Josephine was his. She had issued from the beak in the horse. That beak had turned inwards. It had sliced, picked, pricked to create agonizingly new mental insides somewhere in the region beneath his heart and under the still vortex or unconscious memory of umbilical navel and cord. That beak was agency of furies. PICK. PICK. BEAK. SLICE. CUT. BEAK. “Oh my god I never knew how I stood it.” Seed of the daughter of man. For if there were a twentieth-century son of man (Mary Stella’s human, divine child), there needed to be also a twentieth-century daughter of man (Jackson’s animal, divine child).
“You cabled the old South,” said Khublall turning away from Jackson’s face.
“When I arose from bed they’d flown,” said Jackson, “Sukey and my Josephine. A fury had taken my daughter away. That’s the answer to your question. That’s how I lost her.”
“You did nothing to get her back, you let her go…?”
“I had had time as I lay in a hospital bed to see into myself.”
“See what?”
“Prey—prey of the furies.” He spoke now almost under his breath. “The beak was too much.”
“You needed a rest,” Khublall protested, “that was all. You’d spent nearly all of the money you had. Then when you fell you were concussed.”
“You’re a good man, Khublall, a stout friend.”
“Me? Good? No one’s good.”
“True,” said Jackson. He was actually responding to Khublall’s remark on the concussion he suffered when he fell. “Even today when I look back across the years, faces, buildings, streets, are a mist. My memory’s erratic.” His eyes brightened. “It was good to see her a week or two ago. But I know I have lost her. She was dancing in Paradise Park in the theatre there.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“I couldn’t face it. Just couldn’t bear the crowded theatre or hall. The play was called Scissors and Chariot. Perhaps I should have gone. I may have seen…” The last words were uttered so softly that Khublall did not hear. They may have come of their own accord from another’s, a silent, throat up in the ceiling. Words of a blind family. The divisions were multifold and lay in part between “fictional human divine” and “fictional animal divine”. It was a division that occupied him now like another devious fury. A division that few could hope to bridge or cross except mutual angels and daemons with a capacity to dislodge the terror of the ignorant blind, the proud blind, the terror that one may learn to see through each and every blind in oneself into the arts of the genius of love within, beyond all spheres, limitations, polarizations one takes for granted as the absolute womb of the living or the absolute hierarchy of the dead.
Seven
It was early April. The newspapers were full of analyses of the attempted assassination of President Reagan and the danger of a Russian invasion of Poland. Mary made her way past the old St Paul’s schoolground and turned into the secluded backwater in Hammersmith where Father Marsden lived. It was ten-thirty, a sharp, cool morning. A car drove past and she glimpsed someone with what looked like a bunch of tulips in her hand. It reminded her of the subtle, majestic carpet in the Angel Inn study.
It was one of those mornings when despite the tulips she was still oblivious of the radiant, yet curiously dense curtain of the sky, the fine pale silent music of a spring day. A blackbird was singing but the song fell upon her ears as if she were deaf. She arrived at the door and entered the house with her key, and stopped at the mirror just inside the hall. She replaced the key in a black, suede handbag. She was smartly dressed, pale-green coat that she began to shed to reveal a light-grey woollen dress and a necklace of jade.
Her eyes almost seemed to flash back at her in the slightly overshadowed, spiritual mirror and to heighten the beauty of her lips and skin: the opaque light of spring turned all at once into a standing pool in which she moved rooted in the floor, yet a vertical swimmer. The self-appraisal was so rapid that she hadn’t realized how absent from herself she had been. She came to the door of the study, still fluid, still detached, still cool. Father Marsden paid her well. The thought slid into her mind for no reason whatsoever to make her reflect almost without thinking on the progress she had made over the past years as his secretary, his patient, his friend, his companion on many a “hypnotic expedition”.
She placed her coat on a rack by the window close to her desk overlooking the garden. Irises were in bloom. W. B. Yeats’s A Vision lay on her desk and when Mary picked it up she found a scribbled note inside from Marsden asking her to type the pages he had underlined.
