I know for a fact that an industrial strike over starvation wages occurred on the sugar estates of Old New Forest in 1948 and several strikers were shot dead, one fell in the sugar bowl beneath our window embracing a woman and a child. A tight nightmare fit.
I was three years old when it happened. Three-year-old relic of memory on whose lips was a grain of sugar, on whose lips was a grain of temptation! Memory’s repetitive anatomy may lie in a grain of sugar one surreptitiously steals, forbidden sugar, forbidden sweetness! I witnessed the clash with the police from our window above the square. It could have been happening in our drawing room. Alice and Miriam were staring. Staring eyes. Everything and everyone tumbled into a relic of memory as I now write as if I was there yet absent from myself. Absent living body. I saw the hollow ambulance with Doctor Faustus at the skeleton wheel. The commotion of the skeleton bands. BOOM BOOM DOOM DOOM. Commotion, ceaseless sweetness/bitterness elaboration, movement, voices.
Thus I was moved across the years to sift unreliable fact from true play or fantasy and to reconsider the origins of sensation: an eye in the mouth of a sugar bowland in the bodyof Tiresias,the seer.
Take the seer’s eye: in the wake of the shot a blind silence enveloped every rattling teaspoon, every gun, every drum, every bone in the crowd in the square beneath our window. Then came an explosion of appetite and anger. I dreamt I saw the dead man move and eat the grain on my lip as he whispered in the hole in his chest, ‘Everything you have been tempted to consume recedes into me now, hollow me. See the sweets of violence in dead men’s chests, in dead men’s lungs, in dead men’s hearts, hear the bitterness of explosive suns.
Fifteen suns in a dead man’s chest
Yo-ho-ho and the taste of the lotus.
A different bottled ear or eye from the one I received when I reached out to seize the kingdoms of glass, the kingdoms of the globe, and was greeted by my mother’s exclamation of joy. An ear and a mouth and an eye in a ragged man’s chest … I was translated, I was confused, by the telescopic mind of Ghost in Tiger’s body.
The drums now spoke to the dead seer, the dead tiger, on the ground.
‘Fall down and die, Tiger. We shall pick you up. We shall drum. We shall measure the height of your dance and your fall through ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient America and ancient Africa into Robin Redbreast Glass waiting to see old Godot anew. Old Godot anew, Old Godot anew. Robin wants to know, wants to see, how far he must fall from the sky into old Godot anew. Why should a beast’s sudden death help us to map the ancient heavens anew within the radius of a star, a child’s star? One child’s star is another’s bullet.’
I dreamt I put the question to Ghost and thought I heard him murmur very faintly in the hollow of my ragged doll, ‘Life needs death. Life needs death if it is to be. But remember it is through death that life measures itself, measures its achievements, its glories. Remember it is through death not with death — not in league with death as the ultimate violence, the ultimate deprivation. The distinction is a crucial one — it bears on the fabric of the resurrection within every extremity, every hollow …’ His voice faded. And now it was as if the waiting room of Godot broke its commission with Death and illumined a ragged queue in Tiger’s body. Strings were vibrating very subtly, with incredible lightness, incredible touch — the sensation of ragged but mysterious alignment with the glories, the achievements, of which Ghost had spoken. I began to marvel across the years and the generations at the sensitivity that lies in the fingers of a ghostly musician touching the leaves of the trees into rhapsodic murmur, the fingers of a ghostly drummer sounding in the Sleep of space, the fingers of green (as they are called) of a ghostly gardener, the fingers of earth of a ghostly man or woman who sculpts a rock and makes it live.
Did I not dream that my own fingers were made of clay — of numb clay — until they scuttled on Glass and became the claws of a bird, then scuttled again, all of a sudden, into an intensity of feeling the instant I cried in my Sleep against the comedian of the machine who would have entrapped me, or seized me, as I alighted on a bell at the end of a rod?
I thought of my grandfather’s manuscript (and its ramifications in the simulated world and the real world) — of my mother’s staccato fingers drumming on a typewriter as I dreamt I lay within her — of Aunt Miriam’s plays revising the histories of the world — and wondered at the origins of perception, the relics of memory that lay as much in me as in ancestral re-visions of The Waste Land and of Faust in other, nameless, intuitive masterpieces since time began.
I remembered a journey I took when I was five years old through an ancient volume of Sleep. I remembered it all now as I arose from bed and brushed my teeth with the fin of a fish. I remembered my mother who died in 1961. She led me on that journey. She combed my hair with the honeycomb of the sea. She came into my dreams in a long swaying garment made of the sea, and of moss, and of countless stars sprung from the hollow yet resurrected body of Ghost.
Was it a journey into her death or was it a journey we made when I was five years old? She comes to me when I am old, one hundred years old. The year is 2045. No, not old! Just five, a relic of memory. Five-year-old relic. The year is 1950 on a dusty calendar in an old trunk of books and masks.
We make our way through the trunk and through the barrel at my gate, the round ship, the round coffin of my ancestors. The year is 1950. I am five years old. My mother gives me a ring. I slip it on to my hand. But as I run on the beach it falls from my finger and is lost forever. Alice is angry. ‘You will find it some day,’ she says. ‘I promise you.’ Her voice is sad and angry and I am pierced by foreboding. It was a ring my grandfather had given her. An heirloom or something. Surely she was grossly careless to give it to me before I knew or understood.
Good Ghost! The barrel at our gate was built by me in 1961 a month or two before my mother was drowned. It was built as a memorial to great navigators, great pork-knockers. How could we have made our way through it in 1950 with the lost ring? One is obsessed by time, one is obsessed by the timeless comedy of time. Perhaps the barrel I built in 1961 was invisible to us though it was already there flung up from the bottom of the sea on the crest of a wave of the future as my mother and I stood on the beach facing our grave when I was but a child and she a beautiful, angry woman.
My mother leans on the invisible barrel now.
‘It’s grandfather’s memorial,’ I say.
‘And the ring?’
‘What ring?’ I had forgotten.
‘A ring of spiritual gold studded with minute diamonds on the inside where it touches your skin. On the inside is the flesh of infancy. On the outside is the wreck of a ship.’
The wreck of a civilization? I was astonished. I lay under the wave of old age and looked up to the sky. I held my five-year-old hand up in the sea to the light of moon-shells, star-shells, sun-shells, and saw for the first time a ring on my mother’s skeleton left hand. Had she salvaged it from the sea the day she was drowned? I touched the ring in astonishment. Had I worn it all along and never known it was there?
I touched the ring with the light of my eyes. I felt my mother’s lips on my eyes: were they still bitter or were they now sweet?
‘If ever you are in trouble,’ my mother says — and leans down and lets the sand and the water run through her fingers — ‘just brandish it like an asset of state or pawn it for that matter if money’s short. Remember it’s here to save your life.’