‘How do you see my Dream-book, Mr Mageye? You are my magus-Camera Man, you transcribe my Dream-book into cinematic dress, into ghost-theatre — you are a ghost yourself — but I have no idea whether it’s simply a technological or cannibal appetite in ghosts, capitalism’s ghosts, when they swallow fictions indiscriminately; or whether there’s more, there’s freedom, there’s liberation for fiction in the Camera.’
Mr Mageye acquired his peculiar air of the Sphinx with which I was familiar. But this time a new element tended to emerge. I perceived an almost calculated look of interwoven spectres upon him as he placed his hand upon the Camera.
‘Who can say what may prove to be the role of the Camera in future ages?’
‘But yours is a futuristic Camera …’
‘Ancient visage of time as well, Francisco, in hidden chambers of the heart and mind where figures peer at us dressed as mystical astronauts. That’s in my Camera as well. Deacon would call it celestial mathematics.’
I was startled by the Jest which gave me food for thought as one glimpsed a rare temple of the human body …
Mr Mageye was smiling with a deceptive gravity, a kind of inner levitation of the imagination lifted his features as if his smile took him up into a laurel wreath above his grave in Albuoystown.
‘But to be serious,’ he continued, ‘the Camera is possessed of an organ that cannot — in all honesty — encompass all the textualities of your Dream-book. It measures its limits nevertheless — I speak now in purely technical terms — within those variable boundaries. It pictorializes concrete happenings but imbues these at the same time with far-reaching and meaningful hiatuses and gaps that speak for themselves. The tears that the Virgin weeps, for instance, in poor people’s hospitals become an eloquent pool of milk at which dogs lap and in which rich men and women swim. Eloquent pool! Not straightforward eloquence. Dogs lap, their teeth flash into famine-stricken multitudes that we harbour in our unconscious. Feed my sheep. Feed my dogs. Even as you gorge yourselves on sex. Do you recall the creation of loaves of bread and fish in the Gospels from scraps and crumbs? A multitude was fed. The wonders of mystical science and hungry spirit, hungry ghosts, that can take many shapes around us and in our bodies, shapes that breed excess, or shapes that address us within the gaps of self-centred technology.
‘A hiatus lives within all models of technology. A chasm exists. We tend to turn our backs on this within patterns of realism that we reinforce into absolutes. But the hunger of the spirit grows, the hunger of ghosts everywhere, and excess may turn by degrees into death-dealing prosperity …’
*
The Pool of Tears — into which I had dived — faded and I was back in the poor people’s hospital.
Marie was dressed in a nurse’s uniform. It was too large for her and her head rose above it with the eagerness and pathos of living, carven wood from an El Doradonne tree, wilderness flesh-and-blood child and twentieth-century peasant child. It was the custom or inbuilt tradition of the Golden Man or King of El Dorado to open doors in the oxygen bodies of trees (this was ancient El Doradonne Cinema) and to sculpt emerging Shadows into the retinue of his court, his civil servants, the members of his family, the labourers in the fields …
Marie was playing a princess of ancient El Dorado in a hospital play. The patients were enlivened by the sight of a nurse’s uniform as the robe of royalty.
I was overjoyed to see that her tears had ceased. The dog had lapped the milk and retreated to the side of his master who lay on the floor. The incongruity of the over-size uniform brought the occasion alive as though the princess’s large dress sheltered a multitude of workers who were kith and kin to royalty.
Such was the game of El Doradonne Cinema, ancient, modern synaesthesia.
There was a cradle on a table beside the chair in which Marie sat. The cradle was empty save for a beautiful toy, a wheeled chariot (each wheel one-eighth of an inch in diameter) within which lay a minute cherry from a flake of blood-wood in a Christmas tree.
‘The Wheel is the gift of my father to civilizations,’ said Marie.
I was invisible but a part of the Play and I spoke aloud from a corner of the hospital under the Shadow of Mr Mageye’s Camera.
‘El Dorado never possessed the Wheel or the Christmas tree. Labour was hard as nails. Bare hands pulled rocks and stones into pyramids.’
The Doctor-God arrived on the stage above Marie.
‘It’s true,’ he confirmed, ‘I am the ghost of an ancient medicine-king in olden times. My voice is scarcely heard nowadays. I am a king, a ruined king, yet I am worshipped in this hospital as a free spirit. Science is a free spirit. The Wheel remained a toy in my ancient kingdom. I never found the means to make it available to brutalized labourers. Indeed the labourers in El Dorado may well have been on another globe or planet. Cherries and Circuses were my promise to them, bountiful drugs and prescriptions and harvests and games to come. But alas the gap between heaven and hell continued to widen. Why this was so I could not tell. I knew there would be an uprising sooner or later. El Dorado was paradise on earth, it was heaven … War in heaven and upon earth! But I brushed this aside as rubbish. And even if it happened the cradle remained my enduring hope. It would fly through the air on hidden wings, hidden wheels. Yet I remembered I had reduced the cradle and the Wheel to a toy that the princess played with. I had never found the means to employ them differently. And future generations, it occurred to me, might do the same. Thus it was that I grew a blood-red Christmas tree in El Doradonne forests. Are not ghost-kings — such as myself — the true originators of Christmas? They appear in your Dream-book, Francisco, as magi of medicine, of law, and of the Camera. My dream now — which you may share in this hospital (I do not know) — is that medicine (the science of medicine) may extract the venom from brutalized species and brutalized labour through intercourse with the Scorpion Constellation. That venom would be converted into a serum or a medium of inoculation to achieve immunity to pain.’
I shook my head in fervent disagreement. But his eyes were upon the Princess Marie. Was I visible to him, to his X-ray eyes? A shudder ran through Marie’s frame. She clutched the cradle to her heart. No tears in this instance. Yet hollow tears of Beauty are sometimes the most heartrending of all.
I felt her anguish in myself. It was bitter as hell. I loved her with all my heart. No tears, in this instance, scalded my eyes. No tears, in this instance, were consistent with an inner, unconsumable fire in the wilderness Virgin, a fire one could understandably misconceive as hell. Not hell but a mirror reflecting uncrushed Spirit in the teeth of adversity. Uncrushed Spirit and hell sometimes seemed to walk hand in hand in the wilderness Virgin …
I sought to hide my eyes, and hers — as if they were wed together — in the Shadow of the Camera. Was this a heretical wedding? Had I taken Deacon’s place? A Dream. Nothing more.
One sees but is blinded in seeing …
‘Blinded less by Beauty than by what the apparition of Beauty begins to signify for the age in which you live, Francisco,’ I thought I heard the Virgin say. ‘Beauty can easily be framed by mass-media churches and states and cynical marketplaces. But when fire weeps yet does not seem to weep it breaks the frame. That breakage is misconceived as hell. For it plunges the world into mental anguish, it disrupts planetary hypocrisy, it disrupts the trade in commodities of framed Beauty, commodities of pigmentation that mask a void. God is dead! God is a Prisoner on Devil’s Isle. The truth is that the Apparition of Beauty within the hollow eyes of a child brings innermost fire that may sustain us to question all frames, all partialities, all literalities that we enshrine as absolutes …’