Belly to belly
Back to back
Ah don’t give a damn
Ah done dead a’ready.
Calypso sang more deliberately – as if to supply longer intervals or spaces between lines than on the first occasion. This was astonishing as her song seemed to arise from the bowels of a slave ship becalmed a million light years from home.
Frog was suddenly discomfited. He ripped open the vessel or barrel in search of his Beast. He peered into the dark as into an organ of humanity. I walked over to him. My Shadow followed.
‘The organ’s a text,’ I said, ‘cinematic music, cinematic text. Calypso’s lament with its implicit unshackled dead is as much about death as about self-abandonment, birth. It’s a prelude to my grandfather’s revised text of Faust. He read Faust, he loved Faust, and he re-wrote it in his own image. It was his last trip in the heartland. He was short of fresh fruit, greens, vegetables, and so on. Beriberi got him in the end. But as he starved by infinite degrees he tasted all the bitterness, all the sweetness, all the hope, all the despair in the world. And touched Faust the Beast. Faust the half-circus man, the half-mechanical soul. Faust of the womb and the grave. Faust the slave and Faust the self-mocking engineer of the gods …’
I was unable to finish. Frog was startled. His diamond eyes flashed with terrible jealousy and rage. All of a sudden he raised his mottled hand and before I could say Peter or Emma or Doctor Faustus or Beast or Angel he struck me a blow on the back of my neck. Poor Robin Redbreast, I thought instinctively, as blood flew through my Shadow and rested on Ghost’s right hand. It was so sharp I felt the stillness of the blade pour and coil within me. My head toppled into the Globe. I saw the civilization of Skull and the Mountain of Folly that I needed to climb and transcend if I were to arise from the sea.
TWO
I was innocent. I was guilty. I was good. I was evil. I was solipsistic (autobiographical) character. I was polyphonic (fictional) author. Solipsistic (autoreflective) in seeking to mirror the frailest, deepest origins or unity of the self underpinning all creation. Polyphonic in reflecting alien voices, alien voices in familiar texts, internal/external counterpoint, deformities of spiritual gold and mystical silver, perversities of epic, blind rendezvous with Ghost, diverse masquerades, self-revelations, self-deceptions …
The many conflicting versions of the coming and the arousal of Ghost, the leaden-tongued yet silver-tongued expressions of Ulysses Frog (epic lover yet doomed, jealous scavenger of humanity), the dumb lips of Ghost, the lament of Calypso’s unshackled dead, the country of Sleep that I inhabited as if I lay on a pillow of the ocean yet walked upon waves of land, the breaches of convention, the overturning of expectation, were all the substance of chaos edged by redemptive passion, redemptive hope, in the body of the resurrection that I reflected in myself as the price of an infinite rehearsal of value and spirit.
The sentence of chaos had been inflicted on all species the year I was born, 1945, the year the Bomb fell and history changed, revised itself backwards, never to be the same again.
FROG’S MOTTLED HAND HAD FALLEN LIKE AN AXE IN MY SLEEP. Fallen on many a reflected economy in Mirror and Shadow of Flesh-and-Blood in the flight of the crane or the swallow or the dove from north to south. Shadow-crane, shadow-dove, shadow-fish, with broken neck floating high on a wave or high on the land. I, Robin Redbreast Glass, flew headless then spun with a feather and a scale into the turning Globe, the turning wave, the turning hills, the turning valleys. Put my head and my hat on again and bowed in my Sleep to Prosperity’s block and Necessity’s block.
Capital block prosperity? I asked Ghost who flew in the shadow of a wave and a hill but his lips were sealed though a Strange cry trembled in the recesses of coming Skull but remained short of utterance.
Marxist block necessity then? I asked Ghost: ‘Tell me, Ghost – how deceptive, how real, are Necessity and Prosperity? Are they disguised ballrooms and cells of evil in which the heads of the unemployed roll? Are they in essence the polarizations of a Faustian morality that we need to untangle until the Beast smiles and points to heaven rather than to hell?’
I raised my hat to Faust as the flock of my terrors skimmed a wave and settled on the ground and in the belly of the sacred wood.
‘We are reborn with the fish and the bird, Ghost. We are reborn through the sword that severs the umbilical cord and flashes in the light of the sun and the moon with sudden estrangement from a body of darkness, foetal terror revised, foetal hope revised, revisionary edges of subsistence upon light and darkness, subsistence upon the brute world, subsistence upon the bland world.’
