She was right. I screamed and woke. After that speech came naturally. It was born out of an extremity, yes, extremity, Robin’s extremity, Redbreast Democratic Glass and multi-reflecting organ of the deprived senses. Yes, speech is born of extremity. It runs close to despair, demagoguery and authoritarian command, all functions of deprivation: deprivation or deprivations Aunt Miriam tended to call illiteracies of the heart and mind. I have never forgotten the phrase she used. It laps around me in the rain, in the water, in streams where one misreads time’s face.
Aunt Miriam was right in that we soon forget how strange and mysterious are our capacities, hearing extremity, listening extremity, speaking extremity, touching extremity, seeing extremity, knowing extremity; and that those capacities or extremities may never have come into being except through a dream-life that is steeped in temptations — pre-natal temptations as well as child-temptations — sexual temptations as well as lust-for-power temptations — to which we succumbed. Succumbed yes to the vitality of sensation but recoiled in converting the shadow of temptation into a source of original, self-confessing being in creation.
I remember the terror of the animal bands when they faced the repetitive fall of the Bomb in the shape of perverse manna and Skull-bread. They erupted in the magic wood in 1948. First came the band of the Tiresias Tigers. They were followed by other bands that included the Unicorns and the Horses of the Sea. It was a strike of international significance. It invoked a bullish mood (whatever that meant) in that sugar cane shares rocketed and fell, rocketed again with stone cold dead in the market. Rice shares became animalcule balloons and bullets. Oil shares battled coal. Diamond and gold investments laced the bullet’s horns. That a Tiger could stand on a platform (or a tall sheep or Red Riding Hood or Sister George the Bald Horse) toss a drum or a claw to the winds, and thereby cause millions of ammunition and dollars to roll up the creek, or roll down the creek, was a measure of economic illiteracy and of the deprivations of simulated cities of Skull.
‘BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, all the time,’ my mother said. ‘Enough to drive you mad!’
Aunt Miriam — despite her misgivings, her sense of spiritual malaise — was more generous. ‘It’s all in a good cause,’ she said. And pondered the uncertainty of good causes. ‘Bang, Drum, Strike, to keep the evil spirits at bay.’
‘What evil spirits?’
‘Shame on you, Alice. You should know. The legacies of war. The legacies of fear and corruption. Malnutrition. It’s a strike to win grain.’
My mother looked dubious, even doleful. ‘Corruption,’ she said. ‘Grain,’ she said. ‘Vile bodies.’
Aunt Miriam was nonplussed. She could not tell whether Alice was saying ‘corruption is vile’ or ‘grain is vile’ or ‘the strike of the animal bands is vile’.
‘I tell you, Miriam,’ Alice continued, ‘it’s the terror of the void. That’s the twentieth century.’
‘You mean the terror of angry and confused spirit,’ Aunt Miriam said and tried to look absurdly reasonable though she was scared. ‘The animal bands are dancing like nemesis below in the street. What a sea of faces. I hate crowds.’
A change had occurred in the element of Sleep. The privileged and fashionable strikers and bangers, privileged bands and dancers who preyed upon — or were able to exploit — the illiteracy of the economic imagination and move grain around the globe to starving peoples were dissatisfied with themselves and their entanglement in systems they both supported (profited from) and loathed (or bled in the name of the good cause). They swung around in the book of Sleep into rebellious subversives inciting masses. I sailed upon a tide of popular art, street animal dancers, street animal rebels, street animal poems of protest. Their simulation of an industrial and cultural strike seemed suddenly real. The comedian of the circus who pulled the strings and profited from each calculation of unrest had misjudged the chaos in the magic wood. Time’s countenance darkened into a mirror of involuntary feud on the stairway backwards and upwards, forwards and downwards, upon which I dreamt I climbed.
‘What is spirit when it broods upon chaos, Alice? Ask the politicians, the ageing politicians of the world, who are henpecked in the sacred wood. I ask you, Alice. I ask you to come on stage on the crest of a wave — the name I have given our little theatre.’ (Aunt Miriam ran a school of drama (called The Crest of the Wave) in her home beside the sounding sea. It was but half a mile or so away from Alice’s house in which many rehearsals were conducted.)
‘Let’s begin. Let’s rehearse, Alice.’ She stopped again as if she were intent on dramatizing the part she wished Alice to play. ‘I ask again — what is spirit when it broods upon chaos? Don’t reply straightaway. Shrug your shoulders and point to the Sphinx. Then say — let me see — something like this: “when angry spirit becomes an incestuous block or riddle the food in our very mouths is susceptible to plague”.’
‘I have no intention of saying anything of the sort,’ said Alice. But this was her cue nevertheless in my sea of Sleep on the crest of a wave. She moved across the chapel perilous to the window on the waving street beneath our house. ‘I say the terror of the void,’ she cried in the heart of my dream. Her glass lips touched mine as fish flew through our hair like beautiful birds. ‘I say the terror of the void. The terror …’ and then she saw the spiritual (or the vile) dancer Tiger staring up at her from the street and listening intently. Her voice fell … ‘of the void.’
Spiritual (or was it vile?) Tiger had heard every word. He leapt on the stage with his drum of thunder and his guitar. He leapt over the fence, raced to the front door and was inside in a flash. And then I knew. He had been manipulated by Faust, Faust’s machines, Faust’s technologies, to bang away at the terror of the void. My mother had pricked his animal spirit on the raw.
‘What a paradox,’ said Miriam. Her lips moved in the play that she and Alice had half-made-up, half-borrowed from my grandfather’s Faust in the last days of his beriberi wilderness.
‘What a paradox,’ said Alice. ‘This is the age of the masses, the age of the best-seller, the age of the popular arts, the popular bands, and yet it is the age of the death wish, the age of drugs.’ Alice was nodding as if they murmured the lines together.
‘The torment of spirit. The death wish of an age. True spirit never wars with true spirit but since nature and the values of nature are inextricably woven into every populace — and populace is vulgar spirit — every illness of mind and of spirit becomes the substance of bodily, addictive passion, bodily, addictive fury, ear-splitting, addictive BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM wrestling with itself for a violent/non-violent habitation.’
Then Tiger spoke the lines my grandfather wrote for him. Lines written in his last days in the Bush of the magic wood. My grandfather consumed the shell of a Skull-orange. It tasted so wonderfully sweet that he knew he had been deceived and that Death, the Tempter, stood beside him with the lotus flower in his hand. No ordinary lotus flower. Not the luxuriousness and the inactivity of the grave. No, something much more insidious. Deprivation. The drug of deprivation that looks like the seed of black (or white) purity, the black (or white) seed of God, when the drummer of the senses protests in a fever against the ills of the world that are as much in him as in those he assaults. The lotus flower of addictive bias that hardens into terror! My grandfather chewed it, tasted it, knew its wonderful relish, then spat it forth into Tiger’s speech.