The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  At last the phantom horse responded to the driver. The driver was attired in a long threadbare feathery cloak. Not a feather from a duck’s back but a feather that had drifted down from the sun-raven that flew with the duck through the mist over my mother’s eyes. It was black. The procession moved inch by inch, it seemed, under the yellow sunflower yet black sun-raven in the body of space.

  The procession moved through East Street, Orange Promenade, into Brickdam. The passivity of the procession – the passivity of the audience sealed into their slowly moving carriages and cars – was possessed now of the faintest rumbling. Not thunder, but the agitated digestion of the rock-phantom horse that led the long line of vehicles towards the cemetery. It was at least a mile long. Masters sat with me in the principal mourners’ carriage. We may have been sailing upon the bed of a river sucked dry and in which the prospect of fluid evolutionary/revolutionary soul existed in the inhabitants of the Town who lined the route of the procession.

  There they were with curious waiting gaze as if rooted in a spell within the phantom horse in which I was convinced my father lay. They too had been cropped by that gigantic creature. They too were subject to drought-stage, drought-garden, in Purgatory’s belly. Had not Masters read to me – on one occasion when he visited my parents – the story of the Trojan Horse that became the seed of an overturned age or frame? So now, it seemed to me, a colonial regime, such as poverty-stricken New Forest, secreted in itself the stratagem of Purgatory within its rock-horse that had cropped my garden, and that therein lay the catalyst of modern allegory, modern fiction or biography of terrifying spirit to judge the age in which I lived.

  Fly, sunflower, star, feather, crocodile, cannon – to list a few spectres that haunted the route of the procession – were mutual catalysts on the Delphic blackboard of space outside my window and they rumbled in the digestive organs of phantom Carnival daemon or horse.

  In running along tarred Brickdam at slow-motion cosmic pace (that recalled the game of the crab that Masters had played on the Arawak foreshore), the hooves of the horse bit into the road soft and hard. They were acquainted with the pitch of night melting in the sun. They were acquainted with the heights and the depths. Daylight night, night-time sun, rumbled in the belly of the horse. We gained the Alms House and I was aware of plucked scouts, the feathered police, their plumes waving as they held the traffic in tributary side streets to allow the procession to pass. We passed the gateway through which Thomas had been knighted by Aunt Alice. The garden theatre in which she had danced was as dry as East Street river. The Bartleby dancing school was finished. Finished? Clean slate? Not really. A wisp of paper blew through the gate and floated into my carriage window. White paper. Black slate. It had been crunched by the horse and the teeth marks listed a throng of hopes, desires, biases as dark as midnight pitch; so deceptive and dark is the pitch of slate crunched by the daemon horse that it seems angelic material, clean slate, the purity of existence, whereas it is the litter of hidden injustice that plagues the human imagination.

  I remembered Aunt Alice’s Magna Carta limbs and wondered what archaic revolution she would achieve when she leapt from the belly of Purgatory’s horse into the kingdom of the sun.

  We sailed past the Alms House and came to the College. No sign of Quabbas or young Alice or Becks or Delph. They were hidden in the slate that had been crunched by the horse. We sailed on Brickdam river to the New Forest race course and turned right. This was the last leg of the journey to the cemetery. I descended with Masters from the principal mourners’ carriage but the labyrinthine sensation of having been cropped by the Carnival horse possessed my bones, and when the coffin was lowered into the grave I felt neither I nor my father was in it. He belonged to the past, it was true, I to the future, but I felt neither his death in the past nor mine – whenever it came in the future – had absolutely occurred or would absolutely occur. He had been – I would be – framed to appear non-existent. But the fact was we resided in the womb of the phantom horse as a seed of archaic revolution more enduring than novel or fashionable non-existences that perpetuate a lie.

  His coffin was his frame – dray-cart wheel lashed into hollow trunk of a tree in which an apparition resembling himself had been sealed – and the robed shell of a creature lying there was desolation’s fiend masquerading as the masked parent, the masked advocate, I once knew.

