The Carnival Trilogy (23 page)

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,

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:

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.

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.

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 SLEE
P
. 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.’