i
I’m now unexpectedly six months into my English journey.
It is, of course, ridiculous to make porcelain and try to write.
Just as the porcelain is coming into focus, a heat haze of white, William also starts to write a book. How on earth is he going to differentiate his time, I want to ask him, will you zone it so that you do your making, experimenting, talking in daylight and banish the words into the night? The pronouns slip and slide. I want to ask him if I’m really going to try and interweave the two, a notebook on his bench, like I’m doing this week.
William, now widowed, an Elder, a little myopic and properly stout, as respectable and pragmatic as any Quaker caricature, is trying to make porcelain and he writes.
He hearkens to his friends’ advice and is ‘committing his knowledge of chemistry to black and white’. These are his colours, of course. William is also reading of other people’s visions, and this is when his nights and days meld. Visions can happen to anyone and Emanuel Swedenborg, the practical, engaged scientist, the inspector of mines, evangelist for the divining rod and writer on copper, was in a London tavern when darkness fell, and he was vouchsafed a vision of a man telling him of the End of the World. This was not some general miasmic terror-vision, but one in colour, threaded with detail. Since then, Swedenborg – with increasing regularity – has been visited by angels whose teachings, of course, need careful exegesis.
One night, for instance, he had a vision about porcelain. In a marketplace, filled with detritus, stands a palace. It disappears. And in its place there come plenty of beautiful vessels, ‘porcelain ware it seemed to me, recently put up there … everything was still being arranged’. Swedenborg writes this down: visions are for sharing.
But what does it mean?
Acolytes are spreading Swedenborg’s pamphlets, translating his texts from Latin. William has been sent some and is captivated. He decides that it is imperative to bring into English 400 pages of Latin. He begins to translate.
ii
I sit in the archive of the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury and open the first page of A treatise concerning Heaven and Hell, containing a relation of many wonderful things therein, as heard and seen by the author, the Honourable Emanuel Swedenborg, of the Senatorial Order of Nobles in the Kingdom of Sweden. Now first translated from the original Latin.
I’m a little daunted by William’s translation of this text. It is a slow, obsessive, tidal wash of notes and references to Scripture. And the epigraphs from Isaiah – This is a rebellious people, which say to the seers, See not – and Proverbs – Where there is no Vision, the people perish – make me pause before starting my work. I am here to understand not to judge.
There is a ‘want of simplicity’. Christianity has been in a state of falling away from its essential spirituality. There has been an undue exaltation of man’s natural rational faculties and powers, ‘it chains down the mind to the object of the senses, and things of outward observation, and totally indisposes it for the consideration of things inward and spiritual’.
This is the Preface and I feel this is a proper Quaker talking, measuring his words like a chemist uses his scales, a corn-factor pouring the grain.
And then it just goes completely and utterly wayward and Swedenborg is breathless with elixirs and angelic orders. The world is an interpenetration of the unseen and the seen, there are gradations in the spirit world similar to the ones that we know of. Everything we see has an angelic correspondence. ‘All nature’, he writes beautifully, ‘is a theatre of divine wonders’. It is like reading Blake turned to footnoted prose, a relentless Swedish version of a Beat poet. I remember performance poetry from my childhood on a 1960s campus and it shares this same satisfaction with bearded men taking up space with words, the same utter assumption that someone is listening.
‘To me it has been granted to associate with angels, and to converse with them, as man does with man’, writes Swedenborg. The earth is not as you see it. There is a sagacity in bees, there is a genius in trees. Everything coheres around God as light, the sun, illumination.
And everything, everyone, every angel, is relentlessly ranked.
It takes me 300 pages of this book to work it out: this is what white means.
In Swedenborg’s world, the angels at the sepulchre have ‘raiment white as snow … their garments shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy’. White is truth; it is the glowing cloud on the horizon that shows the Lord is coming. White is wisdom. It is judgement and the subject of Swedenborg’s treatise De equo albo; On the White Horse mentioned in the Revelation. White brings us all into focus, it dispenses clarity, ‘the same light gives pleasing colours in one object, and displeasing colours in another; indeed, it grows brighter in white objects’.
It reveals. It is Revelation itself.
I finish the book. And I start it again. I realise that I have missed a crucial sound that runs through it, a hum that I have only half been aware of. On my second reading, I hear it properly. This is a book about white. But it is also a book translated by a widower, someone who is still married, still living in his marriage.
We are to remain married after death to those we were married to on earth, writes Swedenborg and translates William. This is complete and total heresy, the vision of Marriage in Heaven, eternal Conjugal love bathed in the light of angels, ‘as a moon, glowing white like the moon of our earth and of like size, but more brilliant’.
It is a book about white as grief and white as hope.