The Transfiguration of Mister Punch (8 page)

I blinked and re-read the words. This was too incredible, but it was authentic. After half a century of collecting, ferreting ephemera one starts to see patterns in the sheer avalanche of chaos. The name was so close to a more familiar, frightening name out of fiction. Never to be shared. Never whispered. NEVER. Somehow, this was real and not thrilling. It was frightening.

There is a name which Moses named. He spoke the name and ‘all the rivers were turned to blood.’ I believe that name was written in conjunction with a ritual. This ritual is what my entire story has been leading to. It is all that matters anymore. A frighteningly essential ritual of BINDING was conducted by two magicians who had no less a goal than the saving and survival of the human race. Even the dead hearts of unknown, non-existent stars they hoped to save—and perhaps have.

In 1921 Alfred Watkins discovered the ley system of patterns connecting sacred sites throughout Britain. He wrote several brilliant books which may still be consulted for those who believe that there are ancient shapes in the landscape for those with eyes of the proper tint to see them. Is there really such a thing as the ‘world Golem,’ as mentioned in the manuscript? A sleeping giant, whose heart is the centre of the earth. His veins the tree roots, his entire body a global map of the Tree of Life. Huge channels of power connect the Holy Spots on earth, in conjunction with the rivers of soil and blood of the planet-behemoth. The Devil’s Tor may just as well be The Hill of Punch. Could sorcerers conjure a figure, vast and bursting with the power of the stones and earth? Might such a colossus be as large as countries and isles?

It is amazing but true, if you look at the coast of Cornwall, in fact the entire content of Britain—the coastline and continent forms an enormous, humanoid, grinning face in profile, a rather clownish face with a beaked nose and a pointed chin. Strangely, the coast of Cornwall has been slowly shifting upward in the last five hundred years. The chin approaches the nose, closer and closer, like a good carver should. Continental drift, or what have you, the face of Punch is coming together in the landscape in which he was most accepted and is still so greatly appreciated in body and spirit.

I imagine you can see the pattern now, how it all led up to finding the manuscript in the Punch bookend. Everything makes perfect, wild sense. The years of raving and rain, of silence in starless nights are justified. I understand now why.

Beyond the Grand Discovery of the Manuscripts Found in a Brass Punch Figurine, I shall share one final discovery about Mr. Punch with you, most patient reader, my own secret mirrored self. You. I have spent a good many years thinking about Him, his hook’d nose and upward mirroring chin like a Victorian moon. The resemblance between the familiar lunar gent with winking face and wise or crazy grin is twin to our bloodless Subject, our motley Prince. Coincidence how often that slice of leering moon looms protectively over the Victorian night skies, as the factories advanced. I cannot totally denigrate the steam age and what horrors it began. The great locomotives were what brought droves of people to the seaside towns of England, creating some of the greatest venues for mayhem that Mr. Punch has yet known.

Mr. Punch rants and raves, he murders and bodies heap upon bodies. He explodes and shatters the apparently sacred concepts of family, domestic order, social authority. First he comically, dreadfully destroys his family and the things that hold a ‘civilized’ society together. Policeman and executioner are murdered.

Death appears and is killed.

What can top this?

Satan surfaces from Hell and Punch kills the Devil!

The ultimate practical joking maniac incarnated into puppet-man of earthly flesh proves himself more powerful, and perhaps more evil, than the Hoofed One. In later, toned down versions it is Punch who is taken to the Fiery fate.

“I’m obliged to perform werry steady and werry slow; they won’t have no ghost, no coffin and no devil. And that’s what I call spoiling the performance. It’s the march of hintellect wot’s a doing all this—it is sir.”

A Punch and Judy showman of the eighteen-fifties

Sometimes a ferocious crocodile, replete with loudly snapping red mouth, appears and devours ‘old Red-Nose.’ Punch almost stands in rags. His killing-stick is really the Staff of Priapus. He stands upon a crocodile, ‘like Hoor-pa-Kraat... beyond by-coming...’ He may as well have a wine-skin, so linked is this rebel to Bacchus and Dionesiac frenzy of life and death. The popular stock reptilian character began a modern revival, or unlikely beginning, as a dragon, in the eighteen-sixties. Punch enjoyed his role in a St. George parody. Soon, the dragon was replaced by the ancient crocodile symbol, who stuck. Audiences of all ages loved the klackety-klack of the snapping wooden jaws so threatening, it makes the heart race! The deeper meaning of this will be left to the initiate to appreciate. As the course, adult shows of well over two-hundred years gave way to more children’s-oriented parlour playlets, so have both the overt and secret meanings of the drama been submerged, crossed-out, shelved. It is easy to write Punch and Judy off as harmless, knockabout ‘slapstick’ with no deeper meanings, yet these same meanings insist on revealing themselves, despite our sober resistance. Here he is as the Three Stooges, as every pie in face and poke in eye and fall on arse. He hurts others for us because we are not supposed to. They die over and over so that we can live, over and over, in one lifetime.

