Yes, they were bloody puppets. It was a subtle comedy. They were dead, however active, triggered by strings, manipulated. Masters was alive. Alive? Risen? Yes, I dreamt that he was alive, that he was risen from the humus of a civilization. His anger was real. That was my only proof that he had risen. He had come to the club to seize … Seize whom? The mysterious overseer. Yes, but there was more to it than that. He had come to seize a slender motif, an inner vein, an inner artery in that overseer, an inner current within the wound he carried, a wound that really belonged to the other. His anger was therapy, the therapy of justice he needed to create within his own being through the other.
He might never see his enemy — the enemy — face to face, deceptive face within deceptive face, but the originality of therapeutic anger, therapeutic blood rather than bloody puppets was a form of seizure to withstand every ape of the resurrection.
Even as I perceived this, I also perceived that Aimée’s anger, her resentment at the injustice of being labelled vain and hollow, was equally potent. Lazarus — the risen, alive Lazarus rather than puppets-Lazarus — had aroused her. Not that she was beyond the hysteria of manipulated being but her anger was so real that an original transfusion of justice possessed her. I saw those faint wonderful eyes of hers. The languor of her limbs, her faint arms, reached out not only to the immediate dancer on the stairway but towards the puppets-Lazarus on the floor or pit of the theatre. That reach endorsed her outer gaze on the edge of manipulated being. But her inner faint body glanced at Masters as well with the rage of longing, with the certainty of the genius of love, the genius of vocation within her blood, true blood not bloody puppet. She was a dancer of freedom’s cousinship to epitaphs of fate.
I held Amaryllis close. I knew. And yet … I could not be sure. Aimée was no puppet but I wondered whether the flick of a die on the stairway might tighten the strings around her and about us and change the batteries of anger in the theatre of the world into a strike at humanity that would ape our rage, our longing, our tenderness, and lose the therapeutic originality of inner justice, inner transfusion, inner blood born of transformative organs of power and lust.
A flood of music swept the theatre and lifted Aimée into the sky upon the stairway of Nightbridge, into the arms of the dancer who resembled the overseer of god.
“There is anger and anger,” Masters cried to the dancer with his own body on the stairway of god. “I know the limits of anger. I have ruled and served, have commanded labour and been a labourer myself, have stood high and stood low.”
“Never high enough, never low enough,” said the terrible dancer. “And that is why we deceive ourselves. We project ourselves into the stars but fall far short of the mind, the original mind of angry creation, angry for justice. We project ourselves into the grave but fall far short of the original sobriety, the original seed of the spirit of life. Never high enough to mind, never low enough to original humility, original spirit.”
I saw that the mask of Lazarus had slipped a little from Masters’ face and that it floated between Amaryllis and me. “Is this your gift?” I cried to him, “the gift of true fiction, the gift of the understudy, the living understudy of heights we have not yet achieved and depths we have not yet plumbed? Is this your gift, Masters?”
*
An impulse of obscure anger wrecked Nightbridge Club in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Someone tossed a cigarette end into an accumulation of puppet-rags, a fire blazed, the building was gutted. The stage or stairway on which Aimée had danced shot up virtually uncharred in a charred shell of a building. It was curious and bizarre.
I gained the impression that the stairway or ladder was an intact piece of dream-theatre. The uncharred stage of hell or heaven was a curious rocket. Ribbons of fire had played around it but left it intact. Ribbons of fire! Bonnets of fire! I recalled the car on which Aimée had danced. That car was now a wreck, a mere cinder in Nightbridge. But the stairway-rocket was its uncharred vehicular counterpart, its uncharred vehicular understudy in Nightbridge space. How extraordinary that a proud rocket should understudy a humble motorcar!
Extraordinary, yes, but it helped me to distinguish between fire and fire, the fire that reduces a car to cinders, the fire that hesitates to overwhelm a stairway into the stars, or a rocket into outer space, as if to imply that the resources of creative anger were such that they needed to align themselves with avant-garde technology in resurrection theatre in order to highlight the dangers to humanity, the dangerous, virtually impossible, stairway it would need to climb if traffic on Earth ceased forever.
That core of paradoxical anger — that leaves intact a pattern of access into the heights and into the depths upon Aimée’s stairway — drew me back to Crocodile Bridge in New Forest. There I had witnessed the resources of confused anger in coal pot fires and in the eyes of a living dinosaur aroused from its grave in a canal.
There I had also witnessed Masters’ resurrection from fire and the seed of anger, the seed of the wound, he inherited.
It was Carnival 1957. It was the evening when Masters visited the fisherman’s wife. I was possessed by foreboding and decided to drive to Crocodile Bridge. As I stood there I saw a tongue of lightning strike the roof of the fisherman’s cave. I raced to the scene to find Everyman collapsed in the mouth of cannon in which the workers lived. He had succeeded in crawling out of bed. Naked as he was, lying unconscious, he epitomized miraculous flesh-and-blood ammunition that had been fired, but had escaped being burnt alive. It was a singular distinction between puppet human tyrant rocketed into the depths of plantation space and unconscious human survivor in the mouth of cannon.
In point of fact the fisherman and his wife Jane, after inflicting the wound on the overseer, had vanished in alarm at the strange angry fire that had consumed the roof of the cave but had hesitated, it seemed, to descend. And indeed it was only when I had pulled Everyman from the rocket-cannon that the fire descended in my dream and consumed the rest of the cave.
In contrast to the depths into which Masters had been fired, the uncharred ladder in Soho ascended into the sky. I became conscious of a figure at a blackboard sketching the outer shell of Nightbridge and the intact inner stairway on which Aimée had danced.
It was an early spring morning when I visited the scene of the fire, the shell of Nightbridge. The light air and the music of space shone everywhere despite the busy river of Oxford Street that I had left behind to draw close to the backwater square near Nightbridge.
That the music of space shone was a nervous vibration and fire I had long accepted. I tended to explain it to myself as the phenomenon of the “understudy” that resides in one’s blood.
With each lucid dream I appeared to stand outside of myself, to understudy a self akin to myself yet other than myself. In short I knew Amaryllis and I were involved in a series of infinite rehearsals, infinite in material but true (however elusive), unswerving (however paradoxical) in spiritual mind.
The music of space was conducted by an understudy whose passion lit a flame of response in one’s being. And it seemed to me that I conducted the inner, ecstatic, silent orchestra of light and sprung leaves everywhere except for a fiery moment of release from such hubristic self-identification when the superior “I” seemed to recede, the supreme “I” I thought I was moved into the distance, and in fact I (shrunken me) was conscious of lapsed places, lapsed times, through which understudy/understudies moved.