Monument Maker, page 23
OF THE CHURCH OF THE STONE OF FIRST WITNESS
When we return, Pierre and Maximilian are living at the house of Delius, in Grez-sur-Loing, and writing science fiction together under the pen name Paimon. A third character enters our story at this point, as a ghost or a shade.
Also the man we refer to as Frater Jim, less corporeal, even, than Paimon himself, a stage magician and conjuror with connections to European Freemasonry who, it is reputed, disappeared during the evacuation of Crete in the Second World War, presumed drowned on his torpedoed ship, but who rose again, from the dead, decades later, after an experimental skin graft rebuilt his horribly disfigured face so completely that he was able to return home, in secret, and remarry his first love all over again, as a different man. Reputedly. For we are in the realm of magic, and of science fiction, here, and of the formation of the Church of the Stone of First Witness.
In the garden, Pierre begins work on his first sculptures, the same invisible garden that I share, in my mind, with old Delius, and that was painted pink by his lover. His first works are Emergent, is how he terms them, the Emergents, a single cyclops eye from a pedestal of rough granite; what appears as the side of a head and the shoulder of a man, fused, as it were, with the stone; crude genitals emerging from a headstone of pure polished marble that later Rehberg connects to a brass pump and runs a pipe into the well in the garden, so you can jack it off, he jokes, and luckily it only takes one hand.
They meet Frater Jim at a cafe in a nearby village and are first drawn to him by his striking features, a beauty of another sort, is how Pierre described it, a face which best resembles a Picasso, or an African mask, a fetish with a profile within its profile, like it has been stitched up, and made, which of course we now know, or rather we believe, that it was. They name him Dogon, and then The Elephant Man, and finally Frater Jim.
I am aware of your fascination, Frater Jim says to them, when he finally approaches them, on a day where they have been drinking all afternoon in the sun in Bourron-Marlotte and are now ribald and deranged with the heat. Of course, they think he means their fascination with his mask-like face, but no. I am aware of your fascination, he says, with empathy and fellow-feeling, he says, and they are both amazed. Had he read their furtive glances and the muttering behind their hands and their awkward, conspiratorial silences as coming from fellow-feeling, as coming from sympathy and connectedness and love? But no, Frater Jim says, I am aware of your fascination with the killing of these feelings in your heart, is what he says, and once again, we push on, deeper.
Frater Jim asks them if they are aware of a fraternal organisation known as The SIRK, and he proceeds to school them in its teachings, which centre, he claims, on esoteric practices derived from Christianity, Buddhism and Hermeticism, as well as the rituals of Freemasonry, tantra and sex magick. What is sex magick? Rehberg asks him. Every orgasm gives birth, he says. On various planes, he clarifies, which is no clarification at all. I was briefly involved, Frater Jim tells them, and I learned how to kill my heart, in the name of love. They invite him over to the house, for tea.
Are you gay? Frater Jim asks them. Certainly not, Rehberg says. We just live as man and wife, he jokes. I see, Frater Jim says, well, he says, that rules certain things out. But what these things might have been, he refuses to elaborate.
There is a first stone that floats on water, Frater Jim says. He sits around and smokes drugs and says gnomic things like, the first stone is supported by the first stone, and Pierre nods, and Max Rehberg nods, and they feel closer to, something, some idea is coalescing and that is when Pierre begins the building of his stone ships, his secret life’s work, boats of basalt, which is the densest form of stone, basalt cathedrals are mighty fortresses, he says, and he tells Frater Jim of his ambition to make stone float and Frater Jim says to him, the moon is a stone that floats, which is what you call the stone of the wise, he says, and that is alchemy, he says, which is the transubstantiation of base material into the playing out of spiritual lessons, he says, which is a magickal approach to life, is what Frater Jim describes it as, and he says it like that, with a K, magic with a K, you have added a letter, Pierre says, and Frater Jim says, that letter is sentinel, and stands for the unpronounceable workings of magick, because if true magick were merely pronounceable everyone would just sit around talking it, Frater Jim joked, just like we are doing now, he laughed, instead of, you know, finding magick in its making, and then he said the letter D, the letter D is in there too, he said, only it is an invisible letter and then he said to us, all letters are infinite, there is no difference, and that’s enough to give you vertigo above a page, Pierre said, and where’s Max during all of this, uh-oh, here he is, and he’s saying something facetious about why did Christ ban magick, and Pierre turns to him and says, as a theologian I cannot believe for a fucking second you seriously believe Christ ever talked about banning magick, but at the same time I think it is obvious that God would have to ban himself from magick, should he come down to this earth, because that would just be cheating and where would be the sport, and plus he would have to admit, if he demonstrated magick, that it was within his and his father’s power for anything what-the-fuck-ever to happen, and so admit that God wills it this way, and no other.
