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it, in all its original glory. This was the primal gateway into the underworld and overworld of the cosmos. The light that bathed it infused it, all at once, with the sensation that it grew downwards, that its roots were up here in space, its branches down there in the earth.
    I looked around for the axe that had cut the tree, as the bone had cut the spirit of childhood into light-year bandaged ghost, and thought I discerned it far out upon the retreating tide when a glimmer of sun upon a wave transfigured the ocean into lilting, sighing, singing sharpness. That was the shaman’s axe! It was he (El Doradan shaman or space-priest) who had axed the tree a long time ago and sculpted from it El Dorado himself, El Dorado’s retinue, his court, his wives, his children, his huntsmen, his fishermen, his peers, his civil servants.
    All had come alive under the subtle liquid blow of the axe, and I recalled Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea breathing all of a sudden under the chisel. So too had the wood, sliced from the cherry tree, turned to gold then to flesh-and-blood.
    Were axe and chisel and bone the same liquid tool across parallel light years? I seemed to see it all save that the shadow of uncertain voice or lilt of the cosmos, in all carven broken things, persisted. Masters and his disciple had crawled on the beach, even as the axe sharpened the rhythm of the tide, and the chisel and the bone shone, but I wondered whether they were living sculpted being, whether – despite the fact that thecut or the slice of original shaman may have engendered freedom – a pattern of falsehood masked the truth to promote an automatic procession riveted in reflexes of fascination with violence, reflexes of false brutal axe, brutal greed, the greed of power, the greed of possession.
    They stopped. Thomas crawled away into a sea-wood in pursuit of a colourful crab. Masters remained alone. I felt a shiver run through my veins as through his wound still bound with a rag. To crawl or to stop in mindless attachment to the instrument of power that fashions one’s nerves is to appear to live in freedom, yet not to live in freedom’s consciousness of the sorrow of pain in genesis, the slice, the cut, the blow that dis-members ,yet may occasion one to re-member.
    I felt divisions of sorrow within that blow, divisions of true shaman or creator and false shaman or manipulator of defeated cultures. I felt divisions of sorrow within a universal genius of love that seems at times in pawn to a universal seducer of humanity.
    Yes, I had projected parallel fictions of “doubt” into space in shadow characterization (as though “space” were an entity to be sculpted like “wood” or “marble”), I had felt profoundest sorrow hit me, or reshape me, and I knew that the fiction of Memory (of re-membering, or reconstitution) lay in complex truths and falsehoods that could ape each other’s divisions within the unfinished stroke of genesis and creation.
    The tree or stump of a gateway into the underworld and the overworld was a crucial rehearsal and alignment of truth and falsehood, and I felt myself now related to it as though through it; through its aerial roots and earthen branches I discerned a stranger, an intimate stranger, approaching young Masters. I have personified parallel existences of “doubt” in this spiritual biography. How should I personify Memory in an intimate stranger, Memory the male rather than the female persona at the heart of Carnival?
    Ask young Masters why he suddenly ran from the man who approached him and invited him to go for a walk; he was tempted but he ran.
    I say “ask” – ask the bandaged light-year ghost, ask him whether his fright may have been occasioned by rumours of a rapist on the prowl along the foreshore. I have checked a newspaper of the 1920s (the New Forest Argosy )and found several columns on a rapist that a child could have read. And indeed it would be easy to advance such an explanation for Masters’ fear