It was then, only then, that I knew I had seen the last of my guide and that Amaryllis was seated beside me with a child in her arms.
It had been raining but the rain had ceased as the feather, the balloon of a car moved. The windscreen was covered by the faintest waves that glistened with tears of shadow. Everyman and I had come a long way around the comedy of the globe and I attempted to peer up into the spatial ladder to see if I could perceive him again anywhere at all between the vanished stage and the ground on which we drove. But nothing, no one, could be seen. Alice’s fluid gate had vanished. Mr Delph had vanished. All I could fathom was a rainswept world lit by the memory of bridges of ocean, masks, dances, Waterfall Oracle, arising and painting the great city of London that Amaryllis and I knew in our hearts.
I touched Amaryllis and the child beneath the wave and the rain on the curtain of Carnival. The car was a measure of Masters’ wedding gift to us twenty-five years after we were married. Despite its red inner coat and yellow moon paint, it was a cinder, a luminous cinder light as a feather, marvellous as a balloon, the slenderest inflatable, deflatable motif of crossed bridges, burning yet intact, bridges of fire, bridges of ocean, bridges of earth; the bridges and wages of ascent and descent upon which I dreamt we had been led by the master spirit who had been our guide.
“She says she will breast-feed the child,” Amaryllis said suddenly. It was Jane Fisher’s child! Not Jane Fisher the First, the fisherman’s wife, who lived several blocks away (not dreadfully far from Jane Fisher the Second) beneath the wave into which we had charted not only the core of the bone and the cinder of the sun but the core of maps, the core of streets, cities half-forgotten, half-remembered, great cities, small cities, townships, market-places around the globe’s balloon.
“Jane Fisher the First would have killed him,” I said, “after she lost the child, the mysterious overseer’s child.”
“Why do you call your character-masks first and second and third and fourth and so on as if they are the Carnival kings and queens of vanished times?” Amaryllis was poking fun at me with the bone of her finger that shone like the faintest dagger under the sea. She gave me a sharp stab. I felt I had been miniaturized where the three bridges crossed, fire and earth and water, to re-imagine the cinder of a wound in Masters’ side.
“Tell me, tell me,” Amaryllis insisted.
“Not only vanished times,” I said. “Times of succession as well. Every puppet of disaster moves in parallel with a spark of redemption, the spark of succession.”
“And the spark of pregnancy?”
I was taken aback by the sharp retort.
“Carnival queenship, Carnival kingship, illumine the sacrament of pregnant form in art as in life. She stands,” I pointed to the baby girl in my wife’s arms, “at a point where the three bridges cross. It’s a point of greatest peril and greatest promise. Should she, this child, survive into a new century of mind we may all recover …” I was unable to continue. I felt plagued by subtle doubts. How could I be sure this child was Masters’ child? Jane Fisher the Second’s child, yes! We knew that. We were godparents. We had witnessed the birth in a cave in the sea, dream-cave, dream-sea. Born exactly nine months after the day she had slept with Masters, the day of his second death in the summer of 1982 (or was it 2082?). Time lapses under the sea as it does on the foetal planets around the sun and moon of Vega.
It would be the happiest of coincidences if Jane had conceived for him, if Jane had indeed borne his child, his daughter, the child of a pagan and a Christian master. Both! Pagan and Christian! Such a blend, such profound self-confession, would illumine and redeem, I felt, the cinder of the wound I re-imagined in the globe’s side, it would illumine, I felt, every global fall from colonial plantation into metropolitan factory. It would illumine and redeem, I dreamt, global meaninglessness that stems from fear, the rule of fear, that threatens all, that threatens to abort submarine as well as superstellar civilization.
“Whether she is Masters’ child or not,” said Amaryllis, taking my hand with one of hers and holding the child to her breast with the other, “she runs in parallel with all wasted lives to be redeemed in time. And in that spirit she is his child. She is our child. We killed our parents, remember, in Carnival logic even as they, besieged by fear, fear of a blasted future, were tempted to destroy us. And now in mutual heart, mutual uncertainty across generations, across seas and spaces, as to who is divine parent, who human child, who will parent the future, who inherit the future, we surrender ourselves to each other. The love that moves the sun and the other stars moves us now, my dearest husband, my dearest Jonathan, to respond with originality to each other’s Carnival seas of innocence and guilt, each other’s Carnival lands of subterfuge and truth, and each other’s Carnival skies of blindness and vision.”
THE INFINITE REHEARSAL
FOR MARGARET,
HELEN AND CHRIS
NOTE
W. H. has stolen a march on me and put his name to my fictional autobiography. So be it. I do not intend to sue him for my drowned rights. Call it character licence on his part.
He and I are adversaries, as my book will show, but we share one thing in common, namely, an approach to the ruling concepts of civilization from the other side, from the ruled or apparently eclipsed side in humanity.
Not that my grandfather, my mother Alice, my aunt Miriam, or my close friends Peter and Emma saw themselves as ruled or afflicted subjects of an imperial establishment. And their voices, their plays, their dances and the theatre they created are immanent substance in this book. Yet my grandfather’s Faust (which he wrote or brought to completion in the year I was born) possesses roots as much in the modern age as in the pre-Columbian workshop of the gods and therefore addresses a European myth from a multi-faceted and partly non-European standpoint.
All of which goes to show that my family were profoundly concerned with the original nature of value and spirit and for them there was no final performance to the ‘play of humanity’ or the ‘play of divinity’.
Each apparent finality of performance was itself but a privileged rehearsal pointing to unsuspected facets and the re-emergence of forgotten perspectives in the cross-cultural and the universal imagination.
Robin Redbreast Glass
ONE
Let me begin this fictional autobiography with a confession. The values of a civilization — the hope for a universally just society, for the attainment of the mind and heart of love, the genius of care — are an impossible dream …
I repeat ‘impossible dream’, impossible quest for wholeness. In the same token, however, I know that those values are true and that the impossibility of their achievement nurses, prompts, gives reality to the creative imagination and instils one with profoundest paradox, with insight into the numinous character of all things, all features, all aspects of being.
Indeed I find it essential to trace the burden of value within apparitions that seem virtually irrelevant to moulds of prosperity, the apparition of the numinous scarecrow, the numinous victim, who (or is it which?) secretes himself, herself, itself in our dreams.
It is in the obvious partial being of the scarecrow — half-thing, half-person — dangling between daylight consciousness and the nightfall of civilizations that we sense a light (is it the light of remorse or of self-confession?) which may consume our biases and deposit fabric linking us to the extremities of humanity. For I know that the scum of the world cannot be divorced from myself or from my body in creation.