The Carnival Trilogy (26 page)

‘What coming battles?’ Alice was sceptical.

Miriam had no reply but I could have written the lines for her: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Uganda, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nicaragua. I could have added, ‘Alice thinks it’s just a play! Just fiction! Is fiction meant to be real as inner problematic truth, as unpredictable fact, as a blend of the two to stagger our deformities of insight, of perception, of heart and mind?’

Tiger was dead but for a moment it seemed he had not yet breathed his last on ‘the crest of a wave’ in Miriam’s and Alice’s little theatre. The ecstasy of purity had cleared his vision for a brief spell. Deprivation of the senses was too
real
to be pure. The villain of the heart was too
real
to be pure white or pure black or pure red. The saint was too real to be divine except when divinity invokes a visionary humanity that sees through the veil of its crimes.

Deprivation was so real it festered into food, deceptive lotus and plague, plenty and poverty.

Hunger was so real that I ascended the moon as if it were Glass in a shoestring ladder and knocked on its door.

I
could
not
believe
it.
Ghost was speaking at last. No formal message. A repetition of familiar texts become however strangely cross-cultural, the strangest subversion, where one least
suspected
or expected to find it in hollow convention or solemn usage. An edge, nothing more, above the malaise, the death-wish of an age: an edge born of temptation that one unravels, perceives, and sifts until it yields a value beyond the immediate taste of temptation, the remorse, the penalty, the rewards.

My mother died in 1961. I was sixteen. It was the year the Tiresias Tigers established a new theatre or tent in the magic wood. I heard their muffled drums. Drums swarming with spectres, spectres of the malaise of the twentieth century, a drum upon which the original dancer Tiresias Tiger tapped and tapped and tapped in my dreams. He had arisen from the grave with a hole in his chest when I was three years old.

I played with him (he was a ragged doll) on the drawing-room carpet until he vanished and I did not hear of him, or see him, again until I learnt of the Tiresias Tigers of the magic wood.

Absent or present he was often around the corner in my Sleep and through him I became a pork-knocker scientist who rattled the black hole of gravity in Tiger’s chest with a teaspoon.

A frightening eye of sugar or telescopic spoon with which to scrape the barrel of the cosmos, a frightening glimpse into the heart of Ghost. It was also a mystic dream and the beginning of faith. Yes, faith! But faith in what? Was it faith in one’s powers to measure prosperity or to be measured by prosperity, to save or to be saved, to know or to be known? Was it faith in heaven or in hell?

A recurring dream that came at least once a year across the waste land of childhood fantasy through the barrel at my gate into quantum quetzalcoatl mathematics in teaspoon and
shoestring
middle age.

A disturbing dream for it set into circulation all over again the origins of sensation – such as tasting, rattling silver in a teacup, slicing a bone or a piece of meat that cost a pretty penny.

I know for a fact that an industrial strike over starvation wages occurred on the sugar estates of Old New Forest in 1948 and several strikers were shot dead, one fell in the sugar bowl beneath our window embracing a woman and a child. A tight nightmare fit.

I was three years old when it happened. Three-year-old relic of memory on whose lips was a grain of sugar, on whose lips was a
grain of temptation! Memory’s repetitive anatomy may lie in a grain of sugar one surreptitiously steals, forbidden sugar, forbidden sweetness! I witnessed the clash with the police from our window above the square. It could have been happening in our drawing room. Alice and Miriam were staring. Staring eyes. Everything and everyone tumbled into a relic of memory as I now write as if I was there yet absent from myself. Absent living body. I saw the hollow ambulance with Doctor Faustus at the skeleton wheel. The commotion of the skeleton bands.
BOOM BOOM DOOM DOOM
. Commotion, ceaseless sweetness/bitterness elaboration, movement, voices.

Thus I was moved across the years to sift unreliable fact from true play or fantasy and to reconsider the origins of sensation:
an
eye
in
the
mouth
of
a
sugar
bowl
and
in
the
body
of
Tiresias
,
the
seer.

