“What translucency!” he murmured. “Translucent blood. Sheer marvel. It’s the light you know. Twilight gives a luminous halo, a luminous inner paint to your breasts. Madonna ship.” He added almost ominously, “It’s the way the sun invests itself with a brush and a knife to slice into flesh.”
I started. I freed my hands. They were red.
“It would be different at cloudless noon‚” my father continued, pacing the floor and the deck. He stared at me pointedly. “The sun’s rays are vertical then.” He stared at my mother’s breasts. “Each slice of sailing naked body turns opaque at cloudless noon, opaque wedding to light, opaque funeral of blood. Pallid, slightly shut-in.”
I felt I was beginning to glimpse what my father was saying to me across the difficult years. The dread, the irony, of the holy family of mankind to which someone as unholy, as pagan, as I belonged! That was a crude translation, I knew, but it helped. Were there not proportions of dread, proportions of unsuspected truth, unsuspected beauty, residing everywhere in our most intimate guilts, intimate memories, intimate fallacies, intimate dreams, intimate selves?
“I look as I feel then,” said Jennifer quietly, so quietly I alone heard what she was saying. She felt pallid, shut-in, but amenable to sailing in space again through waterfall or ocean when the lightning-knife I invested in the sun struck and she congealed. I knew her pain. I knew I had wakened her to the cancer of ecstasy and depression from the day I was born. I knew that every canvas of the holy family of mankind invested in human, ailing, shut-in skins and bodies that a painter or a daemonic child slices anew into brilliant conversions of the womb of space. Each slice becomes an indictment of assumptions that clothe our eyes, assumptions of hopelessness, of loss, of absolute peril, absolute evil, absolute bias. What are the roots of the holy family of mankind save that the roots of hope lie through hopelessness that is sliced, transfigured, sliced and sliced again and again?
I knew her pain. I also knew my father’s joy and sorrow in addressing me through my guide Masters. I knew the faintest bridge, the faintest curvature or shoreline, glimmering in the depths of terror, the faintest potential for coniunctio or true marriage between Masters — the dead king — and the slain Amerindian queen, slain in themselves and in their surrogates and substitutes yet each requiring the conversion of the red ball of the sun upon civilization’s canvas. Did not young Alice slay her uncle Quabbas and give him light? Alice had been blissfully unconscious of the deed whereas I … How unconscious/conscious was I of killing my mother from the day I was born? My hands were red in the dying sun.
“Shut-in, a little opaque,” my father said, “whereas a black skin …”
“What about a black skin?” Jennifer asked.
“Well a black skin thrives under the straight noonday sun. It opens like a flower.”
“And at twilight?”
“It looks pallid then. Pallid as you look at noon. Black pools into pallid jam session shadow when twilight falls. White pools into shut-in cave when noon strikes.”
When noon strikes, when noon strikes … I stared at my hands. “So you see,” my father said, “there is a marriage of opposites in the family of the sun.”
*
When the trial was at its height Masters turned his blind/seeing eyes deep into New Forest and to the birthplace of the red king. I felt I was seeking myself as much as the doomed Amerindian who had been charged with matricide. Seeking myself in a labyrinth of rivers that fell from Waterfall Oracle. It was a journey into apparent desolations. The river of New Forest was unusually dry. It lay at the bottom of an ocean I had seen with the bouncing pupil of an eye from the crest of a wave — an ocean we had crossed or were still to cross. A long series of rapids, with intervening spaces and calms, lay before us. Insects descended at night like a plague. As day followed day, night night, Masters was subtly aware of the dream arch of the river beneath the ocean. It was as if he and his nebulous boat crew slid along the curvature of a feather that flew beneath my bouncing eye on its wave. No prospect of sliding from the duck’s back, the duck’s smooth feather, for a long time to come in the slow motion rain of the river. It took ages, it seemed, to drive the boat across a spine or a ridge or to haul it around a portage that lay equally at the bottom of the sea and in the sky. We made our way by infinitesimal degrees within the exposed rocks and naked sand banks of the drought-river.
The wide expanse of the feather cultivated an oceanic illusion as if one were descending in absurdity of flight into pools of sky that shone here and there, pools that were brittle oases in a desert of sand and rock. The ocean’s Carnival feather masked desert. Each rock masked the arid spine of flight tilted in space against a shimmering background of torment.
At night the curvature of the feather-wheel was subtlest yet paradoxically most pronounced. For then the duck’s apparently smooth, apparently oiled machine shed its rain of space like dry oceanic stars that clustered at the tip of our drowned nose and caused our bouncing eye to descend and concentrate upon a luminous fly with silver legs. I had sliced my mother the day I was born but now it was as if I had been sliced by inimitable guilt, inimitable passion, to give birth to a new curvature of time in space; as if we had been sliced — the entire boat crew — as we journeyed into Purgatory.
The tip of one’s nose! Was the tip of a fly on the tip of one’s nose the genesis of Waterfall Oracle?
Seers and saints had listened to the music of a silver fly on the tips of their noses. Each tip became a sensible organ, an ear beneath but in front of their eyes.
We listened with our slain noses to the music of chaos. PRICK. BULLET. Prick of a feather. Twinkling ear, twinkling nose. BULLET. PRICK. A member of the crew lay beside me. Sound asleep. Feigning life. Dead. In the flickering lamp I had lit I perceived another star or fly on his brow. It moved by degrees of which he was unconscious. The prick of a fly! Atrocity of a fly! Fly’s eye carcass! What did a fly see? Did a fly perceive an entire boat as it crawled on a dead man’s lips? Did a fly perceive an entire universe spiralling in space in a parcel of stars like silver blood on a dead man’s face?
After a hard day on the drought-river we slept like the Carnival dead on many a battlefield. New Forest ancient battlefield. African battlefield. Central American battlefield. Beirut battlefield. Belfast battlefield. We slept like a bandsman, a bombed horseman, in St James Park. We slept like a child, or an old man, half-aroused by the prick of a star, the silver legs of a fly. The atrocity of a fly illumined my open eyes; it made me susceptible to blindness in others, it made me susceptible to non-feeling, it made me susceptible to the grain of stone in flesh-and-blood, it imbued every fraction that it traversed with the curvature of genesis susceptible to desolations, the genesis of a cycle that knows its intractable material.
We had been lucky to secure a passage into the interior at this time of the year. Fortunately an ageing anthropologist and his family, his wife and his seven-year-old daughter, were making the trip with a small party of researchers, and Masters was received like an honoured guest. I was dimly recognized as coming from the future into the past in search of myself. No one knew (with the exception of Masters — who was my guide — and the child Amaryllis who was destined, like myself, to return to the land of the living from a dream of Purgatory) that they were dead. They swore they were still alive. They swore they were still proceeding on a journey they had once made or within activities they had once performed.