I was glad to pull back from the chasm. The light or shining music, the sun’s bright, sweet claw, the stars’ music, cleared from my eyes. ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘she sponsors the knife with which Canaima is endowed. It was there in the cabin in which she and Proteus conversed. The very knife Alicia saw in the ribs of black Agamemnon.’ I was unable to continue. A choking sensation! I emerged from this recalling the chasm from which I had pulled back. I saw the chasm again. I recalled the sun’s bright, sweet claw interwoven now with dread. I recalled the stars’ music interwoven now with torment. Were these the unpredictable features of my gestating unconscious coming to birth at last? It was as if Alicia and Rose were my children, sprung from me into swiftest being, swiftest beauty or craft of the body which Rose desired. I ran with one in my Dream even as I ran from the other. I ran with swift Alicia in her fear, I ran from swift Rose into necessary meditation to encompass what was at stake in the craft of the seed – the innermost gift of the seed – of inimitable life. And therein in that moment of well-nigh inexpressible passion and compassion swift as lightning upon the darkest sky – when the gestation of deepest, darkest, innermost form, innermost seed (one has been carrying in the womb of the psyche for ages and generations) turns into newborn life – I saw the furies (I saw their saving rather than destroying light) with which one wrestles in every man-made enterprise, or institution of the heart, or cradle, or school of art.
Harold and the Rose sisters were as much my children now as they had been my terrible parents and relations, Proteus my child as much as he had been my wild patron and uncle … A balance of furies within the craft of the body, the gestating male/female body of spirit one nurtures, the body one slays, the body one sculpts into great man-made Characters of epic myth, epic war, epic disease, great Agamemnon, great Ulysses. Greatness becomes an organ of tenderness in the reversal of diseased antecedents and relationships, the child as the parent of civilization, the parent as child, old age as a mirror of newborn parallels and alternatives, interchangeable fates and freedoms, responsibilities in flight and escape. The great judge became a shape I held now in my arms, a shape of the law I nursed in my arms within a balance of furies, a shape that edges Memory’s man-made legends, man-made martyrdoms into the new inner craft of Rose and into the prospect of a newborn state.
THE FOURTH BANK
(Home)
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations …
Establish thou the work of our hands upon us.
Psalm 90: 1 and 17
My ascent from the third bank of the river of space to the fourth in the theatre of Dream happened within an innermost, deepest blend of resources born of the unconscious, a blend that strengthened my hands, took me by surprise even as it uplifted me: a strengthening of limbs. I meditated in my flight from Rose on the ravelling/unravelling of the tapestry or coat that I associated with Penelope and Ross George in the Imaginary Cathedral and Refectory within the ruins of the burnt Potaro Mission House. Then I came abreast of uplifted Jacob’s ladder in its primitive lightning arc, one curved wing of the law upon the earth, the other breaking into the ceiling of the sky. Lastly I was advised again of the antiphony of the law and the Shadow-tongues of the living and the dead.
It was thus that I gained a sudden, almost precipitate appreciation of the sentence that had been passed upon me in the trial on the third bank of the river of space. Nurse the shadow of the law one carries in one’s arms into a life that speaks through and beyond death. Nurse the shadow of the work of one’s hands.
I listened to the faint tremor of the tides of space like a rounded syllable on the fourth bank of the river. So faint it may have been the vibration of a leaf that fell from my brow onto my hands.
‘Nurse the Shadow,’ said the leaf that grew from a tree on god-rock and from within the skeletal imprint of lightning winged stairway and Bird. ‘Build the Shadow-organ of Home. That is my sentence. Home is the turning world.’
It seemed at first sight, at first sound, a liberal, purely rhythmic sentence that defied logic until I grasped that the key to the future, to a changed heart, lay in complex rhythm, in complex incantation. It was no liberal sentence that had been passed upon me. Each whisper had been threaded into ‘daemons’ and ‘furies’, their subtlety and grain, their masquerade and spiral in the body of a plant, planted tapestry, ecology, the pitch of a voice in the body of wood, newborn wood, divine wood, the splinter of rock that sinks into a tide and cries its seismic lament in the shaken Waterfall that showers the globe. ‘There is a close proximity between natural catastrophe and man-made disaster – proximity as well as distinction – that one never grasps except in a thread that runs through ear and eye.’
