The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  I saw and felt inwardly what he meant by “moderation”. I saw the cosmos of my age as an inward series of gradations of flame resembling fire, yet other than fire, as the cloth of night upon the evening sky differs from ultimate night.

  “Fire consumes but when veiled or rendered apparently opaque in substance and action, it imbues the bursting seed, the veined leaf, the arteried wood, with fertility and regenerative being. Each seed is the flaming birth of a star across light years that are rendered opaque in the veils of a tree. That tree comes from within the spaces of a seed replete with invisible light years. We need to sense the veils within veils within us and around us to see how everything burns so intricately, so imperceptibly, that it seems utterly still, utterly solid, rather than the phoenix of judgement day spirit aroused in the ash of space.”

  “What about the seasons,” I asked him, “how do these gradations vary from season to season?”

  “There is an opaque fire or veil of spring, another opacity or veil of winter, another of summer, another of autumn. Each is an intricate torch into seasonal and non-seasonal forces that resemble each other but differ from each other. The fire that consumes the dead beast resembles the fire that regenerates or fertilizes the life of the imagination, but they are not the same. That was Thomas’s difficulty in sculpting Alice, in weighing each tear that fell from her eyes to water the rose garden of paradise.”

  As he spoke I thought of winter, how the boles of the trees along Holland Villas Road and Addison Road turn black in the winter raining light, a blackness or tone that contributes to a wonderful transparency in contrasting flesh-and-blood. Indeed what is blackness, what is whiteness, what is opacity, what is transparency, but variations of intricate fire within the heart of memory and emotion?

  I thought of autumn and its fossil burning nest in which the phoenix of the year lays its eggs. I thought of spring and the nest of snow from which the sun arises. Masters intervened in the midst of the silence that had descended upon us.

  “There is light and light,” he said. “Noonday under the Northern sky is closer to twilight in the Tropics than to the identical hour to which it corresponds under the Equatorial sky. If the blaze of noon at the Equator were to fall in a flash on the Northern world our eyes of dream would scorch. Noon in the Northern hemisphere falling equally suddenly at the Equator would be a signal of coming night … And if we are to travel back in time, as we speak, you and I, and meet Sir Thomas and the marble woman in the Market-place, then we need to mix light with light, noon with coming night, fire with winter, spring with summer and spring with autumn. We need to sense in paradoxes of light the extended and multi-layered luminosities of the cosmos.” As he spoke to me he seemed to reach with the long arm of Carnival and seize the pointed stillness of flame in the sky before us. He plucked that stillness like a subtle torch and waved it in my eyes …

  *

  That blaze, that fiction of fire, culled from the branch of a tree – and encompassing the origins of vision – took us back and lit the great Market-place in 1926. Sir Thomas and the marble woman arrived there around three or four o’clock in the afternoon after leaving the gate of the Alms House where they had rested for a while.

  A pall of smoke hung in the air above the Market, slowly dissolving and drifting inland away from the river against which the Market square stood. I learnt from Masters that a schooner moored to the Market wharf had caught fire earlier in the day around the very hour perhaps when he had run from the false shaman. Fortunately for the wooden township of New Forest, the fire had been extinguished quite quickly. The great piles and beams of the wharf were partially blackened. The Market itself was untouched by the blaze. But the schooner had been reduced to coal-black sails and hull. I dreamt I stood upon it. It was the vessel of moderated Night. I was protected and therefore invisible to Thomas and the marble woman who were standing on the wharf. I sought to draw their attention nevertheless to the etchings that Masters’ pointed flame had drawn on the hull of Night.

  One etching ran through the irregularity of the coal-black ship into an Arawak trading post that had been erected in the first decade of the sixteenth century. The Arawaks had responded to a couple of Portuguese vessels that had appeared in the New Forest river. They had felled trees to create premises that would later become the New Forest Market square. They had lit a flame there, flame-clock of an age that seemed now, as I stood on the schooner of 1926, an ancestral spike in Masters’ torch.

