It was a blandness I sometimes reflected when the Brutes hid their faces in my Glass. It was the blandness of a spiritual malaise, economic malaise … As though the mirror atrophied into a paradise without fruit … Was Faust in league with the bland, with the Brutes?
Before I could put the question to Mother or to Aunt Miriam or to Ghost a turbulence within the years since 1945 washed over me, over Glass, over Robin Redbreast, and I saw an incongruous feast of numbers, a new mathematics of the hollow soul. Bountiful numbers in a starving bland universe through which I flew with headless cranes and headless doves in my Sleep before settling again once more into the belly of the waving wood.
When did it first dawn on me in scanning the new Faust by my giant parent that he (my grandfather) was a mathematician as well as a poet of the magical dead? Take the following equation. Giant equals pygmy in the incestuous bomb of the divine. He had become a distant, unreachable giant when my biological father vanished and diminished in my consciousness into a pygmy. Distant giant yet close at hand in the turbulences I knew within my mother’s flesh. I mixed them up (giant with pygmy) since I had seen neither; that mixture was at the heart of all the fiction I was to write;my pygmy vanished the night I was conceived, my giant died the day I was born but grew large as God nevertheless.
He was the God of the heartland who had sent pots of gold to us. He was an alchemist whose pay dirt was gold or the diamond eyes of Frog of whom I was to dream (Frog, the inferior shadow of the giant, Frog, the Don Juan trickster pygmy who resembled my vanished father) over the years of childhood, adolescence and maturity when I reconnoitred the beach of Old New Forest and waited for Ghost to arise from the sea.
It was God who inspired me not to be entrapped in a trauma of losses (or in the bounty of ill-gotten gains) but to build through Sleep the resources for a complex autobiographical fiction reflecting both execution and rebirth, holy/unholy parentage and the resurrection of the body built into inimitable being, inimitable species and masquerades of creation … I shall write of my mother later and the crucial part she played … indeed never ceased to play. How else could I have known the quantum womb, the quantum turbulences, through which Ghost came out of the grave of the sea?
*
That year, when my mother was great with child, my grandfather sent her the manuscript of Faust to read and to type. Then came the telegram. It was the end. I knew.
The staccato rhythm of the typewriter punctuated my sleep like muffled gunfire. Her heartbeat quickened as she read and typed. Commotion piled itself into commotion. The giant slipped from the mask of the Faustian poet into the mathematicians’ code of nuclear rape. Did I dream it then or was it years later? Was it a recurring nightmare? I asked Ghost; how was I involved though still in my mother’s body in a dream of pure poetry, pure mathematics, yet nuclear rape? Was I an internalized cipher in the corruption of ‘pure’ mathematics, ‘pure’ inner space God? Or an internalized gene in the corruption of the ‘pure’ humanities, ‘pure’ humanities God? Bland mathematics. Bland humanities. Soulless machine. I asked Ghost. From faraway in the heartland, poetry and mathematics extended their fist to prod my mother in her ribs. Her contractions began. The Bomb fell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was rushed to hospital. I was born within the instant hour — or flash of eternity — the Bomb fell. I knew an anguish I could scarcely fathom. I attribute it now — that anguish — within the Glass of time and the Blast that happened to an effulgence of birth threaded into death, a white blistering fist or axe of light coming so close it was as if pure poetry and pure mathematics died in the instant I was born.
I bowed to my mother’s ghostly legs as I emerged through them into the blinding light, the blinding axe, as they (poetry’s glass legs, mathematics’ glass legs) seemed to break and fold under her yet in other women’s bodies reflecting my mother’s, through other women’s bodies reflecting my mother’s. They gave birth to me even as she did.
A poem’s glass legs, mathematics’ glass legs, reflect the terror and the ecstasy of the new-born. New-born hubris in mirroring birth-in-death, death-in-birth?
‘Not absolute hubris,’ I said to Ghost. ‘Surely not! Profoundest desire to unravel hubris I would say in a quest for original value, original spirit, in a dangerous world.’
THREE
Let me now confess to the gravity of finding myself face to face with questions I hoped to duck but which have been the substance of recurring dreams throughout my life and from the day I was born.
Old questions yet new.
Who am I? What is fragile humanity? What is poetry? What is science? Can they save creation in complex and ceaseless rehearsal of the birth of spirit? What is the value of survival — is it arbitrary chance or partisan mould — or does it open doors into innermost, self-reflecting and reflective being? Have I been asking these questions all along in this fictional autobiography? If so I need to return to them again and again, to sense new emphases, new edges, new extremities, new proportions.
Take the question of survival. Does survival imply an inner mirroring capacity in league with the magical dead who move in one’s blood, the magical unborn who move through one’s blood, magical yet tainted antecedents, magical giants, magical pygmies?
THE BOMB HAD FALLEN. Its consequences were with us into eternity. Nothing would ever be the same again. An awesome dream.
Where lie the roots of such hubristic knowledge in an infant such as I — infant mankind in infant womankind? Where lie the seeds of such peculiar transparency — the one in the other — such peculiar transparency enfolding all creatures? I find myself positing quantum legs, quantum glass in the building blocks of the universe.
Such astonishing and daring fragility that is susceptible to an inimitable self-reflection of all faltering achievement and power may still give us an edge or a particle or a grain of ascendancy over chaos and bring us abreast of the subtle race, the subtle shadow, the subtle and complex majesty of the genius of paradoxical spirit.
I BEGAN TO CLIMB THE MIRROR OF SLEEP THE MORNING I WAS BORN.
It is a source of incredible wonder — that borders on cruelty all the same (the cruelty of the innocent new-born in the guilty new-dead) to be possessed by a recurring dream of accusation through childhood into maturity, accusation that apparently starts from the day one is born, the silent accusation of the species.
BORN DEAF — the dream declares. THE BOMB IS FALLING. No music anywhere. The harps of the angels are numb or dead. But one climbs each silent string. Ghost was as silent as the glass robins hopping in my room, silent robins, amongst whom I stood. Silent unicorns. Silent seals. Silent blackbirds. Silent larks.
They had flown or run or swum on a wave into the room on the blast of the wind and the wood and the sea from pole to pole.
Glass Red Riding Hood lambs and wolves from the building blocks of the universe were loping into the room, transparent but scorched, across the windowsill. A glass unicorn in a building block within the staggered tenses of time, present and past. The unicorn is. The unicorn was. Not a bay. Not a sound. Not a horn. An eerie deafness, eerie silence, eerie destitution of music. THE BOMB FALLS.
Glass toucans perched on my cradle and pecked at my eyes and ears in the building blocks of the universe. Yet not a tap, not a hammer, not a nail, could break the silence in the Looking Glass space I had become. I was all reflected creatures flying on glass wings, swimming with glass wings, walking upon feet of glass in the building blocks of the universe.