Either way he was destined to fall into apparently self-created seas and lands and skies as other cloaks of sacrificed existences.
And the process of that paradox — that fall — led him into a sense of being suspended in time, as in the dateless supernatural days of pre-Columbian Mexican calendar — pinned at the same time into his own numbers and diaries.
For it was as one suspended upon an incline of past and future that he settled into the final leg of his journey to Mexico and to Teotihuacán’s pyramid of the sun.
A log must learn to fly — to stand in mid-Atlantic between continents — between London, Paris, Madrid, Rome and New York to which Idiot Nameless flew in a crowded aeroplane in which he was lucky to make a step or two without bouncing into someone.
He had written to Sisters Rose and Maria whose address he had been given by Father Marsden’s porter.
A log must build, stand motionless in space, sound-conditioned log, cramped aeroplane, carved in the sky like a door into limbo or paradise.
He stood in a still and beautiful canvas of weather, cloud cities assembled on either hand. And when he looked down or through his door he caught a flash, a pinhead at most, that flared like a star in the vast wrinkled map of the sea.
Was it a dream of the evolution of conscience in a gigantic mirror filled with light at the base of the world, monk’s world, mother’s world, savage world, fire-eater’s world to create across cloaked distances the impression of a star, a terrestrial cradle, minuscule pyramid, towards which one fell by inaccessible motionless degrees?
Then again how beautiful, changelessly changing, were the radiant cities of the sky through his scarred door in their bands of colour, green transparencies, unfathomable oceans, blue beyond bluest marbles of smoke, indefinable presences of music to sound catastrophe … to sound suspensions of catastrophe …
He arrived in New York City saturated by the notion of a door through which to step into limbo or into paradise … to step into arcs of static refuse, static congestion …
The very ground on which he stood seemed to embody a visible node in invisible proportions of perpetual mission, perpetual fall into space, perpetual detritus.
Fallen city, ancient and modern, broken city, cities that wrestled in one’s consciousness with the enigma of capsules of relief from the sickness of man …
From a room in Manhattan he looked out across Greenwich Village towards Hudson River and felt, as he deposited overcoat and bag, that the drive from Kennedy Airport had passed for him like one already buried in the foundations of a sky city that had been lost for ever in passive reflections that raced, networks of cars and cloudy epitaphs, clouded crowded arms and legs within a dateless grave of suspended catastrophe …
He made his way back into the street as into encrusted epitaph, rain-cloud, congestion, through which he steered a path. Hailed a cloud-taxi …
Just before midnight, coming out of a theatre, he found himself after a while, ten minutes walk or so, in the vicinity of Rockefeller Cloud Center. He was, incredibly it seemed, alone. Alone on the ground, capped by an aloneness of sky. The crowd had thinned into a mere glow of souls, into a cigarette of consciousness, ghost and architect in that hollow lung or square, abandoned now by daily bundles of newspaper arms and legs, newspaper symphonies, that had fled or vanished into Long Island perhaps as midnight struck like a match in a clock. Hissing strokes. Funeral past and vulgar cradle.
Match. Lung. Clock. Bullet. Cigarette. Architect sky-god riddled by holes the Idiot thought as he looked up into his tunnel of night at an enigma of proportions.
For it was as if the very door he had dreamt that day into oceanic suspension in the sky in his aeroplane had opened again this instant into a tunnel arising from earth, starred nucleus of densities pinned to earth. Mother tunnel. Mother aloneness. Ancient door. Ancient pin. Mirror of dwarfed light across staggered distances with a flawed capacity to reflect up as well as down into a glimpsed abyss of ironies of self, congested, crude and yet in all of its facelessness, its tragic disfigurement, haunted by a mission of thwarted beauty at the base of the world.
If one opened that door, fell through it too rashly, too precipitately, too suddenly, congestion ruled on every hand and one was demolished, demoralised by silences as by crowds, by a conflict of internal emotions and external multitudes, seen/unseen as the malice of cities.
On the other hand if one came upon that door and perceived it as a vision of multi-layered, multi-form densities, one was apprised of an instinct towards astronomical privacy as the heart of god in dynamic suspension and circulation of spaces. Here. On earth … epitaph to lost radiances, lost fables, lost cities reflected in new bases and foundations … MRS. BLACK MARSDEN’S ROLE AND TWO PACES TOWARDS SISTERS MARIA AND ROSE
Sisters Maria and Rose lived close to Greenwich Village between Fifth Avenue and Sixth.
A tidy street the Idiot thought like a tidy beach on the edge of the creeping dilapidation of the Village. The houses were straitlaced perhaps but they possessed splendid vestiges of iron trellis-work that seemed in another light, as the street brightened and darkened, the branches of hardened trees invested with an air of waiting for something to happen. The coming of the sea if not the sky. Perhaps it was a reflection one saw in a window, a shadow and a light, a stranded tree. Long washed away, blown-away inmates …
The Fool read the slip of paper in his hand, checked the address at which he had arrived and knocked. Mrs. Black Marsden came to the door and led him into a glittering room, polished brasses, furniture.
He was astonished to learn that she was a Mrs. Marsden.
“Marsden? Any relation to Father Marsden?”
“My husband is Father Marsden’s brother.” She spoke as though she were testing him and testing herself, too, as if to confirm the half-playful, half-sinister unreality of reality.
“But I thought”, said the Idiot practising his own arts of the game, “that Father Marsden was an old, old man. Of course I didn’t see him the afternoon I was there. I spoke to a porter.”
The woman laughed. She seemed both natural and supernatural like a fine actress built into her part (capable of living her parts), self-possessed at the same time, curiously sceptical about dates and ages and about names too, names of peace, names of war, place-names, habits, conventions
“There is a forest of Marsden faces,” she explained, “buried everywhere, cousins and brothers I fear. Father Marsden and my husband Black Marsden are about the same age.”
“Black Marsden?” the Idiot looked astonished.
“There are several Black Marsdens,” she confessed with a trace of self-mockery. “It’s a complicated masquerade — complicated descent. It’s the source of many inspirations in the theatre, in poetry, in the novel. I am not sure why I am telling you all this.” She stopped but the Fool said nothing. Buried in his (or her) womb of thought. So that, as happens sometimes in the middle of a conversation, one is reborn to many hidden ties, hidden chains, mixed antecedents, rational/irrational dreams of freedom one glimpses in the faces of others as in oneself, contagious laughter, contagious absurdity, contagious youth, contagious age, contagious divinity. Contagious roles of man, contagious family of ghosts. Contagious theatre of absences and presences.
“I see,” he said a little awkwardly.
Mrs. Black Marsden laughed at him as at herself. The Fool laughed at her as at himself. Contagious laughter. Then they were sad for no clear reason at all, contagious sadness.
“As you may have gathered,” she confessed, “I am an actress. There you see a bundle of my costumes in a pile on that chair.” She pointed to a neat collection of garments and wigs in the room. “My husband is interested, you know, in family biographies. He thinks I should do something on Sister Rose — she is a great-aunt of mine. But I find I need to play the part of Rose before I may begin to write it down. We do have a small drama group which meets in this house. In fact we met this morning before you arrived. That is why I am so excited. I am not sure that I know why I am telling you all this but you seem so sympathetic …”