Only then as Boreas crawled off the platform to lie again in peace under the caressing feathers of his heated pond did the Master speak to him.
‘You are an artist — come with us along the multi-value mazes of our mission. Your film caught all the spirit of our cause my life my thought the unspeaking nature of spontagnous living in mystic state!’
Then Boreas turning his great bare bead and naked tearlined cheeks like udders grey with dawn: ‘You stupid godverdomme acidheads and junkies all the same you live inside your crazy nuts and never see a thing beyond! So you mastered my masterpiece, was it? Pah! My fool man de Grand was supposed to bring the cans of film but in his stinking state forgot — and once caught here impossible to leave again the cattlepen. And so my masterpiece my High Point Y unseen and unshown this golden importunity!’
‘We saw it all! It sparked right over with total lootage!’
Sick with disgust salivating.
‘God knows what you thought you saw! God knows, I swear I’ll drown myself, shoot myself, harpoon myself to death, never film again! Not only is my masterpiece unshown but not one of your armada knows it or misses it. This is the nadirene anti-death of art!’
Bitter and acid, Angelines rank morning laughter bit them.
Charteris took in breezy semi-grasp Boreas’ coat and pointed at the emptying square of stood squampede grey in washed-out light but ambered by flames that now consumed the pinnacles recently putrescent in other taints.
‘You have no faith in transmutation or my well of the miraculous! Your oldtime art has caught a light at last! Everything you Boreas tried for broke fire materially and burns into our sounding chambers! You are my second blazer henchforth, Boreas, a black wind blowing off the old alternatives and hurricaning those who cling to what was, electric, electric, see the sign! What you making here in newchanced happens! Stellar art!’ He laughed and cried tired dregs leaping leaping.
Through his blandering tears stared electric Boreas, clutching at his bare brow, screaming, ‘You gurglingodfool — your rainbowheaded randyears have set fire to the place! It’s the last loot! My poor beloved city burning! Bruxelles, Bruxelles!’
The poison that powered their inner scrutinies seeped into beetling baldbright Boreas so he saw himself tumultaneously making the cripple still upon the cabbalistic asphalt making couch among a lake of flames making love to a dummivulva making Age old Ina suffer him. His face cracked its banks china thoughts depiggied. Boreas saw more of boreased self than he could dare or wish to see. He rocked with unreason on the staggered balcony of outsight.
Manifolding with discardment he cheek in hand into the dull inner chambers of shade past old banners toothed with black lions collided with the birdlike nervous drapery-deportment figure of a human cassowary to hiss shoulder lept unmoving and instantly with locking blubber arm seized him groaning and yowling for accompaniment.
‘I am ill — magisterially ill!’ Hollowly to his lackneed squir.
Thus the blind bleeding the blind and dankring leech to leech upon romaining leechions highways where this wesciv sinbiote first took its blindwheeling veinhold with the cohorts tormenta in hurling knowhow to the punchy vein and murk the scenariover evermorgue till savvy was a scavengers filiure of which this sciatic scattering long kuwaited just the last bloodstrained curtain. After the legendary coherets among the darkfalling walls of oh my westering world the venomilk of progross gains its bright eclipse and suppurages from the drawbridgeheads of cleverknowing Charteris gold-pated Nicholas Boreas and black jack cass.
Nothing for Cass but this supporting role uneasy-eyed or never rubicond to shuffer with the ruined borean bulk out down a lamenting grand stair and by tenuous tenebrous betelgrained deathsquared slipways to Boreas’ luxconapt.
There with continuing cunning whines for succour, Boreas almost hauled him to his pool edge. But at the sight of those bulbous hyacinth the castaway squealed like a lifted root seeking too in the convex gilt eyes twin unaimed deadmen of himself!
‘Yes, die-by-drowning, Cass, you undreaming schemer of your hire-oglyphed runways! Wasn’t it you who brought this pyromanichee circus into city just for hope of trade, Cass, for hope of trade? You neo-Nero para-promethean primp, they’ve sacked our silver-breasted capital, haven’t they? Haven’t they? Under the gargling lilies with your scant scruballs!’
He wrenched and tugged in buttacking flapping angony but Cass was nimble and failing took the epicurer man off balance with one tricky twisting cast of leg. Together they struck and smacked among showering orfe and weed and tame piranhas glimpsing for a nanoment undersea eyes of each with sibyling hatred widely divinited beneath the parting roots. Then Cass was sourfacing and outkelping himself, evading Boreas’ doctopurulent grasp to snatch from his stocking nestling a slender beak of knife.
So they confronted, Boreas half-submanged with foliaged morses dotting his sunken suit. Then he recalled his anger with flecked lungs, leaped up brandishing his arm and in megavoice again on set bellowed in long bursting vein the terrors of his repudation!