  The Arawak flame-clock was bright as I looked back upon it. So bright I scarcely discerned additional reinforcement and blaze from Portugal and Spain. They claimed they had come to protect the alien cultures they had taken under their wings. They plundered, they raped, and yet a glimmering fiction of mutual desire for protective law, protective spirit, left its initial nebulous score on the vessel of Night on which I now stood long after the circumnavigation of the globe.

  I sought therefore to trace with Masters’ torch the blackened initials of god, of fiction-globe, fiction-law, within a collision of cultures. I sought to trace an initial unity of Mankind that was so nebulous it ran through every timepiece of frozen fire one wore on one’s wrist (as on the broken body of generations) within fragmented conventions and treaties, false clarities, false economic ideals.

  It was this nebulosity of initial grace that deepened the fire in my eyes. I needed to descend with the vessel of Night into accompanying initials of the mastery of the globe, master-builder, master-philosopher, master-salesman, master of arts. I needed to descend with the schooner of Night into equally related initials of the servant of the globe, servant-builder, servant-philosopher, servant of arts. How creatively interchangeable were they – mastery and service – upon the unborn/born person in the Carnival body of space? I needed to descend into eclipsed initials of the rebirth of spirit within Masters and Thomas and Alice and the marble woman and numerous others. We were partial figures on the deck of Night. Such partial figuration of soul was a signal of terrifying wholeness. Terrifying in an age that had settled for fragmentation, for polarization, as the basis of security.

  In confessing to such partiality and terrifying comedy of wholeness, I sensed the protective veil of which Masters had spoken. I looked through the blackened fire into the ships the Arawaks had seen. Night fell in consistency with the ship of Night moored to the Market-place of the globe. The Spanish came in that Night, then the French, then the Dutch, then the English, then the Americans, and in 1926 – on the very dream-day, dream-night, of the burning schooner and the capsized basket of eggs – a Russian vessel appeared and anchored in New Forest mid-river. It confirmed Flatfoot Johnny’s claim to be czar of Carnival. But the Russian czar was dead and a generation at least was to pass for him to be resurrected in embalmed Lenin.

  In 1926, the Market Carnival, over which Johnny presided, had been untouched by the day’s fire, but something incalculable – a cosmic wind perhaps that had been blowing for ages upon savage heart, savage treaty, savage trade – gave to its iron railings and skeletal arches, its wooden frames and stalls, the proportions of a twin or cousin to the vessel of Night. The Market seemed, therefore, equally gutted, equally afloat in space. The czar Johnny was proceeding with an enormous bag aloft on his shoulders. He was a man of prodigious strength, grotesquely muscular, grotesquely powerful. His prime defect was an awkwardness of pace, so awkward it made him seem old and crippled as he shuffled along. And then of course one saw his muscles and his back that seemed peculiarly incongruous then, incongruous youth cemented upon incongruous age.

  His awkward foot was the gift of the false shaman. It fired his ambition to balance the globe upon his head. His great muscular proclivity, his capacity to lift a crate or a barrel of sugar, was a trick of innate deformity. Imagine then, gentle reader, how chastening and astonishing it was to perceive, in Flatfoot, the czar of New Forest, the shadow of Masters!

  Masters’ escape from the false shaman, his fleet foot, gave an astonishing twist to Flatfoot Johnny�
��s predicament in being caught and lamed on the foreshore.

  Masters and czar Johnny together – in shadowplay cosmic essence – were an irregular portrait of age-old and ageing collectives whose gross or refined ambitions to manhandle the cosmos turn from the prospect of conquest on the battlefield, or conquest in industry, to nursing the spectre of vicarious athletics in space, Carnival Olympic Rocket Games.

  Masters smiled as if I had caught him out, caught his immersion in brutal yet philosophic reverie. It gave him no pleasure to confess to his kinship to Johnny save that such confession reopened the wound of diseased Ambition in which age is cemented to cosmetic youth or grotesque muscle. The powers of the lame are added to the fleet of spirit, as a parable of the partial nature of all human achievement, and human institution, all bodies, all images. I sensed he was as embarrassed and chastened as I, and this made me listen to him all the more closely and sympathetically.

