The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  He paused; his blind eyes seemed to burn. He continued, “To put into reverse the obsolescence of institutions, the obsolescence of dead languages, that accumulate upon the sacred and clothe it with false clarities.” He paused again as if he heard, even as I saw, the rising waves. “A reversible fiction,” he said softly as if he spoke to himself, “unsettles false clarities … reopens the profoundest human involvements and perspectives to illumine a truth.”

  “What is that truth?” I demanded.

  “Violence is not the corner-stone of a civilization.”

  “But, but,” I began to protest.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “Violence seems irreversible in a desperate age where alternatives are fearsome and we appear to have no option but the lesser of two evils. But that is why we need a dual hand,” his voice choked a little then cleared, “a dual hand within an irreversible function to yield an edge, if nothing more, a subversive edge, that turns into the terror of pity, the terror of beauty, the terror of gentleness, to ravage our minds and purge us through violence of violence.”

  The storm hit the vessel at last. The glass sides of the ship darkened and it was as if I saw it now, I saw the sea, in Masters’ eyes. The sea was black and white fire ran along the ridges and valleys of space. I held to my dream-support for bleak life and yet this was my leap into Purgatory all over again, purgation through the terror of beauty.

  I saw through his eyes into a mystery in which hills tumbled and the plates of the sea-bed arose. The storm clung to pupils of devastation everywhere and nowhere. I looked into the ghost of chaos as into a raging, human cosmos. And a shuddering response to the intensity of limits suddenly seized me. The dead king’s eyes were those of a conquering hero secreting everlasting peril. Everlasting peril? I questioned his gaze and the blind/seeing pupils flashed. “Our conquering heroes are crystal balls in reverse. You shake them and raise a cloud of particles, a cloud of finite scale to hubris, the hubris of infinity.”

  The sea, the storm, had been staggeringly miniaturized in the dead king’s sight; it had been converted into the terror of beauty. If he had walked on the sea at that moment I would have followed. For I would have been reduced to a pupil jumping from trough to crest, weightless eye, weightless pupil. The eye of beauty and terror bottles a head of emotion yet floats above fear upon astonishing elements.

  The eye of the terror of pity, the terror of gentleness, walked with me on water, slipped, ran into a cave, emerged, half-capsized bottled head, righted itself, walked with me again on the wave above the majesty of storm. Blind eye that had been uplifted, reversed into visionary gravity’s anti-gravity, visionary violence’s non-violence‚ storm’s peace.

  There was terror still within storm’s peace in the depths of the visionary sea beneath me. I walked to the edge of beauty, the edge of finite/infinite desolation. I held that edge and prayed. I offered it, I offered that edge to Christ. It was a gift, my gift to Christ who would ultimately save me by building on my premise of human, fallible generosity.

  I walked in Purgatory upon water’s sparked fire. The vessel rode the sky, walked. I clung, prayed, walked again with Purgatory’s matchbox ship, Purgatory’s rocket to the stars. It was the dawn of the space age wreathed in fiercest element. I walked to the edge of gravity.

  “Purgatory is all,” said the dead king. “Purgatory is endless.”

  “And what about heaven?” I asked.

  “Heaven requires your gift, your gift of originality. It is but a straw but god will cherish it in the midst of the storm.”

  SIX

  The storm abated, the seas grew calm. I dreamt I was led back by Everyman Masters to the edge of my seventh year. It was 1939, the place was East Street to which my parents, Martin and Jennifer Weyl, had moved. We occupied the house in which the Masters family had lived in the 1920s. They had moved into a two-storeyed mansion next door. I was seven, Masters was twenty-two; Martin, my father, was thirty-two and Jennifer, my mother, was thirty-three.

  My birth in 1932 had been a catalyst of change for the Weyls who had been forced to marry – you may recall, gentle reader – when Jennifer was three months pregnant. My arrival had invoked a stimulus to sharpen Martin’s perception of pawns of fate. It also invoked a post-natal crisis in Jennifer that lingered on and turned into bouts of ecstasy, bouts of depression, over the years. My mother and father moved to the edge of themselves; they were cast down yet peculiarly, devastatingly reborn, when I arrived. They miniaturized two proportions of dread in themselves – even in miniature such edges or proportions are formidable – when I came.

