All to no avail. With the passing of the sentence, he left the courtroom, he was exhausted, he was barely awake on his feet, he was a figure of Carnival dance, a secretive chained boulder drenched in Waterfall Oracle. He had forgotten to disrobe and still wore his gown and wig like sackcloth and bleached autumn snow. He blundered into the road and was knocked to the ground by a cyclist before receiving a frightful blow on the head (crushed dream-eggshell) from the iron wheel of a dray-cart. It ran over him even as the alarmed shadow of the half-prancing donkey or mule or horse that drew the cart engulfed him. Was it shadow-animal or shadow-cart? (The personality or shadow of the animal that pulled the shadow-vehicle was never established, as if to embroider into sphinx-like proportion the profligacy of the boulder-dance written into my father’s death. Pinned to a wall, pinned to a road, yet limbs flung apart, dancing, collapsing in space.)
I see him after all these years as if he too were arraigned before me now in Purgatory’s halls in the mirror of the river and I were at last in a position to begin to revise the sentence of the wheel and the sphinx. The treadmill on which my father found himself in the wake of his death I judge now to belong to phantom Martin Weyl the First (1932–39). Martin Weyl the Second had been partially released from the first frame by 1982–83 and was closer in texture and truth and spirit to the anthropologist’s “leaves of brain” that Amaryllis had been teaching me to ponder and assemble, and I am able to read now the epic defence he waged to interpret Carnival divine right, divine law, in an archaic people, in the archaic king of a “lost” people we judge to be savages, who judge us nevertheless as blind to the enormity of the moribund absolutes, moribund law, we bury in our own institutions.
In the wake of his sudden death, however, in 1939 I was aware of nothing but my mother’s weeping. She was inconsolable. And I felt so guilty it was as if I had condemned her even as the red prince had dismembered his sick queen in the heart of his tribe. My mother’s hair streamed to her waist in Purgatory’s river. Her breasts were cold in the starshine and sun of Purgatory’s bleached snow. She had to be constrained and kept at home when my father’s funeral took place in late September 1939. She was a phantom of solid grief permitted only to stand at a window in which she seemed framed like a picture observing the hearse and the long procession of carriages and cars that accompanied my father’s coffin to the grave.
Was he in that coffin? It all seemed terribly unreal to me in 1939. One ingredient of my father’s defence of the Amerindian — that cut my phantom mother to the heart in 1983 when Masters revisited Waterfall Oracle and found her there — revolved around questions that seemed directed at her as much as at the regime that had sentenced a savage to death for matricide.
Did she wish to be framed forever into the passion of sorrow, the passion of inexplicable violence? Or was she susceptible to capacities through and beyond frames, through and beyond the law of the frame that binds sorrow and violence together?
It was the expression “law of the frame” that agitated my mind as biographer of spirit across the light and the dark years of terrorism, of apparently motiveless killings, of apparently meaningless crime in the twentieth century. The twentieth century was a century of realism that failed entirely to plumb the reality of the pagan in ourselves, the savage urgencies, confusions, labyrinths in ourselves, the savage illuminations we desperately needed, the inner unspoken theatres we projected upon others, the inner problematic ties between mother and son, father and daughter, mother and daughter, father and son, masked stranger and intimate stranger, masked enemy and intimate treacheries of friends, masked governor and intimate governed, masked judge and intimate judged …
The Amerindian had barbarously slain the queen, his mother, in accordance with codes that seemed moribund in 1939 but were sacred law nevertheless to him and his people.
It was true that the colonial regime existing in 1939 had framed its own liberal laws for many decades forbidding such ancient barbarous practice in the savage tribes of the interior New Forest under its flag. But those new laws in no way invalidated the charisma of the law itself in an ancient people.
“Charisma of the law” was a term to which my father clung in defining his concept of “frame”. Divine right of kings may have vanished in Europe and elsewhere but divine right to territory, to frames of space, frames of water, frames of earth, was entrenched in the laws of sovereign states, East and West, North and South, everywhere. Thus the “charisma of the law” in the context of possession was operative in the Carnival masks of absolute regimes and incestuous territorial imperative. It was tragic that such absolutes never yielded, or confessed to, charisma. A European colonizer might trade or surrender territory to another sovereign colonizer but no spiritual confession of moribund principle ever occurred. In effect all that happened was that the new colony staged a ceremony to suppress, or eclipse, past sovereignties in itself. The new colony or regime subconsciously lived by, or subconsciously endorsed, moribund absolutes-in-depth to maintain itself in its divine right to frames of earth and water and sky.
My father argued that the case in hand required Plantation New Forest to desist from prolonging the seizure of the person of the Amerindian as if he were a common criminal (whatever “common criminal” meant) and to engage with him in the complex unravelling of the charisma of the law, the charisma of frames, the charisma of the treadmill. He argued that the action of the courts in New Forest was a symptom of derangement in ourselves, a blind refusal in ourselves to judge the deepest issues at stake, and that it would exacerbate “charisma”. He argued that that exacerbation was occurring at many levels of our colonial civilization and would result, he prophesied, in a nightmare feud of one sort or another, meaningless violence, inexplicable assaults, accidents, horrors, all sprung from addiction to frames that hypnotized peoples into believing themselves not only helpless or insecure or threatened but — through accumulative obsession with postures of attack and defence in those who waxed powerful and strong — overseers of human destiny by divine, territorial right …
Masters returned to New Forest on the eve of my father’s funeral. He was accompanied by Amaryllis, the anthropologist’s daughter. Her astonishing face caught my eye. I knew her in my dreams. It was a face that seemed curiously unframed by moribund anxieties, wonderfully innocent yet passionately aroused. I found it then — and still find it now over all the light years — almost indescribable in tone and quality of expression. She was my age in 1939 but she seemed much older than I in some essential gift from heaven of dancing heart and mind. She too had suffered bereavement in the loss of both her parents. Masters was reticent in speaking of the expedition when the New Forest Argosy came to interview him. There had been clashes, he said, with the angry Amerindian people but fighting had broken out as well between the members of the party on expedition. They had been a motley crew and an escaped convict had somehow inveigled himself into the party. In the end he revealed himself as someone on whom they could rely to fight the savages and to scheme for gold.
Everyman Masters had come close to drowning in Waterfall Oracle and had narrowly succeeded in pulling himself and Amaryllis back from the torrent, from veils of greenest light, blues and roses, veils that wove themselves into chains within all generations, all peoples, in the mystery of the Waterfall. They had secured a trail to another encampment and gained assistance in securing a boat.