Here the elation of the human boulders sprang from complex vocation, complex labour, complex originality. Which dance, I wondered, came first – this or the one Amaryllis and I had danced before in the company of the others? Did an originality of cosmic vocation anticipate the elements that clothed hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt?
Such vocation, such originality, such labour, was desired and desirable beyond all other desire or conviction we felt as we danced. Dancing boulders. Dancing and collapsing. Yes – dancing and collapsing! For the task on which they and we were engaged drained us of immense resources and the most curious fatigue enveloped our limbs. It was a pattern or form of fatigue secreting undreamt-of gaiety. It reflected a drain or loss of energies, yes, but it also reflected – in that loss – an incubation of new forces, new energies.
Perhaps here was the answer to my question as to which of the two dances came first! In the incubation of new energies, the cycle or frame of human dancing boulders oscillated into a humour where first and last things were deceptively first and last, they were clothed by the self-same elements. The very intricacy of the dance of genesis lay in exposing a riddle of infinite parallels between so-called first things and so-called last things‚ between innocence and guilt, between hope and hopelessness.
Such an enigma of parallel opposites moved therefore into the mind of oblivion as incubation of sleeping energies, sleeping originality through frames of mind, through frames of oblivion into undreamt-of resources of spirit …
I looked around for Masters and it seemed I had lost him in Waterfall Oracle, that he had seen things he could not disclose, other dancers, other boulders, beyond my imagination. I felt Amaryllis and I were on the verge of toppling into an abyss. But he reappeared in the nick of time and led us back.
SEVEN
My father, Martin Weyl, was caught upon his treadmill, fixed, pinned to a wall of space, in early September 1939 when the trial of the red prince ended. The Amerindian was found guilty and sentenced by the judge in the New Forest courtroom, Brickdam, “to be hanged by the neck until he was dead”.
Martin was beside himself with grief and disappointment. The jury had taken three days to bring in their verdict. He had slaved like a fiend across many months in the presentation of his case. He had lain wide awake night after night. He exercised every muscle in pursuing the case. He delved into subconscious realms, consulted volumes of Purgatory’s Who’s Who. He depleted his own pockets to bring witnesses from every corner of the globe to testify to the archaic charisma of the law built into the El Doradan “ghost peoples” or “ghost assassins” (as the New Forest Argosy dubbed them).
All to no avail. With the passing of the sentence, he left the courtroom, he was exhausted, he was barely awake on his feet, he was a figure of Carnival dance, a secretive chained boulder drenched in Waterfall Oracle. He had forgotten to disrobe and still wore his gown and wig like sackcloth and bleached autumn snow. He blundered into the road and was knocked to the ground by a cyclist before receiving a frightful blow on the head (crushed dream-eggshell) from the iron wheel of a dray-cart. It ran over him even as the alarmed shadow of the half-prancing donkey or mule or horse that drew the cart engulfed him. Was it shadow-animal or shadow-cart? (The personality or shadow of the animal that pulled the shadow-vehicle was never established, as if to embroider into sphinx-like proportion the profligacy of the boulder-dance written into my father’s death. Pinned to a wall, pinned to a road, yet limbs flung apart, dancing, collapsing in space.)
I see him after all these years as if he too were arraigned before me now in Purgatory’s halls in the mirror of the river and I were at last in a position to begin to revise the sentence of the wheel and the sphinx. The treadmill on which my father found himself in the wake of his death I judge now to belong to phantom Martin Weyl the First (1932–39). Martin Weyl the Second had been partially released from the first frame by 1982–83 and was closer in texture and truth and spirit to the anthropologist’s “leaves of brain” that Amaryllis had been teaching me to ponder and assemble, and I am able to read now the epic defence he waged to interpret Carnival divine right, divine law, in an archaic people, in the archaic king of a “lost” people we judge to be savages, who judge us nevertheless as blind to the enormity of the moribund absolutes, moribund law, we bury in our own institutions.