  “In confessing to partial images,” he said so softly I had to ask him to speak up, “we come abreast of both bias (the bias of ageing institution) and potential (the capacity within all of us to be born anew) in all regimes and civilizations. All images are partial but may masquerade for an age as absolute or sovereign. Take the Market-place to which you have returned like a ghost from the future. As absolute or sovereign image, the Market beguiles us into overlooking the terrors associated with it over the centuries. We tend to see in it the ground of honest trade, honest money – in our time – honest competition between individuals who are innocent of all that has happened.

  “As partial image, however, the Market suddenly assaults us. It is brightest when it is darkest fellowship of greed. It is a net in which peoples and species have been decimated. We grow fat with our greedy antecedents, thin with our decimated antecedents. They inflate us to spawn them and their miseries and their grandeurs all over again.

  “I tell you, my friend, much subtlety and true honesty are needed in the ‘reading’ of partial images. For the partial image – in confessing to the ground of bias in sovereign institution – appears to terrorize us, or to confuse us, though it has begun, in some degree, to free us from the absolutes that clothe our memory and to reveal a potential that has always been there for mutual rebirth within conflicting, dying, hollow generations.

  “The partial image is biased, yes, but it is also in conflict with inherent bias – it is a part of something incalculably whole and stark and true. Such wholeness cannot be confined or structured absolutely; its complex nakedness and community of spirit eludes us within every mask or costume or dress …”

  “What then is wholeness?” I cried.

  “Wholeness is the unique mediation of fiction of spirit between partial images. Wholeness is, shall I say, a real fiction in arousing, penetrating, transforming the parent-in-the-child, the object in the newborn or unborn subject. Wholeness opens the prospect of climates of passion and emotion that reflect each other, not to overwhelm each other but to ‘redeem’ (if that is not in itself too biased a word) the fragmentation of cultures, and to do so without glosses of deception that underestimate the depth, the terror, the obscurity, of the enterprise.

  “The price of wholeness is a fiction that so relives the fragmentation of cultures that it cannot be duped by ideal rhetoric or faiths or falsehoods. It gives creative tension to doubts and uncertainties that become the cousins of god in reflecting their curiosity about the wounds of heaven that revive a concept of innocence, the wounds of hell by which we glorify the individual in traditions of conquest.

  “Wholeness releases partiality to confront itself in others as a necessary threshold into the rebirth and the unity of Mankind beyond the rhetoric of salvation, beyond the rhetoric of damnation. Wholeness is a third dimension in which every mask suffers the kinship of exchange, the kinship of glory, the kinship of humiliation. At least,” he smiled across at me half-commandingly, half-apologetically, “that is what I think.”

  Czar Johnny (half-masked by the future in Carnival generation’s embalmed Lenin) shuffled along with the globe on his back, a globe or an immense crate of sugar. The particular aisle in the gutted (as it seemed to me) Market ship along which he moved was rather narrow and the shoppers or crew over which he ruled pulled aside, as they saw him coming, into areas between the stalls. Thus he made his way inch by inch, foot by foot, through the population of Carnival limbo.

  One Lady Charlotte, however, stood her ground.

  “Charlotte?” I turned to Masters. “Have I not heard that name before?”

  “Flip back to the Alms House scene in Carnival,” said Masters. “There’s mention of Charlotte. Bartleby’s second wife.”

  “Ah yes! I remember. She stripped him of his property in the heat of their romance.”

  “A cunning bitch. She’s dressed in rich cloth today, unlike poor Alice. And her shoes glitter. Ready to dance you would think. But no! she stands abusing Johnny as if she’s chained or riveted to the ground. Her pride won’t let her stir.”

  “It’s infra dig, isn’t it, for her to go aside into the crush and the throng of perspiring infernal bodies between the stalls?”

  “Her sons were educated at the College next to the Alms House, then they studied law at Harvard and in London. She knows her rights, that’s clear,” Masters conceded.

  “What is she saying to the czar?”

  “She’s telling him the folk in the Market have every right to stand in the aisle and buy their fruit and fish. She’s telling him he should back off and use another path away from the people’s stalls. She says she’ll stand where she is until kingdom come or until she’s through with her purchases.”

