The Carnival Trilogy (22 page)

“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-variet
y
. 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.”

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

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.

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?