It was an American edition and the back cover carried a note of contents that Mary read with some astonishment.
“On the afternoon of 24 October 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or so day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. No, was the answer, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”
Yeats and his wife continued to pursue this extraordinary experience over the course of the next seven years, and Yeats recorded the results in 1925 in A Vision. Mrs Yeats’s efforts at automatic writing led to the conscious formulation of an elaborate system of actively related opposites, providing Yeats with something in which he could finally believe, something that left his “imagination free to create as it chose”.
The system of supernaturally revealed images of A Vision gave Yeats both a method by which he was able to categorize humanity and a method for dealing with history. (He) did find in these communications the metaphors for poetry he had been promised. Explaining as it does the sources and significances of such recurrent images and themes as the “anti-self”, “gyres” and the “phases of the moon” A Vision is…
Mary stopped, replaced the book on her desk, and sank into her chair. She had been standing by the window as she read and the light outside seemed as pooled now in the glass of the window—a passing yet strangely fixed shadow and abode of cloud—as in the mirror in the hall that had accompanied her into the study. It stood alongside her, that mirror, like an upright river or pool, a door into inimitable fluid spaces. It was a gratifying shock to discover that her relationship to Marsden possessed a treasury of potentials, that her pre-menstrual stresses were “phases of the moon” that held elaborate tones with which to dress both fire and flood and to secrete the majesty of the seasons in a minute cell, minute spark of infinite sensuous apparel. As for “anti-self” this she read as native to herself, her many antecedent selves; “gyres” was a term she had never encountered before and all she could make of it in her own “narratives” was emphasis on “reversible transference” and upon inanimate features, wheel, scissors, chariot, bale, shawl, line, ladder, etc. that awakened her to the hidden rhythms of her own unconscious.
It was as if Marsden had died and she would never see him again in Angel Inn except in the mirror that walked beside her and stood now in the room like a companion wreathed with faces, misty faces, Marsden’s beard into which Jackson’s tall hairstyle arose, Khublall’s shaven skull into which Marsden’s tall, knobbed stick arose, footballers punting on the green into which Marsden’s floating globe arose, dancers in Paradise Park playing scissors-and-chariot into which the magical child John arose with Josephine’s eyes in his head as if born as much from the South as from the North, as much from Marsden as from herself, perhaps more Marsden’s cross-cultural, religious seed than Sebastian’s physical penetration of Stella’s body on this side of the mirror of life.
In the depths of the mirror—on the other side of the mirror—lay marvels of funeral progression, yet re-birth residing in every deprived circumstance of being.
Mary recalled how deaf she had been to the voice of the blackbird that morning on her way to Angel Inn and yet it returned to her now in the depths of the mirror
that stood beside her. Half-reflected voice, shaded sound, silent echo. Was this the source of musical composition? Did music issue from reflections that converted themselves into silent, echoing bodies in a mirror? Did the marriage of reflection and sound arise from deaf appearance within silent muse (or was it deaf muse in silent appearance) from which a stream of unheard music rippled into consciousness?
The voice of the bird in the mirror converted itself into the spirit of bird-like appearance as if one’s ears were partially unstopped, unsealed, at last, in order to listen to a sound that had no natural antecedent in bird or beast despite a resemblance to something one thought one remembered hearing in the interstices of obliviousness to everyday utterance. That paradox of deaf mirror filled with voices and faces was a cautionary note inserted into “animal divine” and “human divine” voices and it seemed unsurprising to Mary when Marsden appeared not in the room but in the mirror from the other side of life or death to say without utterance, “All voices that claim to be divine are to be distrusted. Remember that, sweet Mary. Nature’s crude therapy is the seal of deafness to reality, seal of blindness to reality, that it plants over our eyes and our ears to render us immune to the voices of temptation and mystery. When that seal lifts a little and one is, in consequence, exposed to great dangers within Angel Inn mirror into which one has stepped, one falls under the action of another protection, a protective grace. And even then what one begins to hear and to see needs to be accepted as partially arisen marvels of conception within still biased appearance, still biased voice, still biased sight, still biased sense, still biased nature.
