‘Why me?’ I cried. ‘Why choose me? Who is it – let us be truthful, Ghost – that writes of me as if he is me in the future? Some damned expert no doubt. (They have ruined the water table in many a flatland, they have despoiled and exploited resources, triggered erosion in global theatres – experts they call themselves, experts in everything cheap though God knows how dear one’s embalmed species may ultimately prove.) Did I not happily drown when Alice and Miriam drowned? Whose body of expertise am I? Whose dear poverty, whose cheap prosperity, am I?’
I uttered the questions without thinking. I spoke, it seemed, in a dream without knowing I had spoken. I was alive yet dead. Why had I spoken as I had? Dream-reflex? Skull-protest? Simulated freedom of speech? Such speech (such uncertainty of motivation) sprang out of a fear, an ambivalence, a distrust of futures that come upon one before one knows the choices one is making, before one knows one’s potential age, one’s deepest age, one’s cross-cultural heritage and body of wisdom to come abreast of the tools that may damn or save (one cannot say) the human race.
Such involuntary speech (half-simulated, half-unscripted) sprang out of the dilemmas of a post-colonial civilization, out of Third Worlds, and bewildered First Worlds. Out of ancient conquests and legacies of evil that Alice and Miriam and all the Calypsonians had danced and played in all apparent and perverse innocence.
I repeated my questions and added automatically, ‘Can one trust the experts who write the fictions of the future?’
Ghost hid his Birthday/Deathday humours in a cloud then spoke above the chapel of the flatlands. ‘I shall call upon W. H. in a moment or two to speak of the book of your life. No expert is he but an adversary.’
‘Adversary!’ I exclaimed.
‘Are the truths of fiction,’ said Ghost, ‘not rooted in an adversarial spirit? Take the fictional houses of God! We call them cathedrals. Admirals and generals and soldiers everywhere. And the saints. Where are they? In a stained-glass window or two where they resist oblivion.’ Ghost was jesting but I experienced a stab of fear. ‘Perhaps W. H. will elbow me …’
‘And you will elbow him,’ Ghost interrupted, ‘into revisionary strategies in which you live as if your hand, your being, your touch, your seeing, your hatreds and fears for that matter, your innermost fantasies, become a medium in which life and death wrestle with one another.’
‘What are revisionary strategies?’ I was uncertain.
‘I say revisionary strategies to imply that as you write of other persons, of the dead or the unborn, bits of the world’s turbulent, universal unconscious embed themselves in your book. Do you see?’
‘And I revise around these and through these. I see.’ I was filled with a sudden animosity towards W. H. ‘It is my life – not W. H.’s. I shall spit in his eye when we next meet for a rehearsal at Aunt Miriam’s in her chapel perilous play of the flatlands.’
Ghost was laughing soundlessly. ‘Did not Christ heal a blind man with spittle and clay? It’s an elaborate strategy simple as it appears. In your case, Robin, it implies that your backward fall into Miriam’s childhood theatre is the visionary substance and the bitter flavour of memory, a relic of memory on your tongue that fills you with such uneasiness you project it upon W. H. And in so doing you help him to see deeper into the fabric of intuitive theatres, theatres of clay as of sea, light and darkness, air and element, theatres of the past, theatres of the present, theatres of the future.’
I was struck by the parallels Ghost had drawn.
‘Intuitive theatres?’
‘Just so,’ said Ghost. ‘They illumine the blind life (the unconscious bits) of the imagination whose roots run deep into the diverse substance of the intimate stranger in yourself Robin Glass, the clay, the claws, and everything that translates into innermost perception. The truths of fiction, yes! They validate you. You are the substance of stranger quarrels – love’s quarrel with time is a healed passageway into God – stranger myth, untameable reality, and renaissance of faculties within the womb of space. You live and write your fictional autobiography from the other side of W. H.’s blind/seeing mind, Robin Glass. He is a character in your book. You are no invention of his. You are no pawn of his. You validate and contest his discoveries. They are your discoveries as much as his.’ Ghost was laughing but deadly serious. ‘I merely confer upon him a body and a mask that are an extension of my paradoxical Being and of your youth into fictional middle and old age in which you lift your pen and write as you now do of your adversary W. H.’