The musicality or linkage between daemon (within natural catastrophe) and fury (within man-made legend, man-made Eden, man-made dynasty) was, I perceived, a component in the Shadow-organ of Home on the fourth bank of the river of space.
Take 1948 when I met Penelope and Ross George and Simon’s warrior-ghost in the Potaro. I saw now, all over again, the glitter of his military decorations within the rags of Ulysses’s beggarly coat upon the skeleton of a tree. He had returned home from leave, found Ross and Penelope together, innocently together in a bombed garden, but as a jealous Governor of flesh and blood seized her (as if she were a disobedient servant), flung her to the ground and advanced upon Ross with hands raised in a boxing gesture or like someone about to pull a giant bow. His Shadow was to dwell with them for the rest of their lives. He returned to his regiment and was killed on the beaches of Normandy.
Four years after his death they volunteered to work in South America and he sailed with them. He clung in jealous spasms at times – when he settled in the Potaro – to Pizarro, the king of thieves, who stalked El Dorado and whom he associated with Penelope’s suitors. He hated Ross. At times I dreamt he hated me as if I were another suitor: as if he saw through the flesh of the Rose (to whom I was linked in musical dialogue) into the possibility that Penelope might bear a child (his dream-child all unknown to him which Ross might claim as his own), a dream-child that might lie in wait for him with a thorn or a knife. Rose seemed to fuse two faces into Penelope’s features – two sisterly faces – and he could not tell which child was his by one sister, which was Ross’s by the other.
Penelope never conceived. She (like Harold’s Alicia) never bore a child. Her marriage to Ross remained childless. But she assembled a group of children into the choir of the Forest, the endangered Forest, the young voices of the Forest.
Had I understood I would have placed my ear (as I was able to do now in a Dream) against her body, beneath her breasts. I would have known that those children sang within her even as they sang without in the Forest. I would have known that therein lay the seed of an infinite symphony. Or opera. Or some other form of nameless music.
Had I listened with her ear to my body – no, my ear to her body – I may have perceived the thread of a leaf within her, within me, and recorded the endangered Forest or family tree of humanity in the rising mist of the river and in the veined Shell of the sounding Waterfall beneath god-rock, recorded the sentence of a universal Home that the judge had uttered in the courtroom long after – or was it long before – within a Memory of childhood’s involvement with a sea of roses and churchbells.
How often had I not stopped under the Mission House as the children sang: stopped to be haunted by sensations of the future and the past yet oblivious of the seed of music everywhere, in every dwelling house, every place, every village, every settlement. Oblivious of the enormous frailty of life.
Frailty, yes, frail dust, frail earth, frail soil that pours through one’s hands. Two years later three of Penelope’s Forest children were drowned in a boating accident. I recorded the fatality in my first book of pilgrimage upon the first bank of the river of space. I did not say there that the drowned were excellent swimmers. I forgot to mention that electric eels were seen grazing in the river the next morning and it became clea
r then what had happened.
Electric eels are innocent monsters one suppresses in every dream narrative of the depths and its fantastic creatures. They are an organ of apparently innocent craftsmanship in nature, neither daemon nor fury. They occupy an unexplored middle ground between these that puzzles our senses and our will. They approach in a swirling current without guile, fondle fluid arm and leg, and seek to dance with all who come close. But each stroke, each embrace, breeds shock and paralysis in those they touch. The swimmer in their embrace collapses and sinks like a stone. Stone as much as the spirit of rubber, rubbery limbs upon a serpent ladder in the dark waters through which they descend to the river of the dead.
Not Jacob’s ladder this time. Not the Macusi brightest wings this time between heaven and earth. Not these. But another manifestation of a ladder. The undulations of the innocent serpent within unexplored territory between daemon and fury, a dancing animal ladder in whose scale or measured rungs is secreted electricity, black lightning eel in reflected skies within the mirrored organ of fluid space.
