The Carnival Trilogy (32 page)

We came down to Skull with a bump. Not with a bang but with a bump like a boat that oscillates in a wave. The streets were swarming with refugees of soul and spirit, refugees of heart and mind. And my first vision was of the Beast with the map of heaven in its claws or its hands. No,
his
claws,
his
hands.

I had seen the Beast before when I hid Ghost in my shadow and outwitted Frog. But in this instance or imminent rehearsal of values he seemed quite different. I dreamt he turned his gaze upon me as if he remembered me from the day I was born. And I drifted into his psychical glass eyes and perceived the vortex of the Tiresian dance. It was the dance of bone and flesh within and without the Beast in the mystery of the resurrection body. I was aware of the wreck of
Tiger
in the mirror of the sea beside the magic wood. The vortex grew steady as a rock. The vortex was a sleeping, spinning, steady top in my dream.

The crew upon
Tiger
were masked in bone as they danced.

‘You have seen them before, these dancers,’ said Tiresias, ‘in your grandfather’s pork-knocker theatre of great navigators and conquistadores. Becalmed above an impossible garden.’

‘But this is
Tiger
,’
I said, ‘the wreck of
Tiger
beside the magic wood and under the sea. This is – or was – my grave.’

‘All graves are becalmed vessels above an impossible garden. Until I mediate in the underworld and sprinkle the lips of bone with Beast-food. So I repeat, Robin Glass, you have seen them before. You saw them the moment you died. I moistened your eyes then with an appetite for visions. And the grain of all foundered ships came alive. You have seen them before I say – the crew of bone that fish for a morsel, a Beast-morsel, Beast-fish, Beast-grain, Beast-shrimp.’

I dreamt I now saw Alice and Miriam on the deck of the
Beastship
of life under the sea. They were masked in flesh. Not bone. But as I scanned their curious bodies in ‘sleeping top’ dance of
stillness
and flesh with sailors of bone I saw the stillness for what it was.
Stillness
was a ‘hole’ in each body through which I looked
beyond the dance into vistas of oceanic spirit. There was a shout like a hoarse drum and one of the bone sailors heaved upon his fishing rod and drew in his line. Beast-fish at last! They cooked and ate. As the fire subsided in the orchestra of the sea, and the spray darkened into musical coal, I was startled profoundly by another ‘hole’ in Miriam’s body. The bone-sailors in their dance, in eating the fish, had subtly cannibalized the spectre of death and eaten into the gravity – or the anti-gravity – of Miriam’s flesh, animal flesh, female flesh. Eaten into the dance and into themselves as well, into their male bone and acquired in consequence a crack or tooth-mark, a sparkling intensity or flute of soul.

And I recalled the tooth of creation that I had brought with me from a sparkling wave when I arose from the sea. I had not understood its innermost music of appetite for vision until now as I moved in the Glass and the mirror of the Beast with the map of heaven in its hands.

‘The resurrected body consumes a vision in every morsel of meat or fish it reflects or cooks,’ said Tiresias. ‘For every disciple of vision dies and dies again and again with an ailing creation. One dies because one lives a visionary life beyond the cannibal
consumption
of dancing grain, dancing fruit, dancing flesh. The gardens of the Beast are signposted with visionary signals of death and resurrection in the agriculture of the soul, the hunting grounds of the soul that loom in the stylized drink and the stylized meat of the soul.’

As he spoke I remembered the unemployed soul of humanity in the stylized munition factories of Skull. What stylized teeth and jaws did such an unemployed soul wear? Were they stylized iron teeth, stylized iron jaws, with little or no apprehension of the dead shrimp in a mouth chewing aimlessly, violently? I saw the stylized body of the unemployed soul of humanity turning within a deeper and deeper chaos of insensible vision, a deeper and deeper
blindness
, a deeper and deeper grave.

‘Visionary employment beyond the grave,’ said Tiresias (and I wondered in what degree he was mocking all civilizations), ‘is an alteration in the biases of the soul, it is a threshold into the resurrection of the body.’

Were not mockery and self-mockery a measure in themselves of the changing shroud, the changing investitures, of bias? I saw all at once – in the psychical Glass eyes in which I stood within the giant
grave of the underworld – that the Beast was involved in weaving a portion of Emma’s seamless garment and that such a weave was a pointer into the tasks of the employed soul.

