“There is, I know, an ineffectuality, no one can fathom, to material oppression that may illumine an individual’s life in a sudden moment, beyond expectation or control, and bring about a sense in him or her — his small life or hers — of unexpected kinship to the very kings or queens, to the greatest souls in time. That is the mystery of poverty. How does a mere straw, tossed on the rubbish heap of human waste, accumulate an intensity or new passion in creation, a brilliancy of surviving bodies within the most unpromising field of circumstance? Perhaps no one can say what everyone burns to say — I am the link between the apparently failed ones and the apparently great ones.”
It was this link between ineffectually or miscarriage and complex human greatness that drew Francis to mask himself in Leonard, in bed, in Eleanor’s arms; to suspend himself over her — upon her perfumed body — within her perfumed body that annihilated his senses until he became oblivious of whom or what he was. And this very obliviousness led to a character of supreme fiction, in limbo sex, as an animal’s or bird’s orientation, in limbo flight, appears mathematics of genius, though it is nothing more than supreme instinct.
“Is there an equation between supreme fiction and supreme instinct and both are marvels beyond logical categories of comprehension?
“Is there an equation between fallible lust and infallible divinity? Have the most virtuous gods, who came to maturity in the pressure of aeons, ascended from their terrestrial encampment, desert or jungle, to sow wild oats or stars, at the end or the beginning of worlds, as if to establish a canon of unfinished (half-defeated) humanity that resembles the mathematics of unfinished (half-defeated) deity?”
Eleanor knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Francis was aware of her as half-dormant, or unfinished creation, who had been lodged in the milky way by ironmonger statistics and consumer affections. Her infinite coarseness and thickness of soil drew him to rape her in the middle of the stars to which he had fled. And she dreamt in turn it lay with him perhaps to assuage — if not cure — the injustices and incompatibilities in her half-created state or kingdom. By assuagement she visualised an extension of herself surviving within the most cruel elements, surviving with him, or through him, into accumulative shadows of approximation to the resurrection of the self like creatures of matching instinct and supreme fiction who pass through fire.
“Abed-negro,” said Leonard (in whom Francis had masked himself). He sat up in bed with a flippant command or prayer on his lips and admired the black spirit of his painted body, decked out like a savage, in the flame of the mirror in Harlequin’s bedroom. “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. The great ones, the kings of fire. I have often marvelled at my admission to such a citizenship, to such a state of survival. I am wholly undeserving….” He still seemed flippant but, in fact, an incredible tenderness lay between him and the young woman at his side who feared for her own flesh and sanity in ironmonger statistics and consumer affections.
*
The ladder of fate drifted out of the room (as Francis unmasked himself) into the street beneath St John’s spire.
The sun stood overhead upon a subtle pillow of cloud suffused with whiteness. Across the blanket of the road, in a square of garden, the filtered light seemed curiously solid with each precipitation of paint. Dancers were poised on the steep ladder of the senses and non-senses, twig, branch, centaur tree, bound to a moment’s bridle of enchantment. Bound to a silver climax, the clock of space that troops into each minute in masked houses, bodies and appearances.
Perhaps each brick or beam that dances in the sun ages into a young lamp, pregnant with fossil resources and glories, with which to light one’s way into the coming of electricity before it had been dreamt into nights of existence.
It was this coming of miraculous translations of a motivated creator of terrifying universes into kings and queens in fire (in drought and ice) that gripped Francis, as he glanced back to Eleanor’s window and sensed a climacteric vision, relating to intuitive bodies of the imagination based on concrete, apparently common-or-garden, affairs and events. The coming of expeditions of rescue within cavalry seasons and elements, within precipitate fires and floods, upon racecourses of history buried in time, translations of intensities of odds pitted against the foodbearing/ love-making spirit as it auctioned its wares of dread and beauty, its memorials of incredible survival, unceasing marvel and fear….
They descended Ladbroke Grove, turned into Westbourne Park Road where the first intimations resided of the thronged river of a painted market and place of auctions. Some of the houses were already dressed like stalls with gaily-painted doors and the sudden sparkle of flowers on a miniature deck of a balcony overhead.
Then suddenly they were in the flood of the market itself that seethed by degrees along the reduced pathway of the road between a variety of stalls.
ORANGES, BANANAS, APPLES, PEARS, FISH, GREENS, EGGS.
ANTIQUE COMPASSES AND CLOCKS.
EXOTIC CANDLES, JEWELLERY, MAPS, MERMAIDS AND MERMEN.
BRACELETS, EARRINGS, RIDING BOOTS, JEANS.
BOOKS, PRINTS, SHELLS, CANNONBALLS, CRADLES.
The pathway of the street was crowded with a carnival of spectators who slipped in and out of currencies of deaths and lives, of masks and appearances, in and out of the foodbearing tree of the sun.
A mock auction was in progress at the stall of DAVID AND BATHSHEBA.
“One hundred thousand.”
“Two hundred thousand.”
Francis nodded. “Three hundred thousand.”
“Four hundred thousand.”
“Five hundred thousand.”
“Six hundred thousand.”
“Seven hundred thousand.” Francis nodded.
“Eight hundred thousand.”
“Nine hundred thousand.” Francis nodded as if he slept on the ladder of fate.
“One million. One million. One million. There. It’s yours sir. Your body of dreams.”
Francis drew up, into the translated page of his book in which the auction had been painted.
“A bargain, sir,” cried the auctioneer. “It’s Michelangelo’s David. Take this subtle wave”, he pointed to the anatomy of magical sculpture, “that climbs from a knotted turbulence, from the genital organs, the genital whirlpool held like a rose, such inimitable control.
“Note the half-visible, half-invisible, ripples that ascend the body, break at the chest, create a dispersal of momentum, ascend again and deepen into a vortex at the human neck before it rises into the glance of a god’s head and into a turbulence of hair that matches the implicit rose or whirlpool from which it commenced. Rose of the sea. Rose of midnight.
“Note also”, he continued in the logic of translated page and dream, “how the right arm is held parallel to the right side of the body. The hand folds in at last against the thigh and leaves a long inland sea of space between arm and side that matches the triangle that runs down from the genital whirlpool.
“Note also how the left arm folds over from the elbow to the shoulder and is held out from the body so that another spatial tide rises there and floods out again to match an inlet formed by the head and the neck above the left hand as it approaches the left shoulder.
“On the face of it it’s a naked body enclosing seas and enclosed by a sea. But, in actual fact, no naked creature is like this. He stands in a flood that is higher than a flood and lives.”
The auction of fate slipped further along the narrow sea of the market. Da Silva was the auctioneer of translated elements, translated bodies, translated ghosts and humours of fire, air, earth, water, humours of cosmos, tenants of cosmos.