The Carnival Trilogy (30 page)

A beam shone through the tunnel that alerted us – Peter, Emma and I – to dateless day infinity comedy in which we were involved. Perhaps it was Emma’s allusion to
‘alter
ego
theatre’ that reminded me of the ruses and the labyrinths of
Faust
,
the simulated voices, simulated scripts, that passed as normality in Skull. Imagine the various factories, pubs, bedrooms, drawing rooms, football arenas, offices, stages – imagine the elegant and violent puppetries, the strings that are pulled, the solemn manifestos, the rages, the brutalities, the sermons, the curses, the drunken fights, the programmes, the dangling shadow of bait – imagine the follies of which Emma had spoken. Follies of Skull! Circus of Skull! Reflexes of Skull!

We – Emma, Peter and I – were caught in the web of Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours that passed for normality. And
yet … I paused, reflected again. Did I mean
abnormality
?
There lay a distinction between ourselves and the ‘normal’ world. We accepted our abnormality and the bizarre truths associated with ourselves as a capacity to mirror yet repudiate and breach Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours. Our apparent unreality – our very unreality – witnessed to a self-confessional reality in which we came to the edge of ourselves and looked
through
ourselves. To be true (to know truth) within an age of violence and lies, an age subject to the reflexes of Skull, was to sense a curious irreality in oneself, a curious originality, a curious divergence from the circus of the real (or what passed for the real).

All this made me scan Emma’s features closely. She was veiled by dateless day infinity comedy. I saw her innate sorrow. I suddenly saw how worn she was. It was as if a nail had woven its innermost weblike constancy into her flesh, an ecstatic nail, a sorrowing nail. Ecstatic and sorrowing! That was her bizarre truth, her divergence from what passed as the real in the circus of the normal and the real.

‘O Emma,’ I cried impulsively, ‘tell me please. How have you made out all these years? There were debts to pay, the old house was sold. Even Miriam’s theatre fell under the hammer though W. H. preserved it for a while.’

‘I have paid dearly,’ Emma said. ‘Survival is dear, it is beyond price, but it is worth it.’

‘It must have been a difficult time after Alice’s death, Miriam’s death, my death.’

‘A difficult time indeed,’ Emma confessed, ‘a difficult
adjustment
for Peter and me. We once shared everything, remember? We were part of your family, remember? We shared the little theatre in the magic wood, remember? We shared every meal. And then came the earthquake, the crash … It was as if we had been orphaned all over again. Flung out of the cradle all over again. But there was no one like Alice to take us in this time. As I lay on the beach I was pierced by the cry of the gulls, the laughing sea gulls. Were they gulls or were they cranes? I could not tell. It was a cry from heaven and yet it was a subtle, piercing, shaking laughter. A shaking note like strings of music in the sea. The motif of an incomparable composition. Music such as we had dreamt to hear in our little theatre.’ She stopped as if she remembered something I had forgotten. ‘Did you not ask Aunt
Miriam, Robin, what is laughter’s mask? Did you not hunt through a trunk of dresses and costumes, etc., in an old cellar?’

‘I remember.’

‘Aunt Miriam wept when you asked her on the bed of the sea. Well let me tell you, Robin, that the answer lay in a bird’s cry, a bird’s feather that pierces heaven and strings the music of laughter into the grief of rain. It was a nail, a half-rending sound, that rose from the sea, from
Tiger
’s broken body, from the shattered boat, from the ships of all the navies of all the oceans, from a broken barrel, an invisible barrel on which Alice leaned into the crest of a wave. It was a nail. And it pierced me. I was nailed into the ground.’

‘My God, Emma!’ I was confused. I recalled the apparition of Ghost, multi-faceted Ghost, innermost Ghost, outermost Ghost, arising from the sea.

‘My God, Emma!’

‘In such a nail that shatters one’s prepossessions I knew the construction of a sound that echoed in the air and in the sea. It was the music of the priest, of the God of nature. One comes,’ said Emma, ‘to a beloved creation, to the divine, in every moment that one survives in the inimitable textures of nature, truly lives and survives.’

I shook myself hard. I tried to reason with myself. I almost felt that I had taken advantage of her, that I knew her secrets because I had lain with her there on the beach, with my lips within the cover of her hair yet on her breasts. I shook myself. I tried to reason with myself. ‘You were desolated, Emma. You had narrowly escaped drowning. One understands.’

‘One understands,’ said Emma and looked at me as if she were addressing Peter, ‘that a priest in a desolate age, in a drowned age, must pay dear for an illumination of ecstasy, Robin. How can one surrender oneself to laughter in the midst of survival that leaves one bereft? How can one sing in the midst of survival that leaves one bereft? How can one play? Yet one does. Peter sings. Peter plays. Calypso sings. Calypso dances. And you and Alice and Miriam paid with your lives for them to be merry in the light of a stranger ecstasy. As for me I became a priest. I dedicated myself to simplicity’s tasks, simplicity’s meals, and to a butterfly-lantern at the heart of the globe.’