I followed the light, almost invisible, thread along
Tiger’s
deck and into every minuscule eye of bone, every faint crack, every ‘hole’ in the flesh of the vortex, the spinning top of sleep in the garden of the remembered sea, every fissure, every sailor, until I was aware of its still match within the flame and the bite of the water, within the flame and the bitten water, as if the light thread turned on itself into an intricate reversal of expectations.

When
Tiger
sailed Alice and Miriam and I and the others who were drowned that day had invested in a safe return to harbour. When Navies sail the crew invest in a safe return to harbour. When civilizations harness the swamp or the earthquake-hillside or the volcanic plateau, humanity invests in safe walls and cities. How safe? How doomed? That the Beast had spun its portion of Emma’s seamless robe in such a context was a pointer into the choices one makes (or which one should perceive one is involved in making), the price one pays at every level of existence (or may find one is called upon to pay when one lives by choice apparently on the edge of the abyss).

‘The Beast-thread in the vortex and the stillness is the life of the
dear
seed one should visualize as a warning of the spirit against monstrous excess, the life of
dear
energy one should visualize as an illumination of true body and mind (a grain of light in a dark world is sustenance indeed), the life of the
dear
corn, the
dear
flower, the
dear
fruit, one should read with the eyes of the heart and the mind as frail extensions of the body of the earth, the convulsive power of the body of the earth that writes of itself with ecstatic petal or cloth of beauty by which it heals its ceaseless ailments and sustains its paradoxical fertility.

‘The life of the dear seed in a blind world intent on excess, addicted to excess, addicted to poverty as much as to glamour, sharpens, I fear,’ said the seer of the underworld, ‘the edge of overturned expectations, the edge of terror in cities, the edge of terrifying pathos in cultures doomed by nature itself, if nature is to survive as a phenomenon of value and therapy of the blind soul.

‘True survival costs dear, Robin Redbreast Glass, true survival should measure its technologies, its investments, against the light of an overturning of expectations and within a capacity to look and
move beyond immediate place, immediate time. True survival should be aware of the temptations of prosperity in fabulous ghettos, fabulous concentration camps. True survival should measure the price we have begun to pay to the Beast in the garden of life as we gambol with it, dance with it, and exploit it to our apparent heart’s content.’

The dance of the vortex staged by the Tiresias Tiger band was now over and I found myself once again in the throngs of Skull. I was aware of the divisions in the population. There were the doomsters and the boomsters. Skull was doomed (that was the logic of the doomsters). Skull was invincible concentration camp (that was the message of the boomsters). They sang together 
DOOM, DOOM, BOOM, BOOM
. I stood amongst them with the unfinished thread Beast had woven reflected in my Glass. Unfinished climax with Being. Unfinished thread that ran through the recesses of merriment to illumine all the more vividly the divisions of which I was aware in every city, every village, that floated before me in the panorama of Tiresias.

‘And both,’ said the seer of the underworld, ‘both groups, doomsters and boomsters, must suffer the reversal of
expectation
. You will not see Emma today, Robin Redbreast Glass. The climax between yourself and the new priest, the new archbishop, remains in suspension. Until humanity can gauge its defeats and the reversed sail by which it moves, one hopes, towards a
philosophy
of true survival.’ There was a clamour in the air, horns and trumpets and drums that issued from the recesses of existence.

‘What is true survival?’ I said in dismay as if even I (the resurrected body) had forgotten everything the dark seer had said. I looked for Emma but she was not to be seen.

‘You must sail towards her,’ said Tiresias. ‘Have I not already implied what true survival is?’

He paused for a fraction and considered. ‘Let me rehearse again before I vanish some of the implications of true survival. To sail in the nuclear rigging of Skull – in anticipation of the raising of
Tiger
and its reversed sail – is to sight all the more vividly the earthquake regions or the volcanic regions or the flood regions or the famine/drought regions of the earth.

‘Not that I, Tiresias, need any reminder. Over the centuries it has been my lot to patrol wrecked villages and cities and pastures where dead sheep nibble the lava from the sun in a mountain top.

‘It has been my lot to mediate between all expectations. And in the teeth of flame I have learnt that someone always survives, some group always survives. The survivors may come (it is ironical) from those who lived in the expectation of doom. Equally many who vanish may have been possessed by a conviction of infallible ground. I – as their mediator – had no alternative but to encompass all groups in the underworld and stress a reversed sail, and a spiritual necessity to look into the heart of true survival, into a shadow linking those who were apparently saved and those who were apparently not.