The wood was in a state of alarm. And indeed I sensed a change in the disposition of the tenant in my Shadow. Ghost was alarmed and uneasy at the intrusion of brute climates, brute absolutes, in the communication of ideas under the sea and over the sea that Faust had converted into a machine, fish of steel, fish of lead, fish of iron, birds of steel, birds of lead, birds of iron.
The mechanics of the circus of power on sea and on land made Ghost tremble on his flying trapeze in the belly of the sacred wood, the mechanics of domination in the name of Brute Prosperity or in the name of Brute Necessity.
Was this opposition between Brute and Brute a prelude to an era of temptation in which one Brute devised ruses of tenderness and humour to tempt the Other? ‘Bow down to me, dear fellow Brute, and the kingdoms of earth are yours. Save in the degree that I keep my options open to save the world and to bring you to heel.’
Faust – both Goethe’s and Marlowe’s – had been a priceless possession in my grandfather’s stock of books. He was still mentally athletic and young when he died aged fifty-five in the heartland of the sacred wood. He had pored over Goethe and Marlowe nights under an uncertain fuel lamp after labouring days in the creeks of the rainforests that ran through his barred consciousness. Ran like a woman’s fluid constellation born of the reflected moon and the reflected sun. Golden offspring born of the inimitable self-penetration of the reflected moon and the reflected sun. Such was the Glass in which he dipped his pen to write his own version of the Beast of immortality, the Beast of the circus and of the machine. I was there in that new version, the Glass child in the golden woman my mother. I was born (may I say it again) in 1945, the year my grandfather died. It was the year of the Bomb, the year of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. ‘We are born with the dead, with the fish and the bird.’
I was the foetus revised, the unborn grandson revised, entangled in the waters of mirrored death revised in the unconscious fluid of my coming birth. There was a turbulence in that revised fluid and I knew what my mother knew. I shared with her – in a kind of void yet potent revisionary abstraction – her concerns, her anxieties, the postman’s knock bringing letters from my grandfather in the distant heartland.
I knew he thought of us – and had heard of me – from the letters Aunt Miriam wrote to him and received from him, the letters my mother Alice wrote to him and received from him. I could not be sure in those turbulences when the dream of diamonds and gold gave way to me, to Glass, and he saw me like a fluttering redbreast bringing its hat (or was it its head?) to Faust and skimming the creek in which he dug for spiritual wealth as well as crass bounty. (Years later when I read his book I saw he had dedicated it to me, his unborn grandson Robin Glass.)
At first he would have given his soul, he would have bartered my head, Robin’s head, for offspring of crass gold, for the diamonds in the eyes of Ulysses Frog that sometimes clouded mine as I slept. (‘Frog’s eyes,’ my mother once said when we peered into the mirror together, ‘are your eyes, Robin. No wonder you invent such terrible guardians of the beach.’) He would have bartered his soul for crass gold, he would have bartered Ulysses’ head in my self-loathing, self-reflecting Frog’s mirror of the injustice of epic plunder, epic statecraft but was stopped. Something happened. He wrote to Alice and Miriam to say he heard voices singing ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’ and within those voices a whisper that may have been the fa
int voice of Robin Redbreast foetus revised in the book of humanity, the book of the Beast of heaven and hell, far up in layer upon layer of sleeping trees. It was the whisper of ironic singing temptation offering him elusive orchid-kingdoms worth a million, elusive toucan-kingdoms worth a million, elusive parrot-kingdoms worth a million in the zoos of the east and the west.
Elusive head of time as well. It was then he began to prize me, prize the ironies of strangest hidden conscience everywhere, the Glass of multi-reflecting telegraph of soul. I knew when he died because my mother knew. I tasted a melon or an orange on her lips. It tasted sweet. Whereas on his it had become a dry shell, the shadow of Skull, in the beriberi zoo that claimed his life. A strange animal he seemed to me at the end as I dipped within my mother’s body into the script, the illuminated script, of her dreams. I saw him roaming the palaces of the peacock-orchid and the unicorn-amaryllis in search of his limbs as they crumbled into the fire and Shadow of Glass, my Shadow. I was a shadowy revised foetus and I gathered those limbs together into a giant dream, giant reconstitution and moved paradoxically upon a fragile arch. I was a shadowy Robin Redbreast revised Glass drifting by uncertain degrees towards a twin desolation or waste land through which to plumb the rebirth of my age.
