Wilson Harris

The Carnival Trilogy

INTRODUCTION

[This introduction is an extract from an address I gave to the Temenos Academy in London on 18 March 1991. The full text was published in the following year in the journal Temenos 13.]

As an imaginative writer I find myself reading in continuously changing ways. I reread works by writers I may have misjudged and which I return to and perceive differently. I reread my own fictions after a long while and see connections there I planted and yet which seem utterly new. Let me attempt to illumine what I mean as concretely as I may. Let me commence with Carnival, the first novel in this trilogy.

A word about the characters in Carnival. Jonathan Weyl is — let us say — a twentieth-century Dante figure. He is secreted in the carnival of the twentieth century. The particularities of his existence make him intimate with some of the proportions of a thirteenth-century Dante even as they move him light years away, so that the origination of a Dantesque formula, a Dantesque investiture, a Dantesque mask, is called into question. There are stars in Dante’s thirteenth-century cosmos he would never have perceived as we perceive them. They were fixed. Whereas for us the light that comes across space from a star is but the shadow of an object that may have vanished. News of its disappearance has not yet been transmitted to us. To put it differently: within the abyss of tradition — within the spatiality, the spectrality of tradition — the original nucleus that motivates us is so peculiar, so unidentifiable, that singularity needs plurality. Dante, in other words, needs a twentieth-century carnival of masks even as those masks look backwards to him and through him into the mysterious origins of Imagination in science and art.

There is also Amaryllis, who is a Beatrice figure. She has acquired particularities of numinous sexuality in the twentieth-century carnival. I shall touch upon these in due course for they help in the transformation of the barrier between the Virgilian pagan and the paradiso.

There is Everyman Masters, the twentieth-century Virgilian guide. As ‘Everyman’ he cannot escape his pagan body. Indeed he visualizes Christ as riding into Jerusalem on a pagan donkey, a donkey that is another kind of Trojan horse. In it lies an invisible text, an invisible army, that will overturn Jerusalem itself as well as the Roman age.

All these complications imply various fractures and subtle abysses in story lines we take for granted. The reader has to read differently, to read backwards and forwards, even more importantly forwards and backwards. All the imageries are partial, though attuned to a wholeness one can never seize or structure absolutely. Wholeness becomes a thread or a continuity running from the inferno into the paradiso. I said earlier that ‘wholeness’ cannot be seized or structured. Wholeness is a rich and insoluble paradox. Wholeness has to do with an origination of the Imagination whose solidity is interwoven with a paradoxical tapestry of spectrality, of the light year. Thus it is that Everyman Masters is both dead and alive when he dies and returns into Jonathan Weyl’s dreams, into Amaryllis’s dreams, as their Virgilian guide. The rich but insoluble paradox that clothes him brings an impulse into the text of Carnival to transform an authoritarian paradiso.

The ecstasies and torments that run parallel through the twentieth-century age made it inevitable that the dead king should descend into the living Inferno the moment Amaryllis and I glimpsed heaven and consummated our secret marriage vows. The Inferno lives when the dead retrace their steps around the globe. Our marriage was unique heart and mind but for that reason — unique tranquillity and ecstasy, unique revolution and peace — it was inevitable that a master spirit would return to counsel us and to bear the penalty of the Inferno that runs in parallel with heaven. Masters accepted the penalty. He became my guide and opposite (our guide and opposite) in arriving from the kingdom of the dead to counsel us in the land of the living and to guide my pen across the pages of this biography of spirit.

The use of the word ‘inevitable’ in the passage above is intended to pre-empt fate and in so doing to steep us in a continuity that is other than fate, the continuity of insoluble wholeness. As a consequence the dead/living king (that Everyman Masters is) bears the penalty of the Inferno in order to make of every erasure of pagan labour’s claim to the paradiso a fracture or subtle abyss in the story-line of the paradiso. That fracture, that subtlety of penetration, is lifted into the bliss of the conjunctio between Amaryllis and Jonathan Weyl as a portent of a healed humanity across all terrifying barriers.

What is divine comedy? In the light of the abyss of space and time of which a thirteenth-century poet was unaware, may not divine comedy transform itself into light-year comedy, may not a numinous equation exist between spectrality and blissful sexuality as the seed of the Incarnation?

Light-year comedy within the context of numinous sexuality brings the rhythms of obsolescence into youth and vice versa. In such rhythms landscapes/riverscapes/skyscapes are miniaturized into bodily/bodiless continuities we do not immediately recognize as pertinent to the sacrament of sex:

Our naked flesh was inhabited by mutual generations clad in nothing but obsolescent organs, obsolescent youth. What obsolescence! What intimate renewal of being beyond age and youth! We were intimate, ageless being, we were four years short of thirty, we were young, we were old as the coition of the hills and waves miniaturized in our bodies. We were a dying fall into deeper orchestration of mutual spaces.

When I wrote that passage — and though it came out of intense care and concentration — I did not realize (it might well have been written by a stranger) the continuity it sustained with future work, the corridor that ran through it into the characters that would appear in the second novel of this trilogy, namely The Infinite Rehearsal. Many imaginative writers know of the legacies one work offers another that is still to be written. What I am referring to, however, is deeper than this. It is as if those legacies are overturned by the hand of a stranger to imply a continuity the legacies themselves may have eclipsed. It would never have crossed my mind — when I wrote The Infinite Rehearsal — to associate Jonathan Weyl, Amaryllis and Everyman Masters in Carnival with Robin Redbreast Glass, Emma and Peter in The Infinite Rehearsal. Even now I advance the association with some trepidation. Yet it is blindingly clear that it exists. Robin Redbreast Glass is immortal Faustian youth. He sustains a link with Jonathan Weyl (the twentieth-century Dante figure in Carnival)because of the mediumistic bliss that erupts into his relationship with Emma. Emma — the female priest in The Infinite Rehearsal — an ageing woman (presumably therefore obsolescent in sexual terms) validates Amaryllis, the Beatrice figure, in Carnival. Numinous intercourse occurs between her — the ostensibly aged woman — and the immortal Faustian youth Robin Redbreast Glass. Peter — as Robin’s alter ego— is a mediumistic Everyman Masters and a shadowy Virgilian guide in The Infinite Rehearsal.

Robin Redbreast Glass arises from the grave of the sea to become immortal Faustian youth. There had been a boating accident in which Robin, his mother, his aunt, and others were drowned. Peter and Emma were in the capsized boat but they escaped and lay on the beach exhausted. Peter lay with his head under Emma’s hair and upon her breasts. When Emma and Peter are old they meet the resurrected Faustian youth (who therefore has not aged) in the tunnel of the light years. Robin sees himself within alter ego Peter as if the years fall away and he (Robin instead of Peter) lies with Emma on the beach. He lies with his head beneath her hair and upon her breasts. And yet he recognizes her as an aged woman simultaneously. He sees her as a female priest. It is this saving paradox within age and youth, within the translation of obsolescence and fertility, that gives to the spectrality of encounter a wholly different apprehension of the living in the dead, the dead in the living, absence in presence, presence in absence. I am not sure that the terms ‘dead’ and ‘living’ apply in this context for one is dealing with a continuity of encounter that nourishes itself by overturning legacies of expectation. That is how it seems to me. I have no dogma or absolute theories about the unfinished genesis of the Imagination.

Robin is amazed to discover that Emma is a priest. So was I, the writer. Prior to writing this novel I believed women should not be priests. I changed my mind in the light of the subtle abysses that appeared in The Carnival Trilogy. Robin records his astonishment in a series of passages (the allusion to ‘Skull’ is to a city of prosperity littered with desolations). Robin exclaims inwardly:

I saw in a flash that she was a priest, a female priest, she was hope in the city of Skull, revolutionary hope, unconventional hope.

Let me confess that the issue of the female priest is one that startles me. It overturns a certain legacy of expectation that I have entertained from childhood. The priest is male is male is priest is male for ever and ever. Aboriginal or ontic tautology enshrined in so many storylines. But a question arises: are the stigmata upon the body of Christ a storyline? Do they not imply an abyss at the heart of history? Is the crucifixion of the Son of God — no less a person, mark you! — the very Son of God — is this not an abyss at the heart of human history? If so, then the stigmata may imply a range of association we do not recognize and have scarcely begun to gauge. That is how I felt when I came to Emma, the young/old, obsolescent/fertile priest. Through her my grasp of Faust underwent a profound change. Let me come first to the stigmata. Robin addresses Emma inwardly again:

All this made me scan Emma’s features closely. She was veiled by dateless day infinity comedy. I saw her innate sorrow. I suddenly saw how worn she was. It was as if a nail had woven its innermost weblike constancy into her flesh, an ecstatic nail, a sorrowing nail. Ecstatic and sorrowing!

When Robin alludes there to ‘dateless day infinity comedy’ as a veil upon Emma’s features he draws upon an ancient pre-Columbian, calendrical perspective. This matches, I think, the notion of light-year vistas. But I wish at this juncture to remind you of the ‘nail’, its ‘innermost weblike constancy … ecstatic nail, sorrowing nail …’

It is as if one glimpses numinous sexuality within Robin’s blissful relationship to Emma on the beach beside the sea, a numinous sexuality that becomes a spectral nail that pierces through the inferno into the paradiso.

In such a nail that shatters one’s pre-possessions I knew the construction of a sound that echoed in the air and in the sea. It was the music of the priest, of the God of nature. ‘One comes,’ said Emma, ‘to a beloved creation, to the divine, in every moment that one survives in the inimitable textures of nature, truly lives and survives.

All this I feel brings a wholly unexpected variation into the stigmata we tend to identify tautologously with the body of Christ. Through Emma the female priest — Emma the body of the womb — a multiple counterpoint — weblike yet constant — is woven that involves Faustian, immortal youth, the resurrection body, ecstatic numinous, paradisean nail, and sorrowing nail that pierces the tyranny of the inferno.

As I lay on the beach I was pierced by the cry of the gulls, the laughing sea gulls. Were they gulls or were they cranes? I could not tell. It was a cry from heaven and yet it was a subtle, piercing, shaking laughter. A shaking note like strings of music in the sea. The motif of an incomparable composition …

It may interest you to note that the cry of the gull echoes a pre-Columbian motif which relates to Quetzalcoatl. Quetzal the bird. Coatl the snake, the abysmal yet fertile earth which is ‘beloved nature’.

Now, may I return to Faust and the way in which the multiple counterpoint affected my vision of Faust. There is an aspect to Faust, immortal youth, when he seems to achieve a divorce from the resurrection body in The Infinite Rehearsal and looms as absolutely dominant. He buries the ecstatic, sorrowing nail within a hubris of immortality. He seeks implicitly to abort the mysterious buoyancy that is open to him as he lies beside Emma. Weblike constancy becomes a sterile rigidity. And then he gains a position by which to manipulate a series of ageing masks. One such mask bears the initials W.H. (my own initials). A joke, a serious joke. Except that Faust sees the ageing masks he wears as expendable. And in that sense the joke may hurt. Despite one’s labours for Faust — despite the labour of one’s antecedents across generations — one and they are expendable and doomed.

The rigidity of the perpetually young immortal Faust secures the tautology of tyranny, the worship of fascism, of evil. Faust’s ageing masks include the ageing institutions of democracy, of the Church, of the humanities, the universities. We have seen how such ageing institutions may be worn to the detriment of peoples in Hitlerite Europe, in Field-Marshal Amin’s Africa, and most recently in Saddam’s Iraq.

I do not have to remind you that tyrannies have been nourished by the ageing Church which turned a blind eye to injustice, by ageing democracies which have been the suppliers of machinery of war or have stimulated in the commercial field gross, materialistic ambitions.

I cannot easily explain it but the curious fractured storylines within The Infinite Rehearsal drew me intuitively to sense that the numinous body of the womb in the female priest implied unsuspected fabric that breaks and alters the rigidity of Faustian hubris. The substance of the nail, the substance of instrumentalities linking cultures, turns institutions around to examine and re-examine themselves in creative and re-creative lights. Robin Redbreast Glass yields to the priest Emma:

I felt her lips upon mine. The kiss of all loves and all true lovers,

The numinous instrumentality of the nail becomes the seed of invisible texts in which ageing, expendable masks become the secretion of strangers who are intimate to ourselves and who will sustain continuity into the future.

One needs to be cautious for the issues we are exploring do not turn on dogma or intellectual formula. Yet one may have, I think, a certain true confidence in the intuitive life of the Imagination, its spectrality and miraculous concreteness beyond implacable identity of formula.

It is the nail, the paradox of associative instrumentalities, which brings me now to the last volume in this trilogy, namely The Four Banks of the River of Space.

Let me commence by presenting a cross-cultural parallel between an aspect of Homer’s Odyssey and South American/Guyanese legend relating to the figure of Canaima. Telemachus is approached in Ithaca by a friend who tells him that his father Ulysses is alive and will return home to redeem the kingdom and to destroy Penelope’s suitors who are wasting the substance of the state. The next day when Telemachus runs into his friend and reminds him of their conversation the friend is astonished. He has no recollection of it. He was somewhere else, Homer covers the discrepancy by saying that a god or a goddess had appeared in the shape of Telemachus’s friend. A similar yet enigmatic confusion of identity occurs in South America and it relates to the revenge apparition or fury or god called Canaima. Ulysses does return as prophesied and is not immediately recognized. He comes in the rags of a beggar.

An aspect of Ulysses’ fury when he returns which I find horrific is his slaying of many or some of Penelope’s serving women who had slept with some of the suitors in the palace in Ithaca. One accepts the necessity of slaying the suitors but the hanging of the serving women filled me with dread as a child when I read Homer. Upon reflection across the years I find it endorses another parallel with Canaima. The aspect of terrifying revenge! True, Ulysses was a great hero, a returning hero, but the redemption of his kingdom is tainted by the horror of revenge.

I recall coming upon a group of Macusi Indians in the Potaro river in British Guiana in the mid-1940s. They told me Canaima was active amongst them and in pursuit of some obscure wrong he had judged their people had done — some crime they had committed in the past — and as a consequence he was spiriting away their young men and maidens. It is hard to describe their state of misery in the face of Canaima who is indeed a formidable legend associated with the enactment of revenge upon wrongdoers. The pathology of revenge in him becomes a form of evil.

It is important to note in charting the parallel with Homeric epic that Canaima may appear in an encampment — intent on sowing fire like a terrorist or causing some bitter distress — and be recognized as a neighbour, as one’s cousin, or someone’s brother or father. Yet the following day when the recognized person is cornered he makes a good case for being somewhere else, hunting, fishing. An uncanny confusion overwhelms the tribe. Not only are they confused about the crime they or their antecedents have committed and which brought Canaima into their midst but they are confronted by an abyss within which lurks the identity of terror. If only they could seize the instrument Canaima uses!

The instrument becomes both spectral and concrete. And this explains in some degree the ascendancy of the camera amongst deprived peoples. If they are to deal with such spectrality, such concreteness, a shift has to occur in the premises of their reading of reality in the sky, in the land, in the river, everywhere. That shift seems almost impossible in a mass-media world and yet a moment may have arrived when the apparatus, the instrumentalities we take for granted, are susceptible to cross-cultural and re-visionary momentum. Take the camera. Disadvantaged peoples become pawns of the camera. Their ills are made visible to millions of viewers and then they fade from the news. The camera becomes a weapon with which we shoot an animal or a savage and bring him home as a trophy in the television box. There are passages in The Four Banks of the River of Space which extend the complications I have raised but I wish to restrict my emphasis to the matter of weaponry and instrument.

A camera is a weapon in some instances. In other instances it is an extension of the caring eye. It could also be a private excursion into the future through recorded relics of memory. Each relic implies a fossil dimensionality that enriches the present and the future. The camera is also an eye of spirit as when one encounters people — as I did in a market place in Mexico City — who are alarmed that their souls may be imprinted or captured on the glass eye staring at them.

If all this is true of the camera how much more varied are the weapons and instruments of past civilizations. The bow of Ulysses in Homer’s epic is not the same bow for us. How it lived for him, how it felt to him, the faint tremor and music of the string, the sound of the wind that whispered in the branches of trees from which the bow came are not the same for us. But tremor, sound, wind, incomparable composition at the heart of words may awaken us to the mystery of trees, the precious life of trees. The abyss that has opened between ourselves and Homer — the greatest of epic poets — nourishes a fantastic and mysterious continuity that breaks a pattern of sameness, same bow, same arrow, even as it enriches the numinous raw material from which we fashion a bow, or a vessel, or a ship.

To destroy our rainforests now is to place our civilization upon another hill of Calvary. The three crosses fashioned from trees become the eloquent masts of a sinking ship from which Robin Redbreast Glass would be taxed, as never before, to arise. A bow, or a ship, or a camera, or a sword, or a knife, or an axe are not singular or same objects. They are instinct with pluralities. On one level that instinct cements violence. On another level we fashion, and are fashioned by, the enigma of constructive truth. The two levels or forces resemble each other but they are not the same.

The resemblance cannot be dismissed however. It achieves an overlap that resists absolute model or formula. There is no absolute model for constructive truth. There is no absolute imprint upon violence. Justice can be tainted by revenge. The resemblance assists us to make differentiations that are sometimes shockingly new in abysmal circumstance between our proneness to violence (as a solution to the world’s ills) and a blow we may strike that liberates our prepossessions, unshackles our bondage to fate. The latter blow is inimitably creative, inimitably constructive, in apprising us of the burdens of an imperilled globe that may only be borne in intimate and far-reaching alignment to strangers who are pertinent to us as we are pertinent to them. This issue of knowing ourselves, recognizing ourselves differently, implies a creative/re-creative penetration or blow directed at models of tradition whose partiality engenders an accumulation of crisis.

That such accumulation is visible everywhere makes clear, I would think, the rituals of sameness, of repetitive slaughter ingrained in violence within the symbols of world politics. One returns to the issue of instrumentality, the life of the extended body, in visualizing the stranger in ourselves. The mould of revenge gives way to profoundest self-confessional imagination. We may not recognize ourselves in the evil-doer but our dismemberment at his hands need not be a prescription for ultimate self-destruction. To jettison such a prescription is to perceive within the threat of a dismembered world an instrumentality that has chiselled us, shaped us, across aeons of space. We cannot seize such instrumentality but we can release in it, from it, proportions that begin to overturn the aboriginal tautologies that condition our responses to evil. Evil seems to be evil for ever and ever until it voids self-confessional creativity. In The Four Banks Canaima, the evil-doer, returns to Anselm, the good man, after forty years. Alarming as it appears Canaima has changed. He has been dislodged within the instrumentality of a cosmos he abused. An abused cosmos which has shaped one, sculpted one, across aeons and evolutions, is a paradox no one can solve. Can one abuse a creator that has sculpted one, written the word of being into dust and marble and flesh? The extremities of evil are woven into such a paradox which Canaima begins to illumine when he returns to Anselm in a Dream.

Canaima the fury becomes a redemptive daemon. Has not Anselm, the good man, the architect, the saint — in the nameless proportions of artifice and instrumentality, religion and law which have their roots in well-nigh forgotten pagan realms — conspired inadvertently with powers that bred catastrophe? Canaima’s return therefore is self-reversal in such illumined conspiracy. His return is an illumination of restrictive vision into shared evil, shared faculty of redemption through the arts and sciences that have been abused in the prosecution of fundamental causes.

Anselm sets out on his Odyssey into the past with Canaima’s dislodged knife in his side. It is as if he gathers up into his arms — in a wholly new, abysmal, terrifyingly creative light — the corpse of the bird-dancer Canaima had slain forty years previously on the bank of the Potaro river in South America. The corpse is but a mask to be worn by endangered species whose life is now wholly precious, sacred.

Canaima’s knife … had metaphorically killed me … pierced me to the core of the body’s waking instrument.

The Body’s Waking Instrument. The arousal of the body to itself as sculpture by a creator one abuses. The body wakes to itself as inimitable art, inimitable multi-faceted, living fossil extending into all organs, objects, spaces, stars, and the ripple of light. Wakes also to self-confessional blindness, blindness to self-destruction and the destruction of others.

The body wakes to the instrumentality of breath — ‘sharpest extension of breath in sculpted body-senses’:

Perhaps I was the medium of the dance in touching the earth, in touching the light, in touching the sculpture of appearances as if every structure one shaped, or ordered, or visualized, was a sacred infusion of slow-motion lightning into substance, substance into life,

I appreciate the difficulty in a phrase embodying ‘slow-motion lightning’. It was the closest I could come to a visualization of the energies of the cosmos as sleeping/waking life, as station and expedition, as the transfiguration of technologies into a therapeutic edge within the malaise of gross materialism that threatens to destroy our planet.

Wilson Harris

CARNIVAL

FOR MARGARET, JEAN-PIERRE AND NATHANIEL

Here all misgiving must thy mind reject,

Here cowardice must die and be no more,

We are come to the place I told thee to expect,

* * *

His hand on mine, to uphold my falterings,

* * *

He led me on into the secret things.

DANTE, The Divine Comedy (translated by Laurence Binyon)

The wanderings of the soul after death are prenatal adventures; a journey by water, in a ship which is itself a Goddess, to the gates of rebirth. In Vao the newly dead man is believed to arrive before the entrance to a cave on the sea-shore, where he encounters a terrible crab. In front of the cave mouth is a mazelike design called the Path. As the dead man approaches, the crab obliterates half of the design, and he has to restore it, or else be devoured. The Path is the same one that he has trodden many times in the ceremonial dances, and his knowledge of it proves him to be an initiate. After completing the design, he must thread its mazes to the threshold of the cave.

NORMAN O. BROWN, Love’s Body

ONE

Everyman Masters celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in the summer of 1982 with several glasses of red wine he consumed in a pub. He returned home intoxicated and, ascending the stairs to his flat in Holland Park, came upon her again, the woman who had moved in within the past week to occupy the apartment above his. He had caught a glimpse of her then but now it was as if he knew her for certain, and everything he had surmised in their previous encounter was true. In her lay the climax of Carnival, the terror of dying, the bliss of reciprocal penetration of masks. She was tall, slender, very white; her skin was transparent yet stood beneath or within coal black hair.

She gave him a faint, pointed smile of recognition. A needle seemed to stitch a spirit on to her lips. Red wine for thread. White skin for fabric. Blackest hair for a veil or net. All these — the glimmering shadow of a star in a glass of wine, the net of whiteness and blackness like the painted apparition of a ghostly storm — were substitutes for another presence as if they were all Carnival fabric, as if they were all animate costume saturated by the wine of memory, the strangest sacrament of jealousy and love that binds one to involuntary divinity, plagued humanity, with which one wrestles across the years.

Her subtle red lips were stitched by the needle of space into another woman’s jealous mouth. Yes, it was true. He saw it all. He remembered. The resemblance ran deeper than mere pigmentation or exaggerations of emotional tone, emotional colour. A black or brown divinity could wear a white mask and red lips and still reveal itself complexly, profoundly, as other than whiteness or redness. So now the white face of the woman in which Masters’ soul was mingled like wine was but the stitched investiture of a hidden pigment, a hidden affair with another woman apparently vanished or past but vividly present again, vividly dark, vividly alive, to break the mould of fate, or finality of ancient colour, inscribed into encounters of personality.

He clung to the banister, then half-stumbled, half-danced, it seemed, into his apartment. She helped him through the door, half-embracing him. They gained the sitting room.

“Water, please.”

Jane Fisher repaired to the kitchen and returned with a glass. He took it from her. “There’s a bottle marked Elixir somewhere on the mantelpiece — would you … yes, that’s it — thanks.” He extracted a tablet that he placed on his tongue and swallowed with a sip. The darkness of his face seemed to burn, then to clear, then to grow mellow. “That’s better. I suffer from the genius of love.” It was an astonishing remark yet seemed weighted now with profoundest matter of fact, profoundest comedy. He stopped, but within a moment or two continued accusingly, yet welcomingly, as if they were characters in a play.

“You astonished me, young woman.”

The expression “young woman” — spoken with a slightly caressing note — softened the blow in his voice, softened the bizarre in his previous utterance.

“You’re the spitting image of someone I met long ago except that she was black, no brown.” He stopped again, took another sip, then continued with unexpected passion, as if he had forgotten himself and spoke to another being within her being. “You were, no, she was the colour of rice that seems white yet conceals brown pigment and black in the dazzle of the sun, an Indian woman, East Indian, one tended to say in New Forest. I am not sure if she was even that. They were a mixed lot, mixed races, the New Forest people.” The effort left him momentarily exhausted, slightly breathless.

“Where is New Forest?” Jane asked. She could think of nothing else to say. She felt herself inwardly gripped by something.

Masters did not reply immediately. But he recovered his voice once again. “South America. Facing the Atlantic. I came to Europe twenty-five years ago, in 1957. Never returned. I remember the year because of Sputnik, the first rocket signalling the Inferno.” He leaned back and rested in his chair. His face, like hers, was a mask, the words he had spoken also masked (she felt) a fantastic, oddly breathless, yet breathing force, a fantastic, troubled, indefinable bond between them. They were real yet unreal presences to each other as all human shocking intercourse is. One lives in and out of Carnival time since each element that masks us sustains time as its original medium of sacrifice within creation. Not only that. Original medium of theatre. One is the other’s veil of timely or untimely dust. For himself Masters saw through Jane to the other woman who had stabbed him twenty-five years ago in New Forest. Life was draining away from him now as then. Life was drawing him close again to the originality of death as a spectre lodged in the breast of humanity, humanity’s eclipsed longings, eclipsed ambitions, eclipsed hopes; that revive, flash forth again upon every border line between theatres of the dying and theatres of the living. Such originality was Masters’ goal, Masters’ quest.

He revived, touched his side where the dagger had lodged. He drew Jane to him. Does the originality of love, however elusive and curiously distorted, cohere, or gain substance, in every theatre of the dying? Carnival had not yet come to London in 1957 when Masters arrived. Twenty-five years ago? He could scarcely credit it. Truer to say twenty-five ages or paces had drawn him closer to the art of dying he sought as his supreme goal. Such art or such a goal involves a penetration of masks that stitch into being a universal and complex Carnival or capacity for shared wounds, shared ecstasies, between past and future through living actor and hidden force.

Masters touched her eyelids and her lips as if he drew her into a performance. He seemed all at once immensely privileged, she felt herself curiously addressed by fictional reality. At first she wanted to pull away from him as if he were a dirty old man, poet or seer, but something indescribable held her, the obscure bond she had felt before, obscure stitched fabric through which he sought to trace the essentiality of other features within her, upon her, the essentiality of a kiss like a scar to which one succumbs again and again.

“Something puzzles your will, my dear,” he said, “some trace of longing you have entertained from childhood into adolescence, some trace of deepest ambition to shed accumulations of deprivation, to become a different creature, disciplined yet abandoned, the subject of lucid dreams in that you dream but still know you are dreaming, ageless child in self-surrender to species of fiction. I can see what is happening. I know within my own doomed flesh. A fever, a drought, possesses you. Is it not so?”

Jane sought to pull away but did not do so in the dream.

“Half-oasis, half-desert. I know. I have been there many times. I understand. Our, or my, birthday performance seems unusual, even perverse, but in point of fact it is a veil I seek to part within you, a veil you hug to yourself because you fear the world and its censure or ridicule.

“If you were a famous actress, yes, then you could be human and divinely mad or unveiled on the stage. You could murder … Society would allow you to play at being possessed by someone as drunken as me whose lines you would utter to enchanted audiences.

“So the world’s ridicule is hypocrisy or veneer, a device men and women don as chattering parrots and apes of the birth of creation that they too fear. Their fear is as great as yours.”

Jane could not make up her mind about the wound of fear. She toyed with the dagger in Masters’ flesh.

“Have you not noticed how politicians, journalists, economists, interviewers, interviewed, who appear on the box, suddenly become, as they confront the spectre of a wounded age” — he touched her hand as he spoke — “mimics of involuntary vice or virtue, a mimicry instigated by the originality of infected being? Something claws at them and unwittingly they utter the Sermon on the Mount to the unemployed or their eyes twist into another mask and they become noble, they cry like Old Testament prophets for the return of the death sentence. You are puzzled. Humanity is uniquely infected by legends of judgement that conflate all professions, all sciences, all vocations, into theatre of the Word or the Wound. The Word is the Wound one relives again and again within many partial existences of Carnival.”

She could not be sure she had heard or understood everything Everyman Masters was saying to her. The bond of confessed partiality and biased personality between them gave her a sudden sensation of privilege — if not divine right — reserved for a minority establishment. The sudden privilege to become “great” and “famous” was both heaven and hell. Her shadow arose, her shadow descended. She was naturally deprived but infected now by Masters’ drunken sobriety. He was drunk but infected by her pigmentations of spirit as if spirit needed to haunt the wedding feast and the funeral with elusive feminine water from a dagger of wine in god’s side. She was naturally common-sensical but infected by his uncommon illness. He was wise but infected by her capacity to twist the daemon’s tail. She was naturally young but infected now by his scent for ageless reserves of fiction. His power to hold her close to him as the soul of the cosmos lay in an immediacy of spirit to invoke greatness in a life such as hers that seemed remote from conventions of fame within which the so-called great actors or statesmen of history mimic universal death or love as they pursue statistics of world hunger, world charity, nuclear wealth, nuclear poverty.

“Ah yes,” he said pointing to the dagger and the wound that she (as newborn famous actress playing another woman’s shadow in the Carnival of history) had inflicted on him twenty-five years or ages past, “there was no reason to stab me. You were joined by your husband when you dealt the blow though you told me, when you invited me to your house, that he was away fishing at sea. I was innocent. You mistook me for someone else who had done you a great harm. I was game to be slaughtered. The wound I received was my first human/animal death, human game. Innocent as I was, there was guilt, another man’s guilt for which I paid. I was lucky to know this. Lucky I say, for others continue to die without possessing a clue about why they are hunted. Think of men and women from all walks of life who become victims, innocent victims. Their lives and deaths accumulate into statistics of motiveless or meaningless crime. How to identify those who are guilty, acquit those who are innocent! How to perceive the morality of Carnival within a universal plague of violence! That is our play. We shall descend, ascend, we shall travel around the globe. A first death and a second dying now as I embrace you, my dearest enemy, my dearest love. These are the facts on which the judgement of spirit rests.”

TWO

News of the death of Everyman Masters in the summer of 1982 was a great shock to me and to my wife Amaryllis. We were younger than Everyman by fifteen years but he had been a close friend for as long as I could remember. He and I sailed from New Forest in 1957 on a converted French troop-ship that offered us economic berths to Marseilles from where we made our way to London. I was twenty-five then, he was forty. I began that very year to compile notes of his life. In the wake of the news of his death in 1982, I was possessed by lucid dreams that intermingled fact with imaginative truth.

Amaryllis ascended above the stage of Carnival and said to the dead king Masters that he should return into my fiction and become my guide into the Inferno and the Purgatory of the twentieth century world. I dreamt that his Carnival body, slightly burnt mask, slightly smoking dagger of Napoleonic age, had come to light out of a cave of darkness when his cleaning woman visited his apartment. She screamed. The police came masked in alligator skin. He had been stabbed by an intruder. Nothing had been stolen. There was money in drawers. Untouched. Ornaments, pictures, clothing. Untouched. There was a glove and a fur coat on the floor. They had been pulled from a wardrobe but flung to the ground. The fur coat was stained with blood.

A dagger is a tool one associates with cloaked assassins and the necessity for complex security around every larger-than-life personage, great phallic masks, presidents, millionaires, upon the stage of history. Masters was a plantation king, he had been an overseer on the estate of New Forest.

I remembered his drunken command to me on his birthday, when we sat in the pub for the last time. “Write a biography of spirit as the fiction of my life.” He was poking fun, as usual, deadly serious fun. It was then that he mentioned the woman he had seen moving into the apartment above his a week before his birthday. She had lifted her hand to her forehead and thrown back a shock of coal. Her brow was elongated. It was an involuntary gesture, yet obscurely premeditated. The whiteness of her skin shone like human lightning. And I recalled as he spoke Orion’s severed hand in the Inferno painted on a wall of his bedroom. It was a severed hand like a glove over Masters’ body. A woman possessed it, New Forest Jane Fisher; she had inserted her hand into the glove. Were female hand and male glove tokens of addiction to the androgyny of the hunt, addiction to hermaphrodite beasts, dragons, slain by he-knights and she-knights of old?

Thus woven into Masters’ “first death” in New Forest, I perceived an equation between plantation overseer and hunted beast, between the prince of the colony and the soul of all sliced creatures, between the enigma of love or jealousy and the emotion of the hunter/huntress elevated in space to alter our conception of complacent tradition in the heights as in the depths.

I shall return to the stages of his “first death” from time to time in this book. Masters had acquainted me with these in many a conversation, but even so I remain in the dark about certain matters and shall need to seek him out, to consult his ghost, and discuss the matter of controversial first death with it (ghost) and with him (mask). Why “ghost” seems a gloved thing and “mask” pitiless/pitiful flesh-and-blood I do not immediately understand. Nevertheless the distinction — however enigmatic — is necessary if the genius of Carnival is to do justice to parallel gloves of emotion upon spirit-hand and spirit-face.

His second death in London in 1982 was a climax for which he had longed since 1957, in order to fulfil a design that could only be achieved within parallel animalities or parallel universes of sexual fate and emotion.

Within a week or two of his passing (an old-fashioned concept I brought with me from New Forest) and the enquiries launched by Scotland Yard, I learnt through one of my “leaves of grass” or Whitmanesque democratic informants that Jane Fisher — the woman with the raised hand and lightning brow who had accompanied him into his flat — had been questioned along with other tenants of the building.

She said nothing whatsoever about visiting Masters but time was to prove that she had. She had risen from bed, dressed hastily, tiptoed out of the room and left him asleep. She was confused and agitated to be plucked from nowhere, as it were, to play a major and crucial role. In her confusion she left the door to his apartment ajar. The intruder entered in the wake of her shadow. Masters awoke at that moment to cement a climax he had long nursed in his heart. He was convulsed by pain. His chest throbbed. He tried to spring at the stranger but fell back in bed. Fate could not have been more co-operative. The intruder was alarmed at the wild mask of the dying king but it addressed him, it imbued him with his part in the play, his signal to act. He seized the dagger and thrust it into the ageing seer who conspired now with royal fate. And with royal freedom. The intruder too wore a mask. He and Masters were related to each other within a labyrinth of rehearsals, a labyrinth of Carnival innocence and guilt within a deeply troubled, violent age. They were to become my guides on the beach and into the cave of character-masks and dreams and through many realms.

THREE

“I am a mudhead though I ride high in your estimation, biographer,” Everyman Masters confessed to me. His words invoked the Atlantic foreshore of New Forest, South America. It was a complex gateway into the underworld of the cosmos. Sometimes it was littered by husks of coconut sculpted to reflect a straw caricature of the human brain, at other times to invest that caricature with lopsided genitals of the mind of place the human brain was. Sometimes it was a theatre of branches and trees, eroded, riven by the action of wind and wave. Etched into these, etched into branch or tree, one sometimes came upon the skeleton of a fish or the staring eye of a button to be pressed in the gallows of species.

“All in all,” said Masters, “you need to seek a gateway here into the underworld, and overworld of the cosmos, an Orinoco-esque or Dantesque gateway.” He wept to my astonishment. “Mud, mud, everywhere and not a loaf to eat. New Forest mud is body and bread projected by the denizens of the underworld. The race of mudheads, if I may so describe my forebears, appeared in post-Columbian times, they were the renaissance of Carnival to compensate the inexplicable demise of El Dorado, the golden man and idol of kings. He ate from golden dishes and bathed in golden waters. So many cultures in ancient America vanished without rhyme or reason, leaving their treasures like heaps of straw on the floor of palaces and temples. Were they slain by Doubt or by Famine?

“I was born in 1917 and was scarcely nine when I began to reconnoitre the foreshore, and to seek the button in the eye of the fish.”

His voice ceased but the foreshore that I knew (I had run there too as a child some twenty years or so after his time, his childhood) rose vividly into my mind. The button in the eye of the fish Masters had pressed projected me up. It was a kind of atomic wheel, atomic fiction rather than deed, in the light years of innocent creatures one rode, sometimes up, sometimes down. He had put his finger on the wounded eye of a hanging creature and uplifted me, whereas before I had stood low and raised him without being conscious of the wound — bird’s broken wing, or leviathan pupil — I had touched, on beach or foreshore, to imbue him with the myth of ascent.

I saw him far below me now like a ghost in space whose light years reached me nevertheless across fictional time. He picked his way on the mud of the foreshore. He was nine years old. He crawled gingerly. Crabs scuttled as he moved, their white legs of Carnival and their shadowed backs shining with the gloom and the pallor of El Doradan nebulae. It was as if I perceived him in another age, an age that was close to the execution of the golden man by Doubt or Famine. And yet he remained a child of the 1920s. A wild and glorious cherry tree suddenly sprouted. I saw it distinctly and yet it existed within a capacity to fade or vanish. How had that wild glory of a tree centuries ago, in the age of El Dorado, subsided into a relic of the 1920s! Unidentifiable relic it would have been were I not aware of it as it originally was.

So too Masters seemed a relic, child and relic, young and ancient, child of the 1920s, child of our century, yet an ancient king, the king of a vanished realm. His subjects were crabs on a South American foreshore, nebula-crabs. I paused as I wrote to reflect upon the constellation of the hunted in the hunter Masters had previously invoked in my book, the eye of the fish in the hanged fisherman upon a wasteland tree. Each ancient relic or stump on which the eye of the fisherman was drawn, each shell of a crab sculpted there, each skin of an animal or cell planted there, addressed me now as susceptible to the glory of Carnival tree, or gallows of god, that could ravish the knowledgeable heart.

I had scarcely dwelt on the thought of such glory when I doubted my inspiration. It seemed suddenly desolating to dream of parallels of glory within gallows stump and relic, within crab and fossil. All I could now discern within my “knowledgeable heart” was the anguish of a child who crawled on a beach beneath me. He had cut himself on a bone, I suddenly saw. He staunched the blood with a rag; it was a new beginning overshadowed by uncertainty, the uncertainty I felt over the origins of kingship. I (though still aloft on the wheel of fiction) reached down and sought Doubting Thomas’s hand then to help young Masters, young mudhead, yet to thwart him in my disbelief. Thomas of New Forest Carnival made a rough gesture, perhaps it was involuntary, and tore the rag. Thomas, in this incarnation cultivated by Carnival tradition, was an older cousin, twelve years old at least, who had accompanied the nine-year-old boy-king in the game they played of light-year wheel and gallows susceptible to glory and to hope …

Before pursuing the game the two boys played, I must stop for a moment to reflect. I was jolted, shocked by what I had felt and seen, by most painful inner revelation in the construction of Everyman Masters’ life (or lives and masks). Profoundest sorrow hit me. Did the hand one projects into games of fiction to help the child or master one portrays also serve to thwart? Did the hand with which one seeks to heal also destroy? It came as a shock to see the rag, to see Thomas’s cousinly hand so raised in the game it seemed bent on proving the resurrection of the child El Dorado from slain gold. It was a hand that appeared to sift — I reflected again — a cruel currency or enterprise of economic proof, economic crusade, across the ages. It was a hand in the process of evolving, I saw, into the shadow of past and future sacred/profane cannibal and assassin. And therein it revealed an essential paradox, I reflected again, within the nature of uncertainty, the uncertainty that seeks proof and needs to tear every rag, re-open every wound, until it becomes fascinated by blood, old and new.

I am curiously glad, gentle reader, to pause and confess to all this, however bitter-tasting it is. For in so doing, so confessing, I begin to feel the obsessional neurosis of “proof” that haunts our civilization. In New Forest Carnival Thomas I perceived the seed of the saint and also of the involuntary assassin or revolutionary. I was shocked by this disclosure. It addressed me both subtly and powerfully within the labyrinth of innocence and guilt through which Masters was taking me. Masters himself was to be pursued all his life by visible and invisible giant hunters whose shadows lay everywhere in skeletons of the Inferno that adorn the gateways into the underworld and the overworld. I had seen myself the button of the fish on the foreshore, the nucleus of atomic giant.

What was strangest about the role of Doubting Thomas in the Carnival of New Forest was his proximity to giants, broken giants, uneasy giants, partially slain giants. He grieved over them (even when he thwarted them), served them through masks of sobriety and rage by sifting the currency of the estate of the world in order to prove the depth of the wounds inflicted on humanity. But that was not all. Thomas sought to prove … Prove what?

Prove the seed or bone of royal genesis; prove a game that started in childhood — mostly forgotten — hope; prove that royalty or glory (however contested) is other than mere fallacy or privilege, and the torn rag with which Everyman wrestles may actually still bind up the wounds of time …

Thus Thomas’s Carnival new world/old world masks were fraught with ambiguity, the ambiguity of the saint and the revolutionary manqué. I was unsure of Thomas, unsure of labels, but I loved him and felt his predicament inwardly and keenly. I knew I was ignorant of the inner problematic of sainthood as of the religious torment in touching a wound that may fertilize a Carnival bond with frustration, anguish, jealousy, violence, in subject cultures. He seemed to me as indispensable a guide through the Inferno of history as Masters himself was.

Even though buried in reflection, in past tenses and present tenses, I had not lost sight of the game on the beach. Thomas had relinquished the rag and was seeking to persuade the boy-king to abandon the game. But he insisted on going on. It had been a trifling cut, he said, pointing to the sharp bone on the beach.

I saw now that the bone was shaped like a knife from El Doradan Carnival.

“A seed sometimes cuts into the masked lip of a bird, the lip within the beak, as a bone cuts into the spirit of a child, the spirit within the flesh. But the axe, where is the shaman’s axe that slices and shapes the monument in the seed, the galaxy in the bone?”

He crawled on with the precocity of age and childhood, nine years old, nine centuries old, and came at last with Thomas in his shadow, in my shadow as well, falling from the sky with its wheel of lights, to the wild cherry tree that had been reduced to blackened limbs and stumps though I had seen it, or thought I had seen it, in all its original glory. This was the primal gateway into the underworld and overworld of the cosmos. The light that bathed it infused it, all at once, with the sensation that it grew downwards, that its roots were up here in space, its branches down there in the earth.

I looked around for the axe that had cut the tree, as the bone had cut the spirit of childhood into light-year bandaged ghost, and thought I discerned it far out upon the retreating tide when a glimmer of sun upon a wave transfigured the ocean into lilting, sighing, singing sharpness. That was the shaman’s axe! It was he (El Doradan shaman or space-priest) who had axed the tree a long time ago and sculpted from it El Dorado himself, El Dorado’s retinue, his court, his wives, his children, his huntsmen, his fishermen, his peers, his civil servants.

All had come alive under the subtle liquid blow of the axe, and I recalled Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea breathing all of a sudden under the chisel. So too had the wood, sliced from the cherry tree, turned to gold then to flesh-and-blood.

Were axe and chisel and bone the same liquid tool across parallel light years? I seemed to see it all save that the shadow of uncertain voice or lilt of the cosmos, in all carven broken things, persisted. Masters and his disciple had crawled on the beach, even as the axe sharpened the rhythm of the tide, and the chisel and the bone shone, but I wondered whether they were living sculpted being, whether — despite the fact that the cut or the slice of original shaman may have engendered freedom — a pattern of falsehood masked the truth to promote an automatic procession riveted in reflexes of fascination with violence, reflexes of false brutal axe, brutal greed, the greed of power, the greed of possession.

They stopped. Thomas crawled away into a sea-wood in pursuit of a colourful crab. Masters remained alone. I felt a shiver run through my veins as through his wound still bound with a rag. To crawl or to stop in mindless attachment to the instrument of power that fashions one’s nerves is to appear to live in freedom, yet not to live in freedom’s consciousness of the sorrow of pain in genesis, the slice, the cut, the blow that dis-members, yet may occasion one to re-member.

I felt divisions of sorrow within that blow, divisions of true shaman or creator and false shaman or manipulator of defeated cultures. I felt divisions of sorrow within a universal genius of love that seems at times in pawn to a universal seducer of humanity.

Yes, I had projected parallel fictions of “doubt” into space in shadow characterization (as though “space” were an entity to be sculpted like “wood” or “marble”), I had felt profoundest sorrow hit me, or reshape me, and I knew that the fiction of Memory (of re-membering, or reconstitution) lay in complex truths and falsehoods that could ape each other’s divisions within the unfinished stroke of genesis and creation.

The tree or stump of a gateway into the underworld and the overworld was a crucial rehearsal and alignment of truth and falsehood, and I felt myself now related to it as though through it; through its aerial roots and earthen branches I discerned a stranger, an intimate stranger, approaching young Masters. I have personified parallel existences of “doubt” in this spiritual biography. How should I personify Memory in an intimate stranger, Memory the male rather than the female persona at the heart of Carnival?

Ask young Masters why he suddenly ran from the man who approached him and invited him to go for a walk; he was tempted but he ran.

I say “ask” — ask the bandaged light-year ghost, ask him whether his fright may have been occasioned by rumours of a rapist on the prowl along the foreshore. I have checked a newspaper of the 1920s (the New Forest Argosy) and found several columns on a rapist that a child could have read. And indeed it would be easy to advance such an explanation for Masters’ fear of the stranger who addressed him. Equally easy it would be to say that he had been warned by his parents and teachers. But the inner facts are different. I questioned him closely. He ran for “reasons” that were “irrational”; his flight was more eloquent than rumour or news, it spoke the language of the unconscious. He had received no caution — conventional caution — against strangers. He had read nothing in the New Forest Argosy.

Fear had become a republic or plantation or colony against which he recoiled and beat his fists, not with his naked small hands that would have been broken in the rapist’s grasp but with his running feet that clawed and sprinted on the earth. Was it a battle then in which he was joined against fear when he ran from fear? Such is the language of the unconscious. It speaks on many levels of dream, half-puppet language, half-spiritual language, half-true language, half-false utterance, the labyrinth of innocence and guilt.

The man who approached him was curiously appealing, oddly familiar, and yet sinister. He seemed to exist and yet not to be altogether real, a presentiment, a fate, something to be metaphysically penetrated, avoided, seen through. He was a menace, a danger; he would appear, again and again betwixt heaven and hell, Masters felt. Perhaps this was not the first time (and there had been previous visits) but whether first or not it would constitute the first critical encounter with Memory he would remember. An instinct for imagination perhaps saved the boy-king. It was a game of soul, a game a child plays with the shadow of Memory false and true, the shadow of Ambition, false and true. For Memory’s male persona aped the shaman of old. With a wave of his arm against the shadowy axe of the sea, far out in the sun, the intimate stranger called to the boy as to someone he knew, someone he saw with a backward glance from the future, or the past, into the present.

Young Masters was fascinated. Such skill he had never witnessed before. The stranger waved his hand and appeared to disembowel space, yet to stitch it around the child in a wonderful garment with a button for an eye. The young boy recalled the eye of the fish on the fisherman’s gallows he had seen that afternoon in the game he played of wheeling light years.

He was tempted now by a most dangerous extension of that game, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye of creation and his, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye mysteriously fired and sculpted, mysteriously dismembered into revisionary pupil and socket until it became a revolution of mind, a window of soul — and his.

He ran, without knowing why, from such a temptation to accept his as the absolute original. It was a temptation he could not rationalize. It was as if the stranger were offering him the gifts, the talents, of a cosmic Pygmalion, a cosmic sculptor and seducer of space, offering him the precision of a godlike puppet to place his finger on the button of collective, explosive rape (to submit himself, in advance of that event, to a private version of collective, explosive rape) so close to, yet so remote from, the garment of love that is threaded into that transfigurative wound by the luminous hand of the sun and the moon and the stars.

Had he stayed, had he been raped by that intimate stranger, the facts of this biography of spirit would have accumulated into a miscarriage of soul (whatever ambitions Everyman Masters may have realized, whatever powers he may have come to possess in imbibing the solicitation of the false shaman) for he would have appeared narcissistically whole in his own eyes and would have forfeited the mystery of partial guilt and therefore the mystery of ultimate surrender to otherness, ultimate innocence. As it was the danger remained — though few were aware of it as Masters climbed the ladder of success into traditional plantation overseer; the danger remained like a constant threat over a king’s or a god’s estate, and the consequences were never wholly to be forgotten. Memory, true and false, had arrived in the gateway of creation.

Young Masters gained the sea-wall and continued running into New Forest. He arrived at the gate to his house, ran along the flagged pathway through sunflowers and sweetpea up the stairs through the front door. Then stopped. The house seemed unnaturally silent except for his own breath which came with the trapped force of a live creature from his heart and blood. The shadow of the false shaman still lay over him though he had run fast and left him behind on the foreshore. It lay over him and imbued his escape with uncanny excitement, akin to a fever, a drive, an energy, the shadow of Memory false and true. Did something reside in him now of the psychology of rape, the psychology of conquest? Was this the seed of Ambition to rule, to master a universe that had despoiled one, to march at the head of great armies into monsters one projected everywhere? (It was a question Masters was to frame long afterwards when we sat in Holland Park and discussed the psychology of power and the nature of Ambition at the heart of diseased politics around the globe.) Had he run forwards from the false shaman that New Forest day into the lust of light years, or backwards into the eye of a star cautionary and wise that forms in the spaces of the womb where fiction gestates? The fiction of Carnival began indeed to gestate from that moment.

His trapped sobbing breath had ceased and he moved gingerly (as he had crawled gingerly like a king crab on the foreshore) toward his parents’ room. The door was very slightly ajar. He was about to rap or push when he glimpsed something through the slit of space. It was his mother’s tears that he saw, tears that masked her and suddenly made her into the mother of a god in the play of Carnival. She was sitting at a mirror and her tears were reflected in the glass. He was so riveted by them, by seeing them fall, by the charisma of grief they spelt to a profoundly disturbed, profoundly impressionable, child that he seemed to see through her side and back into the glass or mirror that ran down her front. Her tears seemed as a consequence to be woven from glass. They were fluid and divine cherries all white and edged with marbled fire. They were small yet unnaturally large as they fell upon her breasts that were open and bare in the shadowed glass front of flesh, and Masters was smitten by the sensation that she knew all that had happened to him that afternoon and was weeping for him, weeping for the lust, the Ambition, in Memory false and true.

Of course she could not have known, the young Carnival god knew. She was weeping for something else of which he was never to learn exactly. Indeed, even if she had turned around then and told him what it was, he would have forgotten and remembered only the tears that were shed for him now, as in the past, and the present, and the future.

She did not turn. He did not disclose he was there. He felt nevertheless that she knew; he felt as she touched her glass breasts in the mirror that she knew he was inside her, halfway between a wall of glass and a cavity of flesh, that she knew he was looking through her into a kind of fire that mingled with her tears.

There was furniture in the room and that too stood within the glass and the cavity of flesh. There was a lampshade that sprang out of the cavity into the glass. There were china ornaments that framed themselves in the glass to greet the flesh. There was a bed in the room that seemed to slide from the glass into the flesh. Slices of all these shone in the fire, shone in the mirror, shone in each minuscule balloon or teardrop sculpted from his mother’s sockets and eyes. One slice seemed to rub against another until as they shone they silently sounded a note of music.

“Here is the evolution of Sorrow,” the foetal Carnival child thought without articulate thought, the kind of thought that lies at the heart of a coiled dancer against a door, peering through his mask, a coiled dream in the womb of space when the eye of a star peers through the crevices of Memory, Memory that is female now rather than male, Memory that brings the danger of cosmic fire, of burning exposure in the body of the mother of god, sudden exposure to the substance and the shadow of spiritual Sex.

Was she weeping at the thought of losing him, of plucking him from her like a brand on fire? Was this inconsistent with what he had felt before, that she was weeping for him and for the encounter he had had with the false shaman that afternoon?

Did the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman” subsist in one of the profoundest secrets of Carnival, the mask of the cuckold?

I remember discussing this question with Everyman Masters in London in the 1960s and 1970s when he addressed the philosophic myth of a colonial age that draped its mantle everywhere around the globe on superpowers, as on empires past and present, to set in train parallel existences, executions, resurrections of a plantation king or emperor or president or god.

Masters explained the seeds of trauma that had led him, within the ground of bizarre irony, to erect the obscure colonial status of sugar or rice estate overseer into Carnival prince of the world. He explained that the shock of encounter as a child with the “intimate stranger” on the foreshore of New Forest had so curiously broken him, yet imbued him with the spectre of terrible Ambition, that he had run back metaphorically into the womb; and in spying upon his mother had been so overwhelmed that a closely guarded family secret sprang into his mind. Closely guarded yet not so closely guarded for he recalled the whispers of servants in his parents’ home. His father was not his father. And it had seemed that she (the glass woman in whom he lay coiled all over again) had contemplated an Abortion when she carried, or was pregnant with, him. I asked him, as he seemed reluctant to continue, what had saved the day. His father, he said, his legal father, had stood by the glass woman, protected her, and insisted upon her keeping the child as if it were his. (It was important to remember, he said, that his legal father was coloured, the glass woman, his mother, was coloured, his biological father, whom he had never met, was white. And all expectations were that the newborn baby would be white.)

Where then, I pressed him, lay the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman”? It lay, he said, in forces of humiliation that resembled each other but differed in ultimate wisdom from each other. To spy upon her or through her, as if he had returned into her body as foetal Carnival child, and to see the fire that threatened to consume him with her tears, was to endure the psychology of rape within her body long before the false shaman appeared and threatened to seize him on the foreshore. How extraordinary, yet inevitable, it was that the “mask of the cuckold” that his legal father wore came into luminous perspective when he ran back into his mother’s womb. In that mask of Carnival humiliation, Carnival cuckold, was raised the enigmatic spirit of Sex through and beyond nature’s intercourse, a spirit that could sustain both mother and child within a cruel and desperate world so easily exploited by the false shaman.

Instead of the “plucked brand” or the Abortion his mother, the glass woman, had begun to plan, the foetus would mature and the child would be born with a capacity for judgement and self-judgement beyond his years, a capacity that was strangely fractured, strangely unfulfilled, a capacity to employ such partial fracture as an integral element in unravelling/overcoming the lure of diseased Ambition or conquest.

In other words the humiliation of the plucked brand he had seen as himself, the potential Abortion written into foetal self, ran in parallel with the psychology of rape he had endured at the age of nine on the foreshore, but the mask of the cuckold upon his legal father (and the humiliation that also implied for his family) was radically different in its internal essence from plucked brand or false shaman. It originated a vision through the Abortion of an age, through the fallacious proprieties of an age, it originated a capacity to set material pride aside in favour of the spirit of care, the innermost spirit of Sex, the spirit of brooding creativity that takes over where nature leaves off … I was, to say the least, intrigued at the origins of such conversion of humiliation into the genius of love that differed from the natural impact of humiliation upon the material body. I was at a loss to understand it all, though I had glimpsed again the transfigurative wound of which Masters spoke on so many occasions. He desisted from saying anything more at this stage though I knew now that his guidance into realms that seemed to exist before birth and after death bestowed upon me in this life (this lived life) a privilege that would deepen and expand the biography of spirit on which I was engaged. It would deepen it, expand it, in peculiar and mutual engagement between author and character at the heart of Carnival.

FOUR

Soon I was to perceive in the complex loves and sorrows of Masters’ life that I was as much a character (or character-mask) in Carnival as he was. Indeed in a real and unreal sense he and other character-masks were the joint authors of Carnival and I was their creation. They drew me to surrender myself to them.

My hand was suffused as I wrote by their parallel hands, my eyes as I looked around by their parallel eyes … And suddenly, paradoxically, it seemed to me that Masters’ coiled posture in the glass woman, his mother, turned upon me and conferred upon me a blessing or privilege, the fictional law that husbands the mother of a Carnival god when it (that law) — that character of law — dons the mask of the cuckold within Carnival.

“That mask,” Masters said, “possesses its origins in the family humiliations I have disclosed that evolve nevertheless into spirit-parent, into fiction-maker, that I confer now upon you.” He cried to me from the womb as much as from the grave that such a peculiar translation of the wounds of humanity was indeed the law of fiction and to wear it made me not only his creation but his father-spirit, to wear it made me not only their creation but the parent-spark of the other characters in Carnival.

Such is the paradox, the comedy, of half-divine, half-Carnival, character-masks in the medium of time. For Carnival time is partial, the past and the present and the future are parts of an unfathomable Carnival whole beyond total capture. Thus the past, as much as the future, bears upon the present, they are the children of the present but they also parent the present. The hidden past affects the present even as it emerges through present discoveries as a new, unsuspected force. If the present parents the future how can it also be the child of the future?

“The contradiction is resolved,” Masters said, “when one sees that the parts of time within which we live, die, are born, imply that there is no absolute parent or model of time that we can seize.

“To see into the future — as into the hidden past — is a revelation of the partial ground on which we stand and the partial ground to which we move backwards or forwards.

“To see into the past as into the future is not to possess absolute knowledge of the past or the future but to be moved nevertheless by the mystery of originality that gives birth to the future as the future and the past give birth to ourselves.

“That originality, that mystery, may perceive a real, however elusive or incomplete, outline of coming events — or hidden past events — even as it confesses to deeper and farther hidden pasts and coming futures that are already transforming the basis of what one sees and feels in this moment. Freedom therefore is grounded in perceptions of originality that see through absolute fate.”

I was seized by a responsibility that may have intuitively existed in everything I had already written but which suddenly acquired a new, subtly terrifying, dimension.

Take, for example, young Masters’ cousin Thomas, the twelve-year-old boy who had vanished in a clump on the foreshore pursuing an animal fragment of original cosmic crab. Was he twelve years old or twelve hundred years old? Whose child was he? In consulting my notes of conversations with Masters in the 1960s and 1970s I find no reference to Thomas’s parent-masks.

Masters nudged me suddenly in the labyrinth of past/present/future through which we moved into accepting his cousin as my spirit-flesh, my fiction-blood. I hesitated even as I accepted. I felt an inner turbulence. Was I giving Thomas the Doubter a new, unsuspected, disturbing Carnival adolescence in a twentieth-century plantation Inferno or Purgatory? Such responsibility in fiction comes as a shock, a blow. For if Doubt (rather than Faith) and its astronomic, biologic, economic antecedents were to be sanctioned and protected by its spirit-parent, and to become my progeny, then the law of fiction I represented needed to visualize diverse proportions of the body of tormented love it had vicariously married to become Thomas’s Carnival parent. One’s obsession with the tormented body of love — who was parent, who not, who would inherit the earth, who not, whose populations were exploding, whose not, who possessed the future, who did not — needed to secure guides (concrete in instinctual imagination) if one were to visualize foetal significance, emergence, adolescence, in alien — or apparently alien — generations one accepted and adopted.

One needed guides in those who — driven by regimes of fear or uncertainty — had regressed backwards in space or had “re-entered the body of the mother” they idolized or worshipped.

I grant that Masters was a principal guide in this context of regression that counterpoints progression and it was he who bestowed upon me the privileged mask of fiction-parent; but in becoming my concrete guide into an area or areas I had but vicariously married he opened the body of time to young Thomas as well and to uncertainties I needed to fathom as acutely more relevant to me, and my age, than Faith. All this in spite of my earlier revelation of the hand of cousinly Thomas that exacerbated the wound it sought to prove. In such exacerbation lay a blindness, or cloud over the world’s eyes I had not realized or experienced before. And in this new exacerbated guidance, or journey into blind collision between worlds seeking to prove each other, young Thomas was virtually indispensable …

It took me months of close conversation with Masters in London to piece together Thomas’s reaction to the flight of the boy-king in his charge from the false shaman. Thomas reappeared from the clump in which he had pursued a fragment of constellation crab. The child-mask El Dorado was nowhere in sight. Thomas shouted, he looked everywhere, then flew into New Forest. The town became a cloud that darkened his eyes as though the bandage upon gold, upon currency, assumed gigantic proportions. He needed proof of the king’s whereabouts. He needed to seize him, scold him for playing tricks. He needed to weigh him in the balance. His uncertainty ran so deep, his fear that his charge may have been molested (he had read the New Forest Argosy), it was as if he himself had never been born and the gigantic bandage diminished into a shell. Masters had feared the Abortion of an age written into universal flesh-and-blood in glimpsing the glass woman. He, on the other hand, glimpsed the concave egg like a mask or blind over his eyes in alignment with “plucked brand” or gold. The uncertain penetration of those veils, egg and gold and fire, was his gestation in the womb of space and it drew him into regions I could not dream to enter on my own as fiction-parent of generations steeped in the collision of worlds.

Thomas flew or ran along East Street, came to a corner, failed to see a market woman approaching him from North Road. They collided. She was massive, he was small. Disaster followed less from her than through him. She was carrying a basket on her head. She staggered, tried to clutch it, but it fell with a lush explosion.

The shell over Thomas’s eyes split for an instant into the splendid yolk and contour of the sun. He was dumbfounded, even paralysed, by the white and orange glare of a miniature pool that reflected the cosmos. He saw everything within a lightning mask but a blind fell over him again. A gross of eggs that the black woman had been taking to New Forest Market lay now smashed and oozing on the ground.

Two elements or forces in nature had conspired to prove or disprove each other. One element was the economic loss that the market woman had suffered. The broken eggs on the road deprived her of a round sum that would have paid her rent for a month at least in the tenement, plantation range in which she lived.

It was a minor catastrophe. It was a major catastrophe. It may have seemed minor in cold shillings and pence but it possessed the heat of emotional configuration in the New Forest economy.

The other element was the sensation of exaggerated disaster Thomas had had in colliding with her, and this seemed to confirm the major content of economic emotion or depression in the 1920s. He could not shake off the feeling that he had exposed, rather than inflicted, an injury. How to probe it, analyse it (text books of Purgatory in the wake of the collision would ask, how to set up schools, universities, political sciences of the Inferno to assess economic emotion in a South American colony)! And blind as he became again after the shell grew once more over his eyes he could still perceive her sagging mouth and the sweat on her brow like tears.

“Oh god,” the market woman cried, “who is going to pay for this? Gold ain’t enough.” The humour of her remark that “gold” wasn’t enough registered faintly on Thomas.

“I shall pay. I shall find the money,” he promised.

“You believe gold is cheap, Boy?” The market woman was laughing but behind her laughter lay not only sweat but the mirror in which El Dorado had seen fire threatening to consume him.

The market woman seemed closer to black marble than to El Dorado’s memory of a cavity of flesh behind him, glass in front of him, as he lay coiled in his mother. Nevertheless Thomas had seen the fire in black marble as he had seen the pool of the sun before through a shell. Despite his promise to pay he was terrified and desired to run, as Masters had run, but the marble woman held him firmly with a hand that seemed both rough and smooth as if it echoed the mystery of the human egg at which the economic spirits of creation in capital cosmos had laboured in the sun and the moon and the stars from the beginning of time.

It was noon in New Forest, the orange yolk on the ground shone, and the labour of capital cosmos, fathered by fiction, impressed itself anew upon Thomas. He knew he could not run. The injury, the hand-to-mouth existence he had exposed loomed larger now than ever in the marble woman. But they had come to some sort of understanding, for she had relinquished her grip on his shoulder.

Thomas had, in the interval, abandoned all responsibility for his royal charge. Indeed he felt that the boy-king had implicated him in another devilish game. And he felt irrational anger, a blaze of irrational fury, but pulled himself up in time, rebuked himself in time. Yet something lingered, something vague, as though in the realm of irrational anger at someone for whom we are held responsible — or were held responsible — we may track down jealousy in its obscure beginnings that increase and multiply to divide those who possess the stigma of the Abortion of an age and those who fear their smooth masks are an inadequate defensive cosmetic.

I discussed this complicated theatre with Masters in London and he expressed the view that the parallel existences or incarnations of Uncertainty owe the character of jealousy that possesses them to a collision of worlds implicit in “primordial colonial egg” that Carnival dramatizes as the birth of a diversity of fictions and masks.

Thus “jealousy” is another humiliation that fiction may employ to fathom the human/animal soul, the glass soul, the marble soul, the iron soul, the steel soul, the weight or weightlessness of deprivations of love that masquerade as prudence.

“The relevance of all this to the fictionalization of a constellation that speaks for the twentieth century is clear,” Masters said to me. “It is as a tormented colonial age that the twentieth century will be remembered and your book should point, I am sure, within its multiple perspectives to an overlapping context of spirit and nature that reveals without dogma the essence of love and love’s imperial malaise, love’s imperial tribulations within the plantation, institution, metropolis, factory, everywhere.”

His voice faded and I continued to piece together Thomas’s “adventures” in 1926.

Thomas and the black marble woman made their way along East Street. She was taking him across the Town to the tenement, plantation range in which she lived, so that he would know where to come when he had accumulated twelve shillings (a prodigious sum in 1926) to pay for the basket of eggs he had been instrumental in capsizing when he ran into her.

The dream-clock in the sky let the sun fall a notch or two deeper than I had previously calculated. Was it noon or afternoon? The mask of the sun shone with brilliance and fury. They turned into Brickdam, an impressive, black-pitched bandage of a road that ran through the middle of the Town. It was distinguished by some of the finest residences in New Forest. East Street had had its fine wooden houses as well, all on stilts in the low-lying township protected by a wall from the sea, but Brickdam with its three-storeyed residences masked the nature of the subsistence (and less than subsistence) economy that controlled a plantation cosmos. Not only overseers resided along the bricked and tarred road (that tended to grow faintly moist in places, to stick to one’s feet) but civil servants of various pigmentation; the dust of gestating ages stuck to their faces in tune with Carnival cosmetic of the unborn.

Incongruously perhaps (or was it congruously?) two mansions, one a famous College for New Forest youth, the other a great Alms House, rubbed sides or fences in the elegant, wooden parade along Brickdam.

A game of cricket was in progress as Thomas and the market woman passed the College. As they moved to a faint, moist pressure on the soles of their feet, the striking batsman was hidden from sight less within the shell of the sun over their eyes than within the bamboo and sugar-cane masks at the edge of the field. But soon the ball had risen from the bat, it almost seemed to whistle in the body of space before arching and descending into Thomas’s hands.

Thomas could scarcely countenance his luck. He wanted to pocket the catch, to take it away and examine its markings for the magic of blood in every game one involuntarily plays, the masked dead with the living, masked bamboo with sugar-cane, the unborn fodder with the born. Was it the redness of the ball that gripped him now or the unexpected metamorphosis of the yolk of an egg? A howl rose from the field. It reached him through every veil, tar and shell and sun, and he tossed the ball back into Carnival spaces.

They had soon left the game of cricket behind and were abreast of the Alms House gate. Thomas peered through the bars. They stroked his eyes like gigantic lashes borrowed from the mask of the sun. Some of the inmates were seated on benches in a burnt-earth enclosure beside a straggly garden with a rose and a lily. Aunt Alice had risen from a bench. She moved around the enclosure like an ancient, sailing doll. Her faded dress reached to her ankles to kiss with the faintest whispering sound the cracked leather of her boots. It was the hour of exercise when the players or puppets in this other kind of dance or game limbered up before daylight supper. Who was she to lead the dance? Who was Aunt Alice? Was she Thomas’s real aunt? She was not. Indeed you may recall, gentle reader, my saying earlier in this book that I have no record of Thomas’s relations except that he was young Masters’ cousin. Even that is unreliable since terms like “cousin” were loosely and inaccurately addressed to distant relations or no relations at all in Plantation New Forest.

Alice was everybody’s ancient purgatorial relative. The dustman called her “aunt”, so did the postman and the drivers of delivery vans and nurses and less uniformed, even nondescript, personages of Carnival. Rumour had it that Aunt Alice had been married to a high-ranking civil service star who had lived but a couple of blocks away from the Alms House. That was an age ago. She had been his third wife. The marriage had been contracted in his sixty-first year (she was then fifty-one or fifty-two) when he had been in retirement for four or five years and was in receipt of a pension. (Civil servants retreated at fifty-five or fifty-six as befitted stars within the Carnival sun.)

His first wife had died from tuberculosis. His second wife (one Charlotte I was informed by Masters) had skilfully stripped him of everything in his early middle age — all his property, in the heat of their romance, had been put in her name — and his former assets were to pass to her children by the marriage she made after their divorce. So it was that his pension, a good one by the standards of the day, kept the wolf from Alice’s door until his death when his pension ceased and she received nothing at all in her own right. It seemed grossly unfair in that he had contributed to the Widows and Orphans Fund all his working life. These contributions were deemed ineffectual in that she became his wife after his retirement.

I gleaned the uncertain facts from Masters.

How long, I wondered, had Alice been an inmate in the Alms House? Ten years or fifteen or ages? No one knew. I learnt, however, that her surname was Bartleby. No relation, I hasten to say, to Herman Melville’s Bartleby, though fiction-spirit, fiction-blood, runs between them. He, Melville’s poor Bartleby, had died a young man, whereas she, like her husband who died in his seventies, sailed into old age; she learnt to dance in the Carnival of the Alms House for her supper.

I checked the New Forest Argosy to see whether it may have glimpsed her genius in the early twentieth century and pleaded her cause. Not a line, not a word, not the flimsiest paragraph existed. It seemed remarkable that the widow of a star should have fallen into the oblivion of a dance of spirit in becoming everybody’s purgatorial aunt. Masters intervened — rather peremptorily when we discussed the matter in Holland Park — to declare it was less remarkable than I thought. The gulf between a “star” and the “inmates of a cosmic alms house” was less wide than it seemed; it was as narrow as that between a privileged survivor in space and the gestating wilderness of intergalactic species …

Thomas held fast to the bars of the gate within the mask of the sun he wore. “Aunt Alice,” he cried. She stopped and looked at him. The elongated eyelashes of the mask, as he peered through the gate, ran down his face and divided it into segments. It was a curious innovation. A human child yet many segments of plantation psyche, many segments of global uncertainty, to which Alice responded out of the strangest, almost old-fashioned, pity of heaven.

Thomas, her purgatorial nephew, could not articulate what he felt. It was too peculiar, too overwhelming, for him, however precocious he was. But he felt it deeply all the same. He felt the museum profit and the museum loss of bureaucratic Inferno in Widows and Orphans state, the elusive and untouchable spell of non-pensionable spirit that secretes itself in oblivion. Aunt Alice was nebulously related to him as to young Masters. She was sister to the “mask of the cuckold”. A nebulous relationship in that Carnival possessed no identifiable role for her and had thrust her into limbo’s purgatory, limbo’s heaven, as a consequence. The “mask of the cuckold” was a privileged humiliation, it sheltered the “mother of god” and gave legitimate status to the child, Masters. But Alice, the sister of the mask, had sunken so far beneath conventional contact, beneath pensionable and non-pensionable desert, that her universal fictional kinship to humanity expressed itself as nothing more than a sailing dress above lined, wrinkled boots, in the limbo heaven of New Forest Alms House.

Was someone actually at home in the pathos of her dress? Was she the prey of phantom nephews and nieces, phantom injustices, phantom diseases, diseased Widows and Orphans state, diseased unemployment in the decade of the 1920s that cast its imprecise, its inexact, parentage of shadow into generations unborn?

Diseased as they were, they sought to toss her pennies to dance. And when they had nothing to toss, they reminded her of the taxes they paid. For without their money, they claimed, there would have been no theatre of the Alms House in which Aunt Alice played the paradoxes of limbo’s evolution into other spheres, the paradoxes of the widow of a dead star and the sister-in-law of the mother of god. Not that they understood such comedy of destitution and non-existent status of wealth. Yet they applauded unwittingly by calling her “aunt”, spirit-aunt, oblivion’s aunt.

Thomas also applauded though he was terrified by “oblivion’s aunt” and by the thought of being swallowed or lost forever in her massive, sailing body. Alice understood. She felt profoundest compassion for him. How close is “oblivion’s aunt” to the seed of heaven that evolves into a family tree of spirit? Her curious dance (Thomas was uncertain whether she were a dream-puppet or sailing flesh-and-blood bound for divinity’s shore) mirrored the division between the two realms he had glimpsed through barred gate and segmented mask, namely, the realm of oblivion or absolute limbo and the realm of Carnival evolution into a family of spirit; and as she danced he felt he could trace the division within her, puppet breast/fertile breast, wasted breast/active breast at which he had never sucked but which she gave to him now.

It was a colonial dance that responded to his deprivations; it symbolized hunger for proof, thirst for proof of genuine survival. It seemed to imply that he too, like Masters, had come close to extinction, and Alice’s breast proffered to him now in the dance was a gesture of succour after all that he had forgotten he had received. It matched Masters’ assumption of kingship. It matched that dream-kingship with a dream-knighthood for Thomas, a dream-enterprise of the milk of freedom that he (Thomas) so desperately needed to prove.

Thomas bowed, he knelt to Alice. He was the plantation king’s knight. In the milk of freedom, the breast of freedom, he perceived the obscure Magna Carta of the womb. And of the grave. Thomas reached out through the bars of dream but he could not quite seize her or touch her. He wished to prove her reality by sculpting her to embrace the rose and the lily in the straggly Alms House garden. He wished to sculpt the shadows of great knights, great ladies, great households buried in her eclipsed breast.

“Take the measure of any statue in a formal square or garden,” Masters said to me. “It weeps with bird droppings. If you doubt those tears then you need to poke a finger into a bird’s hindquarters for the tear duct of a stone knight or a stone lady. But Thomas’s comedy and tragedy was that much as he tried, Alice’s eyes defeated him in the sculptures he sought to make of the animal/human kingdom. No material tear rose there, neither faeces nor fire. The shadow of a rose, perhaps, the decrepitude of a lily, that was all. They wept for mankind. And that Thomas could not prove. She was the one creature, shadow of a dancing rose, he could not touch. And yet she was drawn to him, she pitied him (as my mother pitied me), she loved him, she loved him,imagine that! with the kind of love that is incapable of destroying its siblings. Some say she was a fraud that only a colonial, barren age could fabricate. I say she was the catalyst of fame at the heart of families of non-existence. She was the mystery of genius within the most unpropitious economic circumstances, a mystery that ran deeper than proof or parody of the evolution of limbo into heaven.”

*

There were three stages remaining after the Alms House in Sir Thomas’s journey with the market woman: first, the great Market-place of New Forest; second, the Bridge over the Crocodile Canal; third, the tenement plantation range in which the market woman lived with the czar of Carnival, Flatfoot Johnny.

These stages constituted, Masters said, a descent into the modulated Inferno, modulated Purgatory, of twentieth-century colonial limbo. I have no technologic recording of Sir Thomas’s progression as Child of the Carnival year, precocious human child of 1926. All I have are my conversations with Masters and a profusion of notes I shall endeavour to paraphrase. I hear his voice as if it were yesterday. I remember the hot summer day in the 1970s when he invited me to visualize the three remaining stages as further evidence of what he called a “twentieth-century divine comedy of existence”.

It was indeed a hot June day in London. I drank lemonade and orange; Masters drank beer and spoke with staccato bursts of energy in reply to my questions. I sensed his depression. He suffered often from acute depression, the lineaments of which drove him to compose the paradoxical masks of Carnival that he inwardly wore or perceived upon others arising from the depths into the heights and vice versa. Towards evening our discourse became more even, more resigned (if that is the word), yet deep and many-layered. The day had cooled and the sky was tender, frail with quintessential smoke. There were brush-strokes across that aerial smoke suggesting a curious moderation of fire. The air was still and as the evening deepened, that strange moderation drew Masters’ attention. His inwardly masked face looked eager now, crest-fallen yet ecstatic. (The sensation of many series of inward masks, as if his naked face were dressed inwardly, never outwardly, was something I could never shake off when I met him.)

He was pointing to the trees along Holland Villas Road. “Sponges of shadow,” he declared, “porous with a darkening rain of light that breathes stillness.” It all intimated a quality of fire that we needed to translate, he said. “Take the irregular line of the dark bunched trees over there against the evening sky. Follow that line with your eyes. Look! it shoots up here and there into points resembling the edges of flame still and black. In such apparent immobility, such tone, I detect a version of moderation and fire.” As he spoke I remembered the sponge and its mysterious ingredient of “light-rain”. Was rain too a translation of liquid fire that stabs and blackens the earth as the trees blacken the sky?

I saw and felt inwardly what he meant by “moderation”. I saw the cosmos of my age as an inward series of gradations of flame resembling fire, yet other than fire, as the cloth of night upon the evening sky differs from ultimate night.

“Fire consumes but when veiled or rendered apparently opaque in substance and action, it imbues the bursting seed, the veined leaf, the arteried wood, with fertility and regenerative being. Each seed is the flaming birth of a star across light years that are rendered opaque in the veils of a tree. That tree comes from within the spaces of a seed replete with invisible light years. We need to sense the veils within veils within us and around us to see how everything burns so intricately, so imperceptibly, that it seems utterly still, utterly solid, rather than the phoenix of judgement day spirit aroused in the ash of space.”

“What about the seasons,” I asked him, “how do these gradations vary from season to season?”

“There is an opaque fire or veil of spring, another opacity or veil of winter, another of summer, another of autumn. Each is an intricate torch into seasonal and non-seasonal forces that resemble each other but differ from each other. The fire that consumes the dead beast resembles the fire that regenerates or fertilizes the life of the imagination, but they are not the same. That was Thomas’s difficulty in sculpting Alice, in weighing each tear that fell from her eyes to water the rose garden of paradise.”

As he spoke I thought of winter, how the boles of the trees along Holland Villas Road and Addison Road turn black in the winter raining light, a blackness or tone that contributes to a wonderful transparency in contrasting flesh-and-blood. Indeed what is blackness, what is whiteness, what is opacity, what is transparency, but variations of intricate fire within the heart of memory and emotion?

I thought of autumn and its fossil burning nest in which the phoenix of the year lays its eggs. I thought of spring and the nest of snow from which the sun arises. Masters intervened in the midst of the silence that had descended upon us.

“There is light and light,” he said. “Noonday under the Northern sky is closer to twilight in the Tropics than to the identical hour to which it corresponds under the Equatorial sky. If the blaze of noon at the Equator were to fall in a flash on the Northern world our eyes of dream would scorch. Noon in the Northern hemisphere falling equally suddenly at the Equator would be a signal of coming night … And if we are to travel back in time, as we speak, you and I, and meet Sir Thomas and the marble woman in the Market-place, then we need to mix light with light, noon with coming night, fire with winter, spring with summer and spring with autumn. We need to sense in paradoxes of light the extended and multi-layered luminosities of the cosmos.” As he spoke to me he seemed to reach with the long arm of Carnival and seize the pointed stillness of flame in the sky before us. He plucked that stillness like a subtle torch and waved it in my eyes …

*

That blaze, that fiction of fire, culled from the branch of a tree — and encompassing the origins of vision — took us back and lit the great Market-place in 1926. Sir Thomas and the marble woman arrived there around three or four o’clock in the afternoon after leaving the gate of the Alms House where they had rested for a while.

A pall of smoke hung in the air above the Market, slowly dissolving and drifting inland away from the river against which the Market square stood. I learnt from Masters that a schooner moored to the Market wharf had caught fire earlier in the day around the very hour perhaps when he had run from the false shaman. Fortunately for the wooden township of New Forest, the fire had been extinguished quite quickly. The great piles and beams of the wharf were partially blackened. The Market itself was untouched by the blaze. But the schooner had been reduced to coal-black sails and hull. I dreamt I stood upon it. It was the vessel of moderated Night. I was protected and therefore invisible to Thomas and the marble woman who were standing on the wharf. I sought to draw their attention nevertheless to the etchings that Masters’ pointed flame had drawn on the hull of Night.

One etching ran through the irregularity of the coal-black ship into an Arawak trading post that had been erected in the first decade of the sixteenth century. The Arawaks had responded to a couple of Portuguese vessels that had appeared in the New Forest river. They had felled trees to create premises that would later become the New Forest Market square. They had lit a flame there, flame-clock of an age that seemed now, as I stood on the schooner of 1926, an ancestral spike in Masters’ torch.

The Arawak flame-clock was bright as I looked back upon it. So bright I scarcely discerned additional reinforcement and blaze from Portugal and Spain. They claimed they had come to protect the alien cultures they had taken under their wings. They plundered, they raped, and yet a glimmering fiction of mutual desire for protective law, protective spirit, left its initial nebulous score on the vessel of Night on which I now stood long after the circumnavigation of the globe.

I sought therefore to trace with Masters’ torch the blackened initials of god, of fiction-globe, fiction-law, within a collision of cultures. I sought to trace an initial unity of Mankind that was so nebulous it ran through every timepiece of frozen fire one wore on one’s wrist (as on the broken body of generations) within fragmented conventions and treaties, false clarities, false economic ideals.

It was this nebulosity of initial grace that deepened the fire in my eyes. I needed to descend with the vessel of Night into accompanying initials of the mastery of the globe, master-builder, master-philosopher, master-salesman, master of arts. I needed to descend with the schooner of Night into equally related initials of the servant of the globe, servant-builder, servant-philosopher, servant of arts. How creatively interchangeable were they — mastery and service — upon the unborn/born person in the Carnival body of space? I needed to descend into eclipsed initials of the rebirth of spirit within Masters and Thomas and Alice and the marble woman and numerous others. We were partial figures on the deck of Night. Such partial figuration of soul was a signal of terrifying wholeness. Terrifying in an age that had settled for fragmentation, for polarization, as the basis of security.

In confessing to such partiality and terrifying comedy of wholeness, I sensed the protective veil of which Masters had spoken. I looked through the blackened fire into the ships the Arawaks had seen. Night fell in consistency with the ship of Night moored to the Market-place of the globe. The Spanish came in that Night, then the French, then the Dutch, then the English, then the Americans, and in 1926 — on the very dream-day, dream-night, of the burning schooner and the capsized basket of eggs — a Russian vessel appeared and anchored in New Forest mid-river. It confirmed Flatfoot Johnny’s claim to be czar of Carnival. But the Russian czar was dead and a generation at least was to pass for him to be resurrected in embalmed Lenin.

In 1926, the Market Carnival, over which Johnny presided, had been untouched by the day’s fire, but something incalculable — a cosmic wind perhaps that had been blowing for ages upon savage heart, savage treaty, savage trade — gave to its iron railings and skeletal arches, its wooden frames and stalls, the proportions of a twin or cousin to the vessel of Night. The Market seemed, therefore, equally gutted, equally afloat in space. The czar Johnny was proceeding with an enormous bag aloft on his shoulders. He was a man of prodigious strength, grotesquely muscular, grotesquely powerful. His prime defect was an awkwardness of pace, so awkward it made him seem old and crippled as he shuffled along. And then of course one saw his muscles and his back that seemed peculiarly incongruous then, incongruous youth cemented upon incongruous age.

His awkward foot was the gift of the false shaman. It fired his ambition to balance the globe upon his head. His great muscular proclivity, his capacity to lift a crate or a barrel of sugar, was a trick of innate deformity. Imagine then, gentle reader, how chastening and astonishing it was to perceive, in Flatfoot, the czar of New Forest, the shadow of Masters!

Masters’ escape from the false shaman, his fleet foot, gave an astonishing twist to Flatfoot Johnny’s predicament in being caught and lamed on the foreshore.

Masters and czar Johnny together — in shadowplay cosmic essence — were an irregular portrait of age-old and ageing collectives whose gross or refined ambitions to manhandle the cosmos turn from the prospect of conquest on the battlefield, or conquest in industry, to nursing the spectre of vicarious athletics in space, Carnival Olympic Rocket Games.

Masters smiled as if I had caught him out, caught his immersion in brutal yet philosophic reverie. It gave him no pleasure to confess to his kinship to Johnny save that such confession reopened the wound of diseased Ambition in which age is cemented to cosmetic youth or grotesque muscle. The powers of the lame are added to the fleet of spirit, as a parable of the partial nature of all human achievement, and human institution, all bodies, all images. I sensed he was as embarrassed and chastened as I, and this made me listen to him all the more closely and sympathetically.

“In confessing to partial images,” he said so softly I had to ask him to speak up, “we come abreast of both bias (the bias of ageing institution) and potential (the capacity within all of us to be born anew) in all regimes and civilizations. All images are partial but may masquerade for an age as absolute or sovereign. Take the Market-place to which you have returned like a ghost from the future. As absolute or sovereign image,the Market beguiles us into overlooking the terrors associated with it over the centuries. We tend to see in it the ground of honest trade, honest money — in our time — honest competition between individuals who are innocent of all that has happened.

“As partial image, however, the Market suddenly assaults us. It is brightest when it is darkest fellowship of greed. It is a net in which peoples and species have been decimated. We grow fat with our greedy antecedents, thin with our decimated antecedents. They inflate us to spawn them and their miseries and their grandeurs all over again.

“I tell you, my friend, much subtlety and true honesty are needed in the ‘reading’ of partial images. For the partial image — in confessing to the ground of bias in sovereign institution — appears to terrorize us, or to confuse us, though it has begun, in some degree, to free us from the absolutes that clothe our memory and to reveal a potential that has always been there for mutual rebirth within conflicting, dying, hollow generations.

“The partial image is biased, yes, but it is also in conflict with inherent bias — it is a part of something incalculably whole and stark and true. Such wholeness cannot be confined or structured absolutely; its complex nakedness and community of spirit eludes us within every mask or costume or dress …”

“What then is wholeness?” I cried.

“Wholeness is the unique mediation of fiction of spirit between partial images. Wholeness is, shall I say, a real fiction in arousing, penetrating, transforming the parent-in-the-child, the object in the newborn or unborn subject. Wholeness opens the prospect of climates of passion and emotion that reflect each other, not to overwhelm each other but to ‘redeem’ (if that is not in itself too biased a word) the fragmentation of cultures, and to do so without glosses of deception that underestimate the depth, the terror, the obscurity, of the enterprise.

“The price of wholeness is a fiction that so relives the fragmentation of cultures that it cannot be duped by ideal rhetoric or faiths or falsehoods. It gives creative tension to doubts and uncertainties that become the cousins of god in reflecting their curiosity about the wounds of heaven that revive a concept of innocence, the wounds of hell by which we glorify the individual in traditions of conquest.

“Wholeness releases partiality to confront itself in others as a necessary threshold into the rebirth and the unity of Mankind beyond the rhetoric of salvation, beyond the rhetoric of damnation. Wholeness is a third dimension in which every mask suffers the kinship of exchange, the kinship of glory, the kinship of humiliation. At least,” he smiled across at me half-commandingly, half-apologetically, “that is what I think.”

Czar Johnny (half-masked by the future in Carnival generation’s embalmed Lenin) shuffled along with the globe on his back, a globe or an immense crate of sugar. The particular aisle in the gutted (as it seemed to me) Market ship along which he moved was rather narrow and the shoppers or crew over which he ruled pulled aside, as they saw him coming, into areas between the stalls. Thus he made his way inch by inch, foot by foot, through the population of Carnival limbo.

