L )   O C T O B E R , 1 9 4 3   -   T E A   A N D   Q U O O M I S

From Peter’s notebook: “It is an overcast grey evening; the God-King sits on his many cushions surveying his kingdom of water, smoking his long-stemmed clay pipe. The colourless marsh-lakes, the slate sky, even the statue-like presence of the God-King himself all seem carved from stone, as permanent and eternal as the mountains that ring his kingdom. This timeless quality fills me with a strange euphoria; the emperor of Buryats, on the other hand, seems pensive and melancholic as they sip tea and quoomis on a promontory overlooking the marshes.
‘Tell me of your land, nape,’ the God-King says. ‘But tell me only with gestures and sounds so I may see it better.’
I get up and starts to draw images in the dirt, animating and commenting on them with leaps and whoops, miming the laughter of a man on the telephone, the perfect arc of a glider catching the thermals, the exhilaration of a woman being carried towards her lover by a locomotive. Gradually, my gestures become more abstract - a couple of passes of the hands is enough to depict harvesting of crops or the spire of a cathedral. After several hours, I draw this makeshift narrative to a close and sit back down on the cushions, exhausted. The Buryat King’s eyes grow wistful as he describes my world back to me, a land of constant whirling motion and change where the arc of a man’s life describes a spiral, a land in which man twirls and spins like the angry gods above him.
The Emperor: ‘My kingdom moves to the eternal rhythmns of nature, ancient and harmonious. Yet I know it is rotting; under the pressure of your world, it will blow away like dust.’
I reply: ‘Your kingdom has succumbed to fixity and incessance, it has choked on its own stability. In the stagnant water of its inertia, you see the lifeless reflection of your kingdom, frozen and suspended, and you recognize permanence and solidity are but illusions in this chimerical world.’” (see text plate 33)