Amaryllis had by then left the Catholic Church. In fact our true marriage — if I may so put it — occurred in 1958. No priest then, lay or robed, no official of the State or the Church, presided. Spirit presided. And that is the only mark of a true marriage. She lived in Maida Vale. We had been seeing each other for several months when, one autumn evening, we returned to her rooms. These were at the top of a building overlooking Regent’s Canal. The bedroom was spacious. A fire blazed in the grate. And it seemed to me that we lay in a curious luminous splinter of the cathedral-horse in which we had knelt an age ago in New Forest.
The illusion — if illusion of mist and space it was — sprang out of the fire in the autumn grate of the cosmos. That fire had been cropped by the horse of space but it had achieved the miracle of a flower in which we perceived the mystery of cosmic digestion and evolution, the first seed eaten by revolutionary spirit ages ago, the first leaf phantom god (phantom animal) tasted, the first plant upon the tongue of the sea, the first rose in the lips of soil. We were drowning together in fire and in water, the strangest taste of dying into elements we consumed, the strangest climax, reality of paradise, reality of intercourse; inimitably transparent yet dense bodies were ours. We lived in yet out of our frames, we touched each other yet were free of possession, we embraced yet were beyond the net of greed, we were penetrated yet whole, closer together than we had ever been yet invisibly apart. We were ageless dream.
We subsisted upon genius of revolution of sensibility within the phantom animal in which we lay, a phantom animal that was so ancient it filled us with awe. Our naked flesh was inhabited by mutual generations clad in nothing but obsolescent organs, obsolescent youth. What obsolescence! What intimate renewal of being beyond age and youth! We were intimate, ageless being, we were four years short of thirty, we were young, we were old as the coition of the hills and waves miniaturized in our bodies. We were a dying fall into deeper orchestration of mutual spaces.
In the fire and in the flower, in the rain of autumn leaves that the cosmic horse eats, lies the thrust of revolutionary peace within two beings alone, yet encompassed by an invisible third, an invisible fourth, an invisible fifth, sixth, seventh, in the belly of space, the invisible army of humanity.
Amaryllis’s father had given his “leaves of brain” to us as a stratagem of invisible humanity arising through heart and lungs into imperishable armour and contemplation.
My poor mother framed by a mist of tears was also there in the horse with us. She vanished but left us ammunition in the sorrows of humanity with which to drench the world in the spirit of truth.
Amaryllis’s father led my poor mother through Purgatory within a form that translated the elements of feud into both sorrow and love.
I was translated but unable to read in its entirety the secret and terrible and profound army of invisible humanity within the horse in which Amaryllis and I lay.
Masters knew it all when he knocked on my book long after in 1982 and 1983 to help me revise and to illumine the depths of coniunctio or complex marriage of cultures within the organs of the self. He had been involved, I perceived, in initiating Amaryllis and me into a distinction between transfigured seed of passion and calloused immunity from evil that is embodied in sexual gymnastics, sexual consumerism, sexual escapism from the reality of love in all its depth of beauty and awe and terror.
EIGHT
The ecstasies and torments that run parallel through the twentieth-century age made it inevitable that the dead king should descend into the living Inferno the moment Amaryllis and I glimpsed heaven and consummated our secret marriage vows. The Inferno lives when the dead retrace their steps around the globe. Our marriage was unique heart and mind but for that reason — unique tranquillity and ecstasy, unique revolution and peace — it was inevitable that a master spirit would return to counsel us and to bear the penalty of the Inferno that runs in parallel with heaven. Masters accepted the penalty. He became my guide and opposite (our guide and opposite) in arriving from the kingdom of the dead to counsel us in the land of the living and to guide my pen across the pages of this biography of spirit.
It started in this instance with property even as Amaryllis and I embraced. The shadow of property fell upon our ageless dream, the ageless dream of love. He had arranged for his properties in New Forest to be sold and for the money from the sale to be transmitted to him in London. He tended, however, to be lax in transmitting instructions to his agents and incessant delays occurred. The two-storeyed house in East Street was sold quite quickly but the money never came to him. It went instead to the New Forest Jane Fisher — Jane Fisher the First — who had stabbed him as they made love. I was angry and impatient with such quixotic generosity. Indeed for a prince of an overseer who could be hard as rock, it seemed a singular discrepancy of passion to give cash he urgently needed to a whore who had grossly attacked him. The truth was he regretted the privileges under which he had used the loose women of the estate, and was possessed by uncanny guilt.
I thought that was the truth in 1958 but I know now in 1982/83 when he wears the mask of the dead king that truth runs far deeper. A discrepancy of passion had haunted him through Waterfall Oracle and the legacy of property to the whore who had killed him was essential within the sacrament of a first death.
It was essential also in parallel with my marriage to Amaryllis and with the construction of other paradoxes and parallels such as hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt, the funeral-horse and the wedding-horse, the Inferno and Paradise. In all these the mind of fiction looks deeper than perverse hope into a dialectical hopelessness that releases us paradoxically from the hope of (the desire for) oblivion as guilt releases us to plumb the creative depths and riddles of innocence, as the funeral-horse releases us to unmask the lie of death in life and to embrace what is dearest in humanity, as the Inferno releases us and sets all parallels into motion so that Paradise may be found again and again within each age despite universal travail.
He told me — when he returned from the grave and became my guide — that the protracted delay in selling his other properties had been forecast by Waterfall Oracle as a symptom of the phantom horse that would crop the industries of the world over successive decades and generations. Prices had fallen in New Forest, South America, and he had been advised to descend into the Inferno and unravel a better climate for the stock market or wait until a better climate prevailed. That descent in itself would have appeared, in realistic terms, as nothing but a forecast of bleak economic growth in the late twentieth century but in parallel with the glimpse of Paradise that Amaryllis and I had achieved, it endorsed the mind of fiction again as an irony of forces subsisting upon opposites.
One doorway into the Inferno lay across Crocodile Bridge. In this moment, however, this moment of his return, this moment of suspended climax between heaven and hell, the dead king chose another. He entered the Inferno through a factory in North London that made Frigidaires and washing machines. I thought it perverse that Masters the Second should take a job as a common labourer and it was not until I saw my marriage to Amaryllis in a new light across the light years — not until the dead king returned into my book to enlighten me — that I perceived how he had glimpsed parallel opposites — parallels composed of apparently opposite tendencies — in Waterfall Oracle and in the golden chain he disclosed to me now as an element in his descent into the dancing human boulders upon whom he installed me as fiction-judge over him and others.