I was dissatisfied with this. It was true. And yet it seemed too seductive, too charismatic. Ghost understood my dilemma and turned the brow of El Doradonne Economy around until it gleamed with the eyes of Prospero and I read in those pupils of brilliant dust:
‘Revised spark. Revised histories of the world.’ The brow darkened (NIGHT WAS FALLING) but cleared again into constellated peacock eyes and I read a ghostly script: ‘1832–3, emancipation of the slaves, the axe falls on plantation El Dorado. Landowners protest on behalf of the homeless, houseless slaves. Where will they go?’
THE BROW DARKENED. NIGHT WAS FALLING. BUT STILL I WAS ABLE TO DECIPHER A GHOSTLY FINGER OF INK. ‘1914–18. The axe falls on dynasties and privileges. Where will the unemployed go? They march to the sound of a patriotic drum. If you could see them as I do,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
NIGHT FALLS BUT THE BROW FLICKERS AGAIN. ‘1939, the axe falls on Chamberlain’s peace in our time …’
I could read no further but cried in desperation, ‘WHY, WHY?’ The brow relented and flashed a page in my book — ‘Eat the Word of God in the twinkling of an eye when the axe falls and the Globe tumbles from the block to roll within the stars. Globe, yes, my El Doradonne globe in your heart, your privileged economy in my body which is susceptible to time’s axe when systems are evil, the evil for which the innocent suffer. For the innocent (as well as the guilty) are you and me
I was filled with rage. ‘No,’ I cried, pushing Ghost away, ‘I shall hand you over to Frog. You are my conscience. I fear this quest for the nature and the meaning of value. Why must we axe evil and hurt ourselves? Evil is rich with prosperity and promise.’ I stopped, filled with terror and shame. ‘Don’t pay any attention to me. I shall hide you, Ghost. I shall hide you IN MY SHADOW. in my shadow. Where else?’
Ghost and I slept. Frog and Calypso appeared early on a page of shadow: page, yes, of the dripping sun that rains its ambivalent light upon the sacred wood. They kicked open my rusty book or gate and hammered upon the giant barrel I had built there to house a number of pork-knocker texts.
‘Where are you hiding him, Glass?’ Frog shouted. ‘My information is that some God rode ashore here, near here, that the new moon darkened over the Middle Passage …’
‘Christ!’ I thought in some bewilderment.
‘Don’t look so damned outraged,’ snapped Frog. ‘I have my scouts. Some say they saw a man or a woman with a long plait of hair. Others say they saw a Beast or a Comet with a Snake around its neck.’
I could not help crying aloud in my sleep at Ghost’s outrageous tricks and Frog’s credulity. ‘A snake around your throat is better than a moth-eaten cravat,’ I said to Ghost.
‘What’s that, what’s that?’ cried Frog. ‘If I catch Beast I shall interrogate him about the map of heaven. Do you hear me, Glass? It’s my privilege. I interrogate strangers. I have built a traditional system and network. And another thing. I don’t like you, Glass. You tangle me up in myself, in my own wildness, my own reflection in you. It’s dangerous to see myself reflected in you, intimately black, intimately white. It’s as if I have found the Beast of heavenly and hellish adventure in a subtle redbreast creature like you and do not know it. It’s as if I’m in your dream. I may sentence you, I may judge you, but I’m an inferior at last. Poetic justice! You know me — you fleck of scum from the sea — much better, more deeply, irreverently, terrifyingly, than I ever knew you.’
I could not help shrinking a little at Frog’s schizophrenic claws and diamond eyes that seemed to scuttle upon the mirror of a wave.
‘I shall send you down, Robin Redbreast Glass, to the bottom of the sea. Do you hear me? I shall sentence you. I have sentenced you.’
‘And I shall rise again,’ I cried, ‘into the map of heaven.’
I could have bitten Ghost’s tongue in half. Had he spoken or had I? I had gone too far. Frog swung away and left me to ponder the sentence he had passed. The sea and the wood lightened into imminent Skull and Calypso began to hum ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’. Then she stopped. Began afresh in a deep waving voice:
Belly to belly
Back to back
Ah don’t give a damn
Ah done dead a’ready.
Don Juan Ulysses Frog was enlivened by the song. He returned to the gate to beat time with his fist on the pork-knocker barrel or drum. As he beat the sea responded and crashed into music. It was as if — despite everything — he had been transported to another world, a world unshackled from intrigue and treachery, the world of the map of heaven, the map of the Beast, the glorious Beast he wished to entrap from time immemorial. Indeed it was this steep longing — blunted, deformed — that had led him blindly into the uniform he wore as magistrate, admiral and immigration officer patrolling the beach of the sacred wood.
I had built the great drum or vessel of a barrel as a memorial to my grandfather who died in 1945 in the depths of Old New Forest sacred wood. I associated my grandfather with the early giant navigators who pork-knocked the high seas in search of the Beast of Paradise surviving somewhere, they dreamt, in the headwaters of time.
Sometimes becalmed in a wilderness of ocean reflecting a jungle of stars and suns they prayed for miraculous beast-fish to nibble at their bait — a parcel of stellar beast-shrimp if nothing else — when provisions ran low and hunger stared them in the eyes in the Glass of the sea.
Belly to belly
Back to back
Ah don’t give a damn
Ah done dead a’ready.
Calypso sang more deliberately — as if to supply longer intervals or spaces between lines than on the first occasion. This was astonishing as her song seemed to arise from the bowels of a slave ship becalmed a million light years from home.
Frog was suddenly discomfited. He ripped open the vessel or barrel in search of his Beast. He peered into the dark as into an organ of humanity. I walked over to him. My Shadow followed.
‘The organ’s a text,’ I said, ‘cinematic music, cinematic text. Calypso’s lament with its implicit unshackled dead is as much about death as about self-abandonment, birth. It’s a prelude to my grandfather’s revised text of Faust. He read Faust, he loved Faust, and he re-wrote it in his own image. It was his last trip in the heartland. He was short of fresh fruit, greens, vegetables, and so on. Beriberi got him in the end. But as he starved by infinite degrees he tasted all the bitterness, all the sweetness, all the hope, all the despair in the world. And touched Faust the Beast. Faust the half-circus man, the half-mechanical soul. Faust of the womb and the grave. Faust the slave and Faust the self-mocking engineer of the gods …’
I was unable to finish. Frog was startled. His diamond eyes flashed with terrible jealousy and rage. All of a sudden he raised his mottled hand and before I could say Peter or Emma or Doctor Faustus or Beast or Angel he struck me a blow on the back of my neck. Poor Robin Redbreast, I thought instinctively, as blood flew through my Shadow and rested on Ghost’s right hand. It was so sharp I felt the stillness of the blade pour and coil within me. My head toppled into the Globe. I saw the civilization of Skull and the Mountain of Folly that I needed to climb and transcend if I were to arise from the sea.
TWO
I was innocent. I was guilty. I was good. I was evil. I was solipsistic (autobiographical) character. I was polyphonic (fictional) author. Solipsistic (autoreflective) in seeking to mirror the frailest, deepest origins or unity of the self underpinning all creation. Polyphonic in reflecting alien voices, alien voices in familiar texts, internal/external counterpoint, deformities of spiritual gold and mystical silver, perversities of epic, blind rendezvous with Ghost, diverse masquerades, self-revelations, self-deceptions …