  *

  My father’s death left an indelible scar on my mother’s breasts and heart. It coincided with the beginning of the cancer from which she died in the early 1940s. Masters became my foster-father. And yet I felt parentless when Martin became an ape of soul dressed in bleached snow in the trunk of a tree that served as his epitaph and coffin. How else may I describe the shock of incredulity, of incredible parting from someone of whom I had been jealous when he lay in bed with my mother and yet upon whom I had come to rely as if he were a god?

  Such parentless eventuality is the origin of the paradoxes in this book on which I have been engaged for twenty-five years and more. For instance, Masters was my foster-father over the years following my father’s death, yet I became his fiction-parent – and the fiction-parent of Thomas and other characters – in embarking upon a biography of spirit in them, through them, overshadowing them all. I grew by involuntary stages to appreciate the significance of the “mask of the cuckold” that he (Masters) identified with his legal father through whom, in fact, his survival in his mother’s glass womb was assured when she contemplated Abortion and he protected her and her unborn child by another man.

  GLASS BODY. PHANTOM HORSE.

  The conjunction arose in my mind intuitively, secretively, like the seed of opera or symphony one Easter Friday when Masters, Amaryllis and I visited the Portuguese Cathedral in Main Street, New Forest.

  It was the year after my father’s funeral. The Portuguese were renowned for the Carnival theatre they staged at Easter. The Good Friday Christ was nailed into, then taken from, the cross. The painted blood on his hands and feet, and in his side, seemed astonishingly real. I was struck, however, less by painted blood than by the gloom and shadow, the radiance and dazzle, of glass windows arching up to the roof of the world. I was in the mutuality of the divine, I was in mother-horse, I was in father-glass, father-horse, mother-glass, I ascended, descended, into a mysterious constellation of evolutionary spaces.

  Amaryllis was a Catholic by upbringing and it was through her, I believe, that Masters thought of taking us to the Easter Carnival Mass. I dreamt she was covered with autumn leaves within the phantom horse of the glass-cathedral. Was it a good or a bad omen that the rain of leaves covering her had been cropped by space? We were in the same broad church, the same narrow boat, the same vicarious coffin, the same ultimate cradle, and the digestive rumbling organs of space enlivened, rather than extinguished, the fire of her spirit. I did not see her again until 1957 when I came to London. Masters arranged her passage to England from South America in 1940 and there were rumours that the vessel in which she sailed had been torpedoed by a German submarine and that the sea was strewn by leaves and feathers (akin to fish and scales and stars) of oceanic tree or epitaph. My dream-premonition come true! But the rumours were false. We met in the year Masters and I arrived in England and were married in 1959 at the Registry Office in Kensington.

  Amaryllis had by then left the Catholic Church. In fact our true marriage – if I may so put it – occurred in 1958. No priest then, lay or robed, no official of the State or the Church, presided. Spirit presided. And that is the only mark of a true marriage. She lived in Maida Vale. We had been seeing each other for several months when, one autumn evening, we returned to her rooms. These were at the top of a building overlooking Regent’s Canal. The bedroom was spacious. A fire blazed in the grate. And it seemed to me that we lay in a curious luminous splinter of the cathedral-horse in which we had knelt an age ago in New Forest.

  The illusion – if illusion of mist and space it was – sprang out of the fire in the autumn grate of t
he cosmos. That fire had been cropped by the horse of space but it had achieved the miracle of a flower in which we perceived the mystery of cosmic digestion and evolution, the first seed eaten by revolutionary spirit ages ago, the first leaf phantom god (phantom animal) tasted, the first plant upon the tongue of the sea, the first rose in the lips of soil. We were drowning together in fire and in water, the strangest taste of dying into elements we consumed, the strangest climax, reality of paradise, reality of intercourse; inimitably transparent yet dense bodies were ours. We lived in yet out of our frames, we touched each other yet were free of possession, we embraced yet were beyond the net of greed, we were penetrated yet whole, closer together than we had ever been yet invisibly apart. We were ageless dream.

  We subsisted upon genius of revolution of sensibility within the phantom animal in which we lay, a phantom animal that was so ancient it filled us with awe. Our naked flesh was inhabited by mutual generations clad in nothing but obsolescent organs, obsolescent youth. What obsolescence! What intimate renewal of being beyond age and youth! We were intimate, ageless being, we were four years short of thirty, we were young, we were old as the coition of the hills and waves miniaturized in our bodies. We were a dying fall into deeper orchestration of mutual spaces.

