The storm hit the vessel at last. The glass sides of the ship darkened and it was as if I saw it now, I saw the sea, in Masters’ eyes. The sea was black and white fire ran along the ridges and valleys of space. I held to my dream-support for bleak life and yet this was my leap into Purgatory all over again, purgation through the terror of beauty.
I saw through his eyes into a mystery in which hills tumbled and the plates of the sea-bed arose. The storm clung to pupils of devastation everywhere and nowhere. I looked into the ghost of chaos as into a raging, human cosmos. And a shuddering response to the intensity of limits suddenly seized me. The dead king’s eyes were those of a conquering hero secreting everlasting peril. Everlasting peril? I questioned his gaze and the blind/seeing pupils flashed. “Our conquering heroes are crystal balls in reverse. You shake them and raise a cloud of particles, a cloud of finite scale to hubris, the hubris of infinity.”
The sea, the storm, had been staggeringly miniaturized in the dead king’s sight; it had been converted into the terror of beauty. If he had walked on the sea at that moment I would have followed. For I would have been reduced to a pupil jumping from trough to crest, weightless eye, weightless pupil. The eye of beauty and terror bottles a head of emotion yet floats above fear upon astonishing elements.
The eye of the terror of pity, the terror of gentleness, walked with me on water, slipped, ran into a cave, emerged, half-capsized bottled head, righted itself, walked with me again on the wave above the majesty of storm. Blind eye that had been uplifted, reversed into visionary gravity’s anti-gravity, visionary violence’s non-violence‚ storm’s peace.
There was terror still within storm’s peace in the depths of the visionary sea beneath me. I walked to the edge of beauty, the edge of finite/infinite desolation. I held that edge and prayed. I offered it, I offered that edge to Christ. It was a gift, my gift to Christ who would ultimately save me by building on my premise of human, fallible generosity.
I walked in Purgatory upon water’s sparked fire. The vessel rode the sky, walked. I clung, prayed, walked again with Purgatory’s matchbox ship, Purgatory’s rocket to the stars. It was the dawn of the space age wreathed in fiercest element. I walked to the edge of gravity.
“Purgatory is all,” said the dead king. “Purgatory is endless.”
“And what about heaven?” I asked.
“Heaven requires your gift, your gift of originality. It is but a straw but god will cherish it in the midst of the storm.”
SIX
The storm abated, the seas grew calm. I dreamt I was led back by Everyman Masters to the edge of my seventh year. It was 1939, the place was East Street to which my parents, Martin and Jennifer Weyl, had moved. We occupied the house in which the Masters family had lived in the 1920s. They had moved into a two-storeyed mansion next door. I was seven, Masters was twenty-two; Martin, my father, was thirty-two and Jennifer, my mother, was thirty-three.
My birth in 1932 had been a catalyst of change for the Weyls who had been forced to marry — you may recall, gentle reader — when Jennifer was three months pregnant. My arrival had invoked a stimulus to sharpen Martin’s perception of pawns of fate. It also invoked a post-natal crisis in Jennifer that lingered on and turned into bouts of ecstasy, bouts of depression, over the years. My mother and father moved to the edge of themselves; they were cast down yet peculiarly, devastatingly reborn, when I arrived. They miniaturized two proportions of dread in themselves — even in miniature such edges or proportions are formidable — when I came.
Jennifer dreamt she gave birth to me when she was three months pregnant, three aeons pregnant. I leapt into her arms from the future fully formed. I leapt across the time-lapse of nine months gestation, as if gestations, ages, were edges in eternity. It was a dream that plagued her. My father embraced her tenderly, he sought to console her. But with the passage of time — as her bouts of depression intensified — he could not resist the feeling that he and I (he as her husband, I as her son) were responsible for her ecstasies and alarms. I saw it all through Masters’ blind/seeing eyes. I saw my father anew. He was intent on unravelling a cosmic seed of law, a cosmic reversal of suffering from those who suffer to those who blandly witness suffering, a cosmic reversal of judgement from those who are judged to those who judge, from those who are accused to those who counsel. That was his proportion of dread, that he would suffer at the edge of the law (the birth of the law) as she had suffered, in her proportion of dread, at the edge of the future (the birth of the future).
I saw my mother anew. I saw her awakening to a maternal value of dread that she never knew she possessed towards the stranger at the gate. I saw myself as the stranger. And I was imbued with some measure of her charisma that I would never forget. She loved me, she cared for me, but somewhere within body and mind, there was an obsessional edge or gate that witnessed to my arrival backwards from the future and out of the deeps, out of the storm, of life. I had come to her with a knife in my hand. It was a novel post-natal depression. Novel ecstasy. Novel terror of pity, terror of gentleness (my mother was the gentlest of creatures) in the log-book of Mother Blood, Mother Flesh, Mother Spirit, overshadowing the vessel of the soul.
Mixed families were native to New Forest. The terms “black” or “white” or “coloured” were indeterminate and mutual in privileged or biased or acceptable tone. One saw what one dreaded or wished to see. My mother was fair, perhaps white; my father was coloured; and I was of indeterminate origin or pigmentation. A cloud arose at the heart of the sun in April to drape all savage pigmentation. My father had been appointed defence counsel for a red Amerindian male from the deep New Forest, South American interior. It was the trial of a lifetime, the trial of the family. The Amerindian spoke no English and the matter was complicated by interpreters, kith and kin, who were not altogether at home in the English tongue or in the Amerindian’s tongue.
The charge was matricide. It was a ritual killing. The red man — as a prince descended from El Dorado — was commanded by Kanaima, the “savage heart” of the family, to kill his mother. She was sick and in great pain. It was cancer. “Release her from torment. Purge the people, purge the language of the heart,” Kanaima said. “Give her body and her breasts to the sun.” I was deceived by Masters’ deaf ears, blind eyes, as proportions of divine irony as much as dread, in his guidance of me through the trauma of the law. I thought I heard SON — “give her breasts to the son” — rather than “to the sun”.
What does one hear, what does one see, at the edged proportions of the past and the future, when the quest for redemption from violence arouses the profoundest self-questioning, profoundest honesty, profoundest self-judgement, self-confession, within a family of pigmented soul, pigmented bone?
It was a luminous red ball of a sun when the mother was slain by the child. Queen Jennifer stepped out of a shower, out of a waterfall, out of an ocean, into the bedroom. I was lying half-asleep, half-awake, on her bed. She handcuffed me to her body as to the mast of a ship. My father came on to the deck and touched her lightly. “You’re the loveliest creature on earth Jennifer,” he said. Indeed lightning had struck, had congealed. She was beautiful. She turned to him and to me and she smiled.
“Smile if you like but it’s true.”
“What’s true?”
“You, you’re true.” The tone of his voice changed. “I’ve had the devil of a day defending my poor devil of a son in court. He’s killing you, you know. Look how you spoil him.”
Lightning softened. The congealed lightning mast softened. Queen Jennifer had sailed to the bed and I lay against her. The wonderful canvas of her body seemed to crumple a little, to trail a little into a towel across her legs with edges pointing to the floor.