The Carnival Trilogy (29 page)

‘Look! Look into the swamp of the centuries within your own book that is stained by invisible creek water, invisible river water, invisible pork-knocker barrels, pork-knocker ships; just look! What do you see?’

Before I could answer – as if I were an answering clock – Ghost continued: ‘You see when you scan closely your own death and the deaths of your mother and aunt (whose antecedents came into the magic wood from other continents) that the refugee count in the clock of the sea has moved from adventurers and slaves, from those who fled the sword and the fire, from those who stood on the auction block, into disrupted twentieth-century populations broken by famine or civil war; tyrannized by military regimes; deceived by politicians who rig the ballot when there are elections in the Third World.

‘Their lust for prosperity and their despair are such (and who amongst us can blame them?) that they turn from the brutalities of the sovereign state and the phoney placards of newfound independence and fall on their knees before the new El Dorados of the West.’

‘New El Dorados?’ I was sceptical. ‘There is growing
unemployment
.
There is the rise of labour-saving devices, new clocks whose every tick manufactures redundancy. And this is Skull. It is the archetypal Colony in the magic wood. It stands in or over a swamp.’

‘The archetypal Colony may seem remote from the West but it is an extension of the West. The refugees will come. Indeed they have never ceased to come, sometimes as a trickle, sometimes as a wave. Look deep! Look deep into the heart of the swamp that stains every page of history. Look deep into the necessity to manufacture asylums for refugees, ghetto asylums, god knows what. Scrap a couple of rockets, a couple of nuclear bombs, half a dozen submarines and battleships, an extra penny or two on income tax, and heigho, Skull may be converted into a
prosperous
concentration camp.

‘Think of the prospect of cheap energy. Look deep, I say, into the swamp. Look deep into the cheap electric stars and the cheap electric suns reflected there in the mirror of coming technologies, coming at any price, any human price. Look into the brave new world. Look into the faeryland promise of Chernobyl. Time lifts its skirt like a radioactive whore.’

All my ancient and modern loathing or detestation of Ghost returned. ‘This is a joke, an obscene joke,’ I cried. ‘Face the facts. Don’t exaggerate. Chernobyl is a disaster complex in the Soviet Union. What has it got to do with the free West and the choices that lie before the electorates of the free West? Are you saying such choices are an illusion?’ I felt the shadow of terror in my resurrected body. ‘What bearing has faeryland on Skull?’

‘Hush-hush disaster, dateless day bearing,’ said Ghost. ‘When Communist Rome burns an empire of souls inhales its ash. But no one sees the fire or the brute faery at the extremities of our fingertips. So too when faeryland burns (and the absent body you wear and loathe and which you and I share, as a multi-faceted investiture with which to address and warn the world, looms into theatre) the building blocks of heaven are shaken by the storm. But no one sees or hears the earthquake – not even those who are experimenting with human souls. Skull, dear Robin Glass, is our coming asylum for the refugee spirit. Skull is the dateless day that Faust simulates. Skull is the transformation of the swamp of history into an electric paradise. Cheap energy is the opium of the masses, the new lotus.’

I felt the hordes of the future rush through me into Skull. I pencilled some notes into my book.

Dateless Day Play. Dateless Day (plucked from a pre-
Columbian
infinity calendar) relics of memory. Hollow humanity.

Tooth and ring. Chapel perilous of the sea (
AD
1961–2).

Bridge into Skull. Chapel perilous of the flatlands (
AD
1962).

Indistinct clamour of refugees of spirit. Cheap energy is all (
AD 
1962–86).

Faeryland burns at Chernobyl (
AD
1986).

Capital investment for Play of Humanity begins in Skull. Asylum for refugees. Marvellous glittering tomb-shaped edifice. Twenty-first century sophisticated concentration camp. Fodder of generations (
AD
2000–2050).

I re-read my notes. My loathing of Ghost intensified. I tore the notes into scraps but they floated over the water like a measure of the dancing city, the dancing theatre, of Skull.

Towers were built. Promenades. Halls. Shopping precincts. Streets. Etc., etc., etc. It was a grand play, a grand village. One matter had been omitted from my notes. And now I found myself pencilling it with invisible lead on to the brow of Skull.

