The Carnival Trilogy (25 page)

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-equippe
d 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?

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.’

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?’