‘If I bang Ghost,’ Tiger said, ‘in a dead poet’s — a dead magician’s — shadow in the sacred wood I may grasp, may I not, the hidden malaise (and hidden revolutionary capacity) in the popular arts? I shall try to bang Ghost and make him talk to you, Robin. Make him unravel the masquerade of Death as the Tempter, the bringer of the lotus flower. It’s a narrow pass, very narrow indeed, that I must take, I the dancer, the rebel.
‘You dead poet, dead magician, dead Quetzalcoatl, dead priests and scientists of ancient time, understand — surely you do — the predicament of the popular yet doomed player, popular yet doomed rebel, in an illiterate world. You swing in a sea or a cradle where I blow my deadly trumpet that is wreathed still, I confess, in unawakened powers, unawakened sensibilities, and in the mystery of deprivations through which I must pass. I confess to a reluctance to pass. Such self-righteous deprivation, such pride, seduces me, fastens upon me, as if it were the seed of purity, the seed of God.’
Tiger had succumbed to the Tempter, to the lure and fallacy of black (or white) purity, and as a consequence the confused and confusing diet of the world, half-vile, half-spiritual, rushed into his Shadow and mine even in the last moments of his life, the ticking voice of the suddenly energized clock, ticking invisibly/soundlessly within the roar of passing time.
Tiger was dying though he had not yet realized it. He was dying within my grandfather’s shadow on the page of a book in which history revised itself, the deprivations of Democracy and popular art revised themselves into cautionary ink, the dangers of fascist order, fascist purity, fascist white, fascist black. He knocked on the door of the page to elicit further lines from the dead magician’s hand. My grandfather may have heard. His dead hand, the hand of the magical dead, responded. It wrote some lines that it recalled from its youth before I was born. It could not write its own lines at that moment so it leant on the riddle of the Traveller from another time. As much as to say ‘you may knock Tiger and even though I hear I must be silent in order to stress that there are no easy answers to the predicament of a dying age within its most obvious, most telling biases and assumptions.’
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
I repeated the lines now as if they were an unconscious charm directed at Death, the Tempter. I had hardly whispered to myself and to Tiger and to Alice and Miriam when there was the sound of a gunshot. Was it (that gunshot) the cry of the suddenly reawakened drum? Or was it Tiger’s shout? Tiger gasped. A hole appeared in his chest into which Death crawled. The blood trickled down and stained his trumpet. He lifted the music of dream-life rebellion, dream-life blood, to his lips and appeared to drink. Well of deprivation. Well of purity. Thus he would slip into popular divinity, popular martyrdom. He spun in the dance. His knees buckled. He clung to a dancing woman in the street and they fell together. In the folklore of the dancing Tiresias Tigers the passage to the underworld is adorned by twining snakes: psychical glass snakes in which are reflected the mystery of the male deprived mask and the mystery of the female deprived mask that Tiresias wears in turn within the logic of the terrible seer.
‘O God!’ Aunt Miriam cried. ‘The police are in the street. And an ambulance driven by Doctor Faustus. The police have been attacked. They have fired at the strikers, Alice.’ She stopped and turned to W. H. who advised her on occasions on the direction of her plays. ‘May not the shot that kills Tiger signify in our play a prophecy of coming wars, coming battles, in which men, women and children will die?’
‘What coming battles?’ Alice was sceptical.
Miriam had no reply but I could have written the lines for her: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Uganda, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nicaragua. I could have added, ‘Alice thinks it’s just a play! Just fiction! Is fiction meant to be real as inner problematic truth, as unpredictable fact, as a blend of the two to stagger our deformities of insight, of perception, of heart and mind?’
Tiger was dead but for a moment it seemed he had not yet breathed his last on ‘the crest of a wave’ in Miriam’s and Alice’s little theatre. The ecstasy of purity had cleared his vision for a brief spell. Deprivation of the senses was too real to be pure. The villain of the heart was too real to be pure white or pure black or pure red. The saint was too real to be divine except when divinity invokes a visionary humanity that sees through the veil of its crimes.
Deprivation was so real it festered into food, deceptive lotus and plague, plenty and poverty.
Hunger was so real that I ascended the moon as if it were Glass in a shoestring ladder and knocked on its door.
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door.
Belly to belly
Back to back
Ah don’t give a damn
Ah done dead a’ready.
And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
I who sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.
I could not believe it. Ghost was speaking at last. No formal message. A repetition of familiar texts become however strangely cross-cultural, the strangest subversion, where one least suspected or expected to find it in hollow convention or solemn usage. An edge, nothing more, above the malaise, the death-wish of an age: an edge born of temptation that one unravels, perceives, and sifts until it yields a value beyond the immediate taste of temptation, the remorse, the penalty, the rewards.
FIVE
My mother died in 1961. I was sixteen. It was the year the Tiresias Tigers established a new theatre or tent in the magic wood. I heard their muffled drums. Drums swarming with spectres, spectres of the malaise of the twentieth century, a drum upon which the original dancer Tiresias Tiger tapped and tapped and tapped in my dreams. He had arisen from the grave with a hole in his chest when I was three years old.
I played with him (he was a ragged doll) on the drawing-room carpet until he vanished and I did not hear of him, or see him, again until I learnt of the Tiresias Tigers of the magic wood.
Absent or present he was often around the corner in my Sleep and through him I became a pork-knocker scientist who rattled the black hole of gravity in Tiger’s chest with a teaspoon.
A frightening eye of sugar or telescopic spoon with which to scrape the barrel of the cosmos, a frightening glimpse into the heart of Ghost. It was also a mystic dream and the beginning of faith. Yes, faith! But faith in what? Was it faith in one’s powers to measure prosperity or to be measured by prosperity, to save or to be saved, to know or to be known? Was it faith in heaven or in hell?
A recurring dream that came at least once a year across the waste land of childhood fantasy through the barrel at my gate into quantum quetzalcoatl mathematics in teaspoon and shoestring middle age.
A disturbing dream for it set into circulation all over again the origins of sensation — such as tasting, rattling silver in a teacup, slicing a bone or a piece of meat that cost a pretty penny.