They (Penelope’s drowned choir of three) sank into that organ. Sank into rhythmic stone, sank into eclipsed revived memories of an extensive organ of space through all substances and elements: the organ of Sebastian Bach (where one least expects to find it) in the Imaginary City of God that is imperilled yet drifting, arising within the voices of children in the waters of space. They sank into a medium of unexplored Being in which the very substance of the inner music of the stone transported the lighted candle I had received in the corridor of the third bank of the river of space into a numinous serpent-ladder. I would have lost them forever there within an innocent fabric I dreaded. Except for the lightning Shadow-music, Shadow-candle I visualized. Had I not seen its glimmer before in the shining rain that the king of thieves poured on the dancer in his grave? Had I not perceived it in all unconsciousness in the spiralling flute of evaporative/precipitative cycle?
Yes, I had attempted to draw and record it in the very ordinary tasks of my life (extended now into peculiar sublimity, peculiar dread, peculiar ecstasy), in the survey diagrams I drew and in the science I had pursued. Hardened though my heart may have been I had still been in touch on the first bank of the river of space with a genuine insight (through the ordinary tasks I performed), a true insight into rhythmic stone, shining rain. Except that the linkages between daemon and fury (and the unexplored territory that lay between) were a wholly new revelation upon the third and the fourth banks of the river of space. The inner stone unleashed the Shadow-organ of the deep river into new rain, into the distant voice of the churchbells I recalled in Alicia’s garden city theatre on the second bank of the river of space.
In all these – Forest children, ladder, stone, lightning, churchbells – I had missed the subtle linkages of a parent-Imagination in, through and beyond all creatures, all substances, all elements, a Parent beyond fixed comprehension until I began to retrace my steps. How easy to fall into despair as though one were drowning oneself in a lake of bruises one equated with God – how easy to feel stunned, to grow numb …
Until within the puzzlement of all one’s senses and one’s lapsed, self-paralysed will, the serpent-ladder draws one into bandaged yet visionary eyes to touch the Shadow-organ of space and hear the Shadow-voices of bruised paternity in oneself insisting that much remains to be done in the making of Home … and one suddenly swims up to the light…
I came back with a crucial, piercing sensation that one of Penelope’s drowned children was mine, the other was Ross’s, and the third was intricately at the heart of all her bruises a projection from within herself. Time would disclose the features of the Shadow-children that Penelope, Ross and I now held in our arms.
Yes, I was stunned. Not stunned by despair but by hope, by excitement. For it seemed an utterly prosaic discovery, prosaic hiatus, prosaic stillness at the heart of music in which we listened for a heartbeat and recalled the child arising on the serpent-ladder into a fossil creation, a living fossil of Innocence. Its apparent monstrosities, the dread it occasioned, arose from bruised maternity/paternity we carried in ourselves, the conviction that we were living fossil parents ourselves and the children we parented (their fluidity, their dust) were as old as Time … Such is the prose of the heartbeat of Time.
I had never thought of prose in this light until I stood now on the fourth bank of the river of space and perceived that within my fossilization of parent-self lay a Word I could not utter, a subtle bruised Word or window through bandaged eyes into space. My bruised Word or child seemed all the more tenderly beautiful in its haunted innocence because of a streak or a flaw in each live painting of metaphor, each live sculpture of metaphor one makes to define a borderline between ‘fossil parent’ and ‘terror of beauty at the heart of the serpent-Spirit’.
Ross’s bruised Word or child seemed all the more dark and overshadowed in its primitive innocence because of his genuine misgivings that accumulated into a borderline between ‘fossil parent or missionary’ and ‘terror of a whole unpredictable humanity that one shrinks from almost unwittingly as if one dreads contamination by the very Spirit one serves’.