One Lady Charlotte, however, stood her ground.

“Charlotte?” I turned to Masters. “Have I not heard that name before?”

“Flip back to the Alms House scene in Carnival,” said Masters. “There’s mention of Charlotte. Bartleby’s second wife.”

“Ah yes! I remember. She stripped him of his property in the heat of their romance.”

“A cunning bitch. She’s dressed in rich cloth today, unlike poor Alice. And her shoes glitter. Ready to dance you would think. But no! she stands abusing Johnny as if she’s chained or riveted to the ground. Her pride won’t let her stir.”

“It’s infra dig, isn’t it, for her to go aside into the crush and the throng of perspiring infernal bodies between the stalls?”

“Her sons were educated at the College next to the Alms House, then they studied law at Harvard and in London. She knows her rights, that’s clear,” Masters conceded.

“What is she saying to the czar?”

“She’s telling him the folk in the Market have every right to stand in the aisle and buy their fruit and fish. She’s telling him he should back off and use another path away from the people’s stalls. She says she’ll stand where she is until kingdom come or until she’s through with her purchases.”

Flatfoot glowered. He slowly lowered the globe on his back until he had deposited it like a great boulder in the middle of the narrow people’s aisle. “You cunning bitch,” he cried with venom, almost taking the words, I thought, out of Masters’ shadow of a mouth. “Don’t be hasty, don’t abuse the Lady Bartleby,HE SAYS.”

I was astonished at the sudden caution that had arrived upon Flatfoot’s tongue, as if he were repeating an aside or an injunction he had received from an unseen companion. I played the scene back in my mind and listened intently. “You cunning bitch! Don’t be hasty, don’t abuse the Lady Bartleby, Johnny,HE SAYS.”

Yes, there was no doubt about it. I had overlooked but caught Johnny in the replayed utterance of the unseen companion.

“Who is HE?” I wondered.

“Johnny’s an idiot giant, he hears voices,” Masters half-laughed but I was conscious again of their mysterious global kinship, as mysterious, in a sense, as the cousinship to Sir Thomas who, I suddenly saw, out of the corner of my eye, had his eye fixed upon the czar of New Forest.

I almost swore I saw Masters’ shadow-lips moving in that mirroring eye.

“Lady Bartleby I asking you polite to stir you ass and to move out of me way. Lady Bartleby I telling you …” He began to roar like thunder. Then he stopped. He was listening to someone invisible whose lightning caution he repeated: “Be careful, Johnny, be careful what you say, HE SAYS.”

Charlotte grew icy. She was angry. She ignored him. But despite her anger — as is the way of dreams — she smiled; her ageing body smiled with a faint shrug within the seamless garment of marriage he had conferred upon her. Though she had divorced Bartleby he had called her Lady Bartleby. She remained riveted to the floor of the Market and continued to order iced fish, rice, oranges, pear-shaped mangoes, and other miscellaneous items I could not read from where I stood upon the Carnival vessel of Night.

Masters shifted a little beside me as if he were still embarrassed by a play or a rehearsal of resemblances as he led me through the labyrinth of fire. It was a curious sensation, the sensation of shadow overlapping light, light shadow, day night, the sensation of gesture as speech, of words and images so curiously broken they gave scope to Carnival self-ridicule, Carnival self-love, Carnival self-loathing, within savage pride, savage labour, savage creation. They gave scope to scorn as well as vulgar relief within the play of folk-conscience that enveloped the chained Lady and the Carnival tyrant.

“Lady you know how damn hard I work? You think you know? I move galaxies of sugar. You no have a clue. You too proud to step out of me way. ME. Czar Johnny! You want to gaol me, yes, chain me to you but Lady I could burn you …” He mumbled something that was followed by HE SAYS to imply another caution from his lightning companion, but the voice was so faint this time that Johnny felt he could safely ignore it. He reached out to seize Charlotte but the echo of faintness intensified into another lightning call, female rather than male, arising from the stalls. It pulled him back into himself. He looked around and saw the marble woman, his common-law wife. She had left Sir Thomas to consult a colleague and report on the distressing event of the day — the loss of the eggs. She returned in time and perceived the violent climax that the czar of New Forest was about to inflict on Lady Bartleby.

“Johnny, Johnny, I know you strong. But strong can mean weak, SHE SAYS. Johnny, Johnny, I know you’s a brute, I know you’s a crab. But the lady in chains is a crab too, SHE SAYS, and crab can eat crab.” The marble woman’s dark humour took the Market Carnival by surprise. The riddle of the Carnival crab was known to all, crab-Johnny, crab-Charlotte, as the mutual devouring principle within a chained civilization, North, South, East, West. It was an omen of coming death for one or the other, for Johnny or Charlotte, but at the moment a comedy of design was paramount. The insertion of SHE SAYS into counterpoint with the faint injunction HE SAYS that Johnny had ignored registered upon “male crab” and “female crab” to break a climax of violence though they remained fixed in the Market aisle with the crate of sugar between them. There was resounding applause.

The intricacy of all these relationships, their fullness, their abbreviated texture, their half-eclipsed initial capacity in the riddle of the crab at death’s door was not entirely lost upon Sir Thomas. He recalled his desire to sculpt Aunt Alice when she danced for her daylight supper. Curious to think of one destitute old woman, Bartleby’s third wife, as a dancer (the dancer who knighted him), and the other, the well-to-do second wife, as riveted by pride into the Market-place. Was Alice the fleet spirit, Charlotte the chained, despite her fortune and her privileges? Were the spectral voices of caution HE SAYS, SHE SAYS, contours of oblivion sprung from the blind collision of cultures but heard rather than seen in the voice of the mask, the conscience of the mask?

*

Sir Thomas fell for the marble woman. Her dark folk-humour, dark folk-conscience, thrilled him. He faintly worshipped her. He was wet not dry puberty. He wished he were ancient, at least one hundred years old, a twenty-first century fully grown knight in saintly, sexual armour. Her intervention in the Market theatre, the applause she received, sprang to his head like wine. In the day’s journey — it seemed a whole day, an age — across New Forest, he had been uneasy at times as they made their way along East Street and Brickdam. But now it was as if she swallowed him. He felt the poignant sweetness that an older woman brings to a young lover who has arrived at the precocious puberty of the twentieth-century colonial age and is suddenly enamoured by the touch of exploited flesh-and-blood that consumes him yet enlivens him unexpectedly.

He resented the czar. How old was the idiot giant anyway? Old as Carnival? Old as Everyman Masters’ shadow-resemblance falling everywhere? Masters’ shadow-resemblance had been cut from a true mask that must of necessity be cut again and again, hewn again and again into glimmering configurations, false, true, truer still, truest still, less false, less true, voice of the hidden true mask, voice of the hidden true conscience of the mask everywhere in everything, however true, however less than true, however inferior, devilish, apparently untrue everything seems. This (or all these) fell not only upon Masters’ lame kin Flatfoot Johnny but upon lame bureaucrats, lame governors of the estate of New Forest, lame field-marshals who had fought for land in South America, lame clerks and administrators.

The mask that fell of necessity varied in cut but its gift to Carnival was the hidden voice, the evolving conscience, the hidden contour heard rather than seen in every cruel or other circumstance.

Indeed that hidden contour, that paradox of a mask, fell upon me as well for I was Everyman Masters’ spirit-clerk (as well as parent-spark) in writing his life. I was the clerk of a master-being, some would say, but in concert with lame plantation bureaucrats that he overshadowed and resembled, I was the clerk of tyranny or of a tyranny of sorts. Not only that. His familiarity — from the time he was seventeen or eighteen — with the women of the plantation with whom he slept (as is the privilege and custom of apprentice-overseers/princes of the estate) signified a tradition of intercourse between high and low that I deplored but profited from myself as a young man, a young clerk with money in his pocket. In writing of all this, am I the clerk of tradition or the clerk of a fallacy of tradition that resembles true tradition?

All this helps to give luminous masked age or Carnival tradition to Thomas and the marble woman as they make their way — as they guide me — through past, present and future labyrinth from the czar’s Market-place to Crocodile Bridge.

The bone-littered path they took ran no longer with the wounded ease, the plastered ease, of Brickdam or East Street proprieties. It crackled underfoot with the malady of the caves of the plantation primitive. The tenements or caves were flat and squat. All well and good for missionaries in the Inferno to speak of a good soul or a bad soul, a good meal or a bad meal, or of the devil’s plantation repast, but one was equally held by windows and doors that yawned silently, whose maw seemed capable of swallowing millions, maw or spiked cannon, the uneasy peace in which poverty makes its nest.

Did tenement caves and spiked cannon glimmer with forgotten battlefields as the inmates of the plantation ghetto moved against windows and doors of the setting sun, or were they the green/rotting nurseries of future wars, future abortive revolutions, future czars?

The grotesqueries that were beginning to arise in the return of the dead king of Carnival into my dreams, into my book, were becoming manifest, if I may so put it, in their intricate assault upon my complacency.

I recalled the barred mask of the sun upon Thomas’s face (with its spidery, half-abbreviated, half-obliterated segmented features in other Thomases around incarnations of history around the globe) as he peered at Aunt Alice through the gate of the Alms House. Not a barred gate but the blind mouth and deaf eyes and hollow ears of cannon lay upon dead Masters as he prompted me to visualize the neighbourhood through which Thomas and the marble woman walked — not upon Christ’s metaphysical sea where floated the vessel of Night but upon a daemonic (true? untrue?) globe I thought I knew but scarcely knew at all in its parallel incarnations of deed and reflection.

Masters wanted me to reflect upon a deed or a blow that is enigmatic in substance; it appears spiked or obsolescent, it appears an anachronism, but in inner bombardment or inner strike it is as unexpected as the green lightning of explosive fertility in a rotting garden. Even so I was still unprepared for the dead king’s confession. “As a Boy of seventeen,” he cried with the bone of a woman in the masked aperture of his mouth, a bone that descended into the beam of his body, “I came to this rotting neighbourhood and ate a woman twice my age.” He was laughing soundlessly. “She was — how do the glossy magazines put it? — soul food, soul-sex. It was nothing. I felt … What did I feel? I felt the spring of action that fires itself so reflexively, with such puppet ardour; it is as old as the hills, it is nothing. I was an apprentice-overseer, an apprentice-knight or king or what have you, a mask is a mask is a mask, of the globe. And she was marble one enters like eggshell.”

“You felt nothing?” I pressed him. I felt guilt. As a Boy of eighteen whose age lapses into many vicarious bodies (all self-made heroes in the 1920s, 1930s, Depression cinema were cosmetic overseers, they were the Boys), I had slept for the first time with a woman twice my age. She was a subtle whore with the eyes of black-blooded, tailored actresses. I had felt something, I had heard the hidden voice (the unseen companion) of Masters’ guilt. Masters had felt nothing, he had blanketed my conscience, my calloused conscience, so woven into the apparent indifference of unseen populations, it had seemed nothing whereas I knew it was something. I had felt perverse guilt and pride at the box-office money I paid her to lie with me in bed under a screen concealing spiked cannon, perverse pride and guilt at traditions of the hunt, half-male hunted, half-female huntress. It was the sense of being torn into two or three or four, into trinities, quaternities, that left me fulfilled but profoundly unhappy, proud but shattered within. Masters looked into my heart and read my mind; he saw the paradoxes of something and nothing, unfelt yet felt, the shadow of divine clerk within me, within parchment biography of spirit. I was the clerk of bone and dagger, inanimate/animate soul. I was the clerk of god. I was possessed by the necessity to endure the mystery of truth, the mystery of hell.

*

Thomas and the marble woman had come to the Crocodile Bridge. It had been so named because of the canal that ran from the great Crocodile Swamp into New Forest to provide irrigation and drinking water. The canal was the lifeline of New Forest. It had been designed and built — so legend claimed — by an eighteenth-century antecedent of Everyman Masters. It supplied the Municipal Water Works and the Sugar Estate Reservoir of New Forest. The latter was constructed to hold a special reserve supply for overseers and other top staff in the dry season of the year when water was rationed.

The occasional crocodile or alligator tended to make its way into the canal and was sometimes seen basking at the edge of the water under the noonday sun.

When the Boy and the masked woman arrived on the Bridge it was past six o’clock. The quick tropical twilight was dying and darkness fell in a flash. But not before Sir Thomas had glimpsed in the black water, black as coal, streaked by a pointed flame from the long arm of the dying Carnival sun, a crocodile that floated like a log of wood. The log moved, it dipped, it rose again, it oscillated slightly, it submerged, emerged afresh, no longer wood but an iron body, a piece of cannon drawn by the denizens of the Inferno. That was the instant when night fell. Everything was still save for the moving shadows of Thomas and the marble woman on the Bridge against the glow of an antiquated street lamp.

The woman delved into an antiquated Carnival basket, pulled out an antiquated torch, pressed the switch to replicate the long arm of Carnival. A beam shot forth and played upon the canal. Everything was black. And then the play of light caught something. Two miniature fires gleamed suddenly like lit coals or stars in the underworld sky and the darkness under the Bridge. They were the eyes of the crocodile illumined now, luminous now — as never during the day when they seemed opaque — by the long arm of Carnival exercised by the marble woman. They seemed to rise out of the water, a wounded constellation, until they pierced Sir Thomas with astonishment and uncertainty about the animal age, the iron and metallic fossil riddles, in the paradox of a constellation, in the birth of a star within the depths of space.

There was a faint mist over the water. The pencil of light falling from the Bridge, and igniting the crocodile’s eyes, gave to the atmosphere a faint turbulence, an uneven sensation of fabric vibrating almost imperceptibly. Imperceptible as this was, Sir Thomas perceived it. It reminded him of the ragged cloth or bandage with which he had staunched the cut that Masters had received that day on the foreshore when as Carnival Boy-King he crawled in the mask of a crab. Thomas too had crawled in the king’s shadow — a shadow himself — as they played at El Doradan age within the pencil of light years that illumined not only the crab but also the atomic button or eye of a stranded fish upon the gallows of god.

No ostensible gallows arose before him now save that standing on the Bridge, Thomas could trace the shadowy cannon of the crocodile in the water, the coals for eyes, as another investiture or mask of god, another game that Masters was playing in the wake of the Crab nebula. The god of Carnival had slipped off the crab and the fish to don a dinosaur rocket resembling cannon as much as crocodile. It stirred Sir Thomas deeply, it stirred layers of insubstantial and sculpted emotion within him; it stirred the seed of unconscious jealousy within him of the masks of god. It was the greenness and fertility of god in concert with the apparent obsolescence one reads into the ancient shell of a crab, or the dinosaur hide of a crocodile, or the hoary metal of cannon, that troubled Thomas most deeply.

I was troubled as I followed my Carnival guides.

Did the greenness of god mask a terrible age or was it a terrible age that had built into itself the reflexes of fertility? Did the wound or cut, I wondered, that Thomas had seen earlier in the day on the child-deity El Dorado fester incorrigibly into fortress money or obliterate itself within hardened ages of ingrained ferocity aping spirit and the death of spirit?

I was troubled and jealous of such terrible powers within apparently obsolescent institution and privilege. Above all I was deeply troubled by the wound Thomas had touched in the body of his master but scarcely proven because of its vanishing proportions: a wound that not only festered in a rotting garden but whose transfigurative potential was eclipsed in the reflexes of a puppet, the reflexes of fertility.

I tried to grasp a parallel between wounded constellation and ferocity that apes spirit or the death of spirit. For example, Masters’ ferocity was such that it led him to expose the cut he received, to adventure on with a flag or a bandage; it equipped him equally to run or escape from the false shaman. Such Carnival good fortune, such Carnival fierce capacity to encounter evil, profit from it, learn from it, yet fly from it, exacted a formidable price upon all species, all arts, all being. For the psychology of flight floated a scar that resembled the wound others less fortunate than child-Masters or green god, less equipped to run, received. That scar was the foundation of a series of Carnival callouses across generations or evolutions into the obsolescence and festering disease of territorial imperatives that the armoured crab or crocodile sustained.

I felt that Thomas’s uncertainty sprang from a wound that lay so deeply buried in the armour of a civilization that he almost doubted his original perception and wondered whether it had existed at all. So poignant and heart-rending is Doubt when Faith congeals into a fortress that blocks our vision of the starving and the emaciated in every corner of the globe.

Jealousy — on the other hand — was no fortress. It was the cancerous adoration and envy of establishment heroes or masters whose ransacking of species and cultures Sir Thomas found himself unable to achieve under any banner, Christian or Marxist, except as Everyman’s unwitting shadow. If, for instance, Masters instead of himself had collided with the marble/market woman that noon, he (Masters) — I am sure — would have had no compunction in running even more deeply into her, in accusing her of being as blind as he. And so in accompanying her across the Town and the Plantation, he would have clung, I perceived, to their mutual blindness as the foetus in the female body of humanity clings to blind fate, and the female — whose body it is, after all, that the flying or clinging foetus inhabits — is blind to the accumulating scars of aborted antecedents in a fragmented humanity, a humanity that will turn upon itself at some despairing, later, phallic stage of civilization and penetrate itself as if nothing had happened in the past, as if the deed of coitus between man and woman — as if the intercourse of trade between cultures — is totally functional, totally without sensuous imagination or guilt.

(Thus it was that Masters at the age of seventeen as an apprentice-overseer had visited the neighbourhood in which the marble women lived. He had slept with one of them, a compliant marble prostitute, twice his age. Her flesh may as well have been egg or juicy fashion plate or glass. He had penetrated her with scarcely a thought for unseen companions, the echoes of shared human mask, the reverberations of hidden conscience his action provoked in Thomas — the cousinly shadow that he trailed behind him in history — and in me, his clerk or biographer of spirit.)

*

Thomas envied Masters; he envied him his capacity to run, to fly, to act, and it almost seemed as if such regression into the body of the glass-mother, or the marble-mistress, were substantial with Faith. Whereas he (Thomas), I felt, remained at the mercy of profoundest misgiving. If it were possible I would sculpt his arrival upon the Crocodile Bridge with the liquid tool I had seen that afternoon upon the crest of a wave. It was 1926. A common-or-garden year. Why should I wish to sculpt a passing moment into the Bridge? Precocious as Thomas was, biographer of spirit that I was, we could not say why each and every common-or-garden year or moment cries out to be sculpted in paradoxical contradiction to insane eternity, as if each sculpted fragile year is kin to a spirit one may ape or misconceive but whose innovative reality, whose foreshadowings, naïvetés, whose warnings, cannot be entirely suppressed by the logic of a uniform infinity.

Perhaps it was the sculpture of coming events that Carnival felt in 1926, the economic depression of the 1930s, the war that would follow that depression. Perhaps it was the gestation of a nuclear age to be sculpted in the atom that Carnival felt in 1926. Perhaps it was a nameless foreboding that Carnival felt about independence for the colonies of the Inferno, an independence that would lay bare a variety of stigmata that would bleed in the 1950s and 1960s, but succumb to a brute hardening of the flame of blood, to tribal institutions that made all the more ironclad every ritual grievance of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982 when Everyman Masters died, Carnival’s premonitions in the mask of Sir Thomas had come to a head, I felt, around the globe, and the writing on the Bridge I had nebulously sculpted in backward dream in the labyrinth of time turned into a climate of fear.

*

Thomas was now alone on the Bridge with the faint prophetic sculpture, the bandaged year, falling everywhere into the mist. The Bridge was the naive yet overshadowed vessel of Night, he was the rebel saint, rebel lover, rebel captain of humanity. The mist was ragged sail and bandage, the coal-black waters were timbered with the burnt schooner that had stood beside the Market-place. Crocodile bags were sold to tourists and well-to-do people for six shillings apiece, half the cost of the capsized basket of eggs.

“Charlotte Bartleby,” the marble woman said to Thomas before she vanished, “fond of crocodile to store her lipstick in, her sacred nail varnish, mirror, kerchief, and other items and wisps of paper. You can go home now, Boy. No use to come another step with me. My cave is at the bottom of the lane.” She pointed along the false dawn of the dimly lit path with its antiquated road lamp. “You see that lantern like a half-moon down there?” Thomas barely saw the flash of her teeth. She was laughing in the misty darkness. “It hanging by a wire under the belly of a donkey cart that Flatfoot Johnny inscribe ‘Orion chariot’. When you come next time with a piece of gold for each egg,” she was laughing again, “remember, whether it’s in the day-sky or the night-sky the donkey cart’ll be there by the parapet where I be. You understand, Boy? I easy to find once you pass the Crocodile Bridge constellation.” Before he could protest she was gone. He made an attempt to follow but she waved him back.

Within an afternoon resembling an age he dreamt of defending her against all sovereign powers that sought to ride her, or run into her, all overbearing masters.

Perhaps he had been moved more deeply and dangerously than he understood by the net of counterpoint (HE SAYS, SHE SAYS) that the market woman had flung over Flatfoot Johnny when he raised his fist to crush Charlotte in the Carnival Market-place. Perhaps from that moment he became a dangerous rebel. Perhaps rebellion upheld the invisible net in which Flatfoot was caught, upheld it and converted it into the sparked basket of incipient sexuality or pubertal age interwoven with mist and sail and bandage. Sparked basket! Capsized basket!

Thomas was about to go, albeit reluctantly, when he and I perceived Flatfoot Johnny approaching the Crocodile Bridge. Johnny had been drinking in the late afternoon and his movements were even more cramped and shuffling than usual. The restraints of the net bit into his soul. He was angry. Thomas and I were possessed by a sinking feeling at the pit of our basket stomach, capsized feeling, sparked feeling, acute foreboding. Flatfoot’s powers, however shackled or netted, were extraordinary. Not only because of his formidable back but because of mutual incapacities between himself and us, between rulers and rebels, mutual Byzantine masquerade in which the net of majesty that Johnny trailed around his limbs was a sieve of longing in ourselves. We knew through porous basket, or sparked tapestry of Night, the frustrations that Johnny endured as Carnival czar of Russia in New Forest.

Every shilling, every dollar the czar spent on rum matched the capsized basket of eggs Thomas had blindly engineered in involuntary social experiment or collision of cultures. The art of Carnival revolution lay in involuntary match, involuntary equation, matched sovereign and common peoples. One throne makes another footstool visible. The czar’s indulgences matched the gold, wounded El Dorado, Thomas had agreed to pay.

I sought to read Thomas’s comedy of values in “art of Carnival revolution”. I sought a link between the puberty of the twentieth century — the growing pains of adolescent humanity — and the uncertain desire, the uncertain necessity, to right age-old wrongs everywhere. I sought a link between vulgar relief and comedy, between comedy and tragedy, a link so curious that one blended into the other or lapsed into the other, the serious into the absurd, the absurd into terror or blood or revolution.

The die was cast when the czar passed Thomas on the Bridge. Johnny was drunk. Thomas smelt danger for the marble woman. He kept pace with the czar along the path where primitives trundled, or lived in, cannon. It was a curious scene, but, in point of fact, Thomas dreamt he was descending a ladder or a bandage of mist into the sky of the canal under the Bridge where he had seen the natives move rockets or crocodile weaponry.

What astonished us as we descended the ladder was not the awesome power of such weaponry but — because of Johnny’s shuffling netted footsteps — a sense of absurdity as if Thomas and Johnny and I were inside Charlotte’s bag, in the lipstick, in the mirror, in the other items of sacred toiletry within a crocodile’s belly.

We would have laughed at Jonah in the whale of a crocodile but the idiot giant might have turned upon his unseen companions, seen us in spite of everything, seized us, bled us. Lipstick blood! Eaten us! In the false dawn in which we had paused for a moment of vulgar relief Johnny seemed an ancient woman wiping her falsely reddened lips and seated upon a black chamber-pot with murder in her heart.

The intimacy of Carnival murder executed in a closet, in Charlotte’s crocodile bag, gave way all at once to blazing coal (as if we had flown around the globe from Iron Age sugar mills in black canals to electronic faeces). Johnny arose. Thomas and I stood now somewhere in the roof or the palate of the crocodile, under its night-sky eyes or stars. The inmates of the caves had ceased to trundle crocodile and were cooking their night-time meal in the open barracks of the plantation.

Johnny seemed oblivious of their activity, but they called out to him as to a foul emperor they adored.

“Hey Flatfoot Mask, hey Strong Boy, you drunk or what? You lips stick together or what? Say a damn word. You don’t hear we praying to you night after night as we sit on coal?”

Flatfoot Mask saw nothing, heard nothing, he was already a dead man, and his progress was so slow that Thomas and I had ample time (like an archaeologist, an anthropologist, excavating the body of space, assessing its cracks, its crevices) to inspect the coal pots on which the natives cooked and in which the lighted eyes of darkness shone to miniaturize far-away storms blown by cosmic winds in the anatomy of god. Strips of iron or some nameless metal rested on each coal pot and these supported a frying pan, in some instances, or a vessel with rice or a saucepan with beans or with meat for those who were phenomenally lucky.

The strips of iron created the effect of a laced mask. Within each open segment of the mask, the deposit of an animal face glowered at us. The coal sometimes lay lumpy and naked in its concave bed. Tripods were then constructed above it from which the saucepans hung. Where neither tripod stood nor mask lay above the eyes of the crocodile, the long arm of Carnival had fashioned a metal bar or spit.

Thomas felt himself masked by their vulgar and banal appetite, vulgar and banal spit. So much so that he led me under the eyes of coal, in the crocodile’s grasp yet hidden from it, on the blind inner side of the crocodile’s skull, as if he possessed a cosmic faculty or guideline born of a globe or planet that defecates in space, cooks in space, apparently beneath, apparently above, the light-year stars.

It was this profound “beneath/above skull and anatomy” of the plantation Inferno that gave him a route through time of which the keepers of the coal pot and the chamber-pot were unaware. And that was just as well. For whatever their complaints, or unanswered prayers, Johnny was president and revolution was taboo. And yet for one moment when we passed by they seemed to look up at unseen Thomas like a dog lipsticking its wounds. Such was their presentiment of the androgynous miracle of Carnival revolution.

Flatfoot had now gained the lantern moon under the donkey cart and Thomas said to me that his vertical descent into the underworld sky of the canal, upon bandage, through absurd crocodile belly, lipsticked dog, within the shell and the roof of coal, beneath/above the stars, had ceased and revolved into horizontal arm or axis of Carnival. He felt a commotion in his stomach. He felt faint and dizzy. He had scarcely eaten a scrap or a morsel since his flight from the foreshore in search of Masters. And the sight of food had enlivened and sickened him.

His phallic entrails akin to the Milky Way were turning. Sparked basket of pubertal sex. He had glimpsed the marble woman’s breasts. She stood in her cave. He glimpsed her through the radii of the spokes in the donkey cart wheel. She, unlike the others, was cooking her meal inside as if each spoke that passed through her were a spit to toast meat or milk. Or so it seemed to Thomas with his masked eyes glued to her. In point of fact she was engaged in peeling sweet potatoes. She had shed her dress for a low petticoat. Her statuesque limbs and breasts revolved slowly in the wheel of his eyes like a slow motion legend of storm. She had anticipated Johnny’s flatfooted approach and her humours, her tensions, obscurely matched his. Flatfoot cried through the revolving door, “Where the damn Boy who smash the egg? I see you with he in the Market-place today.” The woman watched him. She tested the strength of the net she had flung over him. Thomas perceived through the wheel that she was unsure. Johnny was so drunk he seemed capable of rending every garment, uprooting every spoke.

“Who tell you all this?” she asked, playing for time.

“I hear. I hear. Not from you but I hear. You take the Boy home? You see he parents? You make them pay?”

“He has no parents,” the marble woman said quietly. “But he promise to come back and pay in gold.” It was a joke. Thomas hoped Johnny would see it and desist from uprooting the wheel.

“No parents?” Flatfoot exploded. “Is what cock-and-bull story the Boy spin you? He’s a white Boy though he coloured. He got white parents.”

“I tell you he’s an orphan.”

“Orphan hell! I know what orphan mean. It mean he cycling with mother in bed. Orphan hell!” Johnny glared around the cave as if he were searching for someone.

“You filthy, Johnny. You in my bed every night. I pray to you to believe …”

“I don’t believe. I know. I know what you up to with Boys, golden Boys. A piece of gold for an egg!”

“Johnny, you dead drunk,” the marble woman said sharply. Her voice was sharp but tired, peculiarly downcast as if Johnny’s “dead drunk” condition matched an area of stalemate in her at the pit of a wheeling imagination. She had changed, she was more vulnerable than ever, she was without an audience. It came as a shock to perceive this. In the Market-place with an audience to cheer, to applaud generously, she had been inventive enough and able to net the czar’s fist. With Thomas, she had been versatile enough, perceptive enough of a wheel of creatures he brought with him, the dancer Aunt Alice, the fleet-footed Masters, and me, divine clerk or biographer of spirit, who needed their guidance. But now that she felt she had lost us, on her own with the idiot giant, she fell on her knees, as if the wheel had been uprooted, had indeed fallen flat; she seemed to pray, she seemed to fumble for HE SAYS, SHE SAYS, she seemed unnaturally docile. And the flattened wheel almost made her believe she was the individual solitary whore, the individual rotten whore that the idiot giant said she was. She was the wife and mother of orphans in a polluted, stilled universe.

“No rotten gold,” the czar said suddenly. “Give me gut-deep money, bloody money, carve me honest money.” He raised his fist to strike but Thomas could stand it no more. He tugged at the wheel, it resisted, he pulled again, it moved, it spun, he felt it turning into a community of mutual spaces, mutual creatures. He jumped miraculously through the wheel from “beneath/above” and seized the knife on the table, raised it so quickly it knitted afresh the net that had been rent, and then with a sensation that her hand was in his, he plunged the dagger into Johnny’s frame.

As the blood came I wondered if it were true that the wheel was turning. Thomas was dizzy all over again, he stroked it, he stroked the woman’s prayer. The blood was true. The transfigurative wound or revolution came within an ace of realization but in his immaturity, her immaturity, my immaturity — in the way we were locked into self-perpetuating order and primitive habit — the revolution eluded us again. The woman sprang to her feet. She was still, she could scarcely speak, and then she found the voice of terrible oracle. She wrung her hands.

“O me god, Johnny the czar of Russia, he dead.”

It was all she could say. She was lost. She seized her savage love, her savage Johnny. She wept to break his heart and hers.

The czar is dead, long live the czar in the cave of abortive revolution.

FIVE

In 1931 at the age of Carnival fourteen Masters became a Boy at the famous College in Brickdam next to Aunt Alice’s dancing school in the Alms House. His cosmic apprenticeship as princeling-overseer of the sugar estate of the globe formally commenced. Above the portals to the College was written an injunction attributed to Heracleitus the Obscure:

THE AION IS A BOY WHO PLAYS,

PLACING THE COUNTERS HERE AND THERE.

TO A CHILD BELONGS THE COSMIC MASTERY.

A high priority on the curriculum was athletics. And within the first year of his apprenticeship Masters shone at the Athletic Meet in two of the under-fifteen events. He beat Merriman in the hundred yards and Philip of Spain in the high jump.

After seventy-five yards (in which he kept me at his side and led me in a dream) he and Merriman were ahead of the field and suddenly it seemed to Masters that Merriman would win. The field stretched into a cave at the entrance to which stood two coal-black guardians or referees holding a ribbon or bandage chest high.

There was a fiendish grin on Merriman’s face. His skull shone through the seed of his hair that had been oiled. Masters and I were on the verge of panic. We saw the merry shadow of the false shaman at our side in the collegiate Inferno. We saw that everything we had gained on the beach could be plucked from us now in the laughter of Merriman. Such are the ruses of diseased Ambition. There is rape and rape. There is the seizure of others, there is conquest. That is one form of rape. There is panic — that is another form — panic in being overtaken by a grin.

Masters made his last crucial effort and succeeded in breasting the tape at the entrance to the cave ahead of Merriman. He found it impossible to say in the interior darkness that enveloped him to what degree he had outrun diseased and merry Ambition, to what degree he had profited from it. The sudden darkness left me blind in the cave and I returned to the sun dazzled and uncertain of where I had been.

Philip of Spain was the nickname given to the Boy Rodrigues, whose antecedents were Venezuelan. He was loose-limbed, sorrowful-looking, and his tutors concentrated on making him spell “crocodile tears” on every page of his exercise book until he had accumulated a body of waves he scaled in the mental high jump. He jumped with a priestly cassock on his head over the bar of the world, into other people’s hearts, other people’s Milky Way entrails.

Each contestant was given three chances to clear the bar or to retire from conquest. Each clearance ran into decades, generations, even centuries, and was a signal for the referees or guardians to take the bar up another inch, another generation. And thus the mouth of the cave heightened into an interior darkness in which a drama of the soul festered or transfigured the elements, the constellations.

Philip was set to win. He had cleared every vertical extension of the cave in which Masters dreamt he discerned the ghostly donkey cart of Christ and the ghostly wheel of revolution that ran through Christ’s imperial masks. There were other relics as well in the cave. What a distance lay between a donkey ride and an emperor’s Byzantine saddle in heaven. It was this thought that drove Masters to face his opponent when the high jump seemed lost. The bar had been raised still another inch, another generation, and Philip had cleared it but Masters had knocked it flat. He jumped, knocked it flat again. Should he fail in the third attempt, he would have lost.

He looked at his priestly opponent. He perceived nothing really “priestly” about him. He was more of an engineer or an architect than a priest. His faculties were primed to structural measures, to siftings, to making adjustments, making divisions, to creating a shield over his interests, an archaic mask, modern adjustments in the archaic shield, partitions, edifices, boundary lines, division of spoils; except that, in an odd way this time, diseased, archaic high jump Ambition was such that it had begun to speculate on diseased frontiers, on a clearance into all or nothing.

“What do you mean by all or nothing?” Masters wanted to ask the budding twentieth-century Philip of Venezuela in a collegiate Inferno or colony. (“Spain” was a nickname for Venezuela. Venezuela, it was said, contemplated invading New Forest. Indeed Philip Rodrigues was loose-limbed and athletic enough to accommodate many skeletons in the cupboard of America, many invaders, many old and new invasions.)

Masters gauged the bar for the last time. He ran at it. He leapt into the air like a daemon. He cleared window and gate and bar to come abreast of Rodrigues’ performance that he had endowed with proportions of contradiction and fantasy to drive him to mental and physical victory. He had seen into Philip, as it were, and profited from conscious, subconscious, unconscious, savage motivation beneath cassock and slide rule. He felt almost sorry for Philip now. His opponent’s powers, his drive to rule the roost, to build upon the bones of the defeated, was a necessary moral evil. Was evil sometimes moral, was evil the moral ground of frames that claim to be absolute? Did such absolutes conscript the imagination until alternatives diminished into lesser and greater evils, and the lesser evil became the moral imperative?

The high jump bar or frame had been raised again. This time Philip faltered. He failed to make the clearance. Masters soared over the cave by an extra inch or two. Philip tried a second time, struck the bar to the ground. He limped as if he were psychically maimed. Perhaps he had been caught off guard — though he was unaware of it — by Masters’ philosophic gymnasium. He ran and jumped again. There was a roar from the spectators. His ankle caught the bar and sent it spinning to the ground. He had lost and yet he had won. He had lost the event but he had secured a premise of “moral evil” that was to haunt Everyman Masters all his life. It was not just that Rodrigues’ high jump — his military, economic or whatever ascendancy — would have proven the greater evil, that his (Masters’) was the lesser. It was the realization that revolution — that the wheel that expands into the door of a problematic cave — required a complex relationship to the tyrant-psyche one overcomes, a complex apprehension of the tyrant’s blood as native to oneself and to the wounds of transfigurative inner/outer being, transfigurative architectures of the Carnival body of space.

“Can you tell me something about the cave,” I suddenly asked Masters, “into which you ran at the end of the race? It seemed so dark when you led me in. I saw nothing.”

The dead king stared at me in my dream.

“It was the cave of the tyrant-psyche,” he said at last. “Do you follow?”

I did not reply. He continued, “It was the cave of relics, it was the cave of heartfelt competition and divine right. It was also — and this was strange — the cave of abortive revolutions. You were actually in,” he paused, gestured, searched for an image, “a hollow shell symbolizing an embalmed god.” He paused again. “May I qualify what I have just said? Not necessarily a god in strict logic, no, that hollow shell may symbolize a beloved atheist or a beloved despot or an ambiguous saint, each or any of these may be embalmed into a god. Cast your eyes around the world and you will see. It was like running, I repeat, into an embalmed shell, into a comedy of excavations.”

“Comedy of excavations!” I was struck by the expression.

“Yes,” said Masters. “Place your ear to the shell and you will hear the echo of an excavated heart, lung, organ. We ran into all these. I tried to make you see but you were hypnotized by the semblance of immortality. Yes, hypnotic semblance of immortal regime.”

His voice faded and I was left to ponder the implications of what he had said. Indeed it was a confession, a deep-seated, far-reaching confession. Rather than accept the lesser of two evils as the nature of order, Masters sought a confessional frame through which to illumine the counterpoint between tyrant-psyche and age-old deception or semblance of immortality. Such illumination — he appeared to imply — might pave the way for a fiction of grace that led through the restrictions of alternative evils within the parameters of conquistadorial deity, conquistadorial morality; led through to a deeper comprehension and rebuttal of conquest in the creativity of underestimated moral being. It was a goal that lay unfulfilled and far in the distance in the race of humanity, and in the meantime I saw that Masters was depressed, chastened, beaten, even though he had won the two events in the collegiate Athletic Meet.

When he received the silver cups that were the prizes for the high jump and the hundred yards he turned and looked at Rodrigues and Merriman and his body hardened all of a sudden (as if it had received the embalmer’s knife) with the conviction that they had won, he had lost. It was the avid way they stared at the silver in his hands and the fact that he kept it close to his heart (as if that too had been sliced); they stared at him as if he were a thief, as if he had stolen the prize from them, as if his heart were in their breasts and he were the shell of the race, not they.

They could not perceive the distinctions he wished to coin in the realm of the state between false shaman and true shaman, between diseased Ambition and confessional frame. It was their currency, their conquest, that he received in accepting the prize. He had robbed them. It was plain to him now. He could not make them see the springs, the torments, that had given him the edge to outwit their diabolic pressure upon him. What they saw was that he had profited from a native alliance, native savagery, and he was one of them, a king of athletes.

Athletics were supreme on the College curriculum but attention was paid to the humanities and the sciences in the race of scholarship.

Mr Becks, a black Grenadian educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, was the Latin master; a brilliant scholar and the recipient of many prizes. Unlike the other masters who drove cars or cycled on ancient bikes, he walked to College along Brickdam from his home. He always wore an immaculate white suit and a white cork helmet such as overseers donned when they climbed into the saddle to ride through the sugar-cane estate on the other side of the Crocodile Bridge. He strode at a beautiful pace that Philip would have envied.

A year or two before Masters enrolled, Mr Becks had taught both Latin and Greek, and though Greek had been withdrawn, he referred perfunctorily on occasion to Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. They had become relics in the cave into which scholarship-masks upon Masters and me ran. In his first year Everyman read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Caesar’s accounts of his invasions of Gaul and Britain.

“Latin,” Mr Becks said non-committally (or was it perfunctorily?), “is a dead language.” Masters was taken aback. He confided to me an anecdote of a precocious composer who wrote his first symphony at the age of seven but was astonished to learn that the keys of his piano were ivory relics from the cave into which music-masks run. Young Masters — though an adept of the cave of my dreams — was equally ignorant. He stated bluntly that Latin was the language of Philip Rodrigues. Was ignorance bliss in poking unintentional fun at Philip, in visualizing him as an imperial speaker, in attributing to him a sacred tongue, a sacred art, a sacred science within a colonial cave that stifles originality and breeds fear. How sacred is fear, how sacred is hypocrisy? Mr Becks rebuked him. The priests and engineers of Spain, he conceded, still conducted solemn Latin masses for the pagan soul of the New World. Masters was intrigued to learn of a new Latin dictionary that blessed the pagan mysteries of surrealism, jazz, aeroplane and radio.

But a nagging doubt remained. What was a dead language? Did surrealism, aeroplane, jazz, radio become instant dinosaur relics within an embalmed language? He asked Mr Becks.

“Latin helps us with modern tongues,” Mr Becks said evasively. “Think of the many words with a Latin root. Latin is an exercise of logical faculty. Latin has beauty and order.” He saw that Everyman was waiting for a reply to his question. “There are technical reasons, technological revolutions,” he hesitated as if unsure what a “technological revolution” was in the museum of progress, “that may explain the low profile or so-called death of a language. Latin still conquers souls.” He spoke grandly with a hollow flourish.

“And aeroplanes and radios?” Masters asked.

Mr Becks blinked uncomfortably. He spoke up all at once. “Language is, or should be, as much an art as a tool or a medium of tools. We need to question, to say the least, the innermost resources of language through the creative imagination, in the creative conscience. Such questions sometimes evolve into profoundest answers to the plague of robot intelligence. A living language is a medium of imaginative death as well as imaginative rebirth and life. It is a medium of creativity in morality. Fiction as much as language dies otherwise. I myself read nothing but mediocre novels and poetry. It is better to be on the safe side, to assume there is no hope. One is then in line to be promoted to the top of the robot league in entertainment, learning and politics.”

The class had been listening, yet not listening. And Masters was more fascinated by Mr Becks’ discomfort and uneasiness as he spoke rather than by what he actually said. Was Mr Becks a sick man or a prime white-coated skeleton in the cave into which we had run? He seemed fearful of his innermost thoughts as he uttered them. He seemed to glance over his shoulder at the running false shaman who might take umbrage at what he had said. It was clear that a class of indifferent college boys was the only audience he possessed, the only stage on which to air his heretical views. Were they really heretical — I wondered — or were they a kind of defiance within a cave assembly of young skeletons who did not understand what he was saying? He was safe indeed. He returned to uttering eulogies of Latin, its beauty, its order. Then he sought vulgar relief by launching into an anecdote about a recent holiday in France.

Masters gained confirmative insight into Mr Becks’ skeleton-soul when he learned that P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste was the Latin master’s favourite novel. Or so he broadcast to all and sundry in the masters’ staff-room. Was it the innate aristocratic vulgarity of Beau Geste that appealed to him, the hidden or unconscious satire on princeling-overseers? Was it the romance of the French Foreign Legion, the inefficiency and corruption, the ingredients of adventure? Did all these in their remoteness from the Latin age serve paradoxically to reinforce a resemblance, an immortal resemblance and a mercenary code? I wondered at Mr Becks’ subconscious mind in the cave of Beau Geste.

The English master, Mr Delph, was an Australian educated in England and Italy, a rolling stone with little moss who slipped through and beyond the cave. Or so one dreamt. His lack of moss stood in contrast to Mr Becks’ elaborate masquerade. They shared an understanding. Mr Delph adopted Mr Becks’ theorem of creativity and morality and pursued this seriously and genuinely. As a consequence Mr Becks secured tenure as an important influence in New Forest education. Mr Delph secured the sack as a blackboard rebel. He was caught red-handed not with Beau Geste but with Brave New World. Huxley’s novel had been banned in New Forest though no one knew why. No one had read it.

In 1931, as if he anticipated the sack, Mr Delph gave Masters several As for English composition. His habit was to inscribe a list on the blackboard and to request his students to incorporate it into a story. One such prophetic list, straight from the oracle’s blackboard mouth in the cave, ran as follows: marble woman, burning schooner, crocodile, milk, Magna Carta, Bartleby’s widow.

Mr Delph sometimes struck a match in the cave to light his pipe and comment with some elaboration on each relic. He rhapsodized over “Magna Carta” and “Bartleby’s widow”.

Mr Quabbas was by no means Australian, nor was he Grenadian. He was New Forestian, of mixed blood; his natural caution (he was a born spy) — and his graphic definition of Antipodes — made him kith and kin to Grenadian/English Becks and to Australian/Italian Delph.

“Feet to feet — click,” he said. “That is Anti-po-des.” He would chant to the cosmic Boys and trace the egg of the globe with gesturing hands at the heart of the cave. He indicated there were souls dressed in boots standing diametrically opposite each other. Then as the egg contracted until it disappeared, the Antipodean boot souls of foetal humanity drew together and clicked like a time bomb. Was it, I asked the dead king, a shadow variation of tap-dancing Magna Carta ladies and barons in Aunt Alice’s wonderland?

Mr Quabbas was a teacher who seemed to defy all categories. (He sometimes lectured on mathematics.) His bulky frame dipped and crouched like the incarnation of many a shy and stern creature. He was hard. He marked his students hard. He was gentle. He taught Masters the geography of Europe, particularly of Great Britain; nothing at all of the Americas, but his silence here was sometimes deafening. He never spoke of the deepening 1920s–1930s depression in New Forest. It was rumoured, however, that he contemplated writing a book for initiated students into the complexities of New Forest sugar and its abortive status in the eighteenth century when it gestated and failed to emerge in radical fictional alignment and twin ship with Boston tea and the birth of the American Revolution.

The book was never finished — perhaps it was never begun — and Mr Quabbas had long vanished from the scene by the late 1940s when the World Bank invested a loan in propping up the archaic economy of New Forest. He knew, though he was no longer there to read the script of economic fiction, that an epitaph has many dimensions, and that the writing on the wall is sometimes the unwritten word, the unwritten book, the unlived revolution.

The Boy imbibed his global education into self-made epitaphs in the 1932 collegiate Inferno. It was a hard lesson. He was privy nevertheless to the genius of love that Quabbas curiously, in Carnival judgements, imparted. Young Masters became hard as the uncut tree or wood on Quabbas’s coming grave but turned that hardness by evolving degrees over long years into complex insight, complex self-knowledge.

“Hardness cracks, when one least suspects it, into the seed of the fruit of god that sets one’s teeth on edge. Hardness becomes King Midas’s, if not El Doradan, gold. It resists consumption. It leaves an unforgettable flavour on royal palates. It evokes an emotion that transcends self-pity in order to foreshadow the arts of self-judgement and rebirth. I am indebted to Quabbas for hardness yet gentleness of heart in the profoundest epitaphs of my age, a hardness and a gentleness I need to perceive before it is too late and the self-made dimension, the unrecorded, unwritten dimension in the wood or marble or stone or naked soil over my grave, is lost.” Thus said the dead king to me in 1982. I was intrigued to learn more of the Quabbas of 1932. And he led me back.

Quabbas lived in Queen Street, a stone’s throw from Brickdam, and the Boy Masters was invited there to a meeting of the Young Men’s Cave Guild theatre. Mr Quabbas was president of the group. The average age of the members of the guild was twenty-four and Masters, barely fifteen, considered it something of an honour to be enrolled as princeling-overseer amongst a body of young lawyers and clerks. In fact he was the youngest ever to attend.

They sat in a large, slightly Victorian drawing room with elegant basket chairs, cushions, other straight-backed chairs, a Persian carpet, wallpaper that did not match the carpet, and a great mahogany piano at which Mr Quabbas’s niece practised her lessons in the middle of the morning. Her name was Alice, young Alice, and rumour had it that she was a distant “great-niece” of Aunt Alice of the daylight supper dancing school. Masters remembered passing one Saturday morning and hearing what seemed to him a passage that young Alice picked from Vivaldi’s La Primavera. She seemed to be echoing a strain of the violin upon the keys of a great cave piano. Mr Quabbas was unmarried, but rumour — a prevailing theme in New Forest society — had it that he adored his young niece and that he paid for her music-masks and music lessons.

She was not around when Masters took his seat in the drawing room within the great dream-cave. The others sat a little stiffly, as if slightly on their guard, under Mr Quabbas’s peculiar, almost saturnine, eye. He spoke to them with that slightly chanting quality of a spy of god who is familiar with every skeleton, every cupboard, of grace. Everything he said carried the resonance of something unsaid. There was a quaint but nonetheless stinging backlash in his jokes and every young man in the cave theatre — whether that cave assumed the proportions of glass or marble or wood or flesh-and-blood or aeroplane — knew he would sooner or later be pierced by Mr Quabbas’s innocent damnations.

This was a very important occasion for the cave theatre and — may I say it — for me. I was — under Masters’ guidance in the realms of the Inferno and Purgatory — to become acquainted with my biological parents for the first time.

It was around four o’clock, the afternoon of 30 August 1932. Mr Quabbas faced the group. His chair was larger than any other in the room in order to accommodate his bulky frame. He was the judge. The drawing room was half-bright. The Venetian blinds were half-drawn. How could the sun so successfully dangle its face from its hand? Was it because it arched across New Forest from Cannon Row Estate where the czar had been killed, through Crocodile Bridge, through the Alms House, through the College buildings and grounds, through the Market-place, and seemed to move upon a wheel or cycle before depositing Thomas’s mask? Thomas was to be put on trial for the assassination of the czar.

Despite the heat of the afternoon, the faintest shudder ran through the masked actors in the room. Each mask was felt both inwardly and outwardly as if one dangled it into oneself with a ghostly dazzling hand. The epidermis of the soul also dazzled in crying to be stroked as primary mask. Stroked by ecstasies, rages, humiliations. The ghostly fingers had skilfully woven a shell to be placed on every person who ran into the cave. It was Quabbas’s design, as he drew us in (the dead, the living, the newborn), to awaken us so peculiarly that the mask of time slipped a little, remained but loosened a little into a sensation of curved face or curved facelessness. And as such face and facelessness became sudden dimensions of soul.

It was the task of Judge Quabbas not only to try Sir Thomas but to choose someone to wear the mask. He glanced rapidly, appeared to be spying through his telescope of soul, from face into face, facelessness into facelessness, loosened shell into loosening mask, and pointed quickly at a young lawyer, Martin Weyl, who sat hidden at the back of the room.

Weyl was around twenty-five and it was clear that the summons to don the mask of Thomas distressed him. There was a murmur of sympathy from the others. The facts were that just over or under six months ago (a month or a day may easily be misread when one converses with one’s guides in Purgatory), Weyl had married “a young lady whom he had gotten into trouble”. She was three months pregnant. It had been a scandal in the small society of New Forest and they were driven to marry by an outraged middle-class establishment. Those were the bald facts — they seemed of little importance in a world in depression, a world of common law wives in the Market-place labouring folk — but they had accumulated into a complex epidermis of the soul upon Weyl’s body, and the birth of the child, compact, male, had accentuated the inner bruise, the inner wound, that the establishment had inflicted. His wife’s labour became his and it left him with a sense of unreality. He had given birth …

The truth was, lawyer Weyl had contracted the prevailing malaise of curved face and curved facelessness, Ambition’s hero, Ambition’s anti-hero, that afflicted New Forest. His friends perceived the birth of his son as the catalyst of the disease. But he knew differently. He knew his distress ran much more curiously. He felt he may have given birth to a pawn. He felt he and his wife Jennifer were pawns. If that were true, would not pawns breed pawns?

It had all started when a plantation society stood at their backs and peered over their shoulders into their private lives, at their shadowy bodies in intercourse. Shadows! Who actually lay with whom? Who had made love to whom? It was almost as if his love for the woman he was forced to marry was immaterial. They must marry; they must marry or else … He had a name to preserve and she was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. Any attempt to live in sin, as the saying goes, any attempt to evade marriage would breed disaster. His briefs would melt away. Clients would vanish. Weyl knew that left to their own devices they would have got married anyway. He knew yet did not know. He had become unsure of everything. Were they pawns, were they really pawns? For if they were, he could be sure of nothing except coercion. To tell themselves that they had not been pressured by business, by convention, since they would have married anyway, in their own time, was cosmetic upon the bruises of an internal body; bruises that evoked in him the sensation of bearing a pawn and giving birth to a pawn. Or if not a pawn— Weyl confided to me — then surely a childof questioning spirit, a child of questioning conscience.

“Which are you likely to be,” he said to me as he rose from his chair to advance to the front of the room, “pawn or child of conscience?” I was their child, his and Jennifer’s. I was born on 2 August 1932. I was scarcely a month old when my father donned the mask of Thomas and the trial took place. In asking me such a question, he leaned upon me for support in the midst of his distress.

Judge Quabbas may have perceived it all. He never lived to write the play or the book he had contemplated, but my guide Masters unearthed the unwritten pages from his grave. He proffered them to me to swallow and consume and to bring forth progeny of mutual spirit.

The trial turned upon the reality of the pawn. Was humanity a pawn of fate, or conditioned responses, of existent or non-existent establishments? How interlinked are fate and freedom within an assembly of overlapping bodies and masks?

My father leaned upon me for support. I was a mere straw of flesh-and-blood. He needed to garner his innermost resources to play Thomas. He needed the wisp of the newborn as innately relevant to bruised insides, bruised psyche, bruised labour. In giving birth to me within the cave of bruised humanity, he (as pawn of circumstance) was subtly undergoing a translation of conscience. Though it was very painful at the time it was an initiation into a task that lay ahead of him in his short, controversial but brilliant career.

“Turn my bruise around and around,” he said to Judge Quabbas. “Turn my insides out. Yes, do. Such is the spirit of the cave. I stand between the murdered czar of Carnival and Thomas. I wear both embalmed masks. I slip from one to the other. The wound I bear is self-inflicted. I cannot be sure where I truly belong — with the vested interests that put bread in my mouth and force my hand or with the misery of freedom, the desire for freedom I suffer acutely. Thus is my child born, the czar’s child as well, Thomas’s child as well. Hideous pawn to suffer the self-inflicted wounds we suffer or conscience, conscience, the innermost creativity of conscience, within the labyrinth of the future.”

The trial of Thomas was to overshadow my father’s life and the remaining days of Judge Quabbas’s life. It was to give a luminous quality to the “savage heart” as the ingrained faculty within the cave of character-masks, the apparently embalmed “savage heart” yet alive and a peculiarly self-reversible organ of love, organ of feud, heart into heart, love into feud, feud into love.

My father was to suffer the stroke of the wheel through which Thomas had leapt at the Carnival czar. It would happen in seven years, Masters said to me, when he defended a prince of El Dorado and confronted that “savage heart” as feud, divine feud, to be tested and borne and analysed by an endangered civilization if that civilization were not to succumb to violence but to fertilize the new womb of an age through paradox, through transfigured wounds.

Mr Quabbas was to suffer the knife of love as a most tender, a most appropriate judgement by that “savage heart” in its unravelling of the limbs of love, unattainable love to be spied upon, enjoyed, even at the end of life, in one’s last moments on earth.

Death by the “savage heart” came to my father as a young man (I was seven years old at the time), but it fell almost immediately upon Judge Quabbas as he emerged from the twilight of the cave on to the night of the tennis court where I was led by Masters. A week had passed since the inception of the trial of the character-mask of Thomas. Masters had spent some time in the library, everyone else had gone home, and he decided to leave the College by a short cut through the tennis court. It was around seven-thirty. The watchman was having his evening supper in the lodge at the main entrance. Masters made his way from the library down to a covered pathway linking the main hall to the gymnasium and then he turned into a path leading to the tennis court.

I followed him through the dark. The lights of the building shone at our back. Suddenly a glare through the trees from the court addressed us and we knew a game was in progress. The grass lawn came into view. The lights at the edge of the court played not upon tennis performers but upon Alice, Mr Quabbas’s niece, who was practising the high jump. She thought she was alone. She had switched on the lights and set up the frame and bar. She jumped, ran around in a circle, paused, ran forward and jumped effortlessly again. She rested for a few seconds and raised the bar once more.

I was enchanted by the quality of action. She leapt into the air with the magic of dream. A curious psychical music animated her limbs, her arms, her entire body. It was the dance of sublimity. She knew, or felt she was alone, and this knowledge — the secure knowledge of playing to no audience at all — did not incapacitate her. Rather it gave her the rhythm of inner and outer, unforced spaces, a supernaturally visible heart and invisible psyche and lung, mysterious concretion of blood.

She was veiled, her blood was veiled and unseen, yet innocently nude flash of grace, sacramental body of grace, with each sublime gesture of flying, leaping spirit. It was as if Masters beheld the entire memorial of embalmed god or goddess utterly reversed. It was as if I beheld a miracle. Excavated, flying body was alive in the girl. The knife of music penetrated to heart, lung, and to every entity and cell within her; it drew every luminous organ from within her and cast an unselfconscious, vital garment over the spirit of a body to imbue it with a fullness of joy we had never seen before. Was this a vision of paradise?

We were confused but liberated. The knife! We pondered the sharpness of unsleeping music in space that one hears with an ear and a sense other than given ear or sense. Was it (that sharp music cutting into, yet knitting, a veil) the first Thomasian stroke of a death sentence upon Judge Quabbas enunciated through the “savage heart” of love in half-sleeping, half-leaping Alice?

Masters lodged himself deeply, flattened himself unobtrusively, into the tree against which he stood in order not only to view the high jump goddess but also to avoid being seen by another presence with eyes glued upon Alice. That other presence was Judge Quabbas himself. He had secured himself in a bush. The leaves and the play of light hid him from her as within a mask but we could see him dream-distinctly, however darkly. The judge was so transported, so intent on the knife that cut into her, as well as into him, that he was unaware of the other standing but a few feet from him lodged in a tree, or uncut wood, resembling the tree or the uncut wood of unwritten epitaph, unopened grave that was already yawning at his feet.

Young, dancing, leaping, immortal Alice! Had the ancient Magna Carta crone, Aunt Alice Bartleby of the Alms House, once looked like this? Had she danced like this long, long ago before she tripped for her daylight supper?

Masters realized that the tree against his back was seventy-five or eighty years old. Perhaps more. It was silk cotton. It would have been a mere seed in the ground when Aunt Alice was born.

Judge Quabbas’s mask of bush grew from a cherry tree scarcely forty years old. That would have been a mere seed in the ground when the marble/market woman of Cannon Row Estate was born. How old would Jane Fisher of New Forest have been then? She was the marble woman’s East Indian daughter who married a jealous fisherman. He played Carnival in the mask of Thomas, the revolutionary saint. He did so in order to kill the Carnival czar or the czar’s elusive, superior Everyman Masters in whose character-mask an overseer damned his wife and left her with child. As for Jane Fisher the Second of London — she had not yet been born and lay in the seed-mask of the future.

As for immortal Alice, she remained blissfully unconscious of the eyes of her uncle and of the budding prince of the estate upon her. The judge, her uncle, was in love with her but she did not know it; and the young prince, the judge’s pupil, possessed a rumbling intimation — as he watched her dance — of generations that haunt us, as we haunt them, from the past and the future, and of the older man’s controlled ecstasy and passion, a rumbling intimation as well of fiery seed, fiery self-knowledge, arching through jealousies, feuds, complicated loves, in Thomas’s Carnival attachment to the marble woman when he seized the knife with his own hand — as with the hand of others — to prove blood and kill the czar of New Forest.

Judge Quabbas was no czar. He was a master of high Antipodean conscience, and the bar that Alice jumped with ravishing simplicity could easily have been a sword that divided them in bed. She was untouchable, chaste. She was a constellation, the blessed Alice. He was childless. He had never married. He clothed her in the music of the stars, remote stars matched sometimes nevertheless by the wit of hell in the lighted coal of crocodile ages under the Crocodile Bridge. Inevitably the blaze of such light-year distances turned glacial and cold; it began to stab him in the legs, in the chest, in the arms — even as Alice sprang to heaven, a naked spirit on the lawn in his darkening gaze. That his attachment to her, the attachment of a middle-aged dying man, diabetic and prone to illness, was in reversible likeness to the crusading love of young Thomas for a woman of forty with whom he collided through fate or folly, remained hidden from him in the depths of the mutual seed of the Carnival mask.

Hidden from him, but it constituted perhaps a major self-reversible element in all revolutions. How to link chaste love for the young by the passionate, eager, middle-aged or old to proof that heaven exists, that wrongs may be righted, in the savage heart of the young who may, more legitimately perhaps, defend all ages and make love, profane or sacred, to all ages. Had Thomas — within a year or two of puberty — defended the marble woman and slept with her to guard her from dragons, the affair might have become the premise of Carnival legend or romance. Had Quabbas slept with young Alice, it would have outraged all propriety. And yet in the revolutions of heaven, in the slow transvaluation of hunter and hunted, masked hunter, masked huntress; masked hunted, a link existed — the seed of a new twentieth-century constellation — that bound middle-aged Quabbas to the young, angry, jealous crusader Thomas. It was profoundest desire for chastity despite malformed “savage heart” and emotional constriction of jealous desire, jealous love, profoundest desire to love rather than to be adored by the beloved, profoundest desire to give, to save, and receive nothing in return.

I was startled, nonplussed, and I cried to Masters, “What is chastity? I have never seen chastity in such a light.”

“Chastity gives rather than receives. It is, contrary to expectation, not a matter of purity, pure spirit, pure nature, but of impure spirit so overwhelmingly lovely that it marries nature or guides nature, a mixture of spirit and nature in other words, a descent of spirit into nature. And thus it is less likely to loom in all its essential mystery between the young and the young, who may mindlessly consume each other, or the old and the old, who may mindlessly loathe each other, but between the young and the old, the old and the young, who come to care profoundly for each other, and in crossing the barriers of mindless consumption and mindless loathing — in shedding mindless consumption and mindless loathing — to gain access to some measure of heavenly love.

“I know it’s difficult to understand. I could not be your guide if I had not descended into the hell of the senses. And the danger remains, of course, that the old may relapse into seducing the young, the young may turn and abuse the old. I know it all. I tell you I have suffered it all. There are risks everywhere. Even heaven is a stage of risk.”

I glanced at Quabbas. The glacial stab cut into him again but he had heard, he understood. He had heard his pupil’s voice transfigured, translated, in his own body. Alice leapt from one realm into another. The knife of her being flared within the seed of the air, the seed in his body. It was a knife, it was a dance. It reopened parallel lives, dressed or masked in music, in liturgy, in the Market-place, Carnival dance and song.

It was the knife of profoundest ecstasy, startling self-knowledge. It was the seed of Carnival that hides us from ourselves, yet reveals us to ourselves. It was a knife that lay between him and Alice, between him and Thomas, between him and Masters.

He sought to hold himself up, to resist the pain. He felt himself melting into the ground, dissolving backwards. But he fell forwards instead on to the lawn. He lay curled like a ball that had been sliced but would bounce high when no one saw it.

*

The death of Judge Quabbas was a climactic moment or guideline into space. I was reminded of it by Masters in the year 1957 when we sailed to Europe. It was autumn. He had been hospitalized for several weeks before he was fit to travel. The shock of his “first death” had been, needless to say, a blow but it revived his memories of Quabbas and of diverse proportions of Carnival that enlisted him now in complicated Carnival of time, past, present and future. Indeed that journey in 1957 was both real and unreal, unreal fact, inimitable fiction. I returned to it — to the ship on which we sailed — in my discourse with the dead king in 1982/83 when he stood at my elbow as I wrote of him, and guided me into seemingly impossible realms.

He resigned from the plantation kingdom of New Forest and abandoned his rights to a static saddle in a corrupt colony. The “death” he had received evolved into “seed” and the judgement that had been exercised upon him by Jane Fisher the First, who mistook him for another overseer and invited him to sleep with her in order to join hands with her husband and kill him, set in train a body of reversible legend, reversible shadow and mutual configuration of the judgement of the age to which we belonged. It set in train the most thoroughgoing analysis of hallucinated layers of being in himself, the most profound inquiry of which he was inwardly capable into everything he had seemed to be, everything he had aped, had done, his apprenticeship, the College he had attended, his parentage cosmic and otherwise, the childhood games he had played with unfamiliar and familiar cousins in a hardhearted yet promiscuous society, the antics of Carnival, the heart of El Dorado, the cross-personal/cross-cultural relationships that he had tended to brush aside as adventitious or hollow myth.

For example, he confessed to me that he had been secretly watching Alice practising the high jump on the tennis court when her uncle (also a secret watcher) collapsed with a heart attack, but it had signified nothing to him in depth, in complex depth, when it happened; it was to take his own “first death” to bring the event back into uncanny focus; it had been a shock, yes, the moment it happened, a realistic shock, but it went no deeper, it did not immediately descend beneath the surfaces of realism into complex reality. Alice had screamed. He had burst forth like a sprinter on to the lawn. The watchman in the lodge at the main gate to the College had been summoned. Mr Quabbas was dead. That was not the end. Within a day or two or three of the funeral, unpleasant rumours about Quabbas and his niece began to circulate, unpleasant rumours also about some of the daring young men that Quabbas cultivated in the guild.

Those rumours were not easily quashed. Everyone knew they were false, and yet everyone persisted in broadcasting a series of lies and diseased fable. The truth was that when a society senses a shape to events that destabilize “example”, it sniggers behind its mask, it becomes uncomfortable, it shrinks from reality. It even encourages fashionable cults of political violence that become the stuff of new heroic example, especially when such cults may be embalmed to resemble innocence or gentleness or courage. Young Alice (the spirit of gentleness) and young Thomas (the spirit of daring) were not immune from conscription into a conspiracy to befoul poor Quabbas’s name. Masters recalled someone sniggering behind his Carnival mask and saying that the Guild Cave theatre was a cover-up for Quabbas’s so-called “latent homosexuality” or “latent bisexuality” in his attachment not only to gentle Alice but to Masters’ sacred cousin or to someone who resembled “sacred rebels” or their cousins. It was all symptomatic, alas, of diseased mask, diseased gossip, that function to preserve the status quo and to suppress the challenge of disturbing inner truth that transcends circumstantial appearance.

“Judge Quabbas’s death and its aftermath,” my guide said to me in the labyrinth of dream that redresses the past in the present in the future, “illumine the genesis of social cults of violence that feed on sex as diseased territory within which the exploitation of sweetness and light, innocence and daring, become commonplace. Yes, commonplace. For within such commonplace all are in chains, all are in gaol. Nothing can change. We must — I beg of you Weyl— put such commonplace into profound reverse if we are to run through the erection of hollow ideal, hollow example, that imprisons us.”

He waved his hand as if to greet the ocean on which we sailed in 1957. Three or four days off Limbo (or was it Lisbon on the map of dream?) a storm began to brew. Masters said to me as the lightning flashed, “You know, Weyl, Quabbas’s death should be a leap in your book from the Inferno into Purgatory and into, may I say it, paradise.” Was he joking, was he mocking me? I was astonished at such optimism in the light of the sorry and unhealthy state of mind that he himself had deplored in his reminiscences of Quabbas’s befouled name. We descended the stairway into a saloon. Masters ordered a drink. The severity of the wound he had received had in no way diminished his cast-iron stomach and its immunity to fiery drink.

“It’s time, Masters‚” I said, “it’s time I confess something to you.” His face darkened as if he anticipated the coming storm.

“Go on, Weyl, go on.”

“Perhaps it’s nothing but …” I stopped. He ordered another drink and waved at me impatiently. The saloon seemed curiously dark, curiously veiled, but imbued with the oddest luminosity as if a bell at the heart of the storm rang with muffled light rather than sound. Masters waved his hand and for a moment the body of the ship turned to glass, womb of glass, flesh of glass, and I dreamt I saw Christ walking on the sea through the side of the ship. I plucked up the courage to speak.

“You speak of hollow example,” I said, “and of exploiting sweetness and light …”

“Yes,” he said, “go on, my dear Weyl.”

“Well then,” I said, “let me confess. I am troubled by guilt that I may unwittingly exploit sacred figures and turn them into romantic concretions of violence. I know there is a distinction between hollow ideal and disturbing truth, and you speak of the necessity for reversibles or reverses within the hollow ideal. I am not sure I understand fully. Take Thomas. He is a sacred figure, a disciple of Christ.” I was staring through the body of the ship into the coming storm. “His hand is upon Christ’s wounds. His hand is also that of the revolutionary who stabs the Carnival czar, the Carnival representative of Christ. An inferior Christ, no doubt — there am I speaking of doubt … It was involuntary. Perhaps such a vision of Thomas, Doubting Thomas, with dual hands, is pertinent to a colonial age lacking in genuine revolutionary hope and deceived by all sorts of fallacies and ideologies. And yet I wonder whether Thomas the disciple can carry the burden of such extreme paraphrase?”

I felt as uneasy and perturbed and crest-fallen as Masters sometimes was. The ship flashed again and I saw through its glass sides, through glass flesh-and-blood, through marble flesh-and-blood, into the rising waves upon which Christ walked as if he understood my guilt, my awkward confession, as if he knew me, as if he forgave me. Masters seemed blind to all this yet he was my guide into space. He looked at me with his sunken blind eyes, pregnant with the mystery of the womb and the grave. “It’s the price you must pay, my dear Weyl,” he said at last, “to reverse non-vision into vision, the blind ornament into the seeing vision.”

He paused; his blind eyes seemed to burn. He continued, “To put into reverse the obsolescence of institutions, the obsolescence of dead languages, that accumulate upon the sacred and clothe it with false clarities.” He paused again as if he heard, even as I saw, the rising waves. “A reversible fiction,” he said softly as if he spoke to himself, “unsettles false clarities … reopens the profoundest human involvements and perspectives to illumine a truth.”

“What is that truth?” I demanded.

“Violence is not the corner-stone of a civilization.”

“But, but,” I began to protest.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Violence seems irreversible in a desperate age where alternatives are fearsome and we appear to have no option but the lesser of two evils. But that is why we need a dual hand,” his voice choked a little then cleared, “a dual hand within an irreversible function to yield an edge, if nothing more, a subversive edge, that turns into the terror of pity, the terror of beauty, the terror of gentleness, to ravage our minds and purge us through violence of violence.”

The storm hit the vessel at last. The glass sides of the ship darkened and it was as if I saw it now, I saw the sea, in Masters’ eyes. The sea was black and white fire ran along the ridges and valleys of space. I held to my dream-support for bleak life and yet this was my leap into Purgatory all over again, purgation through the terror of beauty.

I saw through his eyes into a mystery in which hills tumbled and the plates of the sea-bed arose. The storm clung to pupils of devastation everywhere and nowhere. I looked into the ghost of chaos as into a raging, human cosmos. And a shuddering response to the intensity of limits suddenly seized me. The dead king’s eyes were those of a conquering hero secreting everlasting peril. Everlasting peril? I questioned his gaze and the blind/seeing pupils flashed. “Our conquering heroes are crystal balls in reverse. You shake them and raise a cloud of particles, a cloud of finite scale to hubris, the hubris of infinity.”

The sea, the storm, had been staggeringly miniaturized in the dead king’s sight; it had been converted into the terror of beauty. If he had walked on the sea at that moment I would have followed. For I would have been reduced to a pupil jumping from trough to crest, weightless eye, weightless pupil. The eye of beauty and terror bottles a head of emotion yet floats above fear upon astonishing elements.

The eye of the terror of pity, the terror of gentleness, walked with me on water, slipped, ran into a cave, emerged, half-capsized bottled head, righted itself, walked with me again on the wave above the majesty of storm. Blind eye that had been uplifted, reversed into visionary gravity’s anti-gravity, visionary violence’s non-violence‚ storm’s peace.

There was terror still within storm’s peace in the depths of the visionary sea beneath me. I walked to the edge of beauty, the edge of finite/infinite desolation. I held that edge and prayed. I offered it, I offered that edge to Christ. It was a gift, my gift to Christ who would ultimately save me by building on my premise of human, fallible generosity.

I walked in Purgatory upon water’s sparked fire. The vessel rode the sky, walked. I clung, prayed, walked again with Purgatory’s matchbox ship, Purgatory’s rocket to the stars. It was the dawn of the space age wreathed in fiercest element. I walked to the edge of gravity.

“Purgatory is all,” said the dead king. “Purgatory is endless.”

“And what about heaven?” I asked.

“Heaven requires your gift, your gift of originality. It is but a straw but god will cherish it in the midst of the storm.”

SIX

The storm abated, the seas grew calm. I dreamt I was led back by Everyman Masters to the edge of my seventh year. It was 1939, the place was East Street to which my parents, Martin and Jennifer Weyl, had moved. We occupied the house in which the Masters family had lived in the 1920s. They had moved into a two-storeyed mansion next door. I was seven, Masters was twenty-two; Martin, my father, was thirty-two and Jennifer, my mother, was thirty-three.

My birth in 1932 had been a catalyst of change for the Weyls who had been forced to marry — you may recall, gentle reader — when Jennifer was three months pregnant. My arrival had invoked a stimulus to sharpen Martin’s perception of pawns of fate. It also invoked a post-natal crisis in Jennifer that lingered on and turned into bouts of ecstasy, bouts of depression, over the years. My mother and father moved to the edge of themselves; they were cast down yet peculiarly, devastatingly reborn, when I arrived. They miniaturized two proportions of dread in themselves — even in miniature such edges or proportions are formidable — when I came.

Jennifer dreamt she gave birth to me when she was three months pregnant, three aeons pregnant. I leapt into her arms from the future fully formed. I leapt across the time-lapse of nine months gestation, as if gestations, ages, were edges in eternity. It was a dream that plagued her. My father embraced her tenderly, he sought to console her. But with the passage of time — as her bouts of depression intensified — he could not resist the feeling that he and I (he as her husband, I as her son) were responsible for her ecstasies and alarms. I saw it all through Masters’ blind/seeing eyes. I saw my father anew. He was intent on unravelling a cosmic seed of law, a cosmic reversal of suffering from those who suffer to those who blandly witness suffering, a cosmic reversal of judgement from those who are judged to those who judge, from those who are accused to those who counsel. That was his proportion of dread, that he would suffer at the edge of the law (the birth of the law) as she had suffered, in her proportion of dread, at the edge of the future (the birth of the future).

I saw my mother anew. I saw her awakening to a maternal value of dread that she never knew she possessed towards the stranger at the gate. I saw myself as the stranger. And I was imbued with some measure of her charisma that I would never forget. She loved me, she cared for me, but somewhere within body and mind, there was an obsessional edge or gate that witnessed to my arrival backwards from the future and out of the deeps, out of the storm, of life. I had come to her with a knife in my hand. It was a novel post-natal depression. Novel ecstasy. Novel terror of pity, terror of gentleness (my mother was the gentlest of creatures) in the log-book of Mother Blood, Mother Flesh, Mother Spirit, overshadowing the vessel of the soul.

Mixed families were native to New Forest. The terms “black” or “white” or “coloured” were indeterminate and mutual in privileged or biased or acceptable tone. One saw what one dreaded or wished to see. My mother was fair, perhaps white; my father was coloured; and I was of indeterminate origin or pigmentation. A cloud arose at the heart of the sun in April to drape all savage pigmentation. My father had been appointed defence counsel for a red Amerindian male from the deep New Forest, South American interior. It was the trial of a lifetime, the trial of the family. The Amerindian spoke no English and the matter was complicated by interpreters, kith and kin, who were not altogether at home in the English tongue or in the Amerindian’s tongue.

The charge was matricide. It was a ritual killing. The red man — as a prince descended from El Dorado — was commanded by Kanaima, the “savage heart” of the family, to kill his mother. She was sick and in great pain. It was cancer. “Release her from torment. Purge the people, purge the language of the heart,” Kanaima said. “Give her body and her breasts to the sun.” I was deceived by Masters’ deaf ears, blind eyes, as proportions of divine irony as much as dread, in his guidance of me through the trauma of the law. I thought I heard SON — “give her breasts to the son” — rather than “to the sun”.

What does one hear, what does one see, at the edged proportions of the past and the future, when the quest for redemption from violence arouses the profoundest self-questioning, profoundest honesty, profoundest self-judgement, self-confession, within a family of pigmented soul, pigmented bone?

It was a luminous red ball of a sun when the mother was slain by the child. Queen Jennifer stepped out of a shower, out of a waterfall, out of an ocean, into the bedroom. I was lying half-asleep, half-awake, on her bed. She handcuffed me to her body as to the mast of a ship. My father came on to the deck and touched her lightly. “You’re the loveliest creature on earth Jennifer,” he said. Indeed lightning had struck, had congealed. She was beautiful. She turned to him and to me and she smiled.

“Smile if you like but it’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“You, you’re true.” The tone of his voice changed. “I’ve had the devil of a day defending my poor devil of a son in court. He’s killing you, you know. Look how you spoil him.”

Lightning softened. The congealed lightning mast softened. Queen Jennifer had sailed to the bed and I lay against her. The wonderful canvas of her body seemed to crumple a little, to trail a little into a towel across her legs with edges pointing to the floor.

“What translucency!” he murmured. “Translucent blood. Sheer marvel. It’s the light you know. Twilight gives a luminous halo, a luminous inner paint to your breasts. Madonna ship.” He added almost ominously, “It’s the way the sun invests itself with a brush and a knife to slice into flesh.”

I started. I freed my hands. They were red.

“It would be different at cloudless noon‚” my father continued, pacing the floor and the deck. He stared at me pointedly. “The sun’s rays are vertical then.” He stared at my mother’s breasts. “Each slice of sailing naked body turns opaque at cloudless noon, opaque wedding to light, opaque funeral of blood. Pallid, slightly shut-in.”

I felt I was beginning to glimpse what my father was saying to me across the difficult years. The dread, the irony, of the holy family of mankind to which someone as unholy, as pagan, as I belonged! That was a crude translation, I knew, but it helped. Were there not proportions of dread, proportions of unsuspected truth, unsuspected beauty, residing everywhere in our most intimate guilts, intimate memories, intimate fallacies, intimate dreams, intimate selves?

“I look as I feel then,” said Jennifer quietly, so quietly I alone heard what she was saying. She felt pallid, shut-in, but amenable to sailing in space again through waterfall or ocean when the lightning-knife I invested in the sun struck and she congealed. I knew her pain. I knew I had wakened her to the cancer of ecstasy and depression from the day I was born. I knew that every canvas of the holy family of mankind invested in human, ailing, shut-in skins and bodies that a painter or a daemonic child slices anew into brilliant conversions of the womb of space. Each slice becomes an indictment of assumptions that clothe our eyes, assumptions of hopelessness, of loss, of absolute peril, absolute evil, absolute bias. What are the roots of the holy family of mankind save that the roots of hope lie through hopelessness that is sliced, transfigured, sliced and sliced again and again?

I knew her pain. I also knew my father’s joy and sorrow in addressing me through my guide Masters. I knew the faintest bridge, the faintest curvature or shoreline, glimmering in the depths of terror, the faintest potential for coniunctio or true marriage between Masters — the dead king — and the slain Amerindian queen, slain in themselves and in their surrogates and substitutes yet each requiring the conversion of the red ball of the sun upon civilization’s canvas. Did not young Alice slay her uncle Quabbas and give him light? Alice had been blissfully unconscious of the deed whereas I … How unconscious/conscious was I of killing my mother from the day I was born? My hands were red in the dying sun.

“Shut-in, a little opaque,” my father said, “whereas a black skin …”

“What about a black skin?” Jennifer asked.

“Well a black skin thrives under the straight noonday sun. It opens like a flower.”

“And at twilight?”

“It looks pallid then. Pallid as you look at noon. Black pools into pallid jam session shadow when twilight falls. White pools into shut-in cave when noon strikes.”

When noon strikes, when noon strikes … I stared at my hands. “So you see,” my father said, “there is a marriage of opposites in the family of the sun.”

*

When the trial was at its height Masters turned his blind/seeing eyes deep into New Forest and to the birthplace of the red king. I felt I was seeking myself as much as the doomed Amerindian who had been charged with matricide. Seeking myself in a labyrinth of rivers that fell from Waterfall Oracle. It was a journey into apparent desolations. The river of New Forest was unusually dry. It lay at the bottom of an ocean I had seen with the bouncing pupil of an eye from the crest of a wave — an ocean we had crossed or were still to cross. A long series of rapids, with intervening spaces and calms, lay before us. Insects descended at night like a plague. As day followed day, night night, Masters was subtly aware of the dream arch of the river beneath the ocean. It was as if he and his nebulous boat crew slid along the curvature of a feather that flew beneath my bouncing eye on its wave. No prospect of sliding from the duck’s back, the duck’s smooth feather, for a long time to come in the slow motion rain of the river. It took ages, it seemed, to drive the boat across a spine or a ridge or to haul it around a portage that lay equally at the bottom of the sea and in the sky. We made our way by infinitesimal degrees within the exposed rocks and naked sand banks of the drought-river.

The wide expanse of the feather cultivated an oceanic illusion as if one were descending in absurdity of flight into pools of sky that shone here and there, pools that were brittle oases in a desert of sand and rock. The ocean’s Carnival feather masked desert. Each rock masked the arid spine of flight tilted in space against a shimmering background of torment.

At night the curvature of the feather-wheel was subtlest yet paradoxically most pronounced. For then the duck’s apparently smooth, apparently oiled machine shed its rain of space like dry oceanic stars that clustered at the tip of our drowned nose and caused our bouncing eye to descend and concentrate upon a luminous fly with silver legs. I had sliced my mother the day I was born but now it was as if I had been sliced by inimitable guilt, inimitable passion, to give birth to a new curvature of time in space; as if we had been sliced — the entire boat crew — as we journeyed into Purgatory.

The tip of one’s nose! Was the tip of a fly on the tip of one’s nose the genesis of Waterfall Oracle?

Seers and saints had listened to the music of a silver fly on the tips of their noses. Each tip became a sensible organ, an ear beneath but in front of their eyes.

We listened with our slain noses to the music of chaos. PRICK. BULLET. Prick of a feather. Twinkling ear, twinkling nose. BULLET. PRICK. A member of the crew lay beside me. Sound asleep. Feigning life. Dead. In the flickering lamp I had lit I perceived another star or fly on his brow. It moved by degrees of which he was unconscious. The prick of a fly! Atrocity of a fly! Fly’s eye carcass! What did a fly see? Did a fly perceive an entire boat as it crawled on a dead man’s lips? Did a fly perceive an entire universe spiralling in space in a parcel of stars like silver blood on a dead man’s face?

After a hard day on the drought-river we slept like the Carnival dead on many a battlefield. New Forest ancient battlefield. African battlefield. Central American battlefield. Beirut battlefield. Belfast battlefield. We slept like a bandsman, a bombed horseman, in St James Park. We slept like a child, or an old man, half-aroused by the prick of a star, the silver legs of a fly. The atrocity of a fly illumined my open eyes; it made me susceptible to blindness in others, it made me susceptible to non-feeling, it made me susceptible to the grain of stone in flesh-and-blood, it imbued every fraction that it traversed with the curvature of genesis susceptible to desolations, the genesis of a cycle that knows its intractable material.

We had been lucky to secure a passage into the interior at this time of the year. Fortunately an ageing anthropologist and his family, his wife and his seven-year-old daughter, were making the trip with a small party of researchers, and Masters was received like an honoured guest. I was dimly recognized as coming from the future into the past in search of myself. No one knew (with the exception of Masters — who was my guide — and the child Amaryllis who was destined, like myself, to return to the land of the living from a dream of Purgatory) that they were dead. They swore they were still alive. They swore they were still proceeding on a journey they had once made or within activities they had once performed.

A sensitivity upon calloused form — god’s fly, god’s prick — that I had never perceived before created a minute constellation, a minute star, within the blaze of the sun. I was aroused to face the edge of that minute prick of visionary light within the blind wheel of dawn. It was a feather that tickled a bruised nerve back to life in my slain companions, though they remained unconscious of it. Masters awoke. His blind/seeing eye mirrored my lucid dream, lucid fly.

With dawn the lucid fly withdrew to heaven but left its disturbing light deposit upon the surface of the river. It was a light, an awakening, that differed from every other awakening that Masters had known. Light was imbued with a sensitivity that seemed to promote an aching sadness in silver and gold rays of the sun. That ache, that subtle pain, was a novel and incalculable experience. It put into reverse all models of sensation I had known. These had been adorned by flags of feeling whereas this aching light behind my brow arose from a genuine perception of non-feeling in me and others that had been illumined by the atrocity of a fly upon a dead man’s eyeballs.

“Why lie to myself when I am dead?” Masters was half-joking, I knew. He turned and stared at me from the duck’s back on which he sat, duck’s feather as wide as the river of the sky but retaining the point of a quill he placed in my hand.

“The truth is,” he said, “dip into me for the obsolescence of blood. I’m frozen. My planetary script is frozen. But‚” he hastened to add, “it’s a realistic advantage like witchcraft in this benighted corner of a foreign river, foreign ocean of space. Look how strong I am. Frozen blood gives me a stalwart frame. Look! Amaryllis is ill. But I lift her in my arms. She’s sad and that makes the universe all the heavier. Where would I be — how would I cope — without frozen blood to boost my flesh and strengthen my bones?

“Long, long ago on the Arawak foreshore I saw the eye of a fish mirror the light years. Now it’s the eye of a fly that winds its net into the abnormal repose of this child! I may have seen miracles in my time but have been blind to such abnormality upon a child’s fragile body. Take her. Love her. Your future bride of freedom and fate. I promise you she will unfreeze. She will return with you. She will help you through difficult times. She will be your guide in the future when I am gone. Wait and see. I will restore her to life. The others will die again and again and not know they are dead.”

He seemed so terribly upset I felt I should say something. “Why blind?” I asked. “Why did you say you were blind?”

“I was blind to our companions the first afternoon we set out,” Masters confessed. “And it was not until last nightfall and this strange sunrise that my eye pricked, and I saw how little of abnormality I had ever seen, how little of the abnormal world in which I lived I had ever truly felt. She is your future wife … remember my words.”

“But why?” I asked again, unable to think of anything else to say.

He gave a slight shrug like the ripple of cloth upon the abnormal psyche of stone that possessed him. A slight wind blew in the wake of sunrise upon the abnormal river of El Dorado.

“Not so astonishing,” he said, “when one thinks soberly upon things. We’re all in the same boat, Weyl. Aren’t we — it’s a popular enough cliché — on the same burning ship of the globe?

“But how much do we feel, can we feel, are we really able to feel of the abnormality of peace in a century of war, the abnormality of food in a century of hunger? We think we know repose but do we know the sudden repose of a dead child like this in a bombed house? She will return. She will live. Take her, love her, my dear Weyl, when the time comes.”

He paused but I felt myself unable to speak. I was staggered.

“I say at last quite brutally, quite honestly, my dear Weyl, that I have established defences against abnormality, my own abnormality to which I am largely blind, and the abnormal and sudden repose of others. I have subsisted on noise — noise is normal, the noise of traffic, aeroplanes, everything — I have listened to the noises of television and radio, the noise of canned gunfire, incessant chatter; but the stillness that follows an explosion, the lightning stillness, the bizarre reverie, the bizarre visualization of the flight of the soul from sudden stilled monument, still body — that I have run from until now.

“Confess to it all, my dear Weyl, and in so doing, let your abnormality become a paradox, a moral vision of insensible power, insensible strength. Let abnormality mirror itself in abnormality to see through itself, let your abnormality match or subtly inflame Amaryllis’s, so that you see each other’s fragility. Then you will sustain her, she will sustain you. Such sustenance is the soul of love, love’s shelter at the edge of abnormality that is perceived, confessed to, and therefore subtly transfigured within the fiction of the self.”