Plutonium has been found. Sophisticated Third World/First World dump in the text of the magic wood.

I tried to tear this up too but the bone in the masks of Skull that some of the players wore in the Play of Humanity resisted my touch.

Yet the sensation reminded me of the enigma of time, time’s bone as well as time’s page, and I found myself tracing a calendrical road that ran into the theatre of Skull. It was called Dateless Day Infinity Route or Tunnel. I moved along it to its junction with Prospero Mall. And here it was that I came upon Peter and Emma in the year
AD
2025. Was this an arbitrary calendrical year or was it a provocative and lucid dream-choice reflecting the measureless yet ironically pinpointed canvas in the drama of the future within the life of the creative present?

I reached out to them from within the tunnel: I back from the drowned dead in each year, each century; they hovering still, it seemed, at the margins of the pinpointed living where the spray of the sea in every leaf, in every flower, broke our lips into a kiss.

Tunnel of immortality? Tunnel of death? Tunnel of the resurrection?

As our hands and lips met and parted I felt I had aged not a whit since
AD
1962. Peter and Emma, on the other hand, were my own age yet they seemed older than I in the tunnel or the relic or the passageway of memory in which we stood. Was it ten years older? Was it twenty years older? I puzzled over the difference. What is five years or ten years or twenty years between friends? And yet – since Peter and Emma and I were actually the same age – it became important to know why they seemed older, I younger, why in another light of dream-theatre I might become older, they younger. Were such values of time purely arbitrary, purely conventional aspects of story line in the play of a civilization? Or were they a reflection of absent bodies entering time, excavating time, changing our innermost grasp of fate and of freedom within the veil of time?

I knew it all signified a measure of ironic spirituality and dream-choice in the way one excavates the biases of time, the tyrannies of time. Each relic of time, each built passageway, each sculpted tunnel or bowl or room, each cell, each cradle, glimmered with the cruelties of the past yet with a theatre of new-born spirit to breach or transform a moment of terror.

Each minute distinction of years between me and Peter and Emma in the theatre of spirit reflected our vision or capacity to see or feel or grasp the urgencies and the consequences in the architectures and connective rooms of our age. And in opening a dream-tunnel that ran from the middle of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century we were involved not only in generations but in the pinpointed canvas of the years, in one’s illusory yet immortal youth as much as in one’s illusory and immortal old age.

One was involved in the nature and the meaning of survival as much as in unravelling a distinction in minute accretions in the value of time within childhood theatre, within resurrectionary theatre, within political theatre.

I knew there was a distinction between simulated immortality or youth or old age and the terrifying insights associated with a resurrection/a revolution of inner mind, inner spirit.

In this instance – in reaching out to Emma and Peter – I was assailed by the enigma of authorship and charactership across the years in the Play of Humanity and in my fictional
autobiography
.

One loomed large (the play of humanity) whereas the other, my book, was minute but intensely real, intensely poignant.

In
AD
1962 – when I came within hailing distance of Skull – I was aware of Ghost’s extension of himself into W. H.’s ageing mask through which I wrote my fictional autobiography.

Now, however – in
AD
2025 – though I remained as young as ever (my hair was immaculately black and I was dressed to a
t
or a
T
in the paradox of time/Time) I knew that W. H. himself had vanished and that someone else – some other ageing mask – played the role of authorship/charactership in my book as if I were he, he me. The name or the initials on this new ageing mask eluded me. Yet they marked a further and crucial development in my book. They implied the secretion of ageless myth in the theatre of the world as a subtle rebuttal of an authoritarian realism – however sophisticated – an authoritarian story line or sophisticated dumping ground in the theatre of Skull for an irrelevant and a doomed humanity held in thrall by the logic of violence, the logic of hell. In that subtle rebuttal lay the foundations of religious hope. But even so I could not be sure how precarious such foundations were, how costly they might prove. How possible, or impossible, it was to make a beginning – nothing more – in switching the priorities of Billionaire Death away from the cinematic dance and extermination of the brutes (that claimed the bright lights of Broadway Skull) into scenarios of a hospital of infinity at the heart of space.