Ross never lied about this I sensed as I retraced my steps into the mid-twentieth century. I saw all over again his instinctive distrust of – and withdrawal from – the savage Macusis (‘savage’ as he could not help feeling they were) who attended his classes in school and church. He never pretended he did not feel as he did, he never lied, but he suffered within the language he spoke. His early public school, university unthinking acceptance of epic formula, of the great epic ‘savages’ of ancient myth, the great warriors, crusaders, boatmen, underwent a change. He began to distrust them within the suffering Word and primitive child he now bore in his arms with acute misgiving and ambivalence. The Word changed. Its inherited glory dimmed. He tended to concentrate on its thinness, its wasted features. He spoke of the purity of the language in order to mask from himself apparent deficiencies he feared, the inability of the Word to probe the ultimate issues, he was driven to harness the Word to purely utilitarian purposes, he began to surrender himself to the visual and to retreat from arts of visualization or the seeing mind that lies through and beyond the consuming eye.
Ross’s savage child therefore was a far deeper and a more intricate judgement of language than one would have easily imagined. That judgement (embodied in the first place in conscience-stricken missionaries whom the world forgot) was to become apparent everywhere as the century progressed, in the political simplistic newspapers, in the profit-making documentaries, in the chronicles of radicals who – lacking depth in themselves – clung to every dispute of nihilist conscience, dispute of nihilist religion, dispute of nihilist politics, as a means to flatten the world into implicit class warfare or implicit racial conflict. All this was woven into Ross’s ‘savage child’ – into immigration or emigration ethics that were to come – within Potaro’s El Dorado, the El Dorado of the Seine or the Rhine or the Thames or the Mississippi where white-masked teachers face black-masked children … Such is the prose and the flat poetry of the polarized heart. Ross felt all this, grieved over its implications, long before it became apparent in the meretricious philosophy of the mass media.
By retracing my steps it became possible to lift the bandage of the Word a little and to see, or bear, what would have been unbearable before, namely, the stillness, the echoing stillness of the Word within varieties of the hollow or fossil parent one was. I was able to accept Ross’s difficulties, to learn from him, to chart in a mutual hollow unique correspondences through and beyond his ethic of withdrawal from the ‘savage’; I was drawn back within these varieties of unique correspondence to a moral transcending utilitarian ethic and into a visualization of the unexplored worlds or territory I had glimpsed between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’ but in a different light now, the light of the bruises that encompass the death of a child, the birth of a child, the resurrection of a child: all stillnesses (death and resurrection)
threaded into the movement of birth downwards, inwards, outwards, upwards to leave a transfigurative wound that revives a conception of the mystery of the Word, the Word made flesh.
The ‘drowned children’ that Ross, Penelope and I carried were woven into the tapestry of the Word. Such was the Dream territory of the fourth bank of the river of space overlooking the serpent-ladder. Ross bore his child within a net that made him conscious of a ‘savage formula of glory’ he had grown to distrust. Penelope bore hers within resources of inner metaphor, inner tapestry, inner thread that ran – it seemed to me in the Dream – into her childhood and her early relationship to Simon. I bore mine within the chemistry of a wound I would have been unable to define as transfigurative except in counterpoint to missionary Ross’s ambivalent ethic. Shadow-organ counterpoint. Shadow-organ investiture of the deprived Word, the bruised Word, the well-nigh hollow, thin Word of my age, I now carried in my mind and body and hand in the intricate shape of a Macusi child I had drawn up from the river of space into breath-body. It was clear that we had lifted the Shadow of the three drowned children from the river. Negative resurrection? Negative funeral procession? ‘Time to take them back,’ Penelope said, ‘to the hill and valley country from which they came to attend our El Dorado Mission School. Time to learn from them about ourselves.’ Ross looked dubious as though he already knew all he needed to know but he was curious about rare botanical specimens of the river of space overlooking the serpent-ladder. He had armed himself when he left England with several volumes by nineteenth-century European travellers in South America. Those volumes floated now on the crest of a Dream-wave around him. Were they possessed of unruly spirits? Of Shadows I felt. The Shadows Ross’s predecessors had borne in their heads and arms when they left Europe, Shadows of classical lore with which to christen orchids and flowers. ‘The Dido orchid,’ I murmured, ‘may, it is said, be found in these parts.’ Ross’s eyes lit up with the purest excitement and curiosity though the allusion to Dido left him uneasy. I was unable to pursue the matter for it was time to leave.
The Carnival Trilogy Page 41