As he spoke he struck a sudden match and I watched its reflection flare in Amaryllis’s eyes — as if this were the first impulse to restore her to life — the impulse of a human dawn within the glare of the sun that had increased in the stream of the drought-river at our feet.

Masters settled my future wife in the boat. We had scarcely set out when there was the sound of a shot and her father, the anthropologist, fell dead at our feet. No one knew. No one saw the hole in his temple. No one remembered the clash with an Amerindian tribe, the people of the red prince, and their anger at events in New Forest. No one saw the slice of the bullet save a faintly aroused Amaryllis and blind/seeing Masters and me (also faintly aroused from contagious abnormality).

It was as if Amaryllis accepted the guilt for her father’s death (as I had accepted myself as my mother’s slayer) and slid her fingers in his dishevelled temple. She saw him now in several lights within the flare of Masters’ match in the kingdom of the dead.

The first light disclosed him as abnormally alive though dead. That was how the rest of the crew saw him. She herself saw him faintly aroused, alive beyond the abnormal cloak he wore in the others’ blind sight, a live thread of mind in her sight, a thread that pricked her fingers like a needle and wound its way into the anthropology of the pagan soul. She also saw him faintly, very faintly, in a deeper, farther, stitched dimension of soul, a thread of spirit this time (rather than mind), true spirit, true life. That farther vision of spirit faded and the match that Masters had lit into a needle pricking aroused flesh settled upon the prospect of “mind” the prospect of investigative research her father had pursued into the “pagan soul” (as he used to put it in his lifetime). In settling upon “mind” the match endowed his investigative research with new life, it imbued the dead man with a mental life beyond the apprehension of those in the boat who were conditioned by a repetitive cycle of deeds that seemed absolute, a repetitive cycle of violence that seemed immortal regime.

She (Amaryllis), in slicing her ailing father’s leaves of brain (as I had sliced my mother’s body and breasts) — in slicing them with a match, stitching them with a divine needle — subsumed the bullet he had received (as the writer’s quill, the painter’s knife and brush, subsume the savage light of the sun) and drew forth a number of volumes that her father had written on earth and which he began to busy himself with all over again, to rewrite, to revise now, in Purgatory.

Such volumes were a deed, the deed of the anthropologist’s mental life and — however illusory they were — they foreshadowed the life of spirit, true spirit, he had not yet achieved though Amaryllis had glimmeringly perceived it as his goal in a foreseeable but distant age when he would truly come alive past all abnormality of mind that is oblivious of spirit as the well-fed are oblivious of the starving.

One such volume I saw was entitled, in letters of subtle fire, Purgatory’s Who’s Who.

I was aware all at once of the shelter Amaryllis and I occupied in an abnormal world that is oblivious of spirit. We were both seven years old in 1939 when Masters made his trip into the interior of New Forest, a trip he was to recover or to retrace as our guide in 1982 after his death in London. That Amaryllis and I were susceptible to his guidance, his shelter, in our lucid dream of Purgatory — where I met her for the first time, she me, before we returned to the land of the living on Earth — was witness to the abnormality of childhood cultures I shared with her and which Masters began to puncture or complexly redress.

Childhood has always been an abnormal condition within the mind of the adult who has grown oblivious of pagan labour, pagan womb from which civilization comes. Purgatory made no bones about this I discovered. One of the aberrations of the pagan soul, the pagan womb from which we all derive, was Purgatory Cinema in which flashed child labour across the centuries, across the ages, in the field, in the home, in the temple, in the factory, everywhere, womb of the field, womb of the factory.

Great admirals aged ten sailed in Purgatory Cinema beneath my bouncing eye. (I lodged a protest and was told that though they were not formally great at ten their nuclear apprenticeship began even earlier and this was to lift them upon columns of state in great squares and in great cities). Housewives attired themselves in the garments of children in Purgatory Cinema. They toddled around looking after tyranical elders. Another instance of the nuclear state, the nuclear household.

“Yes,” said Masters, “childhood is always abnormal when the child becomes an adult overnight. We seem more humane, more civilized (whatever that means) in our treatment of children in the twentieth century. Perhaps we are. Provided we see that the difference between ourselves and the Infernos of the past may lie in the subtle arousal of the twentieth-century child to the edges of abnormal existence upon which it stands or within which it shelters.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, glancing at my reflection and Amaryllis’s in the mirror of the water where Masters had lit another match.

“I mean,” said Masters glancing at us, at our red hands, red with our parents’ blood in the mirror he had lit, “that a child can tyrannize its parents, kill them, execute them — and such tyranny seems normal (in playing at being abnormal) in an enlightened state or family — a child can draw in reverse the models of the infernal past and sense the perversity of tyranny, the absurdity of tyranny, when the tyrant-child feeds on, is sustained by, is clothed by, fed by, cared for by, the subject-parent it abuses.

“Thus, as I implied a moment ago, the child is faintly aroused to an absurdity in its abnormal ascendancy over the subject-parent and that breeds a rare affection between them, a rare tenderness, a rare game between tyrant-child and subject-parent. Thus it is that Amaryllis dreams of her dead beloved father and slices his temples into books. It was she who insisted on accompanying him into the interior. And he was so completely under her thumb, under her spell, that he yielded to her entreaty, indeed her command. He told himself what an education it would be, anything to salve his conscience and satisfy her whims. He never foresaw his death, his wife’s death — indeed her death (he thought she had died) — when his party were attacked in 1939 by the angry tribe.”

I glanced again at Amaryllis. The new match that Masters had lit was bringing tears to her eyes. Yes, I was sure now. She would return. She would return whether I looked back or looked forward. True tears. True love. True sorrow. True gladness. Those tears seemed to melt the oceanic brittle fly that traced a line on her dead father’s brow from which she assembled “leaves of grass” and “leaves of brain”, Volume 1, Purgatory’s Democratic Poem, Purgatory’s Who’s Who.

“Did she or her father borrow the title ‘leaves of grass’ from Whitman?” I asked Masters.

“If they did it was because Whitman had passed this way.” He was poking fun at me but still I cried, “Did he pass here, where we are now?”

“He left a line on a rock requesting the adoption of ‘leaves of grass’ in counterpoint to ‘leaves of brain’.”

“But why, why?” I insisted like a child of abnormal democracy in a world of authoritarian structure.

“Perhaps,” said Masters gently, “he was accompanied by his Amaryllis and he felt something was missing, something was incomplete in the game they played together, something needed to arouse itself in the game you play with your parents, in the game this Amaryllis beside you plays with hers, something may falter in the game of democracy when we elect others to rule us who are oblivious of the blood on their hands, the red blood, the pagan blood, and thus may unwittingly lead us into hell.”

We were approaching a region of phantom rocks that had been vaguely discernible at the start of the expedition but were clearer than ever now.

Each rock witnessed to an ancient river-bed that the stream and rains of volcanic memory and non-memory had cut and abandoned in favour of more advantageous cuts or later channels over long centuries and geologic ages of Purgatory.

What was peculiar about the current phenomenon was the translation of these rocks (each belonging by hypothesis to an abandoned or diverse channel) into the same river upon which we presently moved. Thus we moved in lucid dream upon many river-beds, in many channels, all stitched into one. Perhaps they had all been uplifted by a gigantic fault, by a giant geologist — a cousin of the dead anthropologist in our boat — who had signed his name in Purgatory’s Who’s Who a long time ago by heaping all previous channels, or parent rivers, into their present offspring upon which our boat now moved.

It dawned upon me also that the paradoxical game between parent-creator and child-creation gave a luminous tone to some of the phantom rocks in the river. It was an argument that Masters and I ceaselessly conducted through many character-masks. Was he my phantom guide, my spirit-parent, or was I his divine clerk, his fiction-parent. Had I been nursed into becoming a writer through contact with him or had I nursed him into becoming an incalculable guide into being?

I returned to my inspection of the luminous tone or rock within the phantom ancient riverbed rock, and detected, I thought, a coagulation of flame from the match that previous guides with their crews — subject, as Masters and I were, to ambiguous parent/child relationships — had lit and deposited in the river (or the rivers) within expeditions they had led. Each such match or prick of vision into calloused fates was a measure of pagan blood, a revelation of native tyranny or game of tyranny native to the family of Mankind.

The matches Masters had lit were already assembling themselves into slender shapes or pinnacles of subtle coagulated flame as though in our expedition, in ourselves, in our immediate crew, we witnessed to many phantom countries in one purgatorial landscape, many phantom images in one foreign river, many geographies in one theatre of psyche.

Was it a game of self-inflicted parent/child wounds, self-aroused parent/child revelations, in which we were involved? Was Purgatory the region of regions, was it a democracy of soul unravelling itself by faint degrees and redressing tides of obliviousness that had accumulated upon humanity into the erection of an abnormal callous upon the frame of being?

I dipped my hands into the tides of obliviousness around our boat and in concert with match or luminous rock began to perceive the stain that the Governor Pilate (once voted popular administrator of Purgatory) may have seen when he washed his hands in pagan blood. (I say “pagan blood” for the Christ he condemned was no “Christian” for him or for the Roman world to which he belonged.)

I dipped my hands and saw Pilate’s signature in mine. Not leaves of grass that grow from buried flesh nor leaves of brain but the passion of the innocent that mingles in the rain, in the elements, that also clothe the guilty. Rose-red emotion upon innocence and guilt. Sunset emotion in the middle of the day when the sun stands despite sunset straight overhead, noonday sunset, in the pagan body of phallic rocket, phallic love, rocket discordance of sunset and sunrise to prick the sovereignties of heaven and hell.

I shrank from the administration of such a blow with my scorched hand that broke through Pilate’s, such a blow to sovereignties I tended to cherish, the sovereignty of hell no man dares breach, the sovereignty of heaven no man dares breach, except when these are perceived as pagan and therefore opening themselves to a profound game between creator and creature, parent and child, governor and governed, culture and culture, age and age, civilization and civilization, science and art.

Had I, I wondered, been promoted governor of Purgatory?

“No,” Masters explained, “something akin to a fiction-judge who judges himself as much as others and therefore judges governors — and indeed kings like me — as well. It’s an awful responsibility that the living — the living from Earth, that is, who journey in Purgatory — may have to perform. For remember to live — or to dream one is alive — is to be subject to various frames of existence that masquerade as life. The Earth-frame you know well — or do you? Anyway there are the purgatorial treadmills or frames that we have seen so far in our journey. There are those who hold on to an abnormal condition or treadmill of life and cannot fathom the cycle of death or repetitive violence to which they cling; there are those who are faintly aroused to the life of the mind; there are those who aspire to a true life, a true spirit, beyond all frames.”

I dipped my hands into all these apparitions and frames of existence that Masters had enumerated. As if to elaborate further he struck another match. It flared this time into volcanic activity. Volcanic spheres of dust, veil upon veil, tone within tone, exquisite theatres, unfolded themselves in space. Majestic gowns hung upon frames of the living and the living dead at various removes from true life. Faint crimson anxieties were suspended within yellow lampshades and refinements of purple.

I thought I saw boulders dancing together, embracing each other. At first they looked terribly sad, terribly sad, and then I was astonished to see their elation, profligate or extravagant mood, drunken abandon. They were drunk. That was plain to me. Drunk! I too was drunk. They had infected me.

What was less plain to see was the nature of the drunken elation within them and me. “Look again into the mirror of frames you share with them,” Masters said. “Look at those people over there. They want to embrace death and life together. They want the edges of death to become the wages for an existence they hate or find virtually unbearable. Such wages, they believe, would secure them relief from meaningless tasks and employments. Indeed release from hell. They admit as they dance — and this is curious — to the mind of oblivion, a mind that will release them and grant them a haven of nothingness, a haven longed-for, hoped-for, in the dance. Look! I can see from your face how drawn you are to them.” His voice faded but I knew what he said was true. I was almost seduced by the dance. I too began to long for oblivion.

But as the dance began to embrace nothingness, each boulder shifted its weight a little. I shifted my weight a little as I embraced Amaryllis. And the mind of oblivion began to resist oblivion. How could it be mind and do otherwise than resist the folly of courting an absolute extinction?

And so it was that a dance that encompassed the hope of oblivion grew hopeless of achieving oblivion. Such paradox! Such hopelessness! It was a hopelessness that rested on inimitable tip-toe function within volcanic upheaval, inimitable breaches of function, inimitable ballet I had never before so greatly enjoyed and I wondered if somewhere in the elements, at the epicentre of the elements, seismic elements, that clothed both hope and hopelessness, lay the genesis of the dance.

Had the dance started when human boulders moved towards sovereign night but breached that sovereignty, that night, by an evolution of mind, an evolution of partial release pointing through and beyond an absolute night, an absolute release, that falsifies itself in framing itself, in framing its desire, absolutely? How could I participate in movements for release if I have been released so absolutely that I forfeit the memory, the process, the life, the struggle for ongoing release? I could not tell but the ecstasy of such discoveries caused me to topple into another dance.

Here the elation of the human boulders sprang from complex vocation, complex labour, complex originality. Which dance, I wondered, came first — this or the one Amaryllis and I had danced before in the company of the others? Did an originality of cosmic vocation anticipate the elements that clothed hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt?

Such vocation, such originality, such labour, was desired and desirable beyond all other desire or conviction we felt as we danced. Dancing boulders. Dancing and collapsing. Yes — dancing and collapsing! For the task on which they and we were engaged drained us of immense resources and the most curious fatigue enveloped our limbs. It was a pattern or form of fatigue secreting undreamt-of gaiety. It reflected a drain or loss of energies, yes, but it also reflected — in that loss — an incubation of new forces, new energies.

Perhaps here was the answer to my question as to which of the two dances came first! In the incubation of new energies, the cycle or frame of human dancing boulders oscillated into a humour where first and last things were deceptively first and last, they were clothed by the self-same elements. The very intricacy of the dance of genesis lay in exposing a riddle of infinite parallels between so-called first things and so-called last things‚ between innocence and guilt, between hope and hopelessness.

Such an enigma of parallel opposites moved therefore into the mind of oblivion as incubation of sleeping energies, sleeping originality through frames of mind, through frames of oblivion into undreamt-of resources of spirit …

I looked around for Masters and it seemed I had lost him in Waterfall Oracle, that he had seen things he could not disclose, other dancers, other boulders, beyond my imagination. I felt Amaryllis and I were on the verge of toppling into an abyss. But he reappeared in the nick of time and led us back.

SEVEN

My father, Martin Weyl, was caught upon his treadmill, fixed, pinned to a wall of space, in early September 1939 when the trial of the red prince ended. The Amerindian was found guilty and sentenced by the judge in the New Forest courtroom, Brickdam, “to be hanged by the neck until he was dead”.

Martin was beside himself with grief and disappointment. The jury had taken three days to bring in their verdict. He had slaved like a fiend across many months in the presentation of his case. He had lain wide awake night after night. He exercised every muscle in pursuing the case. He delved into subconscious realms, consulted volumes of Purgatory’s Who’s Who. He depleted his own pockets to bring witnesses from every corner of the globe to testify to the archaic charisma of the law built into the El Doradan “ghost peoples” or “ghost assassins” (as the New Forest Argosy dubbed them).

All to no avail. With the passing of the sentence, he left the courtroom, he was exhausted, he was barely awake on his feet, he was a figure of Carnival dance, a secretive chained boulder drenched in Waterfall Oracle. He had forgotten to disrobe and still wore his gown and wig like sackcloth and bleached autumn snow. He blundered into the road and was knocked to the ground by a cyclist before receiving a frightful blow on the head (crushed dream-eggshell) from the iron wheel of a dray-cart. It ran over him even as the alarmed shadow of the half-prancing donkey or mule or horse that drew the cart engulfed him. Was it shadow-animal or shadow-cart? (The personality or shadow of the animal that pulled the shadow-vehicle was never established, as if to embroider into sphinx-like proportion the profligacy of the boulder-dance written into my father’s death. Pinned to a wall, pinned to a road, yet limbs flung apart, dancing, collapsing in space.)

I see him after all these years as if he too were arraigned before me now in Purgatory’s halls in the mirror of the river and I were at last in a position to begin to revise the sentence of the wheel and the sphinx. The treadmill on which my father found himself in the wake of his death I judge now to belong to phantom Martin Weyl the First (1932–39). Martin Weyl the Second had been partially released from the first frame by 1982–83 and was closer in texture and truth and spirit to the anthropologist’s “leaves of brain” that Amaryllis had been teaching me to ponder and assemble, and I am able to read now the epic defence he waged to interpret Carnival divine right, divine law, in an archaic people, in the archaic king of a “lost” people we judge to be savages, who judge us nevertheless as blind to the enormity of the moribund absolutes, moribund law, we bury in our own institutions.

In the wake of his sudden death, however, in 1939 I was aware of nothing but my mother’s weeping. She was inconsolable. And I felt so guilty it was as if I had condemned her even as the red prince had dismembered his sick queen in the heart of his tribe. My mother’s hair streamed to her waist in Purgatory’s river. Her breasts were cold in the starshine and sun of Purgatory’s bleached snow. She had to be constrained and kept at home when my father’s funeral took place in late September 1939. She was a phantom of solid grief permitted only to stand at a window in which she seemed framed like a picture observing the hearse and the long procession of carriages and cars that accompanied my father’s coffin to the grave.

Was he in that coffin? It all seemed terribly unreal to me in 1939. One ingredient of my father’s defence of the Amerindian — that cut my phantom mother to the heart in 1983 when Masters revisited Waterfall Oracle and found her there — revolved around questions that seemed directed at her as much as at the regime that had sentenced a savage to death for matricide.

Did she wish to be framed forever into the passion of sorrow, the passion of inexplicable violence? Or was she susceptible to capacities through and beyond frames, through and beyond the law of the frame that binds sorrow and violence together?

It was the expression “law of the frame” that agitated my mind as biographer of spirit across the light and the dark years of terrorism, of apparently motiveless killings, of apparently meaningless crime in the twentieth century. The twentieth century was a century of realism that failed entirely to plumb the reality of the pagan in ourselves, the savage urgencies, confusions, labyrinths in ourselves, the savage illuminations we desperately needed, the inner unspoken theatres we projected upon others, the inner problematic ties between mother and son, father and daughter, mother and daughter, father and son, masked stranger and intimate stranger, masked enemy and intimate treacheries of friends, masked governor and intimate governed, masked judge and intimate judged …

The Amerindian had barbarously slain the queen, his mother, in accordance with codes that seemed moribund in 1939 but were sacred law nevertheless to him and his people.

It was true that the colonial regime existing in 1939 had framed its own liberal laws for many decades forbidding such ancient barbarous practice in the savage tribes of the interior New Forest under its flag. But those new laws in no way invalidated the charisma of the law itself in an ancient people.

“Charisma of the law” was a term to which my father clung in defining his concept of “frame”. Divine right of kings may have vanished in Europe and elsewhere but divine right to territory, to frames of space, frames of water, frames of earth, was entrenched in the laws of sovereign states, East and West, North and South, everywhere. Thus the “charisma of the law” in the context of possession was operative in the Carnival masks of absolute regimes and incestuous territorial imperative. It was tragic that such absolutes never yielded, or confessed to, charisma. A European colonizer might trade or surrender territory to another sovereign colonizer but no spiritual confession of moribund principle ever occurred. In effect all that happened was that the new colony staged a ceremony to suppress, or eclipse, past sovereignties in itself. The new colony or regime subconsciously lived by, or subconsciously endorsed, moribund absolutes-in-depth to maintain itself in its divine right to frames of earth and water and sky.

My father argued that the case in hand required Plantation New Forest to desist from prolonging the seizure of the person of the Amerindian as if he were a common criminal (whatever “common criminal” meant) and to engage with him in the complex unravelling of the charisma of the law, the charisma of frames, the charisma of the treadmill. He argued that the action of the courts in New Forest was a symptom of derangement in ourselves, a blind refusal in ourselves to judge the deepest issues at stake, and that it would exacerbate “charisma”. He argued that that exacerbation was occurring at many levels of our colonial civilization and would result, he prophesied, in a nightmare feud of one sort or another, meaningless violence, inexplicable assaults, accidents, horrors, all sprung from addiction to frames that hypnotized peoples into believing themselves not only helpless or insecure or threatened but — through accumulative obsession with postures of attack and defence in those who waxed powerful and strong — overseers of human destiny by divine, territorial right …

Masters returned to New Forest on the eve of my father’s funeral. He was accompanied by Amaryllis, the anthropologist’s daughter. Her astonishing face caught my eye. I knew her in my dreams. It was a face that seemed curiously unframed by moribund anxieties, wonderfully innocent yet passionately aroused. I found it then — and still find it now over all the light years — almost indescribable in tone and quality of expression. She was my age in 1939 but she seemed much older than I in some essential gift from heaven of dancing heart and mind. She too had suffered bereavement in the loss of both her parents. Masters was reticent in speaking of the expedition when the New Forest Argosy came to interview him. There had been clashes, he said, with the angry Amerindian people but fighting had broken out as well between the members of the party on expedition. They had been a motley crew and an escaped convict had somehow inveigled himself into the party. In the end he revealed himself as someone on whom they could rely to fight the savages and to scheme for gold.

Everyman Masters had come close to drowning in Waterfall Oracle and had narrowly succeeded in pulling himself and Amaryllis back from the torrent, from veils of greenest light, blues and roses, veils that wove themselves into chains within all generations, all peoples, in the mystery of the Waterfall. They had secured a trail to another encampment and gained assistance in securing a boat.

He brought her back safely to New Forest and I made her acquaintance for the first time. First time? There was no first time, second time, first dance, second dance. We were ageless dream. I knew her, she knew me, it seemed, long before Masters arrived with her in the Town in 1939. When and where we had met puzzled the will at the edge of waking spirit but we were clothed in the sun’s originality as in a book we knew whose chapters overlapped, past shadows lengthened into the future, the future condensed itself in the present. I saw the originality of the sun in her eyes, she saw it in mine. She was a window for me into light. I knew I had been with her in the voyage to Waterfall Oracle. When I told Masters this he smiled at me. I was a child. I was entitled to a child’s game, a child’s intuition. I was entitled to the seed of dream. He knew — even as he smiled — that I would never relinquish it and that it would mature over the years into a recovery of Waterfall Oracle. He would turn into my guide. He would turn into the dead king. Amaryllis and I would be his living companions. He would leave us at some stage but by then we would be launched on our journey to innocence and guilt in this age or the next or still the next.

In 1939 his statement to the press — that Amaryllis pinned into Purgatory’s Who’s Who — was a bald recital of fact and it was to take me all his life up to and beyond the day of his second death to glean a perception of the prophecies he had received as a young man in Waterfall Oracle. Those visions or utterances so staggered him, so overturned him, that he could only impart them to me by indirections and through a variety of phases that were all, in a sense, incomplete. The first phase I tended to call that of Masters the First (1917–57) though in substance and reality this phase possessed sub-systems that ran roughly from 1917–39, 1939–57. (Indeed all subsequent phases were subject to sub-systems.) The second phase I tend to see as running loosely from 1957 into the 1970s. The third phase I tend to see as coming to a close on the day he died in London in 1982. Masters the Fourth commenced then on the day he died and became my guide backward in time.

It was Masters the First (a young man of twenty-two) who consoled me and took charge of my poor mother when he returned to New Forest on the eve of my father’s Carnival funeral. (That funeral was the most outstanding event or masquerade in New Forest for decades.) My mother was stationed next door at a window in the top storey of Masters’ house. Our house — the one in which the Masters family had lived in the 1920s — was single-storeyed, three cave-bedrooms, kitchen, shower-bath cave, lavatory, drawing room cave, front gallery cave overlooking the garden and the long central aisle or pathway through flowering plants to the street.

Thus, at a stroke, as it were, my mother was removed from the funeral stage itself yet ensconced in a high balcony next door as in a theatre. There, locked into a frame, with two servants to keep her company and to prevent her from escaping, she beheld the procession beneath.

I remember glancing up at her from the aisle in the garden along which the funeral audience — the New Forest citizenry — was arriving. Bodies moved in single file into the house, past the wreaths and the show-piece of a coffin, and out again into the street where they stood in slightly tense, somnolent, pleased, passive groups or repaired to sit in their carriages and cars and wait for the coffin to be borne from the house to the hearse and the procession to come alive and take its course to the cemetery. A thrill ran down my spine on seeing my mother far up in her frame. It was not simply her expression but the sensation I had, as I dreamt of her, that rain was falling in the air over the window. It was an illusion, for the sun was sharp and bright and not a drop fell upon me below. But the sensation persisted that my mother was veiled by Waterfall Oracle, by some extraordinary ruse of the light years wheeling in space, by some veil or abstract premise Masters had brought back with him from his expedition upon the river El Dorado.

It is said that a newborn child, with the gift of a seer, sometimes wears a caul over its eyes, and now it seemed that my new-dead father had projected a caul over Jennifer’s eyes through which she looked at me (as if two eyes were raised into a single third eye) — looked at me as if I were her judge and executioner rolled into one around the wheeling years.

I judged her, yes, but she resisted me in that sudden caul of rain. She was a prophetess, the Delphic oracle of slain queen, though not a sound issued as yet from her lips.

Funerals are the most important social event in the New Forest calendar. It was an unforgivable offence if relatives of the deceased failed to attend. Such relatives were but a trickle, however, in a river of mourners drawn from the distant relations of less distant relations of close relatives of the deceased. Then there were the friends of the deceased and the friends of friends of the friends of the deceased. Then there were acquaintances of acquaintances of the acquaintances of the deceased. Then there were colleagues of the deceased and the friends of colleagues and the friends of the friends of colleagues of the deceased. Lastly, as if to defy all convention, there came the curious, and the friends of the curious, and the acquaintances of the friends of the curious who haunted the premises of Carnival.

In my father’s case, despite the universal hostility he had aroused in his conscientious defence of a pagan prince and a savage, all barriers were broken when fate struck — as if by accident — to punish him. The community flocked to him then, not as a free people but in a phantom concourse of solid souls bound for a. racecourse, or a football match, propelled by a devil to mount a gigantic treadmill upon which, it seemed, everybody that was anybody, nobody that was somebody, moved to pay their respects to the shell robed in a coffin in the professional vestments of the advocate.

A reporter stood at the gate and entered the names of important persons attending the funeral. The Governor had asked Masters to represent him. There were representatives of the legal profession, the medical profession, the Church, Sport, Scholarship, Politics, the Prisons, the Estates. The men wore black serge suits, white shirts, black ties. The women wore white dresses and white or black hats. Masters wore black as well but he had had no time to have it dry-cleaned and it was painted with faintly discernible stars like the flame of a match from the El Dorado river. I saw them if no one else did. Even as no one, in the dream, looking up to the frame in which my mother stood, saw the glisten of tears, the glisten of rain.

By degrees, the passive funeral throng acquired a faintly unsettled mould. The lid was fastened upon the coffin. Masters and five other citizens of Purgatory; namely, a lawyer, a doctor, and three Old Boys from College, bore the coffin through the garden into the roadway and toward the hearse. The horse, for some unaccountable reason, took fright and the bearers were driven to deposit the coffin upon the grass verge by the roadside. The horse reared as the mule or donkey had reared to overshadow Martin when he fell under the wheel of the dray-cart. It not only reared but succeeded in backing the hearse on to the parapet. It drew so close to the garden that I dreamt it extended its neck like a harlequin, Carnival giraffe and cropped the sunflowers in the garden to leave the stage under the faint mist of Waterfall Oracle dry and shorn.

The driver of the hearse succeeded at last in calming the frightened phantom-rock of an animal and in restoring the hearse to the roadway. Masters and his fellow bearers lifted the coffin again. They succeeded this time in transporting it to the hearse and depositing it therein. Wreaths were piled upon the coffin; they gleamed through the glass body of the vehicle that had escaped fracture. The horse was frightfully motionless and its panting (however still), perspiring (however dry) sides also gleamed. It was a dappled rock of a creature and its coloration seemed to reflect the garden sun-fodder it had consumed. I wondered whether the glass vehicle had also eaten the wreaths piled upon the coffin within it or whether my father actually lay in the body of the horse with the sunflowers from the garden that the rock-animal had consumed sprouting from him.

At last the phantom horse responded to the driver. The driver was attired in a long threadbare feathery cloak. Not a feather from a duck’s back but a feather that had drifted down from the sun-raven that flew with the duck through the mist over my mother’s eyes. It was black. The procession moved inch by inch, it seemed, under the yellow sunflower yet black sun-raven in the body of space.

The procession moved through East Street, Orange Promenade, into Brickdam. The passivity of the procession — the passivity of the audience sealed into their slowly moving carriages and cars — was possessed now of the faintest rumbling. Not thunder, but the agitated digestion of the rock-phantom horse that led the long line of vehicles towards the cemetery. It was at least a mile long. Masters sat with me in the principal mourners’ carriage. We may have been sailing upon the bed of a river sucked dry and in which the prospect of fluid evolutionary/revolutionary soul existed in the inhabitants of the Town who lined the route of the procession.

There they were with curious waiting gaze as if rooted in a spell within the phantom horse in which I was convinced my father lay. They too had been cropped by that gigantic creature. They too were subject to drought-stage, drought-garden, in Purgatory’s belly. Had not Masters read to me — on one occasion when he visited my parents — the story of the Trojan Horse that became the seed of an overturned age or frame? So now, it seemed to me, a colonial regime, such as poverty-stricken New Forest, secreted in itself the stratagem of Purgatory within its rock-horse that had cropped my garden, and that therein lay the catalyst of modern allegory, modern fiction or biography of terrifying spirit to judge the age in which I lived.

Fly, sunflower, star, feather, crocodile, cannon — to list a few spectres that haunted the route of the procession — were mutual catalysts on the Delphic blackboard of space outside my window and they rumbled in the digestive organs of phantom Carnival daemon or horse.

In running along tarred Brickdam at slow-motion cosmic pace (that recalled the game of the crab that Masters had played on the Arawak foreshore), the hooves of the horse bit into the road soft and hard. They were acquainted with the pitch of night melting in the sun. They were acquainted with the heights and the depths. Daylight night, night-time sun, rumbled in the belly of the horse. We gained the Alms House and I was aware of plucked scouts, the feathered police, their plumes waving as they held the traffic in tributary side streets to allow the procession to pass. We passed the gateway through which Thomas had been knighted by Aunt Alice. The garden theatre in which she had danced was as dry as East Street river. The Bartleby dancing school was finished. Finished? Clean slate? Not really. A wisp of paper blew through the gate and floated into my carriage window. White paper. Black slate. It had been crunched by the horse and the teeth marks listed a throng of hopes, desires, biases as dark as midnight pitch; so deceptive and dark is the pitch of slate crunched by the daemon horse that it seems angelic material, clean slate, the purity of existence, whereas it is the litter of hidden injustice that plagues the human imagination.

I remembered Aunt Alice’s Magna Carta limbs and wondered what archaic revolution she would achieve when she leapt from the belly of Purgatory’s horse into the kingdom of the sun.

We sailed past the Alms House and came to the College. No sign of Quabbas or young Alice or Becks or Delph. They were hidden in the slate that had been crunched by the horse. We sailed on Brickdam river to the New Forest race course and turned right. This was the last leg of the journey to the cemetery. I descended with Masters from the principal mourners’ carriage but the labyrinthine sensation of having been cropped by the Carnival horse possessed my bones, and when the coffin was lowered into the grave I felt neither I nor my father was in it. He belonged to the past, it was true, I to the future, but I felt neither his death in the past nor mine — whenever it came in the future — had absolutely occurred or would absolutely occur. He had been — I would be — framed to appear non-existent. But the fact was we resided in the womb of the phantom horse as a seed of archaic revolution more enduring than novel or fashionable non-existences that perpetuate a lie.

His coffin was his frame — dray-cart wheel lashed into hollow trunk of a tree in which an apparition resembling himself had been sealed — and the robed shell of a creature lying there was desolation’s fiend masquerading as the masked parent, the masked advocate, I once knew.

*

My father’s death left an indelible scar on my mother’s breasts and heart. It coincided with the beginning of the cancer from which she died in the early 1940s. Masters became my foster-father. And yet I felt parentless when Martin became an ape of soul dressed in bleached snow in the trunk of a tree that served as his epitaph and coffin. How else may I describe the shock of incredulity, of incredible parting from someone of whom I had been jealous when he lay in bed with my mother and yet upon whom I had come to rely as if he were a god?

Such parentless eventuality is the origin of the paradoxes in this book on which I have been engaged for twenty-five years and more. For instance, Masters was my foster-father over the years following my father’s death, yet I became his fiction-parent — and the fiction-parent of Thomas and other characters — in embarking upon a biography of spirit in them, through them, overshadowing them all. I grew by involuntary stages to appreciate the significance of the “mask of the cuckold” that he (Masters) identified with his legal father through whom, in fact, his survival in his mother’s glass womb was assured when she contemplated Abortion and he protected her and her unborn child by another man.

GLASS BODY. PHANTOM HORSE.

The conjunction arose in my mind intuitively, secretively, like the seed of opera or symphony one Easter Friday when Masters, Amaryllis and I visited the Portuguese Cathedral in Main Street, New Forest.

It was the year after my father’s funeral. The Portuguese were renowned for the Carnival theatre they staged at Easter. The Good Friday Christ was nailed into, then taken from, the cross. The painted blood on his hands and feet, and in his side, seemed astonishingly real. I was struck, however, less by painted blood than by the gloom and shadow, the radiance and dazzle, of glass windows arching up to the roof of the world. I was in the mutuality of the divine, I was in mother-horse, I was in father-glass, father-horse, mother-glass, I ascended, descended, into a mysterious constellation of evolutionary spaces.

Amaryllis was a Catholic by upbringing and it was through her, I believe, that Masters thought of taking us to the Easter Carnival Mass. I dreamt she was covered with autumn leaves within the phantom horse of the glass-cathedral. Was it a good or a bad omen that the rain of leaves covering her had been cropped by space? We were in the same broad church, the same narrow boat, the same vicarious coffin, the same ultimate cradle, and the digestive rumbling organs of space enlivened, rather than extinguished, the fire of her spirit. I did not see her again until 1957 when I came to London. Masters arranged her passage to England from South America in 1940 and there were rumours that the vessel in which she sailed had been torpedoed by a German submarine and that the sea was strewn by leaves and feathers (akin to fish and scales and stars) of oceanic tree or epitaph. My dream-premonition come true! But the rumours were false. We met in the year Masters and I arrived in England and were married in 1959 at the Registry Office in Kensington.

Amaryllis had by then left the Catholic Church. In fact our true marriage — if I may so put it — occurred in 1958. No priest then, lay or robed, no official of the State or the Church, presided. Spirit presided. And that is the only mark of a true marriage. She lived in Maida Vale. We had been seeing each other for several months when, one autumn evening, we returned to her rooms. These were at the top of a building overlooking Regent’s Canal. The bedroom was spacious. A fire blazed in the grate. And it seemed to me that we lay in a curious luminous splinter of the cathedral-horse in which we had knelt an age ago in New Forest.

The illusion — if illusion of mist and space it was — sprang out of the fire in the autumn grate of the cosmos. That fire had been cropped by the horse of space but it had achieved the miracle of a flower in which we perceived the mystery of cosmic digestion and evolution, the first seed eaten by revolutionary spirit ages ago, the first leaf phantom god (phantom animal) tasted, the first plant upon the tongue of the sea, the first rose in the lips of soil. We were drowning together in fire and in water, the strangest taste of dying into elements we consumed, the strangest climax, reality of paradise, reality of intercourse; inimitably transparent yet dense bodies were ours. We lived in yet out of our frames, we touched each other yet were free of possession, we embraced yet were beyond the net of greed, we were penetrated yet whole, closer together than we had ever been yet invisibly apart. We were ageless dream.

We subsisted upon genius of revolution of sensibility within the phantom animal in which we lay, a phantom animal that was so ancient it filled us with awe. Our naked flesh was inhabited by mutual generations clad in nothing but obsolescent organs, obsolescent youth. What obsolescence! What intimate renewal of being beyond age and youth! We were intimate, ageless being, we were four years short of thirty, we were young, we were old as the coition of the hills and waves miniaturized in our bodies. We were a dying fall into deeper orchestration of mutual spaces.

In the fire and in the flower, in the rain of autumn leaves that the cosmic horse eats, lies the thrust of revolutionary peace within two beings alone, yet encompassed by an invisible third, an invisible fourth, an invisible fifth, sixth, seventh, in the belly of space, the invisible army of humanity.

Amaryllis’s father had given his “leaves of brain” to us as a stratagem of invisible humanity arising through heart and lungs into imperishable armour and contemplation.

My poor mother framed by a mist of tears was also there in the horse with us. She vanished but left us ammunition in the sorrows of humanity with which to drench the world in the spirit of truth.

Amaryllis’s father led my poor mother through Purgatory within a form that translated the elements of feud into both sorrow and love.

I was translated but unable to read in its entirety the secret and terrible and profound army of invisible humanity within the horse in which Amaryllis and I lay.

Masters knew it all when he knocked on my book long after in 1982 and 1983 to help me revise and to illumine the depths of coniunctio or complex marriage of cultures within the organs of the self. He had been involved, I perceived, in initiating Amaryllis and me into a distinction between transfigured seed of passion and calloused immunity from evil that is embodied in sexual gymnastics, sexual consumerism, sexual escapism from the reality of love in all its depth of beauty and awe and terror.

EIGHT

The ecstasies and torments that run parallel through the twentieth-century age made it inevitable that the dead king should descend into the living Inferno the moment Amaryllis and I glimpsed heaven and consummated our secret marriage vows. The Inferno lives when the dead retrace their steps around the globe. Our marriage was unique heart and mind but for that reason — unique tranquillity and ecstasy, unique revolution and peace — it was inevitable that a master spirit would return to counsel us and to bear the penalty of the Inferno that runs in parallel with heaven. Masters accepted the penalty. He became my guide and opposite (our guide and opposite) in arriving from the kingdom of the dead to counsel us in the land of the living and to guide my pen across the pages of this biography of spirit.

It started in this instance with property even as Amaryllis and I embraced. The shadow of property fell upon our ageless dream, the ageless dream of love. He had arranged for his properties in New Forest to be sold and for the money from the sale to be transmitted to him in London. He tended, however, to be lax in transmitting instructions to his agents and incessant delays occurred. The two-storeyed house in East Street was sold quite quickly but the money never came to him. It went instead to the New Forest Jane Fisher — Jane Fisher the First — who had stabbed him as they made love. I was angry and impatient with such quixotic generosity. Indeed for a prince of an overseer who could be hard as rock, it seemed a singular discrepancy of passion to give cash he urgently needed to a whore who had grossly attacked him. The truth was he regretted the privileges under which he had used the loose women of the estate, and was possessed by uncanny guilt.

I thought that was the truth in 1958 but I know now in 1982/83 when he wears the mask of the dead king that truth runs far deeper. A discrepancy of passion had haunted him through Waterfall Oracle and the legacy of property to the whore who had killed him was essential within the sacrament of a first death.

It was essential also in parallel with my marriage to Amaryllis and with the construction of other paradoxes and parallels such as hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt, the funeral-horse and the wedding-horse, the Inferno and Paradise. In all these the mind of fiction looks deeper than perverse hope into a dialectical hopelessness that releases us paradoxically from the hope of (the desire for) oblivion as guilt releases us to plumb the creative depths and riddles of innocence, as the funeral-horse releases us to unmask the lie of death in life and to embrace what is dearest in humanity, as the Inferno releases us and sets all parallels into motion so that Paradise may be found again and again within each age despite universal travail.

He told me — when he returned from the grave and became my guide — that the protracted delay in selling his other properties had been forecast by Waterfall Oracle as a symptom of the phantom horse that would crop the industries of the world over successive decades and generations. Prices had fallen in New Forest, South America, and he had been advised to descend into the Inferno and unravel a better climate for the stock market or wait until a better climate prevailed. That descent in itself would have appeared, in realistic terms, as nothing but a forecast of bleak economic growth in the late twentieth century but in parallel with the glimpse of Paradise that Amaryllis and I had achieved, it endorsed the mind of fiction again as an irony of forces subsisting upon opposites.

One doorway into the Inferno lay across Crocodile Bridge. In this moment, however, this moment of his return, this moment of suspended climax between heaven and hell, the dead king chose another. He entered the Inferno through a factory in North London that made Frigidaires and washing machines. I thought it perverse that Masters the Second should take a job as a common labourer and it was not until I saw my marriage to Amaryllis in a new light across the light years — not until the dead king returned into my book to enlighten me — that I perceived how he had glimpsed parallel opposites — parallels composed of apparently opposite tendencies — in Waterfall Oracle and in the golden chain he disclosed to me now as an element in his descent into the dancing human boulders upon whom he installed me as fiction-judge over him and others.

Poor judge I was! I was ignorant of the comedy, the comedy of parallel powers, high and low, upon which he relied to enlighten me as to the pawn I was when I had been elevated to the judgement seat.

Pawn and judgement seat! Here was another parallel of opposites I had missed. I had chalked up “hope and hopelessness” upon Mr Delph’s blackboard in Waterfall Oracle but “pawn and judgement seat” struck me as new, though upon reflection I saw it had subtly appeared in Mr Quabbas’s cave when he had elevated my father to wear the mask of Thomas. I reflected again and saw that “pawn and judgement seat” placed a special emphasis upon “freedom and unfreedom”. I drew Amaryllis into my arms. I was free to declare my love to her, free to marry her, free to live with her — a freedom that did not exist in other countries, in South Africa for example — and I suddenly saw with a shock that our two selves ran in parallel with unfree selves (unfree lives) in many spheres of hell, not only political hells but moral hells, the moral hell that Quabbas and unsuspecting Alice lived in in New Forest. He could not declare his sensuous love for her there, however intrinsically profound or poetic it was, but the depth of his affection, his unfreedom, in cosmic space nourished my insight into precious, invaluable freedom to love, freedom of spirit and mind and body in Amaryllis and me.

“Such,” he said to me, “is the law of initiations and the price of freedom in the vows you consecrate with Amaryllis. Freedom is partial and as such your private freedoms, the sacred inner vows you take for granted, relate you to — interlink you with — others who are in chains and whose vows are mute.

“Take the golden chain, my dear Weyl, upon which I descend again and again into hell.”

I held Amaryllis close to me.

“I hid it from you in Waterfall Oracle, Weyl, and had I attempted to explain my behaviour in 1958 it would have been premature. But now the two occasions may blend and move us anew through the lapses of dream, the lapsed dream of reality that is the theme of your book, the capacity to revisit occasions, to return again and again to vacancies of memory and to first things and last things that are neither last nor first in the kingdom of spirit.”

He suddenly broke off and spoke rather harshly.

“I was an overseer on a rich plantation, Weyl. Do I have to tell you that? You know it already. Yes, I do have to tell you, if only to endorse the obvious. The plantation is the corner-stone of the economy of the poor world. The factory is the cornerstone of the economy of the rich world.”

“Is it obvious?” I murmured as much to myself as to him. “You said rich plantation.”

“Rich, yes. Rich plantation, rich world, poor world. Rich sets up a dense echo or connection between the plantation and the sophisticated industrial inferno or factory. A connecting doorway. Follow me Weyl. It’s for your sake and Amaryllis’s that I descend. I bequeath you my wages.”

“What wages?”

“The wages of descent. They are my gift to you and to Amaryllis.”

“Gift!”

“Wedding gift,” he emphasized. I mouthed the words after him as if it was my turn to be dumb, as dumb as Quabbas. Laughter hit me, laughter and sorrow. It was unusual, to say the least, to bring a wedding gift to a man and his wife close on twenty-five years after the wedding. Unless the deed of coition, however marvellous and apparently complete, remains suspended in the parallels of royalty within servant and master, parallel losses and gains. Was the dead king our master guide, were we his servants who stood indebted to him? To see such losses and gains, such a debt, in a new light alerted us to the wages of freedom and unfreedom in every chain of being that ran through ourselves and others. Unbearable as all this was I began to link together three concepts in Masters’ chain — the law of initiations, private marriage or freedom to be with whom one wished, the intolerance of hell or unfreedom to be with whom one wished.

What price did freedom pay to maintain its heart and mind? Amaryllis and I had purchased a legal certification of marriage a year or so after we consummated our private vows.

Purchased! What wages did freedom need to earn in the purchase of privacy and the sacrament of body and mind?

I saw in a flash within the golden chain of spirit upon which Masters seemed to dangle how necessary it was for him to descend into the Inferno. He sought to open new links in that chain, new equations and links and parallels beween the sweat of love and the sweat of industry, between the fires of hell and the fires of purification. Without master spirits who descend into hell the wages that make freedom possible would burn so fiercely that we would lose all distinction between grace and fury; we would become the prey of meaningless consumption, meaningless fire.

*

October was closing in when he led me down a hill to catch his first bus to the factory. He led me into an industrial labyrinth even before he came to the workplace. It was his mood. The labyrinth commenced the moment he boarded the bus. It would have been different, I dreamt, if he had been on his way to a great palace to receive the Order of Merit. The bus would have been overshadowed then by a kingdom or a throne. All doors, all stages, all buses, are multi-faceted, reversible frames of emotion in the chain that runs through parallels of humanity.

Thus, that October evening, I sensed a frame of emotion upon him that was already draped by the huge cave of a factory at which he arrived an hour or so later.

A lapse or disjunction of time marks every important appointment with fate. Had he been on his way to a palace — I saw again as he dangled on his golden chain above the Inferno — that timeless lapse, rooted in anticipation, would have embodied a degree of awe perhaps, a degree of pride or privilege perhaps interwoven with other curious emotions. No such luck. He was on his way to the factory and the timeless lapse encompassing him, as he drove to a place where he already was, embodied a degree of bleak present and presence.

He blended the dying light of the evening sky into the faint arc of the new moon and into the chain by which he pulled me or led me to descend into the Inferno.

The din in the factory was tremendous. And yet through it all I could hear the rush, the clamour, of phantom El Doradan rapids. It was drought, a drought that ignited a torrent etching its premises into rock utensils, smooth stripped half-bodied ice boxes, agitated washing machine souls, skeleton birthday funeral stream and dance. Each half-bodied boulder subsisted upon rhythmic cradle-in-epitaph, processional epitaph-in-cradle of industry, yet was a doorway into lapses of time. The dead king was on the threshold of despair in the intense racket but succeeded in slipping through a lapse and found himself walking at the edge of the still Round Pond in Kensington Gardens.

It was as if he had lengthened the chain forwards into tomorrow’s noon and though lapsed time had taken us there I felt we were still in the factory and the noonday sun remained an arc-light in the roof of the cave. Masters was a new factory recruit but already he felt that he had worked in the cave of boulder-machines for years. I saw that his body was imbued with the rhythm of the factory floor as a sailor who comes ashore from his ship moves still upon an involuntary wave. Masters led me within lapsed time to gaze almost sightlessly across the beautiful parkland of Kensington Gardens, through the beautiful trees, across the beautiful water.

Beautiful water! Sightless eyes. Deaf ears. Yes, sightless, deaf. But listen all the same to the distant roar of the traffic running toward and from Marble Arch. A sounding waterfall! Listen! Listen to the friction of wheels in the waterfall, listen to the gallop of horses in the waterfall, listen to the brakes and gears of engines in the waterfall.

There was a crash in the distant waterfall, a muted explosion, a back-firing engine, water on rock. A collision! Was it a bus, was it a car, was it a cyclist, was it a dray-cart in a parade of ancient vehicles? Carnival gait of redressed machines, bus into masked cyclist, car into masked dray-cart, led me to ponder whether I saw or did not see someone crawling out from under a wheel …

“Hey you, give me a hand here. Stop dreaming.”

Masters was back upon his chain from Waterfall Oracle. We stood in the factory, lapsed noon had fallen back into the brilliantly lit night of the cave. A stack of guillotined sections of metal had slipped, half-crashed, onto the floor and needed to be shored up again.

Two West Indians who had come to England in the 1940s and worked with the ground staff of the RAF, operated Madame Guillotine. They were, Masters surmised, around forty, his own age (or two or three years younger perhaps). It was a responsible job. He had been assigned to them. Not as an operator. He was unskilled in the slicing and the execution of metal. His job was to collect the sliced sections and transport them by degrees across the factory to a corridor where they were treated, passed on, treated and fashioned again, before being passed on once more to the assembly line.

There had been an acute shortage of labour and that was how it happened that a great stack of guillotined material had accumulated over the past week. It was this that had partially crashed on the floor to jolt him back from the Round Pond. His first task was to deplete the pile. Though it had been restored it seemed on the verge of slipping again.

“Go easy‚” he was told. “Tricky beast. Use them fucking gloves over there. It’s a night’s job to get it half-way down.”

The night (the factory day) wore on under its manufactured stars and suns. It was during the midnight (the midday) lunch break that he was conscious of peering through another lapse into the faces of his two companions as if day sliced night night day. He knew them in that light. One of them. He had seen him somewhere ages ago. Carnival time. It heightened and sharpened an inner profile, an inner memory, of redressed faculties. It was the edge of blood, the inner sweat of the sun, in an unfamiliar yet familiar shadow of light, that made him know he knew one of them though he could not remember where or when it was that they had met. Perhaps it was the ordeal of unaccustomed labour in transporting the metal with gloved yet wretched hands that evoked some placeless connection between them. He could not say.

Gloved wretchedness was the driving force, the itch or the climax, of industry. It illumined a cloak of savage or savaged memory that ties the worker’s hands, the worker’s bruised body, to his task with almost religious, fatalistic devotion. The sweat of industry was a phenomenon of darkest coniunctio, the marriage of man and material, boulder and boulder upon a chain that stretched from heaven to hell over which he had ruled in Plantation New Forest but as a labourer now himself — tied to Madame Guillotine — the sweat of intercourse infused him with a sensitivity that seemed to split and break every prick, every gloved nail.

His gloves were already cut to tatters — a dead king’s, a dead bridegroom’s, from the grave. He held them up to me, a living bridegroom, a Carnival mask of parallel dream.

Within a fortnight, the mask of the body, darkest coniunctio or marriage to industry, had forged a new skin, a new glove, a new letter that seemed to run at the edges of bone into english letter, french letter, welsh letter, irish letter, west indian letter — and all the other gloved accents, sexual imprecation, blasphemies, curses, one hears on a factory floor.

He was unable to place or identify the West Indian he thought he knew. Perhaps he was deceiving himself. Perhaps he was seeking to create a lapse into fictional memory in order to make game of the night’s/day’s labour. Lapsed night was day. Lapsed day was night. The lapsed unfamiliar was familiar. The lapsed unknown was known.

Each man secretly played his own game of lapses or doorways into time with the devil. Religious devil. Religious pay-packet. So much for rent to keep the devil from the door, so much for the motorcycle or the motorcar to outrun the false shaman, so much for the devil’s cigarettes, for lovely beer, so much for vistas of the Round Pond within the pools in which El Doradan millions shone, so much for hire purchase …

There were moments when the devil took a worker by surprise in the game they played. Was it the worker’s mask or the mask of the devil that crumpled a little? Was it the worker or the devil who seemed to lose his grip? The dual mask slipped and another face appeared, slightly ecstatic, slightly depressed, slightly dark, slightly brilliant, vaguely attuned to home thoughts (an Englishman’s home is his castle), home thoughts of wife or mother or child. Then the castle would darken into irrational siege, irrational casualty, injury, the unemployed, the unemployable.

“You’ve never had it so fucking good,” the devil said to me. “Masters has bequeathed you his wages. Why are you moping, making up fictions?”

The roof of the great hollow cave of a factory was littered with arc lights, manufactured suns, some with moon satellites but in a particular area of the lofty cave there shone a single star that an educated wag had christened Vega. This was devoid, as far as waggish eye could see, of the rings or planets circling Earth’s sun.

Factory Earth therefore, the wag declared, need fear no competition from planets around Vega, the nearest sun in space and time to Planet Earth’s sun.

It was light-year comedy and Masters was well acquainted with the importance of such games to preserve morale within the work forces of Factory Earth and Plantation Earth and to humour or lighten anxieties within a fiercely competitive world. In Vega — in the arc-light of Vega within the cave of the factory — lay the narrative seed of a constellation within a twentieth century biography of spirit. It was a seed in parallel, through distances of psyche, with the hunter/huntress Orion and the male/female Crab nebula.

Such seed of necessity, such predilection for games, was a form of telepathy between worker and worker around the globe. Long before mock-constellations or satellites, invented by science, encircled the earth, cultures had invoked their own satellites and images in the stars through which they bridged distances and separations and spoke silently to each other. They saw without proof each other’s masks, they felt without touching each other’s edged tools, they pooled each other’s tears in the ghost of rain and made a sacrament of vision. The telepathy of the soul. They peered into the night-time live-coal eyes of the crocodile stars in search of a modern telescope to place in Thomas’s hands long before Thomas dreamt of investigating the wounds in the body of space.

Late in November Masters found himself staggering under Vega with a satellite bride of metal from Madame Guillotine in his arms. He was suddenly visited by a revelation that was to be confirmed by science. His mind lapsed into fiction and he saw that there were foetal rings and planets around Vega and that these constituted not just a competitive threat to Factory/Plantation Earth but a new wheel or foothold for life should the golden chain to which he clung be so apparently severed or blasted it flung him — it flung him — through one of its links on to that wheel. HE COLLAPSED AND FAINTED.

This was his first minor heart attack and it was to bring him face to face with the devil. It was time to say goodbye to the factory. He fell through the floor upon his golden chain (or was it up into the roof of the cave?) and lay at the edge of a great fire within a chain of reversible gravities, ups/downs, downs/ups, in Waterfall Oracle. He raised himself nevertheless to his feet to confront a gentleman with a smooth, polished mask.

“What the devil?” said Masters. “Where in god’s name am I? Who are you?”

The devil chuckled. “You called me first,” he said, “so here I am. A mask — the self-same mask — can be worn by parallel angels and monsters.”

“Did I call you? I have forgotten.”

“It’s a game of lapses of memory,” the devil said. “Read the newspapers around the globe. See how they put gory morale into their customers’ breasts — the spy games, the war games, the sex games, the power games. But sometimes a foul, a hideous lapse, is declared and the game almost ceases to exist.”

Masters was stricken with the masquerade of the devil as something or someone he had summoned to play death and life and rebirth. In calling him, in saying “What the devil?” — albeit in the way one cries, “Oh god” or “To hell with you” — had he indeed, however involuntarily, invoked a fiery response in the cosmos, fiery death threatening him here on Earth, on one hand, fiery rebirth, foetal circulation of life around Vega, on the other? If the game stopped with a dreadful foul here on Plantation and Factory Earth would it start all over again somewhere else upon the wheeled chain of mutated spaces, mutated fires?

Masters felt an undoubted attachment to, a longing for, the great beautiful fire beside which he stood with the devil. That longing stemmed from a curious hollowness and depression within him, a desire not just to be purified in hackneyed senses but to be rendered therapeutically impure, therapeutically mixed game (water and fire), so that the measure of his cosmic disease would match the sacrament, or miracle, of a cure. It was a formidable equation between “impurity of the game” and “sacrament or cure” (as if one were integral to the mystery of the other), and it made him see fire as a wonderful bride, a wonderful game, to be embraced, to be courted, to be loved. He lapsed through holed time. It was 1945 in New Forest. He had just donated blood to the Brickdam Alms House and to the State Hospital. The doctor (attired in calendrical mask 1945) who had drawn the blood resembled the devil of Vega’s fire (calendrical mask 1958). Reversible memory, the future in the past, the past in the future. Waterfall Oracle. Delph’s blackboard/white chalk. They were both polished, courteous plantation gentlemen. Except that the plantation doctor in New Forest was Carnival black, the devil (or daemon of souls on Vega) Carnival white.

The doctor in the State Hospital rubbed the dead king’s arm with a piece of cotton wool, offered him a drink, and then, seeing how little affected he was by the blood-letting ritual, ventured to ask him whether he (as a prince of the estate) would take the lead in signing a petition.

“What petition?” asked Masters.

“I need cadavers,” said the doctor bluntly. “Freely donated. Sign please!”

Masters was not sure that he had heard aright. “Whose cadaver?” he asked. He was drawn to the devil’s fire, he was drawn by a lust for purification and yet he shrank away now within a confusion of place and mind, heart and soul, science and religion.

“Whose cadaver?” the doctor repeated. “Why yours, of course. Sign here and I will give you a card marked Atonement. Keep it in your pocket as your good deed to the State. I shall then be able to claim your royal frame in collective instalments, the State’s kidneys, the State’s lungs, the State’s blood bank, the State’s everything.” He shook Masters’ chain.

“No, no, I’m sorry,” the dead king cried quickly. “NO!”

“What, what? Don’t you see that if you — a prince of the State — gave your frame, it would inspire millions?”

“They would give their souls,” the devil confessed.

Masters felt guilt. He had given royal blood. The royal sweat of industry. The royal guilt of industry. He had given all these. But his compulsive desire to marry or to wed fire created a terrible beauty in parallel with a terrible danger and as he resisted the devil’s temptation the fire retreated a little into an organ of mystery that overruled all blind gift of body or soul before or after death in the name of pure science or in the name of pure religion.

“I am a rude king,” he said at last to the doctor, “a king who descends and who labours.”

“I know. I know. That’s why I ask you, of all persons.”

“You do not understand,” Masters said.

“Understand what?”

“A king is reborn for humanity’s impure sake …”

“What the devil does that mean?” the doctor cried.

“Let’s put it like this.” Masters was fencing with the devil. “A king sharpens the sword of religion and science in fire to test how incorrigible is his suit of hate or love, his longing, his insane longing, to wed the bride of heaven. Does he give his earthly body to science because he loathes it, hates it, or adores it for selfish, cynical heaven’s sake, cynical rejuvenation of worn out, obsolete, royal organs in a manufactured Paradise where lust is both eternal and incorrigible?”

The doctor did not know whether to express approval or alarm or disdain. One word stuck in his throat. “You said incorrigible. Why incorrigible?”

“If the fire of religion or science becomes incorrigible lust, incorrigible lust for purity or purity’s goods, if the beauty of art becomes so absolute that it cancels the marriage of the impure body to the impure body, impure ages to impure ages, impure cultures to impure cultures, then it means that the prospect of rebirth, therapeutic rebirth, falls into the void and in that case what use is it, doctor, for you to patch up a wretched soul in the name of wretched eternity, to patch up a wretched society in the name of wretched purity, by cannibalizing the constitution of a dead king?”

The devil was so outraged he could scarcely speak. Purity that masks the extermination of others, pure religion that masks fanaticism, pure science that masks its military consequences, unfreedom and terror, absolute mechanics that mask exploitation, were his bastions and they had been stormed, it seemed to me as I hung upon Masters’ chain, at a heart’s blow.

“The values of a civilization,” said Masters a little pontifically, as if to rile the devil, “need to rest on something much deeper than the mechanics of a frame to prolong the semblance of sovereign life.”

The doctor found his tongue at last. “Is it impure science then, impure art or religion, impure societies, that you favour?”

“I favour the saving desolation of spirit that differs from, though it resembles, despair; I favour the mystery of shocking truth or starkest spirit penetrating and reassembling evolutions, and then it is possible for a king to confess to native evil as inseparable from change — inseparable ingredient in the conscience of wisdom or maturity and change — to confess also to native bias and partiality as bitter travail, and to yield himself in ailing person and deed, through prayer and through necessity, to transfigurative dismemberment/remembermentand rebirth in community and of community.”

The devil vanished as if he had been ousted but the riddling frames of temptation and revelation had not ceased and Masters found himself at the foot of a great palace that rose out of the hollow depression of a half-breathing, half-breathless organ or heart that plagued him still with parallel fires, the fire of the healer, the fire of the destroyer. He placed a tentative foot on a rung in the palatial ladder and recalled, in that instant, Thomas’s animated mask of curiosity glued to the bars and segments of the Alms House gate in New Forest through which he observed Aunt Alice dancing for her supper with faltering yet inimitably courageous steps.

Like Thomas’s, Masters’ eyes were glued to the ladder. Ladder or giant wheel, giant heartbeat within deceptive hollows, deceptive heavens, and with hope beyond hope and hopelessness of true heaven. As he stared through the gate he saw the shadow of Alice gesticulating, warning him, but much more unexpectedly and oddly vivid was the face of the West Indian operator in the factory whom he thought he knew but had been unable to place. He shook the ladder or gate now, and it dawned on him then, as a sudden wheel rattled, who the operator was. A faded newspaper floated down the rungs of the ladder and settled on a cyclist’s brow. That was it. That was the man! Here was the young cyclist who had collided with Martin Weyl in Carnival year 1939. A College Boy then, seventeen years of age.

Masters studied him closely, unable to trust his luck, unable to believe that after so many long weeks in the factory cudgelling his brains, now at last he remembered, now at last, upon the first rung of the dying ladder of an age in his body, he knew the identity of his fellow worker.

The newspaper floated a little in a breath of wind. It was brown and faded. It lacked the meticulous print of the “leaves of grass” in Purgatory’s Who’s Who. But despite this the picture of the young cyclist was impressive as skeleton or ivory or bone that had been browned — if that were possible — by heart’s fire. Parchment invisible heart’s fire. He (the cyclist in bone-brown fire) was wearing a cricketer’s blazer and flannels. His features were curiously round as if ready to bounce … Ah yes! the plague of the heart that cuts into the soul of a brilliant athlete and makes him bounce into eternity. Masters knew him, yes, unmistakably. He had seen him running in the College grounds to catch a ball falling out of the sky from Philip Rodrigues’ bat. Ball. Heart. Bat. Philip of Spain. Remember? The Venezuelan high jumper! Masters was jolted through Carnival ladder of heaven to perceive the young cyclist clutch at the handle bar of his machine. He pulled his brakes hard but was unable to stop. He collided with the half-sleeping, half-dreaming advocate of a pagan body that Martin Weyl was.

Advocate of a pagan body. How curious to see it like that, in such a light, with one apparently Christian foot on the rung of a ladder, of a gate, a palatial ladder, a palatial gate. As if that pagan body might restore his (Masters’) dying heart, might be of advantage to the kingdom he had glimpsed with mask glued to ladder and bar.

Then came the additional shock. Martin Weyl was flung into the centre of the road. It was too late for him (Masters) to reach out and save his friend. He felt that if it were not for the acute pain in his chest he could have done it even now after nearly twenty years. He could have reached back through a hole in time and saved him. He could have reached through the ladder. He could have seized Martin by the hair, by a grain of fire, and saved him. But no! The dray-cart, the startled horse or mule, was upon him. He was dead. But that was not the end of the matter. Too late to save him but not too late to be saved by him, by the friend he dreamt he may have saved.

He was assured after his apparently total recovery on the last day of November 1958 that the heart attack he had suffered had been a minor one despite the hole or lapse or black-out into which he had fallen. But he knew differently when he stood in the palace gate or ladder pointing to the bride of heaven within a cricket bat or cricket ball floating toward Vega in space. In part he was saved by the shadow of Aunt Alice, by her ageing Bartleby humour, crumbling gesticulation through the bars of heaven, and by the cautionary mask she provided for the young, sensuous flying Alice whose wings encircled Quabbas, the young fiery Amaryllis to whom I made love when Masters descended into the Inferno. Aunt Alice cautioned him not to be tempted by the brilliance of such fiery intercourse; to turn back to archaic Earth, to seek to wed the museum of the elements that needed him still. She pointed to Martin Weyl, to his Carnival posture — under wheel or horse or mule — as advocate of a pagan body.

“Yes,” said Aunt Alice, “too late to save your friend but not too late to be saved by him, to have his pagan confessional heart lodged in your breast.”

Her shadow had solidified. She seemed suddenly to become a divine gossip — how else may I describe it? — of heaven. “Do you know, Everyman,” she said to Masters, “that he’s still toiling away at his precious ‘charisma of the law’ theorem?”

“That was the main plank in his defence of the red prince,” said Masters. “I recall how passionate he was — the law is valid, he said, indispensable, even in Purgatory and hell, not to speak of heaven — but because of territorial imperatives, absolute or rigid frontiers above and below (on sea, land, in the air), there is a hideous charisma, a moribund authoritarian fixture of emotion that bars or excludes even as it confines peoples. Moribund it may be, he declared, but in actual practice it remains terrifyingly constant and it underpins all liberal codes — even those liberal codes that attempt to argue sensibly that security is mutual, never one-sided.”

“Ah yes,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby, “if I were allowed, my dear, to take you up and through the ladder, I would show you where he sits writing day and night. Sometimes I find him arguing with a judge, the shadow of a judge, who assumes all sorts of shapes. Sometimes the judge looks like young Weyl, the son judges the father. It’s too absurd! It’s a dream. It’s amazing. His own son sitting there with Amaryllis.” Aunt Alice was laughing and weeping, I thought.

“Sometimes,” she said sombrely, “he plays the scene of his death all over again. Like a kind of cosmic cinema. Why, bless my heart, there he is now. He’s descended the ladder! He’s playing the scene. Look! There’s the newspaper cyclist. There’s the ancient donkey or horse or mule, the wheel, the cart.”

There he was indeed. I saw him, my father. I could see him through the bars of the ladder, even through Aunt Alice Bartleby’s solid, gesticulating, crumbling shadow. It was as if an unforeseen rumbling of the law made itself manifest in his advocacy of a pagan body. His frame, his chest, was suddenly rent before my eyes to illumine savage unconscious realms in which the innocent advocate pays for the guilty court he addresses. Was he falling — as the wheel caught him — through the ladder of the sky from a murdered aeroplane to illumine territorial charisma he had sought to unravel, had he been shot to ribbons under the divinity of the sea’s ladder to illumine Carnival bandages, had he been crushed on a battlefield to illumine a mask of shell?

He had paid the price for deliberating upon territorial imperatives to an indifferent, largely insensible court. He had become the savage hollow he sought to explicate and unravel. He had been broken on the wheel. He had trespassed beyond conventional pavements into the traffic of deadly highways. Or so it seemed to me as I contemplated Masters on his chain that wound itself into many worlds, past, present and to be.

My father had defended a pagan El Doradan whose hideous imperatives could be traced far up, far back, into ancient fires when statesmen-priests broke the organ in their victims’ chest and offered it to the sun or — should the sun fail — to unknown fires far out in space, to foetal plants around Vega.

Such charisma, he argued, had survived within the civilization of twentieth-century age as the reverberating shock of pagan body-ritual of which we were oblivious. Witness our predilection for black-out Carnival and games of nuclear holocaust we have played with computers, with robots, fallen numbers, surviving numbers, underground caves. And thus it was not to be wondered at that humanity, in its subconscious or unconscious advocacy of the body as fodder for the State, was articulating an ancient ritual dressed up in the vestments of purist obsession; it was not to be wondered at that societies were suicidal and accident-prone, and that even those who wrestled to enlighten us with parallel formations fell asleep and stumbled under Christ’s Trojan donkey or resurrection mule.

Christ’s Trojan donkey! What a parallel! Could one bear the shock of such a parallel, I wondered? Could such a parallel bring a new beast, a new heart, a new love, upon which to ride …? Was this my father’s gift, the gift of the beast he dreamt he entered the moment he fell under shadow and hoof?

In an accident-prone, suicidal and conflict-ridden age, violence is a savage masquerade, is it not? It feeds on a void of sacrament and on the infliction of humiliation and shadow. It not only feeds on these but remains blind to the pressures to which it is addicted.

“I know, I know,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby. “I see massacres on earth when I look through the bars of heaven, so many pathetic bodies.”

“What has all this to do with Weyl and me?” Masters demanded. He knew the answer but it was difficult to shoulder such terrible knowledge, that an equation existed between Christ’s pagan donkey and the human beast of love upon which the universe rides.

He touched his own body, his own beast. It seemed to reflect the rent in Weyl’s frame. He had used labouring men and women in his plantation, overseering days as beasts of burden. But the heart of the beast was now his. Weyl had given it to him to pass on to me within the golden chain of existence. It was his, it would renew him, it would save him, imbue him with unbearable and bearable insights as time rode on his back.

“If you see that, my dear Masters, a spiritual evolution in the law may suddenly thrust you into the stars, as into the labyrinth of the Earth, to plumb the equation between fire and fire. If you cannot see it, or plumb it, accidents will pile up everywhere around you. For those accidents are your soul that remains oblivious of its parallel heritages and weeps with a thousand eyes on every battlefield, on every roadway.

“Unless you see yourself as paradoxically enriched by savage pathos, savage dream, you cannot break the spell of motiveless crime, you cannot overcome Hades, you cannot see God.”

*

Early in December, apparently fully recovered — new mystical “savage heart” lodged in his body from Weyl’s rent side and resurrection mule — Masters telephoned the factory in North London and discovered that his West Indian colleagues had been transferred to day shift. He felt he should visit them and say goodbye.

It was curious to reflect, I thought, upon the chain of being through life into death and back again and the necessity for a revisualized chain in the dead king of whom I dreamt and whose steps I had retraced into childhood light year in parallel with the ancient game of the crab. I heard again the mysterious voice that had addressed him and me a moment ago, saying this time, “In El Doradan light-year crab the spirit or half-obliterated cosmic pattern cries out to be completed or fulfilled, cries from the other side of the womb or death-in-life. Cries to be reborn or resurrected. Such rebirth or resurrection is a mystery that resides in parallel shapes and riddles.”

Through the chain of being I began to treasure the commingling of elements in the marriage of Earth and sky, and thus I was able to visualize something I may only describe as “phenomenal resurrection”, healed character, enveloping Masters when he returned for the last time to the factory.

I dreamt the rain ceased the morning he set out on a bus from Notting Hill Gate, but everywhere the light seemed to drip into overcast translucency, mutated silver, mutated pearl. Space within the dead, resurrected king and space without him and me was diffuse, it was a web draping the bare, sculpted branches of trees. The conjunction of inner and outer space was a token of healed hollow or recovery from depression, from illness.

I felt silences within that hollow despite the sound of the traffic. Not only recovered heart but recovered ear encompassed those silences. Silent music. How did one respond to silent music? There it was. Seen music, unheard music. Recovered eye. Recovered ear. Recovered heart. Sight, sound, memory etched themselves into silences replete with harmony: etched themselves through recovered being yet ran upon the fine branches of trees that the dead king perceived as the bus moved, stopped, moved again in the vicinity of Kensington Gardens.

In the winter light that seemed to echo with intimate yet far-away vistas arching through Waterfall Oracle, I felt the imprint of black fire, black tone, numinous wonderful shadow. That imprint or sensation was so acute, so deep, Masters was caught by the Carnival mask of Lazarus, mind of Lazarus in his mind, as the heart of Weyl stood in his heart. Yes, mind, heart, shadow! Imprint of fire, shadow, was the mind of Lazarus in his mind to attune him to ivories of sensation, russets, and other alphabets of the elements within every hollow epitaph of memory, every hollow grave.

Winter lapsed into the carpet of autumn leaves under the bole of a tree that the bus was passing. The trampled leaves appeared to smoke with an arousal of spirit, trampled greenness, trampled yellow paint, in the hollow depression of time and place from which one arises to discourse with silent music within the roar of a great city …

The factory seemed different to Masters’ Carnival Lazarus’ eyes in this actual day of arousal of spirit; different from how it had appeared to him during night shift. Yet night shift had seemed to him but manufactured day, susceptible, at the same time, to blazing stars and constellations.

In the winter day the factory was susceptible to artificial noon. The lights were still on as at night but they were different, he perceived again, from the illuminations he recalled when he blacked out. They were deceptively natural, less glaring. Why should night glare and day time industry under the same manufactured stars be deceptively natural sky or cave of illumination in this late twentieth-century age?

The walls of the factory seemed sharper somehow, greyer somehow, to Masters’ Lazarus’ eyes. They seemed composed of slices and excavations, raw material blood that was white or grey not red, sliced pallor of noon, real noon (whatever that was), artificial noon (whatever that was).

It was this elusive distinction between noon as universal artifice and sliced bread of reality that sobered the Carnival dead king Masters — if he needed sobering at all — and drew him to perceive how close his shadow was to all industrial revolutions, ghost towns, ghost factories, ghost cradles, all hollows, all realms, within the emotion of transplanted arousal of spirit.

Double arousal. Transplant. Resurrection.

It was a liberation yet a burden, transplant/resurrection. He perceived the sadness of a world that was resourceful yet deprived, he perceived the roots of aching memory, the cave, the nursery fable that the dead bring on their backs to be patented anew in Santa Claus commercials, the study, the skin transplants of Christmas, the masks, the oddest commotion in aroused blood, the humour of lust, as workers idled a little and contemplated their coming holiday.

It was the objectivity of Lazarus-spirit, yes, but in the reanimation of mystical organs, it evoked vistas of shocking illusion, shocking power to be all things to all men, power to deceive the corruptible with the corruption of magic. “Oh mind of Lazarus,” said Masters, “what a temptation it is: to see through all things, all peoples, to rule with the power of the grave.”

He looked across the apparently real, the apparently artificial light of noon and waved to one of the West Indians he had come to see. He had cultivated a good accord with the two operators of Madame Guillotine but was astonished — despite his insight into the powers he now possessed — when Jackson, the older operator, rushed across tempestuously to greet him, to seize his magnetic Lazarus hand, and to shake it staunchly with a great demonstration of affection. Affection? No, something else. It was awe, I dreamt. Expectation of wonders. “I sorry James ain’t here to greet you, Everyman,” Jackson cried, “he had a narrow shave. Lucky devil! He swears your magic did the trick, that you pulled him back from the pit.”

“Me?” Masters felt his misgivings were being confirmed. “What did I do?” He smiled secretly, self-mockingly, with sudden pleasure that enormous as his powers appeared to be he was helpless in this instant and could not see into Jackson’s mind and read the tale of James whom he (Masters) — it would seem — had pulled back from the pit. Jackson was having a late tea break close to noon and he drew Masters to a table. “You gave him some damn frozen bubble to wear on his chest, remember?”

Masters had forgotten. “Did I?” then he remembered. “Something from Waterfall Oracle, shaped like a horse?”

“Horse, yes, he was driving home on the highway and dropped off into a doze at the wheel. When he wake he was in a kind of ravine, at the bottom of an embankment. The car lay on its back.”

“Good god,” said Masters. “I see it, yes I do.”

“Not a scratch. Sound as an unbroken egg. He was clutching the bubble horse. It had saved him. He remembered the dream he had had the moment he fell asleep. You were there, it was a river, you were a huge bubbling horse under the car. The rapids of history. He was about to topple into a pit. But you kept the car on your back. He saw your face through the windshield. You broke the fall, you broke the rapids. You let the car down softly though it had overturned. You saved him. What a Christmas gift!”

“A dream,” Masters murmured. “Just a dream. I am no magician.”

Jackson chuckled. “Ask James for his wife and he would consent, Everyman. The way he talk when I see him last night! He find religion in a dream. It was real. He would fall down now and worship you, Masters, more than he love Madame Guillotine who fill his pay-packet when the week end. And that say a hell of a lot.”

Masters could not help smiling again and this partially broke the gloom that encrusted him, encrusted his mind, the mind of Lazarus. “Tell James,” he said softly, “to remember he’s no puppet.”

Jackson was puzzled. “Puppet? What do you mean?”

Masters did not reply. What did he mean I wondered? James is a bloody puppet, I said to myself. Did he not …

Jackson waved at a tea lady. “Coffee or tea, Everyman?”

“Coffee, please, milk, sugar.”

If the world knew that Lazarus had returned to the Carnival of history and was eating a prosaic biscuit with Jackson, coffee, milk, sugar, millions of puppets rich and poor, fat and thin, would vote for him. Vote for him, yes, but not because of the genius of love or resurrection. No, through fear. A vote of fear. Puppets of fear. Yes, fear! Fear of the bomb, fear of the grave, perverse hope that he was the ultimate weapon, he would lift the sentence of death from them and they would bounce back, he would lift the sentence of death, if not war or famine or starvation from mankind.

“Masters, what did you mean when you said I must tell James to remember he’s no puppet?”

Masters started. He glanced at me where I stood in the shadow of dream protesting that the cyclist who ran into my father was … He had forgotten what he had said to Jackson. He touched his mask and remembered. “Ah yes,” he said at last, “I meant that James may have been saved by my gift but he had to give something of himself in return. There are two — indeed three and four and many more — sides to the bubble of resurrection.”

I saw he had turned from Jackson and was addressing me. “I could not save your father, Weyl, by reaching back through the bars of time, but he saved me. I enlightened him nevertheless about his pagan body. I sustained his case. I helped him to evolve a little, to move on. That is the function of originality. Unless one brings originality to the resurrection theme it is hollow, it is impotent. I saved James. He liberated me when he jolted my memory. I saw a mere newspaper clipping — a mere clipping I say — but remember it had been fired into originality on his brow.”

I protested. I hated James. “He is a bloody puppet,” I cried. I turned to Jackson. “Tell James, Jackson, he was a lucky devil when Lazarus pulled him from the pit, but I know who he is. He rode my father down in Brickdam. And then he came to the funeral with a wreath. He was filled with fear, I tell you, Lazarus. The wreath was nothing but a hollow crown. He is a bloody puppet, a bloody puppet.”

“Easy, easy, Weyl,” said Lazarus gently. “The distinction between the bloody puppet and the art of freedom cuts deep. So deep our hate resurrects and, as it does, the bloody puppet is as much ourselves as the man or the woman we hate. Freedom should mean freedom from past fear. We have nothing to fear but fear itself in the resurrection of hate. That is the complex stake in all puppet resurrections that torment us, that chasten us in depth, in every aspect of our lives, in every encounter with Memory, every confession we make, every protest, every longing we cultivate or suppress, every chain upon which we dangle that brings us round and round and round again to know ourselves in dreadful part, in complex whole … My dear Weyl, remember my gift to you is the wages of descent into hell/ascent into heaven, every shade of emotion, however bitter, however terrible or sweet, that makes us prize the arts of freedom as originality to revisit the past and not be confounded or conscripted by the sorrows, the waste, the terror of time, partial time, whose biased face is the resurrection of the puppet, whose stranger, unfathomably whole face is the resurrection of life.”

*

Masters left the factory clothed in my resentment still and entered a phase of existence that was haunted by dubious women. Or so it seemed to me — to my jaundiced mind — when I compiled notes upon him in 1958, 1959, and succeeding years. Now — when he addresses me anew as resurrected paradox, dead king — I see everything quite differently. I see their inner significance with sudden perception or shock. Masters the Fourth wore the Carnival mask of Lazarus in a loose characteristic way that overshadowed Masters the Second and Masters the Third in my dream. He came into the money he had been awaiting from the sale of his New Forest properties not long after his encounter with the devil and with James whom he had rescued from the pit and whose wife he was to pursue. Her name was Aimée and she came to see him not long after Masters’ conversation with Jackson and with me.

Even now — within the labyrinth of resurrections that Carnival Lazarus unravels — I find it difficult to describe her. She was a very attractive woman in a curious downbeat fashion. She was listless yet susceptible to faint rhythms of hysteria and animation (the phenomenon of faintness that adorned her apparition within structured non-feeling made her survival or arousal all the more preternaturally vivid). Her faint arousal from a grave of non-feeling incorporated something of the lightning brow of Jane Fisher the Second with whom Masters slept on the day he died in 1982. And that meant that Aimée was also possessed by a resemblance to Jane Fisher the First who stabbed Masters the First in New Forest.

Despite or because of all this Aimée remains a shadowy figure in my mind as I cling to Masters’ chain of existences in the past, in the present, in the future that is also the biased present, the unfulfilled past. Indeed it is this astonishing preternatural light of shadow and time that makes her unique in retrospect. She came to him in an evening veil, post-Inferno, early Purgatory, a new fashion that sold well in Oxford Street. Upset veil. Weeping shawl. Faint abandon. Edged hysteria. Her perception of James’ accident differed in tone from Jackson’s tale. James may have caught religion in dreaming of the horse that saved him but Aimée had caught the downbeat aroma of guilt distilled from flowers and soil. It lay upon Lazarus’ nose and brow like the vestige of a cloud. Slightly vulgar expensive perfume perhaps, slightly mystic. Aimée shopped without economic bother in Resurrection Road. James — as a skilled Madame Guillotine operator — earned a good pay-packet that she supplemented in a nightclub. She swore with a flick of her wrist — so gentle no bones were broken — that she had been responsible for James’ accident.

“He had learnt I was carrying on with another man under Nightbridge,” she said. “That’s the name of my club. I saw he was upset the morning he left. But I thought nothing of it. He was always so quiet, you know, and I felt the cloud would blow over.”

“Is Nightbridge a cloud that blows over?” asked Lazarus.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t be mean to me. We need to deceive each other a little, some of the time if not all of the time, don’t we? I’ve come to you because he thinks the world of you and he’s changed and I’m worried he may do something bad to himself.”

She was weeping, half-genuine guilt, half-stifled, ominous pleasure. He passed a handkerchief to her. She dabbed her eyes. Her features were a mixture, a paradox. Fragile, eggshell solid, exotic ghost, natural but artificial body, the strip-tease of the soul that made her a great success when she danced in the Club Nightbridge.

“What do you think I should do, Lazarus?”

Lazarus looked intently at her. “The accident,” he said softly, “happened in the late afternoon when James was driving back home. Not in the morning when he left you. Is it not possible that something else, someone else, not you, Aimée, was on his mind?”

“He was brooding all day,” she protested, “all day. It was me. He’s a careful driver. He drives so smoothly I could stand on the bonnet of his car and be safe. I could dance …”

“I know you can,” said Lazarus.

“It’s ridiculous but he says if he hadn’t dreamt of you at the last moment he would have died. What about me? Suppose I had been sitting next to him, and I had dozed off too, would I have lived?”

“You would have danced with me,” said Lazarus, “on Nightbridge stage. I am the grave’s living understudy. I could take the place of your lover. James wouldn’t mind.”

Aimée had not heard Lazarus’ response which was spoken under his breath. She cried, “And that’s why I have come to see you, Lazarus, in case James spake of me to you. I need help.”

Lazarus looked at her even more intently. He saw beyond lucid dream that she was worried about James. And yet there was something else she desired, something that infiltrated her guilt. Was it that James’ sudden accidental death would have freed her, would have been a legacy to her to construct his epitaph in dance and to bring her Nightbridge lover home? Would it have given her, James’ death, the impulse to dance with greater mourning/ecstatic abandon than ever before?

To care for a loved one, yet desire his death, is nothing new. Her guilty desire to see James dead was true but — if anything — it strengthened the bond between them. She needed him. She needed him to fill a dual hole in her affections. She needed him sometimes fictionally dead, concretely alive, sometimes concretely dead, fictionally alive. The knowledge of his presence at home or at work — performing the daily, the nightly chores — gave spice to her Nightbridge affair. The deception she practised prepared her for the greatest figure, the greatest dance, she would ever perform with the grave’s living understudy.

“Look, Aimée,” Lazarus said at last, “I assure you there’s no need to feel guilty about James. He’s a quiet customer, as you know, and I know from something he confided to me in the factory …” he hesitated then plunged on, “that he was having an affair with another woman.”

“Another woman?” Her eyes were incredulous. Lazarus had stunned her. It was the first cue she received in respect of the coming dance.

“Yes, yes, you see it was not just you he was upset over. There was another woman! She threatened to leave him. She wanted a car and though his pay was good he couldn’t manage that. He hadn’t yet paid for his own car. He showered her with gifts but she said no. Time to draw the curtains on their little act. On the day of the accident she left him for good. He was upset, yes, and if he’s downhearted now it’s because he’s sober. One can be quiet as hell and still drunk inside. Some quiet people commit some terrible crimes! James is sober now. Not just quiet. He’s fasting. His stomach aches. He survived but he knows what death is. No more cannibal promiscuity if death sobers one, mind you, it isn’t always the case, death is also a heady champagne, ask any fast driver. James is truly sober now. No more cannibal promiscuity, each intent on eating the other’s wages of body and soul.”

Lazarus sought to lessen the shock of the disclosure of the other woman by rambling on a bit about sobriety, the difficult achievement of sobriety in a world that was drunk. He tried to hold her steady but nothing could dispel the naked faint profligate distress in Aimée’s staring eyes. The dance had begun. She sat in the car beside James and the frame of mutual deception they had played on each other for years unfolded in a flash as the car toppled.

She danced to the rhythm of the accident, she was drawn into a striptease of soul on the bonnet of the car upon Nightbridge stage. Lazarus also danced. He saw himself mirrored in her open faint eyes, trembling lips, astonished brow, as she lay crumpled beneath the embankment against the road. What a dance! Aimée sprang up.

Lazarus saw her eyes again, dark as hair yet segmented with the minuscule bars of a ladder, crossed by stars. She swayed before him on the brink of the wheel of the car on Nightbridge stage. The car was dressed with red ribbons. Advertising gimmick in a garage! (Aimée received an additional fee for this.) Car for sale on Nightbridge! Her lips were parted in a faint gleam to kiss a blade of grass and an autumn leaf descending upon the stage and falling beside the parapet or embankment or road. Her brows invited him, repulsed him. Climax. Anti-climax.

And then in a flash she was clothed again on the stage beside the living understudy of the grave. The wreck of the car had vanished into a mist. (I recalled the faint mist standing over my mother’s eyes at Masters’ window above the East Street garden on the day of my father’s funeral.) But in the interval — between the mist of the dance and the dancer’s quiescence on the stage — several orgasmic or climactic ghosts moved with Lazarus. They reflected a series of involuntary climaxes or relief, stilled rain upon fallen bodies. She was free of James, wasn’t she, he was free of her, wasn’t he? Let them go their separate ways, she said to Carnival Lazarus, into Purgatory or into hell or anywhere else on Resurrection Road. The shops were still there, food was still there, records, newspapers. Why should she be guilty of anything? Why should he be upset over her? But she knew in her heart of hearts she was guilty. She also knew she wanted him to be upset over her. Damn the other woman! “I want him to brood upon me, me, Aimée. Upset over me …” The climax of relief therefore — the climax of separation, that they were free to go their separate ways — was a deception. She knew it was. Lazarus knew it was. He held her close and offered himself to her in place of her Nightbridge lover. He (Lazarus) was the living understudy of the grave. He understudied the deceptions that men played upon women, women upon men, in every resurrection of hate or jealousy, vanity or love.

He understudied the frames of mutual deception that broke in a flash within the mirror of the dance of life. He understudied illusory male bodies in women’s arms in parallel with illusory female bodies in men’s arms through Nightbridge lovers or Nightbridge rehearsals of dual, multiple climax.

“I love James,” she said to Lazarus.