I felt her lips upon mine. The kiss of all loves and all true lovers.

THE SCENE CHANGES
. We are now in the elaborate promenade of Prospero Mall. Emma pulls a veil like the sea around her eyes. She slips away but not before depositing a note in the pocket of my coat. I pull it out. The note is faded as if it had been written long, long ago. In an age of childhood when we were encouraged by Miriam and Alice to write letters to one another about fabulous journeys to the ends and the beginnings of time. I smooth the note slowly and read:

I folded the letter with care and replaced it in my pocket. Dateless Day Infinity Road had brought me now to the end of the Mall. I heard Doctor Faustus’s voice just above me in the Mountain of Folly.

‘Don’t fall this time, Robin. Take your time. It’s a new invention. It’s a new rocket nursery in the stars. A new band blew up above Skull on its way to Mars. Lives were lost. But you can count on me now. So take your time, Robin.’

I was on the point of protesting – ‘I am not a member of a rocket band or of Tiger’s band for that matter.’ And then I recalled Emma’s note from long, long ago in Miriam’s childhood theatre. How remarkable that a childhood/adolescent love affair should
blossom into a female priesthood and nourish the resurrection body. What a shift, a frail shift, yet intimate revolutionary breakthrough into the prospect of a divine Communism in which all generations reflected one another at the heart of anguish yet consummate wisdom.

I recalled Emma’s note. Faust was addressing
alter
ego
Glass Robin in Peter. And yet was he not also speaking directly to me, my absent body yet dream-presence, dream re-entry into the theatre of life?

‘When the rocket blew,’ Faust continued, ‘it opened like a cross. It tautened into a rope. I saw it through my ancient eyes in the workshop of the gods. My ancient eyes that blaze like a comet at the end of time, the beginning of time. Who can say which end, which beginning? I have forgotten so much, have forfeited so much, to become the comedian of the machine in this end or beginning of time.’

It almost seemed to me as if Faust were pleading with Peter and me. ‘It tautened into a marvellous rope, Robin,’ he said.

He stared at Peter from his windowsill above the Mall. A wind blew down the Mountain of Folly. The terror of his smile was lost upon Peter but I was aware of it, all the more aware of it after the mystical laughter of which Emma had spoken (our arms around one another by the sea). I saw it lucidly now (as if for a moment I had borrowed Faust’s ancient eyes, Faust’s remembering/oblique forgetting eyes, Faust’s Quetzalcoatl eyes in which were entwined the marriage of heaven and earth). I saw the backward shift, the forward shift, the folly, the creativity, the parallel laughters of the universe, the laughter of grace and mystery for which one pays dear, the laughter of the electric machine, of mechanical stimulation, one buys cheap.

‘You know, Robin,’ Faust said to Peter, ‘I like to think of my surgery as a window upon heaven. Except that heaven’s changing. (Indeed the workshop I knew in ancient times has long vanished.) The crucifixion’s changing. Technology’s changing. And quite frankly I’m not sure what investitures the devil now wears. If there’s a shift in the radius of a star, in the radius of the soul, who can say on which side one’s bread is buttered?’ He pointed to a plate on his windowsill and I read:
Doctor
Faustus,
fallen
angel
from
the
workshop
of
the
gods,
ambivalent
sceptic
of
the
purposes
of
evil,
reluctant
doctor
of
the
soul.
He was smiling with the
blandness of his forgetting/remembering eyes and I felt a chill. ‘I am on Emma’s side, Robin,’ he said.

He saw my disbelief and continued to press his argument.
My
disbelief? No, Peter’s. ‘For the fact is, Robin, if I’m not careful I shall have nothing to work with – the materials I employ will become sterile – I shall lose everyone and everything. And live in an empty shell from which labour has vanished, machines doing everything, thinking machines, acting machines, killing machines. And so let’s seek a lull in our space wars on earth and in heaven. A respite from computer voices and computer generals and computer admirals in the twenty-first century. Let’s give ourselves a chance to define our terms anew, rehearse the technologies of the crucifixion. Turn them round and round, upside down, downside up, make a rope, a rope and a rocket cross into heaven.’

I saw he was playing with Peter, playing with some ancient design of hope he may have abandoned. He was wooing him with the irreverence, the self-mocking humour, for which the comedian of the machine was universally famous. He knew he was taking a risk, that there might be something in what he was saying that Peter might remember and take to heart but this was a chance he had to accept on behalf of the new spatial cross of humanity. ‘Come, come, Robin,’ he said to Peter, ‘I’m on your side, believe me. We’re making the world safe for mankind. I’m up here to receive you. You’ve hesitated long enough. Seize the glory rope and climb into heaven. I promise you no one will burn this time.’

