Was someone actually at home in the pathos of her dress? Was she the prey of phantom nephews and nieces, phantom injustices, phantom diseases, diseased Widows and Orphans state, diseased unemployment in the decade of the 1920s that cast its imprecise, its inexact, parentage of shadow into generations unborn?
Diseased as they were, they sought to toss her pennies to dance. And when they had nothing to toss, they reminded her of the taxes they paid. For without their money, they claimed, there would have been no theatre of the Alms House in which Aunt Alice played the paradoxes of limbo’s evolution into other spheres, the paradoxes of the widow of a dead star and the sister-in-law of the mother of god. Not that they understood such comedy of destitution and non-existent status of wealth. Yet they applauded unwittingly by calling her “aunt”, spirit-aunt, oblivion’s aunt.
Thomas also applauded though he was terrified by “oblivion’s aunt” and by the thought of being swallowed or lost forever in her massive, sailing body. Alice understood. She felt profoundest compassion for him. How close is “oblivion’s aunt” to the seed of heaven that evolves into a family tree of spirit? Her curious dance (Thomas was uncertain whether she were a dream-puppet or sailing flesh-and-blood bound for divinity’s shore) mirrored the division between the two realms he had glimpsed through barred gate and segmented mask, namely, the realm of oblivion or absolute limbo and the realm of Carnival evolution into a family of spirit; and as she danced he felt he could trace the division within her, puppet breast/fertile breast, wasted breast/active breast at which he had never sucked but which she gave to him now.
It was a colonial dance that responded to his deprivations; it symbolized hunger for proof, thirst for proof of genuine survival. It seemed to imply that he too, like Masters, had come close to extinction, and Alice’s breast proffered to him now in the dance was a gesture of succour after all that he had forgotten he had received. It matched Masters’ assumption of kingship. It matched that dream-kingship with a dream-knighthood for Thomas, a dream-enterprise of the milk of freedom that he (Thomas) so desperately needed to prove.
Thomas bowed, he knelt to Alice. He was the plantation king’s knight. In the milk of freedom, the breast of freedom, he perceived the obscure Magna Carta of the womb. And of the grave. Thomas reached out through the bars of dream but he could not quite seize her or touch her. He wished to prove her reality by sculpting her to embrace the rose and the lily in the straggly Alms House garden. He wished to sculpt the shadows of great knights, great ladies, great households buried in her eclipsed breast.
“Take the measure of any statue in a formal square or garden,” Masters said to me. “It weeps with bird droppings. If you doubt those tears then you need to poke a finger into a bird’s hindquarters for the tear duct of a stone knight or a stone lady. But Thomas’s comedy and tragedy was that much as he tried, Alice’s eyes defeated him in the sculptures he sought to make of the animal/human kingdom. No material tear rose there, neither faeces nor fire. The shadow of a rose, perhaps, the decrepitude of a lily, that was all. They wept for mankind. And that Thomas could not prove. She was the one creature, shadow of a dancing rose, he could not touch. And yet she was drawn to him, she pitied him (as my mother pitied me), she loved him, she loved him,imagine that! with the kind of love that is incapable of destroying its siblings. Some say she was a fraud that only a colonial, barren age could fabricate. I say she was the catalyst of fame at the heart of families of non-existence. She was the mystery of genius within the most unpropitious economic circumstances, a mystery that ran deeper than proof or parody of the evolution of limbo into heaven.”
*
There were three stages remaining after the Alms House in Sir Thomas’s journey with the market woman: first, the great Market-place of New Forest; second, the Bridge over the Crocodile Canal; third, the tenement plantation range in which the market woman lived with the czar of Carnival, Flatfoot Johnny.
These stages constituted, Masters said, a descent into the modulated Inferno, modulated Purgatory, of twentieth-century colonial limbo. I have no technologic recording of Sir Thomas’s progression as Child of the Carnival year, precocious human child of 1926. All I have are my conversations with Masters and a profusion of notes I shall endeavour to paraphrase. I hear his voice as if it were yesterday. I remember the hot summer day in the 1970s when he invited me to visualize the three remaining stages as further evidence of what he called a “twentieth-century divine comedy of existence”.
It was indeed a hot June day in London. I drank lemonade and orange; Masters drank beer and spoke with staccato bursts of energy in reply to my questions. I sensed his depression. He suffered often from acute depression, the lineaments of which drove him to compose the paradoxical masks of Carnival that he inwardly wore or perceived upon others arising from the depths into the heights and vice versa. Towards evening our discourse became more even, more resigned (if that is the word), yet deep and many-layered. The day had cooled and the sky was tender, frail with quintessential smoke. There were brush-strokes across that aerial smoke suggesting a curious moderation of fire. The air was still and as the evening deepened, that strange moderation drew Masters’ attention. His inwardly masked face looked eager now, crest-fallen yet ecstatic. (The sensation of many series of inward masks, as if his naked face were dressed inwardly, never outwardly, was something I could never shake off when I met him.)
He was pointing to the trees along Holland Villas Road. “Sponges of shadow,” he declared, “porous with a darkening rain of light that breathes stillness.” It all intimated a quality of fire that we needed to translate, he said. “Take the irregular line of the dark bunched trees over there against the evening sky. Follow that line with your eyes. Look! it shoots up here and there into points resembling the edges of flame still and black. In such apparent immobility, such tone, I detect a version of moderation and fire.” As he spoke I remembered the sponge and its mysterious ingredient of “light-rain”. Was rain too a translation of liquid fire that stabs and blackens the earth as the trees blacken the sky?
I saw and felt inwardly what he meant by “moderation”. I saw the cosmos of my age as an inward series of gradations of flame resembling fire, yet other than fire, as the cloth of night upon the evening sky differs from ultimate night.
“Fire consumes but when veiled or rendered apparently opaque in substance and action, it imbues the bursting seed, the veined leaf, the arteried wood, with fertility and regenerative being. Each seed is the flaming birth of a star across light years that are rendered opaque in the veils of a tree. That tree comes from within the spaces of a seed replete with invisible light years. We need to sense the veils within veils within us and around us to see how everything burns so intricately, so imperceptibly, that it seems utterly still, utterly solid, rather than the phoenix of judgement day spirit aroused in the ash of space.”