‘Bundle together,’ said Ross drily. ‘The language of fascism, Anselm, the language of uniformity, regimentation. Bundle together! The gods like that. Easier than making distinctions.’
The dream-volume slipped from my hands but its utterance was imprinted on my mind. I did not reply. I found myself staring hard at the blackened fossil flesh of the marvellous Orchid in Ross’s hand. As though his hand lay in mine, mine in his, within the abyss of our age. I saw a library of interior counterpoint no one could destroy replete with the rhythmic tapestry of the City of God, leaf, petal, bone, shell. The resurrection of fossil eternities into living diversity! A library that lay in the future, within us, beyond us. I would have given my sight to open a visionary page, to read a visionary line, to enter the future: the future’s miraculous community of souls born of the divisions of the past.
I would have given my sight to see backwards into a desolate age from the future. Curious self-contradiction! I would have given my sight to see with eyes acquainted with every extremity, to see myself as a living, resurrected fossil steeped in diversity not eternity-for-the-sake-of-eternity, to see my own blindness now from an unravelled, penetrative standpoint within the distant future, to know myself in all my limitations and through such paradox to live within yet beyond the present frame or burning moment …
The wish or prayer had scarcely touched my lips when the blaze subsided. The trail was clear. A doorway into the future. I felt fear then. How easy to slip into the future’s complacency and dream one has escaped the past and the present. No, that was not my intention. My hope was to retrace my steps from the future into the present and the past and know oneself — know the everlasting stranger within oneself — as never before. I had seen Ross for an instant as a total stranger who then became profoundly meaningful within the tension of interior counterpoint. It was this thread I wished to pursue through and beyond all measure of complacency. Perhaps in breaking a formula of complacency — in becoming a stranger to oneself — one would gain the strength to bear the full complication of relationships one had begun to unveil in ascending from bank to bank in the four banks of the river of space.
Should I shrink from such insight into a tapestry of responsibilities, a community of souls (saints and sinners) that — in tearing complacency to rags — could shake me to the core of being?
Had I not already come forwards/backwards a far way in my pilgrimage? Was it not wise to leave it there? Leave them there? Ross, Penelope, the drowned children?
I thought I heard Ross say, as the last embers of the blaze subsided, ‘Let’s stop, Anselm. Let’s go to the riverbank and bury our drowned children in the ruined Mission House that lies in the future, a future we know in the Dream as you retrace your steps from 1988 into 1950. We know Canaima will burn the House in 1966 though this is 1950. Why go forward still more into an uncertain, perhaps threatening, future that may take us back beyond what we already know?’
It seemed sensible advice. And yet…
‘We have come too far‚’ I said, ‘We have earned the right to go forward not into a Golden Age from which to retrace our steps, not into the return of a Golden Age (of which El Dorado in Guyana is a pertinent Shadow), but into profoundest self-recognition of ourselves in and through others: the interior anatomy, the true terrifying flesh of the Word, the true terrifying knowledge of the Heart that may set us free at last from fear.’
*
The fire-talk lucid conversation with its abrupt, wholly natural transitions, traceries, linked memories through polar opposites, faded into sudden darkness upon my lips. Nothing remained except a vague self-portraiture. The procession continued on its way. We camped further along the trail in a valley that was the gateway into the remote and small settlement from which the drowned child I carried had come. I laid the child (whose intricate face and body baffled my sight) on the ground. Sleep was a chasm, a fault in the landscape of Dream, and one wondered whether in falling more steeply or deeply into it everything would vanish forever in the future.
Despite our misgivings the sun rose with new morning in the fractionalized long Night, long Day, of fossil insight into the past. We clung to each feature of landscape as if it were a piece of live, bright coal that lit one’s mind anew. Whereas we had commenced our processional journey with the sensation of being sculpted shells of water, sculpted bodies composed of a fluid reality, now it was as if we had entered another dimension of the still Waterfall of space, a dimension of the future.
Here the great lofty precipitation of silvery bark upon the trees had given way to an open grassy savannah. Streams ran down from the hills. It was light itself that rained upon us: an inner texture of light as though the bark of the Forest had unclothed itself into naked brightness within the multidimensional fabric of the Waterfall.
I was excited by the light paint (restorative fossil paint, meticulous live fossil flesh) I placed anew on our lips in the resurrectionary canvas of space. Modern resurrected savage reflecting ancient primitive humanity within ourselves.
How far had we arrived in the future? We three, carriers of the dead?
‘Every Waterfall‚’ I said to Ross, ‘one enters in Dream or comes upon within a great continent such as this — a continent inhabited by lost or forgotten cultures one needs to see anew from the future, within an Imaginary future — is a veiled messenger of the womb of the sea, of the origins of life and technologies of death rooted in strangest innocence. I trust we shall learn and see. It stands and descends — that Waterfall — upon an escarpment; it appears at first sight to embody an absolute ridge between the past and the present, between the sea and the land … But look!’
Our camp lay within mountainous terrain, the valley itself— in its lofty right — however contained by the vessel of the land — possessed the escalating contours of a hill one million years above the sea: a fractionalized aeon’s perch in space above the tides of the ocean that still crawled in every rock garden.
‘Take the weight of a pebble in your hand. Strip away the mountains within the interior anatomy of space. Imagine ourselves as animate, beautiful, dancing skeletons perched here nevertheless in the ground of a valley that is no valley at all but a hill far up in Time above the rock garden of the sea that fertilizes itself as it splits into reversible lava or life-giving water.’
As I spoke I fished in my pocket for Inspector Robot’s glasses that I had used in ascending god-rock — glasses that fused a parallel between ‘artificial time’ and ‘quantum, simultaneous, microscopic eyes in all fabrics of existence whether flower or grass or tree’.
‘Now replace the mountains. Look through Robot’s glasses at the streams in the distance descending from the mountains we have fleshed into life again — skeleton, vanished mountains we have clothed into action again above the valley/hill on which we stand. Those streams become messengers of the ocean’s volcanic peace, the ocean’s tumult yet inherent quietude, raised above extinct devouring premises as valley is raised above running valley and cloud rains upon still cloud.
‘The mountains become a precipitate ridge, slow-motion Waterfall in space, half-solid appearance. A mountain is a slow-motion Waterfall within the simultaneous eyes of past/ future space. It is not an absolute ridge or monumental fortress between our past memories of the warring sea and our present occupation of the conquered land.
‘It is a fault that may imprison us in territorial conflict unless our eyes are opened to far future Imaginary expeditions when humanity takes its Shadowy rivers of the dead into the stars as new rain upon desert planets.’