Mime to Silent Music
While the surf gently lips and sucks the gray dome of rock, a silent, liquid piping is poured like sweet effluent into the bleak, inarticulate water.
It is a song I cannot understand as I search for the hidden entrance to the dome. It is an absolute song. Without sound, there is no medium for interpretation. I could have understood it once: it used to be a blind force that would have torn me from the rock and battered me to death trying to hurl me through the wall and into the heart of the chamber.
But the notes are changed. The urge and vitality have gone from the song. It is attractive still, but wistful rather than sensuous, and far from irresistible. It is a contented song, nostalgic, with a new — subtler — magnetism, born of an interplay of forces.
The watcher now may only sit atop the smooth hemisphere and listen to the entombed amniotic music. I am trapped in the surf and the spray. The sirens slumber. The Rheingold is safe. There is no prospect of defilement, no question of theft. Perfect security.
The music is synesthetic. It is the pulse of the blood. Blood mingles with blood. The music of the womb. The music of the machine. The machine which holds me still and which would not let me even kill myself. Do I still have being-in-the-world? Of course not. I have brought the music with me. I play it, within my body, and my body is the musical instrument. It is mine. It cannot belong to the machine. Here, there is no such thing as a machine. A machine has no being, no mind. It cannot exist. Save in me.
I am the mind of the machine. I am the mind of the ship. In me is the machine and the ship and the world which sent me. In me, they are music. Synesthesia. What were they in Lindquist? An itch? An occlusion of the eye? Why did he forget? How did he forget?
I am Titan. Titan is a rhythm in my heartbeat. We are safe and well. Having a lonely time, Jenny. Wish you were here.
I am standing at the Gate of Heaven and waiting. The first thing you learn is that you always have to wait. I see a man whose face is smiling with fear, and he walks to the Gate and tries to make it yield to his touch. He is faceless, but I think he is Petrie. Poor Nathan Petrie. They won’t let you through, Nathan. They know it doesn’t matter whether you did it or not. Do you think they even care?
“It won’t open,” he says, smiling.
“It won’t open,” agrees the man in the death-mask, watching as ever. I don’t know who is behind the death-mask. Perhaps it is a problem for me to worry about. Perhaps he is supposed to frighten me. Perhaps he intends to unmask at the end of the play, so that I can see that his face is my own. I don’t care. It might just as well be his own face. What do I care whether death is only a mask or not?
And we are all waiting: the man who smiles, my companion and good friend Death, the star-haired girl, and myself.
And now comes a fire-eyed man who wears courage like a cloak around his shoulders. He approaches us, and his eyes pass over the smiling man and Death, coming to rest upon the face of the star-haired girl.
“You keep strange company,” says the brave man. I try to look inside his coat to get a peek at his medals, but he has the buttons done up tight. It is possible that once upon a time he was only a cowardly lion. I think he is Steve Cannon, but how can one be sure when those who have no masks have no faces either?
The star-hair replies, “It is not for me to choose who waits by my side at the Gate of Heaven.” Very true, that. Can Love choose what company she keeps? Of course not. Anyone and everyone might discover Love beside him, or inside him. Even Courage can’t be all that choosy. I’ve watched cowards do some very brave things, in my time.
“Come with me,” says the man with fire in his faceless eyes.
She bows her head, and together they open the Gate of Heaven and pass through.
The man who smiles in fear again tests the strength of the Gate.
“It will not open,” he says.
“It will not open,” agrees Death, watching as ever.
“What did you expect,” I say, “justice?”
In a root-skulled chamber of black earth I want to find myself a house, a refuge, and a crib. There I can decorate my bones with tinsel and green bottle-glass, and share the vacuum of oblivion with the labyrinth of Minos and the heroes of Rome.
I do not want my footprints to linger after me and tell the direction of my going, nor do I want the scrawling of my fingertips to testify the falseness of my temporary feeling.
I want to be alone, except for the maggots which will clean the filthy flesh from my beautiful white bones, and the worms which will map the streets of my unending empire. The blind and crawling worms I choose now form my brothers and my lovers. They will kindly strip me of my worldly clothes, and my bones will be the arches and the thoroughfares of a great and wonderful city, beneath the sea of grass and tree.
It is a city built in ruins, as nature intended cities should be, existing only to die, to be carcasses harboring the poor and the lonely. And my skull will be a palace and a temple, and kings and priests will look benignly down from the sockets of my eyes.
Your best chance, of course, is with Thanatos. If the man in the death-mask is my companion and my friend, then he is your most favored ally. I know the face which ought to lurk behind the mask, yours and mine. You cannot delude me with facelessness.
And yet I live. I always have. The man in the mask has been my friend since the day I was born, and he has not won me yet. You cannot kill me with death-wish, any more than you can scourge me with despair and sorrow and grief and hate. I survive. I am a survivor. This game, of course, is a test in itself. Death is only one of your victories, the other is gluttony for life. But I have walked that boundary all my life, and I can walk it now. You will not lure me into death, nor pain me into oblivion. My dreams remain my own, whether dreams within dreams within . . .
Or worlds to cage me.
I meet her by the edge of a river which flows forever around a Möbius circuit, so that the same water is cycled past the same shore once in every million years, and all the tears and drowned corpses are thus returned to their haunted wombs.
In my eyes, she is perfect. But in her eyes, and any eyes which care to stare, I am misshapen.
I speak to her in many lying voices, in languages which she cannot know, in cadences which hurt her ears. She cannot hear, she can only understand. Her eyes are fixed within my twisted face, and I feel their scalding glare.
She sobs, and her hands flutter like moth wings to carry the tears from her painted face and drop them in the harrowed waters of the sacred river.
Helpless, I watch her melt into the substance of the river, her tears and her blood borne away on an endless silvery shroud, her flesh and her bones turned fluid in the fertile, faithful earth, which bears her up triumphantly in the infant spring, as a cluster of reeds.
I stay by her moist bedside until the snow-shrouded winter kills the reeds, and then I steal them from the frost-bound soil and make them into panpipes.
And then I play upon them, a random song of loneliness and failure. A song without tune and without beauty. A song of death and heartlessness.
She cannot hear, her eyes are fixed within my twisted face.
I mingle with the absent melody the rhythm of my absent tears.
And in a million years, it is the same again, and in a further million years, the same again, yet as I look down the kaleidoscope of the years, the mirrors flush the music into new patterns and new rhythms, the music becomes silent, and the whole play of it becomes a mime.