In the wake of his sudden death, however, in 1939 I was aware of nothing but my mother’s weeping. She was inconsolable. And I felt so guilty it was as if I had condemned her even as the red prince had dismembered his sick queen in the heart of his tribe. My mother’s hair streamed to her waist in Purgatory’s river. Her breasts were cold in the starshine and sun of Purgatory’s bleached snow. She had to be constrained and kept at home when my father’s funeral took place in late September 1939. She was a phantom of solid grief permitted only to stand at a window in which she seemed framed like a picture observing the hearse and the long procession of carriages and cars that accompanied my father’s coffin to the grave.
Was he in that coffin? It all seemed terribly unreal to me in 1939. One ingredient of my father’s defence of the Amerindian – that cut my phantom mother to the heart in 1983 when Masters revisited Waterfall Oracle and found her there – revolved around questions that seemed directed at her as much as at the regime that had sentenced a savage to death for matricide.
Did she wish to be framed forever into the passion of sorrow, the passion of inexplicable violence? Or was she susceptible to capacities through and beyond frames, through and beyond the law of the frame that binds sorrow and violence together?
It was the expression “law of the frame” that agitated my mind as biographer of spirit across the light and the dark years of terrorism, of apparently motiveless killings, of apparently meaningless crime in the twentieth century. The twentieth century was a century of realism that failed entirely to plumb the reality of the pagan in ourselves, the savage urgencies, confusions, labyrinths in ourselves, the savage illuminations we desperately needed, the inner unspoken theatres we projected upon others, the inner problematic ties between mother and son, father and daughter, mother and daughter, father and son, masked stranger and intimate stranger, masked enemy and intimate treacheries of friends, masked governor and intimate governed, masked judge and intimate judged …
The Amerindian had barbarously slain the queen, his mother, in accordance with codes that seemed moribund in 1939 but were sacred law nevertheless to him and his people.
It was true that the colonial regime existing in 1939 had framed its own liberal laws for many decades forbidding such ancient barbarous practice in the savage tribes of the interior New Forest under its flag. But those new laws in no way invalidated the charisma of the law itself in an ancient people.
“Charisma of the law” was a term to which my father clung in defining his concept of “frame”. Divine right of kings may have vanished in Europe and elsewhere but divine right to territory, to frames of space, frames of water, frames of earth, was entrenched in the laws of sovereign states, East and West, North and South, everywhere. Thus the “charisma of the law” in the context of possession was operative in the Carnival masks of absolute regimes and incestuous territorial imperative. It was tragic that such absolutes never yielded, or confessed to, charisma. A European colonizer might trade or surrender territory to another sovereign colonizer but no spiritual confession of moribund principle ever occurred. In effect all that happened was that the new colony staged a ceremony to suppress, or eclipse, past sovereignties in itself. The new colony or regime subconsciously lived by, or subconsciously endorsed, moribund absolutes-in-depth to maintain itself in its divine right to frames of earth and water and sky.
My father argued that the case in hand required Plantation New Forest to desist from prolonging the seizure of the person of the Amerindian as if he were a common criminal (whatever “common criminal” meant) and to engage with him in the complex unravelling of the charisma of the law, the charisma of frames, t
he charisma of the treadmill. He argued that the action of the courts in New Forest was a symptom of derangement in ourselves, a blind refusal in ourselves to judge the deepest issues at stake, and that it would exacerbate “charisma”. He argued that that exacerbation was occurring at many levels of our colonial civilization and would result, he prophesied, in a nightmare feud of one sort or another, meaningless violence, inexplicable assaults, accidents, horrors, all sprung from addiction to frames that hypnotized peoples into believing themselves not only helpless or insecure or threatened but – through accumulative obsession with postures of attack and defence in those who waxed powerful and strong – overseers of human destiny by divine, territorial right …
Masters returned to New Forest on the eve of my father’s funeral. He was accompanied by Amaryllis, the anthropologist’s daughter. Her astonishing face caught my eye. I knew her in my dreams. It was a face that seemed curiously unframed by moribund anxieties, wonderfully innocent yet passionately aroused. I found it then – and still find it now over all the light years – almost indescribable in tone and quality of expression. She was my age in 1939 but she seemed much older than I in some essential gift from heaven of dancing heart and mind. She too had suffered bereavement in the loss of both her parents. Masters was reticent in speaking of the expedition when the New Forest Argosy came to interview him. There had been clashes, he said, with the angry Amerindian people but fighting had broken out as well between the members of the party on expedition. They had been a motley crew and an escaped convict had somehow inveigled himself into the party. In the end he revealed himself as someone on whom they could rely to fight the savages and to scheme for gold.
