Frog saw my distraction and faraway look. ‘Say a pork-knocker yes or no,’ he thundered like Admiral Ulysses Baboon. And then as if he too had lost his way and were distracted by untenanted worlds he whispered in my ear, ‘Have you seen the axe fall upon the neck of the Old New Forest sun and moon economies? Has the industrial revolution of the sea given up its unemployed dead?’
I stepped back from him with loathing yet intimacy of scorched heart and mind. ‘No,’ I said at last, ‘I have not seen any strangers or travellers around here.’ I moved close to him again to reflect in the mirror of self the moth-eaten Skull tie he wore around his neck like an insect-spangled halter or noose.
As an inferior magistrate, as a piratical statesman, as an immigration great sailor or trickster officer, he could not help subsisting on a sea of griefs, on moth-eaten paradises. I understood (as I stared at Frog) another aspect of Ghost’s dumb lips, Ghost’s silence. For in mirroring Frog in myself it was as if the blood of the moon had turned to dead sea fruit on every political mouthpiece of my age.
Frog snapped at me now. He knocked on the door of my sea chest of books, and peered at the lantern-butterfly I carried within. He bared his teeth and his diamond-sharp eyes feasted on impossible glass in which he saw himself entangled in the multiple desires and waves of space and time.
‘I hope for your own sake, Glass,’ he cried at last, ‘that you are telling the truth.’ He turned away, mounted a parapet, and slid with Calypso into a battered ship of a car. As they drove away I tried to glance at myself as into the flesh of ‘Glass’. One placated or withstood one’s enemies or friends by reflecting their greed and offering it to them as the largesse of the moon. Much harder, of course, to reflect their virtues and astonish them as if manna were falling from heaven upon robin redbreast glass in the body of the mother of humanity.
Glass by name, yet lost golden species I was, lantern-butterfly or illuminated black pulse like a will-o’-the-wisp birthmark/birdmark upon a page of the sacred wood.
Ghost was sitting on a bench when I returned to the book in which we slept. He arose and came close to me and his curious, wide-awake dreaming eyes appeared to comprehend the trials of inner and outer consumption of virtuous blood or greedy blood or dead sea fruit that had commenced. It was my trial as much as his. Should I continue to protect him, to shelter him?
WAS I STORING UP TROUBLE I COULD NOT FORESEE? Or would it lead to a revelation of the mystery of technologies of emotion in flesh-and-blood, complicated space virtues, complicated space greeds, threaded into human bias and the ascendancy of truth as sweetness or light yet bitterness or longing?
THE SEA BROKE IN MY TEETH. DROWNED TEETH. I DISLODGED A SPLINTER AND CLAMBERED UP THE STAIRWAY OF TIME INTO THE JAWS OF THE RESURRECTION. Ghost belonged. He may have appeared or risen in a sea-chanty book but he belonged to the oven of civilization: the burning sea; the oceanic fires; erosions and accretions. Belonged to the soil and the bone and the sea, to the butterfly page and to the lantern page, to the regime of the moth and to the derelictions of lust, to iridescent natures and to the gloom of planets with electric axes shining as if lit by primitive instinct.
The trial in which I was involved ran much deeper than simply concealing apparently illiterate Ghost from inferior Ulysses Don Juan Frog who patrolled the world in every national costume, east, west, north, south, Marxist, Capitalist.
NIGHT WAS FALLING FAST AS I TURNED A PAGE OF SLEEP AND WROTE: Were the sailing men who circumnavigated the globe nothing but ancient chauffeurs, mechanics and technicians? Or were they so drunk with the spirit of value they had forgotten their motivation? Was God nothing but a giant chauffeur, a giant astronaut at the wheels of fire in space? Or did we need to read his ecstasy in the snake that takes wings and flies to heaven, the bird that takes scales and dives into the sea? Was the lamp by which the sun sailed nothing but a hollow fire? Or was it a light by which I dreamt my way backwards in time into the ancient workshop of the gods?
In questioning those who sailed in drunken boats across the ocean to me, and to my savage antecedents long before I was born, I knew I questioned my deepest bottled instincts, deepest bottled intuitions, deepest bottled fears, deepest bottled hopes. I knew I questioned my savage antecedent of Old New Forest. Drunken Quetzalcoatl. Drunken wing. Drunken serpent. (I WAS ASHAMED I MUST CONFESS OF THE ECSTASY OF THE WING AND THE ECSTASY OF THE SNAKE, THE ECSTASY OF THE EGG FROM WHICH I HAD BEEN HATCHED. I WAS ASHAMED OF THE POTION I HAD DRUNK IN SUBCONSCIOUS REALMS IN THE BOOK OF SLEEP FROM A SEED OF BLOOD IN THE YOLK OF SPACE.)
Drunken Quetzalcoatl was the source of all philosophy — the source of the hunt, the source of architecture — and in attuning his appetites to the mystery of the elements had coined the first vowel in evolution — curled egg-shaped snake coatl and curled egg-shaped bird quetzal — only to puncture or unravel the concept into a lightning shoestring potion, lightning artery, lightning vein, lightning intercourse between the rich and the poor, lightning mystery of deprivation as well as palatial conceits, lightning intercourse between himself and the woman of space, lightning mother of space from which he sprang into existence virtually without shelter, without food.
Had he forgotten the original spark, the original draught of ecstasy? Was this the source of his hunger, the source of his greed, the source of his guilt at divine incest? Or was it a measure of creative rehearsal, incompletion, half-spirit, half-flesh, elusive origins of unity, elusive origins of sex, elusive wholeness?
Ghost had nothing to say in reply to my questions except that I recalled when we had first met he had appeared to utter a curious bawdy confession that I had failed to understand. I had hoped he would tell me something however alarming, however incongruous, however chastening. But he had not. I had failed to comprehend. I had not fed him. Except with dead sea fruit that aped a spark of Homeric blood in the underworld of the twentieth century with its twittering shadows, its persecutions, its crucifixions. And I was left, therefore, to sense through his intricate gestures webbed with meaning — and the implicit masks he wore, the implicit disguises, deceptions — the immensity of bottled cargo he brought with him from every corner of the globe: not only bird-cargo, snake-cargo, but Christ-cargo, Socrates-cargo, male, female Tiresias cargo, ancient Egyptian, African cargo, modern, scientific European cargo … I was left to delve for the mystery of the resurrection from the bottled sea within myself, my intimate book. Bottled foetus in the body of the mother of humanity. Bottled seed in the black earth. Bottled page and bone upon which I wrote the music of the spheres.
The book of modern Europe possessed its roasted pigment in the adventures of Faust, Caliban and Magellan. It was a quantum book in which a particle of roast on the moon became a plunging horse saddled with all diasporas, all middle passages. Resurrection from a particle or a wave was a quantum saddle upon which a new physics rode into Bethlehem. I knew for in the country of Sleep I had seen a spade unlock a grain of sand into a towering beast of a wave upon which Ghost came with unwritten, written volumes for my library in the sacred wood.
I KNEW EVERYTHING. I KNEW NOTHING. I WAS THE SUBJECT OF AN INFINITE REHEARSAL OF A PLAY OF THE BIRTH OF HISTORY. Ghost slid from his towering wave of a horse in my library of dreams. He came to me with the head of Sir Walter Raleigh riding on his left hand. A giant El Doradonne brow upon which I read, ‘History revises itself within the intervals of consciousness and unconsciousness that it takes for the economies of our age to fall again and again from the block and to touch the ground, consume a spark of dust, and rise into dream-orbit around the sun.’