“One steps into Angel Inn mirror to a rhythm that still embraces all our past, lapsed, vulnerable apprehensions, our states of being deaf, being blind. Within that embrace one learns that to match one’s step or state to past lapsed states is to see (through the blind eyes of others who still need that protection), to hear (through the deaf ears of others who still need that protection). That paradox is a mutual guard, it signifies that the sculpture of apparent death of the senses is itself a guard to save from unbearable processes of knowledge that could mean extinction if one came to them before one should. And this is reflected not only in science but in every ordeal of unequal state in which the gulf between majorities and minorities tests us to the core to find solutions by mutual effort, the blind protected by the seers (who imperil us all if they succumb to temptation), the ignorant by the wise (whose wisdom is itself a temptation), within world cultures that share the brunt, the tragedies, the humiliations, the burdens, that accumulate on the threshold of radical, human possibility….”
Marsden receded into the mirror. He had spoken without speaking. Perhaps for the last time. As his silent voice faded Mary recalled the anguish she had experienced when she had typed an article he had written on the Soweto riots in South Africa. The keys of the typewriter descended again under her fingers in the mirror and left her shaking with fright. Over two hundred young people had been shot in the streets. The next day was pay day in Angel Inn. Should she send her pay to the bereaved? Was money tainted gold? How could sterling be tainted? Nonsense! Rand perhaps, not sterling. If sterling were to be married to rand then too must roubles, dollars, yen, francs, and every denomination subsisting on gold as far back as Atahualpa.
“I know what I’ll do,” Mary said to her fingers in the deaf mirror, “I’ll ask Stella to collect my pay. I’ll scribble a note to Father Marsden. He won’t mind. He’ll understand.”
There she was. Stella. In the shower. The faintest suggestion of a line of bullets running across her thin shoulders. Flawed but attractive limbs, slightly out-thrust stomach. Her hips flared like a subtle tide, a subtle moon, and it came as an astonishment to Mary to see her naked in the street, a bit thin perhaps, walking along the pavement towards Hammersmith and Angel Inn. The other pedestrians saw nothing but a coat and a dress, high-heeled shoes, a bag on one arm. She wasn’t wearing her slacks this time.
Mary read their obliviousness of Stella’s faintly bullet-ridden, naked body in the mirror. It was true that she (Mary) was as oblivious as they—she was oblivious of their hidden global wounds as they were of Stella’s. She was as oblivious as they were of punctured camouflage or metaphysical strip-tease genius in their midst. And yet in confessing to their obliviousness—in perceiving it so starkly—she seemed to see through their eyes not only how blind they were but the endangered messenger one sends time and time again out of oneself in dream or involuntary reverie into an unexpected shower of bullets, hard rain out of the sun that leaves a pool of blood.
Stella advanced in the street towards Angel Inn, a slim, tantalizing target, high-heeled trance. She came to the door of the house, entered the Inn, moved along the hall into the study. She paused in the mirror close to where Mary now stood, inspected roses that summer long past where irises now stood.
The money she had come for was there within the manuscript that Mary had typed. Marsden was absent. He had left the coast clear. Better to make such exchanges of daemonic currency as bloodless as possible. One needed the daemon to buy food, pay the rent, buy clothing, pay electricity and gas, income tax, bus fare, rail fare, bale fare into the stars, chariot fare for christenings and weddings…. And, said the voice in the deaf mirror, let it be done in all decency by a bloodless machine or, if not that, by Anancy sleight-of-hand in which the giver and the receiver run from each other when the deed is accomplished.
