For example, he confessed to me that he had been secretly watching Alice practising the high jump on the tennis court when her uncle (also a secret watcher) collapsed with a heart attack, but it had signified nothing to him in depth, in complex depth, when it happened; it was to take his own “first death” to bring the event back into uncanny focus; it had been a shock, yes, the moment it happened, a realistic shock, but it went no deeper, it did not immediately descend beneath the surfaces of realism into complex reality. Alice had screamed. He had burst forth like a sprinter on to the lawn. The watchman in the lodge at the main gate to the College had been summoned. Mr Quabbas was dead. That was not the end. Within a day or two or three of the funeral, unpleasant rumours about Quabbas and his niece began to circulate, unpleasant rumours also about some of the daring young men that Quabbas cultivated in the guild.
Those rumours were not easily quashed. Everyone knew they were false, and yet everyone persisted in broadcasting a series of lies and diseased fable. The truth was that when a society senses a shape to events that destabilize “example”, it sniggers behind its mask, it becomes uncomfortable, it shrinks from reality. It even encourages fashionable cults of political violence that become the stuff of new heroic example, especially when such cults may be embalmed to resemble innocence or gentleness or courage. Young Alice (the spirit of gentleness) and young Thomas (the spirit of daring) were not immune from conscription into a conspiracy to befoul poor Quabbas’s name. Masters recalled someone sniggering behind his Carnival mask and saying that the Guild Cave theatre was a cover-up for Quabbas’s so-called “latent homosexuality” or “latent bisexuality” in his attachment not only to gentle Alice but to Masters’ sacred cousin or to someone who resembled “sacred rebels” or their cousins. It was all symptomatic, alas, of diseased mask, diseased gossip, that function to preserve the status quo and to suppress the challenge of disturbing inner truth that transcends circumstantial appearance.
“Judge Quabbas’s death and its aftermath,” my guide said to me in the labyrinth of dream that redresses the past in the present in the future, “illumine the genesis of social cults of violence that feed on sex as diseased territory within which the exploitation of sweetness and light, innocence and daring, become commonplace. Yes, commonplace. For within such commonplace all are in chains, all are in gaol. Nothing can change. We must — I beg of you Weyl— put such commonplace into profound reverse if we are to run through the erection of hollow ideal, hollow example, that imprisons us.”
He waved his hand as if to greet the ocean on which we sailed in 1957. Three or four days off Limbo (or was it Lisbon on the map of dream?) a storm began to brew. Masters said to me as the lightning flashed, “You know, Weyl, Quabbas’s death should be a leap in your book from the Inferno into Purgatory and into, may I say it, paradise.” Was he joking, was he mocking me? I was astonished at such optimism in the light of the sorry and unhealthy state of mind that he himself had deplored in his reminiscences of Quabbas’s befouled name. We descended the stairway into a saloon. Masters ordered a drink. The severity of the wound he had received had in no way diminished his cast-iron stomach and its immunity to fiery drink.
“It’s time, Masters‚” I said, “it’s time I confess something to you.” His face darkened as if he anticipated the coming storm.
“Go on, Weyl, go on.”
“Perhaps it’s nothing but …” I stopped. He ordered another drink and waved at me impatiently. The saloon seemed curiously dark, curiously veiled, but imbued with the oddest luminosity as if a bell at the heart of the storm rang with muffled light rather than sound. Masters waved his hand and for a moment the body of the ship turned to glass, womb of glass, flesh of glass, and I dreamt I saw Christ walking on the sea through the side of the ship. I plucked up the courage to speak.
“You speak of hollow example,” I said, “and of exploiting sweetness and light …”
“Yes,” he said, “go on, my dear Weyl.”
“Well then,” I said, “let me confess. I am troubled by guilt that I may unwittingly exploit sacred figures and turn them into romantic concretions of violence. I know there is a distinction between hollow ideal and disturbing truth, and you speak of the necessity for reversibles or reverses within the hollow ideal. I am not sure I understand fully. Take Thomas. He is a sacred figure, a disciple of Christ.” I was staring through the body of the ship into the coming storm. “His hand is upon Christ’s wounds. His hand is also that of the revolutionary who stabs the Carnival czar, the Carnival representative of Christ. An inferior Christ, no doubt — there am I speaking of doubt … It was involuntary. Perhaps such a vision of Thomas, Doubting Thomas, with dual hands, is pertinent to a colonial age lacking in genuine revolutionary hope and deceived by all sorts of fallacies and ideologies. And yet I wonder whether Thomas the disciple can carry the burden of such extreme paraphrase?”
I felt as uneasy and perturbed and crest-fallen as Masters sometimes was. The ship flashed again and I saw through its glass sides, through glass flesh-and-blood, through marble flesh-and-blood, into the rising waves upon which Christ walked as if he understood my guilt, my awkward confession, as if he knew me, as if he forgave me. Masters seemed blind to all this yet he was my guide into space. He looked at me with his sunken blind eyes, pregnant with the mystery of the womb and the grave. “It’s the price you must pay, my dear Weyl,” he said at last, “to reverse non-vision into vision, the blind ornament into the seeing vision.”
He paused; his blind eyes seemed to burn. He continued, “To put into reverse the obsolescence of institutions, the obsolescence of dead languages, that accumulate upon the sacred and clothe it with false clarities.” He paused again as if he heard, even as I saw, the rising waves. “A reversible fiction,” he said softly as if he spoke to himself, “unsettles false clarities … reopens the profoundest human involvements and perspectives to illumine a truth.”
“What is that truth?” I demanded.
“Violence is not the corner-stone of a civilization.”
“But, but,” I began to protest.
“I know, I know,” he said. “Violence seems irreversible in a desperate age where alternatives are fearsome and we appear to have no option but the lesser of two evils. But that is why we need a dual hand,” his voice choked a little then cleared, “a dual hand within an irreversible function to yield an edge, if nothing more, a subversive edge, that turns into the terror of pity, the terror of beauty, the terror of gentleness, to ravage our minds and purge us through violence of violence.”