The Carnival Trilogy (21 page)

*

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.”