I was in a quandary now. Yes, I was playing a part, a mere peasant role or part in Memory theatre. But it had become real. Not that I was possessed by a ghost. No, I was driven by the prayers of a ghost in my Dream-book. A mere book! Does it matter? Do fallen angels matter which pray to survivors of holocausts?
A curious transference of ghostly — sometimes aggressive, abusive — prayer had begun on the lips of Deacon far back in boyhood and childhood. It insinuated itself even into my jealous passion, my jealousy of him when he and Marie got married in 1954.
The events of that year were so stark I had suffered from lapses of memory. But on the Night of the Day of the Dead in Jonestown — when Deacon fell to his death under the Cave of the Moon — that prayer to me in him (in all its ribaldry and tragedy) had revived.
I was required by him to write a book in which Memory theatre would take me back across the years to revisit the scene of his wedding, to embrace Marie in Dreams, that were more real than broad daylight dream, to see through his blindness when he had forfeited a true intercourse between heaven and earth.
The Prisoner knew. The Prisoner knew how terrible freedom is when one is at liberty to re-imagine the past, to enter changed spatialities in the past that were more real than the real world; to do so with the permission of surrogate Gods and fallen angels and yet to suffer the inmost bite of moral conscience. Was it adultery — or sacramentalized adultery — to sleep with Marie when her dead husband in my Dream-bookwas still alive?I was reliving the year 1954 — however changed in shape and spatiality — and Deacon was alive then! I had taken his place in bed with her. I slept with her on the honeymoon night.
It was a Play of Fire, a Play of the oldest authority. It had happened in the Cave of the Moon and upon remote mountaintops where figures of ancient tradition sought to arrive in the future — even as I sought to re-enter the past — to bring news of a cellular chemistry of love (threading together re-visionary weddings of heaven and earth) which humanity had long forfeited until a Drought of Spirit presided. Fire had become an enemy. Rain was becoming an enemy. The elements were becoming enemies.
All this Deacon had seen — at the last moment — when he found himself perpetually falling to his death yet suspended above his death in a net that permitted him to communicate with me as if his voice, his multi-faceted shapes as bird and soul, had been salvaged to hang in space.
Deacon fell upon her with the wings of an Eagle. Each feather was silver-ash when I held her in my arms in his place. The silver fell away yet curled simultaneously into mutual passion within our bodies and flesh and skin. It was the ash and silver of Moon landscapes upon the Earth, scorched landscapes that glow against a black, winged sky. It was silver and gold feathers of the Eagle as he dipped his beak in fire. Marie strengthened the original seed of conception that the fallen, falling angel had planted.
As I held her in my arms I sought to evaluate Deacon’s blindness in my seeing intercourse without her, within her. Exterior body, interior body of the Virgin. But I knew I would need to see without always seeing, experience without always understanding, the cellular transferences of involuntary desire that brought misreadings into the masquerading features of love within ourselves that lay far back in the uncharted genesis and genius of imaginary time. I was but a minor apprentice of such ghosts and Gods and furies which were themselves major apprentices of an unfathomable Creator.
As I held Marie in my arms I knew — peasant bride though she was — that she was the daughter of science and of ancient art, the Virgin of modern science and of ancient tradition. Peasant widows, dressed as brides, had accompanied their ghost-husbands onto funeral pyres in ancient India. Modern India as well. They were to be seen again in the traffic of hell in modern Europe in World War Two. The tragedy of humanity — in its blindness, in its misreadings of the genius of fire — had become visible to Deacon, the perpetually falling angel, in his last suspended moments on earth.
Visible to him, yes, but the fact remained that he had been a ruthless hero, a tyrant, and I was still clothed in his blindness. Not entirely, for I had also inherited the suspension of death that he endured upon a rock beneath the Cave of the Moon. No wonder the ghost of Einstein — from whom fallen, falling angels draw some of their mathematical equations as engineers — had arrived in the Prisoner’s fiery cell through which I had come.
The riddle of celestial mathematics occupied my mind as Deacon fell upon Marie again and again in their honeymoon bed and I embraced her simultaneously. How was I to account for a strange lameness in Deacon with each successive fall upon his bride? Angelic potency should keep one perpetually whole, or uninjured, or beak-like in each encounter with fire.
I seized upon Deacon’s lame member. It gave me support as a mere mortal survivor still unequipped to die and yet not die, to fall and yet remain perpetually falling. I recalled my Lazarus-arm — as if it were indeed separable from my body — as I seized Deacon’s member.
The truth was — the mystical extensive wholeness of the Body that one tended to misread and misunderstand — that he had fallen upon her so continuously and wastefully and lustfully that a portion of Breath in his body and mine tended to edge into uncontrollable flame.
The member that he used in penetrating his bride tended to cut loose in the Void. Sex became senseless, predatory, the equipment of rapists. It became nothing but technology, technology in the conquest of love.
The conquest of Love was Death’s immortal ambition …
I glimpsed such hideous perversity as I seized Deacon’s member. I was filled with Dread but at least I knew what I was, where I was. I was visited then by a knowledge of technology’s deprivations in the human prison of love. I knew that love could easily become a mass-media technology and that freedom — so-called freedom — could conspire with a liberty to chain millions into the exhibitionism of their grossest appetites.
The fascinations of lameness in sexual encounters were legion. Especially in the light of the orphanage of angels, the orphanage of humanity by sundered generations, separated parentages. Thus one’s cousins, one’s unacknowledged or unknown brothers and sisters, were legion.
Hephaestus — the ancient Olympian God — was lame. He was the father of technology. He was Deacon’s cousin. They had fought shoulder to shoulder in wars in heaven prior to Deacon’s fall to Earth. He had armed Achilles — another of Deacon’s cousins — with a shield Carnival Lord Death would have envied. He deceived millions with promises of eternal peace inscribed into the shield: pastoral scenes, running brooks, sheep, lambs, grazing …
I had seen Hephaestus falling from Heaven on many an occasion when Deacon and I and Jonah had quarrelled in the construction of Jonestown.
And now I saw him again in my Dream-book as Deacon netted his bride again and again. A perverse net. A curiously impotent net. Not the huntsman’s net which had saved me from the Predator in Limbo Land! A jealous net. Was I jealous of him or was he (his ghost) jealous of me, though it was he who had urged me into bed with his wife?
Deacon, in his blindness, was shrewd enough nevertheless to seek to deceive Marie. He elevated her in bed into a tourist madonna who fancied Poverty as a realm inhabited by giants of sex. Anticipation was enough. Anticipation became a refuge in which the madonna waited, as it were, for the coming of her giant.
He adopted the walking stick of a Vulture in the shape of the prestigious giant Legba of Haiti.
Legba’s brand of exotic lameness had long secured a large constituency in the Caribbean and the American black South. He was a tourist attraction. Voodoo was a giant’s business.