‘I attempt, shall I say, to sow a seed in the survivor that runs through his reversed expectation of doom into the shadow of the non-survivor. It is as if they embrace like man and woman and the shadow comes into the light. It is indeed a seed or frail bond between light and shadow, a frail window of strangest
flesh-and-blood
between the visible and the invisible. That seed is the primitive impulse of the resurrection of the body. For how can there be a true resurrection without a true balance between opposites by which we measure the human in the divine, the divine in the human? To measure or weigh ourselves against the light-in-the-shadow, the shadow-in-the-light of others is to deepen a reality that breaches the ailing premises of time.’

Tiresias stopped.

‘This is as far as I – the mediator in every crisis of expectation – may go with you, Robin Redbreast Glass. I illumine the seed of fire to enhance the regeneration of wheat. I illumine the shifting plates within the globe to engage civilizations in movements and migrations of threatened peoples and species upon an earth that is still the nursery of hope. In the fire of spirit let us wrest a therapy of the heart and the mind. Let us steep every inch of the resurrection in a capacity to weigh a reversed sail that arises and moves above the seas of chaos.’

It was his last word. He vanished, it seemed, upon the blowing of a horn or the roll of a drum.

I stood still amongst the moving pageants and throngs. I held the unfinished thread in the Glass of spirit. I remembered Canterbury in the magic wood of childhood, the play of Canterbury that Miriam and Alice had written and which Peter and I and other children had performed when we crowned Emma in our little theatre. The little theatre of remembered/forgotten
history one encompasses in a lifetime but must pursue into the future with reversed sail.

I turned another page in my fictional autobiography. A blank page upon which I had not yet written. Whose hand would seek mine, whose mask become my age in the future? I saw a shadow upon the page, I saw an extension from Ghost. Spirit is one’s ageless author, ageless character, in the ceaseless rehearsal, ceaseless performance, of the play of truth. The fictionalization of the self in age and in youth is a multi-faceted caution of the universal imagination against the tyranny of hard, partial fact.

A wave arose that bore me up. Bore the drowned boat up from the sea-bed. I was launched upon my voyage towards Emma.

When Robin set sail I returned to the sea from whence I had come. I am the ghostly voyager in time, in space, in memory, but always I return to the vast ocean, the rolling seas and the great deeps.

I converse now with the mind and the hand of the new
mid-twenty
-first-century drowned voyager who is to be reflected in Redbreast Glass. Young in mind he shall be as Alice's son was. And his hand? It shall swim both wet and dry as it turns W. H.'s drifting narrative to the stars, drifting between worlds. It shall weigh the obvious with care. For the obvious is sometimes an elusive reality.

He listened with a strange ear, a seeing ear, a listening eye, as we tossed on a wave. I gathered together the fragments of a history …

W.
H.
sold
Miriam's
theatre
in
the
nineteen-sixties
(close
on 
three-
quarters
of
a
century
ago
)
. He sold when others were shouting ‘independence and prosperity'. Alice's and Miriam's untimely deaths had left a mortgage on house and theatre. Had they lived that mortgage could have been concealed for a decade or two. In that sense W. H. was ahead of his time. Fate drove him to discharge a debt of tradition while others were basking still in a dubious El Dorado.

What he could not foresee was the moment when Billionaire Death would be driven to loosen his purse strings and multiply the proceeds from the sale of the magic theatre a thousandfold and more to finance the salvage of the wreck of the boat
Tiger.

This compulsion upon Billionaire Death was astonishing. It sprang from the nerve-end of the resurrection body – the thread of divinity's nerve through all the cavities and the chasms of nature – a nerve-end (or nerve-beginning) that spelt a complex revival of buried resources arching through many cultures and civilizations towards a true voice, a true ear, a true dialogue that the resurrection body nourishes as its ultimate originality. Here at last W. H. felt he could face the world with a dialectic of psyche and imagination. Here at last he saw how Alice's and Miriam's
debts drew him to look with uncanny laughter and sorrow into the meaning of the economy he served. To see the mortgage as a debt to sorrow and ecstasy – a debt to (or of) tradition – was to sight and to weave a thread that ran back into the past as it moved into the cross-cultural humanities of the future.