Had Marsden been there he might have been tempted, in all the circumstances, not to run but to stay and to kiss Stella’s thin shoulders. A kiss to cure faint bullets. Better a kiss than a wound one cannot bear to contemplate. Better a blessed pound note slipped from between the pages of a book than prostitution of body and soul. Better the veil of spring or winter or autumn blood in all its celebrative beauty of flowers and vegetable gardens than money that speaks aloud, weapons that drink milk and chew bread, one man’s investment that turns into another man’s or woman’s or child’s seed or grave in the depths of past and present, past and future place and time.
*
Jackson walked past naked Stella in the street. The mirror picked him up and bore him past her (as if she were not there) to North Pole Road. He switched on his radio in search of the blues or Mozart. The batteries were low and the voice reporting the news of the Brixton riot seemed to come from a far way off. Another planet. It was a thoroughly British accent. Not foreign…
*
Stella returned to Dolphin Street to find an angry and bewildered Sebastian. That very day (Mary’s pay day) he had lost his job as an electrician and been told that his qualifications were inadequate. The sight of Stella with money he had ceased to earn aroused a depth of frustration in him allied to passion, a sensation of injustice, and of belonging to inchoate consensus or body of unemployed millions around the globe. Mary had left when Stella returned. She knew how to be “absent” when Sebastian’s “crowd” or “consensus of deprivation” erupted and drew her into bed.
Sex was sometimes better than “speed” to place a seal upon his undervalued life and the undervalued lives of others.
In coming by degrees to run into darkness and see little, he acquired a terrible protection against seductive horror. He acquired also the subtlest link to Marsden’s “death” or “withdrawal into the mirror of space” and to Mary’s “absence from herself” in Stella. Their fictional death and absence resembled his need for protection, and his need resembled their comprehensive acceptance of layers of non-sensibility to offset total despair. His collective darkness remained therefore a shared reality of individual psyche. To see as they saw with stark complexity was to pay a price for his non-sensibility and to incorporate his eyes and ears into their minds and into camouflaged intercourse with history, the violations, the pathos, the brutality, and yet the paradoxes of protective armour—even death—upon each profoundly vulnerable witness. (There—Mary saw in a flash in Angel Inn mirror that drew into itself worlds as a pool draws an ocean—lay an approa
ch to the camouflage of diminutive seed, essential life, that torments and teases heart and mind in living epitaphs that surviving, embracing creatures are for extinct species.)
Now—as he drew Stella into bed—Mary perceived him and Stella as through “absent body” from a meaningfully distorted angle in the mirror.
That angled intercourse with history spoke as she listened to deaf and silent mirror gathered between them into each other’s crowded arms—crowded with the million facts of birth and death it was hell to bear. “Unemployment is hell” his body asserted to conceal the fires from himself in the way he moved into blank slate or erasure of pain within Stella’s thighs like reversed blackboard of the birth of his son, reversal of emergent child into regressive foetal parent.
*
Jackson switched off the radio in his room, got up, and stroked with an uneasy, absent-minded finger the Flanders poppy on the shelf beside him. The voice of the news-reader detailing events in Brixton still seemed to address him as if it arose now from under his feet or from within the other startled flowers in the room speaking silently to Mary in Angel Inn mirror that flashed upon North Pole Road.
Jackson donned a coat and made his way up into the garden that ran just above and behind his basement flat. He too was suddenly naked in his clothes, not bullet-ridden but scarred by a few random burns he had picked up without knowing it. His legs were slightly bowed with the stalwart defiance of a cricketer rooted in defence of an invisible wicket behind him. Jackson had once played opening bat in the West Indies in 1949 for his University College eleven. The flesh on his bones was now spare as a crumpled tattered dress across the years waiting to slide or to slip on to a pitch of darkness. The hair on his chest was thin, straggly and grey. His body had lost much of its spring as if the memory of the fall from a ladder persisted. Yet there was a vitality, an unpredictable capacity for inner decision.
The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) Page 11