“Is it vanity then,” asked Lazarus, pondering his own lines in the Nightbridge play, “is it vanity, or love, that is hurt, that fractures, when you learn that the one you thought you possessed to brood upon you is possessed by another and broods upon another? Is vanity the root of outraged love?”

“Vanity!” she almost shouted. “Oh my god! I tell you I love him. Don’t you understand?” And Lazarus saw he had hurt her deeply. He had wounded her so deeply I felt her anguish as if it were mine and Amaryllis’s. We were both angry. The dream is no respecter of persons. Lazarus had been, to say the least, tactless. He had taken her into his arms to soothe her distress, then he had turned upon her and accused her of vanity, of feeding upon a splintered faint mirror of multiple bodies to achieve an orgasm. Even Lazarus should mind his own business. Not probe, not question, the vanity of men and women who make love!

Lazarus’ disturbing mirrors, fractions of which lingered in my senses, and Amaryllis’s senses, shifted the gears of personality — at the instant of Aimée’s Nightbridge dance with him — from first to third or fourth dream-person upon the bonnet of the red-ribboned car as if to bring an echo of formidable ecstatic trinity, ecstatic quaternity, into play within multifarious suffering vehicles and bodies in the air, on the sea, upon the Earth. And thus in the dance, despite its deceptions, its schizophrenias, there lurked a nucleus of considerable originality, shared hells, shared heavens, shared self-confessions, shared divinities as well as daemons, shared resurrections as well as orgies, shared vanity so close to authentic affection that the distinction sometimes faded but remained nevertheless to help us define fractions of genuine love, fractions of genuine care, and the mystery of truth.

*

The blow to a universe of vanity that coats ambiguous lovers was a stratagem upon which Masters drew in the mask of Lazarus to gain some knowledge of the whereabouts of the mysterious overseer who had caused his first death in New Forest when he had been mistaken for him by Jane Fisher the First. Aimée and other women in Resurrection Road — who courted a fiction of double lives — might well lead him, he calculated, to seize the devil whose wound he carried and whose guilt he bore. It was a guideline, a dream-chain, to which I clung with immense fascination.

In understudying a sophisticated Nightbridge dancer — whose object in part was to provide a medium of exotic romance, exotic colour upon the ordinary, prosaic bodies of the common-or-garden husbands of bored women — Masters pursued a motif, however slender, that mirrored the privileged overseer who had slept with, and cruelly deceived, Jane Fisher the First. Had not he (Masters himself) profited from such privileges exercised and enjoyed by plantation kings and overseers? In sleeping with the women of the estate, the overseer gave an extra glitter, an extra glory, to the banality of intercourse between buried workers, clerks, even politicians, and their wives. Who, after all, could equal the glamour of a prince?

Who better therefore than he, masked as Lazarus, to understudy Aimée’s Nightbridge lover? Where better than Carnival Nightbridge to glean information about a character one seeks to confront beyond life and death with the injustices with which one has been saddled in life and which were the occasion of one’s first death, a character whose blood runs in one’s privileged Lazarus-veins of memory?

Masters, dressed to play his part, proceeded to Nightbridge Club to dance with Aimée. He rang the bell but had some difficulty at first in gaining admittance. Aimée came to the door and told the doorman that the resurrected king was foul and persona non grata.

“I hope your damn heart bust open again, Lazarus,” she said. “That will teach you the difference between vanity and love.”

He was on the point of leaving when a figure in a great winter overcoat — rich as a fur coat — spoke to the doorman. (Fur coat, I dreamt — where had I seen it or something like it before? Had it not lain on the floor of Masters’ bedroom that day in 1982 when he died at the hand of an unknown assailant in the wake of Jane Fisher the Second?) Lazarus did not see his face in the night but in point of obscure fact I knew that this was the closest Masters was to come to the sovereign daemon of an overseer who long ago had borrowed his face in New Forest. The doorman was instantly agreeable. “Mr Lazarus,” he said, “it’s okay. The play’s started. It started the moment you rang the bell.”

“But Aimée refused …”

“Someone higher than Aimée or anybody else in this club say it’s okay, sir. So it’s okay.”

“Do you mean …”

“The same.”

Masters instantly looked around for his mysterious benefactor but he had vanished in a Soho side street. “I missed him,” he cried. “Oh god, so close yet so far.”

The doorman held Masters and pulled him in. Lazarus was reluctant yet glad to enter the club. It was a chill evening outside. Through a crack in the door he could see — fifty yards or so away — the gleam of a street-light upon the bare arm of a tree. Beneath it the cloth of night had been cut into a square. And beyond the square a church tower loomed black and still. Masters shed his coat and passed it to a young woman with a red ribbon in her hair. He settled at a table inside and ordered a whisky. In a flash — as if a subtle torch had flared or signal been given — the curtains over the stage were up and Masters beheld a winding stairway that rose into heaven. It was a replica, he thought, of the ladder or gate through which Aunt Alice Bartleby had looked down on earth. Aimée now appeared with her dancing partner. They were still, as if frozen, while someone made an announcement to the effect that the real dancer, Aimée’s true partner, was ill and an understudy would perform the part.

“Understudy!” Masters cried with impatience, with confusion, but his voice was lost in the music. He felt cheated. Who was this new understudy who took not only the place of the “real or true dancer” but his (Masters’) place as well? He was exactly the same build, the same height, as Masters. Masters half-rose from the table to leave the club, then sat down again. The path to the door was blocked. His heart was beating fast with sudden anger. My heart was beating fast. I had anticipated another dance between Masters and Aimée in succession to the one he had performed with her on the red-ribboned car. But the cue that the mysterious overseer had delivered at the Nightbridge door had changed the rhythm of Carnival theatre into a form I had not anticipated.

The dance or play now revolved around a core of creative anger in lieu of vanity, genuine creative anger that sometimes runs close to fierce love or fierce hate to offset the illusion of vanity.

It was the dance of purgation through creative anger in which Aimée was now involved and though Masters was not with her on the actual stairway into the stars on Nightbridge stage I suddenly saw how profoundly he was involved in the play, in the dance of anger.

All at once the dance enlisted great heaps of soil piled high at the foot of the stairway. These vibrated. A series of dancing mudheads, freshly risen puppets-Lazarus, appeared. They sprang from the stage on to the floor where Masters sat. They occupied tables there. They formed a great circle around him. And as I stared at them closely I remembered Masters’ distinction between bloody puppets and the art of freedom.

Yes, they were bloody puppets. It was a subtle comedy. They were dead, however active, triggered by strings, manipulated. Masters was alive. Alive? Risen? Yes, I dreamt that he was alive, that he was risen from the humus of a civilization. His anger was real. That was my only proof that he had risen. He had come to the club to seize … Seize whom? The mysterious overseer. Yes, but there was more to it than that. He had come to seize a slender motif, an inner vein, an inner artery in that overseer, an inner current within the wound he carried, a wound that really belonged to the other. His anger was therapy, the therapy of justice he needed to create within his own being through the other.

He might never see his enemy — the enemy — face to face, deceptive face within deceptive face, but the originality of therapeutic anger, therapeutic blood rather than bloody puppets was a form of seizure to withstand every ape of the resurrection.

Even as I perceived this, I also perceived that Aimée’s anger, her resentment at the injustice of being labelled vain and hollow, was equally potent. Lazarus — the risen, alive Lazarus rather than puppets-Lazarus — had aroused her. Not that she was beyond the hysteria of manipulated being but her anger was so real that an original transfusion of justice possessed her. I saw those faint wonderful eyes of hers. The languor of her limbs, her faint arms, reached out not only to the immediate dancer on the stairway but towards the puppets-Lazarus on the floor or pit of the theatre. That reach endorsed her outer gaze on the edge of manipulated being. But her inner faint body glanced at Masters as well with the rage of longing, with the certainty of the genius of love, the genius of vocation within her blood, true blood not bloody puppet. She was a dancer of freedom’s cousinship to epitaphs of fate.

I held Amaryllis close. I knew. And yet … I could not be sure. Aimée was no puppet but I wondered whether the flick of a die on the stairway might tighten the strings around her and about us and change the batteries of anger in the theatre of the world into a strike at humanity that would ape our rage, our longing, our tenderness, and lose the therapeutic originality of inner justice, inner transfusion, inner blood born of transformative organs of power and lust.

A flood of music swept the theatre and lifted Aimée into the sky upon the stairway of Nightbridge, into the arms of the dancer who resembled the overseer of god.

“There is anger and anger,” Masters cried to the dancer with his own body on the stairway of god. “I know the limits of anger. I have ruled and served, have commanded labour and been a labourer myself, have stood high and stood low.”

“Never high enough, never low enough,” said the terrible dancer. “And that is why we deceive ourselves. We project ourselves into the stars but fall far short of the mind, the original mind of angry creation, angry for justice. We project ourselves into the grave but fall far short of the original sobriety, the original seed of the spirit of life. Never high enough to mind, never low enough to original humility, original spirit.”

I saw that the mask of Lazarus had slipped a little from Masters’ face and that it floated between Amaryllis and me. “Is this your gift?” I cried to him, “the gift of true fiction, the gift of the understudy, the living understudy of heights we have not yet achieved and depths we have not yet plumbed? Is this your gift, Masters?”

*

An impulse of obscure anger wrecked Nightbridge Club in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Someone tossed a cigarette end into an accumulation of puppet-rags, a fire blazed, the building was gutted. The stage or stairway on which Aimée had danced shot up virtually uncharred in a charred shell of a building. It was curious and bizarre.

I gained the impression that the stairway or ladder was an intact piece of dream-theatre. The uncharred stage of hell or heaven was a curious rocket. Ribbons of fire had played around it but left it intact. Ribbons of fire! Bonnets of fire! I recalled the car on which Aimée had danced. That car was now a wreck, a mere cinder in Nightbridge. But the stairway-rocket was its uncharred vehicular counterpart, its uncharred vehicular understudy in Nightbridge space. How extraordinary that a proud rocket should understudy a humble motorcar!

Extraordinary, yes, but it helped me to distinguish between fire and fire, the fire that reduces a car to cinders, the fire that hesitates to overwhelm a stairway into the stars, or a rocket into outer space, as if to imply that the resources of creative anger were such that they needed to align themselves with avant-garde technology in resurrection theatre in order to highlight the dangers to humanity, the dangerous, virtually impossible, stairway it would need to climb if traffic on Earth ceased forever.

That core of paradoxical anger — that leaves intact a pattern of access into the heights and into the depths upon Aimée’s stairway — drew me back to Crocodile Bridge in New Forest. There I had witnessed the resources of confused anger in coal pot fires and in the eyes of a living dinosaur aroused from its grave in a canal.

There I had also witnessed Masters’ resurrection from fire and the seed of anger, the seed of the wound, he inherited.

It was Carnival 1957. It was the evening when Masters visited the fisherman’s wife. I was possessed by foreboding and decided to drive to Crocodile Bridge. As I stood there I saw a tongue of lightning strike the roof of the fisherman’s cave. I raced to the scene to find Everyman collapsed in the mouth of cannon in which the workers lived. He had succeeded in crawling out of bed. Naked as he was, lying unconscious, he epitomized miraculous flesh-and-blood ammunition that had been fired, but had escaped being burnt alive. It was a singular distinction between puppet human tyrant rocketed into the depths of plantation space and unconscious human survivor in the mouth of cannon.

In point of fact the fisherman and his wife Jane, after inflicting the wound on the overseer, had vanished in alarm at the strange angry fire that had consumed the roof of the cave but had hesitated, it seemed, to descend. And indeed it was only when I had pulled Everyman from the rocket-cannon that the fire descended in my dream and consumed the rest of the cave.

In contrast to the depths into which Masters had been fired, the uncharred ladder in Soho ascended into the sky. I became conscious of a figure at a blackboard sketching the outer shell of Nightbridge and the intact inner stairway on which Aimée had danced.

It was an early spring morning when I visited the scene of the fire, the shell of Nightbridge. The light air and the music of space shone everywhere despite the busy river of Oxford Street that I had left behind to draw close to the backwater square near Nightbridge.

That the music of space shone was a nervous vibration and fire I had long accepted. I tended to explain it to myself as the phenomenon of the “understudy” that resides in one’s blood.

With each lucid dream I appeared to stand outside of myself, to understudy a self akin to myself yet other than myself. In short I knew Amaryllis and I were involved in a series of infinite rehearsals, infinite in material but true (however elusive), unswerving (however paradoxical) in spiritual mind.

The music of space was conducted by an understudy whose passion lit a flame of response in one’s being. And it seemed to me that I conducted the inner, ecstatic, silent orchestra of light and sprung leaves everywhere except for a fiery moment of release from such hubristic self-identification when the superior “I” seemed to recede, the supreme “I” I thought I was moved into the distance, and in fact I (shrunken me) was conscious of lapsed places, lapsed times, through which understudy/understudies moved.

In becoming “shrunken me”, I saw the lapsed places, the lapsed times achieve the mystery of intact reality. It was as if the supreme “I” that was fading into the distance bestowed upon “shrunken me” a fantastic inner gift. Something or someone (whatever or whoever it was) remained unbroken, intact, in material absurdity, spiritual irony. At Nightbridge Club that something was the absurd stage and ladder into the sky. At Crocodile Bridge that someone was the absurd, unburnt body of Everyman Masters that I — in understudying a fantastic conductor of orchestrated lightnings or science of dreams linking the human person to the heights and the depths of the cosmos — had rescued.

However absurd the uncharred ladder was in a blackened building, however absurd the unburnt king of dreams in the mouth of cannon, they established a link between me and indefatigable understudies of the genius of creation resembling myself but differing from myself to leave the community of the future open to others linked to me but untrammelled in spirit. It was a temptation to dream one was utterly close at points, places, instants of being, to absolute bliss, absolute terror, in creator and creation. But the fact that creation broke into halves, namely, absolute bliss/absolute terror, love/hate, beauty/dread (or whatever Carnival dualities one perceived) was a manifestation of unbroken but untouchable wonder, intact but unstructured mystery (within fractions of material, elusive, concrete destiny), through intricate understudies in mutual reality, omnipresent reality, that glowed at one’s fingertips, in one’s blood, only to fade but never die in visible reflections and in music that shone, never sounded.

I had drawn close to the figure at the blackboard and easel which were peculiarly familiar to me. He stood at the edge of the street and sketched for an invisible class of twentieth-century students the shell and the intact stairway of Nightbridge Club. I suddenly knew him. Antipodean man. Delph! An old man now. He had been sacked — you may recall, gentle reader — from New Forest College in the 1930s and had come to London instead of returning to Australia.

Yes, it was he. Poor Oracle! He was unshaven. His hair was bleached snow. My father’s lawyer’s wig! Within a shadow and a doubt, it was he. Could one be dogmatically certain about the masquerade of the soul, the shadows and lights and investitures of the soul? I studied the blackboard. He did not appear to mind. In one corner he had listed the following: Lazarus character-masks (puppet and truly risen). Aimée. Rocket. Car. Crocodile Bridge. Then he had written beneath: make up a story containing all these. But what held my eyes even more were the sketches-within-sketches that I perceived.

A kind of far viewing. That was what Delph was up to. He sketched places he had never seen, distant places around the globe. Some I did not know. Others I recognized. He saw through the shell of Nightbridge into Crocodile Bridge into a fisherman’s cave into the music of spring that gave to all these the dazzle of rhythmic responses one to the other, through yet beyond the given senses of purely possessive touch, purely possessive hearing, possessive smell, possessive taste.

I stared as Delph sketched oblivious of me, I thought, until we were both immersed in intimate yet far viewing. He could not, or was disinclined, to explain to me the moral and the meaning of such far viewing, but I suddenly saw that moral almost precipitately, excitedly, as if I had climbed into space with him, in the ceaseless understudies of a universal fathomless actor to whom belonged every spiritual vocation or role, every spiritual stage, that we invoked with partial grasp but inimitable originality. I saw the absurd constancy of the theatre of the globe, absurd comedy of intercourse between multi-faceted rehearsed place, or rehearsed theatres of place — overlapping textures of graspable, ungraspable place — and the genius of creation.

Was far viewing an invisible fire that ran along the mind’s contours through lapses and intricacies of universal place? For despite the measure of intact royalty and place, the clues on the blackboard were sometimes elusive and convoluted as if the fire of the mind in an unburnt place, an unbroken king of dreams, possessed no illusions about the fire of self-destructive order and warned us again — as music without voice or instrument had done before — of the hubris of self-identification with an absolute idol or creator, absolute evil, absolute good, that we appropriate into our institutions and project upon others. I saw that intact being, intact survival, was a curious joy but also a terrible warning, a paradox, a shattering of complacency.

I saw myself in Delph’s sketches standing upon a burning schooner. Where was this, when was this? I had forgotten, I was astonished, as if I were looking at someone else in a place I had never known. As a general perhaps returns to a battlefield long years after and finds it exactly as in the moment the guns cease firing, intact dead, intact flowers on blackened trees, and is horrified to see a face resembling his but alien in expression and manner. As a saint sees himself martyred all over again, sees a bottle of untouched wine in a shop window across the street, and is unable to believe it is he in whom such an unbearable thirst exists. I caught my breath at last. I was the half-puppet, half-living human bread Delph drew on the blackboard, bread and wine; I had been broken/spilt in all these, broken and spilt yet unknown, intact puppet captain of ships, broken and spilt yet puppet general of armies, broken and spilt yet puppet saint of Christendom. Puppet trinity of empires.

Yes, of course, the Market-place! The czar of New Forest! What clues Carnival provided on Delph’s blackboard to jolt one’s memory into living philosophy, living fiction! Had not Thomas and the marble woman arrived on the day of the capsized eggs in East Street to find the schooner, a smoking hull, moored to pier or Stelling, and traces of a pall of smoke still lingering in the air over New Forest? Whose martyrdom, whose ship, whose battlefield did they perceive at that moment, intimate place, far viewing, in the Carnival of history? It was as if I saw the puppet nature of cosmic time, puppet histories, puppet pasts, puppet presents, puppet futures, all affecting each other, so that the puppet future bore upon the puppet past — puppet bore upon puppet — to modify all totalities or apparent finalities of event in a shrunken humanity that was aroused to see how small it was yet capable of charting a distinction between apehood or puppetry of soul and true self-reflective immortal spark of fiction.

I (shrunken me) bore upon the puppet trinity of empires. I saw the core within that trinity in Delph’s sketches, untainted core, unblemished core, within the burning schooner, within the burnt schooner, as I had seen uncharred stairway, resurrected king in the mouth of cannon, intact flower on a blasted tree, untouched and bottled wine.

What was this core that Delph seemed so intent on sketching into play? Was it a kind of vegetable, human, architectural black box, was it a cosmic flower ticking with the voices of seed? Did one have to dig within schooners and crashed aeroplanes, trains and coffins, to find a messenger, intact, mysterious, miniaturized technology, miniaturized seed of the tree of space?

Delph’s purgatorial humour of translated puppets into living fiction in parallel with resurrected spirit deepened my curiosity. FEUD. That was it! The core Mr Delph sketched reminded me of the intact equation with glory — intact mystery of beauty — I had seen before but in shattering my complacency on the deck of the burning schooner it became a message of feud. I knew I needed to translate that message again and again, and the tension between such parallels — intact glory and feud — drew me back to masked feud in concert with — in conflict with — the thirsts of holy men.

Mr Delph turned to me. I saw he pitied me. He seemed suddenly outrageously youthful, outrageously sober, despite his unshaven mask and Antipodean smile. Sober geography master’s blood! Sober Mr Quabbas’s blood! Delphic thirst of the holy oracle. He spoke a little pontifically but journalistically like a good schoolmaster-oracle with his tongue in his chalk.

“Put it all down to trade,” he said, erasing a touch of chalk with a touch of spit. It made a smudge or scar on his lips as if he had dipped into a sugar bowl of rice. “Put it all down to bitter-sweet trade.”

“Trade!” I was outraged. He was poking sober chalk at me.

“Trade is one translation, Weyl, of the message of feud. A simple one, I grant, but people want simple answers, don’t they? So let’s be simple. Chalk, rice, sugar,” he said. “Oil, diamonds, you name it. Mudheads, timberheads. Simplicity’s masks of trade.” He tried to clean simplicity’s lips with a handkerchief but only succeeded in smearing his moustache and cheeks afresh. “That’s how they make me up,” he confided, “when I give a television broadcast in yes and no minister for the oracle of trade. Holy trade! Come, come, Weyl, don’t sulk. Trade is holy, who would deny it, and therefore many holy fires have been lit to maintain old, or secure new, markets.

“There you stand, Weyl — English sobriety and geography lesson combined — on the deck of your burning schooner. You love it, you loathe it, it’s the scene of a holy love affair with peoples, their wealth, their customs, a holy hate affair with power and Ambition. It’s a sea-going church within the middle passage, Inferno and Paradiso. It’s the red, blue moon, all tides, all pigmentations, it’s holy crime.”

“There are no churches on the moon,” I said sullenly. He stopped sketching for a moment and looked at me.

“But there will be,” he said, “sooner or later. There will be supermarket churches on the backside of the moon.”

FEUD IN PARALLEL WITH INTACT GLORY IS THE WOMB OF METAPHORS OF SPIRIT.

“Take the holy man, the martyr you saw upon the blackboard of space. He thirsted for wine of an imported Earth-variety. He saw a bottle he desired in a moon shop across from the supermarket church.” Mr Delph’s mask had slipped a little and he was laughing yet grave, utterly grave. It was the strangest sensation. Comedy of martyrdoms on the moon when humanity emigrates into outer space? “The wine was a signal of ordeal, conflict, that he endured. Was he being tempted, or manipulated even then, in his pain, to sell his soul to feuding moon merchants, space captains, feuding Vega field-marshals, generals, who bottle new wine in bulletproof lunar glass?

“Such a bottling is hell, my dear Weyl, but the thirst for truth, for intact glory, remains. Thirst — translated into inner trade between body and spirit — is the womb of fire from which Everyman arises. Thirst is the womb of justice, foetal sponge and human affinity to god that we project into the drought of space. Thirst — translated into inner/outer space famine — is the urgency of grain here on earth. Thirst is the palate of inner earth sacrifice, inner earth revolution, in parallel with absurd supermarket churches and martyrdoms on the moon. We trade with absurdities, my dear Weyl, infinities, distant planets, distant satellites, new-found constellations, galaxies — why do we do it? So that we may come home to ourselves at last, who knows, in every far viewing, intimate self-judgement and moment of truth.”

*

Mr Delph’s blackboard of space, into which he had sketched us, turned from the relic of spring in bridges of fire, to the relic of summer in mutual bridges of ocean. Each relic faced the other yet turned at a slight tangent away from the spiralling coil of the other into the ground-swell of numinous bodies.

Amaryllis and I perceived ourselves once more in the core-cathedral in which we had celebrated Easter with Masters in New Forest before Amaryllis left for Europe. (It had been rumoured that her ship had been sunk by a German submarine in the summer of 1940.)

It was Good Friday when we knelt in the cathedral. My memories, or Mr Delph’s far sketches, were an imperfect wave of recollection. And yet such imperfection seemed now to embody a moment of resistance in ourselves against the ritual crucifixion of love year after year, peace after peace, war after war. The cathedral subsided into the sea in which I had dreamt Amaryllis’s ship had been hit by a torpedo. From within the sea where I lay with her we observed holiday-makers lying on the beaches around us above the ocean wave that was littered with the epitaph of many seasons. We were suddenly uplifted towards them like fluid bone wreathed in stars and leaves to pipe the sweetest saddest music into the absent-minded reverie of lovers. Our bone became flesh. Nibbled bone under the sea, kissed bone, fleshed wave of bone, core-artefact, cross-artefact, of summer blending into autumn flesh, bone under star, under leaf, under flesh, all graves, all cradles of mankind. And despite the passivity, the resignation, of summer’s and autumn’s beached populations, a subtle resistance to the perpetual murder of species in a chain of existences linked to our Easter pulse flitted through the ocean wave and dashed within and against the cathedral of space in which we dwelt under the sea and in risen bone upon the land.

In the arousal of the bone in a wave of flesh lay the strategy of resurrected mind, a rendezvous with resistance movements. I recalled now — with sudden sharpness — the childlike sensation I had had that my father lay in the Trojan Horse of Christ: it was a deep-seated obsession that never left me in the years that followed. It confirmed itself in the core of every summer wave, autumn penetration, in my union with Amaryllis, a union that embodied the mane of oceans upon which we rode, mane of rivers, continents, islands. Mane of sorrow. Mane of gladness.

*

Spring and summer moons had gone and autumn was upon us at last. As though in Mr Delph’s imperfect oceanic sketches Amaryllis and I glimpsed ourselves as we would look, or dress, at the turn of the century. Once again we floated on the mane of time, fashionable or unfashionable bone clad in fashionable or unfashionable flesh. We had discarded not just youth but fabrications of youth, the disguises of old age.

“Resist the seductive death-wish. Cultivate the sober life-wish wherever you happen to be in outer space or under the tides of the moon. Weigh the tyrannies of sex in ageing puppets fascinated with the rejuvenation of the ape of the human body. Weigh nostalgic old age and foetal ambition. Weigh all these to unravel tyranny, to unravel the humour of the birth-wish, the humour of fertility that translates lust into imagination’s harvest. Ploughing, reaping, cultivating, enfolding, embracing, infinite rapture of soil and water and light and darkness that glows in the body of the mind, not as nostalgic puppetries of helpless desire (helpless desiring, helpless desired, and pathos of rape) but as illumined senses in non-senses beyond apparently inevitable fate, apparently inevitable death.”

Masters’ voice in Delph, Delph in Masters, faded. The oceanic curtain of Carnival theatre began to fall. I saw the red-ribboned car upon which Aimée danced. It had been repainted a glowing yellow in the depths of the sea. Glowing, deceptive yellow. It was a spring moon 1983 (or was it 2083?) and we could barely discern it through the mane of the waters. Masters thrust me into the driver’s seat of the inner-coated, red-ribboned, visibly yellow moon-car. I had been drawn aloft to the topmost rung of Alice’s fluid ladder where the sun and the moon are possessed of many intimate, open colours but upon finding myself thrust almost unceremoniously by the dead king into the car, I was astonished to find that the stage on which it stood, adjoining the ladder, seemed to melt into space; the great car descended like a feather. It floated in the air and the tide until it bumped gently upon the ground, a huge rectangular balloon upon wheels and springs. I was safe in the balloon and on gently releasing the gears it moved forward in Addison Road where Amaryllis and I lived in our ocean wave.

It was then, only then, that I knew I had seen the last of my guide and that Amaryllis was seated beside me with a child in her arms.

It had been raining but the rain had ceased as the feather, the balloon of a car moved. The windscreen was covered by the faintest waves that glistened with tears of shadow. Everyman and I had come a long way around the comedy of the globe and I attempted to peer up into the spatial ladder to see if I could perceive him again anywhere at all between the vanished stage and the ground on which we drove. But nothing, no one, could be seen. Alice’s fluid gate had vanished. Mr Delph had vanished. All I could fathom was a rainswept world lit by the memory of bridges of ocean, masks, dances, Waterfall Oracle, arising and painting the great city of London that Amaryllis and I knew in our hearts.

I touched Amaryllis and the child beneath the wave and the rain on the curtain of Carnival. The car was a measure of Masters’ wedding gift to us twenty-five years after we were married. Despite its red inner coat and yellow moon paint, it was a cinder, a luminous cinder light as a feather, marvellous as a balloon, the slenderest inflatable, deflatable motif of crossed bridges, burning yet intact, bridges of fire, bridges of ocean, bridges of earth; the bridges and wages of ascent and descent upon which I dreamt we had been led by the master spirit who had been our guide.

“She says she will breast-feed the child,” Amaryllis said suddenly. It was Jane Fisher’s child! Not Jane Fisher the First, the fisherman’s wife, who lived several blocks away (not dreadfully far from Jane Fisher the Second) beneath the wave into which we had charted not only the core of the bone and the cinder of the sun but the core of maps, the core of streets, cities half-forgotten, half-remembered, great cities, small cities, townships, market-places around the globe’s balloon.

“Jane Fisher the First would have killed him,” I said, “after she lost the child, the mysterious overseer’s child.”

“Why do you call your character-masks first and second and third and fourth and so on as if they are the Carnival kings and queens of vanished times?” Amaryllis was poking fun at me with the bone of her finger that shone like the faintest dagger under the sea. She gave me a sharp stab. I felt I had been miniaturized where the three bridges crossed, fire and earth and water, to re-imagine the cinder of a wound in Masters’ side.

“Tell me, tell me,” Amaryllis insisted.

“Not only vanished times,” I said. “Times of succession as well. Every puppet of disaster moves in parallel with a spark of redemption, the spark of succession.”

“And the spark of pregnancy?”

I was taken aback by the sharp retort.

“Carnival queenship, Carnival kingship, illumine the sacrament of pregnant form in art as in life. She stands,” I pointed to the baby girl in my wife’s arms, “at a point where the three bridges cross. It’s a point of greatest peril and greatest promise. Should she, this child, survive into a new century of mind we may all recover …” I was unable to continue. I felt plagued by subtle doubts. How could I be sure this child was Masters’ child? Jane Fisher the Second’s child, yes! We knew that. We were godparents. We had witnessed the birth in a cave in the sea, dream-cave, dream-sea. Born exactly nine months after the day she had slept with Masters, the day of his second death in the summer of 1982 (or was it 2082?). Time lapses under the sea as it does on the foetal planets around the sun and moon of Vega.

It would be the happiest of coincidences if Jane had conceived for him, if Jane had indeed borne his child, his daughter, the child of a pagan and a Christian master. Both! Pagan and Christian! Such a blend, such profound self-confession, would illumine and redeem, I felt, the cinder of the wound I re-imagined in the globe’s side, it would illumine, I felt, every global fall from colonial plantation into metropolitan factory. It would illumine and redeem, I dreamt, global meaninglessness that stems from fear, the rule of fear, that threatens all, that threatens to abort submarine as well as superstellar civilization.

“Whether she is Masters’ child or not,” said Amaryllis, taking my hand with one of hers and holding the child to her breast with the other, “she runs in parallel with all wasted lives to be redeemed in time. And in that spirit she is his child. She is our child. We killed our parents, remember, in Carnival logic even as they, besieged by fear, fear of a blasted future, were tempted to destroy us. And now in mutual heart, mutual uncertainty across generations, across seas and spaces, as to who is divine parent, who human child, who will parent the future, who inherit the future, we surrender ourselves to each other. The love that moves the sun and the other stars moves us now, my dearest husband, my dearest Jonathan, to respond with originality to each other’s Carnival seas of innocence and guilt, each other’s Carnival lands of subterfuge and truth, and each other’s Carnival skies of blindness and vision.”

THE INFINITE REHEARSAL

FOR MARGARET,

HELEN AND CHRIS

NOTE

W. H. has stolen a march on me and put his name to my fictional autobiography. So be it. I do not intend to sue him for my drowned rights. Call it character licence on his part.

He and I are adversaries, as my book will show, but we share one thing in common, namely, an approach to the ruling concepts of civilization from the other side, from the ruled or apparently eclipsed side in humanity.

Not that my grandfather, my mother Alice, my aunt Miriam, or my close friends Peter and Emma saw themselves as ruled or afflicted subjects of an imperial establishment. And their voices, their plays, their dances and the theatre they created are immanent substance in this book. Yet my grandfather’s Faust (which he wrote or brought to completion in the year I was born) possesses roots as much in the modern age as in the pre-Columbian workshop of the gods and therefore addresses a European myth from a multi-faceted and partly non-European standpoint.

All of which goes to show that my family were profoundly concerned with the original nature of value and spirit and for them there was no final performance to the ‘play of humanity’ or the ‘play of divinity’.

Each apparent finality of performance was itself but a privileged rehearsal pointing to unsuspected facets and the re-emergence of forgotten perspectives in the cross-cultural and the universal imagination.

Robin Redbreast Glass

ONE

Let me begin this fictional autobiography with a confession. The values of a civilization — the hope for a universally just society, for the attainment of the mind and heart of love, the genius of care — are an impossible dream …

I repeat ‘impossible dream’, impossible quest for wholeness. In the same token, however, I know that those values are true and that the impossibility of their achievement nurses, prompts, gives reality to the creative imagination and instils one with profoundest paradox, with insight into the numinous character of all things, all features, all aspects of being.

Indeed I find it essential to trace the burden of value within apparitions that seem virtually irrelevant to moulds of prosperity, the apparition of the numinous scarecrow, the numinous victim, who (or is it which?) secretes himself, herself, itself in our dreams.

It is in the obvious partial being of the scarecrow — half-thing, half-person — dangling between daylight consciousness and the nightfall of civilizations that we sense a light (is it the light of remorse or of self-confession?) which may consume our biases and deposit fabric linking us to the extremities of humanity. For I know that the scum of the world cannot be divorced from myself or from my body in creation.

I know that in unravelling the illusory capture of creation I may still apprehend the obsessional ground of conquest, rehearse its proportions, excavate its consequences, within a play of shadow and light threaded into value; a play that is infinite rehearsal, a play that approaches again and again a sensation of ultimate meaning residing within a deposit of ghosts relating to the conquistadorial body — as well as the victimized body — of new worlds and old worlds, new forests and old forests, new stars and old constellations within the workshop of the gods.

Thus it was that I welcomed Ghost, conquistadorial and victimized Ghost (was (s)he male/female? I could not tell) when it appeared on a beach in Old New Forest (a lofty beach hovering somewhere within south and central and northern Old New Forest) not far from where I earned a subsistence wage as a grave-digger in a library of dreams and a pork-knocker in the sacred wood. I decided to accept IT as male persona and trust that new fragile complications of divinity’s blood would drive me to see the phenomenon I had encountered in the wholeness of a transformative light bearing upon all genders, all animates and inanimates, all masks and vessels in which a spark of ultimate self-recognition flashed … faded … flashed again.

Modern phenomenon or ancient magic? He (Ghost) wore a long, rich plait of hair on the back of his neck. It was covered with glittering salt from the sea and immaculate grime from a comet or from the stars. It was so long and marvellous it could have been the wonderful text of a woman’s hair through which to read the mysterious birth of spirit.

(I need to be as accurate as I can in this fictional autobiography in order to balance uncertainties with a spectre of wholeness that has become the ironic substance of pure science in intercourse nevertheless with the impurities of wisdom and art.)

The graves I dug were libraries of myths of gold, silver, bone within a community of convertible soils and dreams that appeared in my Sleep, the living and the dead, texts of space travel, texts of sea travel, texts of the sacred wood, texts also of descent into the foetus, into the new-born and the unborn, descent into famine, texts that broke a uniform narrative domination by the conquistadores of history in inserting themselves into my book despite the apparent eclipse they endured, despite voicelessness or oblivion.

In regard to my status as a pork-knocker that is easily explained.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door …

When I was short of food I tended to ascend oblivion’s ladder as if it were a fat shoestring to the moon. I scrambled around for a morsel of pork hidden in a pale moon-barrel. I would knock the bottom of the upturned moon-barrel until a splinter of silver roast fell to my feet. In compensation for such largesse from the invisible host of the moon I dreamt of palatial halls and feasts of civilization, feast days, feast nights, of the sacred pork-knocker wood.

I was buried up to my lips in the bounty of hollow moon-roast (the fat shoestring dangling in my eyes) when Ghost appeared out of the sea. He clung to a moon-spade in the pit in which I lay, a sun-paddle as well on the brink of a setting wave, all this and more cemented into the ancient pen or quill of the sun with which I wrote.

Sleep was the terrain of blind/seeing comedy, the terrain of the moon and the setting wave and the sun.

In the wake of Ghost — as he scrambled ashore — lay a great, tall wreck of a ship battered and ribbed and gaping and glistening in the setting sun like a quicksilver goddess’s hatpins in steep, elongated disarray.

Ghost had survived the assault of the sea in discarding his female hat and was emaciated and strange in a suit of gravity’s anti-gravity string; and yet it was the life of the body that struck me (hollow yet inexhaustible body), the mesmeric quality of artery and vein on the moon, on the setting sun, on the black earth of Old New Forest sacred wood.

I was filled with the naïveté of intensest longing and love: was this an apparition of the resurrection of the body?

I saw the new moon like a curved fingernail in the late, afternoon Old New Forest sky. I stared at it with intensity. As if my hollow voyager lost and lost and found again and again had pared it from ancient Homer’s webbed hand with immeasurable Joycean delicacy and drawn it on the sunset sky. Webbed Homeric hand. Impossible human bird. Impossible male, female animal. NIGHT WAS FALLING. My own fingernails were black with earthen light. I had been digging into a library of bone. Ghost approached me through my own pared extremities of Shadow and spoke in a foreign tongue (a mixture of vernaculars it seemed, bawdy verse and waste land poetry). I was baffled. Seeing my difficulty Ghost desisted and ceased to speak. Dumb Ghost. Illiterate Ghost. I was angry with him and with myself. I could not tell whether in playing dumb he wished to take on himself the constellation of a deprived humanity, deprived of dialogue with its innermost and fragile origins and with banished cultures of a half-sacred, half-profane truth. Was Ghost mocking himself or mocking me by taking upon himself the burden of an illiteracy of the imagination that plagued an age bordering Skull in the wake of lost quicksilver beauty and spiritual gold?

Perhaps his quicksilver genius verged upon values that were alien in spiritual substance to crass bounty, crass gold. And yet I knew him and he knew me through sober soil and self-confessing bone. Should I hand him over to the police or to the immigration officers (dressed as great sailors, great admirals) who patrolled this section of beach between the north and the south? Ghost read my thoughts and shook his head.

NIGHT WAS FALLING FAST and I led him up the quaking ground that shook with the impact of the sea into the house in the sacred wood where I lived. A lantern glowed there in the heart of starred bone, starred butterfly. We slept it seemed on the pillow of a wave. I dreamt with the dust of the ocean in my eyes of the coming of dawn. An immigration officer — Frog his name was — arrived at my door and knocked. Frog had the reputation of an inferior Don Juan Ulysses. He was accompanied by one of his painted mistresses, a black, white woman whose name was Calypso. (She belonged to the band of Tiresias Calypsonian Tigers whose fame had spread through many worlds.)

‘Have you laid eyes on any fellow travellers around here, Glass?’ Frog rasped. ‘A blasted ship — pirates I bet from the moon — hit the reef here late afternoon. The reports on my deck or desk speak of one or two swimming ashore on a pin from God’s hat that floated in a sea of hair.’

I shook my head in disbelief. Calypso was humming a famous bawdy ballad — STONE COLD DEAD IN THE MARKET. ‘Don’t play dumb, Glass. Yes or no?’ Frog bellowed. Perhaps I should have said the same to Ghost! ‘Don’t play dumb, Ghost.’ Or perhaps I should have offered him a drop of roast from the dream-barrel of the moon. A drop of roasted blood loosens a ghostly man’s or a ghostly woman’s tongue! A drop of blood truly reflected in the mirror of the self to nourish ancestral conscience may well have unravelled Ghost’s speech when we met, and broken his silence, into words I could have read on the wall of the sunset sky. I had lost my head. I had not fed him. But surely the chance would come again. A chance to knock on the door of the moon again in search of every lost species in the oven of space. A chance to consume with Ghost a splinter of transubstantial creation in every chapel perilous of the heights and the depths …

Frog saw my distraction and faraway look. ‘Say a pork-knocker yes or no,’ he thundered like Admiral Ulysses Baboon. And then as if he too had lost his way and were distracted by untenanted worlds he whispered in my ear, ‘Have you seen the axe fall upon the neck of the Old New Forest sun and moon economies? Has the industrial revolution of the sea given up its unemployed dead?’

I stepped back from him with loathing yet intimacy of scorched heart and mind. ‘No,’ I said at last, ‘I have not seen any strangers or travellers around here.’ I moved close to him again to reflect in the mirror of self the moth-eaten Skull tie he wore around his neck like an insect-spangled halter or noose.

As an inferior magistrate, as a piratical statesman, as an immigration great sailor or trickster officer, he could not help subsisting on a sea of griefs, on moth-eaten paradises. I understood (as I stared at Frog) another aspect of Ghost’s dumb lips, Ghost’s silence. For in mirroring Frog in myself it was as if the blood of the moon had turned to dead sea fruit on every political mouthpiece of my age.

Frog snapped at me now. He knocked on the door of my sea chest of books, and peered at the lantern-butterfly I carried within. He bared his teeth and his diamond-sharp eyes feasted on impossible glass in which he saw himself entangled in the multiple desires and waves of space and time.

‘I hope for your own sake, Glass,’ he cried at last, ‘that you are telling the truth.’ He turned away, mounted a parapet, and slid with Calypso into a battered ship of a car. As they drove away I tried to glance at myself as into the flesh of ‘Glass’. One placated or withstood one’s enemies or friends by reflecting their greed and offering it to them as the largesse of the moon. Much harder, of course, to reflect their virtues and astonish them as if manna were falling from heaven upon robin redbreast glass in the body of the mother of humanity.

Glass by name, yet lost golden species I was, lantern-butterfly or illuminated black pulse like a will-o’-the-wisp birthmark/birdmark upon a page of the sacred wood.

Ghost was sitting on a bench when I returned to the book in which we slept. He arose and came close to me and his curious, wide-awake dreaming eyes appeared to comprehend the trials of inner and outer consumption of virtuous blood or greedy blood or dead sea fruit that had commenced. It was my trial as much as his. Should I continue to protect him, to shelter him?

WAS I STORING UP TROUBLE I COULD NOT FORESEE? Or would it lead to a revelation of the mystery of technologies of emotion in flesh-and-blood, complicated space virtues, complicated space greeds, threaded into human bias and the ascendancy of truth as sweetness or light yet bitterness or longing?

THE SEA BROKE IN MY TEETH. DROWNED TEETH. I DISLODGED A SPLINTER AND CLAMBERED UP THE STAIRWAY OF TIME INTO THE JAWS OF THE RESURRECTION. Ghost belonged. He may have appeared or risen in a sea-chanty book but he belonged to the oven of civilization: the burning sea; the oceanic fires; erosions and accretions. Belonged to the soil and the bone and the sea, to the butterfly page and to the lantern page, to the regime of the moth and to the derelictions of lust, to iridescent natures and to the gloom of planets with electric axes shining as if lit by primitive instinct.

The trial in which I was involved ran much deeper than simply concealing apparently illiterate Ghost from inferior Ulysses Don Juan Frog who patrolled the world in every national costume, east, west, north, south, Marxist, Capitalist.

NIGHT WAS FALLING FAST AS I TURNED A PAGE OF SLEEP AND WROTE: Were the sailing men who circumnavigated the globe nothing but ancient chauffeurs, mechanics and technicians? Or were they so drunk with the spirit of value they had forgotten their motivation? Was God nothing but a giant chauffeur, a giant astronaut at the wheels of fire in space? Or did we need to read his ecstasy in the snake that takes wings and flies to heaven, the bird that takes scales and dives into the sea? Was the lamp by which the sun sailed nothing but a hollow fire? Or was it a light by which I dreamt my way backwards in time into the ancient workshop of the gods?

In questioning those who sailed in drunken boats across the ocean to me, and to my savage antecedents long before I was born, I knew I questioned my deepest bottled instincts, deepest bottled intuitions, deepest bottled fears, deepest bottled hopes. I knew I questioned my savage antecedent of Old New Forest. Drunken Quetzalcoatl. Drunken wing. Drunken serpent. (I WAS ASHAMED I MUST CONFESS OF THE ECSTASY OF THE WING AND THE ECSTASY OF THE SNAKE, THE ECSTASY OF THE EGG FROM WHICH I HAD BEEN HATCHED. I WAS ASHAMED OF THE POTION I HAD DRUNK IN SUBCONSCIOUS REALMS IN THE BOOK OF SLEEP FROM A SEED OF BLOOD IN THE YOLK OF SPACE.)

Drunken Quetzalcoatl was the source of all philosophy — the source of the hunt, the source of architecture — and in attuning his appetites to the mystery of the elements had coined the first vowel in evolution — curled egg-shaped snake coatl and curled egg-shaped bird quetzal — only to puncture or unravel the concept into a lightning shoestring potion, lightning artery, lightning vein, lightning intercourse between the rich and the poor, lightning mystery of deprivation as well as palatial conceits, lightning intercourse between himself and the woman of space, lightning mother of space from which he sprang into existence virtually without shelter, without food.

Had he forgotten the original spark, the original draught of ecstasy? Was this the source of his hunger, the source of his greed, the source of his guilt at divine incest? Or was it a measure of creative rehearsal, incompletion, half-spirit, half-flesh, elusive origins of unity, elusive origins of sex, elusive wholeness?

Ghost had nothing to say in reply to my questions except that I recalled when we had first met he had appeared to utter a curious bawdy confession that I had failed to understand. I had hoped he would tell me something however alarming, however incongruous, however chastening. But he had not. I had failed to comprehend. I had not fed him. Except with dead sea fruit that aped a spark of Homeric blood in the underworld of the twentieth century with its twittering shadows, its persecutions, its crucifixions. And I was left, therefore, to sense through his intricate gestures webbed with meaning — and the implicit masks he wore, the implicit disguises, deceptions — the immensity of bottled cargo he brought with him from every corner of the globe: not only bird-cargo, snake-cargo, but Christ-cargo, Socrates-cargo, male, female Tiresias cargo, ancient Egyptian, African cargo, modern, scientific European cargo … I was left to delve for the mystery of the resurrection from the bottled sea within myself, my intimate book. Bottled foetus in the body of the mother of humanity. Bottled seed in the black earth. Bottled page and bone upon which I wrote the music of the spheres.

The book of modern Europe possessed its roasted pigment in the adventures of Faust, Caliban and Magellan. It was a quantum book in which a particle of roast on the moon became a plunging horse saddled with all diasporas, all middle passages. Resurrection from a particle or a wave was a quantum saddle upon which a new physics rode into Bethlehem. I knew for in the country of Sleep I had seen a spade unlock a grain of sand into a towering beast of a wave upon which Ghost came with unwritten, written volumes for my library in the sacred wood.

I KNEW EVERYTHING. I KNEW NOTHING. I WAS THE SUBJECT OF AN INFINITE REHEARSAL OF A PLAY OF THE BIRTH OF HISTORY. Ghost slid from his towering wave of a horse in my library of dreams. He came to me with the head of Sir Walter Raleigh riding on his left hand. A giant El Doradonne brow upon which I read, ‘History revises itself within the intervals of consciousness and unconsciousness that it takes for the economies of our age to fall again and again from the block and to touch the ground, consume a spark of dust, and rise into dream-orbit around the sun.’

I was dissatisfied with this. It was true. And yet it seemed too seductive, too charismatic. Ghost understood my dilemma and turned the brow of El Doradonne Economy around until it gleamed with the eyes of Prospero and I read in those pupils of brilliant dust:

‘Revised spark. Revised histories of the world.’ The brow darkened (NIGHT WAS FALLING) but cleared again into constellated peacock eyes and I read a ghostly script: ‘1832–3, emancipation of the slaves, the axe falls on plantation El Dorado. Landowners protest on behalf of the homeless, houseless slaves. Where will they go?’

THE BROW DARKENED. NIGHT WAS FALLING. BUT STILL I WAS ABLE TO DECIPHER A GHOSTLY FINGER OF INK. ‘1914–18. The axe falls on dynasties and privileges. Where will the unemployed go? They march to the sound of a patriotic drum. If you could see them as I do,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

NIGHT FALLS BUT THE BROW FLICKERS AGAIN. ‘1939, the axe falls on Chamberlain’s peace in our time …’

I could read no further but cried in desperation, ‘WHY, WHY?’ The brow relented and flashed a page in my book — ‘Eat the Word of God in the twinkling of an eye when the axe falls and the Globe tumbles from the block to roll within the stars. Globe, yes, my El Doradonne globe in your heart, your privileged economy in my body which is susceptible to time’s axe when systems are evil, the evil for which the innocent suffer. For the innocent (as well as the guilty) are you and me

I was filled with rage. ‘No,’ I cried, pushing Ghost away, ‘I shall hand you over to Frog. You are my conscience. I fear this quest for the nature and the meaning of value. Why must we axe evil and hurt ourselves? Evil is rich with prosperity and promise.’ I stopped, filled with terror and shame. ‘Don’t pay any attention to me. I shall hide you, Ghost. I shall hide you IN MY SHADOW. in my shadow. Where else?’

Ghost and I slept. Frog and Calypso appeared early on a page of shadow: page, yes, of the dripping sun that rains its ambivalent light upon the sacred wood. They kicked open my rusty book or gate and hammered upon the giant barrel I had built there to house a number of pork-knocker texts.

‘Where are you hiding him, Glass?’ Frog shouted. ‘My information is that some God rode ashore here, near here, that the new moon darkened over the Middle Passage …’

‘Christ!’ I thought in some bewilderment.

‘Don’t look so damned outraged,’ snapped Frog. ‘I have my scouts. Some say they saw a man or a woman with a long plait of hair. Others say they saw a Beast or a Comet with a Snake around its neck.’

I could not help crying aloud in my sleep at Ghost’s outrageous tricks and Frog’s credulity. ‘A snake around your throat is better than a moth-eaten cravat,’ I said to Ghost.

‘What’s that, what’s that?’ cried Frog. ‘If I catch Beast I shall interrogate him about the map of heaven. Do you hear me, Glass? It’s my privilege. I interrogate strangers. I have built a traditional system and network. And another thing. I don’t like you, Glass. You tangle me up in myself, in my own wildness, my own reflection in you. It’s dangerous to see myself reflected in you, intimately black, intimately white. It’s as if I have found the Beast of heavenly and hellish adventure in a subtle redbreast creature like you and do not know it. It’s as if I’m in your dream. I may sentence you, I may judge you, but I’m an inferior at last. Poetic justice! You know me — you fleck of scum from the sea — much better, more deeply, irreverently, terrifyingly, than I ever knew you.’

I could not help shrinking a little at Frog’s schizophrenic claws and diamond eyes that seemed to scuttle upon the mirror of a wave.

‘I shall send you down, Robin Redbreast Glass, to the bottom of the sea. Do you hear me? I shall sentence you. I have sentenced you.’

‘And I shall rise again,’ I cried, ‘into the map of heaven.’

I could have bitten Ghost’s tongue in half. Had he spoken or had I? I had gone too far. Frog swung away and left me to ponder the sentence he had passed. The sea and the wood lightened into imminent Skull and Calypso began to hum ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’. Then she stopped. Began afresh in a deep waving voice:

Belly to belly

Back to back

Ah don’t give a damn

Ah done dead a’ready.

Don Juan Ulysses Frog was enlivened by the song. He returned to the gate to beat time with his fist on the pork-knocker barrel or drum. As he beat the sea responded and crashed into music. It was as if — despite everything — he had been transported to another world, a world unshackled from intrigue and treachery, the world of the map of heaven, the map of the Beast, the glorious Beast he wished to entrap from time immemorial. Indeed it was this steep longing — blunted, deformed — that had led him blindly into the uniform he wore as magistrate, admiral and immigration officer patrolling the beach of the sacred wood.

I had built the great drum or vessel of a barrel as a memorial to my grandfather who died in 1945 in the depths of Old New Forest sacred wood. I associated my grandfather with the early giant navigators who pork-knocked the high seas in search of the Beast of Paradise surviving somewhere, they dreamt, in the headwaters of time.

Sometimes becalmed in a wilderness of ocean reflecting a jungle of stars and suns they prayed for miraculous beast-fish to nibble at their bait — a parcel of stellar beast-shrimp if nothing else — when provisions ran low and hunger stared them in the eyes in the Glass of the sea.

Belly to belly

Back to back

Ah don’t give a damn

Ah done dead a’ready.

Calypso sang more deliberately — as if to supply longer intervals or spaces between lines than on the first occasion. This was astonishing as her song seemed to arise from the bowels of a slave ship becalmed a million light years from home.

Frog was suddenly discomfited. He ripped open the vessel or barrel in search of his Beast. He peered into the dark as into an organ of humanity. I walked over to him. My Shadow followed.

‘The organ’s a text,’ I said, ‘cinematic music, cinematic text. Calypso’s lament with its implicit unshackled dead is as much about death as about self-abandonment, birth. It’s a prelude to my grandfather’s revised text of Faust. He read Faust, he loved Faust, and he re-wrote it in his own image. It was his last trip in the heartland. He was short of fresh fruit, greens, vegetables, and so on. Beriberi got him in the end. But as he starved by infinite degrees he tasted all the bitterness, all the sweetness, all the hope, all the despair in the world. And touched Faust the Beast. Faust the half-circus man, the half-mechanical soul. Faust of the womb and the grave. Faust the slave and Faust the self-mocking engineer of the gods …’

I was unable to finish. Frog was startled. His diamond eyes flashed with terrible jealousy and rage. All of a sudden he raised his mottled hand and before I could say Peter or Emma or Doctor Faustus or Beast or Angel he struck me a blow on the back of my neck. Poor Robin Redbreast, I thought instinctively, as blood flew through my Shadow and rested on Ghost’s right hand. It was so sharp I felt the stillness of the blade pour and coil within me. My head toppled into the Globe. I saw the civilization of Skull and the Mountain of Folly that I needed to climb and transcend if I were to arise from the sea.

TWO

I was innocent. I was guilty. I was good. I was evil. I was solipsistic (autobiographical) character. I was polyphonic (fictional) author. Solipsistic (autoreflective) in seeking to mirror the frailest, deepest origins or unity of the self underpinning all creation. Polyphonic in reflecting alien voices, alien voices in familiar texts, internal/external counterpoint, deformities of spiritual gold and mystical silver, perversities of epic, blind rendezvous with Ghost, diverse masquerades, self-revelations, self-deceptions …

The many conflicting versions of the coming and the arousal of Ghost, the leaden-tongued yet silver-tongued expressions of Ulysses Frog (epic lover yet doomed, jealous scavenger of humanity), the dumb lips of Ghost, the lament of Calypso’s unshackled dead, the country of Sleep that I inhabited as if I lay on a pillow of the ocean yet walked upon waves of land, the breaches of convention, the overturning of expectation, were all the substance of chaos edged by redemptive passion, redemptive hope, in the body of the resurrection that I reflected in myself as the price of an infinite rehearsal of value and spirit.

The sentence of chaos had been inflicted on all species the year I was born, 1945, the year the Bomb fell and history changed, revised itself backwards, never to be the same again.

FROG’S MOTTLED HAND HAD FALLEN LIKE AN AXE IN MY SLEEP. Fallen on many a reflected economy in Mirror and Shadow of Flesh-and-Blood in the flight of the crane or the swallow or the dove from north to south. Shadow-crane, shadow-dove, shadow-fish, with broken neck floating high on a wave or high on the land. I, Robin Redbreast Glass, flew headless then spun with a feather and a scale into the turning Globe, the turning wave, the turning hills, the turning valleys. Put my head and my hat on again and bowed in my Sleep to Prosperity’s block and Necessity’s block.

Capital block prosperity? I asked Ghost who flew in the shadow of a wave and a hill but his lips were sealed though a Strange cry trembled in the recesses of coming Skull but remained short of utterance.

Marxist block necessity then? I asked Ghost: ‘Tell me, Ghost — how deceptive, how real, are Necessity and Prosperity? Are they disguised ballrooms and cells of evil in which the heads of the unemployed roll? Are they in essence the polarizations of a Faustian morality that we need to untangle until the Beast smiles and points to heaven rather than to hell?’

I raised my hat to Faust as the flock of my terrors skimmed a wave and settled on the ground and in the belly of the sacred wood.

‘We are reborn with the fish and the bird, Ghost. We are reborn through the sword that severs the umbilical cord and flashes in the light of the sun and the moon with sudden estrangement from a body of darkness, foetal terror revised, foetal hope revised, revisionary edges of subsistence upon light and darkness, subsistence upon the brute world, subsistence upon the bland world.’

The wood was in a state of alarm. And indeed I sensed a change in the disposition of the tenant in my Shadow. Ghost was alarmed and uneasy at the intrusion of brute climates, brute absolutes, in the communication of ideas under the sea and over the sea that Faust had converted into a machine, fish of steel, fish of lead, fish of iron, birds of steel, birds of lead, birds of iron.

The mechanics of the circus of power on sea and on land made Ghost tremble on his flying trapeze in the belly of the sacred wood, the mechanics of domination in the name of Brute Prosperity or in the name of Brute Necessity.

Was this opposition between Brute and Brute a prelude to an era of temptation in which one Brute devised ruses of tenderness and humour to tempt the Other? ‘Bow down to me, dear fellow Brute, and the kingdoms of earth are yours. Save in the degree that I keep my options open to save the world and to bring you to heel.’

Faust — both Goethe’s and Marlowe’s — had been a priceless possession in my grandfather’s stock of books. He was still mentally athletic and young when he died aged fifty-five in the heartland of the sacred wood. He had pored over Goethe and Marlowe nights under an uncertain fuel lamp after labouring days in the creeks of the rainforests that ran through his barred consciousness. Ran like a woman’s fluid constellation born of the reflected moon and the reflected sun. Golden offspring born of the inimitable self-penetration of the reflected moon and the reflected sun. Such was the Glass in which he dipped his pen to write his own version of the Beast of immortality, the Beast of the circus and of the machine. I was there in that new version, the Glass child in the golden woman my mother. I was born (may I say it again) in 1945, the year my grandfather died. It was the year of the Bomb, the year of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. ‘We are born with the dead, with the fish and the bird.’

I was the foetus revised, the unborn grandson revised, entangled in the waters of mirrored death revised in the unconscious fluid of my coming birth. There was a turbulence in that revised fluid and I knew what my mother knew. I shared with her — in a kind of void yet potent revisionary abstraction — her concerns, her anxieties, the postman’s knock bringing letters from my grandfather in the distant heartland.

I knew he thought of us — and had heard of me — from the letters Aunt Miriam wrote to him and received from him, the letters my mother Alice wrote to him and received from him. I could not be sure in those turbulences when the dream of diamonds and gold gave way to me, to Glass, and he saw me like a fluttering redbreast bringing its hat (or was it its head?) to Faust and skimming the creek in which he dug for spiritual wealth as well as crass bounty. (Years later when I read his book I saw he had dedicated it to me, his unborn grandson Robin Glass.)

At first he would have given his soul, he would have bartered my head, Robin’s head, for offspring of crass gold, for the diamonds in the eyes of Ulysses Frog that sometimes clouded mine as I slept. (‘Frog’s eyes,’ my mother once said when we peered into the mirror together, ‘are your eyes, Robin. No wonder you invent such terrible guardians of the beach.’) He would have bartered his soul for crass gold, he would have bartered Ulysses’ head in my self-loathing, self-reflecting Frog’s mirror of the injustice of epic plunder, epic statecraft but was stopped. Something happened. He wrote to Alice and Miriam to say he heard voices singing ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’ and within those voices a whisper that may have been the faint voice of Robin Redbreast foetus revised in the book of humanity, the book of the Beast of heaven and hell, far up in layer upon layer of sleeping trees. It was the whisper of ironic singing temptation offering him elusive orchid-kingdoms worth a million, elusive toucan-kingdoms worth a million, elusive parrot-kingdoms worth a million in the zoos of the east and the west.

Elusive head of time as well. It was then he began to prize me, prize the ironies of strangest hidden conscience everywhere, the Glass of multi-reflecting telegraph of soul. I knew when he died because my mother knew. I tasted a melon or an orange on her lips. It tasted sweet. Whereas on his it had become a dry shell, the shadow of Skull, in the beriberi zoo that claimed his life. A strange animal he seemed to me at the end as I dipped within my mother’s body into the script, the illuminated script, of her dreams. I saw him roaming the palaces of the peacock-orchid and the unicorn-amaryllis in search of his limbs as they crumbled into the fire and Shadow of Glass, my Shadow. I was a shadowy revised foetus and I gathered those limbs together into a giant dream, giant reconstitution and moved paradoxically upon a fragile arch. I was a shadowy Robin Redbreast revised Glass drifting by uncertain degrees towards a twin desolation or waste land through which to plumb the rebirth of my age.

That desolation, that dismemberment, was bland economic malaise indistinguishable from bland twin prosperity or from bland twin necessity.

It was a blandness I sometimes reflected when the Brutes hid their faces in my Glass. It was the blandness of a spiritual malaise, economic malaise … As though the mirror atrophied into a paradise without fruit … Was Faust in league with the bland, with the Brutes?

Before I could put the question to Mother or to Aunt Miriam or to Ghost a turbulence within the years since 1945 washed over me, over Glass, over Robin Redbreast, and I saw an incongruous feast of numbers, a new mathematics of the hollow soul. Bountiful numbers in a starving bland universe through which I flew with headless cranes and headless doves in my Sleep before settling again once more into the belly of the waving wood.

When did it first dawn on me in scanning the new Faust by my giant parent that he (my grandfather) was a mathematician as well as a poet of the magical dead? Take the following equation. Giant equals pygmy in the incestuous bomb of the divine. He had become a distant, unreachable giant when my biological father vanished and diminished in my consciousness into a pygmy. Distant giant yet close at hand in the turbulences I knew within my mother’s flesh. I mixed them up (giant with pygmy) since I had seen neither; that mixture was at the heart of all the fiction I was to write;my pygmy vanished the night I was conceived, my giant died the day I was born but grew large as God nevertheless.

He was the God of the heartland who had sent pots of gold to us. He was an alchemist whose pay dirt was gold or the diamond eyes of Frog of whom I was to dream (Frog, the inferior shadow of the giant, Frog, the Don Juan trickster pygmy who resembled my vanished father) over the years of childhood, adolescence and maturity when I reconnoitred the beach of Old New Forest and waited for Ghost to arise from the sea.

It was God who inspired me not to be entrapped in a trauma of losses (or in the bounty of ill-gotten gains) but to build through Sleep the resources for a complex autobiographical fiction reflecting both execution and rebirth, holy/unholy parentage and the resurrection of the body built into inimitable being, inimitable species and masquerades of creation … I shall write of my mother later and the crucial part she played … indeed never ceased to play. How else could I have known the quantum womb, the quantum turbulences, through which Ghost came out of the grave of the sea?

*

That year, when my mother was great with child, my grandfather sent her the manuscript of Faust to read and to type. Then came the telegram. It was the end. I knew.

The staccato rhythm of the typewriter punctuated my sleep like muffled gunfire. Her heartbeat quickened as she read and typed. Commotion piled itself into commotion. The giant slipped from the mask of the Faustian poet into the mathematicians’ code of nuclear rape. Did I dream it then or was it years later? Was it a recurring nightmare? I asked Ghost; how was I involved though still in my mother’s body in a dream of pure poetry, pure mathematics, yet nuclear rape? Was I an internalized cipher in the corruption of ‘pure’ mathematics, ‘pure’ inner space God? Or an internalized gene in the corruption of the ‘pure’ humanities, ‘pure’ humanities God? Bland mathematics. Bland humanities. Soulless machine. I asked Ghost. From faraway in the heartland, poetry and mathematics extended their fist to prod my mother in her ribs. Her contractions began. The Bomb fell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was rushed to hospital. I was born within the instant hour — or flash of eternity — the Bomb fell. I knew an anguish I could scarcely fathom. I attribute it now — that anguish — within the Glass of time and the Blast that happened to an effulgence of birth threaded into death, a white blistering fist or axe of light coming so close it was as if pure poetry and pure mathematics died in the instant I was born.

I bowed to my mother’s ghostly legs as I emerged through them into the blinding light, the blinding axe, as they (poetry’s glass legs, mathematics’ glass legs) seemed to break and fold under her yet in other women’s bodies reflecting my mother’s, through other women’s bodies reflecting my mother’s. They gave birth to me even as she did.

A poem’s glass legs, mathematics’ glass legs, reflect the terror and the ecstasy of the new-born. New-born hubris in mirroring birth-in-death, death-in-birth?

‘Not absolute hubris,’ I said to Ghost. ‘Surely not! Profoundest desire to unravel hubris I would say in a quest for original value, original spirit, in a dangerous world.’

THREE

Let me now confess to the gravity of finding myself face to face with questions I hoped to duck but which have been the substance of recurring dreams throughout my life and from the day I was born.

Old questions yet new.

Who am I? What is fragile humanity? What is poetry? What is science? Can they save creation in complex and ceaseless rehearsal of the birth of spirit? What is the value of survival — is it arbitrary chance or partisan mould — or does it open doors into innermost, self-reflecting and reflective being? Have I been asking these questions all along in this fictional autobiography? If so I need to return to them again and again, to sense new emphases, new edges, new extremities, new proportions.

Take the question of survival. Does survival imply an inner mirroring capacity in league with the magical dead who move in one’s blood, the magical unborn who move through one’s blood, magical yet tainted antecedents, magical giants, magical pygmies?

THE BOMB HAD FALLEN. Its consequences were with us into eternity. Nothing would ever be the same again. An awesome dream.

Where lie the roots of such hubristic knowledge in an infant such as I — infant mankind in infant womankind? Where lie the seeds of such peculiar transparency — the one in the other — such peculiar transparency enfolding all creatures? I find myself positing quantum legs, quantum glass in the building blocks of the universe.

Such astonishing and daring fragility that is susceptible to an inimitable self-reflection of all faltering achievement and power may still give us an edge or a particle or a grain of ascendancy over chaos and bring us abreast of the subtle race, the subtle shadow, the subtle and complex majesty of the genius of paradoxical spirit.

I BEGAN TO CLIMB THE MIRROR OF SLEEP THE MORNING I WAS BORN.

It is a source of incredible wonder — that borders on cruelty all the same (the cruelty of the innocent new-born in the guilty new-dead) to be possessed by a recurring dream of accusation through childhood into maturity, accusation that apparently starts from the day one is born, the silent accusation of the species.

BORN DEAF — the dream declares. THE BOMB IS FALLING. No music anywhere. The harps of the angels are numb or dead. But one climbs each silent string. Ghost was as silent as the glass robins hopping in my room, silent robins, amongst whom I stood. Silent unicorns. Silent seals. Silent blackbirds. Silent larks.

They had flown or run or swum on a wave into the room on the blast of the wind and the wood and the sea from pole to pole.

Glass Red Riding Hood lambs and wolves from the building blocks of the universe were loping into the room, transparent but scorched, across the windowsill. A glass unicorn in a building block within the staggered tenses of time, present and past. The unicorn is. The unicorn was. Not a bay. Not a sound. Not a horn. An eerie deafness, eerie silence, eerie destitution of music. THE BOMB FALLS.

Glass toucans perched on my cradle and pecked at my eyes and ears in the building blocks of the universe. Yet not a tap, not a hammer, not a nail, could break the silence in the Looking Glass space I had become. I was all reflected creatures flying on glass wings, swimming with glass wings, walking upon feet of glass in the building blocks of the universe.

I saw the dove’s addiction to propaganda and to war enlarged into immutable plague, immutable silent discord, deaf mute of silence. I saw the tiger’s susceptibility to false knowledge enlarged into immutable flame, silent discord, deaf mute of the sun. I could not hear or fathom its roar, its blaze. I turned to Ghost across the years and understood at last the cautions that had been threaded into his enigmatic and muffled tongue. He had been telling me of the silence and the deafness that would encompass my age if I failed to sound the origins of spirit. AND THEN WHEN ALL SEEMED LOST — WHEN I HAD SURRENDERED MYSELF TO TOTAL SILENCE — I REMEMBERED THE REVISIONARY FAUST THAT MY GRANDFATHER HAD WRITTEN AND THAT I HAD SCANNED WITH REDBREAST EYE AS MY MOTHER TYPED. I had been possessed of an eye, it seemed, that shone in her breasts, an ear that flowered in the tunnel of her body. I had swum within turbulences and reflected oceans of space. Not oceans now but bombed woods in this recurring dream with its whisper of temptation aloft in the trees at the heart of a chorus singing ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’. Singing ‘seize the species, seize the kingdoms of the earth, grab, plunder, possess.’ It was then — as if there had been a clap of thunder in the grave — that my deafness vanished and I heard the bustle, the movement, the traffic of the kingdoms of the earth. All mine, mine to seize. I had been tempted by a whisper in the trees in my mother’s body to ‘seize the species, seize the kingdoms of the earth’ and had responded instantaneously. Those kingdoms took the form in my dream of quantum, psychical glass, psyche’s glass tigers, psyche’s glass seals, psyche’s glass unicorn (and all the other creatures that had loped or swum into my room) in the building blocks of the universe. I reached out to seize them and I heard the bustle, the movement, the traffic of time, as they slipped from my grasp.

I felt a complex guilt, a complex shame. And yet I was grateful, grateful to someone or something (whoever, whatever, had tempted me). I was glad that I had responded, that I had succumbed, that I had attempted to seize the kingdoms of earth and space. Yes, I had succumbed to the temptation but had also seen through the veil of the moment into the roots of life with which I moved with all creatures that one seeks to seize, the roots of strangest whispering transparency that is the seed of the listening heart in every self-confessional fabric of the birth of truth, the birth of creative conscience.

Was I glad, was I sorry, that the kingdoms of space had slipped from my grasp? I was glad. I was sorry. And within the nexus of such ambivalence almost forgot the whispering Shadow of temptation to which I had succumbed until I stepped with Faust into it, into that now bristling, telephonic Shadow. A telephone was ringing in my mother’s heart or ear into which the creatures of glass had swum or run before they vanished into a whisper of music. I heard it distinctly whereas before I had heard nothing. I heard the clamour of church bells in the sacred wood. I heard them so mysteriously, so potently, it was as if a flock of mighty bell birds flew from down under and encircled the globe. It was so insistent, so wonderful, that I was seduced by another curious and strange bell at the end of a long fishing rodwhich Faust held over my grandfather’s creek in the sacred wood.

‘Faust,’ my grandfather had written (I scanned the page with an eye in my mother’s breasts), ‘is the comedian of the kingdom bell. The fisherman-bell is the kingdom bell. The fisherman-king is the comedian of the machine. Pay attention please.’ THE TEXT CONTINUED: Robin Redbreast’s revised foetus, glass bird, flew in his mother’s cinematic body and alighted on Faust’s fisherman-rod. It (the cinematic foetus, tiny bird) settled on the rod, sidled along it with numb claws until it gained a foothold, a claw-hold, on Faust’s kingdom bell. It fluttered its numb feathers and danced on the bell like kingdom come. The fisherman-rod swayed as it danced. The line descending from the rod dipped sharply in the water as if it had been bitten by a fish. The swaying and the motion were enough to awaken a multiple ripple on Robin’s mother’s belly. But the kingdom bell on the fisherman-rod did not make a sound. ‘It’s not ringing,’ Robin protested, ‘it should have rung to say that the fish in the water is biting …’

‘You mean,’ said Faust wryly, ‘that you, glass Robin Redbreast bird, are dancing on my kingdom bell.’ He stared into Robin’s eyes.

Robin felt numb. It was as if his claws were seized by violent cramp even as they danced. They danced on the bell but felt nothing. Why did they feel nothing? Why had he not known the instant he touched the bell that it was devoid of a clapper and a tongue, that it was a simulated bell not a real bell? Why had he said ‘a fish in the water is biting’ when he knew (or should have known) the commotion came from his active perch or dance?

The answer lay in the riddle of touch, the riddle of the dance. It lay in the riddle of Faust’s implicit dialogue between creatures, between hypothetical fish and numb foetus in the body of humanity.

‘Note,’ said Faust to Robin, ‘in giving you claws, foetal claws, like a bird’s, or a crab’s, I enhance the ironies of the circus and the machine, I am true to fashion, true to obsessional creed and animal destiny in a harshly competitive age

‘And what about spiritual destiny?’ asked Robin. He felt heavy all of a sudden. ‘Do we not lame or cripple animal destiny in equating it with human and competitive slaughter?’

‘Tut, tut,’ said Faust. ‘Toot, toot, heigh-ho nonny and all that! So much for spiritual destiny.’ But his eyes were glued to Robin’s, fiendishly glued, spectacularly glued, and yet there was a crinkle of humour, even pitiful/pitiless understanding, at the edge of his lips.

Robin wanted to protest but he was mesmerized by Faust’s extraordinary sophistication, irreverence and candour.

It was as if the cinematic atmosphere they shared crept into his blood and endorsed his lameness of mind and spirit even as he danced. Faust called the bell at the end of his rod his kingdom or dancing bell because without making a sound it spoke of a labyrinth of patent or invented process — patented flesh, patented bone — between hypothetical creature and cinematic humanity dancing in ballrooms of heaven rounded like great, clapper bells, dancing in space, in tune with the fabric or womb of mother earth but insensible to deprivation.

Faust was the master of new-born ironies and abortive spirit. His kingdom bell spoke of simulated dialogue between hypothetical God and hypothetical Man. It spoke of the bleak conversion (bleak exploitation) of deprivation into puppetries unconscious of hollow being.

Robin sought to protest again. ‘There is life and death, death and life, and somewhere in that ambivalent mixture lies the spark of innermost recall of the value of spirit …’ But Faust brushed him aside: ‘Quite understandably,’ he said, ‘you assumed that when the line shook under my kingdom bell that it was life biting, that life had taken the bait or the hook. Hypothetical life Robin! Remember that.’

‘I was wrong,’ Robin acknowledged.

‘Hypothetical life,’ Faust repeated. ‘Such is the measure of progress. We advance through spheres of deprivation by which we gain tools — have you forgotten the bristling noise of the telephone when you were able to hear?’

‘I remember the secret music,’ Robin was able to say though his tongue ached like Ghost’s.

‘We advance through spheres of deprivation through which we simulate the life of species. Take it a step further, Robin. Put your faith in material progress. Accept me as some kind of prodigious immortal. And then I will make you into my immortal prodigy, my born/unborn prodigy in the bottled but cinematic sphere of a woman’s body. Your mother’s body! Invent the mother. Invent the child. Let me touch you and begin the process.’

‘No!’ said Robin. He felt uncertain, bewildered, even vaguely outraged. He took refuge in attack — ‘Let ME touch you.’ He was uncertain of the distinction between touching Faust himself and being touched by Faust himself … MY GRANDFATHER’S BOOK FADED INTO THE REALITY OF IMMORTAL DREAM. I WAS DREAMING. Immortal dream? Had I succumbed to Faust’s temptation? Could I touch him without being subject to his influence, his charisma? Had I involuntarily accepted the temptation he posed to sustain his immortality and to become immortal dream writer myself? What are the origins of dreams? Are dreams the relic of temptation surviving in the psyche to assume immortality? If so the burden and the ecstasy of dreams had to be revised, ravelled, unravelled, penetrated, probed, rehearsed into infinity in order to make a profound distinction between a true resurrection (a true resurrection)and the strings of prodigious dogma in populations. They resembled one another, they ran in parallel with one another (material prodigy resembled the body of the soul even as cinematic foetus resembled the innermost recall of the conception of life) but they were not the same. LIKE YET UNLIKE FORCES.

I reached out and touched Faust and felt suddenly caught in the nexus of like yet unlike forces, caught and bedevilled by an age that gestated at the edge of a chasm, the chasm of marvels, the chasm of insensible creed in the circus of the machine.

I felt devoid of sensation as I touched him. He felt warm at first, warm as the drug of material progress, but I knew he was bitterly cold, bitterly calculating, stuffed to the eyeballs with terrifying comedy. All of a sudden I screamed. It was wholly spontaneous but nothing could have been more calculated to take him by surprise. I should have been laughing my immortal head off at his immortal joke — he seemed to imply — not screaming … He had failed somewhere in the demonology of the circus to ‘grab me’ as I hopped on his kingdom bell and I knew in my heart of hearts the resurrectionary or revolutionary body was subtly alive however apparently eclipsed within the glamour and the sophistications of the comedian of the machine.

Whereas before I had been delivered from deafness by a clap of thunder in the cradle or the grave — when I sought to seize the psychical glass animals of space that were manifestations of the immanence of God’s kingdoms — now in the circus of the machine, on the circus of the kingdom bell, I was delivered from numbness of spirit, and from seizure by Faust, with a cry I gave from the heart, a cry so poignant, so real, it drew me into the web, into the flesh, the imperilled substance, of all ecstatic and sorrowing creatures. Was this the origin of mental pain woven into the very substance and moment of rich rejoicing? Caught yet instinctively liberated feature. Caught yet spiritually liberated song.

I HAD BEEN CAUGHT YET IMPLICITLY LIBERATED FROM CINEMATIC CHARISMA, CINEMATIC ECLIPSE OF INNERMOST SELF-REFLECTION.

‘The mystery of deprivation!’ said Faust at last. As if with a gesture he sought to enlighten me, to prove he was on my side after all. On the side of liberation.

‘I am on your side once you read me properly. With a literate imagination Robin!’ He was laughing. I could not be sure. Was he laughing or was he mocking a world that was singularly ill-equipped to read its spheres of deprivation or its proclivity to temptation?

‘To enter my Kingdom Bell is to see from the other side of thunder the earlier temptation to which you succumbed. I say ‘earlier’ but does one know what comes first, what is early, what is late? Does one hear before one cries? Is it a simultaneous arousal within veil after veil of rehearsed temptation, rehearsed sensation, secreted in memory?

‘You succumbed to temptation and reached out to seize the glass unicorn, the glass tigers, etc. They vanished but you came alive then to the reflected thunder of all things, to the noises of space and time. At last you could hear, make distinctions, dwell in your mother’s voice and her laughter. Now you yourself have been caught by me yet implicitly liberated in giving voice to a spirit through and beyond yourself … At last you know that you cry, that tears are as true as song. Have I not helped you in the very moment that I threatened your soul? For remember within true voice and true hearing lies an arch of simulated being upon which we build our architectures and institutions. There in due course you will come upon Skull and the bridge to Skull.

‘At the heart of the void of the machine lies a revolutionary spirit that exposes one’s zest for life within the fruits of temptation. That revolutionary spirit exalts us, yet chastens us, makes us see our deprivations (whether deafness or numbness or whatever) through a mysterious glass or composite of opposites reflecting seizure and liberation, invention and creation, the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead, the mortal and the immortal.

‘I am the comedian of the void in the machine … the void in you. I am the script within the machine.’

‘And my voice?’ I asked rudely, ‘is that in your script?’

It was a taunting question to put to a human machine or to a person embodying immortal dynamo replete with implacable marvel and terrible skill, terrible dialectic, but Faust to my astonishment replied, ‘Your voice is revolutionary spirit, Robin. I am glad of this, believe me! I too can rejoice.’ Was he mourning with me or laughing at me or had he been moved in spite of himself by considerations of the mystery of deprivation and its bearing on caught yet liberated senses of the imagination, the mystery of deprivation through which we unlock multi-faceted thresholds, landscapes, doors into being?

FOUR

Some Reflections in 1985 on the Great Strike of the Animal Bands in the Magic Wood in the Year 1948. Ghost is at my Elbow as I Write in the Chapel Perilous of the Sea. He is the Spectre or Character of Time Unravelling Centuries and Decades.

*

THE MYSTERY OF DEPRIVATION. A key phrase in this fictional autobiography of (or is it by?) a drowned man. W. H. insists mystery is a divine comedy with an edge or positive direction to the movement of consciousness above the authorial fury of conflicting powers and the chaos of the world. Mystery is a stairway that takes me up yet back four decades in the comedy of time to the year 1948. I was three years old then. It was the year of the great strike in the sacred or magic wood. Memory’s building blocks under the sea (or upon a wave of land) are composed of reversible glass senses reflecting patterns of intimate sensation — no, patterns of temptation — to which one succumbs. I would never have acquired a literate ear, or literate responses to distinctive voices and sounds — literate self-criticism as well about my deficiencies of understanding in every nexus of intricate being — if I had not been tempted by a stroke of light to seize the kingdoms of space that sped before me in inmost animal and spiritual particles and waves of sound. I would never have given voice to creation if I had not been tempted by the comedian of the machine to become an immortal dream-body upon frontiers of simulated blood and real blood.

I laugh at myself now in 1985 in the light of the composite fruit of temptation that stains the mirror of my lips. Glass kisses glass at the bottom of the sea where fish roam in one’s hair like beautiful birds. My mother kissed me on the bed of the sea in the chapel perilous and said to a friend, ‘Miriam and I thought Robin was deaf, you know, but suddenly he reached out and held my breasts, he heard my voice, the noises in the street, everything, the telephone ringing in the room. It was funny. He began to speak as if he were conversing with someone at the other end of the line. A prodigy! He cried …’

She was right. I screamed and woke. After that speech came naturally. It was born out of an extremity, yes, extremity, Robin’s extremity, Redbreast Democratic Glass and multi-reflecting organ of the deprived senses. Yes, speech is born of extremity. It runs close to despair, demagoguery and authoritarian command, all functions of deprivation: deprivation or deprivations Aunt Miriam tended to call illiteracies of the heart and mind. I have never forgotten the phrase she used. It laps around me in the rain, in the water, in streams where one misreads time’s face.

Aunt Miriam was right in that we soon forget how strange and mysterious are our capacities, hearing extremity, listening extremity, speaking extremity, touching extremity, seeing extremity, knowing extremity; and that those capacities or extremities may never have come into being except through a dream-life that is steeped in temptations — pre-natal temptations as well as child-temptations — sexual temptations as well as lust-for-power temptations — to which we succumbed. Succumbed yes to the vitality of sensation but recoiled in converting the shadow of temptation into a source of original, self-confessing being in creation.

I remember the terror of the animal bands when they faced the repetitive fall of the Bomb in the shape of perverse manna and Skull-bread. They erupted in the magic wood in 1948. First came the band of the Tiresias Tigers. They were followed by other bands that included the Unicorns and the Horses of the Sea. It was a strike of international significance. It invoked a bullish mood (whatever that meant) in that sugar cane shares rocketed and fell, rocketed again with stone cold dead in the market. Rice shares became animalcule balloons and bullets. Oil shares battled coal. Diamond and gold investments laced the bullet’s horns. That a Tiger could stand on a platform (or a tall sheep or Red Riding Hood or Sister George the Bald Horse) toss a drum or a claw to the winds, and thereby cause millions of ammunition and dollars to roll up the creek, or roll down the creek, was a measure of economic illiteracy and of the deprivations of simulated cities of Skull.

‘BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, all the time,’ my mother said. ‘Enough to drive you mad!’

Aunt Miriam — despite her misgivings, her sense of spiritual malaise — was more generous. ‘It’s all in a good cause,’ she said. And pondered the uncertainty of good causes. ‘Bang, Drum, Strike, to keep the evil spirits at bay.’

‘What evil spirits?’

‘Shame on you, Alice. You should know. The legacies of war. The legacies of fear and corruption. Malnutrition. It’s a strike to win grain.’

My mother looked dubious, even doleful. ‘Corruption,’ she said. ‘Grain,’ she said. ‘Vile bodies.’

Aunt Miriam was nonplussed. She could not tell whether Alice was saying ‘corruption is vile’ or ‘grain is vile’ or ‘the strike of the animal bands is vile’.

‘I tell you, Miriam,’ Alice continued, ‘it’s the terror of the void. That’s the twentieth century.’

‘You mean the terror of angry and confused spirit,’ Aunt Miriam said and tried to look absurdly reasonable though she was scared. ‘The animal bands are dancing like nemesis below in the street. What a sea of faces. I hate crowds.’

A change had occurred in the element of Sleep. The privileged and fashionable strikers and bangers, privileged bands and dancers who preyed upon — or were able to exploit — the illiteracy of the economic imagination and move grain around the globe to starving peoples were dissatisfied with themselves and their entanglement in systems they both supported (profited from) and loathed (or bled in the name of the good cause). They swung around in the book of Sleep into rebellious subversives inciting masses. I sailed upon a tide of popular art, street animal dancers, street animal rebels, street animal poems of protest. Their simulation of an industrial and cultural strike seemed suddenly real. The comedian of the circus who pulled the strings and profited from each calculation of unrest had misjudged the chaos in the magic wood. Time’s countenance darkened into a mirror of involuntary feud on the stairway backwards and upwards, forwards and downwards, upon which I dreamt I climbed.

‘What is spirit when it broods upon chaos, Alice? Ask the politicians, the ageing politicians of the world, who are henpecked in the sacred wood. I ask you, Alice. I ask you to come on stage on the crest of a wave — the name I have given our little theatre.’ (Aunt Miriam ran a school of drama (called The Crest of the Wave) in her home beside the sounding sea. It was but half a mile or so away from Alice’s house in which many rehearsals were conducted.)

‘Let’s begin. Let’s rehearse, Alice.’ She stopped again as if she were intent on dramatizing the part she wished Alice to play. ‘I ask again — what is spirit when it broods upon chaos? Don’t reply straightaway. Shrug your shoulders and point to the Sphinx. Then say — let me see — something like this: “when angry spirit becomes an incestuous block or riddle the food in our very mouths is susceptible to plague”.’

‘I have no intention of saying anything of the sort,’ said Alice. But this was her cue nevertheless in my sea of Sleep on the crest of a wave. She moved across the chapel perilous to the window on the waving street beneath our house. ‘I say the terror of the void,’ she cried in the heart of my dream. Her glass lips touched mine as fish flew through our hair like beautiful birds. ‘I say the terror of the void. The terror …’ and then she saw the spiritual (or the vile) dancer Tiger staring up at her from the street and listening intently. Her voice fell … ‘of the void.’

Spiritual (or was it vile?) Tiger had heard every word. He leapt on the stage with his drum of thunder and his guitar. He leapt over the fence, raced to the front door and was inside in a flash. And then I knew. He had been manipulated by Faust, Faust’s machines, Faust’s technologies, to bang away at the terror of the void. My mother had pricked his animal spirit on the raw.

‘What a paradox,’ said Miriam. Her lips moved in the play that she and Alice had half-made-up, half-borrowed from my grandfather’s Faust in the last days of his beriberi wilderness.

‘What a paradox,’ said Alice. ‘This is the age of the masses, the age of the best-seller, the age of the popular arts, the popular bands, and yet it is the age of the death wish, the age of drugs.’ Alice was nodding as if they murmured the lines together.

‘The torment of spirit. The death wish of an age. True spirit never wars with true spirit but since nature and the values of nature are inextricably woven into every populace — and populace is vulgar spirit — every illness of mind and of spirit becomes the substance of bodily, addictive passion, bodily, addictive fury, ear-splitting, addictive BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM wrestling with itself for a violent/non-violent habitation.’

