The judge sat in a box-like Chair with great extended wings on which to rest his arms. And I remembered the lightning Bird of the Macusis, the dancing Bird I had shot down with Canaima’s knife on the first bank of the river of space. How curious are the emblems that mark the fallen species, the unconscious species, the complex slaughter of a beast or a bird or a dancing angel in the animal enthronement of the law, the majesty of the law, the occasional lapse or parole of a monster!
Does the judge see an emblematic beast and is filled with uncanny compassion, or uncanny lust, when he grants parole to a monster? Does he see a fiery angel within the mutual unconscious of hunted species, mutual Sleep, the judge’s sleep (on one hand), and the unconscious of a tilted bone in a wing of space (on the other), bone-bottle in my Dream of wine, bone-sex in his courtroom of love within the famished lips of a Rose?
Yes, I remembered how Rose had listened to drunken Proteus, had accepted his plea for my life, as if he were a judge who desired that I should be set free. I remembered the monstrous Horse on which Rose would have taken me. I saw its majesty in a new and native light now: I saw the prospect of an incarnation of species I was unable to grasp or bear — though it was native to me — and from which Proteus dislodged me in the nick of time to live, to contemplate the mystery of the law in every lived life, however extreme.
Had not Ulysses’s gift of the law to his cousin Aeneas taken the extreme form of a monstrous and pregnant Horse in advance of its time, in advance of the Incarnation of species that civilization was unable to sustain or bear except in the conflagration of war between gods (masquerading as men) and men seeking the art of the divine as a token of grace beyond their comprehension?
‘The animal Home of the law, throne of the law, sustains emblematic compassion, emblematic lust and the emblematic wound that mirrors all hunted creatures. It sustains heartbreak and the chemistry of the animalesque and the divine. Speak the truths of that heart-breaking, heart-changing chemistry, that unresolved chemistry, Anselm, and you approach the mystery of the Incarnation. God will hear your prayers.’
I was filled with awe at such unpredictable association and colour to the law. And yet the very frailty of the judge, his lightness, his capacity for metamorphosis, the paradoxes he revealed within transparencies of the unconscious that cloaked him — that made him into my object as well as my subject — his attachment to someone as marginal or extreme as me, gave me courage to cling to the edges of fused yet broken civilizations. Perhaps he was a creature of labyrinthine jest but all at once he was near and dear to me. In him I saw a sponge of the absurdities yet truths of the Incarnation of the law. He dripped the wine of curiosity into my mouth as I stared at him, the risks that arose from a measure of addiction to the highest form of ecstasy and hope, communion with what could prove a misconception, a misinterpretation, in identifying deity with an animal frame.
But as I drank I saw as well the necessity to endure the wine and the jest, to endure the risks, to disabuse myself of the sensation that I or anyone possessed the sacred in a solid bubble. I saw the necessity to persist in a dialogue with every spark of divine administration of justice in all masquerades however apparently unprepossessing …
‘Your Chair,’ I cried, ‘possesses an ancient savage lineage that drips lightning. Your Chair is symbolic of the incarnation of a drunken storm, the incarnation of lightning. You and the chair together become celebratory flesh on bone in animate wood as the lightning wires lip to heart. The spiritualization of bottled wood, the spiritualization of bottled wing and feather in one’s carnival thirst for the angel of the divine. Lightning strikes the wings of the Macusi Bird and your Chair floats in the Sky. ‘Look!’ I cried, ‘it is there among my charts and diagrams of god-rock, there on the table of the feast, the savage feast before you. Lightning strikes and illumines a winged stairway from sky to earth as the Chair and the table tilt into an abstract diagram and a Bird. See how the wings become a lightning arc or miracle-chalk upon a blackboard. Outspread drunken wings tilt between sky and earth, fold, stretch out again into the spiritualization of wood that is carven into the arms and wings of your Chair.’
Sobriety is always a shock, the sobriety of an individual visionary who faces the passion of faith, the sobriety of the state which turns at last to face itself, the sobriety of a world that has suffered many crises, the sobriety of a saint, or an artist, or a sinner, who suddenly sees in a wounded Bird that falls from the sky, in the lightning of a storm, in paint or ink or chalk or wood that has been sculpted, cut, chiselled, visualized in its grain, grained tree (all these and more), an infinite equation with the Incarnation of the law.
Sobriety, true sobriety, is an awareness of the edges of the chasm in the mind of order, the mind of the incarnate law (how priceless is such visionary understanding of mind and order). Order means risk. Order is a glimpse of the risks to all creatures inherent in creation. Creation is a storehouse of terrifying energies that imply risk. And the law incarnates itself within a chasm of risk as it broods in the storm upon every frail messenger of being that climbs or falls.
The courtroom was still, so still I almost forgot where I was, what I was saying.
‘Every theatre of judgement and trial is a theatre of Dream in its exposure of the language of order that pierces our mind to instil us with orchestrated varieties of the partial translation of sleeping hunger and waking thirst. As the Bird falls it incorporates that chasm of pierced consciousness into itself and revolves into a constellation that is neither pure hunger nor pure thirst.’
I clung as before to the edges of the chasm until hunger and thirst released the apparition of daemons glistening on the wings of the law, one on each wing. They were nameless and I could only identify them from memories of the environment of my childhood. My uncle’s abstention from food (his kind of order) on his alcoholic rounds and drinking bouts had invoked the morality of the creative fast within me as I grew up. Creative fast was one daemon of order upon one of the wings of the law. My father’s obsession with women — with the taste and colour and beauty of women — had reduced him to a shell (a shell of grief, a shell of innermost contrition) within which one hears the murmur of a Voice from an ocean of storm: passion’s peace at the heart of the storm. Passion’s peace was the other daemon of order on the other wing of the law.
And those daemons now turned into an intricate capacity for order and balance within the terror of lightning creation and storm, lightning art, as they stood or rested on the wings of a falling Bird in the judge’s Chair.
‘How strange,’ I replied, ‘that the daemons on the wings of the law, the daemons of order, are as familiar to me as the moral legacies I have drawn from my kith and kin.’