds reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite obscure books: V. M. Yeates’ Winged Victory, a semi-autobiographical novel about RAF pilots during the Great War.
It climbed well, and in a minute reached the cloud layer, which was at fifteen-hundred feet. After a few preliminary obscurings he was involved in the grey deleting mist. The world had gone; dissolved into intangible chaos. Nothing had form except the aeroplane and himself and perhaps that queer circular ghost of a rainbow that sat in the blankness in front. Every motion had ceased, for all the roaring of the engine. Nevertheless, he knew by experience that in this no-world it was necessary to keep the pitot at eighty or more, and the joystick and rudder central, or bad sensations as of dizzying flopping would follow. The mist grew darker. He put his head in the office and flew by his instruments. He kept the speed right but he could feel that all was not well, without being able to tell what might be wrong. The mist brightened. He came suddenly into sunshine. A cloudless blue sky arched over a gleaming floor of ivory rocks. It was all around him in the twinkling of an eye, and the grey chaos away in another universe, a million years or a few feet distant. The two sphere were as close together and as far apart as life and death. He saw that he was flying with unintentional bank.
The bright glare of uncontaminated space and the cold purity of the air had their usual exhilarating effect. He performed several rolls and contorted in nameless rudder-kicking spasms that spun the sky and cloud floor about; and satisfied that Y was not likely to fall to pieces, he dropped to the floor and contour-chased over its shining hillocks and among its celestial ravines. This was not the majesty of cumulus, with its immitigable towering heights and golden threatening; its soul of fire and shadow; pile on pile of magically suspended gleaming dream-stuff; glory of vision and splendour of reality; shapeless splendour of form; empty solidity; fantastic, mutable, illusory as life itself. This was the level-floating rain-cloud, a layer only a few hundred feet thick, that makes the earth so dull a place when it eclipses the sky, and concentrating all dullness there, leaves the region above it stainless, and very like conventional heaven. On those refulgent rocks should angels sit; like them insubstantial, glowing like them. Music should they make with golden wires, unheard; hyming the evident godhead of the sun, from whom the radiance flowed of those immaculable spaces: wings faintly shimmering with faint changing colour, and unbeholding eyes. In that passionless bright void joy abode, interfused among the cold atoms of the air. Breath there was keen delight, all earthly grossness purged.
The first couple times I read this I got hung up on “abode”. I read it as the noun “abode” and not the past tense of “abide”.
Laura writes:
That is fantastic. Judging from the vividness and beauty of this, Yeates didn’t just fly. He abode in the sky.