Everyman Masters had come close to drowning in Waterfall Oracle and had narrowly succeeded in pulling himself and Amaryllis back from the torrent, from veils of greenest light, blues and roses, veils that wove themselves into chains within all generations, all peoples, in the mystery of the Waterfall. They had secured a trail to another encampment and gained assistance in securing a boat.
He brought her back safely to New Forest and I made her acquaintance for the first time. First time? There was no first time, second time, first dance, second dance. We were ageless dream. I knew her, she knew me, it seemed, long before Masters arrived with her in the Town in 1939. When and where we had met puzzled the will at the edge of waking spirit but we were clothed in the sun’s originality as in a book we knew whose chapters overlapped, past shadows lengthened into the future, the future condensed itself in the present. I saw the originality of the sun in her eyes, she saw it in mine. She was a window for me into light. I knew I had been with her in the voyage to Waterfall Oracle. When I told Masters this he smiled at me. I was a child. I was entitled to a child’s game, a child’s intuition. I was entitled to the seed of dream. He knew – even as he smiled – that I would never relinquish it and that it would mature over the years into a recovery of Waterfall Oracle. He would turn into my guide. He would turn into the dead king. Amaryllis and I would be his living companions. He would leave us at some stage but by then we would be launched on our journey to innocence and guilt in this age or the next or still the next.
In 1939 his statement to the press – that Amaryllis pinned into Purgatory’s Who’s Who – was a bald recital of fact and it was to take me all his life up to and beyond the day of his second death to glean a perception of the prophecies he had received as a young man in Waterfall Oracle. Those visions or utterances so staggered him, so overturned him, that he could only impart them to me by indirections and through a variety of phases that were all, in a sense, incomplete. The first phase I tended to call that of Masters the First (1917–57) though in substance and reality this phase possessed sub-systems that ran roughly from 1917–39, 1939–57. (Indeed all subsequent phases were subject to sub-systems.) The second phase I tend to see as running loosely from 1957 into the 1970s. The third phase I tend to see as coming to a close on the day he died in London in 1982. Masters the Fourth commenced then on the day he died and became my guide backward in time.
It was Masters the First (a young man of twenty-two) who consoled me and took charge of my poor mother when he returned to New Forest on the eve of my father’s Carnival funeral. (That funeral was the most outstanding event or masquerade in New Forest for decades.) My mother was stationed next door at a window in the top storey of Masters’ house. Our house – the one in which the Masters family had lived in the 1920s – was single-storeyed, three cave-bedrooms, kitchen, shower-bath cave, lavatory, drawing room cave, front gallery cave overlooking the garden and the long central aisle or pathway through flowering plants to the street.
Thus, at a stroke, as it were, my mother was removed from the funeral stage itself yet ensconced in a high balcony next door as in a theatre. There, locked into a frame, with two servants to keep her company and to prevent her from escaping, she beheld the procession beneath.
I remember glancing up at her from the aisle in the garden along which the funeral audience – the New Forest citizenry – was arriving. Bodies moved in single file into the house, past the wreaths and the show-piece of a coffin, and out again into the street where they stood in slightly tense, somnolent, pleased, passive groups or repaired to sit in their carriages and cars and wait for the coffin to be borne from the house to the hearse and the procession to come alive and take its course to the cemetery. A thrill ran down my spine on seeing my mother far up in her frame. It was not simply her expression but the sensation I had, as I dreamt of her, that rain was falling in the air over the window. It was an illusion, for the sun was sharp and bright and not a drop fell upon me below. But the sensation persisted that my mother was veiled by Waterfall Oracle, by some extraordinary ruse of the light years wheeling in space, by some veil or abstract premise Masters had brought back with him from his expedition upon the river El Dorado.