Could that crocodile be a terrifying manifestation of Judy, as is the ghost character? One of Punch’s greatest eternal struggles is that of banishing his victims from his conscience. The impossible spirit to exorcise is that of Judy. She returns over and over to snap at him, to goad him, to make him scream. Now she is a skeleton. Now a reptilian thing with a massive maw ringed with slavering teeth. And now, could it be that the devil, whom Punch destroys, is also a fiendish embodiment of his late, lamented woman?

The last realization is that Mr. Punch is who he is for a reason. We need not attempt modern analytical methods to look him in his gleaming, manic eyes and see ourselves. We have been kept in shadows, we have been told we could not do it. So we got angry, and became scary and our loved ones looked at us with dismay and horror. We have watched others share beauty and laughter, while we suffered. When will it be our turn to wear the gayly coloured cap, the scarlet and yellow and the big buttons? When will it be our turn to sing:

Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside

I do like to be beside the sea!

I do like to stroll upon the Prom, Prom, Prom!

We crossed the River Styx so many times that we heard the Yawn of Charon. We were destroyed as children, found birth and death in our Mothers, our loves, our Judy’s. We were corralled and bullied, told where to go and how to be before we were formed, before our branches could be carved. The chemicals in Mr. Punch’s brain were formed differently at his inception. Something dreadful happened to him that tore him asunder, crushed his innocence, made him long to be the star of his own show. The father of a family. He found it all too much to handle.

When the pressure is on, and you stand on centre stage, you best have resolved some of your past. Punch never will. His past is our future and it can hurt and be joyous at the same time. In the end he remains isolated, alone with his hump, hooked nose and frozen grin. The beady, blue eyes never blink. To blink would be to bring down the curtain for an instant. This would risk losing his audience. The stage curtain might shut by human claw, but the curtain of Mr. Punch’s vision remains open until the final curtain blacks out the stars.

Punch’s story is our own, veiled in slapstick, heightened pretend violence. He tries to love and tend but fails and kills the child within him. He remains a destructive adolescent lunatic king. He fails at the prime human relationship that matters most we are told. He kills the Other, and is tempted by Pretty Polly, a siren figure. He meets his animal familiar, a creature that he does not own. He can never contain, can never be the master of this ruffle-collared beast, as much as he might dream of it. All he can receive from Toby is a chomp on the nose. The ghost of his murdered love appears, and the audience shares his true terror. The fear that the show generates is real. The skeleton and devil might be amongst a child’s first exposure to such soul-shaking images and ideas. The horned demon our Mr. Punch sends back to the flaming realm shares the fire within his wide blue eyes.

When Mr. Punch cries in despair, in horror, at what he has done to his spawn and spouse, he is forced to remain grinning, the chiseled wooden teeth are almost skeletal. He is cursed. He is kin to Victor Hugo’s Gwynplaine, in
The Man Who Laughs
, who has had a clown-like grin carved into his actual face, to perform as a living grotesque. Like Punch, this tragic figure transgresses all social boundaries and enters the domain of the real and the sacred.

Before this world there was chaos. There were no laws waiting to be written. Punch is a spirit which demands we recognize our own potential for freedom, wildness, craziness, expression, ludicrousness, death and blinding colours. The survival of the show suggests the survival of the instincts that drive the drama.

The show that will never die.

There are already signs that He has Risen.

We are all Mr. Punch.

That is why he will live forever.

He MUST live forever. He must continue attacking and betraying all secular religion. He must betray his child, his wife, the state, the devil and the authority of God. He must negate all meaninglessness, and continue his scarlet and yellow dance of random chaos. He must show no remorse until his guilt begins to torment him. Tell-Tale Punch. His is a randomness that has been collectively honed and repeated for so many eons, by countless performers. They all tell the same strange and tragic ritual story endlessly, with delightful and exquisitely infinite variations. It shines like a cackling diamond of shimmering madness. If he does, the sun will always shine upon the pier.

Shall I state it pure and simple? Every Punch and Judy show is actually a ritual slowly evoking a gathering power. If the little, timeless drama stops, the wheels of terror will begin to churn. The moment the last Punch and Judy show ends, It will be unleashed. The Punch and Judy phenomenon is the largest Winchester Mystery House on the planet. The hammers must never stop, lest there be unrest and malevolence from the armies beyond the grave. The world would swiftly turn into the yawning grey hell of living black flame we are already jettisoning toward. Only Punch can save us now. I am putting signs up around town to let everyone know. So if you see a hunched little fellow putting up a strange screed with a brush full of flour paste, you know that I am in your neighborhood. You must awaken. Again, as in the start, I implore, I beg you. Listen. Awaken. Speak. Shriek. From pulpit to pit, from puppet-stage to mountain peak, I climb and shout for all to know: A change is coming soon, with the next red rain.