Then Tiger spoke the lines my grandfather wrote for him. Lines written in his last days in the Bush of the magic wood. My grandfather consumed the shell of a Skull-orange. It tasted so wonderfully sweet that he knew he had been deceived and that Death, the Tempter, stood beside him with the lotus flower in his hand. No ordinary lotus flower. Not the luxuriousness and the inactivity of the grave. No, something much more insidious. Deprivation. The drug of deprivation that looks like the seed of black (or white) purity, the black (or white) seed of God, when the drummer of the senses protests in a fever against the ills of the world that are as much in him as in those he assaults. The lotus flower of addictive bias that hardens into terror! My grandfather chewed it, tasted it, knew its wonderful relish, then spat it forth into Tiger’s speech.

‘If I bang Ghost,’ Tiger said, ‘in a dead poet’s — a dead magician’s — shadow in the sacred wood I may grasp, may I not, the hidden malaise (and hidden revolutionary capacity) in the popular arts? I shall try to bang Ghost and make him talk to you, Robin. Make him unravel the masquerade of Death as the Tempter, the bringer of the lotus flower. It’s a narrow pass, very narrow indeed, that I must take, I the dancer, the rebel.

‘You dead poet, dead magician, dead Quetzalcoatl, dead priests and scientists of ancient time, understand — surely you do — the predicament of the popular yet doomed player, popular yet doomed rebel, in an illiterate world. You swing in a sea or a cradle where I blow my deadly trumpet that is wreathed still, I confess, in unawakened powers, unawakened sensibilities, and in the mystery of deprivations through which I must pass. I confess to a reluctance to pass. Such self-righteous deprivation, such pride, seduces me, fastens upon me, as if it were the seed of purity, the seed of God.’

Tiger had succumbed to the Tempter, to the lure and fallacy of black (or white) purity, and as a consequence the confused and confusing diet of the world, half-vile, half-spiritual, rushed into his Shadow and mine even in the last moments of his life, the ticking voice of the suddenly energized clock, ticking invisibly/soundlessly within the roar of passing time.

Tiger was dying though he had not yet realized it. He was dying within my grandfather’s shadow on the page of a book in which history revised itself, the deprivations of Democracy and popular art revised themselves into cautionary ink, the dangers of fascist order, fascist purity, fascist white, fascist black. He knocked on the door of the page to elicit further lines from the dead magician’s hand. My grandfather may have heard. His dead hand, the hand of the magical dead, responded. It wrote some lines that it recalled from its youth before I was born. It could not write its own lines at that moment so it leant on the riddle of the Traveller from another time. As much as to say ‘you may knock Tiger and even though I hear I must be silent in order to stress that there are no easy answers to the predicament of a dying age within its most obvious, most telling biases and assumptions.’

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

I repeated the lines now as if they were an unconscious charm directed at Death, the Tempter. I had hardly whispered to myself and to Tiger and to Alice and Miriam when there was the sound of a gunshot. Was it (that gunshot) the cry of the suddenly reawakened drum? Or was it Tiger’s shout? Tiger gasped. A hole appeared in his chest into which Death crawled. The blood trickled down and stained his trumpet. He lifted the music of dream-life rebellion, dream-life blood, to his lips and appeared to drink. Well of deprivation. Well of purity. Thus he would slip into popular divinity, popular martyrdom. He spun in the dance. His knees buckled. He clung to a dancing woman in the street and they fell together. In the folklore of the dancing Tiresias Tigers the passage to the underworld is adorned by twining snakes: psychical glass snakes in which are reflected the mystery of the male deprived mask and the mystery of the female deprived mask that Tiresias wears in turn within the logic of the terrible seer.

‘O God!’ Aunt Miriam cried. ‘The police are in the street. And an ambulance driven by Doctor Faustus. The police have been attacked. They have fired at the strikers, Alice.’ She stopped and turned to W. H. who advised her on occasions on the direction of her plays. ‘May not the shot that kills Tiger signify in our play a prophecy of coming wars, coming battles, in which men, women and children will die?’

‘What coming battles?’ Alice was sceptical.

Miriam had no reply but I could have written the lines for her: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Uganda, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nicaragua. I could have added, ‘Alice thinks it’s just a play! Just fiction! Is fiction meant to be real as inner problematic truth, as unpredictable fact, as a blend of the two to stagger our deformities of insight, of perception, of heart and mind?’

Tiger was dead but for a moment it seemed he had not yet breathed his last on ‘the crest of a wave’ in Miriam’s and Alice’s little theatre. The ecstasy of purity had cleared his vision for a brief spell. Deprivation of the senses was too real to be pure. The villain of the heart was too real to be pure white or pure black or pure red. The saint was too real to be divine except when divinity invokes a visionary humanity that sees through the veil of its crimes.

Deprivation was so real it festered into food, deceptive lotus and plague, plenty and poverty.

Hunger was so real that I ascended the moon as if it were Glass in a shoestring ladder and knocked on its door.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door.

Belly to belly

Back to back

Ah don’t give a damn

Ah done dead a’ready.

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

I who sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.

I could not believe it. Ghost was speaking at last. No formal message. A repetition of familiar texts become however strangely cross-cultural, the strangest subversion, where one least suspected or expected to find it in hollow convention or solemn usage. An edge, nothing more, above the malaise, the death-wish of an age: an edge born of temptation that one unravels, perceives, and sifts until it yields a value beyond the immediate taste of temptation, the remorse, the penalty, the rewards.

FIVE

My mother died in 1961. I was sixteen. It was the year the Tiresias Tigers established a new theatre or tent in the magic wood. I heard their muffled drums. Drums swarming with spectres, spectres of the malaise of the twentieth century, a drum upon which the original dancer Tiresias Tiger tapped and tapped and tapped in my dreams. He had arisen from the grave with a hole in his chest when I was three years old.

I played with him (he was a ragged doll) on the drawing-room carpet until he vanished and I did not hear of him, or see him, again until I learnt of the Tiresias Tigers of the magic wood.

Absent or present he was often around the corner in my Sleep and through him I became a pork-knocker scientist who rattled the black hole of gravity in Tiger’s chest with a teaspoon.

A frightening eye of sugar or telescopic spoon with which to scrape the barrel of the cosmos, a frightening glimpse into the heart of Ghost. It was also a mystic dream and the beginning of faith. Yes, faith! But faith in what? Was it faith in one’s powers to measure prosperity or to be measured by prosperity, to save or to be saved, to know or to be known? Was it faith in heaven or in hell?

A recurring dream that came at least once a year across the waste land of childhood fantasy through the barrel at my gate into quantum quetzalcoatl mathematics in teaspoon and shoestring middle age.

A disturbing dream for it set into circulation all over again the origins of sensation — such as tasting, rattling silver in a teacup, slicing a bone or a piece of meat that cost a pretty penny.

I know for a fact that an industrial strike over starvation wages occurred on the sugar estates of Old New Forest in 1948 and several strikers were shot dead, one fell in the sugar bowl beneath our window embracing a woman and a child. A tight nightmare fit.

I was three years old when it happened. Three-year-old relic of memory on whose lips was a grain of sugar, on whose lips was a grain of temptation! Memory’s repetitive anatomy may lie in a grain of sugar one surreptitiously steals, forbidden sugar, forbidden sweetness! I witnessed the clash with the police from our window above the square. It could have been happening in our drawing room. Alice and Miriam were staring. Staring eyes. Everything and everyone tumbled into a relic of memory as I now write as if I was there yet absent from myself. Absent living body. I saw the hollow ambulance with Doctor Faustus at the skeleton wheel. The commotion of the skeleton bands. BOOM BOOM DOOM DOOM. Commotion, ceaseless sweetness/bitterness elaboration, movement, voices.

Thus I was moved across the years to sift unreliable fact from true play or fantasy and to reconsider the origins of sensation: an eye in the mouth of a sugar bowland in the bodyof Tiresias,the seer.

Take the seer’s eye: in the wake of the shot a blind silence enveloped every rattling teaspoon, every gun, every drum, every bone in the crowd in the square beneath our window. Then came an explosion of appetite and anger. I dreamt I saw the dead man move and eat the grain on my lip as he whispered in the hole in his chest, ‘Everything you have been tempted to consume recedes into me now, hollow me. See the sweets of violence in dead men’s chests, in dead men’s lungs, in dead men’s hearts, hear the bitterness of explosive suns.

Fifteen suns in a dead man’s chest

Yo-ho-ho and the taste of the lotus.

A different bottled ear or eye from the one I received when I reached out to seize the kingdoms of glass, the kingdoms of the globe, and was greeted by my mother’s exclamation of joy. An ear and a mouth and an eye in a ragged man’s chest … I was translated, I was confused, by the telescopic mind of Ghost in Tiger’s body.

The drums now spoke to the dead seer, the dead tiger, on the ground.

‘Fall down and die, Tiger. We shall pick you up. We shall drum. We shall measure the height of your dance and your fall through ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient America and ancient Africa into Robin Redbreast Glass waiting to see old Godot anew. Old Godot anew, Old Godot anew. Robin wants to know, wants to see, how far he must fall from the sky into old Godot anew. Why should a beast’s sudden death help us to map the ancient heavens anew within the radius of a star, a child’s star? One child’s star is another’s bullet.’

I dreamt I put the question to Ghost and thought I heard him murmur very faintly in the hollow of my ragged doll, ‘Life needs death. Life needs death if it is to be. But remember it is through death that life measures itself, measures its achievements, its glories. Remember it is through death not with death — not in league with death as the ultimate violence, the ultimate deprivation. The distinction is a crucial one — it bears on the fabric of the resurrection within every extremity, every hollow …’ His voice faded. And now it was as if the waiting room of Godot broke its commission with Death and illumined a ragged queue in Tiger’s body. Strings were vibrating very subtly, with incredible lightness, incredible touch — the sensation of ragged but mysterious alignment with the glories, the achievements, of which Ghost had spoken. I began to marvel across the years and the generations at the sensitivity that lies in the fingers of a ghostly musician touching the leaves of the trees into rhapsodic murmur, the fingers of a ghostly drummer sounding in the Sleep of space, the fingers of green (as they are called) of a ghostly gardener, the fingers of earth of a ghostly man or woman who sculpts a rock and makes it live.

Did I not dream that my own fingers were made of clay — of numb clay — until they scuttled on Glass and became the claws of a bird, then scuttled again, all of a sudden, into an intensity of feeling the instant I cried in my Sleep against the comedian of the machine who would have entrapped me, or seized me, as I alighted on a bell at the end of a rod?

I thought of my grandfather’s manuscript (and its ramifications in the simulated world and the real world) — of my mother’s staccato fingers drumming on a typewriter as I dreamt I lay within her — of Aunt Miriam’s plays revising the histories of the world — and wondered at the origins of perception, the relics of memory that lay as much in me as in ancestral re-visions of The Waste Land and of Faust in other, nameless, intuitive masterpieces since time began.

I remembered a journey I took when I was five years old through an ancient volume of Sleep. I remembered it all now as I arose from bed and brushed my teeth with the fin of a fish. I remembered my mother who died in 1961. She led me on that journey. She combed my hair with the honeycomb of the sea. She came into my dreams in a long swaying garment made of the sea, and of moss, and of countless stars sprung from the hollow yet resurrected body of Ghost.

Was it a journey into her death or was it a journey we made when I was five years old? She comes to me when I am old, one hundred years old. The year is 2045. No, not old! Just five, a relic of memory. Five-year-old relic. The year is 1950 on a dusty calendar in an old trunk of books and masks.

We make our way through the trunk and through the barrel at my gate, the round ship, the round coffin of my ancestors. The year is 1950. I am five years old. My mother gives me a ring. I slip it on to my hand. But as I run on the beach it falls from my finger and is lost forever. Alice is angry. ‘You will find it some day,’ she says. ‘I promise you.’ Her voice is sad and angry and I am pierced by foreboding. It was a ring my grandfather had given her. An heirloom or something. Surely she was grossly careless to give it to me before I knew or understood.

Good Ghost! The barrel at our gate was built by me in 1961 a month or two before my mother was drowned. It was built as a memorial to great navigators, great pork-knockers. How could we have made our way through it in 1950 with the lost ring? One is obsessed by time, one is obsessed by the timeless comedy of time. Perhaps the barrel I built in 1961 was invisible to us though it was already there flung up from the bottom of the sea on the crest of a wave of the future as my mother and I stood on the beach facing our grave when I was but a child and she a beautiful, angry woman.

My mother leans on the invisible barrel now.

‘It’s grandfather’s memorial,’ I say.

‘And the ring?’

‘What ring?’ I had forgotten.

‘A ring of spiritual gold studded with minute diamonds on the inside where it touches your skin. On the inside is the flesh of infancy. On the outside is the wreck of a ship.’

The wreck of a civilization? I was astonished. I lay under the wave of old age and looked up to the sky. I held my five-year-old hand up in the sea to the light of moon-shells, star-shells, sun-shells, and saw for the first time a ring on my mother’s skeleton left hand. Had she salvaged it from the sea the day she was drowned? I touched the ring in astonishment. Had I worn it all along and never known it was there?

I touched the ring with the light of my eyes. I felt my mother’s lips on my eyes: were they still bitter or were they now sweet?

‘If ever you are in trouble,’ my mother says — and leans down and lets the sand and the water run through her fingers — ‘just brandish it like an asset of state or pawn it for that matter if money’s short. Remember it’s here to save your life.’

I laughed. Alice laughed. The comedy of an invisible ring, an invisible barrel, an invisible fortune. And yet the tragedy … In 1961 when the sea cracked without warning and closed over my mother’s hair that fell like lightning to her waist (she was an excellent swimmer and no one at first believed she had drowned) I was left without a blind penny. The house had to be sold to pay off her debts. I remember my Aunt Miriam saying in one of her plays, ‘Your mother is extravagant, Robin. Your grandfather left her a treasure. Come and live with me before the world ends.’ Was she speaking to me or to W. H.? I went to live with her for a spell on my way to Skull but the house was empty, always empty — she resided now in the waves — and the shadow of W. H. dogged her footsteps as he sought to revive her theatre in the magic wood. They had been close friends, perhaps lovers, and he knew her well. She was sensuous and practical. Sensuous in her deeply grained imagination. Practical in her wit. ‘Accept the day-to-day calendar of doom, doom,’ she said like a housewife scribbling a list on her pad, ‘it’s a style the calypso invented for the BBC and all the grand newspapers. They never acknowledge their debt but that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?’ The word debt pricked me and I half-awoke to Alice’s carelessness and extravagance. Why had I not pawned the invisible ring I wore and raised the money to save our old home from the depredations of strangers?

Too late! Such magical security born of the Ghosts of the sea and the sky comes too late. Too late to save an old house or a lost kingdom.

Lost? Is anything ever absolutely lost? May one not find one’s ancestral treasure again by the light, the spirit, the self-mocking humour of vulnerable humanity, self-mocking yet self-revealing visionary touch?

A paradoxical marriage or contract or rehearsal of the origins of tradition runs through all bawdy and sacred generations, the living, the dead, the unborn, to activate the glories of the present and the past and to imply that the body of the resurrection is a medium of ceaseless rapport between original deprivation and original mystery, between newfound being and insensible being, between the tender apparition of hope and derelict, institutional trappings, between past, present and future time and timeless comedies of time.

Between birthday ghosts and old age.

‘Come,’ Alice and Miriam are saying to me, ‘now that you have touched the ring it is time to celebrate your birthday as if it is a royal event. The world shakes with violence. We live in chapels perilous at the bottom of the sea that we must taste like a piece of cake, on the flatlands, in the valleys, on the mountains, on the moon, and in sight of the masquerade of long-haired Halley’s comet that we must taste right royally. Here are the origins of the games that children play.’

They hold me and lead me to cosmic theatre in the magic wood. We walk on the crest of the sea and the waves leap and jump and make rain. We are on our way to celebrate my fifth boomsday birthday on a fading dusty calendar. A relic of a newspaper blows at our feet. September 1950 turns to mould in June 1961. The paper twists into spray April 1986 and the apparition of Birthday Ghost. I touch my ring and taste the wreck of civilizations.

164 BC Birthday Ghost is Babylonian cake. 12 BC Birthday Ghost is Chinese and Roman cake. AD 66 Birthday Ghost is broadsword cake over Jerusalem. AD 295 Birthday Ghost ices the constellation of Andromeda. AD 451 Birthday Ghost adorns Attila the Hun. AD 684 Birthday Ghost ices a Nürnberg Tiger. AD 1066 Birthday Ghost divides William and Harold. AD 1910 Birthday Ghost submits to photographers. AD 1985–6 Birthday Ghost dresses up for many a party around the globe.

‘Taste it,’ said Alice. ‘Taste a comet and live. Taste the ridiculous fantasies that are the seed nevertheless of history and tragedy. Taste illusion. Taste everything that mirrors childhood and old age. Taste until it hurts, it enlightens, it revives a nebulosity of spirit, the nebulous contract with an apparently doomed humanity ingrained into life. That is your royal birthday Robin Redbreast Glass. The merriment of the lost … What does it mean?’

I was filled with amazement that such a question had been directed at me. Was I a king or a prince in disguise? Alice seemed so close. Alice, the queen in Miriam’s play, is speaking now. She spoke now, she speaks now in a wave, she will speak now in a wave.

‘Now is never,’ Alice says. ‘Now is forever. Now is old age. Now is infancy. Now is Rome. Now is Athens. Now is Babylon. Now is Byzantium. Now is Number Ten. Now is the Kremlin. Now is the White House and a black band playing the blues. Now is the flight of the swallow from summer to winter and back. Now is this precious day in which we live or in which we die.’ She is laughing at me. I know she is laughing at me. Alice is laughing at me. And the merry waves jump and subside at our feet under a sea wall.

Her laughter is close and merry, I feel the bite of a wave, I feel bitten by laughter. Does one bite the flesh of a wave when one drowns, when one is borne by the sharp tooth of merriment through death?

What are the origins of such merriment? What are the origins of such bitten/biting laughter, such laughter at death or through death?

It is a game we play in the chapel perilous under the sea at Aunt Miriam’s parties. The children dress as rocks, as waves, as moss, as fish, as birds.

I bite into the premises of laughter. I chew the laughing fish and pause in mid-air as if I stand on a balloon in an animal’s lung. Boomsday comet or balloon, boomsday lung, boomsday love affair with the pretty girls dressed as fish. Shall I dive into the heart of the balloon and sing, make faces at the chorusing birds? Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

‘Come, come Robin,’ Aunt Miriam says. ‘It’s your turn to play. Such a rich costume. Such a glorious balloon.’

I stand awkwardly on the stage. Perhaps I was the envy of the other children. Perhaps — on the other hand — I envied them, I envied the part they were about to play. Aunt Miriam had rigged up a sheet and a blanket as a curtain behind which we stood, Alice and I. Aunt Miriam gave a jerk and the curtain rose like a cloud from the sky. There was a shout and the children swarmed upon us. Fish, animate rocks, birds, animate moss, all came. Indiscriminate laughter. I reached for Alice and she had gone under the wave. I saw her far down in the sea beneath the sheet and the waving blanket, beneath the merry children whose empty graves — untenanted still — are marked with crosses in the sacred wood. I saw the fish dive for her as I dived into my balloon of space. Nothing united us but the tooth of death we shared with all creatures. Nothing now. I nibbled at a bird in the sky. I nibbled at myself. The fish stroked her, the fish stroked itself, the fish stroked Miriam. How sharp, how bitter, is the merry stroke of death at the heart of self-love that cracks at last into the mysterious reflection of others? How sweet, how bitter, is life, the gravity of heart-rending compassion in life? We must laugh with one another or die. We must laugh at our own incompleteness, our grotesqueries, our absurdities, our fallacies, our proneness to despair, our innermost corruption, our innermost violence.

The biter bitten is the tooth of infinite rehearsals of chapels perilous, of the children in Alice’s and Miriam’s arms under the sea.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

SIX

I was wakened by voices I could not fathom. Were they human, were they other than human? I felt an irrational shock that my college education was over. It was a blow. I felt the hollowness of the humanity to which I returned. My mother was an excellent swimmer. Why had she drowned? The afternoon had been blissful. She had taken our boat Tiger to sea and we were drifting lazily a mile or two off the coast. Such trips were not unusual. This was the third excursion in June 1961. Aunt Miriam was there. Five children were there including Peter and Emma, two close friends of my own age, orphaned in early childhood, who lived with Alice and me. I was there. (No! I am confused. I would have been there but was down with flu and lay in bed at Aunt Miriam’s. W. H. insists that it was he who lay in bed with flu and has another tale to tell that I shall disclose in due course.)

From my bed in Miriam’s house I could see the sky and the sea. I could see Peter and Emma whose lives my mother saved. It was they who brought the news to me, messengers of the roaring laughter of the deep through which they came. I could see the wall and the floor and the window that Miriam used as a stage from which to launch her chapel perilous plays in which I had participated, forever participated, even before I was born, or time appeared to begin.

The blanket and the sheet she erected as a curtain were now missing. Yet they lay on me. I was in them. I was in the sea. I was their being of Sleep. I was the absent players, absent body yet present relic of memory. Sleepwalking relic on a wave of Sleep where my mother played a role that was to recur again and again within my dreams. Dream chapel perilous under the sea as a prelude to chapel perilous of the flatlands, chapel perilous Skull, chapel perilous of the Mountain of Folly, chapel perilous of space.

The boat sailed across the floor. It cracked. Was it a fist of wind shaking the house? Was it the floor that heaved, was it the boat? One of those unexpected tremors or earthquakes that shook the magic wood across the years. Just a tremor but it drove the boat upon the reef.

Fever inflates one’s perceptions of things. High fever. My finger grew large (or was it small) as a tooth clawing at a rock. My lung ballooned and I dived at a bird skimming a wave. The weather suddenly changed. The window on the stage shook. Tiger overturned into a ragged chest, ragged inner sail, inner curtain, ragged cross-currents. Alice bobbed up in Tiger’s tail and swam with Peter and Emma to land. She swung back and dived through grandfather’s ring to save the others. It was the last I saw of her from my wave of Sleep. I held her close. She fell into the Glass of time. Timelessness.

*

Within a year I packed a ghostly pork-knocker bag, secured a spiritual compass, sharpened my drowned ghost-pen, and set out into the sacred wood to make my way in the world, the hollow world, and in the multi-textual regions of space.

The old house in which Alice, Peter, Emma and I had lived belonged now to strangers. Before I left I scouted in a cellar in Miriam’s playhouse and little theatre (occupied now by W. H.) and unearthed a trunk of masks from Tiger’s bobbing chest on a wave of Sleep.

I recalled our last New Year’s Eve party (celebrated in Hogmanay style), my echoing voice in Miriam’s at midnight.

We twa hae paddl’d in the burn

Frae morning sun till dine,

But seas between us braid hae roared

Sin’ auld lang syne.

‘Where is laughter?’ I asked Aunt Miriam. ‘Laughter’s mask?’ but she hid her face in the seas. I saw her tears despite the running waters but these too were woven into another mask in Tiger’s broken body. I left it there out of tenderness and respect. At the bottom of an old man’s cargo of dreams when he revisits the past.

My eye fell on another mask on which W. H.’s shadow fell and this I pulled from the trunk. Shadow and substance. It imbued me with a sensation of renewed inner substance, inner fictional being.

‘I am a stranger,’ I said to the mask of Shadow and Substance in which I was reflected even as I reflected it.

‘Why a stranger?’

I looked at it closely. It was indeed a mask that I knew as if from a great distance. I knew I would come to inhabit it in the future as ageing fictional author in fictional youth, fictional character mirroring and mirrored by transformative relics of memory. It was the mask in which I would write my life, my fictional autobiography.

It was adorned by the tooth I had seen in the chapel of the sea, the tooth I shared with all creatures, a tooth sharper than any pen that I would come to possess. It had eaten its lines, its poetries, its scripts, into the flesh of my spirit. It had cut a long ravine along my brow. It had cut chasms and gulfs. It had shaped my mouth, my lips, to register the miracle of innermost address, innermost self-judgement. It was the tooth of judgement day, ceaseless judgement day I both longed for and dreaded.

‘I am a stranger to you,’ I said to the mask. ‘I reflect you and that is all. I wander the highways and byways of time in search of a gesture that rejects you entirely. I loathe you. I loathe the future. I want to be eternally young, eternally strong.’

‘Can you reject the future?’ the mask replied. ‘Even the dead must reckon with the future if there is to be justice, justice for the unborn son, the unborn daughter, the unborn stranger. You call yourself a stranger! Even the dead … Much more so the stranger who comes from the dead, dead fictions, dead legacies, dead traditions, that are not as dead as they seem but alive, alive as a threat or a challenge we have not yet absorbed, alive as revisionary fabric, revisionary truth.’

The mask paused but continued before I could speak: ‘I am the future in which you will write of this moment, this present moment, and of the past. I am you when this century draws to a close. I am you in the twenty-first century. I am the memory of the future. You are fortunate, Robin Glass.’

‘How so?’ I demanded. ‘I am a stranger. Of that I am sure.’

‘A fortunate stranger,’ said the mask. ‘To speak through the stranger in yourself means this: you are actually in the present moment and yet outside of/beyond the present moment by a fraction — shall I say — by an edge … But that is enough to be in the world yet to move by a fraction above the chaos of the world; it is — let me put it this way — to see yourself in an infinite body lying still with Alice and Miriam and the other children in the sea yet, at liberty, by a hair’s breadth to approach yourself as in a play, relate to yourself in the memory of the future, be in yourself yet move — as I have said — just a fraction beyond a stranger’s death, out of your stillness, your death. One day you will come upon Peter and Emma in the stranger city of Skull that stands upon a simulated arch or bridge between true voice and true ear, true response to the everlasting intimate stranger in yourself.

‘Ah Stranger! you move within yet without yourself. You dream in every age of the womb from which you came as if the womb were a theatre of existence and you are steeped in it even as you surface from it or fall to the edge of time, visionary backwards fall, visionary downwards fall, visionary upwards fall, visionary forwards fall. To transform the vertigo of a stranger birth, a stranger death, in yourself is to fall into the resurrectionary/revolutionary Glass of your age …’

Ghost’s voice faded. For it was Ghost I suddenly saw masquerading as my future self.

I looked at Ghost and knew, despite everything he had said, I loathed his appearance, his sagging cheeks, his age, his apparitional freedom. Yes freedom! One is afraid of the coming of old age because one hates one’s stranger capacity for freedom, for spiritual justice through and beyond one’s trappings, cultural trappings, etc. One dreads the heartrending call of supreme insight, the pain and the anguish of stranger maturity, the slow but inevitable dissolution of the ego, the dissolution of the proud but unfree state or body in its tantrums and rages and incurable desires. One dreads a true marriage with the stranger beloved in all creation — a beloved creation one may learn to touch anew, to sense anew, to know anew beyond all self-deception or arrogance. A beloved creation that astonishes, disturbs: it brings a mirror into the heart of creaturely terror and addictive lust. It asserts anew within the perversities of ambition a necessary quest for the foundations of religious hope where one least suspects these to exist. For some unaccountable reason I thought of poor Emma and Peter. What had they made of their lives, of their survival? Would they disturb me profoundly (yet illumine my quest for religious hope) when I came upon them in the city of Skull?

One is afraid to drown before one’s time (yet live), one is afraid to glimpse the age of the earth (yet descend into the womb), the age of faltering economies (yet arise into the spirit of value), the age of the tides, the age of ageless fall into apparent nothingness … all before one’s time … the age of terrifying responsibility, the necessity to create a true and intimate life of conscience, life of authority within the body of the waste land.

TOWARDS DROWNED SUNRISE IN JUNE 1962 — A YEAR AFTER TIGER STRUCK THE REEF AND BROKE — I (ROBIN REDBREAST GLASS) CAME TO THE EDGE OF A BLACK SWAMP OR LAKE, THE EDGE OF THE CHAPEL PERILOUS OF THE FLATLANDS. The chapel or city (it had not yet been transformed into a wealthy city) was called skull. It stood above an ancient sea-bed. The ocean had rolled here long, long ago on its way to the foot of the Angel Falls escarpment in the magic wood. Boomsday Skull. Boomsday Tiger. I stared into the mirror of the swamp and saw Skull’s future, its lavish prosperity. I heard the voice of Ghost nevertheless. ‘I am in all decrepit humanity. I am in the broken Tiger. I am in the sad dancers who ride on the waves. I am in all lost loves and lost lovers. I am ghost within ghost within ghost.’ I saw my reflection in a ghostly wave, my seventeen-year-old drowned reflection in the water, half-in the sleeping tides that pillowed my eyes, half-out yet in the biting mask of Ghost, half-in my seventeen-year-old shredded skeleton — dressed to look beautiful now, immortal now, in the theatre of Faustian history — half-out yet in the memory bank of the future and in the ageing global mask that Ghost had employed as me in the 1980s and the 1990s and in the year 2000 when Skull would have achieved the status of a faeryland Chernobyl tomb, cheap electricity and deceptively abundant goods.

‘Why me?’ I cried. ‘Why choose me? Who is it — let us be truthful, Ghost — that writes of me as if he is me in the future? Some damned expert no doubt. (They have ruined the water table in many a flatland, they have despoiled and exploited resources, triggered erosion in global theatres — experts they call themselves, experts in everything cheap though God knows how dear one’s embalmed species may ultimately prove.) Did I not happily drown when Alice and Miriam drowned? Whose body of expertise am I? Whose dear poverty, whose cheap prosperity, am I?’

I uttered the questions without thinking. I spoke, it seemed, in a dream without knowing I had spoken. I was alive yet dead. Why had I spoken as I had? Dream-reflex? Skull-protest? Simulated freedom of speech? Such speech (such uncertainty of motivation) sprang out of a fear, an ambivalence, a distrust of futures that come upon one before one knows the choices one is making, before one knows one’s potential age, one’s deepest age, one’s cross-cultural heritage and body of wisdom to come abreast of the tools that may damn or save (one cannot say) the human race.

Such involuntary speech (half-simulated, half-unscripted) sprang out of the dilemmas of a post-colonial civilization, out of Third Worlds, and bewildered First Worlds. Out of ancient conquests and legacies of evil that Alice and Miriam and all the Calypsonians had danced and played in all apparent and perverse innocence.

I repeated my questions and added automatically, ‘Can one trust the experts who write the fictions of the future?’

Ghost hid his Birthday/Deathday humours in a cloud then spoke above the chapel of the flatlands. ‘I shall call upon W. H. in a moment or two to speak of the book of your life. No expert is he but an adversary.’

‘Adversary!’ I exclaimed.

‘Are the truths of fiction,’ said Ghost, ‘not rooted in an adversarial spirit? Take the fictional houses of God! We call them cathedrals. Admirals and generals and soldiers everywhere. And the saints. Where are they? In a stained-glass window or two where they resist oblivion.’ Ghost was jesting but I experienced a stab of fear. ‘Perhaps W. H. will elbow me …’

‘And you will elbow him,’ Ghost interrupted, ‘into revisionary strategies in which you live as if your hand, your being, your touch, your seeing, your hatreds and fears for that matter, your innermost fantasies, become a medium in which life and death wrestle with one another.’

‘What are revisionary strategies?’ I was uncertain.

‘I say revisionary strategies to imply that as you write of other persons, of the dead or the unborn, bits of the world’s turbulent, universal unconscious embed themselves in your book. Do you see?’

‘And I revise around these and through these. I see.’ I was filled with a sudden animosity towards W. H. ‘It is my life — not W. H.’s. I shall spit in his eye when we next meet for a rehearsal at Aunt Miriam’s in her chapel perilous play of the flatlands.’

Ghost was laughing soundlessly. ‘Did not Christ heal a blind man with spittle and clay? It’s an elaborate strategy simple as it appears. In your case, Robin, it implies that your backward fall into Miriam’s childhood theatre is the visionary substance and the bitter flavour of memory, a relic of memory on your tongue that fills you with such uneasiness you project it upon W. H. And in so doing you help him to see deeper into the fabric of intuitive theatres, theatres of clay as of sea, light and darkness, air and element, theatres of the past, theatres of the present, theatres of the future.’

I was struck by the parallels Ghost had drawn.

‘Intuitive theatres?’

‘Just so,’ said Ghost. ‘They illumine the blind life (the unconscious bits) of the imagination whose roots run deep into the diverse substance of the intimate stranger in yourself Robin Glass, the clay, the claws, and everything that translates into innermost perception. The truths of fiction, yes! They validate you. You are the substance of stranger quarrels — love’s quarrel with time is a healed passageway into God — stranger myth, untameable reality, and renaissance of faculties within the womb of space. You live and write your fictional autobiography from the other side of W. H.’s blind/seeing mind, Robin Glass. He is a character in your book. You are no invention of his. You are no pawn of his. You validate and contest his discoveries. They are your discoveries as much as his.’ Ghost was laughing but deadly serious. ‘I merely confer upon him a body and a mask that are an extension of my paradoxical Being and of your youth into fictional middle and old age in which you lift your pen and write as you now do of your adversary W. H.’

I was conscious suddenly of W. H.’s presence and mask in my book.

‘May I give you the facts?’ said W. H. ‘I may be a character in your book but still …’

‘Facts?’ said I.

‘You — Robin Glass — your mother Alice, your aunt Miriam, and three children were drowned in June 1961, the afternoon of the earthquake. The boat Tiger overturned at sea. Alice, brave woman, assisted Peter and Emma, helped them to the land and returned.’

My hatred of W. H. welled into fury. ‘It’s not true,’ I shouted. ‘You know damn well I was in bed with flu at Aunt Miriam’s.’

‘It was I,’ said W. H. gently.

‘You?’

‘Shadow and substance ail everywhere in adversarial contexts of history. And out of that illness is born the resurrection of the body of the soul that we share with one another, black with white, humanity with humanity. What more can you ask of me, Robin Glass, what greater quest, what greater truth? We share an enduring tradition.’

‘You spoke of facts,’ I insisted.

‘Facts, yes, in that fate is the mask authorial freedom wears — the fate of a realistic end or extermination — until it yields to true myth we share with one another, the future with the past. When I arose from bed on hearing news of your death my illness vanished. I knew that time itself had changed and I had become the character of true myth in your book. Not that I was surprised. I had been rehearsing the part for a long time. I had been your aunt’s lover (I had grown to care for you as if you were my nephew) and the producer, the director, of her plays — a background figure. Background yet close as a shadow is to its substance. (Are not authors — forgive me for calling myself an author in this instance — shadow relatives in the book of life? And thus as shadows indispensable to the body of life, the fiction of the body?) When I heard the news I ran, ill as I was, healed nevertheless, blind, seeing nevertheless, down to the sea. The waves were high. The reef — a mile or so away — was a mass of turbulent ocean. A terrible commotion of water. Emma and Peter had already been taken away. It was rumoured your mother Alice swam ashore with them and returned for Miriam and the others. I thought I heard a voice from the ocean cry:“Remember me as I remember you. Become a character in my book. Fiction is real when authors become unreal. Fiction reveals its truths, its genuine truths that bear on the reality of persons, the reality of the world, when fiction fictionalizes authors and characters alike. Thus is archetypal myth resurrected. Thus am I your nephew if not in blood in the language we share.”

‘The voice in the ocean ceased,’ said W. H., ‘and yet I had been so stirred that a crowd seemed to flock out of the waves into my heart and mind. “Fiction relates to presences and to absences,” they said. “Fiction gives buoyancy to us. Fiction explores the partiality of the conditioned mind and the chained body, chained to lust, chained to waste. Fiction’s truths are sprung from mind in its illumination of the sensible body again and again and again, in its illumination of our grasp of intuitive theatre and of deprivation in the materials with which one constructs every quantum leap from the sick bed of humanity.”’ The crowd of voices subsided and W. H.’s confession faded into the page on which I wrote. I moved along the edge of the swamp to the Skull-shaped simulated city of the flatlands. And experienced the oddest vertigo — the vertigo of one’s precipitous age, the heady manifestos, the ambitions, the ideal fallacies, the intoxications, the addictions, the heights — though walking on the flatlands! I — Robin Glass — should have ‘walked tall’ as the President of the United States or as the Chairman of the Soviet Union but sagged instead (when no one was looking). Was it a necessary terror of the resurrection to experience oneself as a young man in a hollow body? Hollow-looking glass marvel in every television box! Such is the illusion of power the resurrected body faces as it ascends from the grave. It is encrusted with illusions of power, illusions of freedom, that it needs to unravel as a prelude to a genuine revolution.

I loathed Ghost as if he had occasioned the vertigo of my arousal. My loathing had intensified when he began to speak a variety of uncomfortable home truths. ‘Better a dumb Spirit than a speaking God. Such are the paradoxes born of the Word and of the possession of a voice by a stranger exercised in true capacity or spiritual right.’

Ghost had made an enemy of me by speaking the language of the judging heart. God had made an enemy of Mankind with every commandment that he uttered. The earth became a battlefield of fanaticisms, one party fighting another, each defending but attacking God in mauling the stranger at the gate. Each was convinced it possessed a duty to maim or to kill in upholding the laws of God. Such is the terror and the ambiguity of the Word. No wonder God tended to keep a silent tongue in His head. Or was it in Her head? (The matter of gender was a sore point amongst male priests and female priests.) Ghost had ventured to speak through a variety of masquerades and utterances that seemed to mock yet to reveal, to discount yet to make visible innermost feuding reality that is masked by self-righteous accent or idiom, self-righteous deprivation.

Indeed this was Ghost’s strategy on behalf of a lost or half-remembered humanity on the edge of the abyss, on the edge of hollow intelligences, hollow prides, into which I moved as resurrected flesh-and-blood within the age of the waste land.

It was this uncertainty about the Word, about truth, in my resurrected body invoking the half-remembered shell I once was that tormented me most of all in returning to the land from the sea and intensified once again my indictment of Ghost. Was I now more than human shell, less than human hollow, other than human shell, in tending to forget (within the grave from which I had arisen) an everlasting strangeness in creaturely divinity’s essence, an everlasting saturation of fabric and necessity for a spiritual irony in all renascent formations, animal and soul, angel and fish and bird?

Was this spiritual irony part and parcel of the seed of Ghost in the Word of God?

Did that seed in its grain of self-mockery and profoundest utterance sustain a true placelessness, a true freedom on land and water and air (not a technological roar or self-righteous bias), profoundest change, profoundest imagination (not ten feet tall cliché-ridden idols and derivatives of global conquest)?

I saw it all now with heartrending insight and remorse such as only the dead who return to the living may know. I had come back from the chapel of the sea with Ghost long, long ago. In dreaming of him on the beach I had been involved in a rehearsal of perfectible order, perfectible industry, perfectible state, that I shared with him from the beginning of time. But in my obliviousness of the ambiguity of the Word and the nature of absence that the dead endure (absence from a hollow humanity) and absence’s ramifications in native presence, I had had to dream again and again of obsessional need, obsessional wealth, obsessional poverty, obsessional expectation of a supreme prosperity as if prosperity were its own perfectible Ghost, perfectible commander of the futures of the race.

‘Supreme prosperity?’ Ghost said to me now from within the masquerades of dream. ‘Supreme irony! The perfectibility of the state, the perfectibility of command, the perfectibility of industry, leads to a growing tide of refugees of spirit in flight from themselves to an illusory benefactor. And your resurrection — each rehearsal in which I am involved with you — is as much a warning of the sickness of the expectant soul as it is a vision of a divine and terrifying love. My fear is, Robin, that the sickness of expectant souls may prevail for a long, long time to come (with increasingly dangerous consequences) in a disordered and chaotic world in flight to a prosperity it confuses with the genius of love. But then have we not sown obsessional desire, obsessional folly, in the waste land that we cherish?’

I thought I had sown the origins of sensation, dance, touch, flowering of poetry … Yes, I thought I had sown such occasions in my library of dreams but everything seemed hollow now. I strove to articulate that hollowness into the ‘withinness’ of the Word, a ‘withinness’ that was transformative wholeness in the vessel of space, the hollow vessel of space; and failed. I sought to articulate that hollowness into the ‘withoutness’ of Spirit, Spirit that immerses itself in the fabric of being yet moves at the edge of the fury of hypocritical slogan and quarrelsome rhetoric upon a plane of reality; and failed. But in failing I knew that that hollowness was the ground of creative conscience and value, the ground of an absence from the world that re-enters the world without illusion, without ideal self-deception. Did the absent body — in re-entering the theatre of the world — begin to acquire its own true echoing voice in a hollow humanity whose hollowness became an unsuspected creative faculty in the vitalized conscience of tradition, the vitalized conscience of the dead?

Did the absent body — in re-entering the theatre of the world as resurrected presence — begin to acquire a capacity to dislodge prepossession and formidable bias within a hollowness of humanity whose conscription of value inevitably shifts or cracks or moves before the breath of Spirit?

One cannot return from the dead, return to the present, without sensing in some degree — however ambiguously — through failure or achievement — that the miracle of a re-entry into a hollow humanity is a subversive reality one has neglected to explore in its ramifications within the origins of value.

I had come to the bridge of wisdom. It arched across the flatlands and across the swamp of adventure through which Raleigh and Cortes and Middle Passage Rastafarian Magellan and many others had moved to the block or the fire or to the grave. Were they in essence refugees of spirit bound together in the chaos of the world? Black refugees. White refugees. Conquistadorial adventurers and refugees. Victimized emigrants or immigrants or refugees. No wonder W. H. had heard such a clamour in the sea whose voices he barely caught and faintly translated.

The bridge was a simulated arch in my Faustian dream of Third Worlds running hand in hand with First or Second Worlds. It stretched between the true (however faint) voice of the absent body and the true (however remote) ear of the absent body, the true voice in and the intimate response from the everlasting stranger in oneself.

I was greeted by an illumination that seemed nevertheless fraught with danger: the cheap light of the sun, the cheap light of a furnace, in a drowned man’s refugee eyes as he arises from the chapel perilous of the sea and is tempted by Prosperity Ghost in the city of Skull.

How cheap is the light of the sun, how cheap is the electricity of the stars?

‘Cheapness is all,’ said Ghost. But I saw that his eyes were sad. Intimate, knowing, sad eyes within the everlasting stranger in oneself. ‘Cheapness is all,’ the refugees roared and would have rushed into Skull but their way was barred as if Time itself were considering their plight before it yielded to their demand.

‘Why should Time yield to such temptation?’ I said to Ghost. ‘You should know since you raise the issue in this masquerade …’

‘Prosperity Ghost you mean!’ he was laughing soundlessly.

‘Yes! Indeed. You raise the issue in this masquerade as a moral aesthetic, I take it — a piece of moral theatre. Miriam loved moral theatre! And I — resurrected bone and flesh that I am — cannot shake it out of my veins. Hollow veins in which I taste nevertheless an impulse to regenerative vessel, regenerative capacity. And so I ask as if the tooth I bring from the grave bites so fiendishly, so terribly, I cannot resist asking (I cannot resist hunting the truth): would it not be kinder, much kinder, of Time to resist the will of the hordes who rush into the lap of exploiters and into the arms of illusory benefactors? Would it not be kinder, much kinder, of Time to assist the growing tide of refugees to draw closer to their innermost conscience, to resist the cheap and the tawdry, to resist the ruthless calculation, the ruthless, the unprincipled?’

‘Time yields,’ said Ghost so softly I could scarcely hear (I held my resurrected ear now to the deck of the Faustian bridge to catch the true and bitter voice of hollow self, the true and bitter response to hollow self) ‘because it is endemic part and parcel of the fodder of generations. Time is not love, divine love. Time is a character of universality incorrigibly stained by partial, biased and cruel forces. Because of its partiality its biases are susceptible to excavation and to the true action of redemptive love, redemptive wholeness. But that is another matter. A matter for the creative and aroused conscience within the graves of history. In regard to your immediate question that bears on the logic of time, Time as an answering device, a speaking device, a machine in the chaotic soul, Time (note I sometimes spell it with a common t, sometimes a capital T) is but a measure of partial events.

‘Look! Look into the swamp of the centuries within your own book that is stained by invisible creek water, invisible river water, invisible pork-knocker barrels, pork-knocker ships; just look! What do you see?’

Before I could answer — as if I were an answering clock — Ghost continued: ‘You see when you scan closely your own death and the deaths of your mother and aunt (whose antecedents came into the magic wood from other continents) that the refugee count in the clock of the sea has moved from adventurers and slaves, from those who fled the sword and the fire, from those who stood on the auction block, into disrupted twentieth-century populations broken by famine or civil war; tyrannized by military regimes; deceived by politicians who rig the ballot when there are elections in the Third World.

‘Their lust for prosperity and their despair are such (and who amongst us can blame them?) that they turn from the brutalities of the sovereign state and the phoney placards of newfound independence and fall on their knees before the new El Dorados of the West.’

‘New El Dorados?’ I was sceptical. ‘There is growing unemployment. There is the rise of labour-saving devices, new clocks whose every tick manufactures redundancy. And this is Skull. It is the archetypal Colony in the magic wood. It stands in or over a swamp.’

‘The archetypal Colony may seem remote from the West but it is an extension of the West. The refugees will come. Indeed they have never ceased to come, sometimes as a trickle, sometimes as a wave. Look deep! Look deep into the heart of the swamp that stains every page of history. Look deep into the necessity to manufacture asylums for refugees, ghetto asylums, god knows what. Scrap a couple of rockets, a couple of nuclear bombs, half a dozen submarines and battleships, an extra penny or two on income tax, and heigho, Skull may be converted into a prosperous concentration camp.

‘Think of the prospect of cheap energy. Look deep, I say, into the swamp. Look deep into the cheap electric stars and the cheap electric suns reflected there in the mirror of coming technologies, coming at any price, any human price. Look into the brave new world. Look into the faeryland promise of Chernobyl. Time lifts its skirt like a radioactive whore.’

All my ancient and modern loathing or detestation of Ghost returned. ‘This is a joke, an obscene joke,’ I cried. ‘Face the facts. Don’t exaggerate. Chernobyl is a disaster complex in the Soviet Union. What has it got to do with the free West and the choices that lie before the electorates of the free West? Are you saying such choices are an illusion?’ I felt the shadow of terror in my resurrected body. ‘What bearing has faeryland on Skull?’

‘Hush-hush disaster, dateless day bearing,’ said Ghost. ‘When Communist Rome burns an empire of souls inhales its ash. But no one sees the fire or the brute faery at the extremities of our fingertips. So too when faeryland burns (and the absent body you wear and loathe and which you and I share, as a multi-faceted investiture with which to address and warn the world, looms into theatre) the building blocks of heaven are shaken by the storm. But no one sees or hears the earthquake — not even those who are experimenting with human souls. Skull, dear Robin Glass, is our coming asylum for the refugee spirit. Skull is the dateless day that Faust simulates. Skull is the transformation of the swamp of history into an electric paradise. Cheap energy is the opium of the masses, the new lotus.’

I felt the hordes of the future rush through me into Skull. I pencilled some notes into my book.

Dateless Day Play. Dateless Day (plucked from a pre-Columbian infinity calendar) relics of memory. Hollow humanity.

Tooth and ring. Chapel perilous of the sea (AD 1961–2).

Bridge into Skull. Chapel perilous of the flatlands (AD 1962).

Indistinct clamour of refugees of spirit. Cheap energy is all (AD 1962–86).

Faeryland burns at Chernobyl (AD 1986).

Capital investment for Play of Humanity begins in Skull. Asylum for refugees. Marvellous glittering tomb-shaped edifice. Twenty-first century sophisticated concentration camp. Fodder of generations (AD 2000–2050).

I re-read my notes. My loathing of Ghost intensified. I tore the notes into scraps but they floated over the water like a measure of the dancing city, the dancing theatre, of Skull.

Towers were built. Promenades. Halls. Shopping precincts. Streets. Etc., etc., etc. It was a grand play, a grand village. One matter had been omitted from my notes. And now I found myself pencilling it with invisible lead on to the brow of Skull.

Plutonium has been found. Sophisticated Third World/First World dump in the text of the magic wood.

I tried to tear this up too but the bone in the masks of Skull that some of the players wore in the Play of Humanity resisted my touch.

Yet the sensation reminded me of the enigma of time, time’s bone as well as time’s page, and I found myself tracing a calendrical road that ran into the theatre of Skull. It was called Dateless Day Infinity Route or Tunnel. I moved along it to its junction with Prospero Mall. And here it was that I came upon Peter and Emma in the year AD 2025. Was this an arbitrary calendrical year or was it a provocative and lucid dream-choice reflecting the measureless yet ironically pinpointed canvas in the drama of the future within the life of the creative present?

I reached out to them from within the tunnel: I back from the drowned dead in each year, each century; they hovering still, it seemed, at the margins of the pinpointed living where the spray of the sea in every leaf, in every flower, broke our lips into a kiss.

Tunnel of immortality? Tunnel of death? Tunnel of the resurrection?

As our hands and lips met and parted I felt I had aged not a whit since AD 1962. Peter and Emma, on the other hand, were my own age yet they seemed older than I in the tunnel or the relic or the passageway of memory in which we stood. Was it ten years older? Was it twenty years older? I puzzled over the difference. What is five years or ten years or twenty years between friends? And yet — since Peter and Emma and I were actually the same age — it became important to know why they seemed older, I younger, why in another light of dream-theatre I might become older, they younger. Were such values of time purely arbitrary, purely conventional aspects of story line in the play of a civilization? Or were they a reflection of absent bodies entering time, excavating time, changing our innermost grasp of fate and of freedom within the veil of time?

I knew it all signified a measure of ironic spirituality and dream-choice in the way one excavates the biases of time, the tyrannies of time. Each relic of time, each built passageway, each sculpted tunnel or bowl or room, each cell, each cradle, glimmered with the cruelties of the past yet with a theatre of new-born spirit to breach or transform a moment of terror.

Each minute distinction of years between me and Peter and Emma in the theatre of spirit reflected our vision or capacity to see or feel or grasp the urgencies and the consequences in the architectures and connective rooms of our age. And in opening a dream-tunnel that ran from the middle of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century we were involved not only in generations but in the pinpointed canvas of the years, in one’s illusory yet immortal youth as much as in one’s illusory and immortal old age.

One was involved in the nature and the meaning of survival as much as in unravelling a distinction in minute accretions in the value of time within childhood theatre, within resurrectionary theatre, within political theatre.

I knew there was a distinction between simulated immortality or youth or old age and the terrifying insights associated with a resurrection/a revolution of inner mind, inner spirit.

In this instance — in reaching out to Emma and Peter — I was assailed by the enigma of authorship and charactership across the years in the Play of Humanity and in my fictional autobiography.

One loomed large (the play of humanity) whereas the other, my book, was minute but intensely real, intensely poignant.

In AD 1962 — when I came within hailing distance of Skull — I was aware of Ghost’s extension of himself into W. H.’s ageing mask through which I wrote my fictional autobiography.

Now, however — in AD 2025 — though I remained as young as ever (my hair was immaculately black and I was dressed to a t or a T in the paradox of time/Time) I knew that W. H. himself had vanished and that someone else — some other ageing mask — played the role of authorship/charactership in my book as if I were he, he me. The name or the initials on this new ageing mask eluded me. Yet they marked a further and crucial development in my book. They implied the secretion of ageless myth in the theatre of the world as a subtle rebuttal of an authoritarian realism — however sophisticated — an authoritarian story line or sophisticated dumping ground in the theatre of Skull for an irrelevant and a doomed humanity held in thrall by the logic of violence, the logic of hell. In that subtle rebuttal lay the foundations of religious hope. But even so I could not be sure how precarious such foundations were, how costly they might prove. How possible, or impossible, it was to make a beginning — nothing more — in switching the priorities of Billionaire Death away from the cinematic dance and extermination of the brutes (that claimed the bright lights of Broadway Skull) into scenarios of a hospital of infinity at the heart of space.

Perhaps Peter and Emma knew of such beginnings and might be able to disclose some unsuspected shift in the priorities of Skull. For they (Peter and Emma) were themselves characters of myth. They had become this in peculiar, uncertain and groping — even self-contradictory — degrees in the midst of the desolations of Prosperity. One finds such characters in every city, in every throng of refugees. The odd survivors. They belong yet do not belong. In some quite lucid and strangely factual way I knew I existed in their dreams — that they were dreaming of me as I dreamt of them at a junction in the tunnel where the resurrection of the dead seemed to blend with the survival of the endangered living.

I knew that their dreams of me were intensely real, that their survival, their escape from drowning, had so affected them, that I was in the very fibre of their lives, an eternal question mark, an eternal misgiving. I was the seed of their terror and their uncertainty in Skull. What did survival truly mean when all those who are dearest to one have vanished? Equally they were for me the seed of religious hope. What did resurrection/revolution truly mean unless one could place it in living, uncertain flesh-and-blood within oneself/without oneself?

‘I have been looking for you for ages,’ I said to them. ‘And now at last …’ I hesitated but rushed on. ‘The resurrection’s a fact, Emma. It’s no panacea, Peter. It doesn’t stop the pain of living. That I now know. I can tell you this. If anything it intensifies mental anguish. For one sees into the shell of what one was. One sees into the bankruptcy of one’s civilization: a terrible business. And yet one loves one’s fellow woman and man as never before. One truly knows the fabric of compassion, of pity, of beauty. A terrifying kind of longing, of hope, within the hollowness of one’s age.’

Peter was staring hard at me. ‘That’s why I became an addict,’ he said. ‘Self-love. Egotistical love. Break all sound barriers. I drink the lotus, the opium of the masses. The death wish of an age. I am a popular singer and player and I feed on the lotus, belly to belly, back to back death wish in Calypso’s and Tiger’s band. A new lament, a new ballad of the soul, Robin!’ He was staring at me quizzically and I could not be sure how serious he was, whether he was testing me, mocking me, mocking himself, testing himself.

Emma tore the shred of incipient but mutual addiction, mutual self-pity from our eyes. ‘That’s not what Robin is saying, Peter,’ she said to me as though she were addressing him. Her voice softened. ‘Poor Peter! He’s an incurable romantic, Robin. But what would I do without him? Robin’s talking of a voice and an ear, Peter, we seldom hear or use. Not BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM. He’s saying it’s a voice and an ear we may come to perceive within ourselves when we return to ourselves and know ourselves for the first bleak and terrible time. Without fallacy. Without illusion. Nothing egotistical. Know suddenly at the heart of despair the true stranger in ourselves, Peter, beyond all our vanity in whom lies the promise of glory.’

She uttered the word ‘glory’ with reluctance, misgiving. An abused word. Napoleonic glory? The glory of lust? I knew she meant neither of these. What did she mean? It was as if she had read the question in my mind as I had read the question in hers in the tunnel of classical penetration, classical endurance, classical genius of love. I sawin a flash that she was a priest,a female priest, she was hope in the city of Skull, revolutionary hope, unconventional hope.

‘It’s divine Communism,’ Peter murmured, ‘when the male priest sups with the female priest at the same high table in the tunnel of centuries …’ He stopped as if he had said too much. But even so it was a definition of ‘divine’ and of ‘Communism’ I had never heard before. Still I wondered. What was ‘divine Communism’? Like ‘glory’ it was of debased coinage, an abused term. Take ‘Communism’! What was ‘Communism’? Surely not the Communist Rome that burnt at Chernobyl while the Party fiddled. Take ‘divine’! What was the ‘divine’? Surely not the pomp and the robes in the theatre of Skull.

Emma, the priest, caught the drift of reflection. She turned to Peter as if he were me in the veil of the tunnel and I were he in the play of divinity. ‘When one breaks true bread,’ she said, ‘with the true stranger in oneself who knows one, is unsparing with one, yet perceives the creative conscience and potential in one, then one begins an ascent through the follies of one’s age to a vision of divine Communism. Alas it’s not easy.’ Her eyes were both dark and pale. I saw she wished to goad me, to startle me, within our pattern of lucid dream. She shot at me, ‘You, Robin, will need Peter as alter ego stranger — alter ego theatre — when you climb the Mountain of Folly above Skull.’

A beam shone through the tunnel that alerted us — Peter, Emma and I — to dateless day infinity comedy in which we were involved. Perhaps it was Emma’s allusion to ‘alter ego theatre’ that reminded me of the ruses and the labyrinths of Faust, the simulated voices, simulated scripts, that passed as normality in Skull. Imagine the various factories, pubs, bedrooms, drawing rooms, football arenas, offices, stages — imagine the elegant and violent puppetries, the strings that are pulled, the solemn manifestos, the rages, the brutalities, the sermons, the curses, the drunken fights, the programmes, the dangling shadow of bait — imagine the follies of which Emma had spoken. Follies of Skull! Circus of Skull! Reflexes of Skull!

We — Emma, Peter and I — were caught in the web of Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours that passed for normality. And yet … I paused, reflected again. Did I mean abnormality? There lay a distinction between ourselves and the ‘normal’ world. We accepted our abnormality and the bizarre truths associated with ourselves as a capacity to mirror yet repudiate and breach Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours. Our apparent unreality — our very unreality — witnessed to a self-confessional reality in which we came to the edge of ourselves and looked through ourselves. To be true (to know truth) within an age of violence and lies, an age subject to the reflexes of Skull, was to sense a curious irreality in oneself, a curious originality, a curious divergence from the circus of the real (or what passed for the real).

All this made me scan Emma’s features closely. She was veiled by dateless day infinity comedy. I saw her innate sorrow. I suddenly saw how worn she was. It was as if a nail had woven its innermost weblike constancy into her flesh, an ecstatic nail, a sorrowing nail. Ecstatic and sorrowing! That was her bizarre truth, her divergence from what passed as the real in the circus of the normal and the real.

‘O Emma,’ I cried impulsively, ‘tell me please. How have you made out all these years? There were debts to pay, the old house was sold. Even Miriam’s theatre fell under the hammer though W. H. preserved it for a while.’

‘I have paid dearly,’ Emma said. ‘Survival is dear, it is beyond price, but it is worth it.’

‘It must have been a difficult time after Alice’s death, Miriam’s death, my death.’

‘A difficult time indeed,’ Emma confessed, ‘a difficult adjustment for Peter and me. We once shared everything, remember? We were part of your family, remember? We shared the little theatre in the magic wood, remember? We shared every meal. And then came the earthquake, the crash … It was as if we had been orphaned all over again. Flung out of the cradle all over again. But there was no one like Alice to take us in this time. As I lay on the beach I was pierced by the cry of the gulls, the laughing sea gulls. Were they gulls or were they cranes? I could not tell. It was a cry from heaven and yet it was a subtle, piercing, shaking laughter. A shaking note like strings of music in the sea. The motif of an incomparable composition. Music such as we had dreamt to hear in our little theatre.’ She stopped as if she remembered something I had forgotten. ‘Did you not ask Aunt Miriam, Robin, what is laughter’s mask? Did you not hunt through a trunk of dresses and costumes, etc., in an old cellar?’

‘I remember.’

‘Aunt Miriam wept when you asked her on the bed of the sea. Well let me tell you, Robin, that the answer lay in a bird’s cry, a bird’s feather that pierces heaven and strings the music of laughter into the grief of rain. It was a nail, a half-rending sound, that rose from the sea, from Tiger’s broken body, from the shattered boat, from the ships of all the navies of all the oceans, from a broken barrel, an invisible barrel on which Alice leaned into the crest of a wave. It was a nail. And it pierced me. I was nailed into the ground.’

‘My God, Emma!’ I was confused. I recalled the apparition of Ghost, multi-faceted Ghost, innermost Ghost, outermost Ghost, arising from the sea.

‘My God, Emma!’

‘In such a nail that shatters one’s prepossessions I knew the construction of a sound that echoed in the air and in the sea. It was the music of the priest, of the God of nature. One comes,’ said Emma, ‘to a beloved creation, to the divine, in every moment that one survives in the inimitable textures of nature, truly lives and survives.’

I shook myself hard. I tried to reason with myself. I almost felt that I had taken advantage of her, that I knew her secrets because I had lain with her there on the beach, with my lips within the cover of her hair yet on her breasts. I shook myself. I tried to reason with myself. ‘You were desolated, Emma. You had narrowly escaped drowning. One understands.’

‘One understands,’ said Emma and looked at me as if she were addressing Peter, ‘that a priest in a desolate age, in a drowned age, must pay dear for an illumination of ecstasy, Robin. How can one surrender oneself to laughter in the midst of survival that leaves one bereft? How can one sing in the midst of survival that leaves one bereft? How can one play? Yet one does. Peter sings. Peter plays. Calypso sings. Calypso dances. And you and Alice and Miriam paid with your lives for them to be merry in the light of a stranger ecstasy. As for me I became a priest. I dedicated myself to simplicity’s tasks, simplicity’s meals, and to a butterfly-lantern at the heart of the globe.’

I felt her lips upon mine. The kiss of all loves and all true lovers.

SEVEN

THE SCENE CHANGES. We are now in the elaborate promenade of Prospero Mall. Emma pulls a veil like the sea around her eyes. She slips away but not before depositing a note in the pocket of my coat. I pull it out. The note is faded as if it had been written long, long ago. In an age of childhood when we were encouraged by Miriam and Alice to write letters to one another about fabulous journeys to the ends and the beginnings of time. I smooth the note slowly and read:

Dear Robin,

The next leg of your journey will take you up the Mountain of Folly. And Peter’s assistance will prove invaluable. Do not ask me how I know! Let us say we are privy to one another’s secrets. We are, if you like, lovers in infinity. When Peter lay beside me on the beach before the ambulance arrived I dreamt it was you! (Aunt Miriam says I am an imaginative letter writer.) What I have to say now will come as a shock. Peter’s addicted to three bands in the sacred wood. One is Calypso’s and Tiger’s band which he joined a year or so after your imaginary (it seems so real now — or is it in the future?) death. The second is called the rocket-crucifixion band. The third is Faust’s circus band.

Peter joined the rocket-crucifixion band and Faust’s circus band not very long ago and decided not to give his own name this time but to use an alias. Indeed he used your name — Robin Redbreast Glass. A parcel of cheek! Shocking alter ego Glass cheek! Faust calls him Robin! So don’t be surprised when he addresses him by your name. Miriam says it’s a kind of test between ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ when you climb. Peter, of course, chose your name because it was dead simple. He knew everything about you. It was easy to secure your birth certificate and to answer any questions that Faust might ask.

Faust (he calls himself Doctor Faustus in Prospero Mall) has his surgery — as it is called — at the end of the Mall.

Surgery! An odd name, I know, but it relates to Faust’s alchemy (Aunt Miriam explained things about alchemy), his phantom nooses, phantom crosses, and also (this is important) ‘a shift that is occurring in the priorities of Billionaire Death from whom Faust borrows capital to invest in themes of simulated immortality.’(I have copied this last from a dusty old book that W. H. reads when he assists Aunt Miriam in staging our plays.) The shift — the book goes on to say — in the priorities of Skull extends through all generations. It’s a frail shift — the book says — but it may build up suddenly into a creative breakthrough. I like that. Don’t you? (W. H. says we are becoming literate imaginations!) The Mountain of Folly, for instance — according to Alice’s legend — has been riddled or penetrated by the vision of a hospital of infinity in which refugees of spirit may reside. (I am a bit frightened by all this, aren’t you? But excited.)

The book also says that the poor doomed people in our theatre of Skull may no longer be doomed as before, that the hospital of infinity is an unexpected blessing in coming space programmes.

On the other hand I heard Tiger growling, ‘it’s too damned early to be sure.’ Things may slip back again. A lot may depend on you and Peter when you climb the Mountain. It’s up to you to save them. And I shall do my best. Remember me.

Emma

PS One thing more. Make your way to Faust’s surgery. You will find Peter there and hear news of the rocket band in which (Miriam whispers) Faust has an interest.

I folded the letter with care and replaced it in my pocket. Dateless Day Infinity Road had brought me now to the end of the Mall. I heard Doctor Faustus’s voice just above me in the Mountain of Folly.

‘Don’t fall this time, Robin. Take your time. It’s a new invention. It’s a new rocket nursery in the stars. A new band blew up above Skull on its way to Mars. Lives were lost. But you can count on me now. So take your time, Robin.’

I was on the point of protesting — ‘I am not a member of a rocket band or of Tiger’s band for that matter.’ And then I recalled Emma’s note from long, long ago in Miriam’s childhood theatre. How remarkable that a childhood/adolescent love affair should blossom into a female priesthood and nourish the resurrection body. What a shift, a frail shift, yet intimate revolutionary breakthrough into the prospect of a divine Communism in which all generations reflected one another at the heart of anguish yet consummate wisdom.

I recalled Emma’s note. Faust was addressing alter ego Glass Robin in Peter. And yet was he not also speaking directly to me, my absent body yet dream-presence, dream re-entry into the theatre of life?

‘When the rocket blew,’ Faust continued, ‘it opened like a cross. It tautened into a rope. I saw it through my ancient eyes in the workshop of the gods. My ancient eyes that blaze like a comet at the end of time, the beginning of time. Who can say which end, which beginning? I have forgotten so much, have forfeited so much, to become the comedian of the machine in this end or beginning of time.’

It almost seemed to me as if Faust were pleading with Peter and me. ‘It tautened into a marvellous rope, Robin,’ he said.

He stared at Peter from his windowsill above the Mall. A wind blew down the Mountain of Folly. The terror of his smile was lost upon Peter but I was aware of it, all the more aware of it after the mystical laughter of which Emma had spoken (our arms around one another by the sea). I saw it lucidly now (as if for a moment I had borrowed Faust’s ancient eyes, Faust’s remembering/oblique forgetting eyes, Faust’s Quetzalcoatl eyes in which were entwined the marriage of heaven and earth). I saw the backward shift, the forward shift, the folly, the creativity, the parallel laughters of the universe, the laughter of grace and mystery for which one pays dear, the laughter of the electric machine, of mechanical stimulation, one buys cheap.

‘You know, Robin,’ Faust said to Peter, ‘I like to think of my surgery as a window upon heaven. Except that heaven’s changing. (Indeed the workshop I knew in ancient times has long vanished.) The crucifixion’s changing. Technology’s changing. And quite frankly I’m not sure what investitures the devil now wears. If there’s a shift in the radius of a star, in the radius of the soul, who can say on which side one’s bread is buttered?’ He pointed to a plate on his windowsill and I read: Doctor Faustus, fallen angel from the workshop of the gods, ambivalent sceptic of the purposes of evil, reluctant doctor of the soul. He was smiling with the blandness of his forgetting/remembering eyes and I felt a chill. ‘I am on Emma’s side, Robin,’ he said.

He saw my disbelief and continued to press his argument. My disbelief? No, Peter’s. ‘For the fact is, Robin, if I’m not careful I shall have nothing to work with — the materials I employ will become sterile — I shall lose everyone and everything. And live in an empty shell from which labour has vanished, machines doing everything, thinking machines, acting machines, killing machines. And so let’s seek a lull in our space wars on earth and in heaven. A respite from computer voices and computer generals and computer admirals in the twenty-first century. Let’s give ourselves a chance to define our terms anew, rehearse the technologies of the crucifixion. Turn them round and round, upside down, downside up, make a rope, a rope and a rocket cross into heaven.’

I saw he was playing with Peter, playing with some ancient design of hope he may have abandoned. He was wooing him with the irreverence, the self-mocking humour, for which the comedian of the machine was universally famous. He knew he was taking a risk, that there might be something in what he was saying that Peter might remember and take to heart but this was a chance he had to accept on behalf of the new spatial cross of humanity. ‘Come, come, Robin,’ he said to Peter, ‘I’m on your side, believe me. We’re making the world safe for mankind. I’m up here to receive you. You’ve hesitated long enough. Seize the glory rope and climb into heaven. I promise you no one will burn this time.’

I kept still and virtually invisible beside Peter like a child playing hide-and-seek in a resurrection cupboard. I saw what Emma had meant. I saw the curious pitch, the curious darkness of a spiritual irony within a destitute world enriched by the oddest parallels, sophisticated technologies running side by side with rickety cupboards, barrels, worn blankets, sheets, chalk to make a seam or line on diagrams of the sky and the sea depicting the intimate recesses of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ — all substance of the shoestring budget of childhood theatre.

Priorities were changing but so peculiarly, so involuntarily it seemed, that the resurrection body could easily be lured from its true seam or true line in the heart of creation with promises that only It (masked Peter and masked me and others of linked generations) could make valid in the light of the rehearsed values within the deaths of Alice and Miriam and grandfather and others lying in the refugee sea or in the refugee forest or up in the refugee stars (their untenanted graves memorialized in a pork-knocker barrel on earth).

For we had been empowered in our nursery rhymes to weigh the doors and windows of heaven, to knock on them and seek assurances of the nature and the meaning of value.

What was the true seam or the true line that Peter and I needed to understand in our ascent and our overcoming of the Mountain of Folly?

I gave Peter a slight nudge and at last he gripped the rope and began to ascend to Doctor Faustus’s surgery. He drew close to the windowsill. Faust leaned out to seize him. I shouted.

‘Peter,’ I cried (and forgot to call him Robin), ‘swing away from the rope or the cross to the true seam in the wave of rock.’

My forgetfulness in this instance may have saved Peter’s life. Faust hesitated for a fraction of an instant. He had heard my voice as if it came from nowhere yet from another source, another line, another thread in space. He was taken aback by all this (by the repudiation of his deadly rope) and by the name ‘Peter’ of which he was unaware. He knew only of ‘Robin’. Who was Peter? Nobody (or absent body) was Peter. Impossible parallels! And in that flash of lightning bemusement that fell over the Mountain of Folly Peter slipped from Faust’s grasp as if he were made of Glass: made of alter ego Robin Glass, alter ego kingdoms of space.

As he gained the seam or divide in the wave of rock I remembered my earliest temptations threaded into the first time I dreamt I heard voices and sounds. I remembered how I had succumbed to the temptation to seize the kingdoms of space. Had I then — without knowing it — stored up a shift in the priorities of life and death? Had I anticipated Faust in miniaturizing the creation in myself? Had I been in league with my grandfather’s revisionary book as I now stood in league with Emma’s Peter? I had stored, I felt now, in frail treaty with the past and the future, a lightning caution by which or through which to outwit the comedian of the machine when he sought to pull all generations into a window of heaven that was ambiguous if not false, an enchainment of the mind if not an extinction of the soul.

A political parable of mind and soul born of childhood remembered visions in an age of dangerous superpowers professing the good intention out of cunning self-interest, the good life out of expedient design.

Peter and I pursued the seam in the wave of rock until a glimmering window in the Mountain of Folly, like a flag one sticks on the moon beneath a black sky, and a white imaginary sea spelt our approach to a ward in space from which Billionaire Death inspected the cosmos. His imaginary eyes met mine. They were shockingly large and black and deep as if I mistook a West Indian black-coated vista of Mars for Columbus’s Venusian India. I tried to adjust my world-weary resurrected gaze within those imaginary eyes. I dreamt I saw them change and turn subtly green, subtly marvellous within love’s murmuring death wish on earth ascending to the hospital of space. I thought of sunset as if it had been painted on a child’s ball in the depths of space at the heart of a long summer vanished day when imaginary veil upon veil of light speaks of the birth of unremembered glory. I thought of the imagination of twilight at the heart of equatorial sunset and the cry of a vanished bird when the rustle of wings ties one’s breath into a feather that floats unconsumed into the darkness.

I thought of the sensation of pain and of benevolent oblivion. I was confused, bewildered, by a sensation of music, a sensation of beauty (as if an unwritten symphony shrouded my eyes, unwitting revolutionary creativity entertained by Billionaire Death). And I recalled Emma’s perception of laughter’s mask as she lay in my arms by the sea. Her perception, I knew, was also saturated by the imaginary cry of an incredible bird born in the workshop of heaven at its margins with the waste land. And I was struck now in Billionaire Death’s presence by what seemed an intermediate vibration between parallel musics of which I already knew: Emma’s dear music of mystery and grace and the cheap music of the electric machine in the circus of hell. Now — between these parallels that were so unlike one another — lay the imaginary chord I had glimpsed in Billionaire Death’s eyes. Love’s death wish. It was as if in seeing this, hearing this, I glimpsed again a reluctant shift in the priorities of life and death.

‘Life is blind spirit, death is love,’ Billionaire Death said in the voice of a strange organ. I knew I must shake off the dreadful fascination and responded almost without thinking: ‘One needs to convert love’s death wish into generations that are capable of such intimate rapport with one another’s frailties that love leads them through death not into oblivion’s space adventure. Life leads them into spirit as if the passage through spirit is the infinity of invisible spirit itself.’

Billionaire Death turned from me to Peter. He knew my voice. He remembered the voice that had addressed Peter and outwitted Doctor Faustus. He felt the time had come to make me aware of his wealth and his power.

‘I have received billions and trillions to gain the eyes I possess.’

‘You mean you are rich enough to have paid or spent billions …’

‘Not so. Received. Death never pays. Death receives. My eyes reflect the accumulated receipt of love’s death wish. My eyes are the substance of all atmospheres that pour into me. I do not spend, Robin. I receive. The cheaper life is, the greater the undervaluation of the mystery of life — the more it sings to me in all sorts of fashions and follies, the more it grieves for me — the less it resists theatres of extinction and the destruction of species and populations.

‘Who really cares, Robin, how vast are the sums civilization devotes to weapons of destruction? Life is cheap, so spend, spend, spend on fashions of death becomes the refrain that falls into me and fills my treasury.’

He paused and placed upon me the imaginary and brooding vistas of his unwritten music in which I saw through his eyes the terrible opera of an age. ‘From the last two World Wars alone I pocketed billions of royalty. Calculate the astronomical sums spent on the war poems written in the trenches! How much did it cost civilization to bring a handful of poets there and throw a sunset/sunrise blanket over their eyes? I plucked those eyes out of their heads and planted them in mine.

‘Imagine what it costs Redbreast Robin to maim a child or a man or a woman in a bombed city. I have reaped imaginary harvests and Ghost knows what in Vietnam and the Lebanon.’ He turned and pointed to an imaginary bed on which I dreamt I saw three children dressed in Alice’s masks — the mask of Beirut, the mask of Belfast, the mask of Jamaica. They oscillated or stirred in the hospital of infinity.

He saw me staring at the Jamaican mask. ‘Oh that! Just a pittance. People were stoning one another and the little female mask ran on the battleground and was killed. How much did it bring? Let’s see.’ He plucked a blur of stones from his brow and chest. Blurred stones in the photography of pupil and orb in Death’s majestic eyes. Jagged. Sharp. They had cut to the brain. I looked at the child again and wondered whether she had seized love’s death wish with her last breath.

‘You said a pittance,’ I spoke helplessly. ‘Just a pittance.’

‘Oh yes, a pittance,’ Billionaire Death repeated. ‘Let’s see.’ He adjusted his imaginary eyes and I saw angry bodies breaking a surf of cane and vegetables upon a glowing hillside. Their arms were slashed but it did not matter. I saw hands coated with dust digging the sun from the hillside. The broken stones from the hillside lost their glow as they were lifted and flung.

‘Say five hundred dollars for loss of crops,’ said Billionaire Death, ‘their loss, my gain. Twenty dollars for each hillside stone. A stone has fossil value in geologic space. A score of stones. Twenty by twenty. Four hundred dollars. Five plus four. Nine hundred dollars. Make it a round sum for a child’s life — a thousand dollars. Death’s a banker, life’s a … life’s a … life’s a … life’s a bloody pauper.’ His voice, I suddenly realized, seemed to have stuck in his throat. A hiccup of a song in a child’s breaking breast.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

EIGHT

Death pulled the window down upon the frightful scene and brawl I had witnessed through his eyes. But not before leaving on the windowsill a pair of glittering scales and the stone from the hillside that had killed a child. Peter and I placed Alice’s ring on one scale and the stone on the other. They drew level in perfect equilibrium, perfect equality in the heart of light.

‘I wonder,’ I said to Peter, ‘what Death received on behalf of Alice and Miriam the afternoon they drowned? (And I with them?) It couldn’t have been much. Alice had spent virtually every penny. And there were debts as you know. Miriam’s little theatre would have fetched but a pittance. Yes …’ I found myself brooding on the word pittance, ‘just a pittance.’

I stopped. Peter was silent.

‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘when we drew level with Billionaire Death’s hospital and treasury I remembered my pork-knocker library, every morsel and text into which I dug. I used to play, remember, I was a grave-digger in the magic wood. What are those books worth now? Another pittance.’

‘Enough,’ said Peter, ‘to bring me a bed in space. And the flavour of being cared for and caring for others. Books of a certain kind — written and revised (as you would say) by the hand of the magical dead — have anti-gravity substance. Death may laugh at them but they have a place, an original place, on his scales.’

I scarcely heard what he was saying except that my books had secured him a bed in space. ‘You?’ I demanded. ‘Bought you a bed?’

‘Why yes me and alter ego you in a manner of speaking, Robin,’ said Peter mildly. ‘How could I be here ascending the Mountain of Folly, how endure its riddles in the heart of a dying age, except I had died to the machinations of Skull? A creative dying! A shared mask with the dying living in every theatre of conscience. Emma’s alive. She wears the mask of an archbishop in AD 2025. Her coronation’s today. Eighty years old. She like ourselves was born in 1945 when the Bomb fell.’

‘But when I dreamt I saw you and her in the tunnel … She dropped an ancient letter in my pocket and you were a book in her hand whose pages she turned …’

‘You were digging in your library and theatre of Sleep, Robin. You saw her through Death’s quantum eyes. And the quantum imagination risks everything to know the truth. Death becomes something of a classic when we fictionalize it, the classic penetration of all our ills and a revolutionary moment in our submission to the resurrection.’

‘You have not understood, Peter!’ I cried. ‘I am saying that when I saw her I sensed something, I sensed a struggle with ancient plays and texts and letters — I knew she was worn — she confessed her difficulties of an intimate nature — but she seemed so incredibly close to my immortal youth, immortal drowned Glass youth and mirror of space through which all things flit in the alchemy of the imagination.’

‘I know, I know, immortal Robin. The machinations of Faust. Beware of the Glass that may mesmerize you. And yet in another light immortality is the comedy of a changeless romance between true, inner flesh and true, outer spirit. Immortality is a feather in the Nightfall of the sea and the land. A feather by which we know that a stone and a ring and other relics that seem unequal may float and link themselves into a chain. Infinity’s chain. That that chain remains unbroken despite everything is our slender passion and hope of the transformation of injustice that we inflict on ourselves and upon others. Should it sever then we are lost. Then we fall into the abyss. But it will not, it cannot.’

His words were the cue for us to move up to another room in space. Ghost had given this ward or room to his chauffeur of infinity who was tinkering at this moment with the rocket of which Doctor Faustus had spoken, the rocket band that had fallen from the sky.

‘It’s a fast car,’ I said to Peter. ‘It’s a still drum or band or something yet it’s moving at a fantastic speed. How can anyone hold on and work! Gravity’s — anti-gravity’s — miracle. I see it as if my eyes are glued into a camera yet flying in a moving fast photographic lens and object in a dark night beyond Mars and Venus.’

‘Planets are ailing fast cars in the hospital of infinity. They’ve been struck by giant meteors. A meteor’s a BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM band. This rocket fell at the foot of the Mountain of Folly. Then it was transported here. And it’s flying still on a film. Such is the genius of Faust.’ Peter was joking with his usual solemn, long face that I knew from long, long ago when we drew planets with chalk on blackboard in Miriam’s childhood theatre.

‘Each planet is the car of an imaginary greatness. Greatness rides again in the West! If you and I sit still, Robin, and wait long enough we may enter into orbit with Alexander and Napoleon and Captain Cat from Under Milk Wood.’

‘Captain Cat is crying,’ I said. ‘Do you remember that line? Captain Cat is dancing to the music of a sad Rosy guitar.’

‘Napoleon’s too fat to dance. The car or the ship or the chariot or the planet on which he lies is a dusty or a waterlogged campaign. It needs to be refurbished with glory. And as a consequence Ghost is driven to employ an army of doctors, chauffeurs of infinity, engineers, programmers, etc., etc., to build new beds, new experimental bunks in tanks, in submarines, in aeroplanes. New cannon poking out of featherbed pillows.’

‘Employment,’ I cried, ‘it’s employment for millions.’ But then I was stricken by the unemployment of the soul. ‘What is greatness,’ I asked Peter, ‘if the soul itself falls into disuse?’

‘And another thing,’ I said, ‘where lies the unbroken chain, the slender hope of which you spoke, in the débâcle of greatness that threatens to break the back of the earth?’

‘It lies in this seam we are pursuing through the Mountain of Folly,’ said Peter. ‘Look! Captain Cat is dancing. Old as a crafty waste land seer but not fat.’ And as he spoke I remembered the lament of Tiger and Calypso in the magic wood. I also remembered Tiger, Alice’s boat, that had toppled into the breaking sea. I remembered Tiresias, the seer, whose spectacles I now placed on my eyes like a tourist under a black sky. I saw the negative film of Thebes, I saw the negative film of ancient walls under the sea through which Tiger fell. I saw Napoleon’s negative crown and Alexander’s sceptre and Captain Cat’s tombstone floating with Alice’s ring and with the stone from a Jamaican hillside. Except that they lay now far below the Wave on the glittering scales that the fictionalization of Death had brought to me.

It was an uncanny vortex. The flotsam and jetsam of empires! Everything moving fast yet still. Everything balanced yet toppling.

‘All I can say,’ I began but stopped and appealed to Ghost. He saw my plight and put words on the page of my lips.

‘All I can say is that the scales are set to weigh an imaginary substance, the imaginary substance of greatness that lies in a fabric we can never wholly grasp.

‘When I saw the ring and the stone in equilibrium at Death’s window I was involved in a religious equation between violence (the slain child) and sacrament (the ring). It was as if the speeding universe slowed for a moment into marvellous poise and equilibrium of spirit within relics of memory. But higher up now — with Ghost’s chauffeur — I cannot dodge or escape the fact of chaos (and so must relate to it as a factor in the marvellous equation of spirit): must relate to it through history that expands into the vision of the seer, visionary motion in motionlessness, the ironies of full employment yet the unemployment of the soul; and this involves me as much in the day I was drowned — when the boat Tiger sank — as in the day ancient Rome fell or Byzantium became a mirage and Greece vanished.

‘Imagine the refugees of spirit across the centuries. Imagine the marriage of turbulence and stillness in every dying mask, imagine vast waves and still bodies, moving hordes and etched caravans against a sky that topples into space. Imagine the literacy of the seer at the heart of chaos, a literacy that reads the beauty of God in every delicate web within the seamless robe of eternity.’

*

Seam and seamlessness! Peter and I had pursued the seam or the delicate web between remembering and forgetting faculties in our ascent through and above the Mountain of Folly. Through and above! Within and without! Here lay the paradox of the seamless garment upon Emma’s shoulders. Peter vanished. I thought I saw him ascending the wave of the rock and then it was as if his shadow melted into the air.

‘I shall take you through the city,’ Tiresias said, ‘to Emma’s coronation. It’s quite an event. Sculpture, song, dance. Millions all over the world, in villages, on mountaintops, in valleys, in bars, in hotel rooms, may be able to view it. I shall take you in a little while. I am not sure her brother Peter fully approves. After all he is her twin. He played in Tiger’s band. He became the pope of the calypso. An odd title I know. But it’s common knowledge that the calypsonian bands adorn themselves with curious titles. The name I bear (Tiresias) figures as you know and once or twice I have danced with them, danced the dance of the twining snakes, half-man, half-woman. The seer needs to know, to see everything from within the heart of chaos — if that is at all possible.’

‘You were speaking,’ I said, ‘of the bands.’

‘Ah yes, the bands! There’s the black Napoleon band. There’s the Persian Ayatollah Alexander band. There’s Peter’s band. Indeed, as I said before, he was the pope of the bands in Skull until his death the afternoon that you met him in the tunnel. Emma would tell you he had been ailing for some time. Ailing science, ailing religion. No wonder Doctor Faustus warned him of a meteor rocket, a meteor drum, falling from heaven. Part of his trouble was that he was a bit of a woman-hater. A long-standing taint in the body of our civilization. It fouls the nest of religion. And of economics though you wouldn’t think it at first. But what is the soul of the unemployed but an implicit extension of the whoredom of money we cultivate subconsciously? I tried, therefore, to mediate between him and the whoredom of money long, long ago — when Greece and Rome were doomed — by egging on Frog to play an inferior modern Ulysses and magistrate and pygmy shadow of the giant of the heartland.

‘In that way I involved you, Robin Redbreast Glass, as the son and the heir of a divided tradition. It was the best I could do in the licentious theatre of Skull. Thus it was that I edged myself into half-man, half-woman masks (even Ghost is not immune to such masquerades) in my mimicry, in my rehearsals, of divine equilibrium that is beyond our grasp. All this, by the way, is implicit in Emma’s book which she attempted to read to you in staggered passages when you met in Dateless Infinity Day in your dream. Emma’s theology vindicated my and Ghost’s disguises. It is rooted in the necessity to bring a sacramental urgency to the ancient and perennially fertile body of sex. Not promiscuity, not cheap stimulation. But something we scarcely understand. The miracle of the senses, touch, taste, echoing waves and particles and penetration.

‘Her task, from this day forward, is to make the body of the resurrection beautiful to the woman in the man, the man in the woman. It’s a formidable vocation. You should know that, Robin. You lay with your head on her breasts by the sea.’

‘Was it not Peter who lay with her? I was drowned, Peter had been saved.’ And yet, even as I spoke, I did seem to remember …

‘Peter, yes, but your shadow slowly took shape out of every refugee of spirit. Took infinite and rehearsible form. It drew Peter into imitating you. He took your name, remember? Alias Robin Redbreast Glass. He was universally popular in Skull in love’s death-wish bands. All fanaticism is rooted subconsciously in love’s terrible death wish! But by degrees you triumphed. Your original sensuousness, your true passion, triumphed. And by the time Emma came to write her intimate book of you and Peter after your death it was you she drew into her arms. Your true passion in nature. And then by degrees in your ascent of the Mountain Peter himself — despite his discomfiture, his reservations — was imbued by the miracle of equilibrium between all genders, all opposites.

‘I put it crudely of course. But you know the subtleties of chaos and history that you have drawn into yourself Robin Redbreast Glass. Peter too was converted but he’s her brother. He’s fixated in a kind of incest. When brothers and sisters marry — whatever the traditional or dogmatic excuse — it’s incest. Or if not incest it’s purity masturbating. And there’s been enough of that I say from my standpoint in the underworld. And that’s where I come in as your guide, Robin, on this day. You need to descend from the Mountain and to start from below in your voyage into a new unity.’

I looked up the Mountain. I missed Peter. I missed the pope of love’s death wish. I had never, I confessed to myself, seen him in that light in the magic wood or in the theatre of an infinite rehearsal of values but I was now prepared to accept the guidance of the stranger seer who stood between the deformities of the popular religion of the bands and the sacrament of sensuous marriage between heaven and earth for which I had suffered in the sea and on the land.

