*
It was a journey which he felt had begun in the very obscurity of ages, as if at one time fire had sealed the cavern — at another time ice. And these seals were the peculiar stamp of insulation from total disaster upon a living crew of fate who were deprived of the extremity of experiencing the very function of death they performed. Cloud or seal, blocking of ears, blinding of sight which rendered one and all immune and faithful guides or servants of each other through the unenviable passage of the underworld. Vessel of reality. Bond of translation.
Each relic “he” touched — antique skull, tooth, fluid object — was instinct with paradox; chafe of fury on one hand and insensible freedom of proportion or function on the other.
Each constellation of properties he visualized — sacrificial litter, dog or snake, ancient, newborn — was both “alive” and “dead” within the crucial operations of the nameless cavern, middle way, middle passage — astronomical man and slave, doctor and patient, lover and mistress, captain and instrument, artist and model. And the ghostly sun which now seemed to glare at him existed both within its own naked right, indescribable, pure, and in another sacred anthropomorphic skin, masthead and shroud of reality. Furnace of blindness as well as blackness of vision. Bound to the stars as well as indestructibly alien — free from total ordeal and attraction within an operative seal and design. Unendurable canvas of fire save for each insulation portrait. Multiple impress and circuit of compassion within the transit of the “living” and the “dead”.
The subterranean cave of Susan. It was as if he had spoken her name aloud and the echoes combined into a crumbling fixture, property of the imagination. There was no price he would not pay to grasp such an ultimate seal of freedom and conviction within the borderline capacities of nature.
The cavern shook once again and rumbled — not with the same echoes this time but with a new distant faint blast. Incredible … surprise … revelation. He knew (as surely as if he had been told) that the blast he now heard had actually occurred ages ago: and that, at long last, it was able to reach him in an echo long muffled and nurtured and preserved (like the sound of the sea in a shell) by its very sovereign stamp of irruption—persona of “deafness” to the original catastrophe and, in fact, “blindness” (until a moment ago) to the ancient shroud of the sun. Shroud of love. Ancient metamorphosis, endless creation, gods, species of fiction within whose mask of death one endured the essential phenomenon of crisis and translation.
Delayed blast. Short circuit. Reaction. Within the radius of which “he” felt himself begin to relive — with new awareness — his descent through the door of the middle passage (down the nameless river of the underworld) as one who had been smitten by the bushmaster of space until “he” and “it” fell through a common skin into a naked darkness they had never dreamt would heal and safeguard them.
There swam before him ghost and bride, armature of love, explosive anatomy he cherished at the end of ages of pursuit within the delayed recognitions of the present in the past, the past in the future….
Page 17.
* She drew him closer still within the skin of another incongruous skeleton they shared, flesh or wood, swimming in the glass of their shop window within and without. Antique display. Waiting room.*