Perhaps Peter and Emma knew of such beginnings and might be able to disclose some unsuspected shift in the priorities of Skull. For they (Peter and Emma) were themselves characters of myth. They had become this in peculiar, uncertain and groping – even self-contradictory – degrees in the midst of the desolations of Prosperity. One finds such characters in every city, in every throng of refugees. The odd survivors. They belong yet do not belong. In some quite lucid and strangely factual way I knew I existed in their dreams – that they were dreaming of me as I dreamt of them at a junction in the tunnel where the resurrection of the dead seemed to blend with the survival of the endangered living.

I knew that their dreams of me were intensely real, that their survival, their escape from drowning, had so affected them, that I was in the very fibre of their lives, an eternal question mark, an
eternal misgiving. I was the seed of their terror and their uncertainty in Skull. What did survival truly mean when all those who are dearest to one have vanished? Equally they were for me the seed of religious hope. What did resurrection/revolution truly mean unless one could place it in living, uncertain flesh-and-blood within oneself/without oneself?

‘I have been looking for you for ages,’ I said to them. ‘And now at last …’ I hesitated but rushed on. ‘The resurrection’s a fact, Emma. It’s no panacea, Peter. It doesn’t stop the pain of living. That I now know. I can tell you this. If anything it intensifies mental anguish. For one sees into the shell of what one was. One sees into the bankruptcy of one’s civilization: a terrible business. And yet one loves one’s fellow woman and man as never before. One truly knows the fabric of compassion, of pity, of beauty. A terrifying kind of longing, of hope, within the hollowness of one’s age.’

Peter was staring hard at me. ‘That’s why I became an addict,’ he said. ‘Self-love. Egotistical love. Break all sound barriers. I drink the lotus, the opium of the masses. The death wish of an age. I am a popular singer and player and I feed on the lotus, belly to belly, back to back death wish in Calypso’s and Tiger’s band. A new lament, a new ballad of the soul, Robin!’ He was staring at me quizzically and I could not be sure how serious he was, whether he was testing me, mocking me, mocking himself, testing himself.

Emma tore the shred of incipient but mutual addiction, mutual self-pity from our eyes. ‘That’s not what Robin is saying, Peter,’ she said to me as though she were addressing him. Her voice softened. ‘Poor Peter! He’s an incurable romantic, Robin. But what would I do without him? Robin’s talking of a voice and an ear, Peter, we seldom hear or use. Not
BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM
. He’s saying it’s a voice and an ear we
may
come to perceive within ourselves when we return to ourselves and know ourselves for the first bleak and terrible time. Without fallacy. Without illusion. Nothing egotistical. Know suddenly at the heart of despair the true stranger in ourselves, Peter, beyond all our vanity in whom lies the promise of glory.’

She uttered the word ‘glory’ with reluctance, misgiving. An abused word. Napoleonic glory? The glory of lust? I knew she meant neither of these. What did she mean? It was as if she had
read the question in my mind as I had read the question in hers in the tunnel of classical penetration, classical endurance, classical genius of love.
I
saw
in
a
flash
that
she
was
a
priest
,
a female priest, she was hope in the city of Skull, revolutionary hope,
unconventional
hope.

‘It’s divine Communism,’ Peter murmured, ‘when the male priest sups with the female priest at the same high table in the tunnel of centuries …’ He stopped as if he had said too much. But even so it was a definition of ‘divine’ and of ‘Communism’ I had never heard before. Still I wondered. What was ‘divine Communism’? Like ‘glory’ it was of debased coinage, an abused term. Take ‘Communism’! What was ‘Communism’? Surely not the Communist Rome that burnt at Chernobyl while the Party fiddled. Take ‘divine’! What was the ‘divine’? Surely not the pomp and the robes in the theatre of Skull.

Emma, the priest, caught the drift of reflection. She turned to Peter as if he were me in the veil of the tunnel and I were he in the play of divinity. ‘When one breaks true bread,’ she said, ‘with the true stranger in oneself who knows one, is unsparing with one, yet perceives the creative conscience and potential in one, then one begins an ascent through the follies of one’s age to a vision of divine Communism. Alas it’s not easy.’ Her eyes were both dark and pale. I saw she wished to goad me, to startle me, within our pattern of lucid dream. She shot at me, ‘You, Robin, will need Peter as
alter
ego
stranger –
alter
ego
theatre – when you climb the Mountain of Folly above Skull.’