‘But freedom was present before time began,’ I cried.
‘That may be so,’ said the Virgin, ‘but we have come close — have we not? — to forfeiting such priorities in our misunderstandings of evolution. Evolution in its innermost unfathomable coherence within parallel universes is intangible. It serves hidden texts that we can never absolutely translate. Hidden priorities. Hidden beginnings prior to all beginnings. And these accumulate into a Jesting net that gathers up everything. The re-visionary truths of love, the re-visionary love of truth. Intangible as Breath.’
Breath
I am apprenticed to the Furies, apprenticed to Dread. How does one learn the complex arts and inter-related mysteries of the Furies across the ages yet see them in oneself and begin to turn them around by stages of incredible game into all-inclusive Love?
Francisco Bone
The Storm abated.
It seemed to arise within me all over again.
The relic of Storm within. It blew from some region within me that lay in a time before evolution was, in a time prior to evolution’s wasteland. How should a pilgrim such as myself, prone to bouts of amnesia in the wake of Jonestown, spell or paint or sculpt ‘wastelands’ or ‘gravelands’ and not make them excessively newsworthy in a violent age? Perhaps I should confess again to divergences built into numinous alphabets which witness to the unfathomable premises of creation. Is ‘wasteland’ a whisper of a nether world in THE WASTE LAND or in WASTE LAND, graveland in GRAVE LAND? Is ORACLE the heightened shout of brothel-oracle in Hollywood Limbo Land?
Evolution’s spectres are the pilgrims of time in Memory’s flesh, wasteland flesh, yes, surreal time prior to flesh, yes, graveland time prior to resurrections of consciousness, netherworlds, constellations, subjective time, objective time, post-subjectivity rooted in hypnotic objectivity, extremities of Breath, the breathlines infused into architectures of space in science and fiction and poetry and art.
Subjectivity is the comedy of intangible objectivity that ignites the stars into the ash of genesis, black holes, fuels the sun with greed for blood in ancient sacrifice.
On such altars of lust and catastrophe unimaginable Love is born for all creatures. And Evolution turns in its grave of space into the mystery of trial and judgement each and all must endure in Memory theatre.
Evolution becomes the resurrection of spectres to confront themselves, to indict themselves in bleak play, bleak but redemptive theatre, Memory’s head on one’s shoulders, limbs sculpted in ancient arts in one’s limbs, dismembered Prisoners, Gods, woven into one’s extinction through which — as if by another unsuspected Genesis of the Imagination — one accepts Dread and the gift of freedom to travel beyond the dice of Light in one’s Skeleton-twins, the flesh of Darkness in one’s Skeleton-twins, to travel beyond all wastelands and gravelands into ultimate transfigured Bone in the wilderness of space …
The Storm abated and I descended the stairway of subsiding waters to the floor of the Circus.
There I jested with my drowned Skeleton-twin who arose from the floor with sleight-of-Breath skill. I jested in a theatre of Breath, relic of Storm.
‘Fiery customer and performer you are,’ I said to him, ‘despite your drowned bones. You have changed. Two deaths! One in an ancient sea, one in the sawyers’ pit or grave in the land. We are ghosts of the sea and ghosts of the land in ancient and modern America. I am changed too. It’s this business of relics. They bring a borderline between the oceanic lightning of the mind and vestiges of unearthly Passion that retain a spark from the blaze. One is equipped to wear another Mask on one’s head and shoulders, a fiery Mask that cools.’
I tried to embrace him but he rejected me all over again. For a moment I dreamt that it was his Mask that I would come to wear in the near future. I touched the holes that had been driven into my neck and shoulders in Limbo Land in preparation for such a Mask. In his changed costume — drowned bones, sleight-of-Breath body — he acquired the air of an ancestor of mine, the air of lightning cooled Storm or Passion. He no longer breathed fire in arising from the sawyers’ pit and the sea.
He may have sensed what I was thinking for he said:
‘Not my Mask shall be placed upon you, Francisco. Yet to be intimate with my descent into hell may prove a necessary initiation into the angel’s Mask that shall possess you …’
‘Angel’s Mask?’
‘Wait and see,’ said my Skeleton-twin.
‘When we rode on the bicycle to Jonah’s house,’ I cried, ‘I wondered if you would grow flames and burn me, reduce me to a handful of ashes. But now I think I know better. We are twins, yes, but you are also an ancestor of the lightning mind secreted in graves of space and in Bone (universal kith and kinship Bone) when it flashes in the Sky. Before evolution’s dawn Bone flashed as a relic of Spirit in a Circus. Circus animals bounce back into lightning in the Sky. The mystery is Breath! There are different layers of Breath in the architectures of space. Imagine Circus stairways, Circus architectures, in the elements. Without peculiar rhythms of Breath one could not leap onto a frontier upon which every flashing relic of Spirit marks a crossing from pre-evolution to evolution’s wasteland. And beyond evolution’s wasteland to post-wasteland graves steeped in the dance and the resurrection of consciousness. One crosses the wasteland and descends into the grave. So many lightning relics descend into the grave! So many peoples, so many houses, so many dancers …’ I stopped.
‘Weigh Breath in dancing feet in the grave as they strive to leap into the resurrection. There’s a key in the Breath-body when one unlocks a door into the Cave of the Moon. There’s a key in the sawyers’ pit and the dark moonlight fleece on the stars of the nether world,’ said my Skeleton-twin.
‘Let me embrace you,’ I cried. ‘You understand …’
‘I understand nothing,’ said my Skeleton-twin self-mockingly. ‘I stand above and below. So I can teach you a thing or two about the dance.’ He eyed me coldly. A faint flare in the sockets of his eyes deposited a key into the tattooed inscription of Lazarus on my arm.
How could one tattoo the Breath-key of another upon one’s arm unless one invoked the cool lightning dance of wilderness space, night-dance that one’s flesh could bear, upon broken archetypal fabric that one shares with those to whom one is indebted, and who begin to take one into hidden architectures, the hidden lives, in the grave of the Circus?
One needs to weigh every trickster of the cradle and the grave that one embodies yet sees as a separate entity in composite epic.
Was the Skeleton-twin a sacred trickster? He was the shared Breath of a broken archetype, heaven and hell.
We set out into the Forest of the Circus and I recalled the route that I had taken with Mr Mageye and the huntsman Christ.
He kept me at arm’s length under the dark, tattooed inscriptions of the Forested Night. Skeleton-twin Lazarus! We walked on a frontier between pre-evolutionary darkness and evolutionary wasteland, a frontier that shone white with the Skeleton’s glowing body, a frontier on which my dancing feet and the Skeleton’s dancing feet were buried before they blazed afresh into primordial consciousness.
I now heard the surfing rasp of the sawyers’ blade in the ghostland of the grave, a wave of sound breaking on the coast of the mind, my eyes floated into that wave, I was in the wave, in the dance of the Skeleton, unable to embrace him, but in the wave, in the dance, of the dance …
The conversion of the ghost sawyers into architects of GRAVE LAND or the nether world into which I was descending took me wholly by surprise.