That desolation, that dismemberment, was bland economic malaise indistinguishable from bland twin prosperity or from bland twin necessity.
It was a blandness I sometimes reflected when the Brutes hid their faces in my Glass. It was the blandness of a spiritual malaise, economic malaise … As though the mirror atrophied into a paradise without fruit … Was Faust in league with the bland, with the Brutes?
Before I could put the question to Mother or to Aunt Miriam or to Ghost a turbulence within the years since 1945 washed over me, over Glass, over Robin Redbreast, and I saw an incongruous feast of numbers, a new mathematics of the hollow soul. Bountiful numbers in a starving bland universe through which I flew with headless cranes and headless doves in my Sleep before settling again once more into the belly of the waving wood.
When did it first dawn on me in scanning the new Faust by my giant parent that he (my grandfather) was a mathematician as well as a poet of the magical dead? Take the following equation. Giant equals pygmy in the incestuous bomb of the divine. He had become a distant, unreachable giant when my biological father vanished and diminished in my consciousness into a pygmy. Distant giant yet close at hand in the turbulences I knew within my mother’s flesh. I mixed them up (giant with pygmy) since I had seen neither; that mixture was at the heart of all the fiction I was to write; my pygmy vanished the night I was conceived, my giant died the day I was born but grew large as God nevertheless.
He was the God of the heartland who had sent pots of gold to us. He was an alchemist whose pay dirt was gold or the diamond eyes of Frog of whom I was to dream (Frog, the inferior shadow of the giant, Frog, the Don Juan trickster pygmy who resembled my vanished father) over the years of childhood, adolescence and maturity when I reconnoitred the beach of Old New Forest and waited for Ghost to arise from the sea.
It was God who inspired me not to be entrapped in a trauma of losses (or in the bounty of ill-gotten gains) but to build through Sleep the resources for a complex autobiographical fiction reflecting both execution and rebirth, holy/unholy parentage and the resurrection of the body built into inimitable being, inimitable species and masquerades of creation … I shall write of my mother later and the crucial part she played … indeed never ceased to play. How else could I have known the quantum womb, the quantum turbulences, through which Ghost came out of the grave of the sea?
*
That year, when my mother was great with child, my grandfather sent her the manuscript of Faust to read and to type. Then came the telegram. It was the end. I knew.
The staccato rhythm of the typewriter punctuated my sleep like muffled gunfire. Her heartbeat quickened as she read and typed. Commotion piled itself into commotion. The giant slipped from the mask of the Faustian poet into the mathematicians’ code of nuclear rape. Did I dream it then or was it years later? Was it a recurring nightmare? I asked Ghost; how was I involved though still in my mother’s body in a dream of pure poetry, pure mathematics, yet nuclear rape? Was I an internalized cipher in the corruption of ‘pure’ mathematics, ‘pure’ inner space God? Or an internalized gene in the corruption of the ‘pure’ humanities, ‘pure’ humanities God? Bland mathematics. Bland humanities. Soulless machine. I asked Ghost. From faraway in the heartland, poetry and mathematics extended their fist to prod my mother in her ribs. Her contractions began. The Bomb fell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was rushed to hospital. I was born within the instant hour – or flash of eternity – the Bomb fell. I knew an anguish I could scarcely fathom. I attribute it now – that anguish – within the Glass of time and the Blast that happened to an effulgence of birth threaded into death, a white blistering fist or axe of light coming so close it was as if pure poetry and pure mathematics died in the instant I was born.
I bowed to my mother’s ghostly legs as I emerged through them into the blinding light, the blinding axe, as they (poetry’s glass legs, mathematics’ glass legs) seemed to break and fold under her yet in other women’s bodies reflecting my mother’s, through other women’s bodies reflecting my mother’s. They gave birth to me even as she did.
A poem’s glass legs, mathematics’ glass legs, reflect the terror and the ecstasy of the new-born. New-born hubris in mirroring birth-in-death, death-in-birth?
‘Not absolute hubris,’ I said to Ghost. ‘Surely not! Profoundest desire to unravel hubris I would say in a quest for original value, original spirit, in a dangerous world.’
THREE
Let me now confess to the gravity of finding myself face to face with questions I hoped to duck but which have been the substance of recurring dreams throughout my life and from the day I was born.
Old questions yet new.
