‘No!’ said Robin. He felt uncertain, bewildered, even vaguely outraged. He took refuge in attack — ‘Let ME touch you.’ He was uncertain of the distinction between touching Faust himself and being touched by Faust himself … MY GRANDFATHER’S BOOK FADED INTO THE REALITY OF IMMORTAL DREAM. I WAS DREAMING. Immortal dream? Had I succumbed to Faust’s temptation? Could I touch him without being subject to his influence, his charisma? Had I involuntarily accepted the temptation he posed to sustain his immortality and to become immortal dream writer myself? What are the origins of dreams? Are dreams the relic of temptation surviving in the psyche to assume immortality? If so the burden and the ecstasy of dreams had to be revised, ravelled, unravelled, penetrated, probed, rehearsed into infinity in order to make a profound distinction between a true resurrection (a true resurrection)and the strings of prodigious dogma in populations. They resembled one another, they ran in parallel with one another (material prodigy resembled the body of the soul even as cinematic foetus resembled the innermost recall of the conception of life) but they were not the same. LIKE YET UNLIKE FORCES.
I reached out and touched Faust and felt suddenly caught in the nexus of like yet unlike forces, caught and bedevilled by an age that gestated at the edge of a chasm, the chasm of marvels, the chasm of insensible creed in the circus of the machine.
I felt devoid of sensation as I touched him. He felt warm at first, warm as the drug of material progress, but I knew he was bitterly cold, bitterly calculating, stuffed to the eyeballs with terrifying comedy. All of a sudden I screamed. It was wholly spontaneous but nothing could have been more calculated to take him by surprise. I should have been laughing my immortal head off at his immortal joke — he seemed to imply — not screaming … He had failed somewhere in the demonology of the circus to ‘grab me’ as I hopped on his kingdom bell and I knew in my heart of hearts the resurrectionary or revolutionary body was subtly alive however apparently eclipsed within the glamour and the sophistications of the comedian of the machine.
Whereas before I had been delivered from deafness by a clap of thunder in the cradle or the grave — when I sought to seize the psychical glass animals of space that were manifestations of the immanence of God’s kingdoms — now in the circus of the machine, on the circus of the kingdom bell, I was delivered from numbness of spirit, and from seizure by Faust, with a cry I gave from the heart, a cry so poignant, so real, it drew me into the web, into the flesh, the imperilled substance, of all ecstatic and sorrowing creatures. Was this the origin of mental pain woven into the very substance and moment of rich rejoicing? Caught yet instinctively liberated feature. Caught yet spiritually liberated song.
I HAD BEEN CAUGHT YET IMPLICITLY LIBERATED FROM CINEMATIC CHARISMA, CINEMATIC ECLIPSE OF INNERMOST SELF-REFLECTION.
‘The mystery of deprivation!’ said Faust at last. As if with a gesture he sought to enlighten me, to prove he was on my side after all. On the side of liberation.
‘I am on your side once you read me properly. With a literate imagination Robin!’ He was laughing. I could not be sure. Was he laughing or was he mocking a world that was singularly ill-equipped to read its spheres of deprivation or its proclivity to temptation?
‘To enter my Kingdom Bell is to see from the other side of thunder the earlier temptation to which you succumbed. I say ‘earlier’ but does one know what comes first, what is early, what is late? Does one hear before one cries? Is it a simultaneous arousal within veil after veil of rehearsed temptation, rehearsed sensation, secreted in memory?
‘You succumbed to temptation and reached out to seize the glass unicorn, the glass tigers, etc. They vanished but you came alive then to the reflected thunder of all things, to the noises of space and time. At last you could hear, make distinctions, dwell in your mother’s voice and her laughter. Now you yourself have been caught by me yet implicitly liberated in giving voice to a spirit through and beyond yourself … At last you know that you cry, that tears are as true as song. Have I not helped you in the very moment that I threatened your soul? For remember within true voice and true hearing lies an arch of simulated being upon which we build our architectures and institutions. There in due course you will come upon Skull and the bridge to Skull.
‘At the heart of the void of the machine lies a revolutionary spirit that exposes one’s zest for life within the fruits of temptation. That revolutionary spirit exalts us, yet chastens us, makes us see our deprivations (whether deafness or numbness or whatever) through a mysterious glass or composite of opposites reflecting seizure and liberation, invention and creation, the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead, the mortal and the immortal.
‘I am the comedian of the void in the machine … the void in you. I am the script within the machine.’
‘And my voice?’ I asked rudely, ‘is that in your script?’
It was a taunting question to put to a human machine or to a person embodying immortal dynamo replete with implacable marvel and terrible skill, terrible dialectic, but Faust to my astonishment replied, ‘Your voice is revolutionary spirit, Robin. I am glad of this, believe me! I too can rejoice.’ Was he mourning with me or laughing at me or had he been moved in spite of himself by considerations of the mystery of deprivation and its bearing on caught yet liberated senses of the imagination, the mystery of deprivation through which we unlock multi-faceted thresholds, landscapes, doors into being?
FOUR
Some Reflections in 1985 on the Great Strike of the Animal Bands in the Magic Wood in the Year 1948. Ghost is at my Elbow as I Write in the Chapel Perilous of the Sea. He is the Spectre or Character of Time Unravelling Centuries and Decades.
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THE MYSTERY OF DEPRIVATION. A key phrase in this fictional autobiography of (or is it by?) a drowned man. W. H. insists mystery is a divine comedy with an edge or positive direction to the movement of consciousness above the authorial fury of conflicting powers and the chaos of the world. Mystery is a stairway that takes me up yet back four decades in the comedy of time to the year 1948. I was three years old then. It was the year of the great strike in the sacred or magic wood. Memory’s building blocks under the sea (or upon a wave of land) are composed of reversible glass senses reflecting patterns of intimate sensation — no, patterns of temptation — to which one succumbs. I would never have acquired a literate ear, or literate responses to distinctive voices and sounds — literate self-criticism as well about my deficiencies of understanding in every nexus of intricate being — if I had not been tempted by a stroke of light to seize the kingdoms of space that sped before me in inmost animal and spiritual particles and waves of sound. I would never have given voice to creation if I had not been tempted by the comedian of the machine to become an immortal dream-body upon frontiers of simulated blood and real blood.
I laugh at myself now in 1985 in the light of the composite fruit of temptation that stains the mirror of my lips. Glass kisses glass at the bottom of the sea where fish roam in one’s hair like beautiful birds. My mother kissed me on the bed of the sea in the chapel perilous and said to a friend, ‘Miriam and I thought Robin was deaf, you know, but suddenly he reached out and held my breasts, he heard my voice, the noises in the street, everything, the telephone ringing in the room. It was funny. He began to speak as if he were conversing with someone at the other end of the line. A prodigy! He cried …’