Our guide was signalling to us. The mouth of the trail had been cleared and we climbed and entered the Bush. The fantastic, planetary greenheart trees rose into marvellous silvery columns on every hand. Clothed in water-music. The trail was narrow. We walked in single file. The cracked silvery veil of greenheart possessed the texture of slow-motion rain falling within the huge Bell of a still Waterfall in which whispering leaves of fluid sound ran up into veil within veil of Shadow-organ gloom towards the highest reaches of the Forest and the slits of the Sky far above. Subtle fire-music.
I had never before seen the shining bark of greenheart columns in this slow-motion raining light (nor the Sky clothed in frail ribbons of fire-music within the lofty gloom of a Bell) in all my remembered Dream of Forests I had travelled in my youth. How young was I, how old was I? We had entered it seemed — the Macusi guide first, Penelope second, Ross third, I last — an innermost chamber of the magical Waterfall beneath god-rock. It encompassed the globe, the ancient world, the modern world. As if the Waterfall had been uplifted from the river and transferred within us in the music of space, around us in Shadow-organ imperceptible (not wholly imperceptible for we were aware of it) dance of genesis.
I recalled the funeral procession when the inner bodies in the rocks in the Waterfall had left their shell to guard the waters even as they arose within the king of thieves and others who bore Canaima’s bird-text victim to his grave. It seemed now that the dancer’s text was a further conversion or alchemy of inner sculpture into living Memory. Penelope, Ross, the Macusi guide and I had been sculpted or painted not from rock but from the silvery text of rain within the fluid, still Bell of the Waterfall to bear the absent bodies of the drowned children to their homes within the tapestry of the Word.
I began to pray — ‘May the daemons and the furies and the archangels help us,’ I prayed, ‘to make unique and far-reaching global distinctions in fabrics of sorrow and innocence, the fabric of names by which we name ourselves, saint-names, king-making names, queen-making names, etc., etc. We have a long way to go backwards into all these names, the names we have given flowers, trees, stars, the names with which we have tagged genesis (though the music of genesis still breaks through); we have a long Dream to take back into our callouses, into the complacent formulae by which we live (whether of stock heroism or stocks-and-shares salvation), a long Dream to take forwards into our addiction to mass prosperity, the ethics of mass prosperity, before we turn and confront our two selves (our many-rooted, many-branched two selves), past and future selves in the present, and confess to an unique and sacred Poverty that makes us susceptible to the regenerated eye, the regenerated ear within the very grain of things and possessions, places native and foreign that we take for granted in our history books.’
The prayer had barely crossed my lips when the perils and dangers we faced dawned upon me within the gloom and the Bell of the forested Waterfall. We were making an ancient journey, we were making a modern journey. We were still rooted in the deprivations of the Word though we sensed a breach that clothed these in paradoxical senses. Had not Penelope implied on the second bank of the river of space that her mission was woven into the tapestry of the ‘adventure of love unfulfilled’? Now on the fourth bank (as we bore the Shadows of the drowned in our arms) that mission was as much a penetration of local sentiment as of non-local and universal grave and cradle in the interwoven aspects of incarnated text. It was idle claiming within the divisions and sub-divisions of the Word that haunted us, within the spaces that lay between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’, between ‘fate’ and ‘freedom’, between ‘endurance’ and ‘passion’, that the language of identity was not fraught with questions we still had to answer, questions of electric mood, ecstasy, electric depression. Melodic Conscience was on our side within each frail candle that shone in the Bush as the breath of music but it was not to be taken for granted. It possessed hidden darknesses, hidden teeth. I felt them biting now into the soil of my mind. Soil of mind! Earth-music. Painful soil, mind, earth-music. Our way was barred I swore by the teeth of music dressed in a sudden, unpredictable downfall of weather and mood. I felt myself an enemy of nature and Mankind as the rainy high mouth of the Forest descended and closed in. Was it morning, was it noon, was it premature Night? Absurd ultimatum. Slightly shivering ultimatum of the enemy within a wave of heat that subsided but left us drenched, bitten to the skin, and cold. Absurd teeth within a Dream that is the simultaneous exposure of untranslatable fear and bias in ourselves. In such exposure, such unearthly music of devouring impulse, melodic Conscience bit deep, bit so deep, it jested with us, it painted us into enemies of the very nature and Mankind we wanted to serve. Bitten artist, bitten engineer, bitten saint, bitten sinner, civilization’s bitten missionary and teacher, civilization’s bitten savage.
We had been walking for several hours. It seemed an age in the mouth of space. The trail ahead of us was blocked again. Fire was needed to clear a path. I tried to disabuse myself of devouring impulse within and without but the tangled branches raised their arms imploringly into a Shape, a woman’s Shape (I could see the fern of her hair and her lustrous black eyes like pools reflected upwards from the ground) crowned by an Orchid. It was not Queen Rose this time. It was bitten-by-fire Queen Orchid. Our guide had set a match to the heaped branches across the trail.
‘The Dido Orchid,’ cried Ross. He seemed in this instant of fire-music immune to the flame in my Dream as if his spontaneous, aroused curiosity or excitement was so strong it baffled the mouth of space in which we stood. He leaned over the Orchid, smiled, I saw the glitter of his teeth this time, touched by flame, kissed by flame. The volumes on South America he had brought from England shaped themselves into brilliant ashes, brilliant intercourse of incandescence and human curiosity that has sustained many a fiery adventurer in the desert, at the Poles, in the depths of the rain-forest, military high-flying adventurers as well before they unleash their bomb. Each volume, each page, was clothed by running music, the cautionary fire-music that breaches the heart of Dream. I could still read the ghostly names of ghostly authors in the subtle furnace, some had lodged themselves in a crackling chorus of high-flying nineteenth-century super-power map-makers, botanists, biologists, evolutionists, soldier-civil servants, anthropologists, chroniclers, etc., etc.: Schomburgk, Horsman, In Thurm, Beebe, Boddam-Whettam, Humboldt, Roth, Waterton … A page fluttered, turned in the fire-music and I read, as page intertwined itself with page, the hand of another nameless writer –
The Dido Orchid was christened by a German botanist. It takes its name from Queen Dido of Carthage and Libya. Note the flaming, wondrous, flaxen, yet blackened, ferny leaves and petals. Queen Dido built her own funeral pyre in Libya as though she had been bombed by fate when Aeneas abandoned her.
I peered into the fire as the nameless hand dissolved in the brilliant ashes of classical investitures upon the flora of the fourth bank of the river of space in which lies the ancient, unconscious, epic seed of modern botany and modern warfare.
The nameless hand revived itself in the ashes of Dream and Ross and I read –
Jupiter forbade Aeneas to wed Dido and settle in Africa. All well and good to dally with her, to sleep with her, but it was implied that ‘miscegenation’ would come of such a union. And yet Virgil painted the African queen with white skin and flaxen hair. Such was the formula of epic evolution. Was it a formula that inevitably sustained the transmission of errors in the oral material that great epic poets use?