Wilting Cass turned his tail before the wind and like a deflayded animal ran away somewhere into the smoking cityhive to hide.
That cityhive and what its singeing symbolled did cosmic Charteris survey from the shaking platform.
Angeline shook the Master’s arm. ‘Come on, Masterpiece, let’s shake this unaimed scenario before the whole action goes Vesuvius! Come on! Uncoil the Kundalini!’
He stood enwrapped staring as the centuries fevered to the edges and breathed and blew themselves to heat again and their stones ran in showers kill slate cracked down the long glacier of mansard roofs and hurtled into the extinct square below to be devoured with its old common order in the long morain of alienation.
He pushed her away.
‘Colin! Colin! I’m not flame-proof if you are! It’s the last loot-in else!’
Rich curtains at the windows of an old embroidery now released a noise like cheering and whistling swept the blaze and the crushed bodies in the square below burst into conflagration with amazing joy. One or two cars were still careening madly about to lie with black bellies uppermost lewdly burning tyres still rotating as their votaries dragged themselves away. The emptying bowls held ashes and a lascivious flute held court.
Angelina was having a mild hysteric fit, crying this was London burning and slapping Charteris wildly on the face. He in his eyes scribbled on the retinal wall saw the graffiti of her blazing hate and all behind her flames like christmas cacti flowering with a lorry coming fast recalled her husband the white land as it rushes up but no impact and his blows and knew among the microseconds lay a terminal alternative to silence her and have no more inspector at his feast for she as much as any of the predelic enemies among the Neanders dream her speckled wake.
She in her turn was not too wild to see a redder shade of crimson leap up his retaining wall and with a lesser scream now our valleys fall echoing before them now in our shattered towns the smoke clings still as the ulcerated countryside rumpled outwards at predatorial speed to her fluttering chimera she did the sleight-of-hand and dodged him as he once more sprang and pushed clutching at his ancient blue coat of Inner Relief but now no Christmas innocence. Slipping he fell and at the rickety platform edge hung down to see bloodied cobbles under surflare. With instinct she on top of him flung her bony trunk loading him back and cosseted him and goosed and mewed and sat him up and like a mother made all kindliness but milk there though the sun novaed.
Half-stunned he sighed, ‘You are my all-ternatives,’ and she half-wept upon him at such grudged sign.
Their hair singed and Buddy Docre came in an illusory moment with Ruby who fancied her and Bill and Greta yelling murder. They together all but not in unison climbed tumbled down the foul inner chimney stair and ran among the flailing lava of another Eurape to the battered cavalcade jarring to take off in another street with the nervewrecked bangwaggon.
‘Boreas!’ cast the whiteface Master. ‘We must save Boreas
!’
And she glowed him amazed still in his headwound he had some human part that plugged for the schillerskulled director. But she was learning now and now stayed silent at his murderous feast with inward tremor knowing she would not break a single crust if Boreas loafed or died as maybe the Master minded: a gulf of more than language lay between them.
Vanquished she tottered against Ruby his face moonstrous in the setglow and he grasped to the smouldering pompous columns gasping ‘Change gear Ange your way doesn’t have to be his or my car in the Chartercade you know that you know how I skid for you even since before Phil’s day two rotten no good bums — ’
But he gave up as through her frantic goosetears she began on tearawy note that she was not good enough for him was no good to any man deserved to die or could render to no man the true grips of loves clutchment till the others turned back calling and Charteris took her failing wrist abraptly.
For him the self was once again in its throne called back from the purged night’s exile and he commanded no more as he faced the lack of his own divinity in all its anarchic alternative. His pyre grew behind him as they barged off across the ruby pavements for as Buddy passed a reefer he flipped the photograph that he had godded himself because they had to crown some earthly king then had forgotten that he was their moulding not his make so tunnelling upwards through the sparce countryside the mole-truth set up its tiny hill that all was counterfate in a counterfeit kingdoom.
He had cried for Boreas because that artifacer could help blow blazes from his parky wavering nature with the bellows of his counterfaking craft.
Before real miracles he had to dislocate the miraculous in himself. New dogs shagged along alleyways with ties of flame. A man ran blazing down a side street. Dischorded impages of choleranis sang along the bars of his perplextives. All were infected from him and in that pandemetic lay his power to make or sicken till nature itself couched underground.
A smoke pall canopiled overhead the new angrimals swimming powerfully in it or hopping along the crestfallen buildings. Shops stood plagened open entrailed on the echoing gravements as men noised abroad and struck at each other with fansticks more than one fire was buckling up its lootage as they acidheaded out towards the oceanic piracy of their motorways.