  Flatfoot glowered. He slowly lowered the globe on his back until he had deposited it like a great boulder in the middle of the narrow people’s aisle. “You cunning bitch,” he cried with venom, almost taking the words, I thought, out of Masters’ shadow of a mouth. “Don’t be hasty, don’t abuse the Lady Bartleby, HE SAYS.”

  I was astonished at the sudden caution that had arrived upon Flatfoot’s tongue, as if he were repeating an aside or an injunction he had received from an unseen companion. I played the scene back in my mind and listened intently. “You cunning bitch! Don’t be hasty, don’t abuse the Lady Bartleby, Johnny, HE SAYS.”

  Yes, there was no doubt about it. I had overlooked but caught Johnny in the replayed utterance of the unseen companion.

  “Who is HE?” I wondered.

  “Johnny’s an idiot giant, he hears voices,” Masters half-laughed but I was conscious again of their mysterious global kinship, as mysterious, in a sense, as the cousinship to Sir Thomas who, I suddenly saw, out of the corner of my eye, had his eye fixed upon the czar of New Forest.

  I almost swore I saw Masters’ shadow-lips moving in that mirroring eye.

  “Lady Bartleby I asking you polite to stir you ass and to move out of me way. Lady Bartleby I telling you …” He began to roar like thunder. Then he stopped. He was listening to someone invisible whose lightning caution he repeated: “Be careful, Johnny, be careful what you say, HE SAYS.”

  Charlotte grew icy. She was angry. She ignored him. But despite her anger – as is the way of dreams – she smiled; her ageing body smiled with a faint shrug within the seamless garment of marriage he had conferred upon her. Though she had divorced Bartleby he had called her Lady Bartleby. She remained riveted to the floor of the Market and continued to order iced fish, rice, oranges, pear-shaped mangoes, and other miscellaneous items I could not read from where I stood upon the Carnival vessel of Night.

  Masters shifted a little beside me as if he were still embarrassed by a play or a rehearsal of resemblances as he led me through the labyrinth of fire. It was a curious sensation, the sensation of shadow overlapping light, light shadow, day night, the sensation of gesture as speech, of words and images so curiously broken they gave scope to Carnival self-ridicule, Carnival self-love, Carnival self-loathing, within savage pride, savage labour, savage creation. They gave scope to scorn as wel
l as vulgar relief within the play of folk-conscience that enveloped the chained Lady and the Carnival tyrant.

  “Lady you know how damn hard I work? You think you know? I move galaxies of sugar. You no have a clue. You too proud to step out of me way. ME. Czar Johnny! You want to gaol me, yes, chain me to you but Lady I could burn you …” He mumbled something that was followed by HE SAYS to imply another caution from his lightning companion, but the voice was so faint this time that Johnny felt he could safely ignore it. He reached out to seize Charlotte but the echo of faintness intensified into another lightning call, female rather than male, arising from the stalls. It pulled him back into himself. He looked around and saw the marble woman, his common-law wife. She had left Sir Thomas to consult a colleague and report on the distressing event of the day – the loss of the eggs. She returned in time and perceived the violent climax that the czar of New Forest was about to inflict on Lady Bartleby.

  “Johnny, Johnny, I know you strong. But strong can mean weak, SHE SAYS. Johnny, Johnny, I know you’s a brute, I know you’s a crab. But the lady in chains is a crab too, SHE SAYS, and crab can eat crab.” The marble woman’s dark humour took the Market Carnival by surprise. The riddle of the Carnival crab was known to all, crab-Johnny, crab-Charlotte, as the mutual devouring principle within a chained civilization, North, South, East, West. It was an omen of coming death for one or the other, for Johnny or Charlotte, but at the moment a comedy of design was paramount. The insertion of SHE SAYS into counterpoint with the faint injunction HE SAYS that Johnny had ignored registered upon “male crab” and “female crab” to break a climax of violence though they remained fixed in the Market aisle with the crate of sugar between them. There was resounding applause.