I dipped my hands and saw Pilate’s signature in mine. Not leaves of grass that grow from buried flesh nor leaves of brain but the passion of the innocent that mingles in the rain, in the elements, that also clothe the guilty. Rose-red emotion upon innocence and guilt. Sunset emotion in the middle of the day when the sun stands despite sunset straight overhead, noonday sunset, in the pagan body of phallic rocket, phallic love, rocket discordance of sunset and sunrise to prick the sovereignties of heaven and hell.
I shrank from the administration of such a blow with my scorched hand that broke through Pilate’s, such a blow to sovereignties I tended to cherish, the sovereignty of hell no man dares breach, the sovereignty of heaven no man dares breach, except when these are perceived as pagan and therefore opening themselves to a profound game between creator and creature, parent and child, governor and governed, culture and culture, age and age, civilization and civilization, science and art.
Had I, I wondered, been promoted governor of Purgatory?
“No,” Masters explained, “something akin to a fiction-judge who judges himself as much as others and therefore judges governors — and indeed kings like me — as well. It’s an awful responsibility that the living — the living from Earth, that is, who journey in Purgatory — may have to perform. For remember to live — or to dream one is alive — is to be subject to various frames of existence that masquerade as life. The Earth-frame you know well — or do you? Anyway there are the purgatorial treadmills or frames that we have seen so far in our journey. There are those who hold on to an abnormal condition or treadmill of life and cannot fathom the cycle of death or repetitive violence to which they cling; there are those who are faintly aroused to the life of the mind; there are those who aspire to a true life, a true spirit, beyond all frames.”
I dipped my hands into all these apparitions and frames of existence that Masters had enumerated. As if to elaborate further he struck another match. It flared this time into volcanic activity. Volcanic spheres of dust, veil upon veil, tone within tone, exquisite theatres, unfolded themselves in space. Majestic gowns hung upon frames of the living and the living dead at various removes from true life. Faint crimson anxieties were suspended within yellow lampshades and refinements of purple.
I thought I saw boulders dancing together, embracing each other. At first they looked terribly sad, terribly sad, and then I was astonished to see their elation, profligate or extravagant mood, drunken abandon. They were drunk. That was plain to me. Drunk! I too was drunk. They had infected me.
What was less plain to see was the nature of the drunken elation within them and me. “Look again into the mirror of frames you share with them,” Masters said. “Look at those people over there. They want to embrace death and life together. They want the edges of death to become the wages for an existence they hate or find virtually unbearable. Such wages, they believe, would secure them relief from meaningless tasks and employments. Indeed release from hell. They admit as they dance — and this is curious — to the mind of oblivion, a mind that will release them and grant them a haven of nothingness, a haven longed-for, hoped-for, in the dance. Look! I can see from your face how drawn you are to them.” His voice faded but I knew what he said was true. I was almost seduced by the dance. I too began to long for oblivion.
But as the dance began to embrace nothingness, each boulder shifted its weight a little. I shifted my weight a little as I embraced Amaryllis. And the mind of oblivion began to resist oblivion. How could it be mind and do otherwise than resist the folly of courting an absolute extinction?
And so it was that a dance that encompassed the hope of oblivion grew hopeless of achieving oblivion. Such paradox! Such hopelessness! It was a hopelessness that rested on inimitable tip-toe function within volcanic upheaval, inimitable breaches of function, inimitable ballet I had never before so greatly enjoyed and I wondered if somewhere in the elements, at the epicentre of the elements, seismic elements, that clothed both hope and hopelessness, lay the genesis of the dance.
Had the dance started when human boulders moved towards sovereign night but breached that sovereignty, that night, by an evolution of mind, an evolution of partial release pointing through and beyond an absolute night, an absolute release, that falsifies itself in framing itself, in framing its desire, absolutely? How could I participate in movements for release if I have been released so absolutely that I forfeit the memory, the process, the life, the struggle for ongoing release? I could not tell but the ecstasy of such discoveries caused me to topple into another dance.
Here the elation of the human boulders sprang from complex vocation, complex labour, complex originality. Which dance, I wondered, came first — this or the one Amaryllis and I had danced before in the company of the others? Did an originality of cosmic vocation anticipate the elements that clothed hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt?
Such vocation, such originality, such labour, was desired and desirable beyond all other desire or conviction we felt as we danced. Dancing boulders. Dancing and collapsing. Yes — dancing and collapsing! For the task on which they and we were engaged drained us of immense resources and the most curious fatigue enveloped our limbs. It was a pattern or form of fatigue secreting undreamt-of gaiety. It reflected a drain or loss of energies, yes, but it also reflected — in that loss — an incubation of new forces, new energies.
Perhaps here was the answer to my question as to which of the two dances came first! In the incubation of new energies, the cycle or frame of human dancing boulders oscillated into a humour where first and last things were deceptively first and last, they were clothed by the self-same elements. The very intricacy of the dance of genesis lay in exposing a riddle of infinite parallels between so-called first things and so-called last things‚ between innocence and guilt, between hope and hopelessness.
Such an enigma of parallel opposites moved therefore into the mind of oblivion as incubation of sleeping energies, sleeping originality through frames of mind, through frames of oblivion into undreamt-of resources of spirit …
I looked around for Masters and it seemed I had lost him in Waterfall Oracle, that he had seen things he could not disclose, other dancers, other boulders, beyond my imagination. I felt Amaryllis and I were on the verge of toppling into an abyss. But he reappeared in the nick of time and led us back.
SEVEN
My father, Martin Weyl, was caught upon his treadmill, fixed, pinned to a wall of space, in early September 1939 when the trial of the red prince ended. The Amerindian was found guilty and sentenced by the judge in the New Forest courtroom, Brickdam, “to be hanged by the neck until he was dead”.
Martin was beside himself with grief and disappointment. The jury had taken three days to bring in their verdict. He had slaved like a fiend across many months in the presentation of his case. He had lain wide awake night after night. He exercised every muscle in pursuing the case. He delved into subconscious realms, consulted volumes of Purgatory’s Who’s Who. He depleted his own pockets to bring witnesses from every corner of the globe to testify to the archaic charisma of the law built into the El Doradan “ghost peoples” or “ghost assassins” (as the New Forest Argosy dubbed them).