Amen, Frater Jim said. God wills it this way, and no other. That is the true meaning of magick, he said.
And Pierre gives a name to all of the ships he is building, all of the stones launched into the water, and he calls them by a female name, Nebula, he calls them, he names ships as a woman as of old, and these are the names of every boat launched from the bottom of the invisible garden of Delius’s brain into the Loing, Nebula, the constant replaying of which, in history, has given the village its name, Stone-on-the-Water, there have been stone boats launched from the foot of these gardens for centuries, Pierre thinks to himself, as he visions the first of the basalt boats and is given a diagram, a blueprint that coheres in his head almost as if it had been secreted in a particular part of the world’s imagination in order to be accessible to dreamers who went down certain roads, dreamers who dreamed impossibly, otherwise why dreams, with their spoken D, is the answer, Pierre figured.
God created this world out of stone, Frater Jim would say, this world is hewn from the rock, and Max Rehberg would say, God created this world out of flesh, this world is hewn from our brains, and Frater Jim would say, flesh and rock and consciousness and flight are the greatest achievements of what we call evolution, but there are secret letters, hidden there, too, he would say, and the nights would go on like this until everyone got drop-down drunk and passed out, or argued like crazy over piddling theological points, or retired to their room and shot heroin into their neck.
The idea of the church comes around. Let’s make a church, Max says one night, let’s start our own cult, religion, like The SIRK, whatever, let’s become initiators, and Frater Jim says, to be an initiator you have to be sure that you are someone who can pass on the experience of being initiated, and Max says to him, what a joke, I have been there, believe me, and this is the first time he mentions the head, and the burning boat, and the first of the Holy Books, and Frater Jim says to him, how many eyes did this head have and Max says to him, two, it was a human-type head, and then Frater Jim says to him, did it speak without speaking, did it speak without moving its lips, and Max says, it was at the bottom of a well so I couldn’t verify that, and then Frater Jim says, why would a headless head be the mode in which a god or a demon spoke to man, and then he said the word Baphomet, Baphomet means in-the-light-of-death, Frater Jim said, this is what the Templars worshipped, he said, and he stood up and he pointed in a direction, in a direction out of the blind night-time garden of Delius and along the canal, Cugny, he said, and at first both Pierre and Max believed he was referring to oral sex with a woman but he said, no, Cugny is the site of the Templars nearby, and of a tiny haunted village, whose occupants made dynamite, and who were killed in a terrible explosion, and beneath Cugny, he said, there is a labyrinth of tunnels that provide ingress into the past and the future, he said, for there is an art of accessing the past, and there is a skill of unlocking the future, Frater Jim said, and they all three of them sat there, round the table, with the umbrella up, inexplicably, on this warm summer night in Stone-on-the-Water, Stone-on-the-River, Stone-on-the-Motherfucking-Brain.
Numerous creeps passed through the ranks of the short-lived First Stone Church; there is no end of people seeking the permission to be what they are. Sometimes, when they would meet prospective candidates, they would think things like, losing weight might be the single biggest magickal prerogative for you right now, as opposed to, you know, learning how to curse others in Hebrew. They were old-school; they still believed in the mystical powers of the alphabet, but also, like, basic hygiene is basic magick, and terror of sex is not, and people would turn up, sometimes dressed outlandishly, as if to announce their wizard ways, wearing top hats and capes and spindly moustaches, and Jim would say something gnomic like, that costume is The Tower, and he would invoke The Hanged Man, and he would rail against identity as the ultimate barrier to existence, like a diving bell or a drowning suit, launched down, into it.