*

Tiresias led me down the Mountain along the other side of the seam and within the hospital of infinity. I caught a glimpse of ailing stars, of meteors gouging holes in planets, of ailing moons and constellations, of ailing civilizations far out in space whose residual and imaginary glow had been simulated by Doctor Faustus, the reluctant doctor of the soul.

We came down to Skull with a bump. Not with a bang but with a bump like a boat that oscillates in a wave. The streets were swarming with refugees of soul and spirit, refugees of heart and mind. And my first vision was of the Beast with the map of heaven in its claws or its hands. No, his claws, his hands.

I had seen the Beast before when I hid Ghost in my shadow and outwitted Frog. But in this instance or imminent rehearsal of values he seemed quite different. I dreamt he turned his gaze upon me as if he remembered me from the day I was born. And I drifted into his psychical glass eyes and perceived the vortex of the Tiresian dance. It was the dance of bone and flesh within and without the Beast in the mystery of the resurrection body. I was aware of the wreck of Tiger in the mirror of the sea beside the magic wood. The vortex grew steady as a rock. The vortex was a sleeping, spinning, steady top in my dream.

The crew upon Tiger were masked in bone as they danced.

‘You have seen them before, these dancers,’ said Tiresias, ‘in your grandfather’s pork-knocker theatre of great navigators and conquistadores. Becalmed above an impossible garden.’

‘But this is Tiger,’ I said, ‘the wreck of Tiger beside the magic wood and under the sea. This is — or was — my grave.’

‘All graves are becalmed vessels above an impossible garden. Until I mediate in the underworld and sprinkle the lips of bone with Beast-food. So I repeat, Robin Glass, you have seen them before. You saw them the moment you died. I moistened your eyes then with an appetite for visions. And the grain of all foundered ships came alive. You have seen them before I say — the crew of bone that fish for a morsel, a Beast-morsel, Beast-fish, Beast-grain, Beast-shrimp.’

I dreamt I now saw Alice and Miriam on the deck of the Beastship of life under the sea. They were masked in flesh. Not bone. But as I scanned their curious bodies in ‘sleeping top’ dance of stillness and flesh with sailors of bone I saw the stillness for what it was. Stillness was a ‘hole’ in each body through which I looked beyond the dance into vistas of oceanic spirit. There was a shout like a hoarse drum and one of the bone sailors heaved upon his fishing rod and drew in his line. Beast-fish at last! They cooked and ate. As the fire subsided in the orchestra of the sea, and the spray darkened into musical coal, I was startled profoundly by another ‘hole’ in Miriam’s body. The bone-sailors in their dance, in eating the fish, had subtly cannibalized the spectre of death and eaten into the gravity — or the anti-gravity — of Miriam’s flesh, animal flesh, female flesh. Eaten into the dance and into themselves as well, into their male bone and acquired in consequence a crack or tooth-mark, a sparkling intensity or flute of soul.

And I recalled the tooth of creation that I had brought with me from a sparkling wave when I arose from the sea. I had not understood its innermost music of appetite for vision until now as I moved in the Glass and the mirror of the Beast with the map of heaven in its hands.

‘The resurrected body consumes a vision in every morsel of meat or fish it reflects or cooks,’ said Tiresias. ‘For every disciple of vision dies and dies again and again with an ailing creation. One dies because one lives a visionary life beyond the cannibal consumption of dancing grain, dancing fruit, dancing flesh. The gardens of the Beast are signposted with visionary signals of death and resurrection in the agriculture of the soul, the hunting grounds of the soul that loom in the stylized drink and the stylized meat of the soul.’

As he spoke I remembered the unemployed soul of humanity in the stylized munition factories of Skull. What stylized teeth and jaws did such an unemployed soul wear? Were they stylized iron teeth, stylized iron jaws, with little or no apprehension of the dead shrimp in a mouth chewing aimlessly, violently? I saw the stylized body of the unemployed soul of humanity turning within a deeper and deeper chaos of insensible vision, a deeper and deeper blindness, a deeper and deeper grave.

‘Visionary employment beyond the grave,’ said Tiresias (and I wondered in what degree he was mocking all civilizations), ‘is an alteration in the biases of the soul, it is a threshold into the resurrection of the body.’

Were not mockery and self-mockery a measure in themselves of the changing shroud, the changing investitures, of bias? I saw all at once — in the psychical Glass eyes in which I stood within the giant grave of the underworld — that the Beast was involved in weaving a portion of Emma’s seamless garment and that such a weave was a pointer into the tasks of the employed soul.

I followed the light, almost invisible, thread along Tiger’s deck and into every minuscule eye of bone, every faint crack, every ‘hole’ in the flesh of the vortex, the spinning top of sleep in the garden of the remembered sea, every fissure, every sailor, until I was aware of its still match within the flame and the bite of the water, within the flame and the bitten water, as if the light thread turned on itself into an intricate reversal of expectations.

When Tiger sailed Alice and Miriam and I and the others who were drowned that day had invested in a safe return to harbour. When Navies sail the crew invest in a safe return to harbour. When civilizations harness the swamp or the earthquake-hillside or the volcanic plateau, humanity invests in safe walls and cities. How safe? How doomed? That the Beast had spun its portion of Emma’s seamless robe in such a context was a pointer into the choices one makes (or which one should perceive one is involved in making), the price one pays at every level of existence (or may find one is called upon to pay when one lives by choice apparently on the edge of the abyss).

‘The Beast-thread in the vortex and the stillness is the life of the dear seed one should visualize as a warning of the spirit against monstrous excess, the life of dear energy one should visualize as an illumination of true body and mind (a grain of light in a dark world is sustenance indeed), the life of the dear corn, the dear flower, the dear fruit, one should read with the eyes of the heart and the mind as frail extensions of the body of the earth, the convulsive power of the body of the earth that writes of itself with ecstatic petal or cloth of beauty by which it heals its ceaseless ailments and sustains its paradoxical fertility.

‘The life of the dear seed in a blind world intent on excess, addicted to excess, addicted to poverty as much as to glamour, sharpens, I fear,’ said the seer of the underworld, ‘the edge of overturned expectations, the edge of terror in cities, the edge of terrifying pathos in cultures doomed by nature itself, if nature is to survive as a phenomenon of value and therapy of the blind soul.

‘True survival costs dear, Robin Redbreast Glass, true survival should measure its technologies, its investments, against the light of an overturning of expectations and within a capacity to look and move beyond immediate place, immediate time. True survival should be aware of the temptations of prosperity in fabulous ghettos, fabulous concentration camps. True survival should measure the price we have begun to pay to the Beast in the garden of life as we gambol with it, dance with it, and exploit it to our apparent heart’s content.’

NINE

The dance of the vortex staged by the Tiresias Tiger band was now over and I found myself once again in the throngs of Skull. I was aware of the divisions in the population. There were the doomsters and the boomsters. Skull was doomed (that was the logic of the doomsters). Skull was invincible concentration camp (that was the message of the boomsters). They sang together DOOM, DOOM, BOOM, BOOM. I stood amongst them with the unfinished thread Beast had woven reflected in my Glass. Unfinished climax with Being. Unfinished thread that ran through the recesses of merriment to illumine all the more vividly the divisions of which I was aware in every city, every village, that floated before me in the panorama of Tiresias.

‘And both,’ said the seer of the underworld, ‘both groups, doomsters and boomsters, must suffer the reversal of expectation. You will not see Emma today, Robin Redbreast Glass. The climax between yourself and the new priest, the new archbishop, remains in suspension. Until humanity can gauge its defeats and the reversed sail by which it moves, one hopes, towards a philosophy of true survival.’ There was a clamour in the air, horns and trumpets and drums that issued from the recesses of existence.

‘What is true survival?’ I said in dismay as if even I (the resurrected body) had forgotten everything the dark seer had said. I looked for Emma but she was not to be seen.

‘You must sail towards her,’ said Tiresias. ‘Have I not already implied what true survival is?’

He paused for a fraction and considered. ‘Let me rehearse again before I vanish some of the implications of true survival. To sail in the nuclear rigging of Skull — in anticipation of the raising of Tiger and its reversed sail — is to sight all the more vividly the earthquake regions or the volcanic regions or the flood regions or the famine/drought regions of the earth.

‘Not that I, Tiresias, need any reminder. Over the centuries it has been my lot to patrol wrecked villages and cities and pastures where dead sheep nibble the lava from the sun in a mountain top.

‘It has been my lot to mediate between all expectations. And in the teeth of flame I have learnt that someone always survives, some group always survives. The survivors may come (it is ironical) from those who lived in the expectation of doom. Equally many who vanish may have been possessed by a conviction of infallible ground. I — as their mediator — had no alternative but to encompass all groups in the underworld and stress a reversed sail, and a spiritual necessity to look into the heart of true survival, into a shadow linking those who were apparently saved and those who were apparently not.

‘I attempt, shall I say, to sow a seed in the survivor that runs through his reversed expectation of doom into the shadow of the non-survivor. It is as if they embrace like man and woman and the shadow comes into the light. It is indeed a seed or frail bond between light and shadow, a frail window of strangest flesh-and-blood between the visible and the invisible. That seed is the primitive impulse of the resurrection of the body. For how can there be a true resurrection without a true balance between opposites by which we measure the human in the divine, the divine in the human? To measure or weigh ourselves against the light-in-the-shadow, the shadow-in-the-light of others is to deepen a reality that breaches the ailing premises of time.’

Tiresias stopped.

‘This is as far as I — the mediator in every crisis of expectation — may go with you, Robin Redbreast Glass. I illumine the seed of fire to enhance the regeneration of wheat. I illumine the shifting plates within the globe to engage civilizations in movements and migrations of threatened peoples and species upon an earth that is still the nursery of hope. In the fire of spirit let us wrest a therapy of the heart and the mind. Let us steep every inch of the resurrection in a capacity to weigh a reversed sail that arises and moves above the seas of chaos.’

It was his last word. He vanished, it seemed, upon the blowing of a horn or the roll of a drum.

I stood still amongst the moving pageants and throngs. I held the unfinished thread in the Glass of spirit. I remembered Canterbury in the magic wood of childhood, the play of Canterbury that Miriam and Alice had written and which Peter and I and other children had performed when we crowned Emma in our little theatre. The little theatre of remembered/forgotten history one encompasses in a lifetime but must pursue into the future with reversed sail.

I turned another page in my fictional autobiography. A blank page upon which I had not yet written. Whose hand would seek mine, whose mask become my age in the future? I saw a shadow upon the page, I saw an extension from Ghost. Spirit is one’s ageless author, ageless character, in the ceaseless rehearsal, ceaseless performance, of the play of truth. The fictionalization of the self in age and in youth is a multi-faceted caution of the universal imagination against the tyranny of hard, partial fact.

A wave arose that bore me up. Bore the drowned boat up from the sea-bed. I was launched upon my voyage towards Emma.

POSTSCRIPT BY GHOST

AD 2025 Remember me

When Robin set sail I returned to the sea from whence I had come. I am the ghostly voyager in time, in space, in memory, but always I return to the vast ocean, the rolling seas and the great deeps.

I converse now with the mind and the hand of the new mid-twenty-first-century drowned voyager who is to be reflected in Redbreast Glass. Young in mind he shall be as Alice’s son was. And his hand? It shall swim both wet and dry as it turns W. H.’s drifting narrative to the stars, drifting between worlds. It shall weigh the obvious with care. For the obvious is sometimes an elusive reality.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the drowned voyager,

Knocking on the moonlit ship …

‘I am here, I am Ghost, as Robin sails. Listen!’

He listened with a strange ear, a seeing ear, a listening eye, as we tossed on a wave. I gathered together the fragments of a history …

W. H. sold Miriam’s theatre in the nineteen-sixties (close on three-quartersof a century ago). He sold when others were shouting ‘independence and prosperity’. Alice’s and Miriam’s untimely deaths had left a mortgage on house and theatre. Had they lived that mortgage could have been concealed for a decade or two. In that sense W. H. was ahead of his time. Fate drove him to discharge a debt of tradition while others were basking still in a dubious El Dorado.

What he could not foresee was the moment when Billionaire Death would be driven to loosen his purse strings and multiply the proceeds from the sale of the magic theatre a thousandfold and more to finance the salvage of the wreck of the boat Tiger.

This compulsion upon Billionaire Death was astonishing. It sprang from the nerve-end of the resurrection body — the thread of divinity’s nerve through all the cavities and the chasms of nature — a nerve-end (or nerve-beginning) that spelt a complex revival of buried resources arching through many cultures and civilizations towards a true voice, a true ear, a true dialogue that the resurrection body nourishes as its ultimate originality. Here at last W. H. felt he could face the world with a dialectic of psyche and imagination. Here at last he saw how Alice’s and Miriam’s debts drew him to look with uncanny laughter and sorrow into the meaning of the economy he served. To see the mortgage as a debt to sorrow and ecstasy — a debt to (or of) tradition — was to sight and to weave a thread that ran back into the past as it moved into the cross-cultural humanities of the future.

‘IT IS A NERVE OR A THREAD IN THE FABRIC OF A SEAMLESS ROBE FAR OUT UPON THE WATERS OF SPIRIT TO WHICH ONE MOVES (I MOVE IN YOU, YOU IN ME) BY INFINITE DEGREES.’ Thus I impelled him to dream as I lay within his shadow. Thus I impel you to dream as I converse with the future …

May I pause and reflect again upon the obvious. I am Ghost. I have never before written a line. But I did utter certain cautionary fragments of text to Robin in the magic wood some time after he hid me in his shadow from the immigration officer Ulysses Frog. If I do write now I do not claim to be original but to tap the innermost resources of eclipsed traditions in the refugee voices that W. H. heard in the sea. I counsel you likewise — with whom I specifically converse — to remember the scripts of foaming water (foaming with constellations) within the traceries of the skeleton marches of the sea. And through these, and this fictional autobiography, I write to you of a seamless robe but find it necessary to stress that such seamlessness is not to be equated with the bounty of conquest. Rather its fabric lies in the spinning vortex of the sea, the still vortex of the sea; as if the still vortex of air, earth and sky — the spinning vortex of dream — secretes a corridor or passageway through every wave and overturning of rigid expectation.

I write in a wave that capsizes into a deformity of vision possessing such ascendancy it tends to conceal its hollowness. Think of that hollow wave as a debt to space! As the fee many a poor soul paid for a ticket to paradise. In the reversal of that hollow wave, space becomes an asset in breaking moulds of prepossession.

It is as if the bill of sale of the magical theatre of childhood that W. H. enacted becomes the currency of spirit. Money is the hurricane that may subside nevertheless into a gentle spray in a realm of ancestral yet new-born space or it is nothing. It may drive a hard bargain between the dead sailor and the living pilot, or a compassionate bargain between the born and the unborn navigator, but its true myth and value lie on the scales of the sea it may never dispense with within a revivification of the spaces of meaning that tie one voyaging generation to another.

How can one sell or put a price on the map of heaven, the map of earth, without incurring an irony that multiplies the purse strings of Billionaire Death? Think of this — you with whom I converse — as you look back from your ship of life and death to the dunning world you have left behind, the landlord or landlady, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, etc., etc.

As the hollow wave breaks, the chorus of the world becomes all at once a sacramental self-confession.

Robin Redbreast Glass began his voyage towards Archbishop Emma in the year of grace AD 2025 in which I am now writing to you. He carried with him a portion of the seamless robe she is to wear. I plucked it from Beast and gave it to him.

Beast’s thread is the seamless garment one carries in ailing nature yet seeks from another source (a healing or healed source) upon the waters of spirit. Carries through arts of sorrow towards the consummation of bliss.

How to find a true balance between such carrying in vessels of nature and such seeking from vessels of spirit!

A wave arises. Look! Here are the scales that Billionaire Death offered Robin and Peter: scales upon which to weigh Alice’s ring against the killing stone from a hillside. Look! Do they not compose a perfect match? The stone is purged of terror in the ring of a sacrament upon the scales on the waters of healing spirit.

But alas the stone begins to drift away from the ring into the Night of civilization. As they drift, the thread one carries towards the thread one seeks, appears to be broken or lost.

And yet it remains, it exists. But I, Ghost, know now — I cannot deceive you — that the price to be paid to gain and regain such a perception of a balance between ‘terror’ and ‘sacrament’ is greater than one imagines. It is a price that may redeem the sale of the earth and the sky in our nuclear age, our nuclear pawnshop, by drawing us — you and me — to the nerve-end fabric in the resurrection body where it touches the sliced purse strings of Billionaire Death.

Weigh that slice against the apparent severance of reality in the thread one carries towards the thread one seeks.

And perhaps one may see again in another light the infinite rehearsal in the economy of the resurrected body, an economy that may still, despite everything, salvage a civilization …

On one scale lies the terror of the broken thread or the drifting stone, the explosive rocket, in the seamless garment of God. On the other the sliced purse strings of Billionaire Death.

It is an extreme balance, an extreme purgation of terror in sacramentalized money, in an extreme age. Another wave arises as I address you. Remember me, remember Ghost.

THE FOUR BANKS OF THE RIVER OF SPACE

FOR MARGARET

AND TO KATHLEEN RAINE

The landscape then looked strange, unearthly strange,

to the Lord Odysseus …

…

He rubbed his eyes, gazed at his homeland

…

then cried aloud:

…

Whose country have I come to this time? Rough

savages and outlaws, are they, or

godfearing people, friendly to castaways?

from The Odyssey by HOMER (translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Collins Harvill, 1961)

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

from ‘Ulysses’ by ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Quantum reality consists of simultaneous possibilities, a ‘polyhistoric’ kind of being … incompatible with our … one-track minds. If these alternative (and parallel) universes are really real and we are barred from experiencing them only by a biological accident, perhaps we can extend our senses with a sort of ‘quantum microscope’ …

from Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by NICK HERBERT (Hutchinson, 1985)

The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other …, the flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediate links of perfect naturalness and propriety — all this magical imponderable dreaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery.

from Association of Ideas by WILLIAM JAMES (first published 1880)

THE FIRST BANK (The King of Thieves)

And with him they crucify two thieves; the one on his right hand, and the other on his left.

Mark 15: 27

I was amazed, to say the least, when I saw him in the theatre of Dream. Had he emerged from an abyss? I was dreaming of peaceful Admiral’s Park, one summer evening, late June 1988, Essex, England. And there he was. I knew him at once in the complicated mirror of a dream after forty years. Lucius Canaima. He came through a door of space into memory and imagination. It was impossible to run. Nailed to the ground. Human tree? He knew me, I him. My heart beat and loosened the nail in one’s foot. The nail that fear had hammered there fell out. The world was a stage for every walking tree and I advanced upon it. Unsure of my lines, my part in the play of a civilization.

For play it was. Play of truth.

I should have memorized my lines in anticipation of this moment, lines written by ‘daemons’ and ‘furies’, lines written within me that seemed familiar yet were profoundly alien in my own ears, lines that seemed unlike words in their material substance, pressure, intensity, lines written by spirits of wood and water, animal, bird, cloud sailing in space.

‘It’s you, Canaima. I know you within the long Day of the twentieth century, a long Day composed of years that are like elongated minutes. We last met on the bank of the Potaro River, South America. 1948. A stage then. A stage now.’

Stage? Why stage? Why theatre? Theatre of freedom’s responsibilities? I wanted to fling such questions at him. ‘You play a murderer, Canaima, and the part you play terrifies me.’ I stopped and thought I heard him reply but I was unsure. Now it’s high time the sky spoke, the rain spoke, the acid rain, the broken leaf. High time they grew within us, they changed us, they made us see how endangered, how polluted our globe is.

Canaima stared at me from within the ageless shadow of sky and wind that I etched into theatre, into grassy curtain, backdrop of trees, tides, oceans. ‘Forty years,’ I said ritualistically, callously, as if ‘forty’ were a mere symbol. I sought to evade him as a statistic or a mere symbol, to cancel him out within myself, to reduce him to nothingness. Why should the living dead return to plague one’s peaceful dreams? What is peace? What is prosperity? He was no ordinary criminal. His victims reflected the moral dilemmas of an age. As if they were carefully chosen to bring home to us our involvement in threatened species, a threatened globe, within the apparently common-or-garden materials we employed or used as architect, sculptor or engineer.

‘I am an architect still, an engineer still.’ I was ashamed to have boasted. ‘And you, Lucius,’ I cried, ‘what are you now?’

‘You saved me,’ Canaima said softly at last. So softly it could have been the breath of an instrument, a strange, disturbing and confessional music interwoven with echoic gravity and fury.

‘Saved you?’ I protested. ‘Saved you?’ I drew his features on the canvas of space. When one dreams one dreams alone. When one writes a book one is alone. The characters one re-creates may have died, or may have vanished into some other country, so one invokes them as ‘live absences’, absences susceptible to being painted into life, sculpted into life, absences that may arise in carvings out of the ground, from dust, from the wood of a tree, the rain of a cloud: paintings and sculptures that are so mysteriously potent in one’s book of dreams that they seem to paint one (as one paints them), to sculpt one (as one sculpts them), and in this mutual and phenomenal hollowness of self one and they become fossil stepping-stones into the mystery of inner space. Perhaps one needs a creative penetration of inner space in a space age if one is to save one’s world rather than, in some future time, abandon it — within technologies of flight — as a wreck.

‘Saved you?’ I protested again.

‘Conspired with me then, Anselm,’ said Lucius Canaima. ‘Do you prefer “conspire with” rather than “save”? You were in league with me one way or the other. Your reputation in the Potaro River of South America was that of a good man — something of a bloody saint’ — he was mocking me — ‘whereas I was bad, a devil. Good men who contemplate the mystery of creativity have a way of conspiring with furies. I killed. Does that make me a fury? I warn you, Anselm, you will have to define the nature of a “fury” in your book of dreams. But there’s time for that.’ He stopped. And yet his voice seemed to persist in the ground. The same voice. Yet not quite the same. As if in Lucius I perceived, however faintly, parallel lives, alternative existences. He was a common criminal. He was an uncommon creature. Did such distinctions touch on the disturbing reality of what one sometimes half-jokingly called ‘salvation’? Was this Canaima the same and identical human being I had known? Had he in returning from the dead changed despite appearances?

‘You knew I had killed the Macusi in the bird-mask. You knew I had enticed him from the tribe, from their ritual dance, and killed him. A threatened tribe. Some say on the verge of extinction within the twentieth century. It was as if I had plucked their bird-dancer from the air. I brought him in my arms to the riverbank and put him at the water’s edge. I sprinkled him with water as if he had been drowned. A drowned bird-creature. And then I put a cap on his head — the Alicia-cap — as if he were a member of my team. Perhaps I should say our team, Anselm.

‘You came upon me on the riverbank leaning over him. All you had to do was raise your voice, make an outcry, and I would have been caught. But you remained silent. Had you raised your voice, raised your hand, I may have been caught, and then I would have lost my soul.’

‘No, no,’ I shouted. ‘I cannot believe …’

‘Believe what?’

‘I cannot believe that I let you go, that I accepted such an appalling responsibility. I should have seized you, I should have shouted, I should have handed you over to Inspector Robot.’

‘But you did nothing of the sort,’ said Lucius. ‘You kept your tongue well in your head. Instead of making an outcry you listened. It was not the first time I had committed a crime in South America …’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I was a fool to let you go …’

‘But,’ said Canaima, ‘it was the first time anyone truly stopped and listened.’

‘Listened?’

‘You have forgotten. You will remember. I have returned to help you remember. You began to listen that early morning when you came upon me and my bird-victim to utterances that may now send you back into the very secrets of your childhood. But first you need to come to terms with what happened that day.’

‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Let me go as I once let you go. I have no desire to write a book of dreams, no desire to retrace my steps.’

‘I had to retrace my steps that day,’ said Canaima. ‘I would never have done so, Anselm, had I not seen that you — no one else had listened before — were attentive to the bird-text on the lips of the dancer I had taken from the Macusi tribe. You became a medium in the dance. The carnival heir of the dance!’ He stopped. I was astonished. I had never dreamt of myself before as a ‘carnival heir’. Perhaps there in that ‘heir’ lay alternative or parallel existences in myself I had suppressed across the years. How strange is one to oneself? How many ‘quantum strangers’ does one bear in oneself?

‘I walked away, that is true, but each step I made was crucial, a crucial rehearsal in an ultimate relationship to test the nature of violence. Terrible but true. And so here I am.’ What did he mean by, ‘And so here I am’? Was he implying that the music, the dance, that he claimed to accept through me (when I stopped for the first time in his experience and listened to the inner voice of the slain dancer) lay in a sphere of the unconscious/subconscious I had sought to eclipse over the years in order to reside within the shallows of consciousness? A sphere of the unconscious I could no longer deny?

I bowed my head. I tried to close my ears. The nature of violence! It was abhorrent to be drawn into such a dialogue. But Canaima’s presence remained. His voice was penetrated I felt by the musical and antiphonal utterance of the bird-creature, his victim, half-coffined in soil and water; I found it almost unbearable. No wonder I had apparently forgotten what I had heard in 1948. It was less an utterance and more the rhythm of space: as if the striking and the stricken soul — the anima of conflict-in-suffering — were speaking in terms ecstatic (as much as to say ‘salvation is real if we retrace our steps into a visionary cradle of being’) yet so disturbing, so unusual, so strange, I wanted to forget absolutely a medium of discourse I dreamt I had entered and knew.

I continued to bow my head but Canaima’s presence remained. He was dancing slowly, dancing intricately. He was dancing away from me into the past, into 1948, up the Potaro riverbank, even as he circled and returned afresh under my bowed head in 1988 within the frame of the present moment. He danced again away from me into the mid-twentieth century, vanished up the hill but returned as upon a curve in intricate space.

And it became essential now to recover a medium of inner/outer response that had triggered the dance long ago, dance as flight, dance as escape, dance as a visitation of terrifying responsibility for one’s deeds. Dance as lightning wings … Lightning was a sudden vision that I associated with the masked corpse on the ground long ago and I could not account for it now except in an unravelling of memory, in recalling the past, in recalling the way I had let Canaima escape into the mist-laden sun up the hill, the way I had seen the face of his victim within a shell of paint, shell-like lips that appeared to glisten and whiten and redden in the rising sun reflected in the water-top at my feet.

My silence had lodged itself in those lightning frail wings on a dancer’s lips: harnessed lightning discourse that we infuse into a suspension bridge, or into a rocking vessel on the high seas, or a distant aeroplane that flashes like a bright insect in the sky within a thin trail of snow-cloud, or a stairway into space, a ladder, the crossing of many a subtle abyss, vertical crossing, horizontal crossing, cyclical crossing.

Perhaps I was the medium of the dance in touching the earth, in touching the light, in touching the sculpture of appearances as if every structure one shaped, or ordered, or visualized, was a sacred infusion of slow-motion lightning into substance, substance into life.

Canaima had returned in that dangerous dance of the soul originating in spatial rhythms and music one rarely listens to. And when one does one tends to forget. Perhaps it is only possible to stop and to listen when one is drawn by a thread or a key to the door of the unconscious as it lifts into slow-motion lightning consciousness.

Had I saved him in order to find him again dancing on the threshold of that uplifted door that I now began so faintly to recall, to see in everything …?

I remembered the wings that had fluttered on the dancer’s lips. A thread ran from them now into the dark melodic door that I had glimpsed as my entry into the first bank of the river of space. It was a curious and a peculiar door of associations but such peculiarity of composition was inevitable in my situation. The truth was I had forgotten so much in myself, I had eclipsed so much in myself. I was beginning to remember now …

It is indeed essential to retrace one’s steps within the long Day of the twentieth century. It is essential to test one’s vocation as an architect. The door of dreams is my achievement, is it not?

‘Your achievement, Anselm? You seem frightfully eager to set out, to go through the door. No doubt you will clothe yourself in invisibility as the ancient epic heroes did in many a long odyssey.’ He was mocking me. ‘Have you forgotten, do you remember?’

‘I almost forgot how fearful I was when you returned. You were so perfectly visible! I asked you to leave me alone. Now I know that whatever form we take it may be an initiation into extending

‘Extending our senses, Anselm. We cannot solve the world’s terrifying problems otherwise.’

His mood suddenly changed as if he were a different person, a fury disguised, a god disguised in ‘visibility’. Perhaps only human heroes on this side of the grave, in the land of the living Dream, need the protection of ‘invisibility’. I was uncertain. Perhaps ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ were biased configurations susceptible to a sacred humour that offered to redeem one’s imperfect grasp of the miracle of time and space: biased configurations within human gods, godlike humans, that the weak artist or saint or architect may bear to express the unbearable divine: weak, yes, but inwardly strengthened through multiple sharers in every field of endeavour in the translation of epic fate into inimitable freedom within the unfinished genesis of cross-cultural moment.

I knew but I was fearful to accept what I knew. I wished to place a seal upon the innermost realms, the innermost cliff of Being that exists everywhere.

‘Anselm, Anselm,’ he cried. ‘Architect, engineer, painter, lover, sculptor, saint!’ He was mocking me again. ‘All these extensions help you to conceal yourself in your various properties. But remember they are suspended by a thread of music in the abyss. That thread is woven out of ages of prayer.’

‘Where did you learn all this rubbish?’ I demanded.

‘The sanity, the humour of the dead who return as themselves, their wicked or their innocent selves, inhabited nevertheless by the fragility of knowing themselves otherwise! You will understand in due course when you go through the door as a living dreamer. It’s time the living entered into a true discourse with the reformative disguises of the dead everywhere amongst them.’

‘Madness,’ I said. ‘Sanity,’ he replied. We were talking within the curious comedy, the curious cross-purpose of incantation and Dream. ‘Let me put it bluntly. We need strange cross-purpose, strange self-contradiction, to open the fabric or prisonhouse of existence. If crime is forever crime, if tautology rules in our dogmas and poetries and statecraft, if violence is the only armour against the violent, then the door is obsolete, the drum is obsolete, the organ engages in nothing but the business of doom. But you know that is not true. The thread of the dance may bring us together again and again, Anselm. But the dance is no absolute enclosure. It is freedom’s re-visionary step, however difficult, into unimaginable truth and beauty.’

I was fascinated by the unfashionable word ‘beauty’. What is beauty in an ugly world, I asked myself. Perhaps he had stumbled and I had gained the upper hand over him, over the fury or the god that inhabited him. Beauty was worthless! He gave a sudden bark and poked me in the ribs as if his finger were truth’s knife. I recoiled. My complacency appeared to bleed as if I had received a wound. Was I a creature — an unwitting creature no doubt — of the nihilist philosophy of a civilization? Did I deserve to die at the hands of Canaima?

‘Not to die. Not to die. You will recover. The thread never snaps. And yet sometimes it appears to snap. It snaps, I tell you. It never snaps. It snaps, I tell you. It never snaps. It snaps, I tell you. Doesit eversnap?’ His voice had grown terrible, and I suddenly recalled the way he had stared at his victim on the ground when I came upon them on the riverbank. As though he were shaking him with his glance, shaking him free, yet binding him in a secret net.

‘I want the world to understand,’ he spoke softly now as if his rage were written into the spectre of a river I recalled, ‘how precious he is. How invaluable you are, Anselm. I came close to taking your life. To killing you in the Dream and flinging you back into the mid-twentieth century upon him. I want you to know who I am not. I am not a mischief-maker. I am a manifestation of a conflict of values that I nurse within my victims. No ordinary criminal, Anselm. You should know within your childhood heart of hearts! We need to puncture one another’s dramatic misconceptions from the day we were born that feed the theatre of the world. You saved me, yes, when you remained silent. I released you when I could have easily, so easily, killed you when I appeared to mother (or was it to father?) my victim on the ground. We are twins …’

I was stunned by Canaima’s outrageous address, the address of a spiritual tormentor. I had set him free and yet he was my prisoner. He had killed, he had come close to killing me. I still felt his knife in my ribs. The dancer he had killed lay within the net of his (and my) mind and heart. The cap of Alicia — a family badge I associated with childhood — had been stuck on the dead man’s head. So he was part and parcel of a childhood — half-forgotten — theatre as well. The knife and the cap were an incomplete badge and signature I suddenly remembered.

Salvation is the mystery of unfathomable grace yet torment, the mystery of the net, of the thread, of the key to a door whose obsolescence or inestimable value I was soon to know within a body of living, sculpted, painted ghosts arising from the past into a Dream of presence.

*

I walked through the door of the dream-unconscious as an honorary ghost in the wake of Canaima’s metaphoric knife in my ribs. As such, as a living dreamer, I was able to don — in true ancient epic style within the late twentieth century — the cloak of invisibility that I needed in retracing my steps and embarking upon my pilgrimage upon the first bank of the river of space.

I turned in the morning light — wholly unseen by the people in the region who were now astir — and took an intricate path along the riverbank in the direction of the Macusi Waterfall and Rapids.

The river was angry as if it had been stirred by Canaima’s glance which shook the dead bird-man at his feet. Its sudden, passionate foam led me to paint the soil of the place with a degree of coarseness that I instantly regretted. I looked everywhere for monsters as I touched the knife in my ribs. What monsters? The masses of the river (miniature masses, I may add, since the population was small) were made up of ordinary folk, gold and diamond miners, everyday faces one would meet in the footpaths through the forest or on the water-top, Macusis whose children were attending the Mission Church and the School, Inspector Robot and his police force, Penelope and Ross George the English missionaries.

I came upon a Macusi woodman with an axe on his shoulder. He was — in the circumstances of my invisibility — unable to see me but I possessed the outrageous liberty of scanning his features and inspecting him from top to toe. There was a faint sweat in his eyes like a spider’s web or the distilled breath of the river upon glass. He was sturdy as rock. His employment was to fell several acres of rainforest timber. A mere drop these were on my canvas of space that invoked the mid-twentieth century into which I had come. But one wondered how it would spread in the future. The rainforests were the lungs of the globe. Trees needed to be felled, yes, but the breath of the rivers and the forests was a vital ingredient in space. It was an issue of living contrasts interwoven by the soul of the dance through every monstrous desert that lay hidden in the coarse soil of place — deserts that had not yet happened in South America but which we could inflict on ourselves if we were not watchful and capable of attending to the voices of the dead in our midst.

I — as Government Surveyor, Government Architect, Government Sculptor and Painter of the City of God, an Imaginary City within the fabulous ruins of El Dorado — had submitted a report on the preservation of the rainforests to my employers in Alicia’s museum of fossils in Georgetown.

I said to the woodman — ‘Your people were here before Columbus dreamt he had touched the shores of India. That is why you and your people are called Indians. History is a book of dreams. And it’s time we scanned the pages afresh and woke up to patterns of Sleep in which we stumble upon each other in the masks of many existences. When we fight one another — whom do we fight? When we love or hate one another — whom do we love or hate? Be careful, axeman! Remember the crosses on Calvary’s hill. They were felled trees, carven trees, felled by living, sleep-walking ghosts like you.’

He did not understand a word but stopped and listened, astonished at my voice. It was the trick of an honorary ghost who sighed in the trees. Was it phantom cinema, phantom radio, imported into savage and remote realms? There was a black bead or ritual charm on his lips that he could blow into a curious kind of balloon in which to trap visual spirits. I took advantage of him. I touched the bead and converted it into a television box over his head that was as transparent as his balloon. Its transparency matched the faint sweat or breath of glass arising from the river into his eyes.

Trick of breath in my sculpture of him it may have been but it was authentic comedy or retrace of unimaginable genesis I sought nevertheless to infuse into the arts of life as a moral counterpoint to civilization’s addiction to technology. I moved within the Painted Bush and threw the net of an unseen camera around him. Startled all at once in recalling the way Canaima had thrown his net around his victim on the ground! The correspondence was indeed startling. It gave an extra edge to the film I was suddenly involved in making with the epic media of the gods who had thrust me on to the first bank of the river of space. The Macusi woodman was in process of becoming a bright Shadow on a screen (in a box-balloon) to millions of invisible viewers within a net of the future (invisible to him as I now was) who would feast on him in their sitting-rooms, feast on him and on the nearextinction of his savage tribe, feast on him as on a rare bird, exotic fish, butterfly.

In the outrageous liberties I took with him I was their ambassador, the ambassador of invisible millions, invisible to the savage I shot with my camera.

I inscribed on my film the following caution — ‘Read the ironies of technology in the haunted spaces of civilization’s mind, a mind infused with metaphors of the hunt and the kill, the seizure of others within every museum or cinema.’

The door of associations through which I had come had now swung wide. It was so close I saw something I had not seen before. There were subtle etchings of three crosses. I was prompted to ask the Macusi axeman (though he did not understand a word) — ‘Who is the king of thieves? Look! there he is. He’s descending from his cross as if to retrace his steps backwards into previous centuries, forwards into later centuries, into our century. Odd of me to say “retrace”. Retrace one’s steps into the past. But can we retrace our steps in the coarse soil of the future? He is the thief who mocked Christ and turned his face away from paradise’s door. Such a thief lives in us all and in a door that haunts us in every century.’

I saw he was listening and I continued as I touched the knife in my ribs. ‘Perhaps my door is rooted in a subtle abyss between Christ’s cross and that of the king of thieves, the door in the cross, the cross in the door.’

‘He is behind you,’ I said suddenly to the axeman. ‘He stands between your raised axe and the tree you are about to fell. I am not sure but he reminds me … I think I know. I remember something from childhood when I played in Alicia’s garden theatre with my uncle Proteus who was adept at all sorts of masks and disguises. The sun would glint on his brow like a cord of bright sixpences. Clever devil! I remember once he stole my pocket money. It wasn’t much but it was a fortune to me. Fortunes are made when one astutely delves into the pockets of infants. It was a moral lesson that Proteus intended.

‘Look axeman! The thief turns in your Shadow within the futuristic television box I have infused into a bead that you wear. Some say he stole the atom from the thorn of a Rose on Christ’s brow. He turns, axeman! he turns in your box and faces millions. Look! how they cheer, how they applaud.’

But the axeman was blind to the past and the future. And yet I was not sure. There was a glint to the blade of his axe that half-blinded my sight as well. Perhaps he was on the brink of disclosing himself in another light. I did my best to keep my eyes fastened upon him. I followed the are that he drew with his blade: slow yet lightning poise of a blade in the darkness of my own mind. The axe stood high in space. He gave a sudden ringing cry. ‘TIMBER, HUMAN TIMBER.’ Then struck. It was a miraculous blow. With one stroke he felled the tree. I scarcely believed what I saw. It was as if his blindness was now — in a flashing instant — a mask that he wore even as my invisibility was a cloak. I was a different person in retracing my steps. He was a different person in striking a blow that was so unusual, so immaculate, it made me abnormally sensitive to the responsibilities that are implicit in every cross one bears, every door one builds. Human timber!

I touched the blade. I marvelled at its subtlety and complex force. I remembered the knife, Canaima’s knife, that had metaphorically killed me yet had pierced me to the core of the body’s waking instrument — as if the knife were an extension of the human hand — so pierced me that I became an heir of civilizations (carnival heir) and was imbued with living dream or inner space to pass through the door of the unconscious, to become sensitive to the abuse of others, to the perils that encompass the globe.

The high stump of the felled tree began to move in the soil of the earth. It drew itself up. It was human timber. It arose from the roots of the cross. My eyes cleared. I remembered. Someone I knew yet did not know. It was the king of thieves. He — unlike the other thief on Calvary’s hill — had rejected paradise. I had glimpsed him on the first bank of the river of space at the heart of the long Day of the twentieth century between the raised axe and the tree. I had glimpsed him in childhood theatre. I had glimpsed him in the protean body of my own family. Such parallels or alternative existences had come into sharpest focus now, quantum axe, quantum camera, quantum knife.

They were the sharpest extension of breath-in-sculpted-body-senses. But simultaneously they made me acutely aware of the king of thieves as burdened with prizes and punishments. The Macusi axeman — whose blade seemed now a lightning extension of my own hand in the sudden darkness that falls over one’s mind in the wake of a staggering event — had vanished. I was left to reflect upon a thief, upon the punishments inflicted upon him, a thief whom I knew or thought I knew. I should have recognized him in the mid-twentieth century when I worked in the Potaro River and he was a miner there but I was blind then, I was deaf then. He was a miner-pork-knocker (in the idiom of the region). Pork-knockers live by the skin of their teeth when the payload, the paydirt, declines. They beat a drum in the Bush for comfort, they scrape the last morsels from every drum or barrel of pork. It was a punishment with which many a great adventurer was familiar in the age of Homer or Virgil or Defoe. And on such scraps I perceived a possibility for — the meditative genesis of — a symphony and a film on the incarnations of the king of thieves.

His nickname in 1948 was ‘Black Pizarro’. It was a tribute to his obsession with gold and to his great namesake, the Spanish conquistador of the sixteenth century, who ransacked the treasuries of the Incas. He was the living mascot of his crew. They hated him yet he was indispensable to them. None was as gifted as he in concealing a stone in the crevices of his flesh or gold under his tongue. He told tales of rich widows and he boasted that he had rubbed shoulders in Georgetown or Rio or Paris or Greece with many a suitor in carnival palaces who waited on queens and wasted their substance. The ruins of El Dorado — whose location tended to shift from region to region, continent to continent, from the present into the remote past, even as it hovered over the future — encompassed he declared the proportions of formidable live fossil (cross-cultural) theatre: ancient Ithaca (with its suitors or millionaire-thieves and its queen Penelope) and modern doors, the door of the modern unconscious uplifted into consciousness, the door of lost paradises, stolen paradises. As a consequence, in sculpting him back from the high stump of a felled tree as multi-existential fabric, as an actor or creature of many incarnations, I placed a stolen diamond in his flesh and a stolen nugget of gold over his heart.

I chiselled him as a thief who sought to steal in every century on earth the heaven he had lost on Calvary’s hill. It was a magnificent obsession. It glimmered in the seed of many an epic, in pre-Christian ages, in many an Odyssey, many an implicit crucifixion upon the high mast of a wrecked ship on the high seas, or beneath the pagan rafters or pagan crosses of buried kingdoms. I chiselled his head into magnificence and plastered the bone and the flesh with ageing leaves (a man in his forties), grey leafy mane or the fleece of cloud or animal hair. This conjunction of fleece with cloud with animal hair with a horse’s mane and with the brilliant, sometimes riotous flow of sun and breeze that stream through a forest of leaves from time to time (before the leaves fall and become sodden or grey or yellow or black) was an indication that the king of thieves sought (however parlous his condition) to ride high in space.

In this extreme context he was both rider and ridden, golden man and slave. He was civilization’s universal puppet, a civilization that took Poverty for granted, Wealth for granted, took the millionaire for granted, took the net that confined them for granted. Until the net snaps in Canaima’s hand. And the diamonds and the gold spill out and breathe in their own right, breathe on high within the forested saddle of space, fall into the ground and rot with every leaf to become emblems of a riotous soul, riotous elements that ride in space, in cloud, in storm, in every landscape, every tide, riotous elements in our mistranslation of the energies of a majestic tempest.

As the net breaks the leaf rides in the sky, as the net breaks the gold flashes in the rain, as the net breaks one’s blindness melts. One sees through the thief’s mask, the thief’s eyes, and he sees through one’s cloak of invisibility. The honorary scarecrow thief on the first bank of the river of space meets the honorary ghost who comes through the door of dreams into a collaboration of elements, a collaboration of poverty and wealth within live fossil theatre.

He is possessed of an insight into levels of being that touch upon all extremities, all prizes, all punishments. The thief and the millionaire — in this commotion of forested and winged elements, streaming and falling rotting leaves in space, gold and silver — come to the verge of surrendering everything into the SLEEP OF HISTORY’S DREAM BOOK in which they encounter themselves as strangers, as intimates. But the gold is heavy (it cannot easily be given up), the rotting leaf is a source of profit, and they find they are addicted still to the charisma of punishment, the charisma of prizes.

Black Pizarro had served, I knew, a sentence of imprisonment in 1947 in Alicia’s gaol of live fossils of history. Six months’ hard labour in the garden theatre. My childhood museum home had become a famous theatre, a prison, a library, it possessed an immortal vase inhabited by queen Alicia’s spirit, it possessed an unfinished Jacob’s ladder. Alicia and my uncle Proteus would have loved it all were they alive in the 1940s, they would have approved the evolution of Poverty — of poor men’s and women’s religion — into carnival masks of wealth.

On his return to the Potaro goldfields in 1948 after he had served his sentence he was chosen leader by the miners. They beat him within a fortnight of his return for a piece of gold he inserted between his toes as they dug the yellow metal in a ravine or a creek close to the Macusi Waterfall.

Even as they beat him they embraced him. They were wed to him, they were wed to an obsession imprinted on the door of the unconscious. The golden man, the golden thief. It did not matter whether gold was black or white.

I remembered now. I saw it now as I retraced my steps upon fossil leaf, fossil gold, fossil diamond, and glimpsed in high heaven, through the body of the forest, the flashing light of a Horse that I was to encounter much later and on another bank in the river of space in my pilgrimage. At the present moment, however, the horse’s mane stood on the thief’s head as an apparition of his fall across the centuries into my age.

*

The king of thieves had pierced my cloak of invisibility (as I had pierced his eyes of blindness), and as a consequence I became a curious honorary telepathist or spy of the heart and the mind, as I continued my journey. The telepathist on the first bank of the river of space is a spy, who dreams of building an Imaginary City of God by accumulating necessary intelligences in every sphere, through all alternatives and parallels. I felt I stood now within a medium of exchange with ‘live absences’, with those who had vanished or died but were returning now into the Sleep of object, as much as the Sleep of subject, the Sleep of ruler, as much as the Sleep of ruled. As though the substance with which I now sculpted them into life was shared thought, a mutual exchange of secrets, a mixture of philosophy and reverie.

I did not have far to go before I came upon the English missionaries, Ross and Penelope George. I had been thinking of them when I met Pizarro. I was sure they had been thinking of me too across the abyss that lay between us. I drew them up, as it were, from within the darkness of my own mind and the darkness of theirs within half-grave, half-cradle of mutual instinct and memory.

I saw them descending a hill towards me. Just behind them came a soldier, a high-ranking officer I perceived from the many decorations that he wore on his chest. The medals and decorations were vibrating almost imperceptibly to the faint rhythm of military music running through Penelope’s mind. She was humming a marching song silently to herself and I picked up an intelligence of the strains and echoes in myself as telepathic spy. A song that left her pensive, uneasy, burdened by something or someone she could not easily shake off. Her reverie ceased when she saw me. (I was now visible to all as my previous cloak had been pierced by the king of thieves.) She stopped humming or beating the strains of the tune silently within herself as she saw me and the soldier who stood so close to her — his hand on her arm, squeezing her arm — stepped away from her into the Bush. I lost sight of him.

But his appearance and abrupt disappearance made me uneasy. It did not yet occur to me that he was a ghost I had sculpted into existence by spying into the materiality of Penelope’s silent song, Penelope’s uneasy military body of thought that possessed her in that instant. My first idea was that he had come to visit Ross and herself (whom I gathered he had known in England) to tell them he was a candidate for the Governorship of the Colony. Perhaps some such odd fantasy — fantasy to do with the dead who haunted their thoughts powerfully — had been relayed to me by them. Or perhaps I had picked up some early ambition, some early hope for a seat in the administrative hierarchy of empire, entertained by the officer himself before his death, of which they knew and which lingered in their subconscious or unconscious.

The tasks of a spy who dreams to build the City of God are complex, sometimes they border upon meaningful self-deception. The notion that he was a candidate for Governorship — indeed much more, a Ulysses returned into his private kingdom, private possession — gripped me. I wondered whether he would know something of my brief in the Potaro as Government Surveyor and Architect. Perhaps he had visited my head office in Georgetown which was set in Queen Alicia’s theatre of history in which I had grown up as a child with Proteus and Harold.

Perhaps he had been informed that I had been sent to reconnoitre the area as a likely settlement for refugees, to assess the hydro-electric potential of the Potaro River above the Macusi Waterfall … I felt the curious tremor of a subject who faces the object of power, the dress, the decorations for military prowess, the uniform, the high masquerade to which one owes allegiance.

I felt the strains of such object-power, heroic personality, lingering in the loom and tapestry of Penelope’s mind. I felt the thread of her song stitching kings and queens upon the Bush around us and into my carnival temperament.

Aunt Alicia was a carnival queen (her imprint was clear to me now on the painted Bush) and Penelope responded to this lightning telepathy by assuming the burden of becoming a queen herself — the queen of the El Dorado Mission House of the Potaro in which she and Ross taught and worked. Burden indeed! The El Dorado Mission narrowly escaped being in the red. It needed funds and though it succeeded — with the help of international charities — in defraying expenses it was driven at times to exceed its slim budget. The War had left us all poor.

I seemed to learn all this as Penelope’s and Ross’s stream of inner sometimes disjointed reflection circulated within a medium of legend that I associated with Alicia. Aunt Alicia knew all about slim budgets. But her humour, her ironic charity, was such that she converted Poverty into a moral comedy. ‘Ask the poor,’ she would say, ‘how they see the world! They will tell you it’s a village

‘A village?’

‘A global village, Anselm. Remember the Beatitudes — “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”’

I never fully understood what my formidable aunt was driving at when she associated her carnival queenship at home when I was a child with the ‘poor in spirit’, but now it became curiously obvious to me that masks of Poverty in her theatre (slim budgets etc. that she shared not only with hard-driven neighbours and members of her own family but with august missions, high enterprises of art or religion or education) embodied the visionary importance of the complex unity of Mankind through dual or triple queenships in order to illumine the necessity to cross frontiers, to break polarizations. ‘When one is poor in spirit,’ she used to say, ‘one is rich in giving a helping hand to others whoever they may be, wherever they may have come from. We’re not just puppets on a string, Anselm. Someone we ourselves put on a pedestal may pull a string or two — I know that — and catapult us into an arena where we fight one another even though we scarcely know whom it is exactly we are fighting. It’s easy to fall into line like helpless idiots, Anselm. Until helplessness becomes the cement of the state … Yes, helplessness is a form of subconscious cement, helplessness is a block that we build in which the state imprisons us. The poor in spirit know they have to reach out. And that’s carnival. Reaching out. Reaching through legacies of helplessness into dual and triple kingships and queenships across frontiers. Kingship or queenship becomes a shared privilege, a shared burden.’

There flashed in my mind, as I remembered the staccato rhythm of her sermon to me — when she wrestled with varieties of distress — a distinction between ‘prizes and punishments’ (in the king of thieves) and ‘shared privilege, shared burden’ in a theatre of Spirit.

I was astonished at the curious wealth of association running through my mind: a spy into world Poverty’s metamorphoses invokes a store of secrets (open secrets) that come thick and fast from everywhere and nowhere.

Penelope was smiling. She shared the material substance of my thoughts even as I penetrated hers. She knew I was an absurd spy for the ‘kingdom of heaven’ (‘absurdity is sometimes a bleak, a terrifying measure of creative hope, creative truth’), and it amused her, even as it helped to lift from her the shadow of unhappiness and anxiety that I had witnessed in her when the soldier had held her hand with his insubstantial but bruising fist, with a kind of brutal force, a kind of jealous rage.

It was as if we shared a range of childhood secrets, within a language of poetry and epic that was ours. She saw plainly imprinted on the Bush — as in a lightning portrait of mind that I painted there within the gallery of the first bank of the river of space — how Alicia had governed me in childhood even as the ‘soldier’ had been her implicit hero or standard-bearer as far back as she could remember in the games they played in childhood. (She had known him as a child. Their families had been neighbours.)

My state of self-confessional subjection to Alicia helped to lift her state of body and mind into a bond of emotion, in which she was able to resist the jealous soldier by associating herself with Poverty’s masks in a world foreign to her own childhood in Kent, where she grew up, yet pertinent to her deepest fantasies. It was an important treaty, it was the beginning of an important alliance, an important comedy, a maturity, a Wisdom, that would extend its implications within the reach of the four banks of the river of space.

And yet I was suddenly cast down. Such extension into genuine Wisdom seemed now suddenly precarious, suddenly remote in a world in which we needed to acknowledge how little we knew ourselves, and how our lack of self-knowledge was threaded into our ignorance of others, our tendency to rely on so-called first impressions and upon superficial estimates of complicated capacity in others. At least — as an honorary spy upon the first bank of the river of space who had begun to retrace his steps into the heartland of the twentieth century — I was apprised of this. I knew I moved into the extremities, the hidden spaces in others, within the extremities, the hidden spaces in myself, upon a quantum materiality interwoven with the gross materiality and bankrupt realisms of my age. No wonder one tended at times to lose heart, to recoil from the task, to distrust oneself.

Does one not fear to open oneself to energies, to risks, that may change one’s being radically, a radical change of heart? Does one not distrust a radical change of heart as the cornerstone of every Imaginary City of God? Distrust is contagious. It overshadows the medium of inner discourse, the medium of the soul.

I had distrusted Ross, he had distrusted me, when we first met in 1948. I accepted our mutual dislike one of the other as the realism of ruling object (he was the friend of Governors and high-ranking Civil Servants) and ruled subject (I was susceptible to nursing grievances against the injustices of colonial order). He seemed to me a reserved, cold-hearted missionary and friend of the establishment. But now as I retraced my steps upon the ground of quantum materiality the shell of mutual distrust began to break.

It broke within the door of the unconscious upon which was inscribed elaborate traceries of far-flung telepathic myth, far-flung intelligences within a theatre of ancient/modern soul.

Penelope had been amused at the fantasies I entertained as a child about my aunt Alicia. So now too I found myself clapping, one hand clapping in the mirror of the soul. Ross had moved upon the stage within that mirror, that theatre. His reserve, his coldness, cracked to reveal another existence that was part and parcel of myself though I would never have suspected it when we first met. He was no base suitor at Penelope’s court. He was no ordinary missionary in the kingdom of El Dorado. His reserve was real. How real? There are many approaches to the real. And now I found myself weighing his real intraversions in mine.

Guilt and fantasy are real. Guilt is rooted in the extraordinary life of fantasy, shared but suppressed fantasy. What better defences against an ignorant world than the appearances of distance from others, the appearances of reserve?

I had known the ice of guilt as a child even under the blaze of the tropical sun. I had seen marvels of suppressed guilt in Proteus’s broken-backed laughter as he played the clown or the king and squeezed himself into another shape. I had seen buoyant guilt in Harold’s lusts. Harold was the womaniser of our family. Ross was no womaniser but he felt himself imprisoned within a pattern of angst and lust one tends to associate with the theft of love from another, another who cultivates jealousy and takes himself for granted as the sovereign master of a woman’s heart.

He fell in love with Penelope during the War when her jealous soldier-husband was still alive. He burdened himself with the thought that this had demoralized Simon (at last I drew the name Simon from the crevices of his mind, the name of the shadowy officer and Governor who had placed himself between them as they descended the hill)when he returned from El Alamein and found them in bed together: that this had led to his death in Normandy in 1944. Simon may have thrown his life away!

It was untrue, it was folly, it was a distortion. Ross had been scrupulous to a degree, wholly conscientious. Penelope needed him. He had stood by her, tried to heal the wounds her husband had inflicted. The marriage had ended (though a legal tie remained) long before he and Penelope met and made love in a room above a bombed garden in which a single rose bloomed. There was no need for guilt. He was no base suitor. Yet guilt and uncertainty remained like a formidable door into a complex and far-flung dimension that I — as a spy who retraces his steps within the long Day of the twentieth century — began to weigh, to assess, to evaluate in new lights, in the light of parallel and alternative existences, guilt in parallel with formidable myth, myth in parallel with duty and devotion, ancient Ithaca in parallel with ruined El Dorado, ruined kings, queens, suitors.

Ross’s intense reserve sustained him in all his tasks, heightened his sense of duty. Such reserve became a hidden door, a door of the Dream I shared with him (I felt myself an imaginary suitor in Penelope’s court, I was struck by her beauty): a door into the kingdom of the heart, a kingdom Ross distrusted and equated with primitive fantasy, primitive humanity. All the more necessary it was for him to work hard, to prize the vocation of a missionary in an alien South America. He was no base suitor in Penelope’s court, no base thief of love here in El Dorado nor there in Europe from which they had come. Indeed the structure of formidable proprietorship of the ancient kingdom of the heart began to suffer a curious reversal. The Shadow of Simon, the Governor, haunted them (I had not realized it before) as it haunted me now though his status as a hero was no longer absolute. It was as if the nature and authority, the ironies of love, choice and fate, were in suspension. And the outcome now lay in re-visionary theatre.

The queen of El Dorado accepted the necessity to weave a tapestry of counterpoint, guilt and innocence, poverty and wealth, that made it impossible for her to conform to a convenient climax with a potent ghost or with a dutiful, conscientious suitor or with an imaginary suitor. The fulfilment of longed-for ecstasy had suffered a measure of eclipse within arts of freedom: freedom of association, yes, freedom to live with whom one wished to live, yes, freedom to declare one’s need of another, yes, but freedom for what, what values, what truths in oneself and others?

Here lay the nature of a discourse in which my fantasies were joined to Penelope’s, to Ross’s, to those of the king of thieves in whom gold was the obsessional guilt of love …

It was astonishing how in glimpsing the complicated features of Ross through a shell of reserve I became a stranger to myself even as he drew paradoxically closer to me in quantum territory. In knowing him better my self-portrait became stranger and truer. I glimpsed my own strangeness. Who was I? Was it a question I would ever be able to answer?

For one moment — the instant I heard Ross inwardly utter the name ‘Simon’ — it almost seemed that he touched the knife in my side, the knife in the body of my mind. Indeed I felt a stab, a twist of pain. He was but one step away from unveiling the portrait I had painted in myself of my early morning encounter with Canaima. I was alarmed. I knew I must divert the action of his thought.

‘My parents, grandparents, great-aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., etc. — Alicia, Proteus, Harold, the Rose sisters, etc., etc. — stored their most secret dreams in the English language, Ross. Their prayers were uttered in the English language. English was their mental tongue — it became their landscape of psyche — whatever the colour of their skin.’ My inner voice — the action of telepathy — struck his ears. I saw he was drawn. He lifted his unconscious hand away from the knife and the veil that lay over my portrait of Canaima. His attention had been diverted from the bird-victim (the masked dancer) Canaima had plucked from the dance and killed. He would learn of it when they returned to the Mission House. In the meantime I felt I needed to learn a great deal more in order to give a full account of the forces that had inspired me not to raise an outcry when I came upon Canaima and the Macusi he had killed. The compulsions that had driven me, the thread of the dance linking all creatures, all spheres, all places — the antiphonal discourse — were so mysterious, so unpredictable, that I needed more time to let them act upon me in my pilgrimage. I needed to retrace my steps more deeply into the past before I could sculpt the dance, paint it in greater range and depth. I needed time even as they needed time to impart to me their particular crisis and its far-flung bearing on the nature of freedom, the innermost authority of the values of love without which freedom would be but nihilism, but a dead-end in a wilderness of licence and permissive abuse.

‘Yes,’ I continued rapidly, ‘my relatives and antecedents composed poems, sermons, etc. in English. Proteus sometimes fancied himself as a minister of religion. Like you, Ross. And as for Alicia, Great-Aunt Alicia! What a scream she was. I am quoting one of her retinue of servants amongst her admiring neighbours from whom she cast many a play. English was her mansion, English was a stage, a ladder, a curtain to be lifted on a variety of objects. It was a landscape populated by dancing figures involved in complicated gestures, imageries and steps. Not easy to describe. I remember when I first saw an L. S. Lowry ballet or painting within a backcloth of depression I thought of Aunt Alicia. But that’s an insufficient and inadequate comparison for her daring and penetrative vision of inner space theatre.’

Ross was smiling now. The comparison fascinated him and I knew I had turned his mind away from the metaphoric knife in my side and from Canaima.

‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘every object she unveils she addresses in English. Subject she may be but she becomes the soul of the object. There’s a wonderful vase, a tall vase inscribed with histories of the world — I hope to come upon it in due course on the second bank of the river of space — in which she resides now playing that she rules the world from within the very objects that ruled her. It’s her moral comedy, her version of moral irony. I dream of her as if she were a living empress who truly knows the tribulations of every subject, who is both within and without every object-masquerade, every mask, every furniture of being that passes before her; who hears the buried voices within the English language, the voices of her mixed antecedents, her mixed ancestry, bringing a new quality of incantation into the language of object and subject.’ I stopped. Despite everything one declares I sensed the divide between sophisticated ‘object’ and carnival ‘subject’. It was present in us all, in Penelope and Ross as much as in me. But Penelope and Ross were so seized by their commanding native tongue they would have accepted the divide as fate’s sealed discourse were it not for the rising subjectivity of Poverty’s queens such as Alicia and honorary spies such as myself. It was the new stresses on ‘native ruling tongue’ that drew us together within a shared telepathy of ruler and ruled, a shared intuition of linked foreign and native sovereigns within the dangerous plaster of ruling object: drew us together in such a way that the plaster became susceptible to unravelling by a carnival spy or ‘kingdom of heaven subject’ within the Sleep of history.

The living dreamer knows in some indefinable way he could rely on them to help him or me respond to Canaima even as they could rely on him or me — in Poverty’s ancestral epic masks — to help them respond to Simon’s shadowy manifestation of malaise, the malaise of a civilization in the wounded, jealous archetype of authority as it returned again and again into the kingdom of the heart to ravage the senses. Penelope possessed her sovereign, cruel master and her guilty, innocent suitors within her own mind’s ruling body and in perceiving this the theme itself, the theme of sovereignty itself, the theme of the suitor, required reversal in cross-cultural frames of theatre. I had, however faintly, begun to recall the theatre of my childhood: Aunt Alicia as a player in a body of dual or triple queenships, King Harold in league with Uncle Proteus. Yes I remembered the beggar Ulysses played by both Proteus and Harold in the gates of Home, native and foreign Home, intact yet scarred. The strangest paradox of theatre lay before me as I retraced my steps apparently backwards, apparently forwards … ‘We may only heal the wounded archetype when we live the divide at the heart of language and place its enormity on many shoulders, when several players — whether Simon, Harold, Proteus — take a share in performances and portrayals of inner ungraspable majesty, inner immensity of craft, inner power.’

I knew I still had a long way to go to encounter Proteus, Harold and the others. Penelope and Ross vanished along the trail on their way to the Mission House. Vanished but I heard their voices calling out to me to join them for dinner that evening. I declined. The invitation remained suspended in the air. It floated towards me across the years. I had almost forgotten. It returned now with immense poignancy. It was to take close on forty years for me to fulfil that summons. I did not break bread with them in the Mission House until 1988 when I retraced my steps into an imaginary refectory in the ruins of the old Mission. The old house had been burnt to the ground in 1966 by Canaima.

*

The way was clear now for me to continue my journey along the first bank of the river of space. I heard the organ of the Macusi Waterfall through the trees and came at last to god-rock, a huge sculpture with a winding stairway like a coiled serpent or eel up into space. It towered above the Waterfall.

Inspector Robot was waiting for me there in the shadow of the rock as within the shadow of time that lengthens mysteriously within us when an age is passing its zenith.

A skeleton-man to be feared in one’s dreams, a remarkable clown, a remarkable detective, a technician of artificial intelligence. He tapped me on the shoulder with a bony finger and conferred on me the extended title ‘honorary doctor, spy and Christian gnostic’. His bony finger reminded me of Canaima’s hand and the knife in my side. The links between violence (bony finger/knife), healing (doctorate of the soul), intelligence (spy), and knowledge as sacrament were disturbing and enigmatic. Were they rooted in some area of insoluble conflict that we needed to visualize in all its proportions if we were to create a changed heart within ourselves, a radical change of heart within a grossly materialistic civilization?

Robot was smiling quizzically. The bones in his face quivered a little. It was as if he were testing me, or mocking me, by implying through channels of twisting telepathy in the network of apparently grave-made, man-made brain that his realm (the realm of ‘artificial intelligence’) was superior to gnosis or to intuitive bodies of original mind and spirit, that he alone was realistic enough to offer no quarter, no parole, to criminals. And yet he seemed equally to be saying that we needed one another, we could profit from an understanding one of the other. I believed in ‘freedom’ (did I not?), he believed in the necessity of the ‘prisonhouse’. Our beliefs were but frames of the vanity of power within a world of sovereign polarizations and clashes of cultures bent on deceiving (if not destroying) each other.

On the other hand those beliefs could genuinely change when one began to perceive the subtle abyss that existed between them, between the vanity of ‘freedom’ and the vanity of the ‘prisonhouse’. How potent was that abyss? That was the Inspector’s prime inquiry of me. Could that abyss alter the features of both time and eternity?

‘Freedom’ by itself could prove a baseless ‘eternity’ that consumes all as the elements become polluted and the fabric of moral order capitulates to an atrophy of being, the ‘prisonhouse’ by itself could prove the cement of baseless ‘time’ through which one flits helplessly into limbo.

How strange if the abyss then that lies between ‘freedom’ and the ‘prisonhouse’ could so extend the range of our perceptions that eternity yielded itself to us not as a consuming and polluted furnace in opposition to passing time but as the parent of vital, original time — re-cast time — within a range of architectures, rooms, doors, walls, cycles, beams that draw themselves up from the very abyss that we begin to contemplate into pregnant consciousness? Draw themselves up into visionary splendours, visionary fragments of a dreaming Creator, a true Creator, whose unknowable limits are our creaturely infinity?

‘Is it possible that the abyss between freedom and the prisonhouse is a source of renewal? Do we need to contemplate the nature of every abyss between patterns and forms that we take for granted?’

I shook my head. I knew he was fencing with me. I knew he believed in nothing. He wanted to pick my brains. He wanted to cannibalize every organ of spirit … He stared at me with his quizzical, cynical smile. A sophisticated tormentor. Man-made, grave-made brain which could utter genuine truths at times but falsify them into instruments of exploitation because they were void of a spiritual ancestry. A sovereign nihilist capable of putting ‘intelligent’ questions in order to extract what substance he could from his victims. In a way, a fascinating and remarkable way, he resembled Canaima. One was a detective and manipulator of souls, the other was the captain of his team of victims.

Perhaps he felt the burden of my distrust for he mopped his bony skull and shot a sudden question at me — ‘There’s reason to believe this wretched thing’ — he pointed to the god-rock — ‘may help us to unlock the code of Canaima’s hiding place.’ He was staring at me now accusingly (his earlier slightly ingratiating manner had vanished) as if he knew I knew something. I decided to fence with him, to lean into the abyss that stood between us.

‘Take this.’ He pointed to a diagram at the foot of the rock. ‘What do you as a spy, God’s engineer’ — his dry lips flared with his contempt for all religions (yet his desire to exploit all religions) — ‘make of it?’

He knelt beside me as I took a sharp pencil and eased its point into each line of the diagram he had indicated to remove an accumulation of faint mould.

‘I have taken the liberty,’ I said with a dryness that matched Robot’s flare of contempt, ‘taken the liberty of putting A and B and C at the three lines on the diagram at the base of god-rock. The Macusi worship the architecture of the tides. They seek a bird’s-eye view of the geology of the tides in the City of God.’

The Inspector stared at me blankly.

‘A is flood level, C drought level, B is an outline of stone or rock in the Waterfall, peak and valley, through which a precipice of water thunders when the river’s full.’

The Inspector listened intently. I felt he had cast a sudden net around me, blank gaze, intent Robotic instinct and listening ear, coldness, calculation that pushed me on the defensive.

‘B is also,’ I continued, ‘a procession of draped bodies in the Waterfall: rock sculptures that harness the river. The Macusis see them as the work of the God of all weathers; they also see them as clothing inner bodies that wait to come alive, a living procession, when the tribe is approaching extinction. So though the rock procession may become their epitaph, the epitaph of the tribe within the Waterfall, something else will step forth into the world, a magical art born of “live absences”, a magical procession of living interior bodies sculpted at the heart of the Waterfall.’

‘You spoke earlier of a bird’s-eye view, Mr Anselm. Can you explain?’ He was tightening the net upon me. I hesitated. I dreaded his deadly curiosity, blank stare, intent listening ear, abstract precision.

‘The soul dreams,’ I said at last and struggled in his net, ‘to dance up from the Waterfall. It dreams it may come to stand tiptoe upon the wing of a bird, that it may wear the feathers and the glory of all winged creatures, and gaze through the eyes of the masked being of space …’

‘What does it see?’

‘It sees the geology of the tides.’

‘Is that all?’ said Robot. He smiled with indifference. He was baiting me, pushing me along.

‘It sees the distant Atlantic coast far below us,’ I sought to explain, ‘where the ocean tides rise and fall. It sees the ease with which the coastal rivers (they look like veins and arteries in the body of distance, earth and space) would run unchecked into the salt sea were it not for every day’s reversal in the pulsation of the tides, the reversed pulse or animate door or fluid wall of the tides that rise where they fell before and ride back up the rivers, push back and conserve the precious fluid of the sky, the drinking fluid, the irrigation fluid.

‘Outflow into the salt sea occurs with every falling tide. Then comes the reversal, the conservation of the river’s resources, with the rising tide that builds itself into a fluid door uplifted on the reversed tracery or re-tracery of the dancing falling/rising body of arterial rivers.

‘I say a fluid door, a fluid wall, to bring home to us — where we now stand (you, Inspector, and I) far inland and above the ocean — the miraculous parallels, the miraculous architecture of the Waterfall. Look closely at the diagram! The sculptured procession of peak and trough, of carven rock, in the Waterfall has been uplifted here by a geological upward displacement of the ocean tides. The ocean tides are a fluid door, the processional rock is an active tide however stationary it seems. You may remember my telling you that this processional rock will become the epitaph of the tribe even as it releases a new magical art. But to return to the action of geological tides within the Waterfall! When the Macusi River (it’s also known as the Potaro River) falls as you see in the diagram from flood to drought, from A to C, it conserves itself because of the sculpture of rock within the Waterfall to release, yet implicitly reverse or hold the flow from above the Waterfall to the plain of the river beneath.’

Inspector Robot placed his finger of bone on the starred portions in the diagram beneath the drought level of the Macusi River.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘The starred portions under C are all the down-flow through the Waterfall that the action of geological tide releases in time of drought. The river conserves itself within a miraculous architecture and balance of parallel forces. The starred portions or selective down-flow become the nightsky of drought in every fable or constellation of the survival of the river.’

‘Ah!’ said the Inspector. His skeleton face was alert. ‘How truly picturesque! Picturesque behaviour! That’s all that poetry is. The nightsky of the drought river! I like that. Bird’s-eye view?’ He came close to me and suddenly I felt the net tighten upon my limbs. ‘Not bird’s-eye view, Mr Anselm. I dispute that. Gaoler’s view! That’s better. Gaoler’s view I tell you. And so perhaps we may yet restrict the movements of Canaima and seize him when the door of the law bangs shut.’

I sought to pull away but it was impossible in this instant. I felt the twist of Canaima’s knife in my mind. How strange are the responsibilities of knowledge, the imparting of knowledge. Does one impart knowledge by imposing it (and thereby falsifying it) upon others? Or did I, through the knowledge I imparted to a juggler of artificial intelligence, give him a chain or a net to bind me?

I suddenly felt angry yet infused with a bitter wisdom. Knowledge illumined the enigma of the self. Was the imparting of knowledge a falsification of its own apparently real but innermost premises? Was the imparting of knowledge a confession of frail humanity upon which an order of machines, the rule of machines, could be built? Knowledge as painful truth subsisted upon contraries, contrary spirit, contrary artifice. I knew I could only be free of Robot by embracing contraries within an unfathomable unity of being, unfathomable self-mockery yet access to unfathomable grace through all patterns, all shapes one may inhabit at various times.

‘Gaoled waters you say, Inspector? Gaoler’s view?’ I could not help the rising passion in my voice. Robot turned and stared intently. ‘Look, see!’ I pulled Canaima’s knife from my side. ‘Look, see.’ It was all I could say. Robot recoiled a little. Perhaps he felt threatened. Then I threw the knife far up into space. It glittered. It flashed. It was a conveyor, a satellite of knowledge. Inspector Robot was startled. And yet perhaps he had been waiting … It glittered. It flashed. Then all at once it shot like lightning into the body of a flying creature. The Inspector and I heard (as with a single yet cloven ear) the flying creature’s long, sweet, poignant, bitter lament as if a note had been struck in the darkest recesses of melodic Conscience. The lightning knife had found its mark. The winged, dancing, flying bird appeared to pause in the twinkling of an eye within us, within inner space, glimmering stillness yet lightning apprehension of the geology of the tides through which to build the architecture of the City of God or to topple El Dorado into further ruin.

The angelic dancer fell with open, outstretched wings. It fell downwards (or was it backwards into the upturned vessel of the sky in which the sun shone like a pooled star within a drought of cloud?). Glimmering star/sun or floating eyelid of the abyss. Did it fall into the Waterfall? I listened for the splintering note of the knife upon a head of rock but heard nothing. We were unsure. Inspector Robot was unsure. I was unsure.

‘Did the dancer and the knife fall and rise upon an ozone door, a toppled, ruined, tidal door in the greenhouse drought-spectre of earth and sky? Every epitaph for a dying savage tribe’s angel of beauty witnesses to an abyss we need to visualize, distances and architectures we have befouled, an abyss between a knife in the sky and a knife on the earth. A double-edged knife! It pierces us with the necessity for a visionary change of heart, for a new sculpture of being.’

It was time to ascend god-rock. We made our way up the serpent stairway and stopped when we possessed a good view of the spectral river and the Waterfall of dreams beneath us. Inspector Robot unslung his telescopic glasses from his shoulders and passed them to me. There was a sly and a terrible look in the bone-sockets of his eyes as if the glasses he passed to me were equally embedded in them. I looked through. Everything was black. It was the grave (but a grave such as I had never dreamt existed) into which I looked. A re-constructed grave, a re-constructed cosmos from which a master-brain, a man-made brain had arisen. I was gripped by uncanny temptation. ‘Wear the eyes of the master-brain, the man-made brain of a skeleton-god. Become a nihilist. Your strength will be prodigious. Arm yourself. No one will dare to touch you, to attack you. You may become, if you wish, a forerunner of revolutionary order and sterile morality, a great man, the masses at your feet.’

A well-nigh irresistible temptation and yet since all knowledge is suspect then knowledge of power over the masses is the most suspect of all temptations, all vanities, the most dangerous to entertain.

One comes close to being crushed by a skeleton-lord of revolutionary technology but clings nevertheless to a thread of liberation through one’s scepticism of absolute power exercised in the name of religion or science or politics or whatever.

So though at first everything was black, black temptation, black power within technology, I was able to approach Robot with understanding if not love. His telescopic glasses became a medium of shared intelligences, artificial and intuitive. I was able to salvage the unfathomable quantum address of every resurrection of the Imagination that runs in parallel with the seductive artifice of the grave as a laboratory of monsters. I was able to reassemble what I knew, or thought I knew, namely, the convertibility of technologies into quantum mechanics, knife into quantum knife, axe into quantum axe, camera into quantum camera, and now telescopic glasses into quantum vision.

‘They’re gathering,’ I cried suddenly. ‘Look! The Waterfall.’

‘Gathering?’ said Robot.

‘The processional rocks in the Waterfall are coming alive. You do see, don’t you?’

The Inspector gave his ingratiating and permissive smile. As much as to say, ‘Have it your own way for the time being.’ He did not actually reply. But I sensed that his perception of the activity of the rocks beneath us conformed to a statistical revelation of geological behaviour. In the laboratory of the grave he was at liberty to exploit all religions and to simulate the life of the earth within the void of his socketed eyes. The ascension of the rocks was possessed of no genius or innermost leap, innermost duration. It was a spectacle that confirmed the avid curiosity and power of the skeleton-brain to give picturesque momentum to a state of ultimate arrest.

It was different with me. I was no giant and little match for Robot. But as I looked through his glasses I became genuinely involved — as if the innermost genius of the planet were at state — in uplifted veil upon veil of darkness until I possessed a glimmering apprehension of the magic of creative nature, the life of sculpture, the genesis of art, the being of music.

The living sculptures were arising from the Waterfall and making their way along the bank of the river. They left the cloak or shell they had worn in place in the Waterfall: cloak or tidal clock through which to conserve another spirit, another existence within the rocks, the spirit of time that remained to invoke protective cover for the river and the Waterfall.

I concentrated upon the particular existential sculptures that had arisen or been plucked from the rocks to make their way along the riverbank to the body of Canaima’s victim, the murdered dancer. They lifted him up and placed him in a box. He was light as a feather. The procession was led by the king of thieves.

I had sculpted the king of thieves that morning from the stump of a felled tree. But now it was as if within the cloak of processional rock in the Waterfall he had eaten of the pooled stars in the Macusi river of drought. Sculpted wood then became unclothed rock, rock visionary flesh and blood in the creation of ‘live absence’ into ‘presence’ upon the first bank of the river of space.

He led the procession up the hill past the El Dorado Mission House. He stood at the head of the grave on the hillside. The corpse of the dancer was laid to rest. I saw Robot’s eyes fixed there. Each detail confirmed his concept of arrested being. None would escape their fate. And that fate was the power of the grave, the power of the prisonhouse, the toleration of a measure of fantasy in chained millions and millions who stood in a long but inevitable queue around the globe awaiting their turn to bury their dead or to be buried by those they hate, fear or even love, to kill or to be killed in a battle, on the street, in the air, on land or water. It was the abyss within those who bury and those who are buried, those who kill and are killed, that divided the Inspector and me: the subtle abyss of an incalculable, inner reformation.

The king of thieves had brought with him a cup of the diagrammatic pooled stars in or under the drought-body of the Macusi/Potaro River. He poured it now over the dancer. It was shining rain. The survival of humanity. The survival of the river of space. It was as if in so doing he released for an instant the heavy burden of gold he had stolen across the centuries, the heavy obsession that tormented him and his fellow miners whom he led. He became the last tormented thief in the world in that miraculous instant. He was eternally alive in that instant. Vital time, newborn time. A curious reformation of the instant heart within the subtle abyss that lies within those who bury and those who are buried.

THE SECOND BANK (Carnival Heir of Civilizations)

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:7

In 1933 I was ‘green and carefree’, I still thought quality and merit, however hardly achieved, the only yardstick. I had yet to hear of Bartók dying, impoverished and forlorn in some foreign field; of Berg whose life might have been spared if he could have afforded a specialist; of Webern, with works known to a handful …; of Schoenberg’s death, aged seventy-seven, worth £100.

from A Goldfish Bowl, Elisabeth Lutyens (Cassell, 1972)

The voices of Macusi children returned to me across the years as I retraced my steps past the grave on the hillside and into the El Dorado Mission House. There were twelve children in the choir Penelope assembled in 1948, seven to eight years old, three of whom were drowned in the Potaro/Macusi tapestry of waters in 1950.

I hear them now. I see them in a loom that Penelope weaves. I hear their faint voices in the deep interior. It is as if the voice of the dancer sings through the soil of his grave. Sings within the voices of the three drowned children I have sculpted into a flute.

Music possesses such solidity one may hold it in one’s mind, sculpt it into a mysterious flute, a flute that is akin to a spiral or a curious ladder that runs into space.

‘Yes,’ I said to Penelope, ‘a living language is a precious ladder, it’s the antiphon of the flute in which the dead and the living discourse in the heights and the depths. Listen to the voices of the drowned children. They live again within solid music and within the elusive story they tell. They brush past my ears as if the dancer in the grave on the hillside hears the rhythm of the pooled stars that the king of thieves tilted upon him. That tilt is important. You shall see. That tilt tells of a ladder.’

I knelt on the ground and meditated upon a grain of dust as light as a feather.

‘The flute sings of an ancient riverbed one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned into the river of the dead. The flute tells that the river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks. We shall see!

‘So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill. Then the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children.

‘Listen to the voice of the flute. It sings and tells its tale in the English language yet solid (however whispering) music gives the Word that echoes in one’s frame as one kneels uncanny twists, uncanny spirals, that relate to ancestral tongues, Macusi, Carib, Arawak, Wapishana pre-Columbian tongues that have been eclipsed.

‘From such eclipse emerges the rich spoil and upheaval of the Word, upheaval into banks of the river of space. As though the flute is a paradox, it arrives at the solidity of music by processes of excavation within a living language.

‘One cannot tame the voices of the flute, voices of such uncanny lightness yet miracle of being that they are able to tilt the two rivers, the visible and the invisible rivers, into diagrammatic discourse; and in so doing to create the four banks of the river of space into a ladder upon which the curved music of the flute ascends. Those banks are dislodged upwards into rungs in the ladder and into stepping stones into original space.

‘The tilted banks convert the river of space into a sieve that spills its contents. That sieve is the antiphon of the Waterfall, it constitutes a discourse between the rocks in the Waterfall and the clouds in the sky. The spilt water evaporates into cloud, evaporates into the promise of new rain, into cloudkinship to latencies of precipitation in and of the Waterfall through rock. And the voice of the spiralling flute mirrors within solid music the ascension of the spirits of the living and the dead through rock and cloud into space.’

It was in this way through abnormal care and attention, by donning the mask and the ears of the dancer, that Penelope, Ross and I were able to follow the spiral of the flute upwards from the first bank to the second bank of the river of space.

Equally through his masked and bandaged eyes in the hill where he lay (half-artifice, half-Christian mound of gnosis) we gained a perception of the crumbling yet renascent spirit — evaporative, precipitative — of the tapestry of the Macusi/Potaro overground/underground rivers dislodged now into a visionary and wide ladder within and beyond our dreams.

Proof of the reality of the curvature of the music that rose upon the ladder of space from rung to rung lay in my work as an engineer in the 1940s and 1950s when I gauged the Potaro/Macusi River for hydro-electric power potential. Electricity culled from the dark waters by harnessing and building upon the architecture of the Macusi Waterfall was a vital ingredient in contemplating a new settlement for refugees in the wake of the Second World War. Nothing was to come of it but though I remained unconscious of a metamorphosis at the time my life had changed in its innermost fabric when I met Canaima and his team of victims and spiritual refugees. The truth was (I had long suppressed the knowledge in myself) I had known Canaima long before we ‘first’ met on the bank of the Potaro River in 1945. As I retrace my steps now in this book of dreams I hear the music and the footsteps of generations upon the ladder of science and spirit as if for the first time, the first truly attentive ear I place to the ground and to the body of the turning globe.

After ten years I possessed the rudiments of a stage-discharge curve sloping upwards from left to right as shown below and this was identical with (one sees now) the diagrammatic voice of the flute (see page 45) rising from the first to the second rung and from the third to the fourth in the ladder of space. In crossing the subtle abyss from the second to the third the voice of the flute maintained the same curve in reversed direction.

Music and numbers were (one sees it now) a revelation of a fluid skeleton, a ribbed body, to be associated with the flesh of the elements, the smooth flesh of water, the spark and the animal magnetism within the anatomy and the blood of ancient streams upon which many cultures had survived and above which they buried their dead in mounds and hills. Our antecedents from all races and peoples glimpsed that skeleton as they wrestled with floods and droughts, plenty and scarcity, from times immemorial, antecedents we also glimpse in the nightsky of the ancient river through the seed of moral legend, moral theatre that they sowed, primitive constellation and metamorphoses of the voice of the flute … Primitive antecedent. Intimate refugee.

The vertical rib in the diagram was a record of river levels in the fossil or bone-pulse of our ancestors. The horizontal ancestral rib was marked to imply a multiplying volume of flow as the river rose and ran into the Waterfall. The initial volume becomes dual, triple, etc., in a library of carnival science. The small circular stars are plucked from that library to give the values of volumetric flow observed with quantum current meters as the river rose and fell, rose and fell again and again across the years. A sufficiency of close agreement or accord between the stars permitted me to trace a stage-discharge rib or curve in the river’s fluid skeleton. The eccentric stars that flew off above or below that rib provided an implicit nightsky or constellation in the river, a primitive violin in league with the diagrammatic voice of the flute, a dual bow, a heart, a head and a neck. It was but a glimpse into a library of illustrated dream within a theatre of science I had not realized then within the mid-twentieth century but perceived now.

That glimpse empowered my pilgrimage upwards in space yet backwards in time within the Carnival Day of the twentieth century. The glimpse became a key into cross-cultural capacity to bear the dual, triple (sometimes self-reversible) content of some of the greatest myths of survival in the body of humanity.

If there is such a mantle as ‘carnival heir of civilizations’ which one shares with others in a time of peril then one must kneel and pluck the carnival rib from the river’s side as darkness threatens to fall and encompass one’s mind and the world appears to slip away from one’s grasp. One plucks that rib as the foundation stone of an Imaginary Cathedral. The grave on the hillside is close to the burnt El Dorado Mission House that Penelope and Ross George occupied when they worked in the Potaro. It is fitting therefore to see the Cathedral encompassing both sites and arising now in my innermost library from dancing bone and fire to the music of the flute and the violin in the Waterfall. I arose from my knees with the magic rib. The music of recall, the music of solid soul, was so faint and strange and heartrending that it was a shock, the shock of terror and beauty, to see Penelope and Ross standing in the doorway of the Cathedral as if the long Day of the twentieth century were inscribed into the very day that the king of thieves had presided over the burial of the dead. It was as if their dinner invitation to me that day which I had been unable to accept remained nevertheless suspended in time within the Imaginary Theatre of a century that I was building. Such is the comedy of dreams. I dreamt I was meeting them for the first time on the second bank of the river of space whereas we had spoken not long before in the old, remembered Mission House.

Now, however, this was a Cathedral and I saw them as the last missionaries in South America but the first reluctant guardians of the fire and the bone, the fire and the bread, the food of the world, on which we were about to sup. It was as if we were involved in a contract to conserve the resources of the earth and the sky, a contract between missionary queen of threatened El Dorado and every unconscious suitor in the womb of space and time who may be seduced by power or prosperity to waste her substance.

Now it was as if they came forward to greet me as warmly as they would have done had I accepted their hospitality so long ago. Penelope was smiling the half-crooked enchanting smile I knew so well and Ross had his hand outstretched toward me. They had returned to England from South America in 1966 or thereabouts, had retired and died in the early 1980s. I had never travelled from Essex to Kent to visit them but we had kept in touch by letter.

The El Dorado Mission House in which they had lived for many crucial years had been abandoned after their departure. Canaima of the Macusi tribe had set it on fire soon after they left, when pictures appeared in the popular press of a child dying of starvation. No one had dared to touch the blackened shell of a Mission House until I perceived it in my Imaginary City of God as a museum loaf of bread within the fast of memory upon which transubstantial love floats up from the first bank to the second bank of the river of space. Transubstantial bread I could at last break with Penelope and Ross into parallel lives (parallel life and death as well) in the refectory of the Cathedral.

