In becoming “shrunken me”, I saw the lapsed places, the lapsed times achieve the mystery of intact reality. It was as if the supreme “I” that was fading into the distance bestowed upon “shrunken me” a fantastic inner gift. Something or someone (whatever or whoever it was) remained unbroken, intact, in material absurdity, spiritual irony. At Nightbridge Club that something was the absurd stage and ladder into the sky. At Crocodile Bridge that someone was the absurd, unburnt body of Everyman Masters that I — in understudying a fantastic conductor of orchestrated lightnings or science of dreams linking the human person to the heights and the depths of the cosmos — had rescued.
However absurd the uncharred ladder was in a blackened building, however absurd the unburnt king of dreams in the mouth of cannon, they established a link between me and indefatigable understudies of the genius of creation resembling myself but differing from myself to leave the community of the future open to others linked to me but untrammelled in spirit. It was a temptation to dream one was utterly close at points, places, instants of being, to absolute bliss, absolute terror, in creator and creation. But the fact that creation broke into halves, namely, absolute bliss/absolute terror, love/hate, beauty/dread (or whatever Carnival dualities one perceived) was a manifestation of unbroken but untouchable wonder, intact but unstructured mystery (within fractions of material, elusive, concrete destiny), through intricate understudies in mutual reality, omnipresent reality, that glowed at one’s fingertips, in one’s blood, only to fade but never die in visible reflections and in music that shone, never sounded.
I had drawn close to the figure at the blackboard and easel which were peculiarly familiar to me. He stood at the edge of the street and sketched for an invisible class of twentieth-century students the shell and the intact stairway of Nightbridge Club. I suddenly knew him. Antipodean man. Delph! An old man now. He had been sacked — you may recall, gentle reader — from New Forest College in the 1930s and had come to London instead of returning to Australia.
Yes, it was he. Poor Oracle! He was unshaven. His hair was bleached snow. My father’s lawyer’s wig! Within a shadow and a doubt, it was he. Could one be dogmatically certain about the masquerade of the soul, the shadows and lights and investitures of the soul? I studied the blackboard. He did not appear to mind. In one corner he had listed the following: Lazarus character-masks (puppet and truly risen). Aimée. Rocket. Car. Crocodile Bridge. Then he had written beneath: make up a story containing all these. But what held my eyes even more were the sketches-within-sketches that I perceived.
A kind of far viewing. That was what Delph was up to. He sketched places he had never seen, distant places around the globe. Some I did not know. Others I recognized. He saw through the shell of Nightbridge into Crocodile Bridge into a fisherman’s cave into the music of spring that gave to all these the dazzle of rhythmic responses one to the other, through yet beyond the given senses of purely possessive touch, purely possessive hearing, possessive smell, possessive taste.
I stared as Delph sketched oblivious of me, I thought, until we were both immersed in intimate yet far viewing. He could not, or was disinclined, to explain to me the moral and the meaning of such far viewing, but I suddenly saw that moral almost precipitately, excitedly, as if I had climbed into space with him, in the ceaseless understudies of a universal fathomless actor to whom belonged every spiritual vocation or role, every spiritual stage, that we invoked with partial grasp but inimitable originality. I saw the absurd constancy of the theatre of the globe, absurd comedy of intercourse between multi-faceted rehearsed place, or rehearsed theatres of place — overlapping textures of graspable, ungraspable place — and the genius of creation.
Was far viewing an invisible fire that ran along the mind’s contours through lapses and intricacies of universal place? For despite the measure of intact royalty and place, the clues on the blackboard were sometimes elusive and convoluted as if the fire of the mind in an unburnt place, an unbroken king of dreams, possessed no illusions about the fire of self-destructive order and warned us again — as music without voice or instrument had done before — of the hubris of self-identification with an absolute idol or creator, absolute evil, absolute good, that we appropriate into our institutions and project upon others. I saw that intact being, intact survival, was a curious joy but also a terrible warning, a paradox, a shattering of complacency.
I saw myself in Delph’s sketches standing upon a burning schooner. Where was this, when was this? I had forgotten, I was astonished, as if I were looking at someone else in a place I had never known. As a general perhaps returns to a battlefield long years after and finds it exactly as in the moment the guns cease firing, intact dead, intact flowers on blackened trees, and is horrified to see a face resembling his but alien in expression and manner. As a saint sees himself martyred all over again, sees a bottle of untouched wine in a shop window across the street, and is unable to believe it is he in whom such an unbearable thirst exists. I caught my breath at last. I was the half-puppet, half-living human bread Delph drew on the blackboard, bread and wine; I had been broken/spilt in all these, broken and spilt yet unknown, intact puppet captain of ships, broken and spilt yet puppet general of armies, broken and spilt yet puppet saint of Christendom. Puppet trinity of empires.
Yes, of course, the Market-place! The czar of New Forest! What clues Carnival provided on Delph’s blackboard to jolt one’s memory into living philosophy, living fiction! Had not Thomas and the marble woman arrived on the day of the capsized eggs in East Street to find the schooner, a smoking hull, moored to pier or Stelling, and traces of a pall of smoke still lingering in the air over New Forest? Whose martyrdom, whose ship, whose battlefield did they perceive at that moment, intimate place, far viewing, in the Carnival of history? It was as if I saw the puppet nature of cosmic time, puppet histories, puppet pasts, puppet presents, puppet futures, all affecting each other, so that the puppet future bore upon the puppet past — puppet bore upon puppet — to modify all totalities or apparent finalities of event in a shrunken humanity that was aroused to see how small it was yet capable of charting a distinction between apehood or puppetry of soul and true self-reflective immortal spark of fiction.
I (shrunken me) bore upon the puppet trinity of empires. I saw the core within that trinity in Delph’s sketches, untainted core, unblemished core, within the burning schooner, within the burnt schooner, as I had seen uncharred stairway, resurrected king in the mouth of cannon, intact flower on a blasted tree, untouched and bottled wine.
What was this core that Delph seemed so intent on sketching into play? Was it a kind of vegetable, human, architectural black box, was it a cosmic flower ticking with the voices of seed? Did one have to dig within schooners and crashed aeroplanes, trains and coffins, to find a messenger, intact, mysterious, miniaturized technology, miniaturized seed of the tree of space?
Delph’s purgatorial humour of translated puppets into living fiction in parallel with resurrected spirit deepened my curiosity. FEUD. That was it! The core Mr Delph sketched reminded me of the intact equation with glory — intact mystery of beauty — I had seen before but in shattering my complacency on the deck of the burning schooner it became a message of feud. I knew I needed to translate that message again and again, and the tension between such parallels — intact glory and feud — drew me back to masked feud in concert with — in conflict with — the thirsts of holy men.