Mr Delph turned to me. I saw he pitied me. He seemed suddenly outrageously youthful, outrageously sober, despite his unshaven mask and Antipodean smile. Sober geography master’s blood! Sober Mr Quabbas’s blood! Delphic thirst of the holy oracle. He spoke a little pontifically but journalistically like a good schoolmaster-oracle with his tongue in his chalk.
“Put it all down to trade,” he said, erasing a touch of chalk with a touch of spit. It made a smudge or scar on his lips as if he had dipped into a sugar bowl of rice. “Put it all down to bitter-sweet trade.”
“Trade!” I was outraged. He was poking sober chalk at me.
“Trade is one translation, Weyl, of the message of feud. A simple one, I grant, but people want simple answers, don’t they? So let’s be simple. Chalk, rice, sugar,” he said. “Oil, diamonds, you name it. Mudheads, timberheads. Simplicity’s masks of trade.” He tried to clean simplicity’s lips with a handkerchief but only succeeded in smearing his moustache and cheeks afresh. “That’s how they make me up,” he confided, “when I give a television broadcast in yes and no minister for the oracle of trade. Holy trade! Come, come, Weyl, don’t sulk. Trade is holy, who would deny it, and therefore many holy fires have been lit to maintain old, or secure new, markets.
“There you stand, Weyl — English sobriety and geography lesson combined — on the deck of your burning schooner. You love it, you loathe it, it’s the scene of a holy love affair with peoples, their wealth, their customs, a holy hate affair with power and Ambition. It’s a sea-going church within the middle passage, Inferno and Paradiso. It’s the red, blue moon, all tides, all pigmentations, it’s holy crime.”
“There are no churches on the moon,” I said sullenly. He stopped sketching for a moment and looked at me.
“But there will be,” he said, “sooner or later. There will be supermarket churches on the backside of the moon.”
FEUD IN PARALLEL WITH INTACT GLORY IS THE WOMB OF METAPHORS OF SPIRIT.
“Take the holy man, the martyr you saw upon the blackboard of space. He thirsted for wine of an imported Earth-variety. He saw a bottle he desired in a moon shop across from the supermarket church.” Mr Delph’s mask had slipped a little and he was laughing yet grave, utterly grave. It was the strangest sensation. Comedy of martyrdoms on the moon when humanity emigrates into outer space? “The wine was a signal of ordeal, conflict, that he endured. Was he being tempted, or manipulated even then, in his pain, to sell his soul to feuding moon merchants, space captains, feuding Vega field-marshals, generals, who bottle new wine in bulletproof lunar glass?
“Such a bottling is hell, my dear Weyl, but the thirst for truth, for intact glory, remains. Thirst — translated into inner trade between body and spirit — is the womb of fire from which Everyman arises. Thirst is the womb of justice, foetal sponge and human affinity to god that we project into the drought of space. Thirst — translated into inner/outer space famine — is the urgency of grain here on earth. Thirst is the palate of inner earth sacrifice, inner earth revolution, in parallel with absurd supermarket churches and martyrdoms on the moon. We trade with absurdities, my dear Weyl, infinities, distant planets, distant satellites, new-found constellations, galaxies — why do we do it? So that we may come home to ourselves at last, who knows, in every far viewing, intimate self-judgement and moment of truth.”
*
Mr Delph’s blackboard of space, into which he had sketched us, turned from the relic of spring in bridges of fire, to the relic of summer in mutual bridges of ocean. Each relic faced the other yet turned at a slight tangent away from the spiralling coil of the other into the ground-swell of numinous bodies.
Amaryllis and I perceived ourselves once more in the core-cathedral in which we had celebrated Easter with Masters in New Forest before Amaryllis left for Europe. (It had been rumoured that her ship had been sunk by a German submarine in the summer of 1940.)
It was Good Friday when we knelt in the cathedral. My memories, or Mr Delph’s far sketches, were an imperfect wave of recollection. And yet such imperfection seemed now to embody a moment of resistance in ourselves against the ritual crucifixion of love year after year, peace after peace, war after war. The cathedral subsided into the sea in which I had dreamt Amaryllis’s ship had been hit by a torpedo. From within the sea where I lay with her we observed holiday-makers lying on the beaches around us above the ocean wave that was littered with the epitaph of many seasons. We were suddenly uplifted towards them like fluid bone wreathed in stars and leaves to pipe the sweetest saddest music into the absent-minded reverie of lovers. Our bone became flesh. Nibbled bone under the sea, kissed bone, fleshed wave of bone, core-artefact, cross-artefact, of summer blending into autumn flesh, bone under star, under leaf, under flesh, all graves, all cradles of mankind. And despite the passivity, the resignation, of summer’s and autumn’s beached populations, a subtle resistance to the perpetual murder of species in a chain of existences linked to our Easter pulse flitted through the ocean wave and dashed within and against the cathedral of space in which we dwelt under the sea and in risen bone upon the land.
In the arousal of the bone in a wave of flesh lay the strategy of resurrected mind, a rendezvous with resistance movements. I recalled now — with sudden sharpness — the childlike sensation I had had that my father lay in the Trojan Horse of Christ: it was a deep-seated obsession that never left me in the years that followed. It confirmed itself in the core of every summer wave, autumn penetration, in my union with Amaryllis, a union that embodied the mane of oceans upon which we rode, mane of rivers, continents, islands. Mane of sorrow. Mane of gladness.
*
Spring and summer moons had gone and autumn was upon us at last. As though in Mr Delph’s imperfect oceanic sketches Amaryllis and I glimpsed ourselves as we would look, or dress, at the turn of the century. Once again we floated on the mane of time, fashionable or unfashionable bone clad in fashionable or unfashionable flesh. We had discarded not just youth but fabrications of youth, the disguises of old age.
“Resist the seductive death-wish. Cultivate the sober life-wish wherever you happen to be in outer space or under the tides of the moon. Weigh the tyrannies of sex in ageing puppets fascinated with the rejuvenation of the ape of the human body. Weigh nostalgic old age and foetal ambition. Weigh all these to unravel tyranny, to unravel the humour of the birth-wish, the humour of fertility that translates lust into imagination’s harvest. Ploughing, reaping, cultivating, enfolding, embracing, infinite rapture of soil and water and light and darkness that glows in the body of the mind, not as nostalgic puppetries of helpless desire (helpless desiring, helpless desired, and pathos of rape) but as illumined senses in non-senses beyond apparently inevitable fate, apparently inevitable death.”
Masters’ voice in Delph, Delph in Masters, faded. The oceanic curtain of Carnival theatre began to fall. I saw the red-ribboned car upon which Aimée danced. It had been repainted a glowing yellow in the depths of the sea. Glowing, deceptive yellow. It was a spring moon 1983 (or was it 2083?) and we could barely discern it through the mane of the waters. Masters thrust me into the driver’s seat of the inner-coated, red-ribboned, visibly yellow moon-car. I had been drawn aloft to the topmost rung of Alice’s fluid ladder where the sun and the moon are possessed of many intimate, open colours but upon finding myself thrust almost unceremoniously by the dead king into the car, I was astonished to find that the stage on which it stood, adjoining the ladder, seemed to melt into space; the great car descended like a feather. It floated in the air and the tide until it bumped gently upon the ground, a huge rectangular balloon upon wheels and springs. I was safe in the balloon and on gently releasing the gears it moved forward in Addison Road where Amaryllis and I lived in our ocean wave.