Despite the warmth of their greeting I hesitated, drew back, a little uncertain whether it would all vanish into nothingness, the entire scene, the Imaginary Theatre, everything that I visualized. I clung to the genesis of hope in cross-cultural community around the globe, the solemn occasion, one’s entry into the first post-colonial, post-Christendom Cathedral on earth, as if I were about to receive a blessing from the last missionaries from Europe into Central and South America. I clung to the Cathedral I was building within myself on the ruins of an English Mission House, ruins of real/unreal cities in the compositional fabric of the elements.

What does one mean by ‘last missionaries’ within the long Day of the twentieth century? Had there not been last governors, last governor-generals, etc., etc., of Spanish empires within the long Day of the nineteenth century? No one had truly visualized what the ‘last’ meant. The last was as much an ironic statistic as the first in the archives of chameleon politics. Would there come a moment when a chameleon newspaper would carry a vast headline, THE LAST CHILD STARVES TO DEATH. STARVATION ENDS. THE LAST BATTLE FOUGHT. WAR ENDS.

I knew it appeared absurd. And yet within such absurdities may lie a reflection of terrifying truth. Unless one visualizes the impossible last descendant in the lineage of the tormented in every sphere one cannot do justice to the masses who have perished without a trace of self-recognition of their ancestry of spirit … In the last tormented may lie the fullest, truest, everlasting poignancy of the changed or changing heart of Man within the kingdom of heaven. For the last tormented suggests (or should suggest) something more than a harrowing transition from pain (the ancestral pain of the last child who starves to death) to a museum cradle, a museum refinement, a museum skeleton, a museum bone. For if one were to settle absolutely for the pains of starvation — absolutely for a museum refinement or sublimation of starvation when starvation seems a thing of the past — then one would have imprisoned oneself in one or the other false eternity and eclipsed the genuine mystery of parallel thresholds into sustaining otherness, parallel pain and release from pain, by which the architect in the City of God animates a gulf, an abyss, yet a crossing between the lack of food, on one hand, the meaningless bounty of food, on the other …

I stopped and reconsidered the enigma of parallels, ‘pain’ in parallel with ‘release from pain’, ‘lack of food’ in parallel with ‘bounty’. The mystery of the abyss lay between such parallels. And it was as if one saw horizontals and verticals in a numinous light. ‘Parallels’ signified ‘depths’. One saw a vertical column or bar or shaft descending from each parallel on either side of the abyss. Take ‘pain’, giant pain in the world, giant ghost of pain, giant parallel. The vertical column that descended from ‘pain’ possessed a series of imprints one above the other. Each descending imprint subtly, almost imperceptibly, altered the imprint of ‘pain’ above. Thus giant ‘pain’, giant ‘parallel’ that seemed eternal on its side of the abyss, underwent a series of accumulating, almost imperceptible, transformations in depth.

Likewise ‘release from pain’ possessed its vertical shaft or column which in its layered or descending series of imprints possessed a curious echoic or vibrating spectre of gravity akin to the genesis of the conscience of the abyss. The column vibrated as if to a distant seismic eruption. Then it was still. So still I was able to read — Conscience is a blend of hunger and ecstasy and pain; and therefore there is no release from abysmal torment except …

‘Except what?’ I asked. ‘What reconciliation of opposites lies in the abyss?’

There came a moment in the stillness of conscience when the two columns descending from parallels ‘pain’ and ‘release from pain’ appeared to ‘sound’, to ‘utter’, to reflect a music of joint-resource so incredible one may only describe it as the inimitable ground of Being …

Not simply a reconciliation of opposites. Such a formula was too uncreative or mechanical. Not just a mechanics of psyche. But a gathering up of all that had been experienced in every condition of existence, an accumulation of apparently imperceptible change into true change, in which nothing was lost and everything possessed an inimitable difference akin to joy … I knew then albeit still with dread what I had sensed earlier in relinquishing one or other false eternity locked in an assumption of absolute parallels.

Giant ‘pain’ was real but it was not an absolute condition of time or timelessness. ‘Release from pain’ was an illusion until it became a joint-witness in yielding itself to a whole concert or design composed of paradoxical levels of altered imprint in depth, paradoxical architectural incarnation of the beauty of creative conscience.

Inimitable architecture of the City of God one touches but never seizes is a resource I dreamt, through which one gathers vicariously (one becomes a vicar of truth) all parallels and columns of experience in what is yet other than every net or entrapment of the senses, what is graspable sensation yet ungraspable solid music …

In the same token if one were to settle for the last missionaries on earth as a broken-backed Atlas (the desolation of love, the adventure of love unfulfilled) on one hand, a museum church or statistic of endeavour on the other, then one would have forfeited entirely the quantum mystery of parallel desolations through which the architect in the City of God animates a gulf, an abyss, yet a crossing between adventure unfulfilled and the visualization of love as the supreme creative power that holds the long, traveller’s day and the long, traveller’s night together within every envelope of soul or frailty of flesh and blood …

In this way — by seizing upon the mystery of quantum, parallel lives, parallel formations — I found it possible to pull the last missionaries back into my canvases of imagination, sculptures, shapes with which I animated allegorical presences in the original Greek sense of speaking otherwise, presenting others in diverse shapes of myself, other selves within as much as without oneself. Penelope and Ross re-emerged from the margins of nothingness into which they had almost vanished. The depletions of spiritual memory, the curious fast of memory that I endured, strengthened in a paradoxical way the open, broken yet flowering seed of visualized presences within me, before me. As though the hollow materialistic age or day within which I lived revealed itself as possessing — in its uttermost cavities of renascent, cross-cultural myth, uttermost reaches of emptiness — unsuspected room for original sensation, unsuspected and piercing ironies of spirit that nailed one into the congregation of all one’s characters and even into the shoes of the king of thieves. One is obsessed by every being one visualizes whether apparently evil or apparently good. One bears the wounds of the past into the future and the present. One is oneself and other than oneself … It was thus that I limped, as though nailed upon an Imaginary walking tree in stained-glass window that I painted, into the presence of the last missionaries on earth in the post-Christendom Cathedral and refectory that I was building.

I heard Penelope speak plainly but her voice seemed changed by the acoustic of spiritual being, the acoustic of hollow, echoing being, and this gave daemonic absurdity yet revelation to her utterance.

‘Three of us are here instead of two, Anselm. My two husbands and me! That is the beauty of breaking bread so late in this twentieth-century Day. Shadows acquire substance as the twentieth century draws to a close. Substance acquires new shadow. Ross is my second husband. Simon, my first, died in 1944 in the Normandy campaign. He was my epic lover, my epic soldier.’ Her lips crinkled a little with a trace of self-mockery and she whispered almost under her breath — ‘I shall tell you later about some of the terrible things he did to me despite the many decorations he wore on his chest. But that’s for another moment, another painted moment. Not now. Poor Simon!’ She paused for a fraction of an instant then spoke up loudly again — ‘Ross is my good angel. We got married in 1946. That very year we left England to work in South America. First in Brazil. Then we came to the Potaro in 1948, two of us ostensibly, but we hid Simon in ourselves.

‘A wise precaution, for had we declared that all three of us were solidly there (Simon’s shadow was quite solid, believe me!) on the banks of the river of space, why — think of it — everyone would have said we had come to South America, the three of us, not to be missionaries but to live in sin. One woman and her two husbands! Imagine the pain and the scandal of love.’ Penelope was laughing and Ross and I and Simon (with the king of thieves inserted between us upon a slab of gold that floated in space) could not help laughing too. Laughter echoes sometimes on the lips of solid grief and frail men and women within the feast day music of the gods whether ancient Greek or ancient pre-Columbian allegory.

We were now within the refectory and had taken our places at a great dining table.

‘Look,’ Penelope said, ‘I have been slaving at a coat for many a month, many a year, in this day or century. A coat that is woven of the fabric of sunset, the stillness, the transience of flame. A coat that is as much a tapestry of the world, as of fire and water, to fit the shoulder of a hill, or the body of rock in a Waterfall. A coat that sometimes looks like a beggar’s divine rags! A coat that is woven of every long rift in the cloudy blue of space that precedes the suspended fall of night. The coat of Wisdom when impermanence is well-nigh graspable beauty. This has been my task since Ross died in 1981 and I in 1982. You painted me into the Day of my age, the cathedral of stained-glass window sunset, as if the needle with which I work and sew were a match. The match of sunset. And because of the impermanence of darkness and light the match of sunrise as well. The coat never fits Ross or Simon perfectly. I must tell you all this, Anselm. For it is the way you appear to see us. The coat never quite fits. Always a sleeve of element or a fluid stitch that’s out of joint.’ She moved as she spoke and I saw the faint but indelible colour of bruises on the soft, bright flesh of her arm as she lifted it away from the side of her body. The gesture appeared to tighten a close-fitting garment upon her breasts.

‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘always a discrepancy. And as a consequence I unravel the work I have done, unstitch everything, and start all over again from the very beginning whenever that was. I unravel my Day and start all over again. Who knows, the coat may at last fit Ross perfectly — or Simon (who can say) — and then,’ she paused with a triumphant smile, ‘I shall be an emancipated woman in heaven. Ageless sunset and sunrise woman for all I know. A status of Wisdom, a status of elemental Wisdom, not easily achievable on earth! The perfect fit, the perfect marriage between light and darkness, Night and Day. No divorce, no separation from the obscure beauty one loves best out of many ephemeral lights with which or whom one may have slept in anticipation of dawn.

‘And he — the husband or lover whom the coat fits — may then vanquish the king of thieves forever. Not so! I am joking. You know that, Anselm, don’t you? Seriously joking or is it joking seriously? Creation’s a curious and a serious comedy, and divine comedy (as I see it) is more genuinely disturbing than tragedy. For in divinity’s shadow arises the daemon of freedom that rends the human imagination with a sense of lost paradise, a sense of miraculously regained entry into paradise … As I said, I was joking when I spoke of my husband or lover — whom the coat may fit — as the one who would vanquish the king of thieves. Not so! For the king of thieves is a reformed character in the City of God. And though I also spoke of heaven a moment or two ago I perceive certain distinctions in your city. It’s a city of inner regeneration, the inner and slowly changing heart, is it not? Not to be confused with a complacent outer paradise or state of prosperity.

‘So even my perfect coat may be an approximation when measured in other inner, unsuspected lights. All tradition is an approximation … It may prove a garment that the king of thieves pulls away from me, within his reformation, to cover the rags of a hollow materialism. Thus I may find myself in the company of three men, rather than two, on my pilgrimage. Ross, Simon, and the thief I call king, who turned his face away from Christ and was to pursue his lost paradise in many incarnations across the centuries into this very Day. He possessed an even older line of descent that you bring to light in your Imaginary Theatre, don’t you, Anselm? And perhaps even four — in the company of four — if I include you. But I am not sure. You may have other plans for yourself.

‘Are you satisfied with your Imaginary paintings, sculptures, etc.? Are you satisfied with your subversive creation? The enigma of love! Tell me. Are you satisfied?’

I was astonished. Penelope was weeping. Her tears broke into my heart, such gentle tears yet such a shocking revelation of the enigma of love. ‘It’s not only the enigma of love,’ I declared, as I tried to comfort her, ‘It’s the enigma of creation. Do you not see that I am as vulnerable as you? I have pulled you back from the margins of nothingness but it’s as if you too have pulled me, have drawn me, into your tapestry and canvas within (I am not sure), across (I am not sure) an abyss.’

Suddenly I felt a stab, the stab of parallel ages. ‘You may remember your suitors in another age. Another Penelope! Suitors, lovers, call them by any name. The truth is your husband may have returned from the Trojan war to vanquish your suitors. But you remained central to every canvas. You were Wisdom, feminine Wisdom. You pulled him there across the seas into the loom that you wove, unravelled, stitched … And who were the suitors in your elaborate design? Thieves! They hoped to gain your hand in marriage and to rob you of everything you possessed. As far as they were concerned you were little more than a black slave on a new world/old world auction block.

‘They (the suitors) are — in my Imaginary Cathedral — a collective equation across the long Night of the centuries to the king of thieves with whom you say you now travel.

‘A collective parallel to one of the thieves beside Christ — our king of thieves in my Imaginary Theatre — who turned his face away from paradise.

‘Fate crucified that collective, your suitors, when Ulysses returned, when Ulysses was drawn into the loom that you wove. But fate, in the shape of your all-conquering design, never entirely vanquished them. For they were to descend from the pagan rafters of their woven cross and set alight new wars, new slave raids, new piracies in the long day, or is it the long night, of the centuries.

‘The distinction between being vanquished and returning again stronger than ever to man the bastions of trade and industry is one we know only too well as the twentieth century draws to a close across the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean.

‘As a consequence — in drawing you out of the margins of nothingness into visualized being — I needed to bridge the centuries-long Night, the Night of ancient Greece into North African desert Night where Simon, your first and jealous husband, fought in Montgomery’s army, the Night of Spain into the Night of South America where the reincarnated thief ransacked the gold of the Incas. As for Ross — good angel he is, yes, but his curious missionary guilt resides in the fact that he (like all of us, like me and my relatives) may have one foot in one camp — the epic camp — and the other in another camp — the camp of reformed thieves; half-thief of love, of your love, half-epic Ulyssean beggar in the gates of Home is his fate, my fate too, the fate of my relatives who scraped to make ends meet. It is this shared burden, in the light of the abyss, which requires us to unclothe self-reversible perspectives within a civilization we take for granted, self-reversible pride into responsibility as we ponder our predicament.

‘I needed a dark comedy of blind warriors and suitors, half-epic guilt, half-theft of love. You are an emancipated queen, an emancipated centre, around whom and which your husbands, your lovers, and the thief — the thief who stole the coat you made — revolve on the second bank of the river of space. Who comes first, who comes last? In this late cycle of cosmic Capital are there not rich, desirable slave women (enslaved to systems of money) with a dozen suitors, divorced husbands and lovers, rich, desirable slave men (enslaved to the Stock Market) with two dozen mistresses, all fighting, arguing, over fortunes that have been made or spent by this or that besieged spouse they loved, loathed, envied?

‘It is true you Penelope — as inimitable twentieth-century spouse of missionary endeavour whose vocation lay in a foreign and a starved continent — know in your heart of hearts that a genuine choice is necessary. A true sacrament, a true marriage, is necessary. That is the purpose of the loom, the coat of tradition.

‘But how can you discover the chosen one unless you weave unsuspected variations upon the pain and ecstasy of freedom? How can you know what true sacrament is unless you find the key that the king of thieves let slip from a pocket in the coat that he snatched from you as you stood under the pagan rafters of every cross?’

I was startled by the sudden question that came upon my lips like an inspiration. ‘Did you really put that key there, Penelope, in the loom of tradition without knowing you had done so — the coat of tradition that never quite seems to fit the globe? And as a consequence we travel, we all travel, in search of … of what?’

Penelope hesitated. As if the words I had spoken had been on her lips as well. We were so close I felt I could seize her breath. She was searching into the depths of hollow yet brimming religious impulse by which she was led to travel into foreign lands, the lands of the living, the lands of the dying.

We were searching together for the key to the adventure of love unfulfilled, a key inscribed into the foundations of blind empires, still blind in this Day to the past and to the present but susceptible nevertheless as never before to a new crumb or piercing light in the mutual body of Wisdom that one broke into bread.

Wisdom is strong meat. It rocks the imagination to the foundations of memory. The imaginary Cathedral around you fades, Anselm. The window of time grows black. The bone and the fire subside into a rose, a rose tree, a garden. At the heart of the black/red rose you dream you see the ancient Macusis feasting and dancing. They too fade. But you will see them again. The rose remains, the roses of childhood in Aunt Alicia’s garden-city theatre. Listen to what Uncle Proteus is now saying — ‘Watch the river of space, watch this dream space, dream-rib, metamorphoses, watch the live processional sculptures from the Waterfall. They bring the key …’

Yes, the key. I remembered the key in the loom of tradition of which I or Penelope had spoken but it was nowhere in sight in the kingdom of the Rose. And yet … I was still to retrace my steps into the body of the Rose.

‘In the land of the Rose,’ Proteus said, ‘you will find the key.’ He was laughing. Better Proteus’s laughter than his anger.

‘The key to carnival,’ Proteus said, ‘is rooted in imperial and colonial disguises. The key to carnival lies in a displacement of time-frames to break a one-track commitment to history. The key to the reformation of the heart breaks the door of blind consciousness into shared dimensions, the dimension of subconscious age and the dimension of childhood. They cross and re-cross each other within levels of Dream. The key to the unconscious future lies in shared burdens of intuitive Memory, shared volumes written by mutual science and art within the Spirit of age, dual and triple beggars and kingships and queenships. Listen for a commotion of bells in the abyss, in the clouds, in cloud-rocks, in the precipitation of biological and mythical antecedents, the precipitation of living masks in Aunt Alicia’s live fossil museum theatre.’

‘Here, take this. Sup,’ said the king of thieves. He held the vessel of the pooled stars to my lips. ‘Retrace your steps into childhood when you dreamt the skies were a living garden, Anselm. Here’s a programme of plays, a feast of the Imagination. Uncle Proteus plays the beggar Ulysses, remember? You,’ the thief was laughing, ‘are something of a robber-baron yourself, Anselm. You steal the beggar’s rags, remember? Then there’s Harold whom you loathe when he tells you … (You will find out in due course.) He shares the burden of Ulyssean carnival kingship with Proteus when he plays the part at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Not quite the top! One of your Aunt Alicia’s conceits. Conceit or not it is rooted in the Wisdom of theatre. Strong meat. Then you will meet black Agamemnon and when he vanishes you will hear the voice of Presence. Then comes the Antiphon of the … But no. I must leave you to make your own discoveries as the dimensions of childhood and old age cross and re-cross each other. It’s epic habit to summarize the progress of coming events and to recapitulate the flight of past events as if they were one and the same true, timeless yet changed, changing fabric … Prophetic conceit some would say. I would say the creative riddle of the abyss. Homer was versed in this. Homer the greatest of all epic imaginations. I knew him once long, long ago. I ate every blind crumb, every blind tear, that fell from his eyes. Poor thief I was even then long before Calvary’s hill.’ His voice faded into the global village garden theatre, Georgetown theatre (had it been named after Ross and Penelope George?), I was about to enter.

The programmes, the broken tapestry of forthcoming plays, sculptures, paintings slipped from my fingers and fluttered to the ground. The programmes were torn and as I sought to retrieve them in the Dream the eclipsed portions drifted into the subconscious from which a child emerged nine years old. I was that child clothed in the epic tears of memory. Tears were habitual to epic character … My parents had died in a road accident in 1914 when I was two. Aunt Alicia died in 1929, Harold in 1920, Proteus in … Now I was unsure for whom I truly wept in the past and in the present as the Imaginary Cathedral faded into Alicia’s Garden City Theatre.

The church bells were ringing in the distance. I felt dejected but buoyed up nevertheless by the distant Waterfall music.

Depression is a disease but I was strangely afloat within the music of the distant bells.

They were the faraway voice of eternity through and beyond time, God was eternity. Eternity was buried in my longings, in my anxieties. That faraway voice melted into the liquid pulse of vanishing sound that resuscitates itself, faint, marvellous, descending, ascending.

Uncle Proteus had told me that the garden city theatre’s global village was on the brink of hard times. ‘Charles Dickens,’ said the voice of God. ‘Recession’s coming,’ said the bells. ‘Ask in Wall Street in 1929.’ The chimes came in separate lines (Ask in one line or dream-year, In in the line or year below that, Wall in the third line, etc., etc., etc.), as if the voice of God possessed a comic slant, innermost humour I sought to nourish in an illiterate world, in becoming a best-selling poet’s utterance in the prosperous heavens.

I stood in Camp Street with the flowering trees on either hand. I tore the poem into the scraps of dollar bills. Proteus appreciated that. There was a breath of quickening air in the bright morning light. No wonder the pace, the occasional disparity, the occasional break or self-mockery in the voice of the bells made one float into anticipating anything, everything, the anticipation of terror, the anticipation of peace.

The voice unrobed itself, drew a naked shadow within a blossom or leaf that fell and seemed to bruise my head with a trace of red ink. Proteus was adept at such preparations and markings. I had seen many of his sketches for Alicia’s plays, the naked shadows he appeared to create as if in these nature reversed itself into the true substance of a dream that left its mark upon us everywhere. To dream of being killed was to dream we had ourselves killed others, to dream of being attacked was to know simultaneously that we were ourselves attacking others. Such was the naked shadow, self-reversible shadow, in the substance of dream that Proteus employed as his moral design.

He had smeared the blood-red ink on his Ulyssean brow for the play and, as if it were an afterthought, leaned towards me so that a trace or bruise or shadow of my aggression fell on my head and hand. My aggression? His blood?

Now as the leaf fell — upon the identical trace or shadow I had received when he leaned towards me — the Rose-queen in the garden sent her shaft or thorn straight to his brow. The thorn drew blood, his blood. The leaf danced in the wake of the thorn and settled upon him, his blood.

I knew the scene by heart after several rehearsals but a new element had arisen which took me by surprise. The despatch of the thorn by the queen had never before coincided with the stroke of the leaf, the naked shadow of blossom. Had I been bruised by — or had I occasioned — the shadow of his wound as the thorn pierced the leaf before lodging itself in his flesh and bone? Had I secured her line of sight by balancing the leaf on my brow and upon my hand? If so it were a feat of unconscious Shadow, a feat of Dream.

Proteus’s Ulysses appreciated my dilemma. What is nakedness? When one dreams of nakedness does one dream of aggression, or of the nature of birth, the nature of dying, the nature of humility? He was dressed in rags, a beggar in rags, and this was also a new element in the naked play. He had discarded the robes of lord and master, king of the Rose garden of Home. The thorn in his brow grew sharp, the agonized tongue of the brain that stuck forth from his wound and spoke now on behalf of its lord and master — ‘The Rose that pierced me secretes your Shadow in her body, Anselm. I wish I could lift you in my arms and tell you the secrets of nature, a nature that recoils upon us, the conflicts we need to understand, our roots in nature, our ignorance of nature … tell you that true heroism is founded in accepting the poverty of our understanding through which we may at last perceive our mutual deprivations and begin a transformation of our (I should say your) inheritance … I wish I could tell you the secret of your birth within a society addicted to lust, to fleshly property, fleshly acquisition. Harold will tell you when you ascend Jacob’s ladder in another scene of the play.’

I stared at him with a sense of awe and peculiar apprehension, peculiar understanding I could not now express. I had expected him to worm his way into the Rose garden and slay his enemies. But instead the imperial design of the homecoming lord and master had been converted into a colonial fable that spun its web in reverse order in the branches of the lofty rose tree over my head. The queen lay hidden in its branches.

This much I was able to read in the web of a volume — ‘The lordor master disguised as a beggar diesin colonial and post-colonial fable. The virtuous Rose betrays him because she wishes to goad him into reflecting upon innermost nature, pregnant nature, innermost potential, innermost peril, innermost craft. Such is the divine comedy of the master’s homecoming, a comedy that pierces convention to break a complacent mirror of conquest, the conquest of love by the master (when love cannot be conquered or else it ceases to be a gift truly given, truly taken), the conquest of the suitors of the beloved by the master: suitors who may take the most unpredictable form in pregnant natures, natures one has abused or exploited sometimes in perversity, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in blind lust.’

Ulysses stared up at me with a plea, a curious plea, in which he confessed that true heroism and a true Homecoming was a burden too great to be borne by any single warrior or lover or actor or individual in the theatre of twentieth-century history. Alicia and Proteus were aware of this in the early twentieth century within their live fossil museum. So was I in the Imaginary Theatre I was building and in the incorporation of Alicia’s and Proteus’s early plays into my pilgrimage within the long Day of the twentieth century. The truth was that the enormity of lordship that Ulysses implied needed to be borne and shared by several (all partial) performances by different actors within different contexts of fate or freedom. The residue or fall-out from such performances implied a quantum reality that slipped forever into the future though it sustained immense pertinence for a Being of true hope within the recurring present moment. Proteus’s Ulysses needed support from Haroldian Ulysses as from Simon’s Ulysses whatever the inadequacies of each, each one’s sins, each one’s shortcomings. In each lay a door into unexplored realms, unexplored suit of God conducted by intimates as well as strangers whose conscious or unconscious role it was to challenge all assumptions of proprietorship of soul, proprietorship of flesh and blood. Such was the moral design of epic/allegoric theatre.

Simon’s implicit governorship of an Imaginary Colony in order to haunt Penelope and Ross, Harold’s proprietorship of Imaginary estates and slave-women within the Rose garden, were part and parcel of the enigmatic texture of fate, freedom, authority, industry, tyranny, that constituted the psyche of twentieth-century civilization.

Proteus’s early twentieth-century Ulysses needed still others, as I would discover, to share the burden of the thorn of the Rose in the gates of Home. I was involved in this and I recalled his prophecy that Harold would tell me something important that I needed to know when we met in the theatre of Jacob’s ladder.

Now — in the curious, abrupt and realistic absurdity of Dream — I realized that a small bag I had been carrying, when I stumbled upon the masked lord and king, had opened and spilt its contents on the ground between us. A shirt, a pair of socks, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, a draughtsboard and two dozen pawns, lay scattered so close to the beggar that they seemed an extension of his rags.

He stretched out his hand: it seemed possessed of a mysterious nail that grows on a tree side by side with Rose’s thorn and Canaima’s knife. Our eyes met. And I felt a moment of shattering peace. As if I saw through him into a future when one would indeed relinquish one’s ridiculous possessions, a future Home, a future Garden. But now they seemed so precious to me that I tried to push him away, to seize my own goods, to seize his rags as well. All of a sudden he held me and drew me close to him. My head lay against his heart. I heard the faint chiming of the bells in the distance in place of his heart. Curiously hollow yet brimming pulse of music. Had he died, was he still alive? Had I unwittingly helped to kill him? Had I been involved in the killing of the lord and master who returns to a broken, half-ruined fable of a Colony? What was the time and where and what was the Colony? Alicia in her absurdity would have said global colony, global prosperity, global poverty, global secretion within carnival history. Each hour or day one gave (early twentieth-century Day, late twentieth-century Day) crisscrossed into a pattern of Dream, Dream-Play within history, the depletions of history, the hungers of history, the desperations of history, the great and small wars from which the multi-faceted hero returns again and again and again … And the object of his return? He returns, it is said, to serve God, to make God his absolute beloved in every mission of peace, God the Mother of all men and women … Alicia was famous for such absurdities, absurdity plays, morality plays. Absurdity equals morality …

My innermost speculations were hushed. I was dazzled. He was the same and yet not the same beggar or king. The burden had been lifted. Or was it a reversal of the live, fossil premises of myth? Lifted, reversed! One was unable properly to say. Hints, guesses! Surely humanity was literate enough to read the webbed volume in the rose tree? Here was the key to mythical wealth (I had retrieved my ridiculous possessions and seized the beggar’s rags as I lay against him). Here was the key in the distant bells to the music of mixed royal ancestry, mixed royal parentage, abused kith and kin, glorified kith and kin, legitimacy, illegitimacy, jealousies, hatreds, loves. All these were woven into the lifted burden of the dying hero and into the rags I had stolen which left him naked on the stage with the thorn of the Rose in his brow.

Naked and crumpled as he appeared to be now, Proteus had given the part an inimitable and unique seed. As though in descending from the peak of lord and king and master he had acquired the ability of a mountaineer of God. Sheer paradox! Descent into the realm of the ‘poor in spirit’ was implicit spiritual muscle or extraordinary craft and power to cling to and make his way down the steepest face of the world’s abyss.

I entered the Rose garden and made my way to the palace of the Rose. Aunt Alicia sat at a long table. As a child I had sometimes dined — when money was short — upon a crumb of bread: now in old age I dreamt of her presiding over the long table like an empress and a queen. The table groaned with sumptuous dishes, roast duck, crisp turkey, lamb, pork, fish, boiled and baked meats, shrimp, eggs, cooked-up rice, creamed, sweet potatoes, and other preparations and varieties of food. Aunt Alicia invariably cried in the Dream through the curtain of the years as it lifted into a theatre — ‘Eat, Anselm. It’s here for you. All for you.’ I felt she was tempting me in a peculiar way. ‘Not now,’ I told her, ‘not now. Sorry.’

‘But why, Anselm?’

I tried to read her expression before I replied –

‘The face of the beggar! I can’t erase it from my mind! Such a strange face, a strange colour.’ I stared at the dishes on the table.

‘It’s his Macusi blood,’ Aunt Alicia cried. ‘He’s mixed. Like all of us. Like you. And as for his blighted, strange-coloured face — well, Proteus is a master at make-up, racial make-up, animal make-up.’

‘It’s real,’ I protested. ‘Human make-up. I see his face beside me. At the bottom of the abyss.’ I stared around the hall of dreams.

‘Continue, continue,’ Alicia cried. ‘Or everything will vanish. The Dream will vanish …’

‘As a real child I sometimes came upon real Dream-beggars in Camp Street. They never vanish. Always yellowish dark faces, dreadful haunted faces. Couldn’t eat a thing when I got home.’

‘I thought I had prepared a welcoming meal for you, Anselm,’ Alicia said coldly. ‘Fit for the carnival heir …’ Again I felt she was pushing me, tempting me. Then she continued so softly it was my turn to listen hard — ‘There are times when we have had to do with a crumb, a blessed crumb.’ She seemed to be relishing the flavour or thought of a ‘blessed crumb’ and the sumptuous banquet almost disappeared into a hole in the Dream.

The great clock in the colonial mansion was striking twelve. And this pulled me up alive out of the hole into which I had almost slipped. But the danger remained. I felt I must say something. ‘It’s good to fast at times, Aunt Alicia. Good for the sculptor’s interior and the painter’s heart. Spiritual fasting is the seed of creation. In that seed within the earth one breaks bread — one’s fingers are roots to break bread — with living trees and living rocks. If we cease to fast in spirit, God forbid! the seed will lose its magical space, its inner space in the body of the mind …’

I stopped with a gnawing sensation, a gnawing torment, and recalled the hole into which everything had appeared to slip but a moment ago and how it resembled the sculpture within the self (the inner hollow or fast that is the seed of art). Resembled as well the steep face of the abyss upon which the masked king or beggar had clung to illumine the profoundest distinction between the creative hollow of the fast (the ‘poor in spirit’) and the pit or hole of bottomless greed. They resembled each other but were subtly, complexly, miraculously different … I would have lost my Dream-footing entirely but for a tall vase on a small table close to where Alicia was sitting. I needed her strength at this time. A river wound its way up the vase through and beyond the hole of greed into which I had almost slipped. It wound its way through pages of etched manuscript upon it that were illustrated with hunting parties, naked game, naked meat. Antique river of blood. Antique pit. Yes, I remembered clearly now. It was one of Alicia’s prized possessions. She used to say to me — ‘It’s my pit, not as deep perhaps as the one you fear but a way of communicating with divided worlds, a way of crossing the river and still speaking to generations who think me dead. Speaking to you, Anselm.

‘My advice now is concentrate on the banquet you have rejected. Then perhaps I may be able to help you read the crumb of the Word.’

I perceived the wisdom in what she was saying and concentrated upon the duck on its plate of gold. The broken wings suddenly began to stir. The naked bird flew towards the guarded pit of my stomach. Then on realizing I had no intention of eating it it flew up into the ceiling of the great hall. It hesitated just beneath the smoky timbers then settled there and imprinted its wings in gold. In that instant of Dream in which I was a child I yet remembered Canaima’s lightning knife which I flung as a man in early middle age into the sky when Inspector Robot and I ascended god-rock. I remembered the future. The strangest epic licence of Dream … ‘Is memory a medium of epic slaughter, epic hunt, through which to sculpt or paint golden futures one has already made extinct or is it the seed of past, mutilated being, hunted being, one recalls, which acquires new branches, new wings, new life?’

The duck had settled on the ceiling of the hall and I turned the focus of my concentration upon the other dishes on the table but the faintness within me now was such that I knew I needed sustenance.

‘Fasten your mind, your intelligence, your soul, upon the crumb of the Word.’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘a crumb or a crust of bread will suffice.’

And so across the intervening, criss-crossing years in the tapestry of Memory within the long Day of the twentieth century I was back where I began with a mere crust, a mere crumb. The entire hall, the entire scene, began to glow: well-dressed crumb, well-dressed Word at the heart of bread through which ran the antique river of blood upon Aunt Alicia’s vase; antique river of the hunt that one needed to cross from death to life, from death to death.

‘Never take the pit for granted, Anselm,’ Alicia was saying, ‘it takes many forms. Never take life for granted, or heaven, or hell, or death. Hell has its pitiful game one pursues forever and forever until one is gorged by extinction, heaven but bread, and death … Death can become the tautology of the hunted soul, death is death is death, whereas life is the breaking of a mould into divinity’s morsel.

‘When I died in 1929, Anselm, I broke the mould, I broke through a crust, a crumb. Bread and water from the river of the hunt was my diet. And I crossed the pit. I floated upon a crumb into the strangest library in which I was a portion in the Word of Bread. I read myself there in others who hunted with Cleopatra and were hunted by Caesar, hunted with Dido of ruined Carthage and were hunted by Aeneas of ruined Troy, still others seduced by brute desire, brute game, nameless El Dorados. Well-dressed queens and kings at the heart of sacred ruin, re-awakening souls upon their plate of gold.’ She turned all at once and spoke with almost irrational absurdity, irrational humour. ‘You know how I love royal pageants, grand clothes, Anselm.’ She was laughing now. Her voice was music.

I caught a glimpse of marvellous books within the heart of bread through and beyond the meat of brute desire; marvellous dresses spun from a crumb of delicate craft and labour evolving across the river through and beyond all ruined, sacred fabric, ruined industrial fabric (ghost towns, the colonization of a civilization by ghosts), the ruined fabric of War (the governorship of a civilization by field marshalls), ruined fabric of passion (proprietorship of flesh and blood) …

Alicia stood on the other bank of the river or pit that ran through the banqueting hall. ‘I am glad you broke your fast and drew me back from nothingness, Anselm. A gulf stands between us. But still we can converse. Such a pity if your book of dreams had hardened into a blind banquet, if you had succumbed to temptation and a welcoming feast that was poison. No chance then to continue retracing your steps. No chance to meet Harold. I know you detested him as a child. I know you loved Proteus. But you cannot go forward and back without them both. Harold has a confession to make. Proteus gave you a glimpse of the mountaineer of God, Harold (I know it’s difficult to believe) will bring you a glimpse of the priest of God. He and Proteus understood each other when they were alive.’ She stopped for she saw the incredulity on my face. She was laughing now with a grain of sadness upon her lips. ‘I know, Anselm. I know how you feel. Proteus (you forgave him as a child because you loved him even when you dreamt of killing him) was a drunkard, a bit of a wastrel. He could have made life so much easier for you and for all of us. He made a small fortune in the diamond fields but spent it all. Harold was a womaniser. I know. I was his wife. Write it all down, Anselm. The seed of true bread, true mountaineer, true priest, lies in the apparent ruin of many a career once we accept the grace we are given to see it, grace to climb, grace to ascend and descend the ruined scaffolding of our lives.

‘And you have made a beginning. You have glimpsed the marvellous seed of Bread, you are still to pursue your glimpse of the terrifying (however curiously ecstatic) thorn of the Rose.’

She began to fade and I drifted now through a door in the great hall into the scene of one of Proteus’s failed industrial projects. Proteus was a sacred socialist (metamorphoses of socialism was the name of his business) and socialism was destined to harden, grow brittle, and fall. The scene into which I had come may have been an ancient warehouse or a cinematic project of paradoxes and resources linking heaven and earth. I remembered the axeman I had filmed into moral imperative, moral proportion, on the first bank of the river of space when we contemplated the prospect of ruin — or one’s capacity to avert the ruin — of great tropical forests. The axeman had felled a tree with a single, lightning blow; now from within the heart of that tree emerged an unfinished, a ruined, ladder. Jacob’s ladder theatre.

The hall was dark as a sacred Bible of epic prophecies and I lit a candle. Its flickering light (there was a faint draught in the huge warehouse) caught the shadow of the lightning stroke of the axe. And as I looked up at the dim, lightning, shadowy stairs of the felled yet arisen tree I was reminded of an escalator in a great city such as London or Paris, of gigantic excavations, of my apprehensions on arriving there, of venturing for the first time into the great underground, into a concrete riverbed beneath a fluid riverbed.

That apprehension of woven or cemented spaces within spaces at the heart of a global community gave substance to retraced steps within ancient and modern Dream, crossings, ascendings, descendings, substance to echoing footsteps upon Jacob’s ladder that resembled the hollow passages, the hollow shoes of childhood that one sometimes abandons as one runs barefoot through a whispering tide within whispering floorboards, whispering palaces of achievement.

Proteus’s ‘escalator’ had been long abandoned in the body of Alicia’s museum-whispers, museum-voices, fading pageants, vases, banquets. And now in barefoot candlelight I dreamt of a distinction between true bread and trodden bread at the edges of the ladder of space: trodden bread like candle-grease: trodden tears. Barefoot candlelight was an expensive commodity in the making of a film of palaces and cardboard boxes. ‘It burns a hole in space. It burns into a pit at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Barefoot candlelight lights the way to bed in a cardboard box on the pavement of a great city.’

Proteus envisaged an economic leap despite recession in the 1920s and 1930s when money would become so plentiful (one hundred dollars for a loaf of bread) that it would serve as a drunkard’s walkway in space. It would serve as one of the planks he would employ to cross the river or strengthen the ladder on his death. ‘A great film,’ he confided, ‘a funeral pageant.’

I perceived now that at the heart of Proteus’s humour lay the economic necessity to gauge the scaffolding of his business career.

‘Business‚’ he said, ‘is more than business, capital more than capital, labour more than labour. Visualize the innermost heart of a lightning tree, visualize the necessity to scale heights and depths one may otherwise overlook.’

Beyond a shadow of doubt my memories of Proteus’s ‘warehouse of civilization’ were the intricate substance that I threaded later into Inspector Robot’s glasses, into the axeman’s blade, into the camera that I used on the first bank of the river of space.

It was a forbidden area. Proteus’s religious socialism was dangerous. He had warned me to stay away. Dangerous ladder, he said. A drunkard’s pitfall. When the sacred business crashed he blamed no one but himself. He had invested in a joy-ride to the stars that involved expenditures and proportions that had sliced into the core of his genius. He had invested in a waxworks museum that threatened to come overwhelmingly alive, vulnerable, entombed, yet active spectacle within the subconscious and unconscious. His intention was to paint the ceiling with stars and galaxies and to build secret corridors in which great, historical, wounded personages would stand in an eerie light and point the way to the ladder … or to the plank afloat on the river …

He was suddenly taken ill after a bout of excessive drinking, whisky, rum, wine, champagne. The waxwork figures moved and became his epitaph. The last time I saw him it seemed as if he had been beheaded, his arms and his body from the neck down were so hidden under a sheet. I dreamt his head addressed me now from the top of a mountain. ‘Time to brave the ladder, Anselm‚’ he said. ‘The living dreamer may ascend and descend and return to life. Time to be born again within the Shadow of truths we have little understood about ourselves and others.’ He was one of the strangest sculptures I drew forth in the secret corridors that took me to the ladder.

The ladder shot up through the roof of the theatre into the sky. As I climbed I kept my eyes glued on the bright pit of the heavens above, all the brighter for the dark tunnel and walls on either side of me. I tried to touch these. Were they steel or waxwork or cardboard? Could one punch one’s way through them? The thought had scarcely settled in the Dream when I came to a corridor. Perhaps every mental probe into the substance of space begins with visualizations of the familiar, familiar absurdity, familiar structure or shape, living waxwork epitaph, slow-motion joy-ride to the stars in Alicia’s museum.

I had forgotten the candle that I still carried. Its eye of flame was now strong: as strong as the familiar sun in the sky into which the ladder shot far above me and the corridor into which I had come.

The corridor was at blessed room temperature, deceptively comfortable, deceptively relaxing, as I contemplated the business of the sacred above the warehouse of civilization from which I had come.

Haroldian Ulysses was waiting for me here like a ragged merchant-warrior and landowner. As if to emphasize the concept of ruined business career in the scaffolding of the Play, the concept of familiar being, he wore the very rags I had stolen from Proteus’s Ulysses in the gates of Home.

Alicia’s warning rang in my ears. ‘Take nothing for granted.’ I listened and thought I heard her voice again on the other side of the river upon her prized vessel or vase, a faint flute or piping voice this time within a chorus of drowned children — ‘Masks of wood or stone or wax or clay appear identical hardware/software at times within a strange universe to sustain us in our recovery of a dialogue with the past. It is the music, however faint, of inner spaces that tells of furies and daemons, intimate catastrophe’s, intimate ecstasy’s unpredictable substance and duration, high fever yet saving grace.’

Everything in the corridor was familiar yet everything was incalculably strange.

‘I died when you were eight‚’ Harold said suddenly. ‘I know you hated me, Anselm.’

He was trembling. He was biting his lips fiercely but no blood came. I was taken aback at the accusation. Had I hated him? Feared him, perhaps! I was unsure. ‘I shrank from you, Uncle Harold.’ It was the only way I could voice my distress. ‘I wanted to run whenever you struck Aunt Alicia.’

‘I struck her when you came. She was never the same after that. You were the beginning of my downfall.’

‘Me?’ I could not believe my ears even as I was driven to ponder the word ‘downfall’. It echoed in my mind as a focus of ‘destitution’ that resembled though it differed radically from Proteus’s Ulyssean ‘steep face of the abyss’. It was as if a contrasting link between ‘downfall’ and ‘steep face’ had appeared in the overwhelming Ulyssean body shared by two masters of the Dead, dead antecedents, dead but living figurations of Memory, one possessing the instinct of the mountaineer of God, the other (Harold) replete I felt with the anguish and terror of royal and possessed, bought and sold, flesh and blood.

Haroldian Ulysses was staring at me now and somewhere in his familiar/unfamiliar eyes, his buying/selling eyes in the marketplace of a corridor of space, I knew that he knew he was tempting me, tempting me to consume not a physical but a mysteriously elusive poison, a dish of hate, the spirit of hate. It was a desperate ploy on his part. ‘Hate sometimes masks love.’ Did he desire me to love him after all this time and felt he must feed me with the entrails of bitter passion, passion to hate, as a prelude to a confession of love, terrifying love, love for one’s enemy?

There had been no gesture of love from him when I arrived in his and Alicia’s house at the age of two on the death of my parents. In fact I had no memory of them, of those parents. It was as if they had never been and I had slipped myself down a precipice or hill into Proteus’s hands to live with Alicia and Harold and other obscure relations as a privileged slave. Harold resented Alicia’s love for me.

‘She was never the same after you came,’ he said. I saw the grief, the torment, the rage in his expression. It shocked me. He spoke so softly I had to listen hard to understand — ‘I learnt the reason why your arrival changed our lives when it was too late for me to profit from it. I was a dying man then …’

‘And still you were lusting after women‚’ I cried.

‘She told you so, did she?’

‘It’s true, is it not?’

He hesitated now for a long time: as if he desired to retreat or to fade into nothingness. And then a grain sprang upon his lips, the grain of confessional need. A subtle dam broke in the abyss between us and he cried. — ‘I learnt when it was too late that you were my son, Anselm. No one had told me before. They kept it from me. Your mother did. Alicia did. Proteus did.’

‘Your son?’ I recoiled. It was my turn to be filled with terror, to taste as never before the spirit of hate he had offered to me. A dizziness arose. How had one arrived here, by what retraced steps of Dream? A ruined corridor of space, yes, that’s where I now stood. There had been the beggar’s rags in the gate of Home (I remembered that). There had been the subtle river upon Alicia’s vase (I remembered that); and the ladder I had climbed from the warehouse of Proteus’s cinema to gauge a deeper self-knowledge of the theatre and the industry of the great Dead who were my mythical and real (however dangerous) antecedents. Strong meat is the spirit of hate.

‘It’s not true. It’s not true. My true parents …’ I stopped. Who were my real parents?

Harold’s face was much darker now as if the corridor had been overshadowed by the first intimations of a storm. I began to consider how to trip him up, how to lay bare his lie. Alicia had often said he was a ‘good’ liar. ‘He’s a master player.’

‘The parents you believe in who died when you were two are a tale that Proteus invented.’

‘Why did he not tell me the truth?’

‘He and Alicia signed a bond to keep it secret. Had they not your mother would not have given you up. I was not to be told until she elected to do so. I thought I could buy everything. I could buy the beauty of nature, I dreamt of a child I would purchase with the blood of money. Money bleeds, Anselm. Money is a powerful passion in nature’s estate and garden of Roses, Rose-flesh, Rose-limbs, Rose-breasts. Money lies between men and women in bed to give teeth to their offspring. I invested in such teeth and the Rose sisters plucked them from me and left me hollow, drawn. I learnt of you, that you were my son, when it was too late.’

How much did I now desire to protest but was unable to speak!

‘I bought the first Rose sister with potent money, Anselm. I forced her to sleep with me. Please listen!’

I had blocked my ears with Proteus’s wax but on seeing his face now, his expression of greatest need, knew beyond a shadow of doubt that he needed my listening mind, my responsive — however repelled — spirit.

Incredible but true. Needed me. Needed to confess to me. Needed me so much that were I to refuse to listen the scaffolding of the great Play, the corridor, the ladder, everything (however apparently fixed and solid) would lose its spark of farflung, interior rehabilitation of the mystery of Conscience within doomed forebears and intimate, self-reflecting creatures. It seemed extraordinary that his need of me, someone as frail as me, was so crucial to the substance of the Play. Need of the living dreamer in the halls, the dimensions, the panoramas of complex, parallel existences of life and death.

I turned away from him for a moment and looked into the storm that overshadowed the corridor. There was a Presence there. Yes, a presence. A presence far greater, far more mysterious than the ‘living absences’ I had invoked, painted, sculpted. It seemed to embrace us all within the Dream-play. It drew me to recall the ‘shattering peace’ that I had glimpsed in the beggar’s eyes within the gate of Home when the burden upon him lifted for an instant into the uncanny reversal of all expectations and premises of myth one anticipates or entertains. Perhaps that Presence had been there overshadowing every retraced footfall I had made but I had not felt it as truly as I did now.

‘The Rose twin-sisters‚’ Harold confessed, ‘both became pregnant by me.’

My first reaction to this was a sense of curious anticlimax. It seemed banal, nothing new, just plain sexual business in a nihilistic age. How does sexual licence, sexual freedom of expression, that an age takes for granted matter, bear upon, or fit into, the moral business of sacred theatre?

‘It fits into the business,’ Harold said, ‘it fits because it bruises our iron-clad scars and opens an abyss between exploited nature and the ground of reconciliation between ourselves and those we have abused.’

He spoke with deceptive clarity and ease but within it I sensed a rhythm that troubled me deeply. It was as if he were cloaking one voice in another (antiphon or discourse of ancestral tongues), speaking deceptively through me, within me, with a shadow-tongue or incantatory rhythm that reminded me of myself (the way I spoke) even as it seemed to breach all complacency in the given self. Was this incalculable rhythm the art of confession between priest and supplicant? Did its origins — the origins of the confessional — lie in such theatre overshadowed by a Presence?

Of one thing I was sure. This was no enchantment, no spell. It was intensely human, intensely real. It possessed its humour. The emphasis on ‘business’ for instance reminded me of Haroldian and Protean comedy as they aped the marketplace of God! Harold was, I perceived — in gratitude to me for listening, for playing the part of divine ape or priest to whom he confessed — seeking to give his utterance both luminous self-mockery and practical detail. It was my listening ear imbued with the mystery of the singing ape I was (and he was) that encouraged him to speak the intimate poetry of his fate — and of matters he had long suppressed and hidden in himself — within a context that revealed his need of me, of the living dreamer, his need through me, my frail imaginative quest for the City of God, of redemption by the overshadowing Presence I had glimpsed as intricately woven into ‘living absences’, into the arts, into the sciences, into architectures, Waterfall, rainfall, riverfall.

‘They were twins‚’ he said at last, ‘women of the estate, the estate of nature, in which one buys or plunders the beauty of the world. The slave-Roses. Believe me! I saw it all when it seemed so late, too late. Perhaps it’s never too late, Anselm. That’s why we need one another. But it seemed desperately late for me when I learnt you were the child of … my child …’ He stopped. Unable to speak. Then continued — ‘The first Rose I bought … She left me. She said I was a mean bastard. And then some seven or eight years later when I was dying (I had less than a couple of months to live though I did not know it) the other Rose came. She slept with me. No word of meanness. She said I was generous. I paid her handsomely. And then she turned on me. Six weeks to the first night we slept together she knew she was pregnant. She turned on me. What is meanness, what is generosity, when one buys or sells souls? I did not listen for I was transported by the news that she was pregnant, that at last I had hunted and cornered the wild beauty of the world, that she was mine,a pregnant vessel, pregnant with my child, my first child. Rose said: your first child? Not your first child. Your first child has lived in your house for eight years and you have been blind to it. Your first child was my sister’s child. Remember her? You bought her too. She was staring at me. She knew, I swear, my days were numbered. Less than two weeks to live. You cannot seize, or buy, or conquer, the wild beauty of nature, Harold. I have been waiting to tell you this for a long time. My twin-sister has been waiting for eight years. You were blind to your first child. You shall never see your last. They have inherited the thorn and the knife.’

It was then with deadly certainty and sensitivity that I knew he was speaking the truth. His confession was true, heartrendingly true. And I remembered the gate of Home and the masked king in it upon whom I had come, the leaf that had bruised my brow: I saw it flutter again in the corridor of space. I saw the flight of the thorn into Proteus’s brow in the gate, I saw its shadow all over again upon Harold’s in the corridor. I had secured Rose’s line of sight in the gate. I had helped her instinctively, involuntarily: as though she (Rose) symbolized a palatial twin-body, twinleaf, twin-petal, twin-flesh, twin-thorn, in which lay my involuntary shadow, the involuntary shadow of the carnival heir in his suit, masked suitor, unconscious suitor.

His suit rather than mine as if I were other than an incestuous lodger in Nature and lover of mother Rose, as if I were another newborn, confessional medium (however prone still to conflict), unborn, newborn, gestating stranger in her and myself.

As much as to say that his suit was both an unfinished garment upon all species in the body of nature and a spiritual contest, a spiritual repudiation of the abuse of mother nature that I sustained in others, shared with others through and beyond myself.

Thus it was I had instinctively, unconsciously, raised my hand against the beggar in the gate of Home, against Proteus’s masked king and all over again once more against Harold this time, Harold the masked proprietor of flesh and blood.

Raised my hand within a train of habit, involuntary, apparently incestuous habit; raised my hand within involuntary apparently stranger compulsion. Raised my twin-hand within a medium of passion, a medium of animus, the biting animus of mother nature ingrained into one’s blood that one directs against every abuser and exploiter.

Raised my hand to strike and kill: not so: not to kill: to bless my returned father, returned to me from the kingdom of the Dead.

How had it happened, when had it started, such unconscious arbitration and change within the suit of tradition, mysterious suit, mysterious Presence overshadowing the corridor of space? I could not say but I knew that in the twin-scales of nature lay a complex balance I would need to ravel/unravel/ravel between creation and violence, art and revenge. A difficult task but a true however precarious beginning had been made with others, through others …

What was remarkable about all this, I dreamt, was that in my sudden apprehension of an unconscious alteration within the hand of nature and spirit I felt pain, great pain, knew the terrifying pain in the desire to kill another, knew this now as I had never felt it before; yet in that very instant was held by a dialectic of confessional spirit that addressed me as the Presence appeared to speak –

‘Nature breaks into mysterious selfhood, breaks into what is itself yet other than itself. The twin-blow that Nature delivers through you, Anselm, may turn into art, into self-confessional art. May illumine afresh Penelope’s garment or tapestry of tradition. May illumine afresh your relationship to Ross. Ross is another suitor whom South American/English Penelope has named her “good angel” in seeking a key to repudiate the charisma of Simon’s ascendancy over them.’ The voice ceased.

Harold had now begun to fade within the corridor of space. I cried to him before he vanished — ‘The other child.’ I cried, ‘the other Rose’s child, twin-Rose’s child, your last child — my half-brother, my cousin — can you tell me of him? Who is he? Where is he? Born long after me yet he seems now my twin, my hand in his, his in mine

Harold was half-visible now, half-invisible now. I saw his remorse. He knelt at my feet. ‘Proteus will tell you or show you. I cannot. I cannot.’ He held his head in his hands then looked up into the Presence overshadowing us both. He had confessed. I had confessed. Had I confessed to Presence or Priest? The candle flickered and the flame went out. But a new match flared, the sudden lease of a new day upon the third bank of the river of space.

THE THIRD BANK (The Trial)

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Matthew 5:18

The task of perceiving the other in his (or her) authenticity, or of identifying the essential ‘configuration’ of a given culture, is more difficult in the twentieth century than it was in earlier epochs‚… the most obvious reason being the interpenetration of multiple modes of thought and discourse that has attended the swift expansion and intensification of international relations on every level of human activity throughout the world. To know… just which vocabulary supplies the governing value references…; to discern which grafts are likely to be rejected and which, by contrast, are fit to be accommodated in some form or another — these and the like are questions of major significance …

from The Future of the Law in a Multicultural World, Adda B. Bozeman (Princeton University Press, 1971)

The sun was rising now: a new sobering lease of light, a new sobering homecoming day of the law conferred I dreamt by invisible Priest or Presence (invisible paradox because glimmeringly perceived) within the corridor of the third bank of the river of space.

The early morning radio was playing in the corridor: a marvellous invention. Conversation floated in space and time, present space and time, past space and time, re-voiced spaces, retraced echoes, within the archives of Alicia’s live fossil museum.

‘Confessional fabric of a universal homecoming when everybody talks to everybody on the airwaves,’ Proteus’s echoing radio voice was saying as I listened, criss-crossing stations, antiphonal voices within voices (rooted in or mimicking the Voice of Presence) beneath the crucifixion, the resurrection of the sun.

‘Let me warn you of the trial you shall face further along this airwave corridor when you shall be called to answer for the deeds of your brother

‘Who is my brother?’

There was no immediate answer. Proteus’s radio voice appeared to fade, to crackle into muffled gunfire, then to resume its ancient pitch within the corridor of space, the corridor of Home — ‘It’s a new, old newsgathering day, newsgathering confessional day of the homecoming of a carnival king (of whom everyone dreams) and the private and public anguish this occasions, the private and public business it brings, the daemons and furies we need to grasp, analyse, within a procession of events, natural events, man-made events. All this will emerge in the trial. A trial that started within Alicia on the day of your father’s death. To put a rough date on it! When does one’s trial truly commence? The day your father died a black Syrian magus, a ghostly merchant, appeared on the doorstep of the palace of the Rose. This was 1920. He offered Alicia a piece of sculpture which now stands, Anselm, in the corridor beside you. She paid him in tea, myrrh, gold and Demerara sugar. He bowed and accepted the precious gifts in return for a work of art that gave its purchaser a taste of ancient Greece in the modern world — in modern Palestine from whence he came — modern India, modern Asia, the modern United States, everywhere, the rebirth of refugee art seeking a home in the City of God, refugee kings seeking a new post-colonial home in the wake of the fall of many regimes, refugee family of Man. The sculpture was painted black, and when she asked its name or title he said black Agamemnon. She was startled. She took it inside, touched it, kissed it. Impulse, pure impulse! Alicia was a creature of immense practicality yet unpredictable impulse. Would you believe it? She hid it away after that, she locked it away from the sun in a dusty cupboard. I transported it into the corridor …’

‘I had forgotten but I remember as you speak,’ I said. ‘I always wondered

‘She bought it and hid it away the day your father died.’

‘But why?’

I was startled to hear my voice played back, playing back in the Dream. A child’s ageing voice. Or was it an ageing cradled echo of the stranger, the everlasting stranger one is despite every homecoming?

I scanned the sculpture of black Agamemnon. It appeared to recline in space as in a Waterfall, Waterfall river or bath of space, with Canaima’s knife in its ribs. It wore the Alicia cap. It was a member of Canaima’s team. No sign of a thorn this time. Just the knife! It was a private and startling piece, naked yet reticent.

‘Why did she hide it away?’

‘She touched the knife and felt that her hand, Rose’s hand, was in yours, in Canaima’s. It was the reverse of what had happened before when your hand had been an involuntary extension of Rose’s. So you see it belonged in the self-reversible parallels, the ravelled/unravelled tapestry of a multi-faceted king in dual suitors and triple queens that we have been playing. Every unconscious suitor who repudiates our expectation of the safe return of the carnival king, who kills in the name of the law, the law of love (did not Harold purchase hate instead of love?) is involved in a pattern of unconscious sacrifice in a violent and a terrorist age. Not unconscious suit or suitor this time who raises his hand in involuntary but protective love for abused mother nature but unconscious sacrifice that becomes an instinctive, redemptive base in a conflict-ridden age, a base upon which the family of the Alician state resurrects the slain king (saddled with charges of the abuse of the world) — a slain king who is akin to a slain God — resurrects him through daemons and furies of poetic justice, poetic dynasty, poetic law.’

As he spoke I felt a glimmering understanding … a glimmering apprehension of the trial to come and its bearing on ‘daemons and furies’. Had not Canaima warned me in his complex dance on the first bank of the river of space that I would need to grasp and reinterpret the nature of the ‘furies’?

Proteus’s inner broadcast had subsided a little but it suddenly increased in volume — ‘Your Aunt Alicia was the most faithful of wives, the most loyal of women. And then she realized you had changed everything. She had paid the price demanded of Rose to have you. She had aided and abetted Rose in the punishment inflicted on your father. She had sworn to keep your identity a secret. The bond with the twin-Roses had become a contract — an agreement — to secure revenge in the end. And when the Syrian magus appeared on her doorstep she was impelled to face the full implications of your ascendancy over her (the legacy of responsibility you would be summoned to unravel sooner or later) and Rose’s judgement upon her dead husband.

‘Her private contract, her private bond, became a thread into the mystery of the law. How guilty was she? Should she have broken her word? What is the law of love? What is the law of revenge? Where lies the medium of sacrifice within love and revenge? How do dynasties rise and fall, fall and rise, with the murder, the assassination of kings?’

There was a sudden hiatus within the airwaves, hiatus or subtle abyss, as the ancient/modern broadcast within my living Dream ceased. I was drawn into the complicated homecoming of human surrogates of divinity through the gateway of a piece of sculpture that had appeared on my aunt’s doorstep when I was a child. I felt the shadowy weight of self-reversible merchants and magi around the globe. It was as if the collective unit of piratical bodies (ancient Ithacan and post-war modern) in equation with the king of thieves — that I had sensed on the second bank of the river of space — had now become paradoxical merchants and magi. My aunt had paid them, those paradoxical and self-reversible magi, in tea, myrrh, gold, sugar, as if to give their trade an Imaginary sacred seal to redeem, she hoped, the revenge implications built into her contract with Rose.

In this context of self-reversible sculpture it was not the magi who brought gifts but the Alician family of state who gave of its possessions to glimpse an involvement with a core of Being, a core of metamorphosis, in which Penelope’s unfinished garment of Presence and tradition overshadowing the globe — snatched from her by the king of thieves — had materialized into a shape, a form, a sculpted body that had arrived, it seemed, from the margins of the world.

Not from great centres or establishments but from an obscure and marginal village in Palestine that possessed a thread of blood with ancient, long-forgotten family histories in Greece and upon Calvary.

It was as if I had been deluged by a Waterfall of Dream in Agamemnon’s bath. I swam in the corridor of space into the charisma of the political family of Man, the complicated family of Man everywhere, divided in its allegiances out of necessity, fate, freedom. I struggled to find my footing and knew — as if I had been stabbed all over again by Canaima’s hand within myself — why Alicia had apparently run from herself, why — despite her courage — she had pushed the black Agamemnon into a dusty grave or bin.

Even now in the revived murmuring echoing voices that had resumed their inner chorus within me on the airwaves, living chorus, long dead chorus, historical personages, mythical personages, speaking from the archives of chameleon space (staid spatial accents, sharp accents, lyrical accents, gentle tones, ringing spatial tones, grave accents, etc., etc.) I felt fear and uncertainty in facing black Agamemnon again as the long Day of the twentieth century drew to a close.

Blackness was but a mask. Strip it away and one was left with features of blood on one’s doorstep.

Did I not hear features of sacrifice on the airwaves in the voice of a great American president? One hears with the eyes of Dream, sees with the ears of Dream. I could not be sure. Sacrificial voices are faceless until the burden is shared through one and other, man and woman. ‘Politics is choosing between the inherited blunders of Adam and Eve.’ President Kennedy spoke again — I assumed it was he in Proteus’s genesis radio play — Adam and Eve at the Berlin Wall, homecoming Adam, Dallas. I dreamt I heard a sudden scramble of voices in the Fall, inherited blunders, the Waterfall, live rock-voices, a funeral procession, followed by deathly stillness. The drought of history! Assassination. Home after Troy’s Berlin, Troy’s Cuba, Troy’s latent Vietnam, criss-crossing radio tragedies past, present and future. ‘Humanity weds every great fallen commander or ruler,’ said Proteus, ‘within a tapestry of voices, the news, displaced quotations, memorable utterances.’

I touched the knife in Agamemnon’s body. I touched the thorn of the queen Rose my mother in Alicia’s hand. A president’s inherited wounds? A king’s inherited wounds? ‘Will the legacy of an American president, the legacy of uncrowned Martin Luther King (“I have a Dream”) turn by degrees in the sacrificial medium of an age into the root of futuristic American theatre, uncrowned Irish kings, uncrowned black kings? Or — to put it differently — will the blood of sacrifice, of martyrdom, witness for a universal and protective sovereignty within tragic republics around the globe that yearn in the dynastic pigment of the unconscious for the regeneration of saving kingship, saving queenship?’

I was unable to reply except by raising another question. ‘Does there lie in the assassination of the Mahatma Gandhi a charisma of loss that fertilizes the seed of new sorrowing dynasties in Asia, a Nehru, sorrowing dynasty, a Bhutto, sorrowing dynasty, the rise of future, peasant ruling families from the soil of the “untouchables” whose champion Gandhi was?’

‘The homecoming play, political, religious,’ said the airwave voice of Proteus, ‘was Alicia’s dream of unconscious sacrifice lifting and surfacing into shared consciousness within cross-cultural, self-reversible, parallel existences. Within her own family she had experienced many sorrows, slavery, emancipation, grief, poverty, passion, the scaffolding of ruin, the pains of mortal and immortal humanity, every pattern of hunger one could name, the hunger of deprivation, the hunger of the rich, and all of this imbued her with a sense of bleak but real hope, a sense of transfigured bodies and ghosts, that led her to anticipate the need — a great abiding need — for a carnival procession in which all shades, all illuminations, all losses, all gains, deprivations, miseries, glories, may enter into a self-confessional treaty with democracy and sovereignty.

‘What she feared, Anselm, was that the sculpture of black Agamemnon on her doorstep was a premature manifestation of an evolution of creativity and of a reformation of the heart: premature because of a refusal to judge the self, to judge one’s frailty, and to entertain dualities, trinities, quadruple associations through which impossible stature, impossible divinity of character, may still come into the theatre of history when such “impossibility” is shared by many actors, broken into mutual parts, into mutual lives, shared lives, shared difficulties, shared obscurities, shared illuminations, shared compassion.’

I understood. Yes, I knew now clearly why she ran from herself, why she looked into me as an extension of herself, extensive living dreamer and carnival heir retracing his footsteps in hers into a theatre of law, shared trial, the trial of the self. I was on trial, Alicia was on trial, Canaima, Rose, Proteus, Harold were on trial. Nameless others. The judge was on trial. The natures of art and science, man-made order, nature-made furies or daemons, were on trial. If I were not convinced they were all on trial I would have run away from myself into the dust of history and abandoned any hope whatsoever of comprehension of the core of Being, the core of metamorphosis.

I could not leave it there. I felt the necessity to restate Alicia’s misgivings and anxieties, the anguish of women enslaved by the codes of men, the contracts, the bonds, instigated at a psychical level by men. What was Being? What was Presence? Black, white, ancient, modern Agamemnon was but a partial and bleak manifestation of sacrificed Being (to which women were subject) within a civilization disposed to War (whether violent war or non-violent war) and a humanity disposed to the betrayal of itself, the betrayal of what it appeared to admire or love. As much as to say sacrificed Being in its ancient fullness lay within immediacies of private grief, private betrayal, even as it moved beyond all narrow confinement or pigmentation, narrow gender, male, female, towards an infinite goal. Presence was the immensely and varied genius of the sacred. Presence (Alicia had made plain, Penelope too in the ceaselessly unfinished garment she wove) gave birth to characters of well-nigh impossible mythical stature in our midst whose roots lay (Alicia knew) beyond individual seizure, they lay in us, all levels of the politic and the private, all vocations, all despairs, all hopes …

Yes, I was grateful to Alicia beyond formal understanding. Rose was my jealous mother, Alicia my spiritual womb and I had inherited all her misgivings about the codes of a male, aggressive society which nevertheless she had to bear in celebration and art and ritual, to translate, to puncture, to transform by subtle degrees into her own state.

The moment had come to enter the room where the judge sat. I turned before doing so to scan black Agamemnon for the last time. He was about to fade, to vanish into nothingness. I saw him for the last time as a prime refugee of war (I recalled my scientific mission in the Potaro to advise, survey the river, map, report to Alicia’s government in the palace of the Rose, on the possibilities of a settlement for refugees). I saw him not only in the Potaro but in Palestine. He was running through a hail of bullets. Slain child, slain dancer, slain man, slain woman. They were all part of me, part of my team, part of Canaima’s team. They wore the slightly pulled down, evasive bandage or cap of dreams, cap of my private family on their brow.

Once again the Dream trembled on the verge of extinction and one was tempted to run from oneself, run from the past and the future. I saw the glimmering seed of a new dynasty in resurrected family from the body of a slain child, slain man, slain woman even now in some dusty corner of a Palestinian/Potaro-esque/El Dorado-esque garden or Bush or hillside within the estate of nature.

I saw the bloodstained curtain of Haiti, of the Middle East, of the South Americas. ‘There are alternatives,’ I cried. ‘Quantum parallels imply self-recognitions across hard-and-fast barriers as well as subtle alternatives within a ruling frame or pattern of fate. The birth of the state is already possessed of a royalty of the Imagination that is prepared to surrender itself to us. Why must we kill and subsist on martyrdoms?’

I touched the knife in Agamemnon’s body as he vanished into hovering Presence beyond structured gender or appearance, through Rose, through every stained-glass window I visualized in post-Christendom cathedral, through every Protean riddle of Being. My trial had commenced. Not as I may have expected. The noble judge for whom I looked in the room I had entered had apparently not yet arrived. Or if he were here (as I thought he was) he was invisible to me. It would have been impossible to entertain such a paradox but I had — as epic ancient yet futuristic character on the first bank of the river of space — been cloaked by invisibility when I turned from Canaima’s victim and made my way to the Waterfall.

Was invisibility a form of grace one shares unaccountably with daemons and furies? I had shared it with the terrifying Canaima.

Was invisibility the hidden curvature of the art of God one clings to unknowingly? Such curvature raised issues of the imagination of the unimaginable. In less daunting terms it raised issues of marginality, of our capacity to stand upon the margins of our world, to know ourselves as absent from yet present in the world, to free ourselves from a rigid category of vested interests, and thus with profoundest disinterestedness to realize potentials we scarcely dream we may call upon in tapping beginnings that reach into priorities that are so faint we have forgotten how pertinent they are to us, reach equally into endings or endlessness: the marriage of faint conception to a faintness that seems extinction but is not extinction …

Christ’s Presence was there, I knew, but as the strangest spectator of the funerals and the cradles of civilization. I was unable to see him except in the degree that he assisted me to perceive the serial bodies, or serial funerals, processions, serial cradles, conceptions, that moved on the third bank of the river of space.

My translations of an art I pursued through partial pigmentation, colour, tone, etc., an art that lay therefore beyond total seizure, were the beginnings of an essential humility but I knew one must persist even if one were accused of pride.

I framed the measure of persistence into temporary scaffoldings in which it seemed that each killed serial body was an abstract spectator at its own funeral, each unborn or gestating metaphor a window backwards into the spark of life. Here was the marriage of purely visualized architectures and sculptures to the genesis of the Word. In such a marriage the invisible Word of creation becomes concrete or the seminal proportion of Dream, the seminal proportion of the music and the rhythm of vision by abstract spirit, abstract substance.

‘Face the concrete,’ the Voice in the corridor said, a Voice that was attached to no absolute beginning, no absolute ending, within alternatives, parallel spaces, sculptures of myth and history. I could not resist the quantum humour of paradox. Without the invisible one would lose the seminal secret that resides in vision (the birth of vision as deathless life), would lose the medium or spark of divine comedy, abstract self-judgement, abstract fertility clothed by apparent nothingness.

It was a thought, an intuition, an inspiration that I could not yet fathom though the Voice of invisible Christ had spoken with such authority.

My mind was inhabited by questions of the architectures of birth and extinction, the locality and non-locality of ideas, questions of the origins of space (somethingness-in-nothingness) that I could not frame.

Yet an answer began to unfold on the third bank of the river of space through the memory of concrete Shadows that had visited me, or I them, on the first and second banks of the tilted rivers of the epic Guyanas, epic cosmos. I had been fortunate to gain through them a spark or grain of the seminal concrete of which Christ had spoken.

Suddenly it were as if radio-voiced, radio-armed Proteus slid into quantum television along the curvature of the arc of God in partial response to my unspoken questions or prayers. He (Proteus) turned into a spectator at his own funeral. He was there before me, he was here beside me, in the throng that viewed him. He had split himself into a versatile primordium or television amoeba, television irony, through which to contemplate a divided human/divine self, contemplate his and humanity’s funeral as a compartment nevertheless in a train of action and reflection within the sub-divided and mirroring mass-media eye of Protean age in myself and others. A drama unfolded, astonishing, unpredictable in its grain of living moment. Space (visual space, visualized space) became a stepping-stone into other dimensions.

Proteus was ascending a hill within a Waterfall, within a river, within a series of tides from which he arose as from a coffin and bottomless cradle into our self-made victim, our self-made actor, his self-made audience.

I reflected on the curvature along which he had come out of the depths as much as the heights: chiselled, as it were, into the ‘last comedian in space’ by an unfathomable and concrete Creator. I saw the tracery of peculiar self-knowledge in him, peculiar self-trial, peculiar sorrow, peculiar humiliation … For nothing was to be taken for granted in the ‘last sacred clown’ one associates with one’s intimate relatives, intimate family, intimate humanity. Neither the stereotypes of the box office nor the story-line of birth and death. To take such a story-line for granted was to surrender oneself to a conjurer’s unchanging universe. Whereas this unpredictable mythmaker was miracle and metamorphosis though so abused by us, so misunderstood, so exploited by advertisers, he had become the strangest ‘first’ rather than ‘last’ grotesque within which the seed of a resurrection lay buried in us, deep in us, in advance of its time. Invisible concrete (partially visible seed) was the art of the resurrection of humanity.

‘To stand on the brow of a quantum television hill in advance of one’s time requires one to gaze backwards in space into a mist in which one discerns through every veil an event that has already happened but which is so curiously suspended in the present moment it seems utterly native to the future.’

My Dream appeared to retreat a little into the Voice I had just heard and then to re-emerge with greater strength. Proteus died in 1922 but he seemed more alive now within the language of Memory. The old man (he seemed old to me in 1922 although he was less than fifty-five) had lived a full life — whatever that means — when I was a child.

‘What is a full life?’

‘A full life entails a body or bodies that lie so deep — and beyond a one-track frame of existence — that their true complexity and potency live and relate to the future.’

Proteus was more alive now than he ever was. More alive within an immediacy of Dream that drew part, indeed much, of its revolving content from barbarisms, killings, terrorisms everywhere. More alive and real now because the innermost suspended body of the past, through the veil of the present and the future, drew him invisibly/visibly into millions and millions whose hopes are threaded into a fabric of menace and dread, a fabric of absurdities and trivialities as well, through which they survive (their hopes gain bodily, wounded substance in survival) from day to day: bitter day, trivial day, happy day, unhappy day, overshadowed by the ephemeral solidity of the news, the black news, the television soul, the radio homecoming of the maimed around the globe.

All this edged itself into a Dream in which ‘space’ becomes Proteus’s ‘stepping-stone’ into a theatre of conception and birth I would soon encounter on the hillside he was ascending: becomes so because when I knew him it was so, he was a native of the abyss (whether I understood this or not). The germ of the abyss was there in his masks (adding new and unsuspected content to these), in the rags (divinity’s, humanity’s rags) that he wore, the inks, sketches, bottles, vessels of every shape and form, the warehouses, churches, schools, the business he conducted with the profane and with the sacred, the abuse he allowed others to heap upon him, in the intoxications of existences that he played — it was there in all these — in Poverty’s, El Dorado’s, primitive cinema, primitive radio, which I now perceived in Memory’s leap into quantum proportions.

When Alicia and I received a telegram of his death in the interior of the Guyanas, he climbed into my childhood as if this had become another stepping-stone into an audience within me which would write his obituary in film. We watched him avidly as the camera rolled within us on his last expedition for gold and diamonds, we watched him, he watched us, watchman of the golden abyss, watchman of the diamond abyss, weather charts, subtly rising oceans, subtly melting ice-caps. He was, some said, a notorious gambler and drunkard in the global village. Beardless as an infant yet crafty as a hermit. Adept at many games, God’s amoeban mountaineer of tragic/comic theatre, capable of uprooting many a family tree. He had tricked me when he gave me parents who were susceptible to many divisions and sub-divisions. He used chalks of glittering ice and snow-flesh in the tropics (as if to counsel one on the priceless family tree of the rainforests that were in danger), inks as black as midnight (as if to counsel one on the necessity to nurse the sun into a new lease of day). He painted me black at times, painted himself white at times.

After such trials (carnival ecologies, carnival inverted/subverted racism) I became a hollow man who had no alternative but to fast in spirit to become well: ‘Fasting is primordial insight into the hollow Day of the twentieth century as one retraces one’s steps.’

It was my turn now to mock him, to join hands with his tormentors, stitch a few famous last words on his lips, a four-letter word or two, an expletive or two, an inane gesture or two, by which posterity would remember him on television or radio as Comedian Uncle.

‘Damn you, blast the world,’ he said, as if to oblige me from within Poverty’s ghetto. There was faint applause. I lifted his hand in Carry-On Cardboard Cinema to everyone’s uproarious delight and let it fall on Rose’s backside as he ascended the hill. I placed him on quantum television hill in 1922. It was a triumph of science. ‘Poor devil! Poor scientist of the theatre, poor uncle Proteus, we’ve got him by his tail at last, he’s dead.’

He seemed to know it all in the throng of human/divine apes that viewed him as if he were rehearsing with us the tributes we paid him, the evolution of self-mockery. We were his spectatorial Shadows. He was elusive yet concrete and in seeing him through ourselves he immersed us in epic — absurd epic yet epic of conscience — and put us on trial. The screen or stage on which I saw him gave extremity to the curvature or line upon which he had come into our midst, an extremity of self-knowledge we could bear in our abuse of him. Such is the shared burden of divine comedy in responsive clowns. The clowns we abuse, in taking our abuse, shoulder our evolutionary deprivations, make light of our box-office stupidities, our best-seller orgies, regard us with supreme however self-deprecating character, supreme metamorphic insight into our self-love, self-hate, and eccentric malice.

Yes, I was grateful to my uncle Proteus as I had never been before for an enlightenment on the nature of clowns, sacred clowns, profane clowns, I would not have been able to bear until now in the wake of the Voice of Presence, the Voice I had heard that came from no painting or sculpture on earth. I knew my wild uncle confessed to his partiality in the shadow of such Presence, and in so doing revealed his flaw and the flaw in every solid trickster, solid (in contradistinction to elusively concrete) absolute, every flaw that is mediated through genuine theatre and narrative extremities in intoxicated flesh or intoxicated wood or stone or marble or pigment to warn us of the abysses, gaps, divisions of and in space, that lie between us and the invisible measures of the sacred.

I knew that he knew that the intoxicated obituary of him that we wrote (dancing scripts, dancing camera) as he ascended the hill in oceanic river of space reflected a growing tension that lay between him (as human/animal abused advocate of the invisible sacred) and us (as the ones who would nurture his advocacy even as we abused it) until the tension or marriage between the caricature of the divine and the dialectic of partial being precipitated inevitably daemonic furies within a society whose courtship of the Dead (as if the Dead were to be manipulated into the deprivations of the structured living) became a serial indictment of itself; became also an irony within the arts of the Imaginary City of God I dreamt I was building. ‘Such arts work through indirections, indirections that appear at first to promote the triumph of nihilism and realism only to bring home the taste of crumbling age and nakedness in our mouths. Does one’s age need to consume a body of Shadow to unclothe itself into the visionary life of a Child, ancient truly marvellous Child it once was?’

When news came of my uncle’s death I ran and curled myself into a body of newborn Shadow at the foot of Jacob’s ladder in the great warehouse. I lay in a cardboard box there and sailed on the pavement of a great city towards a bush house on the tilted side of the oceanic Potaro which Proteus was ascending through inbuilt tidal rock and wave.

He came to the bush house and entered the waving door. It was a makeshift cabin, as in the body of a wrecked ship deposited by geologic fable on a hillside. It stood half-way up the giant wave of the hill: half-way up from the Potaro to the ceiling of the sky reflected in stained-glass river cathedral Dream as if the river itself ran through the blue fire of heaven. He broke a loaf of bread and poured himself a glass of star-studded liquid.

The cabin was sparsely furnished. I lay in my cardboard palace upon the Hill of the Sea. There was another child in the cabin. He was several years younger than I but seemed my twin. Rose’s sister’s child. My half-brother and cousin. He lay on the solid surf of a cloud with a glittering knife in his hand. The years melted away between us as if we were twin-born — I in my cardboard palace, he quite still yet afloat on the crest of a still wave. Proteus glanced at us, touched the other child then my head with a gentle finger.

I saw the shadow of his finger in my infant dream-book writing through me in my old age. One was conscious of a curious combination of faculties in oneself: the sheer ordinariness of things — whether bread or cardboard palace — fused into miraculous fire and sea and cloud. Was this blend, this fusion, the character of infant-perception, infant-vision, one thought one had lost or forfeited for ever? I was immersed then and there through infant-vision in the truth of a resurrection that reverses and extends the rhythm of time, the music of time.

The frames of time slipped into curious musical twinship, extension, reversibility. It was as if as Proteus ascended he was drowning in the black, orchestrated depths of the river of space. As he drowned his past life began to unwind its loom within me. The reel of events — the drunken boat or tapestry of time — stopped at 1912 (the year I was born), within the martial drum-beat of post-World War 1920, when my half-brother Canaima was born. I knew the parallel, fused year (1912 in 1920) as an ordinary event, even as I saw the drunken boat afloat on the oceanic Potaro, buried in the sea, yet uplifted into the sky, even as I saw millions of soldiers on the skyline of War fused into a giant Child, a killing Child, a twin-Child that bears the burden of killing in each of us, each of us destined through our ancestral Dead to reinterpret anew the miracle of life, a crumb of substance, a glass of unpolluted water.

A woman with Asian-flu pigmentation, a twin-Rose, had entered the cabin. ‘It’s too much, Proteus,’ she said. ‘You ask too much of me. You travel as you drown, I ride as I die. I can take care of him’ — she was pointing at me — ‘I can fly with him on my saddle. You ask me to give him up … Millions have died. Does one frail child matter?’

‘Millions are dying, will die, in the long Day of the twentieth century, from twin-glorious-revolution-and-massacre, twin-prosperity-and-hunger, in Africa, South America, China, but a child — the conception of a child — still matters. A child clothed in its animal skin, the animal skin of endangered species … Hush! he’ll swim. Let him come with me.’

‘Swim and be damned my flat backside country,’ said the woman. ‘Better for him to ride hard, to fly hard with me.’

She stopped. They faced each other. I was able to see her now through a crevice in my cardboard palace. I accepted their uncanny, strange conversation as native fabric, as native blend of ordinary reality and ecstatic reality, disease and the evolution of fury. They spoke a strange yet everyday tongue, the loosened tongue of flesh and blood that stitches itself into bizarre peasant or aristocratic costume. Had not Marie Antoinette amidst a diseased Europe played at being a shepherdess or a virgin milkmaid? So too dying Rose — dying of post-war Asian flu that had drifted across the Atlantic into Alicia’s colonial garden — had dressed herself in riding boots and the spurs of heaven or hell. Her arms were bone-bare, her breasts bare, and the colour of apples of sunrise. Her hair was full and rich, a great mass of curls upon her head. Her lips were queen-roses and her eyes glistened into the imaginary precipitation of ancient rainfall upon a parched landscape. A desert appeared, a desert of famine, then clouds arose upon her skin far out in thin vistas of space. A thorn of sweetest, bitterest fire ran through her fever-lips and from eye to eye. I could see it through the flesh and high bone of her nostrils that pointed at me across the navel of the world to which I was tied.

Her nakedness in her bed of illness was a kind of fire, she had ridden upon a Horse of fire to bring me (or was it Canaima?) into the world. It was my life she sought to bear away with her in a joint illness (I too was ill when she gave birth to my twin).

Horses are naked creatures of primordial sex whose unselfconscious majesty clothes them with the mystery of privacy, a privacy one glimpses and fears. Except for the shelter it sometimes brings. The nakedness of the Horse — that seeks to erase in oneself all traces of the thighs of darkness through which one comes into the light of birth — is still miraculously, in the body of the unconscious, one’s cloth and shelter of grace.

‘You do overshadow him with the terror of a love he cannot yet bear. Let me have him,’ said Proteus. ‘I shall see to his upbringing with Alicia’s help. Believe me! we shall find him parents, we shall bring him up as our own. And Harold will never know who he is until your sister tells him. If you take him now you will inflict upon him a passion from which he shrinks’ — he was pointing at me, I had retreated into my box of naked flesh and away from the terrible Horse-woman, the dying Rose of the sky and the sea, my mother in Canaima’s twin-mother …

‘But he’s mine,’ said the woman with the thorn in her eyes and on her lips. She would have taken me with her if Proteus had not pleaded for my life. Even now in old age it seemed so real it was touch and go. Perhaps I had known it all as a child and had suppressed the knowledge in myself, suppression of unwelcome news, synaesthesia of the body of Dream, dying limb? newborn limb? Or perhaps I had learnt it all in later years, in censored letters, censored diaries that Alicia kept. Such staggered (or staggering) knowledge exists on a borderline between knowing and not knowing one’s mother, between riding and swimming through a multiple sensation of mothering spaces, between walking and running backwards into a mothering past that becomes the living uncertain present in the sisters with whom one’s father slept. Alicia had taken her into the house, the Rose who was apparently my mother. She nursed her. She nursed me. She nursed us under the shadow of a great Horse. I too had been infected by the fever, by the deadly Asian flu. It was the year the other Rose, my dying mother’s sister, gave birth to Canaima. And when my mother died — despite Alicia’s care — the other Rose appeared over my bed as the Horse reared, swam, flew. The fever in my limbs began to subside, running limbs, swimming limbs, bird-limbs. The gift of survival! The gift of a twin-mother!

‘I am a king of oceans and skies,’ said Proteus to Rose. ‘I swam, flew the Atlantic through Middle Passage Africa, India, Greece, Rome, multiple Christian/pagan motherhood of carnival. I reached the margins of the world, I came to El Dorado, all in Jest. What a golden Jest colonialism and post-colonialism are. What untold riches! He knows as he dreams in his cradle. What a gift for a newborn child. Let us give him the riches of the Imagination for we have nothing. We are poor. Give him a chance, Rose. Let him live to create his Imaginary City of God.’

But Rose was still unconvinced. ‘I shall chain him,’ she said. ‘I shall tie him to the other child, Harold’s other child, the child with the knife in his hand.’

Once again as I listened I was aware of the orchestrated fabric of the unconscious, the language of the eloquent — however absurd, however comedic — unconscious: ordinary accents arisen from the abyss into Dream-life, fragmentation’s organ and tone, the self-mockery of wholeness and Jest within a cradle of Memory, prodigious infant-perception.

Infant-perception floats within age and youth to fuse remembered illnesses, my illness and recovery in 1920, my mother’s and Harold’s death in the same year, Proteus’s in 1922, Alicia’s in 1929, etc., etc., the dying and the living in the twentieth century into whom one arrives when one is twin-born. I possessed the thorn, Canaima the knife.

The thorn and the knife were fused yet subtly broken, subtly transformed illnesses within ourselves and others in theatre of Memory; such breach, such transformation, became a window of hope in Imaginary City of God where the thorn and the knife float into self-judgement, self-comprehension, when greed and lust and idolatry and revenge appear absolute or triumphant in a violent age.

It was a glimpse into the sanctuary, the sanctuary of Presence that dwells so deep it sometimes appears to inflict a wound, a wound that instils the mystery of the law in flesh and spirit.

‘It’s never too late to catch a glimpse of the sanctuary,’ I said. ‘To be born is to begin to learn the complex wound one suffers in all innocence. One touches fire in all innocence, one touches the splinter of the knife or the sharp bone of the thorn in all innocence. One touches the parentage of the wound in the fabric of the sanctuary.’

I had spoken in all prodigious innocence, innocent yet prodigious wisdom that wells from unconscious birth, of being born despite uncertainty as to the motherhood of values one inherits within a divided civilization.

‘He’s a talking infant,’ cried Rose suddenly. I felt her rage, her jealousy. I felt an incredible atmosphere, the terrifying Shadow of the parentage of the Imagination, and it was all I could do to retain my breath. Rose could have squeezed me into a ball, she could have placed me on her breast, and galloped into space.

‘A talking infant is the lighthouse of music, the lighthouse of the unconscious, the lighthouse of the Dead,’ said Proteus.

They laughed and the spell of danger was broken. And thus in Jest, as it were, as if to marginalize a burden of perception, to give it the status of a feather, a drum of lightness in the cradle, I was allowed the chance for which Proteus had pleaded, a chance to live and to ‘speak’ within an Imaginary temple, an Imaginary courtroom.

*

One had entered, to my astonishment, a blackened hall as though a fire had touched the walls of the courtroom, but I was convinced still of everlasting Presence. I perceived the enigma of the sanctuary in its veiled proportions within water or fire or soil or air. The sanctuary or courtroom may have apparently receded but was to be glimpsed through ordinary places, within ruins, within desolations where exists a self-accusing logic: self-accusing chemical warfare, man-made viruses, etc., etc., that touch the lives (threaten to consume the lives) of all species. One glimpses a kingdom, an animal haven, a human haven, that is close to us in the elements of nature, the chemistry of Being, yet barred from us by the perversity (criminal perversity?) that runs hand in hand with the marvels of science.