‘
IT IS A NERVE OR A THREAD IN THE FABRIC OF A SEAMLESS ROBE FAR OUT UPON THE WATERS OF SPIRIT TO WHICH ONE MOVES
(
I MOVE IN YOU, YOU IN ME
)
BY INFINITE DEGREES
.' Thus I impelled him to dream as I lay within his shadow. Thus I impel
you
to dream as I converse with the future …

May I pause and reflect again upon the obvious. I am Ghost. I have never before written a line. But I did utter certain cautionary fragments of text to Robin in the magic wood some time after he hid me in his shadow from the immigration officer Ulysses Frog. If I do write now I do not claim to be original but to tap the innermost resources of eclipsed traditions in the refugee voices that W. H. heard in the sea. I counsel you likewise – with whom I specifically converse – to remember the scripts of foaming water (foaming with constellations) within the traceries of the skeleton marches of the sea. And through these, and this fictional autobiography, I write to you of a seamless robe but find it necessary to stress that such seamlessness is not to be equated with the bounty of conquest. Rather its fabric lies in the spinning vortex of the sea, the still vortex of the sea; as if the still vortex of air, earth and sky – the spinning vortex of dream – secretes a corridor or passageway through every wave and overturning of rigid expectation.

I write in a wave that capsizes into a deformity of vision possessing such ascendancy it tends to conceal its hollowness. Think of that hollow wave as a debt to space! As the fee many a poor soul paid for a ticket to paradise. In the reversal of that hollow wave, space becomes an asset in breaking moulds of prepossession.

It is as if the bill of sale of the magical theatre of childhood that W. H. enacted becomes the currency of spirit. Money is the hurricane that may subside nevertheless into a gentle spray in a realm of ancestral yet new-born space or it is nothing. It may drive a hard bargain between the dead sailor and the living pilot, or a compassionate bargain between the born and the unborn navigator, but its true myth and value lie on the scales of the sea it
may never dispense with within a revivification of the spaces of meaning that tie one voyaging generation to another.

How can one sell or put a price on the map of heaven, the map of earth, without incurring an irony that multiplies the purse strings of Billionaire Death? Think of this – you with whom I converse – as you look back from your ship of life and death to the dunning world you have left behind, the landlord or landlady, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, etc., etc.

As the hollow wave breaks, the chorus of the world becomes all at once a sacramental self-confession.

Robin Redbreast Glass began his voyage towards Archbishop Emma in the year of grace
AD
2025 in which I am now writing to you. He carried with him a portion of the seamless robe she is to wear. I plucked it from Beast and gave it to him.

Beast's thread is the seamless garment one carries in ailing nature yet seeks from another source (a healing or healed source) upon the waters of spirit. Carries through arts of sorrow towards the consummation of bliss.

How to find a true balance between such carrying in vessels of nature and such seeking from vessels of spirit!

A wave arises. Look! Here are the scales that Billionaire Death offered Robin and Peter: scales upon which to weigh Alice's ring against the killing stone from a hillside. Look! Do they not compose a perfect match? The stone is purged of terror in the ring of a sacrament upon the scales on the waters of healing spirit.

But alas the stone begins to drift away from the ring into the Night of civilization. As they drift, the thread one carries towards the thread one seeks, appears to be broken or lost.

And yet it remains, it exists. But I, Ghost, know now – I cannot deceive you – that the price to be paid to gain and
regain
such a perception of a balance between ‘terror' and ‘
sacrament
' is greater than one imagines. It is a price that may redeem the sale of the earth and the sky in our nuclear age, our nuclear pawnshop, by drawing us – you and me – to the nerve-end fabric in the resurrection body where it touches the sliced purse strings of Billionaire Death.

Weigh that slice against the apparent severance of reality in the thread one carries towards the thread one seeks.

And perhaps one may see again in another light the infinite rehearsal in the economy of the resurrected body, an economy that may still, despite everything, salvage a civilization …

On one scale lies the terror of the broken thread or the drifting stone, the explosive rocket, in the seamless garment of God. On the other the sliced purse strings of Billionaire Death.

It is an extreme balance, an extreme purgation of terror in sacramentalized money, in an extreme age. Another wave arises as I address you. Remember me, remember Ghost.