  Jennifer dreamt she gave birth to me when she was three months pregnant, three aeons pregnant. I leapt into her arms from the future fully formed. I leapt across the time-lapse of nine months gestation, as if gestations, ages, were edges in eternity. It was a dream that plagued her. My father embraced her tenderly, he sought to console her. But with the passage of time – as her bouts of depression intensified – he could not resist the feeling that he and I (he as her husband, I as her son) were responsible for her ecstasies and alarms. I saw it all through Masters’ blind/seeing eyes. I saw my father anew. He was intent on unravelling a cosmic seed of law, a cosmic reversal of suffering from those who suffer to those who blandly witness suffering, a cosmic reversal of judgement from those who are judged to those who judge, from those who are accused to those who counsel. That was his proportion of dread, that he would suffer at the edge of the law (the birth of the law) as she had suffered, in her proportion of dread, at the edge of the future (the birth of the future).

  I saw my mother anew. I saw her awakening to a maternal value of dread that she never knew she possessed towards the stranger at the gate. I saw myself as the stranger. And I was imbued with some measure of her charisma that I would never forget. She loved me, she cared for me, but somewhere within body and mind, there was an obsessional edge or gate that witnessed to my arrival backwards from the future and out of the deeps, out of the storm, of life. I had come to her with a knife in my hand. It was a novel post-natal depression. Novel ecstasy. Novel terror of pity, terror of gentleness (my mother was the gentlest of creatures) in the log-book of Mother Blood, Mother Flesh, Mother Spirit, overshadowing the vessel of the soul.

  Mixed families were native to New Forest. The terms “black” or “white” or “coloured” were indeterminate and mutual in privileged or biased or acceptable tone. One saw what one dreaded or wished to see. My mother was fair, perhaps white; my father was coloured; and I was of indeterminate origin or pigmentation. A cloud arose at the heart of the sun in April to drape all savage pigmentation. My father had been appointed defence counsel for a red Amerindian male from the deep New Forest, South American interior. It was the trial of a lifetime, the trial of the family. The Amerindian spoke no English and the matter was complicated by interpreters, kith and kin, who were not altogether at home in the English tongue or in the Amerindian’s tongue.

  The charge was matricide. It was a ritual killing. The red man – as a prince descended from El Dorado – was commanded by Kanaima, the “savage heart” of the family, to kill his mother. She was sick and in great pain. It was cancer. “Release her from torment. Purge the people, purge the language of the heart,” Kanaima said. “Give her body and her breasts to the sun.” I was deceived by Masters’ deaf ears, blind eyes, as proportions of divine irony as much as dread, in his guidance of me through the trauma of the law. I thought I heard SON – “give her breasts to the son” – rather than “to the sun”.

  What does one hear, what does one see, at the edged proportions of the past and the future, when the quest for redemption from violence arouses the profoundest self-questioning, profoundest honesty, profoundest self-judgement, self-confession, within a family of pigmented soul, pigmented bone?

  It was a luminous red ball of a sun when the mother was slain by the child. Queen Jennifer stepped out of a shower, out of a waterfall, out of an ocean, into the bedroom. I was lying half-asleep, h
alf-awake, on her bed. She handcuffed me to her body as to the mast of a ship. My father came on to the deck and touched her lightly. “You’re the loveliest creature on earth Jennifer,” he said. Indeed lightning had struck, had congealed. She was beautiful. She turned to him and to me and she smiled.

  “Smile if you like but it’s true.”

  “What’s true?”

  “You, you’re true.” The tone of his voice changed. “I’ve had the devil of a day defending my poor devil of a son in court. He’s killing you, you know. Look how you spoil him.”

  Lightning softened. The congealed lightning mast softened. Queen Jennifer had sailed to the bed and I lay against her. The wonderful canvas of her body seemed to crumple a little, to trail a little into a towel across her legs with edges pointing to the floor.

  “What translucency!” he murmured. “Translucent blood. Sheer marvel. It’s the light you know. Twilight gives a luminous halo, a luminous inner paint to your breasts. Madonna ship.” He added almost ominously, “It’s the way the sun invests itself with a brush and a knife to slice into flesh.”

