And then, with all the bustle, the counting of luggage, and re-counting, with the crew members lost in work, they all forgot Jute’s terror, and Riley’s magic disappearance. Even Jim forgot his own near lachrymosal despair. Work had become god, directing their souls to outward goals. Everyone was lost to him or herself, except Lao, who had to make an awkward crossing, a crossing as difficult as fording a deep cold river. For now he had to ford human perception. He had to cross a terrain in the minds of people. He had to submit to one of his life’s endless trials – the trial of colour.
He prepared himself for materialisation. For, on the whole, in the living moments, minutes, hours of self living in self, of his being dwelling in his being, of simply living in his life, Lao was almost never aware of himself but as a human being; and even then he seldom thought about being human, but merely was. His thoughts lingered and dwelled in realms humorous, realms philosophical, realms fictional, realms financial, when worried, as often he is, about finance. He dwelled in realms sensual and sexual, loving the body as much as the spirit, and loving the body of woman more than all other forms. He dwelled in realms of pure abstraction, thoughts without objects, dreams, notions, childhood moments lost in time’s betrayals and exile. He dwelled in calm lakes with swans, in calm skies, with the birds of the clouds, among leaves and flowers of summer. He dwelled in the great suffering of millions in their broken places, in neglected continents. He dwelled in films loved, on faces that moved him, in books and paintings and music and art works that shaped him and shape him still, mostly in book-worlds, where things are real because abstract. Oh, he dwelled in the happiest realms of the spirit when not aware of it, and cultivated his cynicism as a perfect mask when not aware of his intrinsic happiness. But seldom did he dwell in the nature of colour, and colour differences on the great globe, because he lived, in spirit, within humanity’s abstraction, within the oneness of it. He believed, deep down beyond thought, that all are one.
True, he had learned to live as a hermit, a recluse, and had as little contact as possible with the ugly things that induced suicide upon his soul. He had found this truce effective, this de-materialisation useful, this exile within England practical, this exile from colour grading a liberation, so that his mind could wander and be strong, and not burn with rage and self-doubt externally induced, but strong with the spirit soaring, free and powerful, like the mind of a child, or the casual notions of an Alexander on a quiet afternoon between momentous battles, serene master of the battles of daily life. He, Lao, dwelled thus, in a splendid unreality that made reality malleable, because he had come to secretly understand that all individual reality is unreality, and that we make our world with our thoughts. And with irony he thought of himself as a man and artist of the spirit and the world, a lover of the world, a giver and a learner, and a hundred noble and not-so-noble and sensual things beside, a dancer to life, a scholar of the serious and the light things, a poet, a thinker, a sexualist, a warrior, a fool, a free man, a broken-off island of God, a mind charged with the grandeur of all minds, a spirit courageous, a laughing being of joy, a divine victim, a clown concealer of discoveries and powers, but seldom, seldom, indeed, did he think himself a being, a man, a figure, reducible to colour, only to colour, definable only by colour, to a place on the spectrum, a light impression negative on eyes that in the hearts register such negation. He seldom allowed it, and when it happened, when he felt himself being painted into being, becoming only a colour, not a simple complex human being, like everyone else, when he felt this reduction, he experienced the strangest sensation of being snatched, for a mortal moment, away from Eden, into unreality, from childhood games and freedoms into adult imprisonments, from the hidden bliss of all creation into the eye’s historical grading of pigmentation. Often it was not acute or violent or hostile, often it was merely being invented as an exotic, being projected upon, with the skin as a celluloid fantasy or nightmare, or a celluloid remembrance, or desire, or distrust, or illusion.
But now, with entry into Paris before him, facing the army of immigration control as he had done before in his life, sometimes with disastrous results, Lao felt himself materialise from the realm of pure being, of reverie, of selfhood, or the thoughts of happiness or despair, of money or love, of travel or wishing to be home, the vast run of human thoughts, that spin and merge, that dance and twine themselves through life’s moments – he felt himself materialising from that realm of normal humanity into a state that Camus called ‘humiliated consciousness’: the consciousness of being automatically suspect, automatically distrusted, automatically de-humanised, less than humanised, demonised, because of colour differences, because of variety in nature’s canvas, because of history, the eyes, what people read into the skin, illusions.
Lao approached his materialisation from pure selfhood to defensiveness with annoyance, with irritation. He called Jim aside and said:
‘This journey is a quest, and in all great quests there are always trials.’
Jim was hassled. Sam wanted Lao in a shot with passengers streaming through immigration control. There were problems with the baggage handlers, and the heat, heavy-laden and multiplied by all the engines and the absorbent metal and the breathing concrete all around, exacerbated the general irritability. Jim said:
‘What are you getting at?’
Lao said:
‘There are invisible lines that society sets up which make some people more visible.’
Jim snapped:
‘Stop being so damned philosophical. Get to the point.’
Lao said:
‘I’m being philosophical to stop me being angry.’
‘Angry about what?’
‘There are many many invisible lines in the world. You cross the line without noticing it. You are unaffected by it. For you there is no line, no chemical reaction, no danger of being humiliated, insulted, bundled up and thrown out, shouted at, animalised, locked up in a back room with a gag that eventually chokes and kills. You wander through it all so unknowing. But if I go past the line a chain reaction is set off. The line is meant to weed out people like me, different people. The line trips me up. I get detained. I get questioned. It is a question of pigment. It makes pigs of people. My innocence is my crime. I am condemned at birth, because of a different sun.’