There were footsteps in the street below that seemed to whisper like lips of leather upon the soil. They rose to the walls of the cell with a faint, sinister momentum. They seemed to declare that the Prisoner had challenged me to become a seer, a journeyman, a prophet steeped in inventions of time, Eclipses, Bags, Nets, Nemesis, Fate.
Curious how the traffic of an age runs in one’s blood with intimations of past and coming events, footsteps in the Nether World, unearthly ruins, collapsing, sighing walls and cities, a Wheel in space.
The Prisoner’s life was in danger, the Old God was in danger.
I knew for I had returned from the future to the past. So I brought within me from later decades knowledge of events in 1954 associated with the wedding of Deacon and Marie. But rack my mind now as I did, a blank fell out.
Had I forgotten in the light of a wholly new element and pact that I knew — though I was uncertain how I knew — was looming between the Prisoner, Deacon and me? It evoked the pact between Jonah, Deacon and me but it was profoundly different.
Whereas the pact with Jonah signified catastrophe — and this I remembered — the new pact planted in the past, the new shape to time within the past (in this revisitation from the future) signified a mathematic of decapitation in the re-shouldering of past and future in my body, upon my body, through Deacon’s absent body, and through the Prisoner’s potential sacrifice of his body.
Mr Mageye had promised me that we would build Memory theatre. And now I began to see glimmeringly that Memory theatre is rooted in events one knows to have occurred even as it breaks the Void that imprisons one to create new pacts within lapses of memory within oneself when one revisits the past. Such strange lapses — that seem deeper than mere common-or-garden lapses — are motivated perhaps by a mystical crumbling of the Void … I was unsure. I could not truly say …
I crossed to the window and looked down from the cell into the street. Looked down a dream-ladder in the anatomy of the cellular body of the Void that I shared with the Prisoner even as it seemed to crumble … I remembered Bonampak. I remembered Jacob’s ladder. I shuddered with the sensation that my bones walked in air with God’s …
The dancing, ominous footsteps ceased, no one could be plainly seen in the street but Carnival Lord Death.
He was staring up at the window as if he had become a transparent reservoir of subconscious/unconscious dis-memberment costumery and re-memberment masquerade within the Grave and the Body of Carnival.
The footsteps had ceased as if the walking dead were more cunning than one realized. They were here for Marie’s and Deacon’s wedding. Did I hear Marie’s now, Marie’s footsteps approaching mine, though I had not moved an inch in the Prisoner’s cell from the moment I came to the window?
How sensitive is the mind to read a walking epitaph and a walking marriage-bed and a walking cradle in the footsteps of humanity, ghostly humanity, bodiless humanity, bodily humanity?
All were tokens of dis-memberment and re-memberment in the air of the Void, the uncertainty of the crumbling of the Void.
Of one thing I was sure. There was danger everywhere. There was hypocrisy everywhere. There was injustice everywhere. Fiction was truth. Fact was polished and manufactured into lies. I trembled. I was a Jester of pasts and futures in the present moment. I was a Jester of chaos, I was susceptible to a transference of masks with giants of chaos, masks to be inserted within and upon familiar and unfamiliar footsteps. But I trembled. I trembled at the prospect of the wedding (Marie’s and Deacon’s). I trembled at the consummation of their union in the Void. This much I knew and remembered. I clung to the notion that my return into the past from the future was a phenomenon of changed time, new time, a phenomenon of the Imagination steeped in creative purpose despite every old hedge or blanket of terror.
When one returns from the future into the past, and the past becomes once again the living present day or moment or year, one sees into the womb of time, the womb of Virgin comedy, as it adventures into intercourse with Fate and Dread inscribed into a bridegroom who lassoed the Horses and their riders on the Moon and who is claimed by them now as their leader, their hero promising salvation … Did I remember all this or had it been inserted into Memory theatre as a new invention however rooted in past time?
Why should Time choose poor Virgin peasant Marie to marry the ruthless angel Deacon? Did one need to assess and reassess the mystery of Fate and Dread in new fictions of reality if one were to break moulds of complacency in the Void? Did Time seek to pour cold water on eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century portraits of the family? Fate and Dread are banished from such portraits in favour of a comedy of manners as the tincture or costumery of the moral family.
The Void is converted into currency — comedy of manners currency — with which to purchase the furniture of an age carpentered from felled trees and forests or spun from the fur, or the horns, or the hide of extinct species, extinct flesh-and-blood.
‘A dash of cold water in one’s eyes in the tears of Paradise, the Paradise of the Rain God,’ said the Prisoner, ‘unfreezes Memory’s hollow currency as Fate and Dread revive to wed Virgin Marie of Port Mourant. Portrait of the Moral Family — in the novels of the past three hundred years which you were conditioned to read at college, Francisco — cannot sustain brides and bridegrooms now who have inherited the Voidand the crumbling prospect of the Void. You see now, don’t you, why I fear for myself and for my daughter?
‘Let me tell you, Francisco — in the shape of the pact that you and I share with absent Deacon in this revisitation of past time — that I desire the crumbling of the Void — yes, I do — but one is not spared from scanning the Void (even as one desires a change) for the Void is in the ascendancy everywhere still masked by varieties of diplomacy in markets of culture. The dangers then that one continues to face in a cruel and hypocritical age cannot be underestimated.’
He was standing in the middle of the cell behind me, as he spoke, even as Carnival Lord Death stood below in the street.
They (the Prisoner and Carnival Lord Death) were still, all of a sudden, as if they had become eighteenth-century pieces of furniture in Church and State. A Jest of God. The cell and the street became an altar and an aisle. It was an odd apparition to flash into one’s mind. But then I remembered. Jonah had favoured such furniture and architecture in his Church in Jonestown.
The Prisoner was bent as if in pain under a sensation — it seemed to me — of a coming blow.
Carnival Lord Death looked like a clothes-horse in the aisle of the Church or the street. He too was motionless. But the garments on his back appeared to brood in carven suspension as if they could be worn or discarded at a moment’s notice in the prosecution of family rituals and celebrations.
But then suddenly, and equally surprisingly, these flesh-and-blood furnitures began to breathe in a theatre of Dread. Dread imbued them with life to oppose a system of values that burdened them with picturesque inanimation.
The Prisoner seemed to know that there was a price to the blow that he would receive in himself as an altar in humanity. Inanimation would break into genuine intercourse with Fate. He would appoint me to respond to the mystery of Fate, the trial of Fate. I saw it in his eyes as they sought to affirm the fatherhood of the Virgin. Do Prisoner-Gods pray to men to respond to a wholly different family of Being in creation?
When one returns to the past from the future, one finds that the theatre of Money in the carpentered or sculpted Prisoner above or in the altar, in the robes upon the back of aisled Lord Death, changes in emotional subtlety and passion and immediacy. The Prisoner’s sacrifice cannot be measured in realistic or comedy-of-manners coin. Yet a price, involving an enormity of innermost change in all institutions, has to be paid for the gift of freedom, when Gods sentence themselves to death and pray to men to evaluate their gift …