Perhaps the instinct to charge into sculptured solutions to the resurrection of man in the malaise of time came up against a conviction of other solid armies or orders within which lay buried, apparently forever, an imprint of frail imaginative stables of truth. And it was in this curiously lost battle, synonymous nevertheless with varieties of the overcoming of insensibility, that the procession wound its way to the hollow in which God lay under the tree of the sky and the sun. As it drew there, deposited its coffin, confronted its seed of unfathomable father/mother divinity, it began to turn by degrees and to scatter as the ceremony drew to a close, as if the processional charge in which it had been involved had been turned by another invisible hoofbeat, that echoed out of the earth into the loftiest columns of never-ceasing forested bier, never-ceasing forested cradle, extrapolated into the creations of space.
It was the vanity of all construction in the arts of space that seemed to strike at Julia on her return from her father’s graveside; and this bottomless perception pinpointed again — like an indescribable or minuscule horse and rider sounding the drumbeat of the sun — the nature of sorrow she had entertained earlier in the day. Pinpointed it within a majesty of proportions that made almost dazzling the fleetingness of the heart, the expedition of feeling into undreamt-of other worlds.
It seemed incredible that the majesty of the evolution of the universe possessed its grain or motivation, at certain cathedral levels, in nothing more substantial than a stranger fleeting stable of feeling, an inexplicable expedition, or just meeting with a Creator in whom and upon whom one appeared to be little more than a curious gatecrasher of space, within funeral processions of the gods, that adorned windows and ceilings.
Gatecrasher indeed. She stood at the window — as if painted into glass herself — and looked out along the cathedral road, the procession had taken, with the sense of being a stranger in her father’s house, her dead father’s house, the wealth of which she would inherit.
At any moment perhaps the hoofbeat would sound and her retreat around the globe would commence, her great-aunt’s stick like the comedy of elderly cavalry, a kindly but insistent shoe or brush (in da Silva’s hand) upon the canvases of the world.
The time was at hand when she would leave and never return to Zemi. Was it indeed a retreat, a rout at her father’s grave? Had she gatecrashed into her own house, in the very beginning, her own wealth, in the very beginning? Did the tears that fell gatecrash on her breasts to rain on the ground?
It was time to remember the construction of the gate, the construction of the rain, the construction of the soil, through and upon which she moved with seeing and unseeing eyes as a stranger in the house of the gods, the house of father-deity, the house of mother-deity.
Earlier in the afternoon, when the mourners began to gather, Julia had had a glimpse of a figure standing beside the nondescript Zemi Chronicle reporter at the gate of her father’s house. As though to support him, to give him an unfathomable dimension, myth that lurks in every man’s heart to which he subconsciously confesses.
She was struck by the dark confessional beard of self within self that cloaked half his face and fell upon his chest to highlight a chalk-white quality of brow and skin; and in a flash she conjured up through him an ironic tabula rasa construction, a blackboard mirror in which a hidden combination of features appeared in counterpoint to the rose on her father’s bier.
“Who is he — that man?” She turned to one of her father’s secretaries pointing.
“He’s a Doctor Black Marsden, an archaeologist, he came to see your father a few days ago, the day before he died.”
“What a strange look he has about him, almost like some devilish monk. And the other, the young man who almost appears to lean on him?”
“Oh, he’s a reporter from one of the newspapers. His name is Francis Leonard Harlequin Rigby.”
“What a curious pair — the monk and the clown.”
Julia was distracted by the entry of a maid into the room and when she turned back to the window Black Marsden had vanished. Only Da Silva da Silva endured, in the nondescript apparitional skin of the young reporter he had painted into his canvases until it stuck to him closer than reality. Perhaps it was an inescapable fiction or costume of possession, in the translation of other lives and letters and books, in which he was involved, as if he became the “soul” of past and present times in everliving presence or renascence of the arts.
Now, in the late afternoon after the funeral, standing alone at the very window and looking out to the gate that led to the cathedral road of Zemi, she recalled the vanished archaeologist as if his presence typified, in part, the condition of man standing between costumes of heaven and earth as gatecrasher (mirrorcrasher) into soils, souls, minerals, animals, and other nameless elements.
This was her condition too, her emotional condition, and she felt it acutely as the scenes of the funeral flooded into her mind — the trench of the grave, the sky of the grave — like images devoid of reflection, as if she herself, in her trespass into the mirror of the elements, began to absorb the prime quality of archaeological sorrow created in the void of herself — within the glass of herself — in the death or absence of her father. It was as if she were already married to Francis (and to posterity in da Silva) as she mourned like a superb unconscious actress, unselfconscious queen of an actress, in the irrational/rational drama of death-in-life, birth-in-life.
Thus an immateriality or non-reflected pressure became an aspect or gate of enduring emotion, in metamorphoses of created and re-created and uncreated populations, back into the past and into bodies of the future.
Take the population of faces of the women who had been her father’s mistresses after her mother’s death. They had all come to the funeral (or so it seemed as she scanned the features in the crowd). Nondescript faces of women she recalled from the age of five or six. Masked gate of creation stained by varieties and pigmentations of soils. Masked stick of creation on which a young girl could lean dressed up for a ball. Elderly cavalry on which young men and old could ride dressed to death. They seemed quite old, old as her great-aunt, but there were young women there as well, the youngest was barely twenty in whose bed her father had died….
Long after, in one of her letters to Francis, she was to link them, these ancient women, these young women (grandmothers and granddaughters in god’s mistresses), with the nondescript young reporter at the gate, the disguised face of a future (or futures) that would caress her, indict her, console her, quarrel with her, censor her, care for her, in the depths of the cradle and the grave.
Nondescript faces of father-deity’s mistresses who go down into the tomb with him as carved wood in flesh-and-blood. Nondescript faces of mother-deity’s masters who go down into the body of the womb with her. It consoled her, even as it astonished her, cautioned her, made her despair, made her hope, to see them in that ancient, equally tender, privileged light and darkness. Half-monster, half-angel.
“What is foetal hope? What is foetal despair?” she wrote. There was no immediate answer.
Long after, in another letter to Francis, she confessed to a recurring dream which seemed so real, that though she dreamt it after her first miscarriage, it was as if she had dreamt it long before on the very night after the funeral at Zemi. (Or lived it at the open window through which she looked out on her father’s gate at the young reporter standing there.)