The many conflicting versions of the coming and the arousal of Ghost, the leaden-tongued yet silver-tongued expressions of Ulysses Frog (epic lover yet doomed, jealous scavenger of humanity), the dumb lips of Ghost, the lament of Calypso’s unshackled dead, the country of Sleep that I inhabited as if I lay on a pillow of the ocean yet walked upon waves of land, the breaches of convention, the overturning of expectation, were all the substance of chaos edged by redemptive passion, redemptive hope, in the body of the resurrection that I reflected in myself as the price of an infinite rehearsal of value and spirit.
The sentence of chaos had been inflicted on all species the year I was born, 1945, the year the Bomb fell and history changed, revised itself backwards, never to be the same again.
FROG’S MOTTLED HAND HAD FALLEN LIKE AN AXE IN MY SLEEP. Fallen on many a reflected economy in Mirror and Shadow of Flesh-and-Blood in the flight of the crane or the swallow or the dove from north to south. Shadow-crane, shadow-dove, shadow-fish, with broken neck floating high on a wave or high on the land. I, Robin Redbreast Glass, flew headless then spun with a feather and a scale into the turning Globe, the turning wave, the turning hills, the turning valleys. Put my head and my hat on again and bowed in my Sleep to Prosperity’s block and Necessity’s block.
Capital block prosperity? I asked Ghost who flew in the shadow of a wave and a hill but his lips were sealed though a Strange cry trembled in the recesses of coming Skull but remained short of utterance.
Marxist block necessity then? I asked Ghost: ‘Tell me, Ghost — how deceptive, how real, are Necessity and Prosperity? Are they disguised ballrooms and cells of evil in which the heads of the unemployed roll? Are they in essence the polarizations of a Faustian morality that we need to untangle until the Beast smiles and points to heaven rather than to hell?’
I raised my hat to Faust as the flock of my terrors skimmed a wave and settled on the ground and in the belly of the sacred wood.
‘We are reborn with the fish and the bird, Ghost. We are reborn through the sword that severs the umbilical cord and flashes in the light of the sun and the moon with sudden estrangement from a body of darkness, foetal terror revised, foetal hope revised, revisionary edges of subsistence upon light and darkness, subsistence upon the brute world, subsistence upon the bland world.’
The wood was in a state of alarm. And indeed I sensed a change in the disposition of the tenant in my Shadow. Ghost was alarmed and uneasy at the intrusion of brute climates, brute absolutes, in the communication of ideas under the sea and over the sea that Faust had converted into a machine, fish of steel, fish of lead, fish of iron, birds of steel, birds of lead, birds of iron.
The mechanics of the circus of power on sea and on land made Ghost tremble on his flying trapeze in the belly of the sacred wood, the mechanics of domination in the name of Brute Prosperity or in the name of Brute Necessity.
Was this opposition between Brute and Brute a prelude to an era of temptation in which one Brute devised ruses of tenderness and humour to tempt the Other? ‘Bow down to me, dear fellow Brute, and the kingdoms of earth are yours. Save in the degree that I keep my options open to save the world and to bring you to heel.’
Faust — both Goethe’s and Marlowe’s — had been a priceless possession in my grandfather’s stock of books. He was still mentally athletic and young when he died aged fifty-five in the heartland of the sacred wood. He had pored over Goethe and Marlowe nights under an uncertain fuel lamp after labouring days in the creeks of the rainforests that ran through his barred consciousness. Ran like a woman’s fluid constellation born of the reflected moon and the reflected sun. Golden offspring born of the inimitable self-penetration of the reflected moon and the reflected sun. Such was the Glass in which he dipped his pen to write his own version of the Beast of immortality, the Beast of the circus and of the machine. I was there in that new version, the Glass child in the golden woman my mother. I was born (may I say it again) in 1945, the year my grandfather died. It was the year of the Bomb, the year of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. ‘We are born with the dead, with the fish and the bird.’
I was the foetus revised, the unborn grandson revised, entangled in the waters of mirrored death revised in the unconscious fluid of my coming birth. There was a turbulence in that revised fluid and I knew what my mother knew. I shared with her — in a kind of void yet potent revisionary abstraction — her concerns, her anxieties, the postman’s knock bringing letters from my grandfather in the distant heartland.
I knew he thought of us — and had heard of me — from the letters Aunt Miriam wrote to him and received from him, the letters my mother Alice wrote to him and received from him. I could not be sure in those turbulences when the dream of diamonds and gold gave way to me, to Glass, and he saw me like a fluttering redbreast bringing its hat (or was it its head?) to Faust and skimming the creek in which he dug for spiritual wealth as well as crass bounty. (Years later when I read his book I saw he had dedicated it to me, his unborn grandson Robin Glass.)
At first he would have given his soul, he would have bartered my head, Robin’s head, for offspring of crass gold, for the diamonds in the eyes of Ulysses Frog that sometimes clouded mine as I slept. (‘Frog’s eyes,’ my mother once said when we peered into the mirror together, ‘are your eyes, Robin. No wonder you invent such terrible guardians of the beach.’) He would have bartered his soul for crass gold, he would have bartered Ulysses’ head in my self-loathing, self-reflecting Frog’s mirror of the injustice of epic plunder, epic statecraft but was stopped. Something happened. He wrote to Alice and Miriam to say he heard voices singing ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’ and within those voices a whisper that may have been the faint voice of Robin Redbreast foetus revised in the book of humanity, the book of the Beast of heaven and hell, far up in layer upon layer of sleeping trees. It was the whisper of ironic singing temptation offering him elusive orchid-kingdoms worth a million, elusive toucan-kingdoms worth a million, elusive parrot-kingdoms worth a million in the zoos of the east and the west.
Elusive head of time as well. It was then he began to prize me, prize the ironies of strangest hidden conscience everywhere, the Glass of multi-reflecting telegraph of soul. I knew when he died because my mother knew. I tasted a melon or an orange on her lips. It tasted sweet. Whereas on his it had become a dry shell, the shadow of Skull, in the beriberi zoo that claimed his life. A strange animal he seemed to me at the end as I dipped within my mother’s body into the script, the illuminated script, of her dreams. I saw him roaming the palaces of the peacock-orchid and the unicorn-amaryllis in search of his limbs as they crumbled into the fire and Shadow of Glass, my Shadow. I was a shadowy revised foetus and I gathered those limbs together into a giant dream, giant reconstitution and moved paradoxically upon a fragile arch. I was a shadowy Robin Redbreast revised Glass drifting by uncertain degrees towards a twin desolation or waste land through which to plumb the rebirth of my age.
That desolation, that dismemberment, was bland economic malaise indistinguishable from bland twin prosperity or from bland twin necessity.