It is said that a newborn child, with the gift of a seer, sometimes wears a caul over its eyes, and now it seemed that my new-dead father had projected a caul over Jennifer’s eyes through which she looked at me (as if two eyes were raised into a single third eye) – looked at me as if I were her judge and executioner rolled into one around the wheeling years.
I judged her, yes, but she resisted me in that sudden caul of rain. She was a prophetess, the Delphic oracle of slain queen, though not a sound issued as yet from her lips.
Funerals are the most important social event in the New Forest calendar. It was an unforgivable offence if relatives of the deceased failed to attend. Such relatives were but a trickle, however, in a river of mourners drawn from the distant relations of less distant relations of close relatives of the deceased. Then there were the friends of the deceased and the friends of friends of the friends of the deceased. Then there were acquaintances of acquaintances of the acquaintances of the deceased. Then there were colleagues of the deceased and the friends of colleagues and the friends of the friends of colleagues of the deceased. Lastly, as if to defy all convention, there came the curious, and the friends of the curious, and the acquaintances of the friends of the curious who haunted the premises of Carnival.
In my father’s case, despite the universal hostility he had aroused in his conscientious defence of a pagan prince and a savage, all barriers were broken when fate struck – as if by accident – to punish him. The community flocked to him then, not as a free people but in a phantom concourse of solid souls bound for a. racecourse, or a football match, propelled by a devil to mount a gigantic treadmill upon which, it seemed, everybody that was anybody, nobody that was somebody, moved to pay their respects to the shell robed in a coffin in the professional vestments of the advocate.
A reporter stood at the gate and entered the names of important persons attending the funeral. The Governor had asked Masters to represent him. There were representatives of the legal profession, the medical profession, the Church, Sport, Scholarship, Politics, the Prisons, the Estates. The men wore black serge suits, white shirts, black ties. The women wore
white dresses and white or black hats. Masters wore black as well but he had had no time to have it dry-cleaned and it was painted with faintly discernible stars like the flame of a match from the El Dorado river. I saw them if no one else did. Even as no one, in the dream, looking up to the frame in which my mother stood, saw the glisten of tears, the glisten of rain.
By degrees, the passive funeral throng acquired a faintly unsettled mould. The lid was fastened upon the coffin. Masters and five other citizens of Purgatory; namely, a lawyer, a doctor, and three Old Boys from College, bore the coffin through the garden into the roadway and toward the hearse. The horse, for some unaccountable reason, took fright and the bearers were driven to deposit the coffin upon the grass verge by the roadside. The horse reared as the mule or donkey had reared to overshadow Martin when he fell under the wheel of the dray-cart. It not only reared but succeeded in backing the hearse on to the parapet. It drew so close to the garden that I dreamt it extended its neck like a harlequin, Carnival giraffe and cropped the sunflowers in the garden to leave the stage under the faint mist of Waterfall Oracle dry and shorn.
The driver of the hearse succeeded at last in calming the frightened phantom-rock of an animal and in restoring the hearse to the roadway. Masters and his fellow bearers lifted the coffin again. They succeeded this time in transporting it to the hearse and depositing it therein. Wreaths were piled upon the coffin; they gleamed through the glass body of the vehicle that had escaped fracture. The horse was frightfully motionless and its panting (however still), perspiring (however dry) sides also gleamed. It was a dappled rock of a creature and its coloration seemed to reflect the garden sun-fodder it had consumed. I wondered whether the glass vehicle had also eaten the wreaths piled upon the coffin within it or whether my father actually lay in the body of the horse with the sunflowers from the garden that the rock-animal had consumed sprouting from him.
The Carnival Trilogy Page 13