Who am I? What is fragile humanity? What is poetry? What is science? Can they save creation in complex and ceaseless rehearsal of the birth of spirit? What is the value of survival – is it arbitrary chance or partisan mould – or does it open doors into innermost, self-reflecting and reflective being? Have I been asking these questions all along in this fictional autobiography? If so I need to return to them again and again, to sense new emphases, new edges, new extremities, new proportions.
Take the question of survival. Does survival imply an inner mirroring capacity in league with the magical dead who move in one’s blood, the magical unborn who move through one’s blood, magical yet tainted antecedents, magical giants, magical pygmies?
THE BOMB HAD FALLEN. Its consequences were with us into eternity. Nothing would ever be the same again. An awesome dream.
Where lie the roots of such hubristic knowledge in an infant such as I – infant mankind in infant womankind? Where lie the seeds of such peculiar transparency – the one in the other – such peculiar transparency enfolding all creatures? I find myself positing quantum legs, quantum glass in the building blocks of the universe.
Such astonishing and daring fragility that is susceptible to an inimitable self-reflection of all faltering achievement and power may still give us an edge or a particle or a grain of ascendancy over chaos and bring us abreast of the subtle race, the subtle shadow, the subtle and complex majesty of the genius of paradoxical spirit.
I BEGAN TO CLIMB THE MIRROR OF SLEEP THE MORNING I WAS BORN.
It is a source of incredible wonder – that borders on cruelty all the same (the cruelty of the innocent new-born in the guilty new-dead) to be possessed by a recurring dream of accusation through childhood into maturity, accusation that apparently starts from the day one is born, the silent accusation of the species.
BORN DEAF – the dream declares. THE BOMB IS FALLING. No music anywhere. The harps of the angels are numb or dead. But one climbs each silent string. Ghost was as silent as the glass robins hopping in my room, silent robins, amongst whom I stood. Silent unicorns. Silen
t seals. Silent blackbirds. Silent larks.
They had flown or run or swum on a wave into the room on the blast of the wind and the wood and the sea from pole to pole.
Glass Red Riding Hood lambs and wolves from the building blocks of the universe were loping into the room, transparent but scorched, across the windowsill. A glass unicorn in a building block within the staggered tenses of time, present and past. The unicorn is. The unicorn was. Not a bay. Not a sound. Not a horn. An eerie deafness, eerie silence, eerie destitution of music. THE BOMB FALLS.
Glass toucans perched on my cradle and pecked at my eyes and ears in the building blocks of the universe. Yet not a tap, not a hammer, not a nail, could break the silence in the Looking Glass space I had become. I was all reflected creatures flying on glass wings, swimming with glass wings, walking upon feet of glass in the building blocks of the universe.
I saw the dove’s addiction to propaganda and to war enlarged into immutable plague, immutable silent discord, deaf mute of silence. I saw the tiger’s susceptibility to false knowledge enlarged into immutable flame, silent discord, deaf mute of the sun. I could not hear or fathom its roar, its blaze. I turned to Ghost across the years and understood at last the cautions that had been threaded into his enigmatic and muffled tongue. He had been telling me of the silence and the deafness that would encompass my age if I failed to sound the origins of spirit. AND THEN WHEN ALL SEEMED LOST – WHEN I HAD SURRENDERED MYSELF TO TOTAL SILENCE – I REMEMBERED THE REVISIONARY FAUST THAT MY GRANDFATHER HAD WRITTEN AND THAT I HAD SCANNED WITH REDBREAST EYE AS MY MOTHER TYPED. I had been possessed of an eye, it seemed, that shone in her breasts, an ear that flowered in the tunnel of her body. I had swum within turbulences and reflected oceans of space. Not oceans now but bombed woods in this recurring dream with its whisper of temptation aloft in the trees at the heart of a chorus singing ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’. Singing ‘seize the species, seize the kingdoms of the earth, grab, plunder, possess.’ It was then – as if there had been a clap of thunder in the grave – that my deafness vanished and I heard the bustle, the movement, the traffic of the kingdoms of the earth. All mine, mine to seize. I had been tempted by a whisper in the trees in my mother’s body to ‘seize the species, seize the kingdoms of the earth’ and had responded instantaneously. Those kingdoms took the form in my dream of quantum, psychical glass, psyche’s glass tigers, psyche’s glass seals, psyche’s glass unicorn (and all the other creatures that had loped or swum into my room) in the building blocks of the universe. I reached out to seize them and I heard the bustle, the movement, the traffic of time, as they slipped from my grasp.
The Carnival Trilogy Page 21