I was conscious suddenly of W. H.’s presence and mask in my book.
‘May I give you the facts?’ said W. H. ‘I may be a character in your book but still …’
‘Facts?’ said I.
‘You – Robin Glass – your mother Alice, your aunt Miriam, and three children were drowned in June 1961, the afternoon of the earthquake. The boat Tiger overturned at sea. Alice, brave woman, assisted Peter and Emma, helped them to the land and returned.’
My hatred of W. H. welled into fury. ‘It’s not true,’ I shouted. ‘You know damn well I was in bed with flu at Aunt Miriam’s.’
‘It was I,’ said W. H. gently.
‘You?’
‘Shadow and substance ail everywhere in adversarial contexts of history. And out of that illness is born the resurrection of the body of the soul that we share with one another, black with white, humanity with humanity. What more can you ask of me, Robin Glass, what greater quest, what greater truth? We share an enduring tradition.’
‘You spoke of facts,’ I insisted.
‘Facts, yes, in that fate is the mask authorial freedom wears – the fate of a realistic end or extermination – until it yields to true myth we share with one another, the future with the past. When I arose from bed on hearing news of your death my illness vanished. I knew that time itself had changed and I had become the character of true myth in your book. Not that I was surprised. I had been rehearsing the part for a long time. I had been your aunt’s lover (I had grown to care for you as if you were my nephew) and the producer, the director, of her plays – a background figure. Background yet close as a shadow is to its substance. (Are not authors – forgive me for calling myself an author in this instance – shadow relatives in the book of life? And thus as shadows indispensable to the body of life, the fiction of the body?) When I heard the news I ran, ill as I was, healed nevertheless, blind, seeing nevertheless, down to the sea. The waves were high. The reef – a mile or so away – was a mass of turbulent ocean. A terrible commotion of water. Emma and Peter had already been taken away. It was rumoured your mother Alice swam ashore with them and returned for Miriam and the others. I thought I heard a voice from the ocean cry: “Remember me as I remember you. Become a character in my book. Fiction is real when authors become unreal. Fiction reveals its truths, its genuine truths that bear on the reality of persons, the reality of the world, when fiction fictionalizes authors and characters alike. Thus is archetypal myth resurrected. Thus am I your nephew if not in blood in the language we share.”
‘The voice in the ocean ceased,’ said W. H., ‘and yet I had been so stirred that a crowd seemed to flock out of the waves into my heart and mind. “Fiction relates to presences and to absences,” they said. “Fiction gives buoyancy to us. Fiction explores the partiality of the conditioned mind and the chained body, chained to lust, chained to waste. Fiction’s truths are sprung from mind in its illumination of the sensible body again and again and again, in its illumination of our grasp of intuitive theatre and of deprivation in the materials with which one constructs every quantum leap from the sick bed of humanity.”’ The crowd of voices subsided and W. H.’s confession faded into the page on which I wrote. I moved along the edge of the swamp to the Skull-shaped simulated city of the flatlands. And experienced the oddest vertigo – the vertigo of one’s precipitous age, the heady manifestos, the ambitions, the ideal fallacies, the intoxications, the addictions, the heights – though walking on the flatlands! I – Robin Glass – shoul
d have ‘walked tall’ as the President of the United States or as the Chairman of the Soviet Union but sagged instead (when no one was looking). Was it a necessary terror of the resurrection to experience oneself as a young man in a hollow body? Hollow-looking glass marvel in every television box! Such is the illusion of power the resurrected body faces as it ascends from the grave. It is encrusted with illusions of power, illusions of freedom, that it needs to unravel as a prelude to a genuine revolution.
I loathed Ghost as if he had occasioned the vertigo of my arousal. My loathing had intensified when he began to speak a variety of uncomfortable home truths. ‘Better a dumb Spirit than a speaking God. Such are the paradoxes born of the Word and of the possession of a voice by a stranger exercised in true capacity or spiritual right.’
