The Carnival Trilogy (24 page)

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
rod
which
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
tempta
tion
?
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.