At last she arose from her chair draped in the Shadow of Mr Mageye’s Camera. I dared not feast my eyes upon her terrible, childlike loveliness.
I seemed to gaze upon her within the fragmentation of my own composite, epic body. She approached the framed cherry tree in the kingdom of the Golden Man of El Dorado. She moved upon the Utopian Bridge into that ruined kingdom. The tree was wounded, her Apparition was wounded, her eyes were wounded, the numinous child in the cradle that I could not see was held by her to her breast in the game that she played with the Gods in her nursery in El Dorado.
I could not bear to look but I saw it all nevertheless through Mr Mageye’s fragmented Camera with its ancient, futuristic lenses.
She moved in her apparitional, royal nursery to another tree.
This resembled the ornamental branches in a Japanese garden. I swore now that I saw Prisoner-Gods, Prisoners of War hanging from it. Were they weak, were they mutilated? They held the Atom Bomb in their fingertips. At last she moved to the Christmas tree. She placed the cradle of a sick God beneath it. Was it possessed all at once of the lineaments of the patients in the hospital?
I bowed my head still further but I could not rid myself of the Virgin’s eyes, the Virgin Princess’s childlike fiery eyes.
They burnt a hole into the Camera.
I had sailed in that hole into the vanished kingdom of El Dorado. I had sailed East, I had sailed West, I had sailed North, I had sailed South, to sight the Golden sick Man in a village hospital in Port Mourant.
‘Marie,’ I cried, ‘the king at your breasts whom you rock invisibly in your arms has left the stage and become a child in your arms, a child at your breasts. A sick king. A patient in this hospital. What a bridge across ages! If only I could tread upon it. So many bridges to cross. There he is! The Doctor is back. Your father is back. He does not perceive the game that you play. He thinks he is well. He leans over the patient with the dog resembling a lamb lapping milk. He does not see that you have pooled his reflection into the North and the South, into the East and the West, into a collective desire for gold everywhere, gold without pain. He does not see. Do I truly see? Do I truly understand? Let me lift him from your imaginary cradle and address him as the ghost of gold and medicine and science.
‘Doctor,’ I cried, ‘you are the Virgin’s son and father in this riddle of theatre. She sees you playing many parts, she sees me playing many parts, she sees us with the eyes of uncrushed Spirit.
‘Doctor,’ I cried again, ‘you are blind, you need her eyes to see in this hospital. Her eyes are the fire of uncrushed spirit.’
I held up my left hand with its phantom fingers. They were possessed of music even as the Virgin’s childlike being was possessed of ancient wisdom. Had I not heard her speak in an impossible tongue that had long vanished from the face of the earth?
The Doctor turned his back on me and made his way off the stage. Was he displeased with his daughter? Words seemed pointless now against the displeasure of a God. To whom should I pray?
‘Pray to uncrushed Spirit in every newborn child with whom you share an apparently empty cradle,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Pray to the heart of the Wilderness. Pray in silence, pray to invisibility’s wounds. All wounds, all stigmata, carry a silent and invisible counterpoint in the orchestra of ages. Silence speaks nevertheless, invisibility surfaces nevertheless, through you into a community of selves. One knows yet does not know one’s wounds in all their range and particularity; yet they are stored in some private mystery or theatre of music that animates oneself to come abreast of deprivation and numbness in humanity across the ages. One sees it in some unforgettable moment or glimpse into the temple of the human body as much as in the forlorn possessions in Carnival Lord Death’s Limbo marketplace. One strikes an exquisite chord or lament in the orchestra of ages with absent fingers upon a piano in a pawnshop, or on a beach against a golden flood of hollow materialism, or on the wave of a desert. The apparently irredeemable structure and plot of a civilization breaks …’
I waited within what seemed the displeasure of God (or of the Doctor-God). And it dawned on me to my astonishment that my unspoken prayer to uncrushed Spirit had been answered within the net of the Virgin’s hair.
Marie — the nurse — in her oversize, slightly ridiculous uniform, had turned from El Dorado in Guyana to the patient with the dog. I turned myself to Mr Mageye in further astonishment — ‘Is it possible?’ I cried. ‘He holds a long strand of her hair in his hand. Not to employ as a lasso for the Horses on the Moon as Deacon did or as Alexander the Great may have desired to do when El Dorado was an empire. No — look Mr Mageye — he coils it into a net. Have I not glimpsed that net before? In Limbo Land! I remember. The huntsman and his dog! He saved my life.’ I stopped to consider the extremities of response to unspoken prayer in wilderness theatre, wilderness orchestra.
When music and unspoken prayer animate language, all proportionalities of being and non-being, genesis and history, are subject to a re-visionary focus.
The Wilderness comes into its own as extra-human territory which unsettles the hubris of a human-centred cosmos that has mired the globe since the Enlightenment.
The interrelationships between the sciences and the arts — that ancient humanity may have sought to nourish within its crises and difficulties — address diminutive survivors of holocausts (such as myself) all over again in new and startling ways.
I voiced these thoughts to console myself. I was bewildered by the sudden dawning light on the countenance of the sick patient in the Port Mourant hospital. He was arising from the floor now with the net in his hand. I was bewildered … How could I have seen that net before in Limbo Land — when he flung it around the Predator and saved my life — if he had suddenly acquired it now from the wilderness nest of the Virgin’s hair?
Was it the same net? Was it an old net? Was it a new net?
Such are the paradoxes of musical chords that compose a net in the language of fiction.
Was it possible that a deeply sprung chord of music is unique and untranslatable fiction and therefore both old and new? Was it possible that the strange density of the net — arising from the universal wilderness unconscious into the subconscious and the conscious — was of quantum linkage and differentiation and thus what was old was new, what was young was ancient, Virgin was child, child was ancient mother of humanity in the live fossil nursery of language?
I was so bewildered that I had no hesitation in setting forth my thoughts as if to plumb some tracery, however elusive, of the depths of unspoken prayer … I prayed to a disembodiment and an Apparition and an Abstraction that I felt I perceived in the sick man’s Christ-like face.
Why sickness? How sick was my projection of sickness, the archetype of sickness, into the huntsman in whose dawning light upon his face I dreamt I saw Christ? In such sickness I saw a dying age (though when that age would die, if ever, I did not know). Still it was implicitly dying and imbued with new elements of a re-visionary genesis of the hunt … The sickness of slaughter for slaughter’s sake was subtly evolving beyond fixtures of cruelty into a net to save me and hold the Predator at bay.
An enormous theme this was that I needed to ponder upon again and again and again.
‘Is it an insoluble net, Mr Mageye?’ I asked.
‘You must seek to understand,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘You must seek to visualize its tracery or traceries everywhere in Memory theatre. Remember, Francisco.’
‘I remember Limbo Land when I thought I would be crushed by the Predator but was saved by the huntsman. I did not see his face then even as I dream I see it now in a patient arising from a bed …’