One is afraid to drown before one’s time (yet live), one is afraid to glimpse the age of the earth (yet descend into the womb), the age of faltering economies (yet arise into the spirit of value), the age of the tides, the age of ageless fall into apparent nothingness … all before one’s time … the age of terrifying responsibility, the necessity to create a true and intimate life of conscience, life of authority within the body of the waste land.
TOWARDS DROWNED SUNRISE IN JUNE 1962 — A YEAR AFTER TIGER STRUCK THE REEF AND BROKE — I (ROBIN REDBREAST GLASS) CAME TO THE EDGE OF A BLACK SWAMP OR LAKE, THE EDGE OF THE CHAPEL PERILOUS OF THE FLATLANDS. The chapel or city (it had not yet been transformed into a wealthy city) was called skull. It stood above an ancient sea-bed. The ocean had rolled here long, long ago on its way to the foot of the Angel Falls escarpment in the magic wood. Boomsday Skull. Boomsday Tiger. I stared into the mirror of the swamp and saw Skull’s future, its lavish prosperity. I heard the voice of Ghost nevertheless. ‘I am in all decrepit humanity. I am in the broken Tiger. I am in the sad dancers who ride on the waves. I am in all lost loves and lost lovers. I am ghost within ghost within ghost.’ I saw my reflection in a ghostly wave, my seventeen-year-old drowned reflection in the water, half-in the sleeping tides that pillowed my eyes, half-out yet in the biting mask of Ghost, half-in my seventeen-year-old shredded skeleton — dressed to look beautiful now, immortal now, in the theatre of Faustian history — half-out yet in the memory bank of the future and in the ageing global mask that Ghost had employed as me in the 1980s and the 1990s and in the year 2000 when Skull would have achieved the status of a faeryland Chernobyl tomb, cheap electricity and deceptively abundant goods.
‘Why me?’ I cried. ‘Why choose me? Who is it — let us be truthful, Ghost — that writes of me as if he is me in the future? Some damned expert no doubt. (They have ruined the water table in many a flatland, they have despoiled and exploited resources, triggered erosion in global theatres — experts they call themselves, experts in everything cheap though God knows how dear one’s embalmed species may ultimately prove.) Did I not happily drown when Alice and Miriam drowned? Whose body of expertise am I? Whose dear poverty, whose cheap prosperity, am I?’
I uttered the questions without thinking. I spoke, it seemed, in a dream without knowing I had spoken. I was alive yet dead. Why had I spoken as I had? Dream-reflex? Skull-protest? Simulated freedom of speech? Such speech (such uncertainty of motivation) sprang out of a fear, an ambivalence, a distrust of futures that come upon one before one knows the choices one is making, before one knows one’s potential age, one’s deepest age, one’s cross-cultural heritage and body of wisdom to come abreast of the tools that may damn or save (one cannot say) the human race.
Such involuntary speech (half-simulated, half-unscripted) sprang out of the dilemmas of a post-colonial civilization, out of Third Worlds, and bewildered First Worlds. Out of ancient conquests and legacies of evil that Alice and Miriam and all the Calypsonians had danced and played in all apparent and perverse innocence.
I repeated my questions and added automatically, ‘Can one trust the experts who write the fictions of the future?’
Ghost hid his Birthday/Deathday humours in a cloud then spoke above the chapel of the flatlands. ‘I shall call upon W. H. in a moment or two to speak of the book of your life. No expert is he but an adversary.’
‘Adversary!’ I exclaimed.
‘Are the truths of fiction,’ said Ghost, ‘not rooted in an adversarial spirit? Take the fictional houses of God! We call them cathedrals. Admirals and generals and soldiers everywhere. And the saints. Where are they? In a stained-glass window or two where they resist oblivion.’ Ghost was jesting but I experienced a stab of fear. ‘Perhaps W. H. will elbow me …’
‘And you will elbow him,’ Ghost interrupted, ‘into revisionary strategies in which you live as if your hand, your being, your touch, your seeing, your hatreds and fears for that matter, your innermost fantasies, become a medium in which life and death wrestle with one another.’
‘What are revisionary strategies?’ I was uncertain.
‘I say revisionary strategies to imply that as you write of other persons, of the dead or the unborn, bits of the world’s turbulent, universal unconscious embed themselves in your book. Do you see?’
‘And I revise around these and through these. I see.’ I was filled with a sudden animosity towards W. H. ‘It is my life — not W. H.’s. I shall spit in his eye when we next meet for a rehearsal at Aunt Miriam’s in her chapel perilous play of the flatlands.’
Ghost was laughing soundlessly. ‘Did not Christ heal a blind man with spittle and clay? It’s an elaborate strategy simple as it appears. In your case, Robin, it implies that your backward fall into Miriam’s childhood theatre is the visionary substance and the bitter flavour of memory, a relic of memory on your tongue that fills you with such uneasiness you project it upon W. H. And in so doing you help him to see deeper into the fabric of intuitive theatres, theatres of clay as of sea, light and darkness, air and element, theatres of the past, theatres of the present, theatres of the future.’
I was struck by the parallels Ghost had drawn.
‘Intuitive theatres?’
‘Just so,’ said Ghost. ‘They illumine the blind life (the unconscious bits) of the imagination whose roots run deep into the diverse substance of the intimate stranger in yourself Robin Glass, the clay, the claws, and everything that translates into innermost perception. The truths of fiction, yes! They validate you. You are the substance of stranger quarrels — love’s quarrel with time is a healed passageway into God — stranger myth, untameable reality, and renaissance of faculties within the womb of space. You live and write your fictional autobiography from the other side of W. H.’s blind/seeing mind, Robin Glass. He is a character in your book. You are no invention of his. You are no pawn of his. You validate and contest his discoveries. They are your discoveries as much as his.’ Ghost was laughing but deadly serious. ‘I merely confer upon him a body and a mask that are an extension of my paradoxical Being and of your youth into fictional middle and old age in which you lift your pen and write as you now do of your adversary W. H.’
I was conscious suddenly of W. H.’s presence and mask in my book.
‘May I give you the facts?’ said W. H. ‘I may be a character in your book but still …’
‘Facts?’ said I.
‘You — Robin Glass — your mother Alice, your aunt Miriam, and three children were drowned in June 1961, the afternoon of the earthquake. The boat Tiger overturned at sea. Alice, brave woman, assisted Peter and Emma, helped them to the land and returned.’