Take the seer’s eye: in the wake of the shot a
blind
silence enveloped every rattling teaspoon, every gun, every drum, every bone in the crowd in the square beneath our window. Then came an explosion of appetite and anger. I dreamt I saw the dead man move and eat the grain on my lip as he whispered in the hole in his chest, ‘Everything you have been tempted to consume recedes into me now, hollow me. See the sweets of violence in dead men’s chests, in dead men’s lungs, in dead men’s hearts, hear the bitterness of explosive suns.

A different bottled ear or eye from the one I received when I reached out to seize the kingdoms of glass, the kingdoms of the globe, and was greeted by my mother’s exclamation of joy. An ear and a mouth and an eye in a ragged man’s chest … I was translated, I was confused, by the telescopic mind of Ghost in Tiger’s body.

The drums now spoke to the dead seer, the dead tiger, on the ground.

‘Fall down and die, Tiger. We shall pick you up. We shall drum. We shall measure the height of your dance and your fall through ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient America and ancient Africa into Robin Redbreast Glass waiting to see old Godot anew.
Old
Godot
anew,
Old
Godot
anew.
Robin wants to
know, wants to see, how far he must fall from the sky into old Godot anew. Why should a beast’s sudden death help us to map the ancient heavens anew within the radius of a star, a child’s star? One child’s star is another’s bullet.’

I dreamt I put the question to Ghost and thought I heard him murmur very faintly in the hollow of my ragged doll, ‘Life needs death. Life needs death if it is to be. But remember it is
through
death that life measures itself, measures its achievements, its glories. Remember it is
through
death not
with
death – not in league with death as the ultimate violence, the ultimate deprivation. The distinction is a crucial one – it bears on the fabric of the resurrection within every extremity, every hollow …’ His voice faded. And now it was as if the waiting room of Godot broke its commission with Death and illumined a ragged queue in Tiger’s body. Strings were vibrating very subtly, with incredible lightness, incredible
touch
– the sensation of ragged but mysterious alignment with the glories, the achievements, of which Ghost had spoken. I began to marvel across the years and the generations at the sensitivity that lies in the fingers of a ghostly musician touching the leaves of the trees into rhapsodic murmur, the fingers of a ghostly drummer sounding in the Sleep of space, the fingers of green (as they are called) of a ghostly gardener, the fingers of earth of a ghostly man or woman who sculpts a rock and makes it live.

Did I not dream that my own fingers were made of clay – of numb clay – until they scuttled on Glass and became the claws of a bird, then scuttled again, all of a sudden, into an intensity of feeling the instant I cried in my Sleep against the comedian of the machine who would have entrapped me, or seized me, as I alighted on a bell at the end of a rod?

I thought of my grandfather’s manuscript (and its ramifications in the simulated world and the real world) – of my mother’s staccato fingers drumming on a typewriter as I dreamt I lay within her – of Aunt Miriam’s plays revising the histories of the world – and wondered at the origins of perception, the relics of memory that lay as much in me as in ancestral re-visions of
The
Waste
Land
and of
Faust
in other, nameless, intuitive masterpieces since time began.

I remembered a journey I took when I was five years old through an ancient volume of Sleep. I remembered it all now as I arose from bed and brushed my teeth with the fin of a fish. I remembered my
mother who died in 1961. She led me on that journey. She combed my hair with the honeycomb of the sea. She came into my dreams in a long swaying garment made of the sea, and of moss, and of countless stars sprung from the hollow yet resurrected body of Ghost.

Was it a journey into her death or was it a journey we made when I was five years old?
She
comes
to
me
when
I
am
old,
one
hundred
years
old.
The
year
is
2045.
No,
not
old!
Just
five,
a
relic
of
memory.
Five-year-old
relic.
The
year
is
1950
on
a
dusty
calendar
in
an
old
trunk
of
books
and
masks.

We make our way through the trunk and through the barrel at my gate, the round ship, the round coffin of my ancestors. The year is 1950. I am five years old. My mother gives me a ring. I slip it on to my hand. But as I run on the beach it falls from my finger and is lost forever. Alice is angry. ‘You will find it some day,’ she says. ‘I promise you.’ Her voice is sad and angry and I am pierced by foreboding. It was a ring my grandfather had given her. An heirloom or something. Surely she was grossly careless to give it to me before I knew or understood.