I kept still and virtually invisible beside Peter like a child playing hide-and-seek in a resurrection cupboard. I saw what Emma had meant. I saw the curious pitch, the curious darkness of a spiritual irony within a destitute world enriched by the oddest parallels, sophisticated technologies running side by side with rickety cupboards, barrels, worn blankets, sheets, chalk to make a seam or line on diagrams of the sky and the sea depicting the intimate recesses of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ – all substance of the shoestring budget of childhood theatre.

Priorities were changing but so peculiarly, so involuntarily it seemed, that the resurrection body could easily be lured from its true seam or true line in the heart of creation with promises that only It (masked Peter and masked me and others of linked
generations) could make valid in the light of the rehearsed values within the deaths of Alice and Miriam and grandfather and others lying in the refugee sea or in the refugee forest or up in the refugee stars (their untenanted graves memorialized in a
pork-knocker
barrel on earth).

For we had been empowered in our nursery rhymes to weigh the doors and windows of heaven, to knock on them and seek assurances of the nature and the meaning of value.

What was the true seam or the true line that Peter and I needed to understand in our ascent and our overcoming of the Mountain of Folly?

I gave Peter a slight nudge and at last he gripped the rope and began to ascend to Doctor Faustus’s surgery. He drew close to the windowsill. Faust leaned out to seize him. I shouted.

‘Peter,’ I cried (and forgot to call him Robin), ‘swing away from the rope or the cross to the true seam in the wave of rock.’

My forgetfulness in this instance may have saved Peter’s life. Faust hesitated for a fraction of an instant. He had heard my voice as if it came from nowhere yet from another source, another line, another thread in space. He was taken aback by all this (by the repudiation of his deadly rope) and by the name ‘Peter’ of which he was unaware. He knew only of ‘Robin’. Who was Peter? Nobody (or absent body) was Peter. Impossible parallels! And in that flash of lightning bemusement that fell over the Mountain of Folly Peter slipped from Faust’s grasp as if he were made of Glass: made of
alter
ego
Robin Glass,
alter
ego
kingdoms of space.

As he gained the seam or divide in the wave of rock I remembered my earliest temptations threaded into the first time I dreamt I heard voices and sounds. I remembered how I had succumbed to the temptation to seize the kingdoms of space. Had I then – without knowing it – stored up a shift in the priorities of life and death? Had I anticipated Faust in miniaturizing the creation in myself? Had I been in league with my grandfather’s revisionary book as I now stood in league with Emma’s Peter? I had stored, I felt now, in frail treaty with the past and the future, a lightning caution by which or through which to outwit the comedian of the machine when he sought to pull all generations into a window of heaven that was ambiguous if not false, an enchainment of the mind if not an extinction of the soul.

A political parable of mind and soul born of childhood
remembered visions in an age of dangerous superpowers professing the good intention out of cunning self-interest, the good life out of expedient design.

Peter and I pursued the seam in the wave of rock until a glimmering window in the Mountain of Folly, like a flag one sticks on the moon beneath a black sky, and a white imaginary sea spelt our approach to a ward in space from which Billionaire Death inspected the cosmos. His imaginary eyes met mine. They were shockingly large and black and deep as if I mistook a West Indian black-coated vista of Mars for Columbus’s Venusian India. I tried to adjust my world-weary resurrected gaze within those imaginary eyes. I dreamt I saw them change and turn subtly green, subtly marvellous within love’s murmuring death wish on earth ascending to the hospital of space. I thought of sunset as if it had been painted on a child’s ball in the depths of space at the heart of a long summer vanished day when imaginary veil upon veil of light
speaks
of the birth of unremembered glory. I thought of the imagination of twilight at the heart of equatorial sunset and the cry of a vanished bird when the rustle of wings ties one’s breath into a feather that floats unconsumed into the darkness.

I thought of the sensation of pain and of benevolent oblivion. I was confused, bewildered, by a sensation of music, a sensation of beauty (as if an unwritten symphony shrouded my eyes, unwitting revolutionary creativity entertained by Billionaire Death). And I recalled Emma’s perception of laughter’s mask as she lay in my arms by the sea. Her perception, I knew, was also saturated by the imaginary cry of an incredible bird born in the workshop of heaven at its margins with the waste land. And I was struck now in Billionaire Death’s presence by what seemed an intermediate vibration between parallel musics of which I already knew: Emma’s dear music of mystery and grace and the cheap music of the electric machine in the circus of hell.
Now –
between these parallels that were so unlike one another – lay the imaginary chord I had glimpsed in Billionaire Death’s eyes.
Love’s
death
wish
. It was as if in seeing this, hearing this, I glimpsed again a reluctant shift in the priorities of life and death.

‘Life is blind spirit, death is love,’ Billionaire Death said in the voice of a strange organ. I knew I must shake off the dreadful fascination and responded almost without thinking: ‘One needs to convert love’s death wish into generations that are capable of
such intimate rapport with one another’s frailties that love leads them
through
death not
into
oblivion’s space adventure. Life leads them into spirit as if the passage through spirit is the infinity of invisible spirit itself.’