I know that in unravelling the illusory capture of creation I may still apprehend the obsessional ground of conquest, rehearse its proportions, excavate its consequences, within a play of shadow and light threaded into value; a play that is infinite rehearsal, a play that approaches again and again a sensation of ultimate meaning residing within a deposit of ghosts relating to the conquistadorial body — as well as the victimized body — of new worlds and old worlds, new forests and old forests, new stars and old constellations within the workshop of the gods.
Thus it was that I welcomed Ghost, conquistadorial and victimized Ghost (was (s)he male/female? I could not tell) when it appeared on a beach in Old New Forest (a lofty beach hovering somewhere within south and central and northern Old New Forest) not far from where I earned a subsistence wage as a grave-digger in a library of dreams and a pork-knocker in the sacred wood. I decided to accept IT as male persona and trust that new fragile complications of divinity’s blood would drive me to see the phenomenon I had encountered in the wholeness of a transformative light bearing upon all genders, all animates and inanimates, all masks and vessels in which a spark of ultimate self-recognition flashed … faded … flashed again.
Modern phenomenon or ancient magic? He (Ghost) wore a long, rich plait of hair on the back of his neck. It was covered with glittering salt from the sea and immaculate grime from a comet or from the stars. It was so long and marvellous it could have been the wonderful text of a woman’s hair through which to read the mysterious birth of spirit.
(I need to be as accurate as I can in this fictional autobiography in order to balance uncertainties with a spectre of wholeness that has become the ironic substance of pure science in intercourse nevertheless with the impurities of wisdom and art.)
The graves I dug were libraries of myths of gold, silver, bone within a community of convertible soils and dreams that appeared in my Sleep, the living and the dead, texts of space travel, texts of sea travel, texts of the sacred wood, texts also of descent into the foetus, into the new-born and the unborn, descent into famine, texts that broke a uniform narrative domination by the conquistadores of history in inserting themselves into my book despite the apparent eclipse they endured, despite voicelessness or oblivion.
In regard to my status as a pork-knocker that is easily explained.
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door …
When I was short of food I tended to ascend oblivion’s ladder as if it were a fat shoestring to the moon. I scrambled around for a morsel of pork hidden in a pale moon-barrel. I would knock the bottom of the upturned moon-barrel until a splinter of silver roast fell to my feet. In compensation for such largesse from the invisible host of the moon I dreamt of palatial halls and feasts of civilization, feast days, feast nights, of the sacred pork-knocker wood.
I was buried up to my lips in the bounty of hollow moon-roast (the fat shoestring dangling in my eyes) when Ghost appeared out of the sea. He clung to a moon-spade in the pit in which I lay, a sun-paddle as well on the brink of a setting wave, all this and more cemented into the ancient pen or quill of the sun with which I wrote.
Sleep was the terrain of blind/seeing comedy, the terrain of the moon and the setting wave and the sun.
In the wake of Ghost — as he scrambled ashore — lay a great, tall wreck of a ship battered and ribbed and gaping and glistening in the setting sun like a quicksilver goddess’s hatpins in steep, elongated disarray.
Ghost had survived the assault of the sea in discarding his female hat and was emaciated and strange in a suit of gravity’s anti-gravity string; and yet it was the life of the body that struck me (hollow yet inexhaustible body), the mesmeric quality of artery and vein on the moon, on the setting sun, on the black earth of Old New Forest sacred wood.
I was filled with the naïveté of intensest longing and love: was this an apparition of the resurrection of the body?
I saw the new moon like a curved fingernail in the late, afternoon Old New Forest sky. I stared at it with intensity. As if my hollow voyager lost and lost and found again and again had pared it from ancient Homer’s webbed hand with immeasurable Joycean delicacy and drawn it on the sunset sky. Webbed Homeric hand. Impossible human bird. Impossible male, female animal. NIGHT WAS FALLING. My own fingernails were black with earthen light. I had been digging into a library of bone. Ghost approached me through my own pared extremities of Shadow and spoke in a foreign tongue (a mixture of vernaculars it seemed, bawdy verse and waste land poetry). I was baffled. Seeing my difficulty Ghost desisted and ceased to speak. Dumb Ghost. Illiterate Ghost. I was angry with him and with myself. I could not tell whether in playing dumb he wished to take on himself the constellation of a deprived humanity, deprived of dialogue with its innermost and fragile origins and with banished cultures of a half-sacred, half-profane truth. Was Ghost mocking himself or mocking me by taking upon himself the burden of an illiteracy of the imagination that plagued an age bordering Skull in the wake of lost quicksilver beauty and spiritual gold?
Perhaps his quicksilver genius verged upon values that were alien in spiritual substance to crass bounty, crass gold. And yet I knew him and he knew me through sober soil and self-confessing bone. Should I hand him over to the police or to the immigration officers (dressed as great sailors, great admirals) who patrolled this section of beach between the north and the south? Ghost read my thoughts and shook his head.
NIGHT WAS FALLING FAST and I led him up the quaking ground that shook with the impact of the sea into the house in the sacred wood where I lived. A lantern glowed there in the heart of starred bone, starred butterfly. We slept it seemed on the pillow of a wave. I dreamt with the dust of the ocean in my eyes of the coming of dawn. An immigration officer — Frog his name was — arrived at my door and knocked. Frog had the reputation of an inferior Don Juan Ulysses. He was accompanied by one of his painted mistresses, a black, white woman whose name was Calypso. (She belonged to the band of Tiresias Calypsonian Tigers whose fame had spread through many worlds.)
‘Have you laid eyes on any fellow travellers around here, Glass?’ Frog rasped. ‘A blasted ship — pirates I bet from the moon — hit the reef here late afternoon. The reports on my deck or desk speak of one or two swimming ashore on a pin from God’s hat that floated in a sea of hair.’
I shook my head in disbelief. Calypso was humming a famous bawdy ballad — STONE COLD DEAD IN THE MARKET. ‘Don’t play dumb, Glass. Yes or no?’ Frog bellowed. Perhaps I should have said the same to Ghost! ‘Don’t play dumb, Ghost.’ Or perhaps I should have offered him a drop of roast from the dream-barrel of the moon. A drop of roasted blood loosens a ghostly man’s or a ghostly woman’s tongue! A drop of blood truly reflected in the mirror of the self to nourish ancestral conscience may well have unravelled Ghost’s speech when we met, and broken his silence, into words I could have read on the wall of the sunset sky. I had lost my head. I had not fed him. But surely the chance would come again. A chance to knock on the door of the moon again in search of every lost species in the oven of space. A chance to consume with Ghost a splinter of transubstantial creation in every chapel perilous of the heights and the depths …