One such volume I saw was entitled, in letters of subtle fire, Purgatory’s Who’s Who.
I was aware all at once of the shelter Amaryllis and I occupied in an abnormal world that is oblivious of spirit. We were both seven years old in 1939 when Masters made his trip into the interior of New Forest, a trip he was to recover or to retrace as our guide in 1982 after his death in London. That Amaryllis and I were susceptible to his guidance, his shelter, in our lucid dream of Purgatory — where I met her for the first time, she me, before we returned to the land of the living on Earth — was witness to the abnormality of childhood cultures I shared with her and which Masters began to puncture or complexly redress.
Childhood has always been an abnormal condition within the mind of the adult who has grown oblivious of pagan labour, pagan womb from which civilization comes. Purgatory made no bones about this I discovered. One of the aberrations of the pagan soul, the pagan womb from which we all derive, was Purgatory Cinema in which flashed child labour across the centuries, across the ages, in the field, in the home, in the temple, in the factory, everywhere, womb of the field, womb of the factory.
Great admirals aged ten sailed in Purgatory Cinema beneath my bouncing eye. (I lodged a protest and was told that though they were not formally great at ten their nuclear apprenticeship began even earlier and this was to lift them upon columns of state in great squares and in great cities). Housewives attired themselves in the garments of children in Purgatory Cinema. They toddled around looking after tyranical elders. Another instance of the nuclear state, the nuclear household.
“Yes,” said Masters, “childhood is always abnormal when the child becomes an adult overnight. We seem more humane, more civilized (whatever that means) in our treatment of children in the twentieth century. Perhaps we are. Provided we see that the difference between ourselves and the Infernos of the past may lie in the subtle arousal of the twentieth-century child to the edges of abnormal existence upon which it stands or within which it shelters.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, glancing at my reflection and Amaryllis’s in the mirror of the water where Masters had lit another match.
“I mean,” said Masters glancing at us, at our red hands, red with our parents’ blood in the mirror he had lit, “that a child can tyrannize its parents, kill them, execute them — and such tyranny seems normal (in playing at being abnormal) in an enlightened state or family — a child can draw in reverse the models of the infernal past and sense the perversity of tyranny, the absurdity of tyranny, when the tyrant-child feeds on, is sustained by, is clothed by, fed by, cared for by, the subject-parent it abuses.
“Thus, as I implied a moment ago, the child is faintly aroused to an absurdity in its abnormal ascendancy over the subject-parent and that breeds a rare affection between them, a rare tenderness, a rare game between tyrant-child and subject-parent. Thus it is that Amaryllis dreams of her dead beloved father and slices his temples into books. It was she who insisted on accompanying him into the interior. And he was so completely under her thumb, under her spell, that he yielded to her entreaty, indeed her command. He told himself what an education it would be, anything to salve his conscience and satisfy her whims. He never foresaw his death, his wife’s death — indeed her death (he thought she had died) — when his party were attacked in 1939 by the angry tribe.”
I glanced again at Amaryllis. The new match that Masters had lit was bringing tears to her eyes. Yes, I was sure now. She would return. She would return whether I looked back or looked forward. True tears. True love. True sorrow. True gladness. Those tears seemed to melt the oceanic brittle fly that traced a line on her dead father’s brow from which she assembled “leaves of grass” and “leaves of brain”, Volume 1, Purgatory’s Democratic Poem, Purgatory’s Who’s Who.
“Did she or her father borrow the title ‘leaves of grass’ from Whitman?” I asked Masters.
“If they did it was because Whitman had passed this way.” He was poking fun at me but still I cried, “Did he pass here, where we are now?”
“He left a line on a rock requesting the adoption of ‘leaves of grass’ in counterpoint to ‘leaves of brain’.”
“But why, why?” I insisted like a child of abnormal democracy in a world of authoritarian structure.
“Perhaps,” said Masters gently, “he was accompanied by his Amaryllis and he felt something was missing, something was incomplete in the game they played together, something needed to arouse itself in the game you play with your parents, in the game this Amaryllis beside you plays with hers, something may falter in the game of democracy when we elect others to rule us who are oblivious of the blood on their hands, the red blood, the pagan blood, and thus may unwittingly lead us into hell.”
We were approaching a region of phantom rocks that had been vaguely discernible at the start of the expedition but were clearer than ever now.
Each rock witnessed to an ancient river-bed that the stream and rains of volcanic memory and non-memory had cut and abandoned in favour of more advantageous cuts or later channels over long centuries and geologic ages of Purgatory.
What was peculiar about the current phenomenon was the translation of these rocks (each belonging by hypothesis to an abandoned or diverse channel) into the same river upon which we presently moved. Thus we moved in lucid dream upon many river-beds, in many channels, all stitched into one. Perhaps they had all been uplifted by a gigantic fault, by a giant geologist — a cousin of the dead anthropologist in our boat — who had signed his name in Purgatory’s Who’s Who a long time ago by heaping all previous channels, or parent rivers, into their present offspring upon which our boat now moved.
It dawned upon me also that the paradoxical game between parent-creator and child-creation gave a luminous tone to some of the phantom rocks in the river. It was an argument that Masters and I ceaselessly conducted through many character-masks. Was he my phantom guide, my spirit-parent, or was I his divine clerk, his fiction-parent. Had I been nursed into becoming a writer through contact with him or had I nursed him into becoming an incalculable guide into being?
I returned to my inspection of the luminous tone or rock within the phantom ancient riverbed rock, and detected, I thought, a coagulation of flame from the match that previous guides with their crews — subject, as Masters and I were, to ambiguous parent/child relationships — had lit and deposited in the river (or the rivers) within expeditions they had led. Each such match or prick of vision into calloused fates was a measure of pagan blood, a revelation of native tyranny or game of tyranny native to the family of Mankind.
The matches Masters had lit were already assembling themselves into slender shapes or pinnacles of subtle coagulated flame as though in our expedition, in ourselves, in our immediate crew, we witnessed to many phantom countries in one purgatorial landscape, many phantom images in one foreign river, many geographies in one theatre of psyche.
Was it a game of self-inflicted parent/child wounds, self-aroused parent/child revelations, in which we were involved? Was Purgatory the region of regions, was it a democracy of soul unravelling itself by faint degrees and redressing tides of obliviousness that had accumulated upon humanity into the erection of an abnormal callous upon the frame of being?
I dipped my hands into the tides of obliviousness around our boat and in concert with match or luminous rock began to perceive the stain that the Governor Pilate (once voted popular administrator of Purgatory) may have seen when he washed his hands in pagan blood. (I say “pagan blood” for the Christ he condemned was no “Christian” for him or for the Roman world to which he belonged.)