Ghost had made an enemy of me by speaking the language of the judging heart. God had made an enemy of Mankind with every commandment that he uttered. The earth became a battlefield of fanaticisms, one party fighting another, each defending but attacking God in mauling the stranger at the gate. Each was convinced it possessed a duty to maim or to kill in upholding the laws of God. Such is the terror and the ambiguity of the Word. No wonder God tended to keep a silent tongue in His head. Or was it in Her head? (The matter of gender was a sore point amongst male priests and female priests.) Ghost had ventured to speak through a variety of masquerades and utterances that seemed to mock yet to reveal, to discount yet to make visible innermost feuding reality that is masked by self-righteous accent or idiom, self-righteous deprivation.
Indeed this was Ghost’s strategy on behalf of a lost or half-remembered humanity on the edge of the abyss, on the edge of hollow intelligences, hollow prides, into which I moved as resurrected flesh-and-blood within the age of the waste land.
It was this uncertainty about the Word, about truth, in my resurrected body invoking the half-remembered shell I once was that tormented me most of all in returning to the land from the sea and intensified once again my indictment of Ghost. Was I now more than human shell, less than human hollow, other than human shell, in tending to forget (within the grave from which I had arisen) an everlasting strangeness in creaturely divinity’s essence, an everlasting saturation of fabric and necessity for a spiritual irony in all renascent formations, animal and soul, angel and fish and bird?
Was this spiritual irony part and parcel of the seed of Ghost in the Word of God?
Did that seed in its grain of self-mockery and profoundest utterance sustain a true placelessness, a true freedom on land and water and air (not a technological roar or self-righteous bias), profoundest change, profoundest imagination (not ten feet tall cliché-ridden idols and derivatives of global conquest)?
I saw it all now with heartrending insight and remorse such as only the dead who return to the living may know. I had come back from the chapel of the sea with Ghost long, long ago. In dreaming of him on the beach I had been involved in a rehearsal of perfectible order, perfectible industry, perfectible state, that I shared with him from the beginning of time. But in my obliviousness of the ambiguity of the Word and the nature of absence that the dead endure (absence from a hollow humanity) and absence’s ramifications in native presence, I had had to dream again and again of obsessional need, obsessional wealth, obsessional poverty, obsessional expectation of a supreme prosperity as if prosperity were its own perfectible Ghost, perfectible commander of the futures of the race.
‘Supreme prosperity?’ Ghost said to me now from within the masquerades of dream. ‘Supreme irony! The perfectibility of the state, the perfectibility of command, the perfectibility of industry, leads to a growing tide of refugees of spirit in flight from themselves to an illusory benefactor. And your resurrection – each rehearsal in which I am involved with you – is as much a warning of the sickness of the expectant soul as it is a vision of a divine and terrifying love. My fear is, Robin, that the sickness of expectant souls may prevail for a long, long time to come (with increasingly dangerous consequences) in a disordered and chaotic world in flight to a prosperity it confuses with the genius of love. But then have we not sown obsessional desire, obsessional folly, in the waste land that we cherish?’
I thought I had sown the origins of sensation, dance, touch, flowering of poetry … Yes, I thought I had sown such occasions in my library of dreams but everything seemed hollow now. I strove to articulate that hollowness into the ‘withinness’ of the Word, a ‘withinness’ that was transformative wholeness in the vessel of space, the hollow vessel of space; and failed. I sought to articulate that hollowness into the ‘withoutness’ of Spirit, Spirit that immerses itself in the fabric of being yet moves at the edge of the fury of hypocritical slogan and quarrelsome rhetoric upon a plane of reality; and failed. But in failing I knew that that hollowness was the ground of creative conscience and value, the ground of an absence from the world that re-enters the world without illusion, without ideal self-deception. Did the absent body – in re-entering the theatre of the world – begin to acquire its own true echoing voice in a hollow humanity whose hollowness became an unsuspected creative faculty in the vitalized conscience of tradition, the vitalized conscience of the dead?
Did the absent body – in re-entering the theatre of the world as resurrected presence – begin to acquire a capacity to dislodge prepossession and formidable bias within a hollowness of humanity whose conscription of value inevitably shifts or cracks or moves before the breath of Spirit?
