The key was in the lock as I danced and soon the glowing Skeleton and I had arrived.
Breath shone in the Sky. The sun of GRAVE LAND or the nether world was the Breath of fire.
I turned to my Skeleton-twin. ‘Is this the Land of the Dead? The dancing figures before us wear the masks of Maya peasants. I know of such murals in the city of Bonampak and elsewhere. Abandoned cities flooded with murals of the happy dead …’
I had stopped dancing but the field before me was alive with dancers in floating apparel as they encircled a mound. They danced in the field. They danced in open spaces. They danced past houses that were lodged it seemed in a net. Had they been lodged there, drawn up there, from a lake? The rasping surf of the blade struck my ears like waves breaking on the bank of a river, or coast, or shore.
‘It’s also called,’ said my Skeleton-twin, waving at the dancers, ‘the Paradise of the Rain God.’
‘Let’s join them and dance,’ I cried. ‘Let’s embrace them …’
‘A chasm exists between you and them.’
‘No chasm! They’re across a field, that’s all.’
I heard the rasping surf of the sawyers’ blade again like the sea. But there was no sea except for the cinematic sensation on the coast of the mind, in the field of the mind beside an invisible lake or river or ocean or sea.
‘There’s the rub,’ said my Skeleton-twin. ‘You see a field, you see dancers, you hear an ocean but nothing’s there. Is the field really there? They dance in elements upon a borderline between the wasteland and the post-wasteland theatre from which they seek to leap …’
‘But that’s wrong,’ I protested. ‘The borderline’s between pre-evolutionary darkness and evolution. Did you not say so yourself when we were arriving?’
‘The two borderlines look alike in GRAVE LAND. I am your twin now and your ancestor then in the past. Such is the comedy of relics of Spirit.’
‘How do we know the difference?’
‘Variations of Breath, the land that breathes, the water that breathes, are in the difference. Hard to define. For instance the sound of the sea in the sawyers’ blade indicates substance that is used to build houses. Houses of the invisible sea. Houses with walls of solid water. Paradise of the Rain God. The dancers in the field then have settled for a while. As you appeared to settle on your Virgin Ship. Their houses are filled with the joy of rain. The Paradise of the Rain God. I would say they are primordial folk myself. Pre-evolutionary folk.’
‘Who am I? What are you?’
My Skeleton-twin laughed.
‘It’s a good question, Francisco. You danced into GRAVE LAND on primordial feet. But in fact you are alive, you survived the holocaust,you possess — it is true — all the appearances of having died. But you belong to the living extremities of the WASTE LAND. You are almost in a post-wasteland grave. Almost in. Almost there. Not quite. That is why you are tattooed …’
‘And you?’ I cried. ‘Where do you belong?’
‘I am indisputably of the Circus. I fell into the pit and whilst you lived, whilst you grew flesh and I suffered in your place, I became a curious Skeletal animal of the WASTE LAND. I performed numerous tricks. Think of it this way. When I fell into the pit I left my inscription on your arm to remind you I was still there, I would arise, I walked in two worlds. GRAVE LAND. WASTE LAND.’
I could not help protesting. ‘It,’ I said, ‘the inscription or tattoo, was done at Deacon’s instigation. He took me to a specialist. It was a Jest, his assumption of himself as my orphaned, peasant father. We were of the same age. A game we played, Deacon and Jonah and I. I found myself with two fathers, a schoolboy rag, nothing more, but serious as hell in a land of orphans, and slaveowners, and conquistadores, and puritans. Jonah — my puritan schoolboy father — slept with an Animal Goddess, and Deacon anticipated sleeping with the Virgin of Port Mourant. For some unearthly reason he projected me into her, upon her, he placed his fallen angel’s Mask upon my head, the Mask of the Virgin’s husband and the Virgin’s son. He said my epic would redeem a relic.’
I stopped. Shattered by the revelation. Dream-book revelation that made me into a stranger to myself, a multi-faceted stranger, a vessel of masks suspended in past futures coming abreast of future pasts.
The pain of Memory theatre, of breaking trauma in the wake of the holocaust, was great.
My Skeleton-twin reached out and almost held me but he desisted. Profoundest sympathy or empathy perhaps within which lay a chasm. Close to each other yet subject to broken archetypes that we shared but could never absolutely mend.
‘Likewise myself, Francisco‚’ he said at last. ‘I descended into the grave in your place. I anticipated the difficulty, the preternatural difficulty, immanence and transience combined, of your leaping up out of the grave to play your dual part, bridegroom-in-son, son-in-bridegroom, and beyond such duality intricate distinctions that would break a mould of incest within the mystery of freedom … Yes, I was aware of the immensity of the task. So I exercised my limbs as doubly supportive of you. In GRAVE LAND I suffered for you. In WASTE LAND I was close to you however apart from you. I created a chasm across which you would need to leap to fulfil your fate, to become free, to know love as you never dreamt to know it … Wait and see … A paradox of Breath-bodies I grant! You need, you see, to combine several keys into yourself. Wasteland key, post-wasteland key, primordial key. But the price you pay is the relinquishment of conquest! Your intercourse with Virgin Sorrowing space is the intangible but innermostly supportive embrace of many cultures living and dying upon the extremities of the WASTE LAND. So you see Francisco there are Deacon’s projections that you bear and relive as a survivor of the holocaust. Deacon did not survive in the extremities of the WASTE LAND as you do. There are Jonah’s projections that you bear and relive in ORACLE-Brothel. Jonah did not survive on the extremities of the WASTE LAND as you do. And there are my projections from within the grave and without the grave. I survived in a sense through you for whom I suffered and whom I assisted in the clothing of yourself with Flesh as you dance on the cradle and the grave of the globe. Wasteland extremity Flesh, evolution’s extremity Flesh, in the Circus of Mankind …’
Flickeringly changing expressions swept across the Skeleton’s Mask that my twin wore in the Carnival Circus of GRAVE LAND.
I swore I saw an expression of gravity. But as I scanned this it became a ripple of bones on his brow and across his high pointed cheeks like stricken sails in the Phallic tree. It may have been the Circus laughter of the relic of Storm within myself. My twin was known to ache with laughter. I attributed laughter to his fluid, however curiously rigid, flights of expression. But I may have been witnessing the genesis of some other nameless emotion. My Skeleton-twin caught the drift of my mood.
‘You see, don’t you Francisco, how mobile are other frontiers of emotion in GRAVE LAND? Am I sad, am I grave, am I smiling, am I mad, am I a fixture or a fluid personality of shadow and light? Do I sail with the turning globe, do I stand still? Am I susceptible to nameless emotions? Let me put in bluntly. Do I speak truths as clown, as trickster? All these borderlines between truth and trick!’
He paused on perceiving my bewilderment.
‘Consider the key to hell within the grave. Is hell GRAVE LAND’S truths, is GRAVE LAND hell’s truths? You and I entered by the sawyers’ pit. We speak of a door through the sawyers’ pit to which we possessed a key. But reflect! There was nothing in the sawyers’ pit but a rusting lantern, some skulls, a rusting saw, rusting bolts and nuts, sodden leaves, sodden ground. How real is the key of the Imagination?’