And you can see what happened, what happened to the order in the 1990s when it was revived by hobbyists, it’s pathetic. Ask The Flashlight. Look him up, he exists, seriously, look him up. But back then, despite the chancers and the charlatans and the social defectives, it was true magick they were working, and it was transformative, to a point. There were workshops, initiations, bacchanalian celebrations and a few mental breakdowns. But I can’t tell you about any of those for fear of ruining your own. And then it all went to shit and these days the lineage has no link to the founders whatsoever and it is basically just a shitshow for geriatric conspiracy theorists and Second World War nostalgists and sexless psychogeographers and would-be literary critics, my God, but all the time Pierre is working on these stone ships, which is a logistical nightmare, and the first launches take place and there are sinkings—Nebula sinks to the bottom of the Loing like a sarcophagus, her hands clasped in prayer as she is raised upon, and then buried beneath, the tide—and there are incredible moments—like when a dog leaps onto one of them and glides like a surfer into the distance until finally it is sunk, and the dog swims back towards the shore—and there are strange awkward silences—where everyone looks to each other and suspects themselves victims of a collective delusion or, worse, the uncovering of impossible truth.
Or shot heroin into their neck. Maximilian Rehberg was a junk fiend by this point. How come is it that people who nearly die on Mount Everest are hailed as brave heroes and great sportsmen when those of us who dare an Olympic dose of drugs are called fiends and junkies and sent packing from the doctor’s? he says.
You have been reading too much William Burroughs, Frater Jim cautions him, and it was true, Ballard, Burroughs, and someone else beginning with a B that eludes me now—Bowles? Bowie? Behan? (Norman O.) Brown? Borges? Bova?—were becoming a big influence, certainly on Paimon, on the arc of the duo’s science fiction stories, it’s plain to see, which by this point were bringing in a fair bit of money, it has to be said, and a cult had developed around Paimon as to who in the actual fuck was this guy and how in the actual fuck is he named after a goetic demon, and a transsexual one at that, which anyone will tell you who has ever had dealings with that gay little sprite will confirm, and of course he rides on a camel, across a desert of Africa, Paimon does, so there’s that, too, but then it turns out—and who could believe it—that there’s some weird autistic outsider unknown musician called Paimon too, some downer real-people DIY blues psychonaut has also taken the name, and cause this guy never does interviews, or plays live, or is ever spotted in the street, a rumour springs up that it’s this same idiot savant musician that is behind all of these weird cult science fiction stories.
And in the midst of this, there are mysterious stone ships pulling up at the bottom of gardens and of parks all along the River Loing, silently, and without meaning, for whoever encounters them sees something in them, something impossible, which is their death, approaching, for these are monument stones, memorial devices, carved basalt, light-filled, and lovely on the water. Pierre has become the sculptor he would end his life as, which is called final, and fulfilment, and is terrifying when sought, and found, because if you are lucky, then unlucky you, because First Church is Final.
Maximilian Rehberg receives a letter from his aunt asking him to return home, your father is dying, is what she says, in this sad, tear-stained letter, this letter that has been pursued by tears from the beginning of time, which are the tears of Christ that Jesus wept, tears pursuant of himself, and then of Max’s father, and now his sister, and now Max himself, via this letter, which he opens and all the cares of the world spill out, and Max’s father is dying of stomach cancer, and it is eating its way out of him like a grub, or a stone in his passway, or a single bright tear from the beginning of time, and Max makes the decision to return home, and even though he thought his heart was stone, he thought his heart was cold dead stone, this stone is borne up on the waters and returned home, where his father’s tears have so overwhelmed him that he begs his estranged son to end his life, Maximilian’s father pleads with his son to take his life, to help him suicide, but Maximilian Rehberg is unable to do so, even as his father rolled in agony in his grave already, and tore at his bedclothes, and bent over double and vomited black vomit on the sheets, even then Maximilian was incapable of a true and supreme compassion, which is the bravery to end suffering, the bravery not to be afraid, and not to terrify anyone else either, which is the mark of a man, in its persistence, in its following unto the very ends and its faith in those same endings is the true mark of a man, which is called Persistence, and his father wouldn’t give up with his pleas, and his aunt begged him, kill your father, she said, burn what you love, she said, in the end, we can imagine, as though now Max’s past was speaking via his future and he has been presented with the truth of compassionless love, which means to make of your heart a fortress, and then to yield, and that yielding is the hardest part, his father urges him to take up arms, by the side of his bed, his father begs him, and Maximilian is unable, yet he stays with his father, he sits silently by