He laid out at least five hundred watches in the Limbo forest. He tied them to the branches of trees. He laid out earrings, women’s purses, and men’s linen shirts, men’s vests, short pants and long pants and baby clothes.
A curious business, a curious self-addictive satire, a curious mockery and self-mockery rooted in despair, it was that the grave-digger conducted in charting his evolution into millionaire Carnival Lord Death.
The robes on his back had been borrowed from the dead and the living. The baby clothes seemed dead baby clothes too small for the giant of Death. Who knows how small or large Death is? He possessed a scarf, on the other hand, around his neck that had been mine. I had wrapped it around my hand when blood oozed from the wound I received and left it on the bushes beside the Clearing. Nothing! I felt nothing at all when I lost two fingers from Deacon’s random bullet … Carnival Lord Death wore the bloodstained scarf now with style that was a wonderful gloss upon numbness.
What was bizarre and charismatic in his style was the strangely lifeless but majestic, ritualistic folds of his dress. He possessed the aplomb of an astronaut on the Moon in Limbo theatre.
This was fascinating stuff. Charismatic aplomb was in fashion. Tradition bouncing on surfaces but bereft of depth, Brain shorn of mind or philosophy, life shorn of unpredictable Spirit or originality.
The array of goods — far beyond the range I have described — confirmed his majestic skills as an entrepreneur par excellence of Limbo Land.
But there were other considerations and moral fables in Carnival Lord Death’s pitiless barter of the numb word, numb lips, numb ears and eyes for treasurers that he pulled from the pockets of the living and the dead, from their running feet, or reluctant hands, from their frames and bodies, to adorn his kingdom.
The quality of Justice! What sort of Justice did Carnival Lord Death administer? He was a just man: as just as any man could be in the Mask of Death. What are the foundations of Justice as the twentieth century draws to a close?
I looked around but there was no help from Mr Mageye in this instance. Carnival Lord Death loomed over me as I uttered a silent prayer, an unorthodox prayer that was more an awkward statement than a request for enlightenment.
‘To feel nothing,’ I dreamt inwardly, ‘except the possession of privileged immunity to famine or to hell, to feel nothing but a licence that is granted in Carnival jump-ups and crusades, in an age of the mechanical death of the soul, is justice. Justice is the tautology of the death of the soul. Justice is the prosecution of spare-parts methodologies, spare-parts bodies. Or so it seems everywhere. I know for mechanical ornamentation, buttocks and breasts and all, in pleasure palaces, is the structure of a wound that forgets it is a wound.
‘God forgive me (as I pray awkwardly) but I know. I was shot in Jonestown and lost all feeling in my hand. It became a tool, an insensible tool.
‘Perhaps Lord Death (you are in my prayer, for who knows what Carnival omens Death employs in an age of the death of the soul in the machine?) were you to permit me to reach up and unloose the scarf around your neck, feeling would invade my absent fingers at last which were blown like cigarette ends in the wind.
‘The scarf or noose is mine. That very rich scarf that you wear. Poor man’s, beggar man’s, thief’s, scarf of kings! It sings of soul’s blood and the genesis of pain all over again. It sings of an apparitional or phantom grasp of reality that may resurrect the elusive lineaments of the Soul.
‘And this brings me to the mystery of injustice that the Soul expresses in my wounds. To suffer injustice is to see the Soul within every small creature that cries out for pity against pitilessness. Can we fathom the enduring, insubstantial cry of pity? Pity’s sake can neither be bought nor sold. Compassion is beyond price.’
Another form of prayer it was that involved me not in a plea for justice but enduring, creative capacity to suffer the mystery of injustice if the Soul were to live, phenomenal fellow-feeling, despite predatory games and uniform insensibility to crisis …
I feared Carnival Lord Death but he appeared to acknowledge — in some recess of himself — the mystery of prayer and he returned the scarf to me.
‘You poor devil, Francisco‚’ he said, ‘if it gives you some comfort have the bloody scarf. It went well with my daring dress. I came upon the eighteenth attire I now wear in Jones’s house …’
I wanted to tell him that this too was mine. I had loaned it to Jones for a fancy dress occasion in Jonestown. It was a kind of heirloom or legacy that I had been given by my mother.
The travail for me in the grave-digger’s evolution into a capitalist and into Carnival Lord Death lay in the chasm it illumined between mechanical Justice and the extraordinary numinosity of Injustice and in every trial one is called upon to endure at the bar of time. How to come abreast of the past one believes one has forfeited or killed is more self-searching than knowledge of current affairs. For if one fails to come abreast of dead time (or what seems to be dead time) a Predator in the future will destroy us. And time past, the living texture and spirituality in time past, would have become too weak to stand at our side and assist us.
Limbo Justice involved an equation between numbness and immunity to hell. To be just then in Limbo Land was to serve one’s vested interests absolutely, whether pleasure or profit, to sublimate or suppress or eclipse one’s wounds in favour of strengthening a wall between oneself and the inferno that rules elsewhere in many dimensions of one’s age.
Injustice, on the other hand, bore on a coming abreast of wounds one has suffered in the past through which one knows pain in oneself and others, pain of mind that revives the Soul of Compassion beyond all machineries of the law of Death or of the state of embalmed institutions.
Without the mystery of Injustice — when one suffers with others to whom the world is unjust — the soul would vanish entirely and leave behind the mechanical futility of knowledge in the besieged Brain in the crumbling Body …
I had never meditated on morality in this light and I needed to emphasize and re-emphasize, rehearse and rehearse again, what I had learnt from my encounter with the capitalist Carnival Lord Death.
I needed a Dream-book that would take nothing for granted within the prayer I had attempted to address to an unfathomable Creator of worlds and universes. I needed to embrace ‘pity’s sake’ though such an embrace of the Word made me infinitely vulnerable.
I was now convinced that Limbo Land was a trap from which it was unlikely I would ever escape to view the open cities of Paradise. I had failed in building a new Rome in Jonestown’s web of abandoned and lost cities arching back into pre-Columbian mists of time.
All well and good to have escaped from the holocaust into Limbo Land but a variety of enormous and subtle dangers now encompassed me. Foremost amongst these was the menace of the Predator who lurked in the giant forests of Day and Night.
I was infinitely vulnerable. How could I withstand such a menace? In a sense I felt easier with the grave-digger now — when I ran into him in my wanderings after the Day of the Dead and prior to my arrival in Trinity Street — I accepted his new role (with the death of the conventional Church) as Lord Death. Perhaps he and I possessed a secret understanding about the omens of Carnival.
Nothing however could forfeit or erase the scent — the backwards, forwards scent — of the Predator. I knew I was hunted, pursued, or stalked in Limbo Land. Stalked as a commodity to be devoured by mighty institutions, great Banks, great systems that ransacked and devoured privacy: but such systems were but one feature in the unnameable menace of the Predator.