Christ’s Trojan donkey! What a parallel! Could one bear the shock of such a parallel, I wondered? Could such a parallel bring a new beast, a new heart, a new love, upon which to ride …? Was this my father’s gift, the gift of the beast he dreamt he entered the moment he fell under shadow and hoof?
In an accident-prone, suicidal and conflict-ridden age, violence is a savage masquerade, is it not? It feeds on a void of sacrament and on the infliction of humiliation and shadow. It not only feeds on these but remains blind to the pressures to which it is addicted.
“I know, I know,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby. “I see massacres on earth when I look through the bars of heaven, so many pathetic bodies.”
“What has all this to do with Weyl and me?” Masters demanded. He knew the answer but it was difficult to shoulder such terrible knowledge, that an equation existed between Christ’s pagan donkey and the human beast of love upon which the universe rides.
He touched his own body, his own beast. It seemed to reflect the rent in Weyl’s frame. He had used labouring men and women in his plantation, overseering days as beasts of burden. But the heart of the beast was now his. Weyl had given it to him to pass on to me within the golden chain of existence. It was his, it would renew him, it would save him, imbue him with unbearable and bearable insights as time rode on his back.
“If you see that, my dear Masters, a spiritual evolution in the law may suddenly thrust you into the stars, as into the labyrinth of the Earth, to plumb the equation between fire and fire. If you cannot see it, or plumb it, accidents will pile up everywhere around you. For those accidents are your soul that remains oblivious of its parallel heritages and weeps with a thousand eyes on every battlefield, on every roadway.
“Unless you see yourself as paradoxically enriched by savage pathos, savage dream, you cannot break the spell of motiveless crime, you cannot overcome Hades, you cannot see God.”
*
Early in December, apparently fully recovered — new mystical “savage heart” lodged in his body from Weyl’s rent side and resurrection mule — Masters telephoned the factory in North London and discovered that his West Indian colleagues had been transferred to day shift. He felt he should visit them and say goodbye.
It was curious to reflect, I thought, upon the chain of being through life into death and back again and the necessity for a revisualized chain in the dead king of whom I dreamt and whose steps I had retraced into childhood light year in parallel with the ancient game of the crab. I heard again the mysterious voice that had addressed him and me a moment ago, saying this time, “In El Doradan light-year crab the spirit or half-obliterated cosmic pattern cries out to be completed or fulfilled, cries from the other side of the womb or death-in-life. Cries to be reborn or resurrected. Such rebirth or resurrection is a mystery that resides in parallel shapes and riddles.”
Through the chain of being I began to treasure the commingling of elements in the marriage of Earth and sky, and thus I was able to visualize something I may only describe as “phenomenal resurrection”, healed character, enveloping Masters when he returned for the last time to the factory.
I dreamt the rain ceased the morning he set out on a bus from Notting Hill Gate, but everywhere the light seemed to drip into overcast translucency, mutated silver, mutated pearl. Space within the dead, resurrected king and space without him and me was diffuse, it was a web draping the bare, sculpted branches of trees. The conjunction of inner and outer space was a token of healed hollow or recovery from depression, from illness.
I felt silences within that hollow despite the sound of the traffic. Not only recovered heart but recovered ear encompassed those silences. Silent music. How did one respond to silent music? There it was. Seen music, unheard music. Recovered eye. Recovered ear. Recovered heart. Sight, sound, memory etched themselves into silences replete with harmony: etched themselves through recovered being yet ran upon the fine branches of trees that the dead king perceived as the bus moved, stopped, moved again in the vicinity of Kensington Gardens.
In the winter light that seemed to echo with intimate yet far-away vistas arching through Waterfall Oracle, I felt the imprint of black fire, black tone, numinous wonderful shadow. That imprint or sensation was so acute, so deep, Masters was caught by the Carnival mask of Lazarus, mind of Lazarus in his mind, as the heart of Weyl stood in his heart. Yes, mind, heart, shadow! Imprint of fire, shadow, was the mind of Lazarus in his mind to attune him to ivories of sensation, russets, and other alphabets of the elements within every hollow epitaph of memory, every hollow grave.
Winter lapsed into the carpet of autumn leaves under the bole of a tree that the bus was passing. The trampled leaves appeared to smoke with an arousal of spirit, trampled greenness, trampled yellow paint, in the hollow depression of time and place from which one arises to discourse with silent music within the roar of a great city …
The factory seemed different to Masters’ Carnival Lazarus’ eyes in this actual day of arousal of spirit; different from how it had appeared to him during night shift. Yet night shift had seemed to him but manufactured day, susceptible, at the same time, to blazing stars and constellations.
In the winter day the factory was susceptible to artificial noon. The lights were still on as at night but they were different, he perceived again, from the illuminations he recalled when he blacked out. They were deceptively natural, less glaring. Why should night glare and day time industry under the same manufactured stars be deceptively natural sky or cave of illumination in this late twentieth-century age?
The walls of the factory seemed sharper somehow, greyer somehow, to Masters’ Lazarus’ eyes. They seemed composed of slices and excavations, raw material blood that was white or grey not red, sliced pallor of noon, real noon (whatever that was), artificial noon (whatever that was).
It was this elusive distinction between noon as universal artifice and sliced bread of reality that sobered the Carnival dead king Masters — if he needed sobering at all — and drew him to perceive how close his shadow was to all industrial revolutions, ghost towns, ghost factories, ghost cradles, all hollows, all realms, within the emotion of transplanted arousal of spirit.
Double arousal. Transplant. Resurrection.
It was a liberation yet a burden, transplant/resurrection. He perceived the sadness of a world that was resourceful yet deprived, he perceived the roots of aching memory, the cave, the nursery fable that the dead bring on their backs to be patented anew in Santa Claus commercials, the study, the skin transplants of Christmas, the masks, the oddest commotion in aroused blood, the humour of lust, as workers idled a little and contemplated their coming holiday.
It was the objectivity of Lazarus-spirit, yes, but in the reanimation of mystical organs, it evoked vistas of shocking illusion, shocking power to be all things to all men, power to deceive the corruptible with the corruption of magic. “Oh mind of Lazarus,” said Masters, “what a temptation it is: to see through all things, all peoples, to rule with the power of the grave.”
He looked across the apparently real, the apparently artificial light of noon and waved to one of the West Indians he had come to see. He had cultivated a good accord with the two operators of Madame Guillotine but was astonished — despite his insight into the powers he now possessed — when Jackson, the older operator, rushed across tempestuously to greet him, to seize his magnetic Lazarus hand, and to shake it staunchly with a great demonstration of affection. Affection? No, something else. It was awe, I dreamt. Expectation of wonders. “I sorry James ain’t here to greet you, Everyman,” Jackson cried, “he had a narrow shave. Lucky devil! He swears your magic did the trick, that you pulled him back from the pit.”