his bed, and the tears finally catch up with him, Maximilian’s father in an old white T-shirt and striped pyjama bottoms, and his tanned arms, and his biceps, and his smell of men, his own smell of men, and those tears dispatched from so long ago now, and even though he has the ability to end his father’s pain, and to redeem himself, and to take responsibility (for that’s what it would have felt like, who else gets to murder their own father at the appropriate time, and according to his own father’s desire? This feels like a gift especially put together for Maximilian, this feels almost as if from behind the scenes he had written it himself), but when the universe presents you with the perfect mirror is when it speaks your name to your face, and his father is incontinent and all over himself, and still alive, and Max can’t go to him, he remembers his dead comrade in Africa, how he held his dead body tight in his arms for a final embrace (how could he not bring it to mind with what was going on right in front of him), and remembers, too (of course this must bring to mind his mother), his dying mother, and here is his father, rolling in his own shit in front of him and begging for compassion and for mercy and for his son to end his suffering which is entirely within his power, to end suffering was entirely within your power, Max, which would have made of you a god, and yet Max cannot move or speak or go to him, and Max is sat silent on a chair next to his dying father and Max thinks, Max has to wonder, if, perhaps, all of his love was, in fact, reserved for the dead and the already departed, if all of his ideals are not, in fact, reserved, almost exclusively, for theoretical scenarios, for the realm of fantasy and adventure, a kind of escapist apologia, if we are being honest, perhaps he was too religious, or not religious enough, ultimately, for his father shitting himself right there in front of him, nor for all of the pain in need of making holy down here, which is a lack of faith, and an overwhelming of awe. And all of this takes place in Golgotha, which is the place of the skull, all of these ideas take place there but from these ideas—what?
There is the garden, because it is virgin, and invisible, and untrodden upon. But is it yours?
And his father dies, in terrible pain and in agony his father finally dies, but not by the hand of his only son, who watches helplessly, and in terror, as we can imagine, as the final agonies of his father are written, in stone. And at one point his father says to him, you don’t have it in you, you don’t have it in you, he says, do you, and then he evacuates all over himself and two days later he dies, screaming.
But what did he not have in him? And do you? Compassion, steel-heartedness, tenderness, bravery, cold stone, resilience, acceptance, self-belief? All of it inside us. Love, I say. L.O.V.E. And now I am a silent channel in time, a rivulet, which is as beautiful a word as rumfles, as a passway is for tears, in stone.
And we enter the summer, which is the final summer of Holy Maximilian Rehberg’s life, the late summer that was to become as a book, the summer that Pierre would memorialise, as the two of them, Pierre and Max’s lover Hildegard, toured the monasteries and the churches and the bars, let’s face it, and the cafes and restaurants and expensive hotels, too, it’s safe to say, and the cold leather on the back seat of the car, we know now, and the assignations, the three-way assignations, which, again, we have been made fully aware of, and meanwhile, back home, Rehberg’s heroin use is spiralling, and both he and Frater Jim end up on week-long benders where they trip and do coke and float on rubber rings, naked, and inebriated, in the river, until the police are called, yes, even in France two naked guys passed out on rubber rings and with their cocks all flaccid and hanging out floating down the river while spinning in slow circles, even this is too much to bear for the kind of Frenchman who will lie down in dogshit, who will simply cover the dogshit with a towel and plump himself down there, still, the sight of two men spinning slowly, as I said, hypnotically, even, as they float slowly past the families laid out on towels and the boys playing frisbee and I hear that Max’s long hair was dragging behind him, he was passed out in this ring with his head in the water and with his hair trailing behind him like he was falling from a great height, right into this story, and who knows, he might be naked and dead, the way he looks, and so perhaps it was right that they called the cops, and so they call the cops and honestly, by this point Max wasn’t looking his best, maybe it’s no wonder that Hildegard ran off with Pierre for a summer, because the pigs, sorry, the police, take one look at him, with these fucking welts on his neck, and they were like, we just netted ourselves some junkie scum, and you know they are strict about drugs in France, just like in Mexico, the two places you would seriously expect them not to give a fuck, but this is France and so they are screwed but at the same time, you can’t be charged with being on smack in charge of a rubber ring, plus they’re buck naked, so they obviously have no drugs on them, but the police fine them, and caution them, and who knows, maybe even put them on a list of subverts and they might be there still, look it up, how would I know, but from that time on there are rumours spreading, about this satanic church, about black magick nudity and flagrant drug use and a magickal attitude to reality.