At the far end of the blackened hall sat the noble judge. Was he a scientist? Was he a saint? I could not tell. Inspector Robot was seated amidst the congregation in the fire-stained room. I recognized him from the shining bone above his socketed eyes. He was a master of artificial intelligences with whom one could play ball, the spinning ball of the globe. I felt the profoundest gratitude in not having to answer to him within living Dream as my judge though his bone-Shadow reminded me of the intricacies of the trial of body and soul one faced.

The year of the spinning globe was ostensibly 1988. The cradle of infant-perception (my cardboard palace) had lodged itself within a bounce of the ball to lie still upon the dark ground of the sanctuary. It confirmed the Jesting play and footfall of age, the age of Dreams, the agelessness of Dreams. Had I not stood within the box, within the palace, had I not lain within it as a child in a fusion of years or chemistry of intoxicated being? Chemistry, yes! the chemistry of the sanctuary one glimpses through perversity and risk, through every hazard of creation. ‘Why me?’ I cried to the noble judge, ‘why have I survived? It’s close on seventy years since my life was spared. Indeed it seems longer. As if the broken fever bears on the very moment, the very crest or wave in the moment I was born.It was then — in that crested moment — that Rose set me free. Danger, survival, was but the reflex of a deeper miracle, a deeper wave. Life’s the miracle. Creation’s the tide that runs through us into every excess.’

‘You are on trial,’ said the noble judge matter-of-factly, ‘because Rose set you free even as you let Canaima escape. Is the gift of life but a pattern of escape from death, a pattern of escapism? How guilty are you, how guilty is Rose, how guilty is Canaima in leading an escapist dance?’

I was bowled over by the question — its configuration took me completely by surprise — but managed to reply — ‘Rose was my mother, Canaima my brother.’ I spoke softly, automatically. No one heard me except the judge. I was glad no one did, I was ashamed to advance such a plea or revelation of bias. Indeed — even if I had known how related I was to Canaima and Rose — I had never really welcomed it, I had suppressed the knowledge in childhood, suppressed it over the long years until it flared into the obituary notice or film of Proteus’s death, flared into scorched sanctuary and blackened courtroom.

Perhaps I had advanced the plea not simply out of the biased flare of instinct but in the light of the carnival crown, carnival heirloom or kingship conferred upon me. But Canaima and I were twins … Were we not both equally entitled to the crown? What did such entitlement and equality imply? Was carnival a legacy of escapism, licence and abandonment, suppressed criminality, or was it a profound universal theme and a reinterpretation of the great masks of legend and history, the progressions, digressions, reversals of great myth?

Were the two — suppressed criminality and reinterpretations of the great body of a civilization — linked together yet subtly divided within the cellular organs of carnival, the cellular chemistry of carnival, carnival guilt, carnival innocence?

The judge stared at me out of his dusty, deceptively matter-of-fact, sleeping (however apparently wide-awake) eyes. He seemed to know my mind. ‘Why should carnival cells assist us in these deliberations? Your uncle was a street-performer, an actor, a good-for-nothing, a sailor, a spendthrift, a gold miner, a man of no fortune. He died penniless in his early fifties. There’s derangement of cells for you!’

I was outraged by the jest. ‘My uncle was an immortal,’ I protested. I felt the pressure of eyes in the courtroom upon me. I felt I was on trial for the poor, the heartbreak of the poor who seek the seed of value, of religious value, in their excesses. I felt the absurdity of the occasion but I had to reply in the spirit of wine, with a tongue of wine (whatever that was). I had to do justice to Proteus.

‘Of such stuff are immortals made,’ I cried. ‘He drank, I know; he spent, I know; but he cared for the inner robustness of art, he faced great odds, he spoke philosophy as if it were mother’s milk. The very excess of his life sustained a moral tale. There were days when he went without food and drank nothing but wine and rum and water. It made him feel strong, it gave him a handle with which to grip the sensation of being poor but risen above greed. His larder then was the wilderness and that’s a moral tale …’ There was a murmur in the courtroom. I waited until it subsided and continued in the spirit of rum and wine, the spirit of excess. ‘As for my poor devil of a father, he was a brilliant womaniser until his eyes were blinded by Rose. He misconceived money and dreamt his purchase on life was strong. Stronger that Proteus’s. In him too lies a sobering morality and the veiled cornerstone of the sacred grotto that I now glimpse in everyman’s, everywoman’s, body in this burnt courtroom, I glimpse the chemistry of passion that may save or destroy at the heart of the law.’

I saw the Shadow of Sleep veiling the judge’s eyes. Was Sleep a theatre of excess for saint, for sinner? Either vocation involved far-reaching tone and passion. Proteus would have understood the judge. Harold would have understood the judge. ‘You may be right,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps there the transition is, the new (or is it old?) morality of which you speak. It lies in variety, subtlety, and unfixated wholeness.’ He was staring at me in the gloom of the grotto or grotesque courthouse. I knew he was mocking me. Mocking my appearance of a drunkard’s simplicity. He had cut me to the bone of outcast spirit. He saw my discomfiture and was sad. I felt as the wine coursed through my veins that he loved me as if he were my father in heaven, that he would err on my side in protecting me. And yet his curious biting mockery of himself and of me remained.

Why — I wondered — had the members of my family become immortals? ‘Perhaps,’ I said slowly, groping to find a true equation between the feast of love (wine and women) and immortality, ‘it was because every feast begins to grow too rich or too sour and one begins to absorb the immortal spirit of the creative fast and passion’s peace.’

I felt I had struck a chord of wisdom but the judge shot me down with a dusty glance. ‘Fasting is no defence nor is passion’s peace in the business of murder.’

Business of murder. Business again! Was murder business? He was eyeing me cryptically within the savage gloom. ‘You will have to do much better than that in Church, Anselm.’

I was amazed. ‘Why Church? What do you mean by Church?’

He ignored the question and I found myself shouting at him with a sphinx-like ardour that matched his. ‘Do queens spurn kings and judges and the fasting male to throw a new religious light on humanity’s fascination with crime?’

The judge smiled. A smile that shook the terraces of the court.

‘Fascination indeed,’ he said, ‘the fascination of religious judges like me in the bizarre sentences, bizarre freedoms, we sometimes mete out to sex offenders as if we see them with sudden irrationality against a backcloth of spiritual appetite, spiritual marrow, spiritual bone. You and Proteus and Harold should know what I mean.’

At last the blackened room within our mutual unconscious, my unconscious, the judge’s unconscious, loomed bright. I saw the strange humour of the occasion quite distinctly now. I had been aware of the judge’s self-mocking eyes before but now he seemed wired to the skeleton of a sexual bottle in my mind though he was not Inspector Robot. Each jesting bone in his bottled face quivered as if it were waiting to be drawn from a Bird’s wing and placed between the lips of the Queen of Roses. A bone is a lightning conductor of sexual freedom, sexual wine, and of the parole of furies in dusty graves, furies arriving suddenly on a judge’s lips and speaking irrationalities through him that occasion laughter. Thus a monster of the deeps may hope to be set free when the Dead speak in high court museum. I felt there was a chance for the drunkard in me. A chance for Proteus. A chance for Harold. I felt I needed no apology to speak on behalf of the immortals in my family.

The judge sat in a box-like Chair with great extended wings on which to rest his arms. And I remembered the lightning Bird of the Macusis, the dancing Bird I had shot down with Canaima’s knife on the first bank of the river of space. How curious are the emblems that mark the fallen species, the unconscious species, the complex slaughter of a beast or a bird or a dancing angel in the animal enthronement of the law, the majesty of the law, the occasional lapse or parole of a monster!

Does the judge see an emblematic beast and is filled with uncanny compassion, or uncanny lust, when he grants parole to a monster? Does he see a fiery angel within the mutual unconscious of hunted species, mutual Sleep, the judge’s sleep (on one hand), and the unconscious of a tilted bone in a wing of space (on the other), bone-bottle in my Dream of wine, bone-sex in his courtroom of love within the famished lips of a Rose?

Yes, I remembered how Rose had listened to drunken Proteus, had accepted his plea for my life, as if he were a judge who desired that I should be set free. I remembered the monstrous Horse on which Rose would have taken me. I saw its majesty in a new and native light now: I saw the prospect of an incarnation of species I was unable to grasp or bear — though it was native to me — and from which Proteus dislodged me in the nick of time to live, to contemplate the mystery of the law in every lived life, however extreme.

Had not Ulysses’s gift of the law to his cousin Aeneas taken the extreme form of a monstrous and pregnant Horse in advance of its time, in advance of the Incarnation of species that civilization was unable to sustain or bear except in the conflagration of war between gods (masquerading as men) and men seeking the art of the divine as a token of grace beyond their comprehension?

‘The animal Home of the law, throne of the law, sustains emblematic compassion, emblematic lust and the emblematic wound that mirrors all hunted creatures. It sustains heartbreak and the chemistry of the animalesque and the divine. Speak the truths of that heart-breaking, heart-changing chemistry, that unresolved chemistry, Anselm, and you approach the mystery of the Incarnation. God will hear your prayers.’

I was filled with awe at such unpredictable association and colour to the law. And yet the very frailty of the judge, his lightness, his capacity for metamorphosis, the paradoxes he revealed within transparencies of the unconscious that cloaked him — that made him into my object as well as my subject — his attachment to someone as marginal or extreme as me, gave me courage to cling to the edges of fused yet broken civilizations. Perhaps he was a creature of labyrinthine jest but all at once he was near and dear to me. In him I saw a sponge of the absurdities yet truths of the Incarnation of the law. He dripped the wine of curiosity into my mouth as I stared at him, the risks that arose from a measure of addiction to the highest form of ecstasy and hope, communion with what could prove a misconception, a misinterpretation, in identifying deity with an animal frame.

But as I drank I saw as well the necessity to endure the wine and the jest, to endure the risks, to disabuse myself of the sensation that I or anyone possessed the sacred in a solid bubble. I saw the necessity to persist in a dialogue with every spark of divine administration of justice in all masquerades however apparently unprepossessing …

‘Your Chair,’ I cried, ‘possesses an ancient savage lineage that drips lightning. Your Chair is symbolic of the incarnation of a drunken storm, the incarnation of lightning. You and the chair together become celebratory flesh on bone in animate wood as the lightning wires lip to heart. The spiritualization of bottled wood, the spiritualization of bottled wing and feather in one’s carnival thirst for the angel of the divine. Lightning strikes the wings of the Macusi Bird and your Chair floats in the Sky. ‘Look!’ I cried, ‘it is there among my charts and diagrams of god-rock, there on the table of the feast, the savage feast before you. Lightning strikes and illumines a winged stairway from sky to earth as the Chair and the table tilt into an abstract diagram and a Bird. See how the wings become a lightning arc or miracle-chalk upon a blackboard. Outspread drunken wings tilt between sky and earth, fold, stretch out again into the spiritualization of wood that is carven into the arms and wings of your Chair.’

Sobriety is always a shock, the sobriety of an individual visionary who faces the passion of faith, the sobriety of the state which turns at last to face itself, the sobriety of a world that has suffered many crises, the sobriety of a saint, or an artist, or a sinner, who suddenly sees in a wounded Bird that falls from the sky, in the lightning of a storm, in paint or ink or chalk or wood that has been sculpted, cut, chiselled, visualized in its grain, grained tree (all these and more), an infinite equation with the Incarnation of the law.

Sobriety, true sobriety, is an awareness of the edges of the chasm in the mind of order, the mind of the incarnate law (how priceless is such visionary understanding of mind and order). Order means risk. Order is a glimpse of the risks to all creatures inherent in creation. Creation is a storehouse of terrifying energies that imply risk. And the law incarnates itself within a chasm of risk as it broods in the storm upon every frail messenger of being that climbs or falls.

The courtroom was still, so still I almost forgot where I was, what I was saying.

‘Every theatre of judgement and trial is a theatre of Dream in its exposure of the language of order that pierces our mind to instil us with orchestrated varieties of the partial translation of sleeping hunger and waking thirst. As the Bird falls it incorporates that chasm of pierced consciousness into itself and revolves into a constellation that is neither pure hunger nor pure thirst.’

I clung as before to the edges of the chasm until hunger and thirst released the apparition of daemons glistening on the wings of the law, one on each wing. They were nameless and I could only identify them from memories of the environment of my childhood. My uncle’s abstention from food (his kind of order) on his alcoholic rounds and drinking bouts had invoked the morality of the creative fast within me as I grew up. Creative fast was one daemon of order upon one of the wings of the law. My father’s obsession with women — with the taste and colour and beauty of women — had reduced him to a shell (a shell of grief, a shell of innermost contrition) within which one hears the murmur of a Voice from an ocean of storm: passion’s peace at the heart of the storm. Passion’s peace was the other daemon of order on the other wing of the law.

And those daemons now turned into an intricate capacity for order and balance within the terror of lightning creation and storm, lightning art, as they stood or rested on the wings of a falling Bird in the judge’s Chair.

‘How strange,’ I replied, ‘that the daemons on the wings of the law, the daemons of order, are as familiar to me as the moral legacies I have drawn from my kith and kin.’

There was a murmur in the courtroom. The Voice of an organ murmured — ‘The daemon of the creative fast rides on one antiphonal wing of the law, the daemon of passion’s peace rides on the other, to sustain a balance when the storm rages and the sky appears to mirror the extinction of all creatures.’

*

There was a long interval of silence as hunger and thirst rearranged their element in the theatre of Memory and Imagination. I felt the trial was over but all at once the judge stirred and awoke. He rustled the papers before him into a gentle, sighing wind. His gaze had lightened from dusty corridors into the reflection of a feast. His self-mocking eyes were upon me. I was sobriety. Sobriety was on trial. I had often seen Proteus solemn as a judge. I had often seen him raise a tissue of dialectical ecstasy and argument with a straight face, a face of glass, a face to sip glass and glass’s reflection of the flea that bites the drunken dog.

‘I accept the miracle,’ the judge said at last, ‘I accept the miracle of insight into your early background and environment. Let us be clear. The balance you imply is threaded into natural events, into nature as a vessel of creation that may overwhelm us. The fiery liquid is not of our brew. All well and good. But surely, Anselm, you need to touch upon another kind of balance within man-made perils, man-made disasters as distinct from any kind of natural catastrophe …’

I stared into the vessel of the sky through the veiled fabric of the courtroom. ‘The daemons that provide a balance within the risks of creation help us to perceive another kind of balance within man-made engines, a man-made cosmos (so to speak). There I tend to see furies rather than daemons as agents of balance. But those furies alas are in a state of disarray, diseased genius

I stopped. The judge was waiting like a policeman at a feast that is scattered on a pavement in the cold blue light of the dawn. Ulysses sat there in rags and chewed a sandwich. I saw Rose’s majestic Horse in the Shadows of the courtroom. It loomed on the veiled terraces of the sanctuary. The sounding hooves ran into my mind. I felt close to being trampled but arose and faced the judge.

‘I felt myself,’ I said to him, ‘so close to the hooves I could have been lying in the throng on the pavement of Troy amidst those who were trampled as they ate and drank. What a craft that Horse was. In it was the diseased genius of a civilization. And yet how close it came to sheer divinity. Pregnant wood. Divine wood. It was the gift of the law. But a law that had eclipsed its true proportions of peace. The furies in the saddle were in disarray. And yet as I lay under the hooves I perceived them. I perceived human excess interwoven with lightning storm, lightning fear and passion, lightning excess. A terrifying blend! How difficult to unravel.’

The judge appeared to be growing smaller in his Chair. Curious foetal object? Curious child?

‘The first fury or mistress of the saddle,’ said the judge, ‘is Rose.’

‘The second,’ said the Shadow-organ of the living and the dead, ‘is fire, fire’s naked grace.’

‘Fire,’ said the judge, ‘is an emanation of the storm of creation that lingers in Memory at the moment of birth. It vanishes and we tend to forget we saw it but it reappears on the pavement in the feast that is abandoned by the trampled masses.’

‘The third rider is a craftsman of diseased genius‚’ I said quietly. ‘That is obvious. He built the Horse. He harnessed the Rose sisters (their lust for revenge) to naked fire, naked grace.’

As I spoke I could hear the singing voices of the Rose sisters afire in my mind. Sober mind. Incandescent mind.

‘Such craftsmanship is so magnificent, so marvellous, it mimics the incarnation of the law but falls short and becomes an engine of conquest.

‘It is ridden sometimes by missionaries, by priests who bless guns. One could enumerate the fascinations of such engines in every fable or legend in every land. Wheels in the Biblical sky, Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines, medieval submarines, etc., etc..’

The Rose-music was subsiding.

‘Rose knows this. I can hear the echo of her involuntary complaint as she rides every man-made legend. Her existence is at stake. Her hopes within my gestating unconscious lie in the craft of the animal body, its unique frailty, its beauty (not beauty in fashionable abortion), beauty as life, as the inimitably crafted seed of life.

‘Thus — more so than anyone else — it is Rose in my gestating unconscious (rather than my foetal unconscious in her as a judge) who must question ailing genius. On one hand Rose possesses the thorn.’

‘Tell me more of the thorn,’ said the judge.

I was silent for a moment listening to the distant music of agricultural and industrial revolutions in the blood of the thorn.

‘The thorn is an inoculation at the feast that brings Home to us the severity of the illness of genius. To be pierced in one’s cradle by the thorn is to imbibe a trace of the harvests our antecedents have sown and reaped in the past in all ignorance, ignorance of continuing consequences, ignorance of the furies they conscripted, the mutual traumas of enslaver and enslaved, broken forests in the flesh of the world, polluted rivers, etc., etc….’

‘Does this mean,’ said the judge, ‘that genius must reckon with the womb of the unconscious, with hope that a spark in the body of the living dreamer will erupt, a spark that will be fleshed by furies in balance …?’

‘Such a spark or Home is the Spirit of the kingdom of truth we have scarcely begun to build ….’

I felt I was being swept along by Shadow-organ music built of filaments of rain, flashes of sun in illuminations of soil, dark and red soil, the catspaw of the stars in the soil, rippling and pinpointed gold within the ground on which I stood. The ground had spoken through me and I felt I was on the edge of tilting into an incredible chorus but the judge drew me back. He reminded me of the thorn. ‘What else does Rose have?’ he asked.

I was glad to pull back from the chasm. The light or shining music, the sun’s bright, sweet claw, the stars’ music, cleared from my eyes. ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘she sponsors the knife with which Canaima is endowed. It was there in the cabin in which she and Proteus conversed. The very knife Alicia saw in the ribs of black Agamemnon.’ I was unable to continue. A choking sensation! I emerged from this recalling the chasm from which I had pulled back. I saw the chasm again. I recalled the sun’s bright, sweet claw interwoven now with dread. I recalled the stars’ music interwoven now with torment. Were these the unpredictable features of my gestating unconscious coming to birth at last?It was as if Alicia and Rose were my children, sprung from me into swiftest being, swiftest beauty or craft of the body which Rose desired. I ran with one in my Dream even as I ran from the other. I ran with swift Alicia in her fear, I ran from swift Rose into necessary meditation to encompass what was at stake in the craft of the seed — the innermost gift of the seed — of inimitable life. And therein in that moment of well-nigh inexpressible passion and compassion swift as lightning upon the darkest sky — when the gestation of deepest, darkest, innermost form, innermost seed (one has been carrying in the womb of the psyche for ages and generations) turns into newborn life — I saw the furies (I saw their saving rather than destroying light) with which one wrestles in every man-made enterprise, or institution of the heart, or cradle, or school of art.

Harold and the Rose sisters were as much my children now as they had been my terrible parents and relations, Proteus my child as much as he had been my wild patron and uncle … A balance of furies within the craft of the body, the gestating male/female body of spirit one nurtures, the body one slays, the body one sculpts into great man-made Characters of epic myth, epic war, epic disease, great Agamemnon, great Ulysses. Greatness becomes an organ of tenderness in the reversal of diseased antecedents and relationships, the child as the parent of civilization, the parent as child, old age as a mirror of newborn parallels and alternatives, interchangeable fates and freedoms, responsibilities in flight and escape. The great judge became a shape I held now in my arms, a shape of the law I nursed in my arms within a balance of furies, a shape that edges Memory’s man-made legends, man-made martyrdoms into the new inner craft of Rose and into the prospect of a newborn state.

THE FOURTH BANK (Home)

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations …

Establish thou the work of our hands upon us.

Psalm 90: 1 and 17

My ascent from the third bank of the river of space to the fourth in the theatre of Dream happened within an innermost, deepest blend of resources born of the unconscious, a blend that strengthened my hands, took me by surprise even as it uplifted me: a strengthening of limbs. I meditated in my flight from Rose on the ravelling/unravelling of the tapestry or coat that I associated with Penelope and Ross George in the Imaginary Cathedral and Refectory within the ruins of the burnt Potaro Mission House. Then I came abreast of uplifted Jacob’s ladder in its primitive lightning arc, one curved wing of the law upon the earth, the other breaking into the ceiling of the sky. Lastly I was advised again of the antiphony of the law and the Shadow-tongues of the living and the dead.

It was thus that I gained a sudden, almost precipitate appreciation of the sentence that had been passed upon me in the trial on the third bank of the river of space. Nurse the shadow of the law one carries in one’s arms into a life that speaks through and beyond death. Nurse the shadow of the work of one’s hands.

I listened to the faint tremor of the tides of space like a rounded syllable on the fourth bank of the river. So faint it may have been the vibration of a leaf that fell from my brow onto my hands.

‘Nurse the Shadow,’ said the leaf that grew from a tree on god-rock and from within the skeletal imprint of lightning winged stairway and Bird. ‘Build the Shadow-organ of Home. That is my sentence. Home is the turning world.’

It seemed at first sight, at first sound, a liberal, purely rhythmic sentence that defied logic until I grasped that the key to the future, to a changed heart, lay in complex rhythm, in complex incantation. It was no liberal sentence that had been passed upon me. Each whisper had been threaded into ‘daemons’ and ‘furies’, their subtlety and grain, their masquerade and spiral in the body of a plant, planted tapestry, ecology, the pitch of a voice in the body of wood, newborn wood, divine wood, the splinter of rock that sinks into a tide and cries its seismic lament in the shaken Waterfall that showers the globe. ‘There is a close proximity between natural catastrophe and man-made disaster — proximity as well as distinction — that one never grasps except in a thread that runs through ear and eye.’

The musicality or linkage between daemon (within natural catastrophe) and fury (within man-made legend, man-made Eden, man-made dynasty) was, I perceived, a component in the Shadow-organ of Home on the fourth bank of the river of space.

Take 1948 when I met Penelope and Ross George and Simon’s warrior-ghost in the Potaro. I saw now, all over again, the glitter of his military decorations within the rags of Ulysses’s beggarly coat upon the skeleton of a tree. He had returned home from leave, found Ross and Penelope together, innocently together in a bombed garden, but as a jealous Governor of flesh and blood seized her (as if she were a disobedient servant), flung her to the ground and advanced upon Ross with hands raised in a boxing gesture or like someone about to pull a giant bow. His Shadow was to dwell with them for the rest of their lives. He returned to his regiment and was killed on the beaches of Normandy.

Four years after his death they volunteered to work in South America and he sailed with them. He clung in jealous spasms at times — when he settled in the Potaro — to Pizarro, the king of thieves, who stalked El Dorado and whom he associated with Penelope’s suitors. He hated Ross. At times I dreamt he hated me as if I were another suitor: as if he saw through the flesh of the Rose (to whom I was linked in musical dialogue) into the possibility that Penelope might bear a child (his dream-child all unknown to him which Ross might claim as his own), a dream-child that might lie in wait for him with a thorn or a knife. Rose seemed to fuse two faces into Penelope’s features — two sisterly faces — and he could not tell which child was his by one sister, which was Ross’s by the other.

Penelope never conceived. She (like Harold’s Alicia) never bore a child. Her marriage to Ross remained childless. But she assembled a group of children into the choir of the Forest, the endangered Forest, the young voices of the Forest.

Had I understood I would have placed my ear (as I was able to do now in a Dream) against her body, beneath her breasts. I would have known that those children sang within her even as they sang without in the Forest. I would have known that therein lay the seed of an infinite symphony. Or opera. Or some other form of nameless music.

Had I listened with her ear to my body — no, my ear to her body — I may have perceived the thread of a leaf within her, within me, and recorded the endangered Forest or family tree of humanity in the rising mist of the river and in the veined Shell of the sounding Waterfall beneath god-rock, recorded the sentence of a universal Home that the judge had uttered in the courtroom long after — or was it long before — within a Memory of childhood’s involvement with a sea of roses and churchbells.

How often had I not stopped under the Mission House as the children sang: stopped to be haunted by sensations of the future and the past yet oblivious of the seed of music everywhere, in every dwelling house, every place, every village, every settlement. Oblivious of the enormous frailty of life.

Frailty, yes, frail dust, frail earth, frail soil that pours through one’s hands. Two years later three of Penelope’s Forest children were drowned in a boating accident. I recorded the fatality in my first book of pilgrimage upon the first bank of the river of space. I did not say there that the drowned were excellent swimmers. I forgot to mention that electric eels were seen grazing in the river the next morning and it became clear then what had happened.

Electric eels are innocent monsters one suppresses in every dream narrative of the depths and its fantastic creatures. They are an organ of apparently innocent craftsmanship in nature, neither daemon nor fury. They occupy an unexplored middle ground between these that puzzles our senses and our will. They approach in a swirling current without guile, fondle fluid arm and leg, and seek to dance with all who come close. But each stroke, each embrace, breeds shock and paralysis in those they touch. The swimmer in their embrace collapses and sinks like a stone. Stone as much as the spirit of rubber, rubbery limbs upon a serpent ladder in the dark waters through which they descend to the river of the dead.

Not Jacob’s ladder this time. Not the Macusi brightest wings this time between heaven and earth. Not these. But another manifestation of a ladder. The undulations of the innocent serpent within unexplored territory between daemon and fury, a dancing animal ladder in whose scale or measured rungs is secreted electricity, black lightning eel in reflected skies within the mirrored organ of fluid space.

They (Penelope’s drowned choir of three) sank into that organ. Sank into rhythmic stone, sank into eclipsed revived memories of an extensive organ of space through all substances and elements: the organ of Sebastian Bach (where one least expects to find it) in the Imaginary City of God that is imperilled yet drifting, arising within the voices of children in the waters of space. They sank into a medium of unexplored Being in which the very substance of the inner music of the stone transported the lighted candle I had received in the corridor of the third bank of the river of space into a numinous serpent-ladder. I would have lost them forever there within an innocent fabric I dreaded. Except for the lightning Shadow-music, Shadow-candle I visualized. Had I not seen its glimmer before in the shining rain that the king of thieves poured on the dancer in his grave? Had I not perceived it in all unconsciousness in the spiralling flute of evaporative/precipitative cycle?

Yes, I had attempted to draw and record it in the very ordinary tasks of my life (extended now into peculiar sublimity, peculiar dread, peculiar ecstasy), in the survey diagrams I drew and in the science I had pursued. Hardened though my heart may have been I had still been in touch on the first bank of the river of space with a genuine insight (through the ordinary tasks I performed), a true insight into rhythmic stone, shining rain. Except that the linkages between daemon and fury (and the unexplored territory that lay between) were a wholly new revelation upon the third and the fourth banks of the river of space. The inner stone unleashed the Shadow-organ of the deep river into new rain, into the distant voice of the churchbells I recalled in Alicia’s garden city theatre on the second bank of the river of space.

In all these — Forest children, ladder, stone, lightning, churchbells — I had missed the subtle linkages of a parent-Imagination in, through and beyond all creatures, all substances, all elements, a Parent beyond fixed comprehension until I began to retrace my steps. How easy to fall into despair as though one were drowning oneself in a lake of bruises one equated with God — how easy to feel stunned, to grow numb …

Until within the puzzlement of all one’s senses and one’s lapsed, self-paralysed will, the serpent-ladder draws one into bandaged yet visionary eyes to touch the Shadow-organ of space and hear the Shadow-voices of bruised paternity in oneself insisting that much remains to be done in the making of Home … and one suddenly swims up to the light…

I came back with a crucial, piercing sensation that one of Penelope’s drowned children was mine, the other was Ross’s, and the third was intricately at the heart of all her bruises a projection from within herself. Time would disclose the features of the Shadow-children that Penelope, Ross and I now held in our arms.

Yes, I was stunned. Not stunned by despair but by hope, by excitement. For it seemed an utterly prosaic discovery, prosaic hiatus, prosaic stillness at the heart of music in which we listened for a heartbeat and recalled the child arising on the serpent-ladder into a fossil creation, a living fossil of Innocence. Its apparent monstrosities, the dread it occasioned, arose from bruised maternity/paternity we carried in ourselves, the conviction that we were living fossil parents ourselves and the children we parented (their fluidity, their dust) were as old as Time … Such is the prose of the heartbeat of Time.

I had never thought of prose in this light until I stood now on the fourth bank of the river of space and perceived that within my fossilization of parent-self lay a Word I could not utter, a subtle bruised Word or window through bandaged eyes into space. My bruised Word or child seemed all the more tenderly beautiful in its haunted innocence because of a streak or a flaw in each live painting of metaphor, each live sculpture of metaphor one makes to define a borderline between ‘fossil parent’ and ‘terror of beauty at the heart of the serpent-Spirit’.

Ross’s bruised Word or child seemed all the more dark and overshadowed in its primitive innocence because of his genuine misgivings that accumulated into a borderline between ‘fossil parent or missionary’ and ‘terror of a whole unpredictable humanity that one shrinks from almost unwittingly as if one dreads contamination by the very Spirit one serves’.

Ross never lied about this I sensed as I retraced my steps into the mid-twentieth century. I saw all over again his instinctive distrust of — and withdrawal from — the savage Macusis (‘savage’ as he could not help feeling they were) who attended his classes in school and church. He never pretended he did not feel as he did, he never lied, but he suffered within the language he spoke. His early public school, university unthinking acceptance of epic formula, of the great epic ‘savages’ of ancient myth, the great warriors, crusaders, boatmen, underwent a change. He began to distrust them within the suffering Word and primitive child he now bore in his arms with acute misgiving and ambivalence. The Word changed. Its inherited glory dimmed. He tended to concentrate on its thinness, its wasted features. He spoke of the purity of the language in order to mask from himself apparent deficiencies he feared, the inability of the Word to probe the ultimate issues, he was driven to harness the Word to purely utilitarian purposes, he began to surrender himself to the visual and to retreat from arts of visualization or the seeing mind that lies through and beyond the consuming eye.

Ross’s savage child therefore was a far deeper and a more intricate judgement of language than one would have easily imagined. That judgement (embodied in the first place in conscience-stricken missionaries whom the world forgot) was to become apparent everywhere as the century progressed, in the political simplistic newspapers, in the profit-making documentaries, in the chronicles of radicals who — lacking depth in themselves — clung to every dispute of nihilist conscience, dispute of nihilist religion, dispute of nihilist politics, as a means to flatten the world into implicit class warfare or implicit racial conflict. All this was woven into Ross’s ‘savage child’ — into immigration or emigration ethics that were to come — within Potaro’s El Dorado, the El Dorado of the Seine or the Rhine or the Thames or the Mississippi where white-masked teachers face black-masked children … Such is the prose and the flat poetry of the polarized heart. Ross felt all this, grieved over its implications, long before it became apparent in the meretricious philosophy of the mass media.

By retracing my steps it became possible to lift the bandage of the Word a little and to see, or bear, what would have been unbearable before, namely, the stillness, the echoing stillness of the Word within varieties of the hollow or fossil parent one was. I was able to accept Ross’s difficulties, to learn from him, to chart in a mutual hollow unique correspondences through and beyond his ethic of withdrawal from the ‘savage’; I was drawn back within these varieties of unique correspondence to a moral transcending utilitarian ethic and into a visualization of the unexplored worlds or territory I had glimpsed between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’ but in a different light now, the light of the bruises that encompass the death of a child, the birth of a child, the resurrection of a child: all stillnesses (death and resurrection) threaded into the movement of birth downwards, inwards, outwards, upwards to leave a transfigurative wound that revives a conception of the mystery of the Word, the Word made flesh.

The ‘drowned children’ that Ross, Penelope and I carried were woven into the tapestry of the Word. Such was the Dream territory of the fourth bank of the river of space overlooking the serpent-ladder. Ross bore his child within a net that made him conscious of a ‘savage formula of glory’ he had grown to distrust. Penelope bore hers within resources of inner metaphor, inner tapestry, inner thread that ran — it seemed to me in the Dream — into her childhood and her early relationship to Simon. I bore mine within the chemistry of a wound I would have been unable to define as transfigurative except in counterpoint to missionary Ross’s ambivalent ethic. Shadow-organ counterpoint. Shadow-organ investiture of the deprived Word, the bruised Word, the well-nigh hollow, thin Word of my age, I now carried in my mind and body and hand in the intricate shape of a Macusi child I had drawn up from the river of space into breath-body. It was clear that we had lifted the Shadow of the three drowned children from the river. Negative resurrection? Negative funeral procession? ‘Time to take them back,’ Penelope said, ‘to the hill and valley country from which they came to attend our El Dorado Mission School. Time to learn from them about ourselves.’ Ross looked dubious as though he already knew all he needed to know but he was curious about rare botanical specimens of the river of space overlooking the serpent-ladder. He had armed himself when he left England with several volumes by nineteenth-century European travellers in South America. Those volumes floated now on the crest of a Dream-wave around him. Were they possessed of unruly spirits? Of Shadows I felt. The Shadows Ross’s predecessors had borne in their heads and arms when they left Europe, Shadows of classical lore with which to christen orchids and flowers. ‘The Dido orchid,’ I murmured, ‘may, it is said, be found in these parts.’ Ross’s eyes lit up with the purest excitement and curiosity though the allusion to Dido left him uneasy. I was unable to pursue the matter for it was time to leave.

It was a blue morning, blue yet red with bruises of dawn-cloud. We set out from the Mission House around seven. The year was 1950. It was the week of the drowning fatality (as an El Dorado newspaper had put it). The Macusi lightning axeman (subdued now and shrunken) whom I had met on the first bank was our guide. We made our way uphill, up the blue, red, dawn-cloud world to the grave where Canaima’s dancer lay. It was as if we were venturing upon another planet to mourn our dead. I recalled the bird-text on the lips of the dancer when I had come upon him long ago on the riverbank. Here on the fourth bank of the river of space that bird-text had been uplifted from the first bank (uplifted grave as well) into our gateway into the planetary Forest. We stopped at the uplifted grave as our guide moved up ahead to clear a mass of fallen branches from the mouth of the trail.

Ross had put an arm around Penelope. They stood beside the dancer’s epitaph in the very depression that the king of thieves had occupied when he poured shining rain into the ground. I saw the shadow of leaves touch their faces with the light bruise of a candle that seemed to sing in the wind. Shadow organ investiture of the technology of a candle or a bulb when one sets foot in unexplored realms. How else may one come abreast of what lies beyond one’s vocabulary of apprehension? Penelope grieved. The body of the child she carried began to slip from her arms. It was after all an alien burden that did not fit easily into the texts of her education in the world from which she had come. Was it an illusion to cherish the body of a drowned alien? Why not let it slip into oblivion? Why not let it resume its path upon the serpent-ladder into deep anfractuous caves and deeper still into the river of the dead? As Ross placed his arm around her her question was answered by the bird-text in the ground. She looked up into drought-planets, forest-planets, riverain-planets and into the fossil bodies of the living in their anfractuous, multi-layered, circuitous corridors of space. She heard the faint sound of aircraft far above and was able to see — from the clearing where we were — a white ribbon of frozen smoke in the wake of an aeroplane.

We stood beneath the lines and circles of flight of hundreds of criss-crossing planes on their way to the uplifted graves of Rio or Buenos Aires or Ecuador or Caracas or Port-of-Spain or Kingston. A veritable hive of transparent or uplifted corridors and caves, uplifted by bird-men and women into space. Not to speak of satellites and perpetual debris afloat above us, immersed in an ocean of space around us, in perpetual suspension between us and the stars. Uplifted graves? Uplifted cradles? And all at once Penelope resumed the burden in her arms, she pulled it against her breasts in an ocean of space in which she swam in my Dream into a future from which she could not escape. All were involved, all were responsible, all were being tested to the core …

It seemed to me then that she would have preferred not to be touched, not to be held by Ross. She accepted his arm because had she pulled away he would not have understood the singular tide, the complex labyrinth of emotion and passion in which the drowned child lay against her now, heavy as stone yet frail as an unimaginable feather from the wings of God’s angel as if to witness to untranslatable Innocence within the wastes of Time. I could not be sure that this was how she felt. And yet I knew. I knew how coiled one is into the ladder of lightning peace that runs midway between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’: so coiled that one may unwittingly embrace another and bring hurt to him or her — a hurt or an injury of which one is unconscious.

One may embrace another when one’s arm or body is not desired at that particular moment. One should step back but one continues (sometimes apparently mindlessly) to step forward. Such is the dance of primitive nature that is intent on its goal. One’s touch is born of the riddle of possession (the desire to possess), the riddle of compassion (the desire to support or console). One may seek not to possess but to console and still bring the shock of pain or grief… The Dream intrudes. It makes one aware of what is happening and yet it does not disclose why sorrow or grief is a thread in the dancing fabric of innocence …

The other submits (as Penelope does now to Ross in the Dream) because she is aware that the need to withstand the terrors of primitive nature runs deep: it runs in the voices of the blood in one’s veins into a whisper of untouchable beauty.

‘Touch what is untouchable. Dance to a music of genesis one scarcely remembers …’

Perhaps in secretly withstanding Ross, yet accepting the consolation of his arm, Penelope was shaken by the voice of the drowned child she had taught to sing her English songs, shaken by another music, the music of genesis that triggered a response in the eel, the dance with the eel, the lightning dance, black lightning peace. Black lightning peace? Black lightning conception?

Peace became, conception became — against that sounding backcloth of the music of genesis within the whispering tide — a measure of our mutual acceptance of fate (when fate voices its legend, the legend of the dance of genesis), our mutual acceptance of freedom (when freedom voices its legend, the legend of ultimate insight, ultimate consolation), melodic Conscience.

I reached out too to touch and support Penelope as she seemed on the verge of toppling into a faint. The Dream had not disclosed to me or to her or to Ross or to our savage guide why sorrow and grief were a thread in the fabric and the dance of innocence but it offered a clue now to the grain of the hollow Word. Hollowness needs to clothe itself again with heaven’s dance and then it may plumb the flesh of genesis that we carry everywhere in the body of the unconscious. Melodic Conscience is the subtle flesh of the Word that clothes a child one bears on earth … Such is the prayer of the Word, the intimate, ultimate dance of the Word, the renewed Word, the ecstatic Word.

I was driven by a glimmering understanding of the voices heard in mutual blood yet could not fully articulate: voices of fate and freedom one hears as if they were a breach in a vocabulary of fear and apprehension, the breach that clothes one’s deprivations with fire-music, water-music, earth-music …

We were at last in a position to face our expedition on the fourth bank of the river of space. It was as if — whatever divisions stood between us — a new dialogue had commenced as the twentieth century drew to a close and we retraced our steps.

Our guide was signalling to us. The mouth of the trail had been cleared and we climbed and entered the Bush. The fantastic, planetary greenheart trees rose into marvellous silvery columns on every hand. Clothed in water-music. The trail was narrow. We walked in single file. The cracked silvery veil of greenheart possessed the texture of slow-motion rain falling within the huge Bell of a still Waterfall in which whispering leaves of fluid sound ran up into veil within veil of Shadow-organ gloom towards the highest reaches of the Forest and the slits of the Sky far above. Subtle fire-music.

I had never before seen the shining bark of greenheart columns in this slow-motion raining light (nor the Sky clothed in frail ribbons of fire-music within the lofty gloom of a Bell) in all my remembered Dream of Forests I had travelled in my youth. How young was I, how old was I? We had entered it seemed — the Macusi guide first, Penelope second, Ross third, I last — an innermost chamber of the magical Waterfall beneath god-rock. It encompassed the globe, the ancient world, the modern world. As if the Waterfall had been uplifted from the river and transferred within us in the music of space, around us in Shadow-organ imperceptible (not wholly imperceptible for we were aware of it) dance of genesis.

I recalled the funeral procession when the inner bodies in the rocks in the Waterfall had left their shell to guard the waters even as they arose within the king of thieves and others who bore Canaima’s bird-text victim to his grave. It seemed now that the dancer’s text was a further conversion or alchemy of inner sculpture into living Memory. Penelope, Ross, the Macusi guide and I had been sculpted or painted not from rock but from the silvery text of rain within the fluid, still Bell of the Waterfall to bear the absent bodies of the drowned children to their homes within the tapestry of the Word.

I began to pray — ‘May the daemons and the furies and the archangels help us,’ I prayed, ‘to make unique and far-reaching global distinctions in fabrics of sorrow and innocence, the fabric of names by which we name ourselves, saint-names, king-making names, queen-making names, etc., etc. We have a long way to go backwards into all these names, the names we have given flowers, trees, stars, the names with which we have tagged genesis (though the music of genesis still breaks through); we have a long Dream to take back into our callouses, into the complacent formulae by which we live (whether of stock heroism or stocks-and-shares salvation), a long Dream to take forwards into our addiction to mass prosperity, the ethics of mass prosperity, before we turn and confront our two selves (our many-rooted, many-branched two selves), past and future selves in the present, and confess to an unique and sacred Poverty that makes us susceptible to the regenerated eye, the regenerated ear within the very grain of things and possessions, places native and foreign that we take for granted in our history books.’

The prayer had barely crossed my lips when the perils and dangers we faced dawned upon me within the gloom and the Bell of the forested Waterfall. We were making an ancient journey, we were making a modern journey. We were still rooted in the deprivations of the Word though we sensed a breach that clothed these in paradoxical senses. Had not Penelope implied on the second bank of the river of space that her mission was woven into the tapestry of the ‘adventure of love unfulfilled’? Now on the fourth bank (as we bore the Shadows of the drowned in our arms) that mission was as much a penetration of local sentiment as of non-local and universal grave and cradle in the interwoven aspects of incarnated text. It was idle claiming within the divisions and sub-divisions of the Word that haunted us, within the spaces that lay between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’, between ‘fate’ and ‘freedom’, between ‘endurance’ and ‘passion’, that the language of identity was not fraught with questions we still had to answer, questions of electric mood, ecstasy, electric depression. Melodic Conscience was on our side within each frail candle that shone in the Bush as the breath of music but it was not to be taken for granted. It possessed hidden darknesses, hidden teeth. I felt them biting now into the soil of my mind. Soil of mind! Earth-music. Painful soil, mind, earth-music. Our way was barred I swore by the teeth of music dressed in a sudden, unpredictable downfall of weather and mood. I felt myself an enemy of nature and Mankind as the rainy high mouth of the Forest descended and closed in. Was it morning, was it noon, was it premature Night? Absurd ultimatum. Slightly shivering ultimatum of the enemy within a wave of heat that subsided but left us drenched, bitten to the skin, and cold. Absurd teeth within a Dream that is the simultaneous exposure of untranslatable fear and bias in ourselves. In such exposure, such unearthly music of devouring impulse, melodic Conscience bit deep, bit so deep, it jested with us, it painted us into enemies of the very nature and Mankind we wanted to serve. Bitten artist, bitten engineer, bitten saint, bitten sinner, civilization’s bitten missionary and teacher, civilization’s bitten savage.

We had been walking for several hours. It seemed an age in the mouth of space. The trail ahead of us was blocked again. Fire was needed to clear a path. I tried to disabuse myself of devouring impulse within and without but the tangled branches raised their arms imploringly into a Shape, a woman’s Shape (I could see the fern of her hair and her lustrous black eyes like pools reflected upwards from the ground) crowned by an Orchid. It was not Queen Rose this time. It was bitten-by-fire Queen Orchid. Our guide had set a match to the heaped branches across the trail.

‘The Dido Orchid,’ cried Ross. He seemed in this instant of fire-music immune to the flame in my Dream as if his spontaneous, aroused curiosity or excitement was so strong it baffled the mouth of space in which we stood. He leaned over the Orchid, smiled, I saw the glitter of his teeth this time, touched by flame, kissed by flame. The volumes on South America he had brought from England shaped themselves into brilliant ashes, brilliant intercourse of incandescence and human curiosity that has sustained many a fiery adventurer in the desert, at the Poles, in the depths of the rain-forest, military high-flying adventurers as well before they unleash their bomb. Each volume, each page, was clothed by running music, the cautionary fire-music that breaches the heart of Dream. I could still read the ghostly names of ghostly authors in the subtle furnace, some had lodged themselves in a crackling chorus of high-flying nineteenth-century super-power map-makers, botanists, biologists, evolutionists, soldier-civil servants, anthropologists, chroniclers, etc., etc.: Schomburgk, Horsman, In Thurm, Beebe, Boddam-Whettam, Humboldt, Roth, Waterton … A page fluttered, turned in the fire-music and I read, as page intertwined itself with page, the hand of another nameless writer –

The Dido Orchid was christened by a German botanist. It takes its name from Queen Dido of Carthage and Libya. Note the flaming, wondrous, flaxen, yet blackened, ferny leaves and petals. Queen Dido built her own funeral pyre in Libya as though she had been bombed by fate when Aeneas abandoned her.

I peered into the fire as the nameless hand dissolved in the brilliant ashes of classical investitures upon the flora of the fourth bank of the river of space in which lies the ancient, unconscious, epic seed of modern botany and modern warfare.

The nameless hand revived itself in the ashes of Dream and Ross and I read –

Jupiter forbade Aeneas to wed Dido and settle in Africa. All well and good to dally with her, to sleep with her, but it was implied that ‘miscegenation’ would come of such a union. And yet Virgil painted the African queen with white skin and flaxen hair. Such was the formula of epic evolution. Was it a formula that inevitably sustained the transmission of errors in the oral material that great epic poets use?

The blaze settled. White teeth, red fire’s black voice! Nameless muse or chorus of the imagination that runs in one’s blood. Ross’s eyes had darkened. I saw him for a flashing moment in the bombed garden in which Simon had come upon him and Penelope long ago. His love of her had been translated into a curiosity that tied him to a foreign landscape and the phantom South American orchid of ancient Libya and Carthage. I sensed the music of the unconscious in him, unconscious seed underlying the vocabulary of the imperial travellers who were our predecessors.

Indeed I could be sure of nothing. How conscious was I of the imperial legacies that tended to frame the environment of my mind? I may have read in the nameless hand in the fire a paraphrase of Schomburgk’s German prose which I had seized intuitively and made into my own. On the other hand — other nameless hand — I may have tapped the rhythm of Im Thurm’s sensuous English dialogue with the rivers of Guyana and found it native to fire, my fire, my blood. What was clear was the necessity to penetrate, replay, reinterpret, and not succumb to, formulae of static evolution: to respond to the true, multiple voices — familiar, unfamiliar, native, alien — that run in one’s mixed inheritance, mixed blood. The fire-music, the earth-music, had illumined the mouth of space that we (and our imperial predecessors) had entered long before a voyage to the moon had been contemplated.

Those true voices in the live fossil blood of music could turn nevertheless and tear one’s convictions into shreds, into a beggar’s rags, with jesting translations, with jesting paraphrase, of flawed history, flawed anthropology, flawed biology, enshrined by cultural habit into pure white, pure black, frames. Deprivation’s frames.

‘She bars our path,’ the voice in my blood cried. The blaze was high. The black African queen with white skin and flaxen hair split into two pictures. One was a constellation of Botanic lore transferred into the soil of the Americas. The other was a crucial moment in the womb of the human imagination when the queen gives up the ghost of black or white purity and biased fossil, biased formula, on her funeral pyre in the heart of future generations.

Ross was aroused. He shared my vision but distrusted it. He was staring at the Macusi guide who tended the blaze that had been lit in the blocked trail of fallen branches and trees. He stroked the enigmatic Orchid flesh of the queen. The stoic demeanour of the savage who led us reminded him of the pupils in his classroom and drew a veil as it were between him and the fire with its frail implications of passion’s peace on the delicate singed bloom in his hand.

‘Peace is an illusion,’ he murmured, ‘without massive deterrence. It is unfair, no doubt, to equate the young Macusis in my classroom, their slightly sombre and entrenched expression, with the dread efficiency and uniformity of the Nazis or the Japanese in World War Two. And yet it is the Shadow in the mirror, the Shadowy conflagration of a queen or a king or an imperial dynasty that fills me with misgiving. I see not peace there in primitive fires and implicit holocausts but xenophobia. I hear no music except the delirium of power. Alas, people fear people everywhere, Anselm. I wish it were otherwise.

‘Natives fear immigrants, immigrants natives. It has taken nearly a century and a half for the French and the Germans to relinquish a pattern of feud that may have had its roots in the Napoleonic wars. I have seen my friends and relations engulfed in two great wars on European soil in this century. I have French and German antecedents — though I am English — and (let me say in jest) I sometimes see myself as my own worst and best enemy with whom — thank God — a treaty is now possible but at a price, Anselm…’

‘What price?’

‘A price that involves an awareness of savage idealism. I wish it were possible to enter a laboratory (not a monastery, mind you) and devote the rest of my life to training a telescope or a microscope on forests and constellations, flowers and stars. A blissful existence! Instead my job is to educate a tribe, a generation, I cannot fix, do not — in heaven’s name — wish to fix. For then I would have betrayed everything I hold dear.’ He was laughing at himself and yet I felt he was asking a question of me. Not of me! Of the substance of Dream that divided and united us.

‘Eruption is a measure of a healing process in nature,’ I cried. I felt tears in my eyes. His logic seemed unanswerable. ‘The globe cleanses itself when it quakes and spews forth lava. There would be no flowers to spy on without the quake, the lava.’ I could not stop the tears welling up and pouring from me in the Dream. ‘The gods are an eruption within and from humanity‚’ I said haltingly, ‘that may set in train …’ I hesitated, ‘set in train a process of healing once we turn, face events, and make distinctions.’

He stared at me against the mirror of fire-music (‘delirium of power’, he had called it) as if I were a child. I had brought him no release from misgiving. And yet I could not be sure but I sensed that a tension of true counterpoint lay between us in the abyss of our age: a deeper self-confessional edge to our lips in self-portraitures and the sculpture of others. His mind about the nature of history, the nature of nature, was apparently made up. Mine was too. And yet I felt the very divisions between us were a catalyst (if ‘catalyst’ were the word) of far-flung change and of the translation of ourselves on to another level of being that would assist us to see ourselves differently in different shades and lines and fragments of existence.

‘Rid yourself of myth, Anselm‚’ he said softly. ‘It’s a dangerous addiction, this business of eruptive yet healing nature. A manifesto of anarchy. Reform of our institutions is necessary of course. Everywhere. But we need discipline and control. I have seen eruptive human nature, revolutionary activity, and it’s a fruitless bargain. No one wins.’

‘You’re turning your back on what I am saying, Ross‚’ I cried.

‘What are you saying, Anselm?’ His manner was cold despite the leaping tongues of fire.

‘I am saying that eruptive being has now reared its head in all of us (conservatives have become radicals, radicals pseudo-conservatives) — whether we admit it or not — in all sorts of ways. Not the old revolutionary compulsions. Reared its head because of technological uncertainties, the clash of cultures, the susceptibility of masses to charismatic leadership …’ I blurted out almost crudely, crude Word, yet desire for truth — ‘The gods are not God‚’ I cried. ‘That much we know, Ross.’

‘Do we?’ he spoke like a complete stranger in the Dream.

I turned and looked into the fire as if I spoke from it, in it, as if I leapt from broken ladder of flame to broken ladder of flame in danger of falling into a pit. I held a charred volume in one hand and read from it in the Dream. ‘God does not imbue us with the power of delirium but with a capacity for infinite, creative distinctions at the heart of all relationships, relationships of sorrow or joy, bitterness or sweetness …’ The page was crumbling but I was still able to read —’ … invaluable distinctions we need to make when the gods overshadow our world. The gods are in phenomena that excite us to mindlessness, mindless self-abandon, mindless superstition, the gods erupt in charismatic lusts and leadership, charismatic radicalism to purge our ranks, expel our enemies, charismatic conservatism to bind, to entrap, charismatic self-interest, charismatic mutiny or strike. The gods are dangerous, sometimes notoriously fickle and amoral. But they open the way to distinctions we scarcely ever make until their shadow darkens our path. A terrifying lesson. If we bundle together God, gods, daemons, furies in a uniform and gross package then we misinterpret sacred balances and forfeit the instructive bite of music, the interior anatomy, the creative fast that is required of us…’

‘Bundle together,’ said Ross drily. ‘The language of fascism, Anselm, the language of uniformity, regimentation. Bundle together! The gods like that. Easier than making distinctions.’

The dream-volume slipped from my hands but its utterance was imprinted on my mind. I did not reply. I found myself staring hard at the blackened fossil flesh of the marvellous Orchid in Ross’s hand. As though his hand lay in mine, mine in his, within the abyss of our age. I saw a library of interior counterpoint no one could destroy replete with the rhythmic tapestry of the City of God, leaf, petal, bone, shell. The resurrection of fossil eternities into living diversity! A library that lay in the future, within us, beyond us. I would have given my sight to open a visionary page, to read a visionary line, to enter the future: the future’s miraculous community of souls born of the divisions of the past.

I would have given my sight to see backwards into a desolate age from the future. Curious self-contradiction! I would have given my sight to see with eyes acquainted with every extremity, to see myself as a living, resurrected fossil steeped in diversity not eternity-for-the-sake-of-eternity, to see my own blindness now from an unravelled, penetrative standpoint within the distant future, to know myself in all my limitations and through such paradox to live within yet beyond the present frame or burning moment …

The wish or prayer had scarcely touched my lips when the blaze subsided. The trail was clear. A doorway into the future. I felt fear then. How easy to slip into the future’s complacency and dream one has escaped the past and the present. No, that was not my intention. My hope was to retrace my steps from the future into the present and the past and know oneself — know the everlasting stranger within oneself — as never before. I had seen Ross for an instant as a total stranger who then became profoundly meaningful within the tension of interior counterpoint. It was this thread I wished to pursue through and beyond all measure of complacency. Perhaps in breaking a formula of complacency — in becoming a stranger to oneself — one would gain the strength to bear the full complication of relationships one had begun to unveil in ascending from bank to bank in the four banks of the river of space.

Should I shrink from such insight into a tapestry of responsibilities, a community of souls (saints and sinners) that — in tearing complacency to rags — could shake me to the core of being?

Had I not already come forwards/backwards a far way in my pilgrimage? Was it not wise to leave it there? Leave them there? Ross, Penelope, the drowned children?

I thought I heard Ross say, as the last embers of the blaze subsided, ‘Let’s stop, Anselm. Let’s go to the riverbank and bury our drowned children in the ruined Mission House that lies in the future, a future we know in the Dream as you retrace your steps from 1988 into 1950. We know Canaima will burn the House in 1966 though this is 1950. Why go forward still more into an uncertain, perhaps threatening, future that may take us back beyond what we already know?’

It seemed sensible advice. And yet…

‘We have come too far‚’ I said, ‘We have earned the right to go forward not into a Golden Age from which to retrace our steps, not into the return of a Golden Age (of which El Dorado in Guyana is a pertinent Shadow), but into profoundest self-recognition of ourselves in and through others: the interior anatomy, the true terrifying flesh of the Word, the true terrifying knowledge of the Heart that may set us free at last from fear.’

*

The fire-talk lucid conversation with its abrupt, wholly natural transitions, traceries, linked memories through polar opposites, faded into sudden darkness upon my lips. Nothing remained except a vague self-portraiture. The procession continued on its way. We camped further along the trail in a valley that was the gateway into the remote and small settlement from which the drowned child I carried had come. I laid the child (whose intricate face and body baffled my sight) on the ground. Sleep was a chasm, a fault in the landscape of Dream, and one wondered whether in falling more steeply or deeply into it everything would vanish forever in the future.

Despite our misgivings the sun rose with new morning in the fractionalized long Night, long Day, of fossil insight into the past. We clung to each feature of landscape as if it were a piece of live, bright coal that lit one’s mind anew. Whereas we had commenced our processional journey with the sensation of being sculpted shells of water, sculpted bodies composed of a fluid reality, now it was as if we had entered another dimension of the still Waterfall of space, a dimension of the future.

Here the great lofty precipitation of silvery bark upon the trees had given way to an open grassy savannah. Streams ran down from the hills. It was light itself that rained upon us: an inner texture of light as though the bark of the Forest had unclothed itself into naked brightness within the multidimensional fabric of the Waterfall.

I was excited by the light paint (restorative fossil paint, meticulous live fossil flesh) I placed anew on our lips in the resurrectionary canvas of space. Modern resurrected savage reflecting ancient primitive humanity within ourselves.

How far had we arrived in the future? We three, carriers of the dead?

‘Every Waterfall‚’ I said to Ross, ‘one enters in Dream or comes upon within a great continent such as this — a continent inhabited by lost or forgotten cultures one needs to see anew from the future, within an Imaginary future — is a veiled messenger of the womb of the sea, of the origins of life and technologies of death rooted in strangest innocence. I trust we shall learn and see. It stands and descends — that Waterfall — upon an escarpment; it appears at first sight to embody an absolute ridge between the past and the present, between the sea and the land … But look!’

Our camp lay within mountainous terrain, the valley itself— in its lofty right — however contained by the vessel of the land — possessed the escalating contours of a hill one million years above the sea: a fractionalized aeon’s perch in space above the tides of the ocean that still crawled in every rock garden.

‘Take the weight of a pebble in your hand. Strip away the mountains within the interior anatomy of space. Imagine ourselves as animate, beautiful, dancing skeletons perched here nevertheless in the ground of a valley that is no valley at all but a hill far up in Time above the rock garden of the sea that fertilizes itself as it splits into reversible lava or life-giving water.’

As I spoke I fished in my pocket for Inspector Robot’s glasses that I had used in ascending god-rock — glasses that fused a parallel between ‘artificial time’ and ‘quantum, simultaneous, microscopic eyes in all fabrics of existence whether flower or grass or tree’.

‘Now replace the mountains. Look through Robot’s glasses at the streams in the distance descending from the mountains we have fleshed into life again — skeleton, vanished mountains we have clothed into action again above the valley/hill on which we stand. Those streams become messengers of the ocean’s volcanic peace, the ocean’s tumult yet inherent quietude, raised above extinct devouring premises as valley is raised above running valley and cloud rains upon still cloud.

‘The mountains become a precipitate ridge, slow-motion Waterfall in space, half-solid appearance. A mountain is a slow-motion Waterfall within the simultaneous eyes of past/ future space. It is not an absolute ridge or monumental fortress between our past memories of the warring sea and our present occupation of the conquered land.

‘It is a fault that may imprison us in territorial conflict unless our eyes are opened to far future Imaginary expeditions when humanity takes its Shadowy rivers of the dead into the stars as new rain upon desert planets.’

Perhaps we were stealing a march into the future upon Inspector Robot in making such use of his glasses. I remembered he had tried to steal a march upon me when he sought to ape the features of the great judge at the trial on the third bank of the river of space.

We did not have long to wait. Gleaming, dazzling messengers were sighted on their way from the settlement we were seeking. The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses …

I STOPPED. All at once the lines — ‘Perhaps we were stealing a march, etc., etc.’ — that had been dictated to me within the theatre of the future — as it drew me to recall the past — seemed too inflexible (inflexible fossil-humour?), lines steeped, I felt, in an aroma that filled me with unease. ‘Whyunease?’ said the dictating Voice, ‘why did you stop? I am no future dictator you have come upon, I am not dictating what you may continue to record on the fourth bank. Such apparent dictation and its aroma stemfrom — let me put it this way — transparencies of the unconscious. And these have an inimitable style of their own that seems dictation from an alien source. They can be very disturbing. Conscience is the spark you are seeking to trace within every dazzling transparency and within unique atmospheres and fossil-strata above you and beneath you. Fire was the atmospherichumour in which you read the nameless hand and its writings before you came through the trail to where you now are.

‘Now it’s not that strict fire which you experience in this reach of future time. It’s another element, an element that has evolved from imprints of fire, an element that is not fire in any ordinary sense yet it smoulders into a consciousness that does not burn but may for that very reason be unbearable, well-nigh unbearable, at times.

‘It is the spark of the living Word that you seek, the sacred Word. And that’s akin to a compulsion even as it indicates liberation. It’s upsetting. It’s a style that drives you on but leaves you unsettled, even unhappy. The touch of long-dead, buried masters who travelled into the future long, long ago and who are intent on helping you in the quest for truth, yes,truth I say — truth that is interwoven with a sacred kind of self-deception(odd business I know)but without which — without that peculiar interweave — conscience would not exist. You will see and it will shake you, Anselm.’

I would see in due course. That was his promise. I wanted to close my ears to the voice or voices of the transparent unconscious. But it was impossible to do so. What was the last image I received when I saw‘the gleaming, dazzling messengers’ approaching?

The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses. It was the glistening drums they carried, and other adornments on their bodies, that made them shine. I recalled Proteus’s half-jesting remark to Rose in the hillside cabin on the third bank of the river of space: ‘infant lighthouse of science’. I was not sure I had remembered exactly but it helped us to feel partially at home with the savages of the past one perceived in a burning, non-burning light from a tower or tent in the future.

We looked through Robot’s glasses within transparencies of the unconscious at the ancient masquerade of a newborn tribe. They wore a long subtly woven belt — or shining umbilicus-eel — that issued from the region of their navel and coiled itself around their bodies to reach their shoulder and neck.

It was as if they bore the brunt of a fault within the inner/outer body of brightest innocence one could scarcely visualize except as a jest of nature. The bright umbilicus or eel brought home the drowned children (the Shadowy obscure bodies of the drowned children) we had brought to them for ritual burial. And the ease with which the eel had coiled itself around them suggested an intimacy with the elements (with the fluid electricity of the elements, animal electricity, animal ‘lighthouse’) that revived in me an attachment to the mother of light and darkness (the twin-Rose) who had spared my life.

Were they pitiless phantoms in the fossil-strata of the unconscious or harbingers of hope?

‘Eel’ or ‘umbilicus’ equalled ‘electricity’.

That was the nature of their innocent jest, innocent transgression into consuming technology, consuming spires of electricity that would pierce the heavens and rival the stars. The gift of life was a gift of terrifying responsibility.

‘Eel’ or ‘infant lighthouse’ equalled a ‘fault’ in the generation of innocence within the depths of nature and as a consequence one was prone to worship nature and yet to recoil from it.

Before we knew what had happened they had surrounded us. They flattened our tower or tent in a flash and we were pulled without further ado into the long grasses as into a river of passions. The green swell of the grassy tide hemmed us in yet swept us along. The white waving crest of the sun sang with non-burning heat. It was a river as well as a lake or sea into which the band or tribe took us. The Shadow of my ‘drowned child’ had been snatched from my arms but Ross and Penelope still held theirs. I dreamt of long ancient spars and the rigging of sailing ships sprouting from the bodies of men. I dreamt of the wrecked cabin on a waving hillside in which my uncle Proteus had pleaded with my twin-mother Rose for my life.

It was a Dream of such power the cabin became preternaturally real. It became the grain of expeditions in space seen from a newborn standpoint of truth and self-deception. Truth in that it was a vivid articulation from within the unconscious of the perils I faced when my mother was taken ill and I was infected by the very Asian flu epidemic in Alicia’s household: an illness that occurred in the very year or month that my mother’s twin sister gave birth to my half-brother Lucius Canaima. The two happenings were so blended — my mother’s and my illness (on one hand) and the pregnancy of the other Rose and the birth of her child (on the other) — that I was deceived by patterns of memory into dreaming my recovery from illness occurred in a cabin on a waving hillside the day I was born and that my half-brother (five years younger than I) was my ageless twin born on the same day. His age tended to vary in the recurring Dream, five years, six years younger, five years, six years older than I. Sometimes born in my skin, I in his. He was ageless. He was elusive. Our mother was the twin-Rose …

How had I come into such knowledge of hidden family relationships (Harold and the Rose sisters) in my Aunt Alicia’s household? Had I overheard her and Proteus talking? Had I known it all in childhood and suppressed it into symbolic truth, symbolic distortion, symbolic displacement of seniority (saints/sinners) until it erupted in the corridor of the third bank of the river of space in my book of dreams?

I dreamt that Proteus pleaded with the twin-Rose my mother for my life the day I was born and that Canaima lay not far from me in the cabin. It was all utterly real — my recovery from illness in Proteus’s plea — and yet as I retraced my steps I perceived a magical and profound self-deception. I saw now what the Voice had been implying but a short while ago: conscience would not exist, the spark of conscience that apprises us of the invaluable texture of life, the gift of creative life, the necessity to give an account of our thoughts and our deeds, would vanish were it not for truth (the vividness of eternal truth) and magical self-deception to which we confess, a magic that opens the way to reshape, revise, penetrate again and again, unravel, ravel again and again the materials of age and youth and childhood and desire (the materials of experience) that we build into a cabin or a ship or a house or whatever tapestry of implicit being asserts our pilgrimage in space.

Proteus’s cabin had slipped down the waving hillside of Dream into a pit or a stage within a great clearing in the sea of grasses. Our captors had brought us there. The sun was held still in a painted net within its path of descent. Everything looked fixed and still. The yellow golden paint lay unmoving on the stage and cabin. And the pit seemed but an extension of the mouth of space in which we stood. A reconstructive job. Beautifully determined and reassembled. I had seen scientists cement the bones of a fish, or a long-dead animal whose scattered pieces had been excavated from the bottom of a sea or from within a hill or valley or bog, until its gleaming frame, one million years old (a-gleam as if still conscious of the glow of vanished suns and stars), seemed strangely alive however motionless or passive. Ready to swim or plunge into the forest.

So too shone Proteus’s cabin. We had been taken half-way up the hill by our captors within the painted transparency of the unconscious sun that lay on the stage beneath us. The passive, motionless light illumined a sign on the door of the cabin.

HISTORIC CABIN IN THE PSYCHE OF SPACE.

COMMUNITY OF SOULS. ANSELM WAS BORN HERE.

CANAIMA DIED HERE. BOTH IN THE SAME YEAR.

Every letter was stark and clear.

‘It’s not true‚’ I protested, unable to credit my eyes. I tried to strike a stationary drum in a savage’s hand and raise an outcry but was unable to do so. It was as if we were their captors, they were ours, in the reassembly of bone and mask and drum in the life of ancient theatre. I turned — despite the regime of stillness — to Penelope and Ross.

‘It’s not true‚’ I insisted. ‘They have made a mistake. Surely scientists can make a mistake across a million years or fifty years or a hundred years. We are a fallible species blessed with imagination in sensing our fallibility and breaking subtly, miraculously, a one-track frame of existence.’ I had almost forgotten my complaint but then I insisted again. ‘It’s not true.’

‘What’s not true?’

‘My Dream-cradle, yes, science may say of this cabin. Science is a species of art after all. I survived. Canaima’s cradle too. He also survived. He did not die here. He was very much alive in 1948 when he killed a man and I let him escape. I have told you the story.’

Proteus’s million-year-old cabin, one hundred-year-old cabin, eighty-year-old cabin, revealed itself from within. It was the stable of Rose’s Horse. It was a fossil White and Black Colonial House, fossil Mansion, fossil Palace, fossil Inn, fossil Hospital. A million years of modern art, modern architecture rooted in kingship, tribal hierarchy, tribal medicine, tribal hospitality.

It was hollow, beached, it seemed to levitate a little, Newton’s gravity, Einstein’s counter-gravity, it was the painted light of an apple in a sun-ship, cave-rocket-apple to the moon, it was the painted bone-light of a night-ship, cave-rocket-bone to Venus, it was everything one salvages and nets from the body of a man or a woman akin to ours in palaeolithic corridors of space, savage electricity in fingers and joints, savage umbilicus or eel encircling the stars.

The cabin was still as a whisper in the river of the dead. It was furnished with emblems of immemorial wreckages, immemorial forests, hills. It mirrored the still light of voyages on inland sun-seas within the Waterfall of space. It reflected the sun in the mouth of space, the dragon of space in which we stood. It was host to painted newborn, newdead pilgrims, newborn, newdead pirates, newborn, newdead slaves, newborn, newdead priests — newborn, newdead populations wired into a ribcage. It was the still dance of the robin and the dove, the dolphin and the whale.

I was awakened in the Dream of captivity, captivity in the past, captivity in the future, by the emphasis in Proteus’s cabin on newborn, newdead species. I wanted to shout –

‘It’s the passivity, the acceptance of a glittering museum one enshrines again and again, that makes it so testing — if not unbearable — in this reach of future time from which one looks back, from which the living dreamer looks back.

‘So much has happened yet no one claims moral responsibility except that I was born there in that shell or cabin or cave: a helpless infant. How may an infant see himself or herself as subsisting upon a frail thread of moral responsibility in all peoples for the world of tomorrow? And I insist — Canaima was born there too. He was my twin. He was forced on me, as if he were a different race, a different pigmentation; I never wanted him, never welcomed him as a brother or a twin.’

There was no reply but the enormity of responsibility threaded into infant life, infant conscience, infant humanity, began to dawn upon me. As if I had received a staggering blow from one of my motionless captors. Staggering in that the living dreamer knows himself as an infant lighthouse in space because of polarities of the conscious and unconscious that are lifted to another level of counterpoint, passive/active counterpoint, newborn/newdead counterpoint. No fossil reconstruction of skeleton or frame is a purely technical achievement: for what is rebuilt by fallible manoeuvre walks or swims or flies again within the universal unconscious of nature to question itself, to question every formula by which its scales or feather or hair were stitched together. Thus it is that an infant lives again within a body of unconscious wholeness that questions every enterprise of the fallible imagination that would fix it, or pin it, to the wall of a cabin or a museum.

A staggering blow of re-awakened spirit is built into the vicarious essence that runs through our visualizations of reconstructed presences in nature. A staggering blow lies at the heart of the early Church, early art, which begins to clothe itself with the unfinished fabric of an infant lighthouse and vicar of Time, vicar of the primordial imagination.

He held me; my motionless subtly active captor — within an aeon of unconscious wholeness that drew us to face one another — held me, forced me to look again into the depths of the cabin at the drowned child I had pulled up the serpent-ladder from the river of space. Pulled up, sheltered in my arms as vicar of Time, and borne across a landscape one thousand million years old into an uncertain and threatened future. Pulled up and borne and placed upon the stage of Proteus’s cabin.

The transparency of the unconscious sun broke in my eyes and made clear to me beyond belief whose face and body I had borne. I studied every feature as if it were imprinted on ancient yet modern canvas. There was no doubt as to who it was. A child of indeterminate age. Five to ten years old. Five, six, seven, eight. How indeterminate is the age of a child, how starved is age, how thin is agelessness? It was Canaima. But how could it be? Canaima had not died in this cabin when he was eight years old or I was eight years old. Was I not eight years older than he? Or was it five or six? My unwanted brother had survived. As I had survived. Lucius had not died or been drowned as a child. Perhaps I had painted him or sculpted him as a child — when I was eight or ten — painted him as an infant and buried the paper or wood. It was a Dream of such power it made me feel I had killed him then if not in the flesh then as a vivid being — however delicate — vivid artifact of presence I wished to suppress and forget for ever. But here he was. Back again. The umbilicus-eel or belt had straightened itself into a knife in his hand. The technology of a knife. A tall electric knife or spire pointing to the invisible stars in a still blazing sky. Blazing, setting, unmoving sun.

‘I threw Canaima’s knife — my twin-brother’s knife — into the heavens on the first bank of the river of space. Inspector Robot and I were climbing god-rock at the time. God-rock’s spire it seems now to me! God-rock’s spire is the spire of my Imaginary City of God. How strange are the foundations of the sacred, sacred reciprocity between innocence one nurtures with all one’s heart and guilt one has suppressed or buried from the day one was born. Sacred reciprocity that provides a vertical bridge through the faults of tilted nature, tilted banks which move the spoil of passive being, the passive Word, to transcend a levelling proclivity. Sacred reciprocity between art and science, between the vertical and the horizontal.

‘I struck the dancing angel or Macusi Bird. The knife became a form of human lightning, man-made lightning. At the time I could not tell whether the knife continued up or whether it fell back into the Waterfall stained with ozone and the blood of punctured atmospheres. Or whether it fell in my unconscious to erupt into the Dream of this cabin. Canaima’s knife! Now I know. It fell here. It was his Shadow — my brother’s indeterminate Shadow (twin-Shadow, older Shadow than I, younger than I?) — that I drew into my arms up the serpent-ladder. He wanted to tell me — indeed he wants to tell me that the knife I threw may never be purified until he comes Home to me within my deeds (however involuntary, however secret, however buried or forgotten). The Macusi god-rock is the spire of the City of God that floats on a cornerstone encompassing the knife of civilization, that is in need of ceaseless purification, and the thorn of the Rose.’

One could hear a murmuring vibration in Shadow-organ space. One could hear one’s voice issuing from the body of a stranger.

‘It is a sounding cornerstone that exists everywhere, in the soil, in the air, in the fire, in the water. It exists in the singing chorus of the Waterfall, in the greenhouse Shadow of the drowned in space whose indeterminate age makes them as much our victims as our attackers, as much our killed as our killers.

‘Are we too old, too young, to dream of the knife and the Rose? When do dreams commence? In the womb or in the seed of the womb? I have drawn the Shadow of my brother from the river of the dead. And still I ask myself: whose Shadow? whose brother? whose stranger? A life or a death that baits the unconscious is not to be equated with conventional structures, or conventional hubris, or conventional uniformities and clarities. The sweetest song of unconscious beauty may turn and rend a theatre of technicalities, technical apparatus, technical nudity, technical descriptions of the act of love or death, purely technical climax that averts its head from the anatomy of the abyss.

‘Is it the anatomy of the abyss that I glimpse in myself, in him, in nameless others one bears — who bear one — into the parentage of Being? Have I borne a spatial being that is capable of taking upon itself familiar/unfamiliar resemblances? Does the burden of art involve a confrontation with an ultimate loss of fear? Nothing that is or was, nothing that bears or is borne, was created in the beginning from fear, fear of one or fear of the other, though fear may come in the wake of a Presence with which one needs to be reconciled through stages of haunted masquerade, the haunted sinner in one’s arms, or in the cradle, or on the stage of Memory …

The uncanny, unfinished body of music within us ceased. But it had invoked a change in the transparencies of the unconscious. The paint of the sun began to lift. Everything had been passive, fixed. Now a spark in the sun lifted, the sun itself moved and began to fall. The spark unravelled the sky to touch the high precipice of the globe in the Dream. Night was soon falling.

*

‘Where are your drowned children?’ I cried to Penelope and Ross, ‘Do you know who they are? Have you recognized them? Mine was the Shadow of my twin-brother Canaima.’ I laughed. Laughter seems a spring of irresistible and uncanny merriment in the gravity of a Dream. ‘You saw him lying on the stage. Incredible! It’s not true of course. Yet it’s true. A true parable! Parable employs meaningful self-deception as the strange humour, the essence of the spiritual irony that imbues the nature of the arts in the City of God.’

The laughter faded from my lips. I had spoken with some urgency. It dawned on me within the starlit Night that now lay about us like a fabulous cloak that Ross and Penelope were clinging to the Shadowy drowned children they had drawn up the serpent-ladder from the river of the dead. I saw they would continue to do so until they surrendered themselves to their captors. A curious phrase! Surrendered themselves to their captors. I understood their hesitation, their difficulty, their anguish. These grew from the fact of their idealism (in Penelope’s case), agnosticism (in Ross’s), idealism and agnosticism that signified a freedom (self-deception?) they took for granted. They were free people, freer than I was. When is freedom fate, fate freedom? One may be held by a captor and yet so resist him, so resist captivity, one learns nothing about oneself, about one’s fate in falling into his or her hands.

So it was with Ross and Penelope within the great Night of the savage encroachment of space in which the very texture of the universe had begun to change and the stuff of reality drew us back into reconsiderations of our private selves and of the past and the present we had never entertained. They had been seized but their resistance was such that they could not part, or give, any portion of themselves that could provide them with a new threshold into a testing and hazardous community. Freedom, their ideal freedom, became a curious obstacle.

Ross knew what I was implying and he turned upon me with a dry, almost angry, smile.

‘You capitulated, Anselm, as soon as you saw the savages of space erupting not from the heart of darkness but from the heart of the unconscious. You are no Conradian idealist! Idealists always make the best pessimists. You are something different. Closer to a saint perhaps? I wonder. God knows who the devil you are. Penelope thinks you are half in love with her. El Dorado is a fitting place for a queen and her suitors and revelations of ancient kingship through which to revive a concept of sainthood. It starts with your capitulation! Your capitulation to the savages is such that your brother’s evil deeds may well become yours in the history books of another age.

‘You need to be careful, Anselm! Soon it may be said that Canaima never existed at all. What potent non-existence! So potent every saint stands to lose his good name. You stand to lose your good name. You performed the things he did. You become the actor within his mask. Do not say I did not warn you, Anselm, of such terrible myth. Possession! That’s the bleak word. That’s what it is. The acceptance of another’s crimes and sins.’

He stopped and I listened in the starlit Night for the winged feather of angelic species as the globe moved and the stars faintly altered their course.

‘Danger, yes,’ I said at last. I pondered the fires far out in space. I pondered the nature of captor and captive. I pondered my ignorance of ultimate freedom, ultimate fate.

‘Danger yes, terrifying myth. You are right, Ross. But in such danger lies a catalyst of purification. Creation is a risk! You know that. Daemons and furies are a measure of balance within the lightning storm of creation that binds us to sky and earth. And at the heart of every trial, within every danger of possession — possession by what appears to be evil — lies a catalyst of purification in weighing the fabric of deeds performed by another. Without that weighing, that intricate balance, without the necessary truth of purification that applies to all of us, we may march a hundred, a thousand abreast, and we are still pilgrims of the void. We are lost. We may swear we have clean hands in the marketplace of freedom, that we are untainted by evil, and still we are lost, lost in the hubris of consciousness.

‘And so I plead again. Surrender yourselves to your captors before it is too late and you forfeit a true scrutiny of the Shadows that you bear. I know your pride in the appearances of freedom. Take Penelope!’ I stared into the heart of the starlit Night and into the drowned child upon her breasts whose outline was becoming clear to me now. ‘I see something there. I see a different kind of catalyst from mine. Another form of balance, another factor of necessary truth in weighing the fabric of possession.’

I stared into her arms and almost recoiled.

‘Tell me, Anselm! What do you see?’

‘I see the corpse of heroism,’ I said gently, ‘weighed in a balance that demarcates men and women.’

She gave a start as if her memory had been jolted.

‘What is true heroism, Penelope? What balance divides heroism into sheer possession of others, the sheer hunt, on one hand, and necessary sacrament, on the other, the necessary ritual burial of the stranger one bears who brings news of the chains that bind us, chains we hide from ourselves, for they have been upon us so long we have forgotten they are there.

‘To break those chains we need to see ourselves as captives in the hand of a stranger. We need to see our acceptance of a hidden state of unfreedom masked by ideal freedom in an eruptive light, the light of the strangest self-surrender. And that’s where the intricate balance lies between heroism that possesses and inner courage that liberates

I was unsure of the intricate design I had seen and of the words that had come upon my lips. Nevertheless they had scarcely dropped into the starlit Night when the savages encircled Penelope. They took the frail body from her arms. The stage was clear. The shape of Canaima had vanished. And now in its place appeared Penelope’s child.

‘Black,’ she said wonderingly. ‘It’s black.’

Ross came forward and placed an arm around her.

‘It’s the light of the stars in this curious transparency, this strange atmosphere, that makes it appear black. It’s so ancient.’

‘How could my child be ancient?’

She wanted to rush upon the stage and lift the child back upon her. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep. But Ross held her close. The savages made a wall around her. We turned and stared once again at the child. The light of the constellations had changed and it was as if we were looking now at the skeleton, starred, infant stature of a king. There were bracelets of gold on his ankles and wrists.

‘Impossible,’ said Penelope. ‘It’s a trick. They took my child and replaced it with the Macusi fossil of a prince.’ And then she gave a faint scream that clothed itself in the echo of a drum. There was a silence. She was pointing to another adornment we had failed to see. Medals on the young king’s chest! They glittered like marvellous coins in the constellations of the Night. And before she spoke I knew. I had seen those medals on a warrior-ghost, on the Governor of a Colony, as he came over a hill on the first bank of the river of space. Simon’s medals!

‘Simon was not black,’ she cried, ‘except on one occasion …’ She stopped. Ross had withdrawn his arm from around her. ‘Let me descend on to the stage,’ he cried, ‘and I’ll show you, Penelope, that there’s nothing there. No medals. It’s the deceptive light. Look how it shines. As if someone is playing with a candle.’ But Penelope was eager to resume the thread of her tale in the Dream. She restrained him. She held him back from the stage.

‘I should have told you long ago,’ she said to him.

‘Told me what?’

‘Simon’s family and mine were neighbours in Dartford, Kent.’

‘I know that,’ said Ross.

‘Did you know that Simon was the victim of an accident when he was nine or ten?’

Ross did not reply. It was news to him.

‘He was struck by a car, a runaway driver. On the face of it he was lucky. A broken rib, a sprained arm, a bruise on his forehead. The car struck him a glancing blow. I thought it was nothing until I visited him in hospital. He asked me whether the runaway driver had been caught and I said No. A change came over him then. His face grew black. The bruise on his forehead turned into a fire. Look! there it is! on the stage now! The fire! It’s burning him up. He’s stopped breathing.’

‘Impossible,’ said Ross.

‘I tell you, Simon died,’ said Penelope. ‘I was convinced he would never come back.’ She was possessed by the gravity of the starlit Night with its constellation of warring kings and imperial crusades. The starlit cloak of Night parted. The ancient, royal body of the child-king in the pit, or on the stage, floated up to our eyes. We were possessed by the starlit Night. I heard Penelope’s voice as if it came from far away. ‘I was a child, a bit highly-strung perhaps. But that look! You see it now, don’t you? I shouted for a nurse. “Simon’s died,” I cried. They all came running. My mother took me away. She was amazed and horrified at the way I looked. I had become the ghost. “Whatever came over you, Penelope,” she said. “Such a scene.” I tried to say, “Simon died. I know he did. It’s the runaway driver. Simon was so angry he fled into becoming a corpse. Angry that the runaway driver had escaped.” That’s all I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. Until now. It’s a relief. When he came out of hospital I couldn’t shake off the feeling that he owned me. Yes, women — even queens — have long been the property of the realm. Owned me. But I hid it in myself. It became an unspoken legend that blended into respectable ideal, respectable convention, respectable freedom. We grew up together. Childhood sweethearts (whatever that means) became adolescent lovers. He went to public school and university. We fell deeper in love, we got married. He became a hero. He never forgot the runaway driver. He saw him on every battlefield. He grew nerves of steel and a jealous fury and rage.

‘Before the accident he was a marvellous child. After the accident, though I hid it from myself, he became another person. I married that other person. I married a hero. I felt his fist on my arm. You know the rest.’

A veil came over the Night. When it lifted the medals had disappeared from the boy-king’s chest. He lay on the stage. He seemed as old as Time. A fossil pre-Columbian king. A king of ancient Greece. Penelope’s expression had acquired a wonderful calm. She looked closely at the child she had pulled up from the river of space. It had floated up to our eyes but now it lay once again on the stage. Its two hands were open to the sky. One hand was tense and drawn, the other relaxed, so relaxed it seemed to weigh in its spirit the link of a broken chain. Penelope’s inner Dream-courage had made it possible for her to retrace her steps and to confront a spectre that had dominated her life. She was free. A numinous, starlit freedom that travellers may find at the heart of a desert. She had surrendered herself to the frail, magical king in the pit. The chain she had long hidden from herself was broken at last.

Ross was shaken but he preserved his steady and fateful aplomb. He had no hesitation now in surrendering in his turn the child he had brought from the river of the dead. ‘My child I am sure is simplicity itself,’ he said. ‘Nothing like Penelope’s.’ But was it? Canaima had vanished, Penelope’s king had vanished. And in their place lay Ross’s child. Simplicity itself he had said. I was glad for my Dream-narrative was simplicity itself. So Ross and I had much in common. We knew the face at once and the slender body of the child robed in the evanescent cloak of the Waterfall. Here at last was one of the drowned children who had danced with the eel. We knew her immediately. She had been one of the finest young voices in the Mission House. Clear as the laughter of a bell. Sometimes soft as a flute. Ross’s expression changed. He had seen her dancing in school. He remembered her black, lustrous hair, her grave child’s face. She had danced in his class a day or two before she drowned. Was this the body of a uniform race? Were these the eyes to mirror a long primitive queue awaiting its turn to ride the globe? Were these the eyes of the new conquistadores?

Ross was humane. His vocation was that of a teacher, his temperament that of a sceptic, an agnostic, despite his religious calling. I saw from his expression — the expression of a complex suitor — that he was on the verge of surrendering himself to … To what? To whom? Not to conquest. To the miracle of hope in a child-queen who might still breach an epic formula.

It was a question of personal relationships, personal involvements. Ross surrendered himself to the child-queen who had danced in his class on the eve of descending into the sky of the Waterfall with its pooled stars under the guardian rocks and clouds.

Our captors (were they perhaps our guardians now?) began to beat the drums of Home, the drums of the turning world. Not frenziedly but with a haunting rhythmic pulse, like rain that seemed to encompass us all and as the music widened and flew we were caught up in its embrace.

This rain of Night seemed to glimmer in the stars. Captors and captives began to loom in the new darkness of the Dream, the new guardian rocks, the new guardianship of sky and cloud at the heart of the Waterfall of space, a theatre of interchangeable masks and fates and elements upon savages and civilizations. The rain that fell upon us was so fine-spun and delicate that it seemed an impossibility when within it we discerned the burden and mystery of the rising sun.

Content

Wilson Harris
The Carnival Trilogy

INTRODUCTION

CARNIVAL

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

THE INFINITE REHEARSAL

NOTE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

POSTSCRIPT BY GHOST

THE FOUR BANKS OF THE RIVER OF SPACE

THE FIRST BANK (The King of Thieves)

THE SECOND BANK (Carnival Heir of Civilizations)

THE THIRD BANK (The Trial)

THE FOURTH BANK (Home)