Before pursuing the game the two boys played, I must stop for a moment to reflect. I was jolted, shocked by what I had felt and seen, by most painful inner revelation in the construction of Everyman Masters’ life (or lives and masks). Profoundest sorrow hit me. Did the hand one projects into games of fiction to help the child or master one portrays also serve to thwart? Did the hand with which one seeks to heal also destroy? It came as a shock to see the rag, to see Thomas’s cousinly hand so raised in the game it seemed bent on proving the resurrection of the child El Dorado from slain gold. It was a hand that appeared to sift — I reflected again — a cruel currency or enterprise of economic proof, economic crusade, across the ages. It was a hand in the process of evolving, I saw, into the shadow of past and future sacred/profane cannibal and assassin. And therein it revealed an essential paradox, I reflected again, within the nature of uncertainty, the uncertainty that seeks proof and needs to tear every rag, re-open every wound, until it becomes fascinated by blood, old and new.
I am curiously glad, gentle reader, to pause and confess to all this, however bitter-tasting it is. For in so doing, so confessing, I begin to feel the obsessional neurosis of “proof” that haunts our civilization. In New Forest Carnival Thomas I perceived the seed of the saint and also of the involuntary assassin or revolutionary. I was shocked by this disclosure. It addressed me both subtly and powerfully within the labyrinth of innocence and guilt through which Masters was taking me. Masters himself was to be pursued all his life by visible and invisible giant hunters whose shadows lay everywhere in skeletons of the Inferno that adorn the gateways into the underworld and the overworld. I had seen myself the button of the fish on the foreshore, the nucleus of atomic giant.
What was strangest about the role of Doubting Thomas in the Carnival of New Forest was his proximity to giants, broken giants, uneasy giants, partially slain giants. He grieved over them (even when he thwarted them), served them through masks of sobriety and rage by sifting the currency of the estate of the world in order to prove the depth of the wounds inflicted on humanity. But that was not all. Thomas sought to prove … Prove what?
Prove the seed or bone of royal genesis; prove a game that started in childhood — mostly forgotten — hope; prove that royalty or glory (however contested) is other than mere fallacy or privilege, and the torn rag with which Everyman wrestles may actually still bind up the wounds of time …
Thus Thomas’s Carnival new world/old world masks were fraught with ambiguity, the ambiguity of the saint and the revolutionary manqué. I was unsure of Thomas, unsure of labels, but I loved him and felt his predicament inwardly and keenly. I knew I was ignorant of the inner problematic of sainthood as of the religious torment in touching a wound that may fertilize a Carnival bond with frustration, anguish, jealousy, violence, in subject cultures. He seemed to me as indispensable a guide through the Inferno of history as Masters himself was.
Even though buried in reflection, in past tenses and present tenses, I had not lost sight of the game on the beach. Thomas had relinquished the rag and was seeking to persuade the boy-king to abandon the game. But he insisted on going on. It had been a trifling cut, he said, pointing to the sharp bone on the beach.
I saw now that the bone was shaped like a knife from El Doradan Carnival.
“A seed sometimes cuts into the masked lip of a bird, the lip within the beak, as a bone cuts into the spirit of a child, the spirit within the flesh. But the axe, where is the shaman’s axe that slices and shapes the monument in the seed, the galaxy in the bone?”
He crawled on with the precocity of age and childhood, nine years old, nine centuries old, and came at last with Thomas in his shadow, in my shadow as well, falling from the sky with its wheel of lights, to the wild cherry tree that had been reduced to blackened limbs and stumps though I had seen it, or thought I had seen it, in all its original glory. This was the primal gateway into the underworld and overworld of the cosmos. The light that bathed it infused it, all at once, with the sensation that it grew downwards, that its roots were up here in space, its branches down there in the earth.
I looked around for the axe that had cut the tree, as the bone had cut the spirit of childhood into light-year bandaged ghost, and thought I discerned it far out upon the retreating tide when a glimmer of sun upon a wave transfigured the ocean into lilting, sighing, singing sharpness. That was the shaman’s axe! It was he (El Doradan shaman or space-priest) who had axed the tree a long time ago and sculpted from it El Dorado himself, El Dorado’s retinue, his court, his wives, his children, his huntsmen, his fishermen, his peers, his civil servants.
All had come alive under the subtle liquid blow of the axe, and I recalled Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea breathing all of a sudden under the chisel. So too had the wood, sliced from the cherry tree, turned to gold then to flesh-and-blood.
Were axe and chisel and bone the same liquid tool across parallel light years? I seemed to see it all save that the shadow of uncertain voice or lilt of the cosmos, in all carven broken things, persisted. Masters and his disciple had crawled on the beach, even as the axe sharpened the rhythm of the tide, and the chisel and the bone shone, but I wondered whether they were living sculpted being, whether — despite the fact that the cut or the slice of original shaman may have engendered freedom — a pattern of falsehood masked the truth to promote an automatic procession riveted in reflexes of fascination with violence, reflexes of false brutal axe, brutal greed, the greed of power, the greed of possession.
They stopped. Thomas crawled away into a sea-wood in pursuit of a colourful crab. Masters remained alone. I felt a shiver run through my veins as through his wound still bound with a rag. To crawl or to stop in mindless attachment to the instrument of power that fashions one’s nerves is to appear to live in freedom, yet not to live in freedom’s consciousness of the sorrow of pain in genesis, the slice, the cut, the blow that dis-members, yet may occasion one to re-member.
I felt divisions of sorrow within that blow, divisions of true shaman or creator and false shaman or manipulator of defeated cultures. I felt divisions of sorrow within a universal genius of love that seems at times in pawn to a universal seducer of humanity.
Yes, I had projected parallel fictions of “doubt” into space in shadow characterization (as though “space” were an entity to be sculpted like “wood” or “marble”), I had felt profoundest sorrow hit me, or reshape me, and I knew that the fiction of Memory (of re-membering, or reconstitution) lay in complex truths and falsehoods that could ape each other’s divisions within the unfinished stroke of genesis and creation.
The tree or stump of a gateway into the underworld and the overworld was a crucial rehearsal and alignment of truth and falsehood, and I felt myself now related to it as though through it; through its aerial roots and earthen branches I discerned a stranger, an intimate stranger, approaching young Masters. I have personified parallel existences of “doubt” in this spiritual biography. How should I personify Memory in an intimate stranger, Memory the male rather than the female persona at the heart of Carnival?
Ask young Masters why he suddenly ran from the man who approached him and invited him to go for a walk; he was tempted but he ran.
I say “ask” — ask the bandaged light-year ghost, ask him whether his fright may have been occasioned by rumours of a rapist on the prowl along the foreshore. I have checked a newspaper of the 1920s (the New Forest Argosy) and found several columns on a rapist that a child could have read. And indeed it would be easy to advance such an explanation for Masters’ fear of the stranger who addressed him. Equally easy it would be to say that he had been warned by his parents and teachers. But the inner facts are different. I questioned him closely. He ran for “reasons” that were “irrational”; his flight was more eloquent than rumour or news, it spoke the language of the unconscious. He had received no caution — conventional caution — against strangers. He had read nothing in the New Forest Argosy.