Did the absent body — in re-entering the theatre of the world as resurrected presence — begin to acquire a capacity to dislodge prepossession and formidable bias within a hollowness of humanity whose conscription of value inevitably shifts or cracks or moves before the breath of Spirit?
One cannot return from the dead, return to the present, without sensing in some degree — however ambiguously — through failure or achievement — that the miracle of a re-entry into a hollow humanity is a subversive reality one has neglected to explore in its ramifications within the origins of value.
I had come to the bridge of wisdom. It arched across the flatlands and across the swamp of adventure through which Raleigh and Cortes and Middle Passage Rastafarian Magellan and many others had moved to the block or the fire or to the grave. Were they in essence refugees of spirit bound together in the chaos of the world? Black refugees. White refugees. Conquistadorial adventurers and refugees. Victimized emigrants or immigrants or refugees. No wonder W. H. had heard such a clamour in the sea whose voices he barely caught and faintly translated.
The bridge was a simulated arch in my Faustian dream of Third Worlds running hand in hand with First or Second Worlds. It stretched between the true (however faint) voice of the absent body and the true (however remote) ear of the absent body, the true voice in and the intimate response from the everlasting stranger in oneself.
I was greeted by an illumination that seemed nevertheless fraught with danger: the cheap light of the sun, the cheap light of a furnace, in a drowned man’s refugee eyes as he arises from the chapel perilous of the sea and is tempted by Prosperity Ghost in the city of Skull.
How cheap is the light of the sun, how cheap is the electricity of the stars?
‘Cheapness is all,’ said Ghost. But I saw that his eyes were sad. Intimate, knowing, sad eyes within the everlasting stranger in oneself. ‘Cheapness is all,’ the refugees roared and would have rushed into Skull but their way was barred as if Time itself were considering their plight before it yielded to their demand.
‘Why should Time yield to such temptation?’ I said to Ghost. ‘You should know since you raise the issue in this masquerade …’
‘Prosperity Ghost you mean!’ he was laughing soundlessly.
‘Yes! Indeed. You raise the issue in this masquerade as a moral aesthetic, I take it — a piece of moral theatre. Miriam loved moral theatre! And I — resurrected bone and flesh that I am — cannot shake it out of my veins. Hollow veins in which I taste nevertheless an impulse to regenerative vessel, regenerative capacity. And so I ask as if the tooth I bring from the grave bites so fiendishly, so terribly, I cannot resist asking (I cannot resist hunting the truth): would it not be kinder, much kinder, of Time to resist the will of the hordes who rush into the lap of exploiters and into the arms of illusory benefactors? Would it not be kinder, much kinder, of Time to assist the growing tide of refugees to draw closer to their innermost conscience, to resist the cheap and the tawdry, to resist the ruthless calculation, the ruthless, the unprincipled?’
‘Time yields,’ said Ghost so softly I could scarcely hear (I held my resurrected ear now to the deck of the Faustian bridge to catch the true and bitter voice of hollow self, the true and bitter response to hollow self) ‘because it is endemic part and parcel of the fodder of generations. Time is not love, divine love. Time is a character of universality incorrigibly stained by partial, biased and cruel forces. Because of its partiality its biases are susceptible to excavation and to the true action of redemptive love, redemptive wholeness. But that is another matter. A matter for the creative and aroused conscience within the graves of history. In regard to your immediate question that bears on the logic of time, Time as an answering device, a speaking device, a machine in the chaotic soul, Time (note I sometimes spell it with a common t, sometimes a capital T) is but a measure of partial events.
‘Look! Look into the swamp of the centuries within your own book that is stained by invisible creek water, invisible river water, invisible pork-knocker barrels, pork-knocker ships; just look! What do you see?’
Before I could answer — as if I were an answering clock — Ghost continued: ‘You see when you scan closely your own death and the deaths of your mother and aunt (whose antecedents came into the magic wood from other continents) that the refugee count in the clock of the sea has moved from adventurers and slaves, from those who fled the sword and the fire, from those who stood on the auction block, into disrupted twentieth-century populations broken by famine or civil war; tyrannized by military regimes; deceived by politicians who rig the ballot when there are elections in the Third World.
‘Their lust for prosperity and their despair are such (and who amongst us can blame them?) that they turn from the brutalities of the sovereign state and the phoney placards of newfound independence and fall on their knees before the new El Dorados of the West.’
‘New El Dorados?’ I was sceptical. ‘There is growing unemployment. There is the rise of labour-saving devices, new clocks whose every tick manufactures redundancy. And this is Skull. It is the archetypal Colony in the magic wood. It stands in or over a swamp.’
‘The archetypal Colony may seem remote from the West but it is an extension of the West. The refugees will come. Indeed they have never ceased to come, sometimes as a trickle, sometimes as a wave. Look deep! Look deep into the heart of the swamp that stains every page of history. Look deep into the necessity to manufacture asylums for refugees, ghetto asylums, god knows what. Scrap a couple of rockets, a couple of nuclear bombs, half a dozen submarines and battleships, an extra penny or two on income tax, and heigho, Skull may be converted into a prosperous concentration camp.
‘Think of the prospect of cheap energy. Look deep, I say, into the swamp. Look deep into the cheap electric stars and the cheap electric suns reflected there in the mirror of coming technologies, coming at any price, any human price. Look into the brave new world. Look into the faeryland promise of Chernobyl. Time lifts its skirt like a radioactive whore.’
All my ancient and modern loathing or detestation of Ghost returned. ‘This is a joke, an obscene joke,’ I cried. ‘Face the facts. Don’t exaggerate. Chernobyl is a disaster complex in the Soviet Union. What has it got to do with the free West and the choices that lie before the electorates of the free West? Are you saying such choices are an illusion?’ I felt the shadow of terror in my resurrected body. ‘What bearing has faeryland on Skull?’
‘Hush-hush disaster, dateless day bearing,’ said Ghost. ‘When Communist Rome burns an empire of souls inhales its ash. But no one sees the fire or the brute faery at the extremities of our fingertips. So too when faeryland burns (and the absent body you wear and loathe and which you and I share, as a multi-faceted investiture with which to address and warn the world, looms into theatre) the building blocks of heaven are shaken by the storm. But no one sees or hears the earthquake — not even those who are experimenting with human souls. Skull, dear Robin Glass, is our coming asylum for the refugee spirit. Skull is the dateless day that Faust simulates. Skull is the transformation of the swamp of history into an electric paradise. Cheap energy is the opium of the masses, the new lotus.’