  I started. I freed my hands. They were red.

  “It would be different at cloudless noon‚” my father continued, pacing the floor and the deck. He stared at me pointedly. “The sun’s rays are vertical then.” He stared at my mother’s breasts. “Each slice of sailing naked body turns opaque at cloudless noon, opaque wedding to light, opaque funeral of blood. Pallid, slightly shut-in.”

  I felt I was beginning to glimpse what my father was saying to me across the difficult years. The dread, the irony, of the holy family of mankind to which someone as unholy, as pagan, as I belonged! That was a crude translation, I knew, but it helped. Were there not proportions of dread, proportions of unsuspected truth, unsuspected beauty, residing everywhere in our most intimate guilts, intimate memories, intimate fallacies, intimate dreams, intimate selves?

  “I look as I feel then,” said Jennifer quietly, so quietly I alone heard what she was saying. She felt pallid, shut-in, but amenable to sailing in space again through waterfall or ocean when the lightning-knife I invested in the sun struck and she congealed. I knew her pain. I knew I had wakened her to the cancer of ecstasy and depression from the day I was born. I knew that every canvas of the holy family of mankind invested in human, ailing, shut-in skins and bodies that a painter or a daemonic child slices anew into brilliant conversions of the womb of space. Each slice becomes an indictment of assumptions that clothe our eyes, assumptions of hopelessness, of loss, of absolute peril, absolute evil, absolute bias. What are the roots of the holy family of mankind save that the roots of hope lie through hopelessness that is sliced, transfigured, sliced and sliced again and again?

  I knew her pain. I also knew my father’s joy and sorrow in addressing me through my guide Masters. I knew the faintest bridge, the faintest curvature or shoreline, glimmering in the depths of terror, the faintest potential for coniunctio or true marriage between Masters – the dead king – and the slain Amerindian queen, slain in themselves and in their surrogates and substitutes yet each requiring the conversion of the red ball of the sun upon civilization’s canvas. Did not young Alice slay her uncle Quabbas and give him light? Alice had been blissfully unconscious of the deed whereas I … How unconscious/conscious was I of killing my mother from the day I was born? My hands were red in the dying sun.

  “Shut-in, a little opaque,” my father said, “whereas a black skin …”

  “What about a black skin?” Jennifer asked.

  “Well a black skin thrives under the straight noonday sun. It opens like a flower.”

  “And at twilight?”

  “It looks pallid then. Pallid as you look at noon. Black pools into pallid jam session shadow when twilight falls. White pools into shut-in cave when noon strikes.”

  When noon strikes, when noon strikes … I stared at my hands. “So you see,” my father said, “there is a marriage of opposites in the family of the sun.”

  *

  When the trial was at its height Masters turned his blind/seeing eyes deep into New Forest and to the birthplace of the red king. I felt I was seeking myself as much as the doomed Amerindian who had been charged with matricide. Seeking myself in a labyrinth of rivers that fell from Waterfall Oracle. It was a journey into apparent desolations. The river of New Forest was unusually dry. It lay at the bottom of an ocean I had seen with the bouncing pupil of an eye from the crest of a wave – an ocean we had crossed or were still to cross. A long series of rapids, with intervening spaces and calms, lay before us. Insects descended at night like a plague. As day followed day, night night, Masters was subtly aware of the dream arch of the river beneath the ocean. It was as if he and his nebulous boat crew slid along the curvature of a feather that flew beneath my bouncing eye on its wave. No prospect of sliding from the duck’s back, the duck’s smooth feather, for a long time to come in the slow motion rain of the river. It took ages, it seemed, to drive the boat across a spine or a ridge or to haul it around a portage that lay equally at the bottom of the sea and in the sky. We made our way by infinitesimal degrees within the exposed rocks and naked sand banks of the drought-river.

  The wide expanse of the feather cultivated an oceanic illusion as if one were descending in absurdity of flight into pools of sky that shone here and there, pools that were brittle oases in a desert of sand and rock. The ocean’s Carnival feather masked desert. Each rock masked the arid spine of flight tilted in space against a shimmering background of torment.

