‘I struck the dancing angel or Macusi Bird. The knife became a form of human lightning, man-made lightning. At the time I could not tell whether the knife continued up or whether it fell back into the Waterfall stained with ozone and the blood of punctured atmospheres. Or whether it fell in my unconscious to erupt into the Dream of this cabin. Canaima’s knife! Now I know. It fell here. It was his Shadow — my brother’s indeterminate Shadow (twin-Shadow, older Shadow than I, younger than I?) — that I drew into my arms up the serpent-ladder. He wanted to tell me — indeed he wants to tell me that the knife I threw may never be purified until he comes Home to me within my deeds (however involuntary, however secret, however buried or forgotten). The Macusi god-rock is the spire of the City of God that floats on a cornerstone encompassing the knife of civilization, that is in need of ceaseless purification, and the thorn of the Rose.’
One could hear a murmuring vibration in Shadow-organ space. One could hear one’s voice issuing from the body of a stranger.
‘It is a sounding cornerstone that exists everywhere, in the soil, in the air, in the fire, in the water. It exists in the singing chorus of the Waterfall, in the greenhouse Shadow of the drowned in space whose indeterminate age makes them as much our victims as our attackers, as much our killed as our killers.
‘Are we too old, too young, to dream of the knife and the Rose? When do dreams commence? In the womb or in the seed of the womb? I have drawn the Shadow of my brother from the river of the dead. And still I ask myself: whose Shadow? whose brother? whose stranger? A life or a death that baits the unconscious is not to be equated with conventional structures, or conventional hubris, or conventional uniformities and clarities. The sweetest song of unconscious beauty may turn and rend a theatre of technicalities, technical apparatus, technical nudity, technical descriptions of the act of love or death, purely technical climax that averts its head from the anatomy of the abyss.
‘Is it the anatomy of the abyss that I glimpse in myself, in him, in nameless others one bears — who bear one — into the parentage of Being? Have I borne a spatial being that is capable of taking upon itself familiar/unfamiliar resemblances? Does the burden of art involve a confrontation with an ultimate loss of fear? Nothing that is or was, nothing that bears or is borne, was created in the beginning from fear, fear of one or fear of the other, though fear may come in the wake of a Presence with which one needs to be reconciled through stages of haunted masquerade, the haunted sinner in one’s arms, or in the cradle, or on the stage of Memory …
The uncanny, unfinished body of music within us ceased. But it had invoked a change in the transparencies of the unconscious. The paint of the sun began to lift. Everything had been passive, fixed. Now a spark in the sun lifted, the sun itself moved and began to fall. The spark unravelled the sky to touch the high precipice of the globe in the Dream. Night was soon falling.
*
‘Where are your drowned children?’ I cried to Penelope and Ross, ‘Do you know who they are? Have you recognized them? Mine was the Shadow of my twin-brother Canaima.’ I laughed. Laughter seems a spring of irresistible and uncanny merriment in the gravity of a Dream. ‘You saw him lying on the stage. Incredible! It’s not true of course. Yet it’s true. A true parable! Parable employs meaningful self-deception as the strange humour, the essence of the spiritual irony that imbues the nature of the arts in the City of God.’
The laughter faded from my lips. I had spoken with some urgency. It dawned on me within the starlit Night that now lay about us like a fabulous cloak that Ross and Penelope were clinging to the Shadowy drowned children they had drawn up the serpent-ladder from the river of the dead. I saw they would continue to do so until they surrendered themselves to their captors. A curious phrase! Surrendered themselves to their captors. I understood their hesitation, their difficulty, their anguish. These grew from the fact of their idealism (in Penelope’s case), agnosticism (in Ross’s), idealism and agnosticism that signified a freedom (self-deception?) they took for granted. They were free people, freer than I was. When is freedom fate, fate freedom? One may be held by a captor and yet so resist him, so resist captivity, one learns nothing about oneself, about one’s fate in falling into his or her hands.
So it was with Ross and Penelope within the great Night of the savage encroachment of space in which the very texture of the universe had begun to change and the stuff of reality drew us back into reconsiderations of our private selves and of the past and the present we had never entertained. They had been seized but their resistance was such that they could not part, or give, any portion of themselves that could provide them with a new threshold into a testing and hazardous community. Freedom, their ideal freedom, became a curious obstacle.
Ross knew what I was implying and he turned upon me with a dry, almost angry, smile.
‘You capitulated, Anselm, as soon as you saw the savages of space erupting not from the heart of darkness but from the heart of the unconscious. You are no Conradian idealist! Idealists always make the best pessimists. You are something different. Closer to a saint perhaps? I wonder. God knows who the devil you are. Penelope thinks you are half in love with her. El Dorado is a fitting place for a queen and her suitors and revelations of ancient kingship through which to revive a concept of sainthood. It starts with your capitulation! Your capitulation to the savages is such that your brother’s evil deeds may well become yours in the history books of another age.
‘You need to be careful, Anselm! Soon it may be said that Canaima never existed at all. What potent non-existence! So potent every saint stands to lose his good name. You stand to lose your good name. You performed the things he did. You become the actor within his mask. Do not say I did not warn you, Anselm, of such terrible myth. Possession! That’s the bleak word. That’s what it is. The acceptance of another’s crimes and sins.’
He stopped and I listened in the starlit Night for the winged feather of angelic species as the globe moved and the stars faintly altered their course.
‘Danger, yes,’ I said at last. I pondered the fires far out in space. I pondered the nature of captor and captive. I pondered my ignorance of ultimate freedom, ultimate fate.
‘Danger yes, terrifying myth. You are right, Ross. But in such danger lies a catalyst of purification. Creation is a risk! You know that. Daemons and furies are a measure of balance within the lightning storm of creation that binds us to sky and earth. And at the heart of every trial, within every danger of possession — possession by what appears to be evil — lies a catalyst of purification in weighing the fabric of deeds performed by another. Without that weighing, that intricate balance, without the necessary truth of purification that applies to all of us, we may march a hundred, a thousand abreast, and we are still pilgrims of the void. We are lost. We may swear we have clean hands in the marketplace of freedom, that we are untainted by evil, and still we are lost, lost in the hubris of consciousness.
‘And so I plead again. Surrender yourselves to your captors before it is too late and you forfeit a true scrutiny of the Shadows that you bear. I know your pride in the appearances of freedom. Take Penelope!’ I stared into the heart of the starlit Night and into the drowned child upon her breasts whose outline was becoming clear to me now. ‘I see something there. I see a different kind of catalyst from mine. Another form of balance, another factor of necessary truth in weighing the fabric of possession.’