Good Ghost! The barrel at our gate was built by me in 1961 a month or two before my mother was drowned. It was built as a memorial to great navigators, great pork-knockers. How could we have made our way through it in 1950 with the lost ring? One is obsessed by time, one is obsessed by the timeless comedy of time. Perhaps the barrel I built in 1961 was invisible to us though it was already there flung up from the bottom of the sea on the crest of a wave of the future as my mother and I stood on the beach facing our grave when I was but a child and she a beautiful, angry woman.

My mother leans on the invisible barrel now.

‘It’s grandfather’s memorial,’ I say.

‘And the ring?’

‘What ring?’ I had forgotten.

‘A ring of spiritual gold studded with minute diamonds on the inside where it touches your skin. On the inside is the flesh of infancy. On the outside is the wreck of a ship.’

The wreck of a civilization? I was astonished. I lay under the wave of old age and looked up to the sky. I held my five-year-old hand up in the sea to the light of moon-shells, star-shells,
sun-shells
, and saw for the first time a ring on my mother’s skeleton
left hand. Had she salvaged it from the sea the day she was drowned? I touched the ring in astonishment. Had I worn it all along and never known it was there?

I touched the ring with the light of my eyes. I felt my mother’s lips on my eyes: were they still bitter or were they now sweet?

‘If ever you are in trouble,’ my mother says – and leans down and lets the sand and the water run through her fingers – ‘just brandish it like an asset of state or pawn it for that matter if money’s short. Remember it’s here to save your life.’

I laughed. Alice laughed. The comedy of an invisible ring, an invisible barrel, an invisible fortune. And yet the tragedy … In 1961 when the sea cracked without warning and closed over my mother’s hair that fell like lightning to her waist (she was an excellent swimmer and no one at first believed she had drowned) I was left without a blind penny. The house had to be sold to pay off her debts. I remember my Aunt Miriam saying in one of her plays, ‘Your mother is extravagant, Robin. Your grandfather left her a treasure. Come and live with me before the world ends.’ Was she speaking to me or to W. H.? I went to live with her for a spell on my way to Skull but the house was empty, always empty – she resided now in the waves – and the shadow of W. H. dogged her footsteps as he sought to revive her theatre in the magic wood. They had been close friends, perhaps lovers, and he knew her well. She was sensuous and practical. Sensuous in her deeply grained imagination. Practical in her wit. ‘Accept the day-to-day calendar of doom, doom,’ she said like a housewife scribbling a list on her pad, ‘it’s a style the calypso invented for the BBC and all the grand newspapers. They never acknowledge their debt but that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?’ The word
debt
pricked me and I half-awoke to Alice’s carelessness and
extravaganc
e. Why had I not pawned the invisible ring I wore and raised the money to save our old home from the depredations of strangers?

Too late! Such magical security born of the Ghosts of the sea and the sky comes too late. Too late to save an old house or a lost kingdom.

Lost? Is anything ever absolutely lost? May one not find one’s ancestral treasure again by the light, the spirit, the self-mocking humour of vulnerable humanity, self-mocking yet self-revealing visionary touch?

A paradoxical marriage or contract or rehearsal of the origins of tradition runs through all bawdy and sacred generations, the living, the dead, the unborn, to activate the glories of the present and the past and to imply that the body of the resurrection is a medium of ceaseless rapport between original deprivation and original mystery, between newfound being and insensible being, between the tender apparition of hope and derelict, institutional trappings, between past, present and future time and timeless comedies of time.

Between birthday ghosts and old age.

‘Come,’ Alice and Miriam are saying to me, ‘now that you have touched the ring it is time to celebrate your birthday as if it is a royal event. The world shakes with violence. We live in chapels perilous at the bottom of the sea that we must taste like a piece of cake, on the flatlands, in the valleys, on the mountains, on the moon, and in sight of the masquerade of long-haired Halley’s comet that we must taste right royally. Here are the origins of the games that children play.’

They hold me and lead me to cosmic theatre in the magic wood. We walk on the crest of the sea and the waves leap and jump and make rain. We are on our way to celebrate my fifth boomsday birthday on a fading dusty calendar. A relic of a newspaper blows at our feet. September 1950 turns to mould in June 1961. The paper twists into spray April 1986 and the apparition of Birthday Ghost. I touch my ring and taste the wreck of civilizations.