One cannot return from the dead, return to the present, without sensing in some degree – however ambiguously – through failure or achievement – that the miracle of a re-entry into a hollow humanity is a subversive reality one has neglected to explore in its ramifications within the origins of value.
I had come to the bridge of wisdom. It arched across the flatlands and across the swamp of adventure through which Raleigh and Cortes and Middle Passage Rastafarian Magellan and many others had moved to the block or the fire or to the grave. Were they in essence refugees of spirit bound together in the chaos of the world? Black refugees. White refugees. Conquistadorial adventurers and refugees. Victimized emigrants or immigrants or refugees. No wonder W. H. had heard such a clamour in the sea whose voices he barely caught and faintly translated.
The bridge was a simulated arch in my Faustian dream of Third Worlds running hand in hand with First or Second Worlds. It stretched between the true (however faint) voice of the absent body and the true (however remote) ear of the absent body, the true voice in and the intimate response from the everlasting stranger in oneself.
I was greeted by an illumination that seemed nevertheless fraught with danger: the cheap light of the sun, the cheap light of a furnace, in a drowned man’s refugee eyes as he arises from the chapel perilous of the sea and is tempted by Prosperity Ghost in the city of Skull.
How cheap is the light of the sun, how cheap is the electricity of the stars?
‘Cheapness is all,’ said Ghost. But I saw that his eyes were sad. Intimate, knowing, sad eyes within the everlasting stranger in oneself. ‘Cheapness is all,’ the refugees roared and would have rushed into Skull but their way was barred as if Time itself were considering their plight before it yielded to their demand.
‘Why should Time yield to such temptation?’ I said to Ghost. ‘You should know since you raise the issue in this masquerade …’
‘Prosperity Ghost you mean!’ he was laughing soundlessly.
‘Yes! Indeed. You raise the issue in this masquerade as a moral aesthetic, I take it – a piece of moral theatre. Miriam loved moral theatre! And I – resurrected bone and flesh that I am – cannot shake it out of my veins. Hollow veins in which I taste nevertheless an impulse to regenerative vessel, regenerative capacity. And so I ask as if the tooth I bring from the grave bites so fiendishly, so terribly, I cannot resist asking (I cannot resist hunting the truth): would it not be kinder, much kinder, of Time to resist the will of the hordes who rush into the lap of exploiters and into the arms of illusory benefactors? W
ould it not be kinder, much kinder, of Time to assist the growing tide of refugees to draw closer to their innermost conscience, to resist the cheap and the tawdry, to resist the ruthless calculation, the ruthless, the unprincipled?’
‘Time yields,’ said Ghost so softly I could scarcely hear (I held my resurrected ear now to the deck of the Faustian bridge to catch the true and bitter voice of hollow self, the true and bitter response to hollow self) ‘because it is endemic part and parcel of the fodder of generations. Time is not love, divine love. Time is a character of universality incorrigibly stained by partial, biased and cruel forces. Because of its partiality its biases are susceptible to excavation and to the true action of redemptive love, redemptive wholeness. But that is another matter. A matter for the creative and aroused conscience within the graves of history. In regard to your immediate question that bears on the logic of time, Time as an answering device, a speaking device, a machine in the chaotic soul, Time (note I sometimes spell it with a common t, sometimes a capital T) is but a measure of partial events.
‘Look! Look into the swamp of the centuries within your own book that is stained by invisible creek water, invisible river water, invisible pork-knocker barrels, pork-knocker ships; just look! What do you see?’
Before I could answer – as if I were an answering clock – Ghost continued: ‘You see when you scan closely your own death and the deaths of your mother and aunt (whose antecedents came into the magic wood from other continents) that the refugee count in the clock of the sea has moved from adventurers and slaves, from those who fled the sword and the fire, from those who stood on the auction block, into disrupted twentieth-century populations broken by famine or civil war; tyrannized by military regimes; deceived by politicians who rig the ballot when there are elections in the Third World.
‘Their lust for prosperity and their despair are such (and who amongst us can blame them?) that they turn from the brutalities of the sovereign state and the phoney placards of newfound independence and fall on their knees before the new El Dorados of the West.’
The Carnival Trilogy Page 25