  At night the curvature of the feather-wheel was subtlest yet paradoxically most pronounced. For then the duck’s apparently smooth, apparently oiled machine shed its rain of space like dry oceanic stars that clustered at the tip of our drowned nose and caused our bouncing eye to descend and concentrate upon a luminous fly with silver legs. I had sliced my mother the day I was born but now it was as if I had been sliced by inimitable guilt, inimitable passion, to give birth to a new curvature of time in space; as if we had been sliced – the entire boat crew – as we journeyed into Purgatory.

  The tip of one’s nose! Was the tip of a fly on the tip of one’s nose the genesis of Waterfall Oracle?

  Seers and saints had listened to the music of a silver fly on the tips of their noses. Each tip became a sensible organ, an ear beneath but in front of their eyes.

  We listened with our slain noses to the music of chaos. PRICK. BULLET. Prick of a feather. Twinkling ear, twinkling nose. BULLET. PRICK. A member of the crew lay beside me. Sound asleep. Feigning life. Dead. In the flickering lamp I had lit I perceived another star or fly on his brow. It moved by degrees of which he was unconscious. The prick of a fly! Atrocity of a fly! Fly’s eye carcass! What did a fly see? Did a fly perceive an entire boat as it crawled on a dead man’s lips? Did a fly perceive an entire universe spiralling in space in a parcel of stars like silver blood on a dead man’s face?

  After a hard day on the drought-river we slept like the Carnival dead on many a battlefield. New Forest ancient battlefield. African battlefield. Central American battlefield. Beirut battlefield. Belfast battlefield. We slept like a bandsman, a bombed horseman, in St James Park. We slept like a child, or an old man, half-aroused by the prick of a star, the silver legs of a fly. The atrocity of a fly illumined my open eyes; it made me susceptible to blindness in others, it made me susceptible to non-feeling, it made me susceptible to the grain of stone in flesh-and-blood, it imbued every fraction that it traversed with the curvature of genesis susceptible to desolations, the genesis of a cycle that knows its intractable material.

  We had been lucky to secure a passage into the interior at this time of the year. Fortunately an ageing anthropologist and his family, his wife and his seven-year-old daughter, were making the trip with a small party of researchers, and Masters was received like an honoured guest. I was dimly recognized as coming from the future into the past in search of myself. No one knew (with the exception of Masters – who was my guide – and the child Amaryllis who wa
s destined, like myself, to return to the land of the living from a dream of Purgatory) that they were dead. They swore they were still alive. They swore they were still proceeding on a journey they had once made or within activities they had once performed.

  A sensitivity upon calloused form – god’s fly, god’s prick – that I had never perceived before created a minute constellation, a minute star, within the blaze of the sun. I was aroused to face the edge of that minute prick of visionary light within the blind wheel of dawn. It was a feather that tickled a bruised nerve back to life in my slain companions, though they remained unconscious of it. Masters awoke. His blind/seeing eye mirrored my lucid dream, lucid fly.

  With dawn the lucid fly withdrew to heaven but left its disturbing light deposit upon the surface of the river. It was a light, an awakening, that differed from every other awakening that Masters had known. Light was imbued with a sensitivity that seemed to promote an aching sadness in silver and gold rays of the sun. That ache, that subtle pain, was a novel and incalculable experience. It put into reverse all models of sensation I had known. These had been adorned by flags of feeling whereas this aching light behind my brow arose from a genuine perception of non-feeling in me and others that had been illumined by the atrocity of a fly upon a dead man’s eyeballs.

  “Why lie to myself when I am dead?” Masters was half-joking, I knew. He turned and stared at me from the duck’s back on which he sat, duck’s feather as wide as the river of the sky but retaining the point of a quill he placed in my hand.

  “The truth is,” he said, “dip into me for the obsolescence of blood. I’m frozen. My planetary script is frozen. But‚” he hastened to add, “it’s a realistic advantage like witchcraft in this benighted corner of a foreign river, foreign ocean of space. Look how strong I am. Frozen blood gives me a stalwart frame. Look! Amaryllis is ill. But I lift her in my arms. She’s sad and that makes the universe all the heavier. Where would I be – how would I cope – without frozen blood to boost my flesh and strengthen my bones?