My hatred of W. H. welled into fury. ‘It’s not true,’ I shouted. ‘You know damn well I was in bed with flu at Aunt Miriam’s.’
‘It was I,’ said W. H. gently.
‘You?’
‘Shadow and substance ail everywhere in adversarial contexts of history. And out of that illness is born the resurrection of the body of the soul that we share with one another, black with white, humanity with humanity. What more can you ask of me, Robin Glass, what greater quest, what greater truth? We share an enduring tradition.’
‘You spoke of facts,’ I insisted.
‘Facts, yes, in that fate is the mask authorial freedom wears — the fate of a realistic end or extermination — until it yields to true myth we share with one another, the future with the past. When I arose from bed on hearing news of your death my illness vanished. I knew that time itself had changed and I had become the character of true myth in your book. Not that I was surprised. I had been rehearsing the part for a long time. I had been your aunt’s lover (I had grown to care for you as if you were my nephew) and the producer, the director, of her plays — a background figure. Background yet close as a shadow is to its substance. (Are not authors — forgive me for calling myself an author in this instance — shadow relatives in the book of life? And thus as shadows indispensable to the body of life, the fiction of the body?) When I heard the news I ran, ill as I was, healed nevertheless, blind, seeing nevertheless, down to the sea. The waves were high. The reef — a mile or so away — was a mass of turbulent ocean. A terrible commotion of water. Emma and Peter had already been taken away. It was rumoured your mother Alice swam ashore with them and returned for Miriam and the others. I thought I heard a voice from the ocean cry:“Remember me as I remember you. Become a character in my book. Fiction is real when authors become unreal. Fiction reveals its truths, its genuine truths that bear on the reality of persons, the reality of the world, when fiction fictionalizes authors and characters alike. Thus is archetypal myth resurrected. Thus am I your nephew if not in blood in the language we share.”
‘The voice in the ocean ceased,’ said W. H., ‘and yet I had been so stirred that a crowd seemed to flock out of the waves into my heart and mind. “Fiction relates to presences and to absences,” they said. “Fiction gives buoyancy to us. Fiction explores the partiality of the conditioned mind and the chained body, chained to lust, chained to waste. Fiction’s truths are sprung from mind in its illumination of the sensible body again and again and again, in its illumination of our grasp of intuitive theatre and of deprivation in the materials with which one constructs every quantum leap from the sick bed of humanity.”’ The crowd of voices subsided and W. H.’s confession faded into the page on which I wrote. I moved along the edge of the swamp to the Skull-shaped simulated city of the flatlands. And experienced the oddest vertigo — the vertigo of one’s precipitous age, the heady manifestos, the ambitions, the ideal fallacies, the intoxications, the addictions, the heights — though walking on the flatlands! I — Robin Glass — should have ‘walked tall’ as the President of the United States or as the Chairman of the Soviet Union but sagged instead (when no one was looking). Was it a necessary terror of the resurrection to experience oneself as a young man in a hollow body? Hollow-looking glass marvel in every television box! Such is the illusion of power the resurrected body faces as it ascends from the grave. It is encrusted with illusions of power, illusions of freedom, that it needs to unravel as a prelude to a genuine revolution.
I loathed Ghost as if he had occasioned the vertigo of my arousal. My loathing had intensified when he began to speak a variety of uncomfortable home truths. ‘Better a dumb Spirit than a speaking God. Such are the paradoxes born of the Word and of the possession of a voice by a stranger exercised in true capacity or spiritual right.’
Ghost had made an enemy of me by speaking the language of the judging heart. God had made an enemy of Mankind with every commandment that he uttered. The earth became a battlefield of fanaticisms, one party fighting another, each defending but attacking God in mauling the stranger at the gate. Each was convinced it possessed a duty to maim or to kill in upholding the laws of God. Such is the terror and the ambiguity of the Word. No wonder God tended to keep a silent tongue in His head. Or was it in Her head? (The matter of gender was a sore point amongst male priests and female priests.) Ghost had ventured to speak through a variety of masquerades and utterances that seemed to mock yet to reveal, to discount yet to make visible innermost feuding reality that is masked by self-righteous accent or idiom, self-righteous deprivation.
Indeed this was Ghost’s strategy on behalf of a lost or half-remembered humanity on the edge of the abyss, on the edge of hollow intelligences, hollow prides, into which I moved as resurrected flesh-and-blood within the age of the waste land.
It was this uncertainty about the Word, about truth, in my resurrected body invoking the half-remembered shell I once was that tormented me most of all in returning to the land from the sea and intensified once again my indictment of Ghost. Was I now more than human shell, less than human hollow, other than human shell, in tending to forget (within the grave from which I had arisen) an everlasting strangeness in creaturely divinity’s essence, an everlasting saturation of fabric and necessity for a spiritual irony in all renascent formations, animal and soul, angel and fish and bird?
Was this spiritual irony part and parcel of the seed of Ghost in the Word of God?
Did that seed in its grain of self-mockery and profoundest utterance sustain a true placelessness, a true freedom on land and water and air (not a technological roar or self-righteous bias), profoundest change, profoundest imagination (not ten feet tall cliché-ridden idols and derivatives of global conquest)?
I saw it all now with heartrending insight and remorse such as only the dead who return to the living may know. I had come back from the chapel of the sea with Ghost long, long ago. In dreaming of him on the beach I had been involved in a rehearsal of perfectible order, perfectible industry, perfectible state, that I shared with him from the beginning of time. But in my obliviousness of the ambiguity of the Word and the nature of absence that the dead endure (absence from a hollow humanity) and absence’s ramifications in native presence, I had had to dream again and again of obsessional need, obsessional wealth, obsessional poverty, obsessional expectation of a supreme prosperity as if prosperity were its own perfectible Ghost, perfectible commander of the futures of the race.
‘Supreme prosperity?’ Ghost said to me now from within the masquerades of dream. ‘Supreme irony! The perfectibility of the state, the perfectibility of command, the perfectibility of industry, leads to a growing tide of refugees of spirit in flight from themselves to an illusory benefactor. And your resurrection — each rehearsal in which I am involved with you — is as much a warning of the sickness of the expectant soul as it is a vision of a divine and terrifying love. My fear is, Robin, that the sickness of expectant souls may prevail for a long, long time to come (with increasingly dangerous consequences) in a disordered and chaotic world in flight to a prosperity it confuses with the genius of love. But then have we not sown obsessional desire, obsessional folly, in the waste land that we cherish?’
I thought I had sown the origins of sensation, dance, touch, flowering of poetry … Yes, I thought I had sown such occasions in my library of dreams but everything seemed hollow now. I strove to articulate that hollowness into the ‘withinness’ of the Word, a ‘withinness’ that was transformative wholeness in the vessel of space, the hollow vessel of space; and failed. I sought to articulate that hollowness into the ‘withoutness’ of Spirit, Spirit that immerses itself in the fabric of being yet moves at the edge of the fury of hypocritical slogan and quarrelsome rhetoric upon a plane of reality; and failed. But in failing I knew that that hollowness was the ground of creative conscience and value, the ground of an absence from the world that re-enters the world without illusion, without ideal self-deception. Did the absent body — in re-entering the theatre of the world — begin to acquire its own true echoing voice in a hollow humanity whose hollowness became an unsuspected creative faculty in the vitalized conscience of tradition, the vitalized conscience of the dead?