The Fool laughed. Then grew sad. Sipped his coffee, shivering a little.
“I said bloody revolution. Do you accept that? Bloody unity. Do you accept that?”
“I accept that revolution is possible, barely possible, when we discern an element of conscience in the most implacable roles unity plays. The question is — how deep does that element lie, how frozen, how far in is it fallen?” The Fool spoke like a Fool to a post-midnight workman’s head.
“Fallen mate? Fucking where? Fallen into what and whom?” The workman spoke like a workman to a pre-dawn Fool’s midnight head.
“Into institutions,” said the Fool helplessly. “Into everything that models the shape of the world we live in, the kind of demands we make of each other and have been making for so long we can’t even remember when we started. Into the highest canvases, if you like, sculptures of the land. For if we are to move them, transform them in the slightest real way, we need to regress into them as sacrificed bodies into which a spark fell and still falls. Can’t you see?” The Fool spoke like a Fool to a post-midnight workman’s back turned now towards him. “Royal sacrificed body, presidential sacrificed body,” he said to that back as to a piece of leaden furniture. “We need to see from within the roles that are played by others in our name, and in the name of the nameless forgotten dead, the nameless forgotten living. Me. You. We need to regress into our most formidable and implacable rituals for they dress us up like mummified children at a fair …” The Idiot felt ashamed. Ashamed of the passion of his tongue or the passion of tongues as if they were two or more in his head. As though passion were born of elements carved high and low that one was ashamed to recall. Ashamed of self-contradiction, strangeness, hunger for beauty, hunger for faith … heaven … hell.
The fast of one’s tongue was an animal’s chain that pulled one to turn one’s back upon enemy or friend.
Not clockwork back nor clockwork cave alone. Not clockwork front nor clockwork womb alone. These yes. But other reflected chains as well. Such as toppling sensation, descent into self-mocking canvas, blind square of factory, blind square of revolution painted there on the workmen’s canvas, on a workman’s back as if it were Stone Emperor’s eloquent blood.
Descent by a spark. Factory cradle. Descent into a spark. Factory overall. “Which is a way of saying”, he translated the chains in his blood, “that I am implicated in a tension of bodily and bodiless pasts, tongues of darkness, tongues of light, unconfessed elements.” The Fool shivered.
“Take this,” said one of the workmen suddenly turning and throwing him an overcoat that smelt of grease and hell’s paint. The Idiot slipped into it, shivering still, as into another’s grave, Stone Emperor’s blood, bullet-ridden workman. The smell of vulgar death was in his nostrils. “No,” the overcoat said to him. “Not death, heroic strife. No, not death I say, a hero’s grave, yes death, brute death. Which is it?” The Idiot shivered to each sovereign bullet NO, YES. “Yes, No” hit him in the spine. “Revolution Square, Heretic Square” echoed along his spine.
“Whose coat … death do I wear?” It was an unanswerable question that left him drained, stubborn, shrouded by immortal indifference of ruling back, half violated comradeship of subject heart. Half aware of himself in another’s sceptical grave, sceptical of ready-made answers, ready-made resurrections, Atlas pit, bullet in his back. Cloaked on all sides by the fast of the sun, bullet-ridden workman, Unknown Warrior and Workman King — two silent tongues in his head forever “No, Yes”—one loud command in his heart FIRE … ultimate buried fate … ultimate buried freedom …
All this encompassed the Fool and riddled him until all of a sudden he came to himself and remembered what he was here for. The woman. He had followed her across the city from Emperor Square through emperor death into this entanglement in sovereign hero, brute death in the overcoat of a dead workman whose name had long been forgotten at the heart of an insurrection. He had been shot when things got “out of hand”. And the Idiot was imbued afresh by the terror of banal lips, banal dialogue with earth as he sank into unwritten, unspoken reserves, codes, bodies, window dressing, overalls, bullets, factories …
Now anything — he prayed wordlessly — to move again from the bottom of the world, inch by inch, foot by foot towards her, by the skin of his teeth, cup, saucer, globe, sun, self-reversible monuments, languages, self-reversible wagons, coffee wagon outlined in its particular chasm of dawn.
“Christ,” he said as he rose out of the ground and addressed a bearded tramp, “where is she? Tell me please. Where is she?” It seemed to him he had risen out of the ground after a lifetime of conflict but in fact — sovereign fact — he had crossed from one subsistence wagon to another, one continent to another … INTERCHANGEABLE DREAMS OF SUBSISTENCE IN MOSAIC OF CITIES IN PLAY CHRIST AND THE FIRING SQUAD
Each step around the globe for the Fool subsisted upon unwritten reserves planted in the death of obscure men and women who were antecedent to the gods. As though the gods were born of antecedent silences, lost buried tongues that set up unfathomable necessities of unexpressed feeling upon which the Idiot subsisted — which drew him through them into unsuspected spaces that cried for a language, the language of creation, the language of the deaf, dumb, blind fallen who lay at the bottom of the world.
“Born of … born of …” said the Idiot. The tramp with the beard of the fire-eater was standing over him.
“You fell mate. Are you ill?”
“Ill? I am as well as ever.” He lay on the ground with his head upon an overcoat the fire-eater had bundled into a pillow.
“You were blazing away there to yourself the good news — born of woman. We all are, aren’t we mate?”
The sky was growing much lighter now and the Idiot realised he had made a journey through space — seas, skies, places — which seemed to condense itself now into a few paces he had just taken (before he fell) from one subsistence wagon to another.
“Born of woman,” the Fool repeated. “There is no way of fathoming in its entirety all that that means. The immensity of the quarry one pursues. The antecedents of obscurity out of which one has come. Where is she?”
The fire-eater dissected the Fool with his majestic eyes that seemed to look through the globe, dissected pigment by pigment, thread by thread, vein by vein. Dissected wrinkled child, wrinkled age built into the apparition of halo and wave that lay now at his feet.
It was on the edge of his lips to say like a terrible god, a terrible painter—“I have seen no one. You have no woman, no wife, no mother. Born of none.” But instead he lifted a mop with which he had been brushing the pavement under his awning. He squeezed it like a brush of sky dripping dew, dripping tears. “Ah yes,” he said. “She was dripping wet. The pool on the ground. She squeezed her dress as I do this sky …”
“Does one”, said the Idiot, “cross water or cross fire at the moment of birth … at the moment of death.?”
The fire-eater was painting the shape of a woman on the pavement around him, lost mother, lost woman across death by water, death by fire, unfathomable premises…. A fasting wave is as good a pillow as any on which to lie …
DATELESS DAYS (Eight and Nine)
Idiot Nameless’s companion days and nights drew him back into an impersonal past, into a multi-form diagram of savage resources of tradition and into autumn, winter, spring doors of preparation for flight.