FAMINE STARTING AT THE HEAD
She clad herself in nylon
Walked the flagstones by my side
The feathered eagle
To the skies
No more uprises
Instead a palm of dust grows
You know that earthly tree now bears no bread
A hand outstretched is trembling
The flagstaff has an ensign
Only madmen see
With famine starting at the head
Some judy delivers a punchline
In the breadbasket today
No fond embraces
Are afoot
Death puts a boot
Where the bounce was once
In among the listening lilies a silent tread
Bite the fruit to taste the stone
Throughout the Gobi seed awaits
The rain to stalk
Famine starting at the head
He only has to say one word
Roses grow from an empty bowl
In our shuttered streets
The cars roam
Don’t need a home
Or volume control
Wandering sizeless with the unaimed dead
We hear his voice cry ‘Paradise!’
On the Golden Coast the cymbals
Start to sound
Salvation starting at the head
TORTURES
There’s no answer from the old exchange
I want to push inside you
The sensations you find in yourself
May just be within my range
Grimly sitting round a table
Fifteen men with life at stake
They may torture themselves but those tortures
Will not make them awake
The cards were somehow different
The board I had not seen before
Their iron maiden gleamed dimly cherry-red with s
Down in the basement I reached Low Point X
Last year they stopped their playing
Phone just ceased to buzz
But if you find them there tomorrow
Better start in there praying
Reincarnation where the cobwebs
Are comes daily from your keep
We may torture ourselves but those tortures
Cannot break our sleep
POOR A!
(Gurdjieffs Mocking Song)
Poor A! Poor A! Now there’s a clever man!
He only wants to talk and he is happy!
I could have pulled his trousers off
Un-noticed, silly chappie!
Poor A! Poor A! What sort of man is it
Who only wants to talk and he’s okay?
I tell you everyone’s like that —
They fill the world today.
I might say poor old A is rather better
Then some wild talkniks I have met, a
Chap who in his way knows what is what —
On military onions he knows quite a lot.
In a superficial public way he tries to find out Why:
And he’d hate to think he ever told a lie.
Poor A! Poor A! He is no longer young!
He said so much I think and was uncouth
To guard against an awful chance
To listen to the truth —
He led himself a merry dance —
He hid his head in circumstance—
To fight against the truth!
Disciples: Poor us! Poor us! We really felt his tongue
He drank Khagetia and chattered without ruth
To guard against his only chance
To hear G give out truth —
He led us all a merry dance —
He leads himself a dreary prance —
To smite against the truth!
To fight against the truth!
THE UNAIMED DEADMAN THEME
Foreign familiar filthy fastidious forgotten forbidden
Suicide’s revelation its sunnyside hidden
Death’s black-and-white checker is down on the table
Fugitive fustian funebral infinite formidable
Far down the runway the black sheds are standing
My love talks to me with a delicate air
I am the victim the assassin the wounder
Her face looks no larger as I stand close than
It simultaneously does in my telescope sights
But pleasant is walking where elmtrees paint shadow
If I fire I might as well hit me
I walked with her once where her elms brought their shadows
The dogrose dies now while the invalid car
Barks vainly and I the assassin the wounder
On the runways the markings are no longer valid
Hieroglyphs of a system now long obsolete
No this button first love yes that’s the idea
If I fire I might as well hit me
Foreign familiar filthy fastidious forbidden forgotten
I sprinted a dozen times over where rotten
Things grew and she cried for a sweet-flavoured minute
Fugitive fustian funebral formidable infinite
LAMENT OF THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE OLD ORDER
(A silent dummy dirge)
We kept up our façade
The unworld showed the third world how
And prized its pretty inhibitions
They undressed us
And possessed us
And now that times are hard
The unworld holds its outward show
Too late for us to change positions
They have dressed us
And confessed us
THE SHUTTERED STREET GIRL
(Love
song for flutes)
Her face showed like a shuttered street
Under the mauve and maureen flash
From which iguanas might crawl
Golden gullets wide
She stood there in a wet shift breathing
And just a mental block away
A lane lay in old summer green
Behind her pregnant eyes
Where a young barefoot girl might drive
Her would-be-swans all day
Or night for night and day are both
They don’t apply
There’s always summer in the dreaming elms
Till your last shuttered white year
And while the small rain fills
The thoroughfares of love
So her face in blue fermentation
When she crouches seems
Like an ever-visiting miracle
As she pees by old brickheaps
There’s whole sparse countryside
Buckling up from far
Underground as she stoops there
And our small rain raining
THE INFRASOUND SONG
Where the goose drinks wait the wildmen
Wait the wildmen watching their reflections
When the damson fruits the wildmen
Wild Neanders dream their speckled sleep
They have their dances ochre-limbed to a stone’s tune
And their heavy hymns for the solstice dawn
Their dead go down into their offices berobed
With ceremony. Their virgins paint
Their cinnamon lips with juice of berry
They owned the world before us
Barefoot in the Head Page 17