  In the fire and in the flower, in the rain of autumn leaves that the cosmic horse eats, lies the thrust of revolutionary peace within two beings alone, yet encompassed by an invisible third, an invisible fourth, an invisible fifth, sixth, seventh, in the belly of space, the invisible army of humanity.

  Amaryllis’s father had given his “leaves of brain” to us as a stratagem of invisible humanity arising through heart and lungs into imperishable armour and contemplation.

  My poor mother framed by a mist of tears was also there in the horse with us. She vanished but left us ammunition in the sorrows of humanity with which to drench the world in the spirit of truth.

  Amaryllis’s father led my poor mother through Purgatory within a form that translated the elements of feud into both sorrow and love.

  I was translated but unable to read in its entirety the secret and terrible and profound army of invisible humanity within the horse in which Amaryllis and I lay.

  Masters knew it all when he knocked on my book long after in 1982 and 1983 to help me revise and to illumine the depths of coniunctio or complex marriage of cultures within the organs of the self. He had been involved, I perceived, in initiating Amaryllis and me into a distinction between transfigured seed of passion and calloused immunity from evil that is embodied in sexual gymnastics, sexual consumerism, sexual escapism from the reality of love in all its depth of beauty and awe and terror.

  EIGHT

  The ecstasies and torments that run parallel through the twentieth-century age made it inevitable that the dead king should descend into the living Inferno the moment Amaryllis and I glimpsed heaven and consummated our secret marriage vows. The Inferno lives when the dead retrace their steps around the globe. Our marriage was unique heart and mind but for that reason – unique tranquillity and ecstasy, unique revolution and peace – it was inevitable that a master spirit would return to counsel us and to bear the penalty of the Inferno that runs in parallel with heaven. Masters accepted the penalty. He became my guide and opposite (our guide and opposite) in arriving from the kingdom of the dead to counsel us in the land of the living and to guide my pen across the pages of this biography of spirit.

  It started in this instance with property even as Amaryllis and I embraced. The shadow of property fell upon our ageless dream, the ageless dream of love. He had arranged for his properties in New Forest to be sold and for the money from the sale to be transmitted to him in London. He tended, however, to be lax in transmitting instructions to his agents and incessant delays occurred. The two-storeyed house in East Street was sold quite quickly but the money never came to him. It went instead to the New Forest Jane Fisher – Jane Fisher the First – who had stabbed him as they made love. I was angry and impatient with such quixotic generosity. Indeed for a prince of an overseer who could be hard as rock, it seemed a singular discrepancy of passion to give cash he urgently needed to a whore who had grossly attacked him. The truth was he regretted the privileges under which he had used the loose women of the estate, and was possessed by uncanny guilt.

  I thought that was the truth in 1958 but I know now in 1982/83 when he wears the mask of the dead king that truth runs far deeper. A discrepancy of passion had haunted him through Waterfall Oracle and the legacy of property to the whore who had killed him was essential within the sacrament of a first death.

  It was essential also in parallel with my marriage to Amaryllis and with the construction of other paradoxes and parallels such as hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt, the funeral-horse and the wedding-horse, the Inferno and Paradise. In all these the mind of fiction looks deeper than perverse hope into a dialectical hopelessness that releases us paradoxically from the hope of (the desire for) oblivion as guilt releases us to plumb the creative depths and riddles of innocence, as the funeral-horse releases us to unmask the lie of death in life and to embrace what is dearest in humanity, as the Inferno releases us and sets all parallels into motion so that Paradise may be found again and again within each age despite universal travail.

  He told me – when he returned from the grave and became my guide – that the protracted delay in selling his other properties had been forecast by Waterfall Oracle as a symptom of the phantom horse that would crop the industries of the world over successive decades and generations. Prices had fallen in New Forest, South America, and he had been advised to descend into the Inferno and unravel a better climate for the stock market or wait until a better climate prevailed. That descent in itself would have appeared, in realistic terms, as nothing but a forecast of bleak economic growth in the late twentieth century but in parallel with the glimpse of Paradise that Amaryllis and I had achieved, it endorsed the mind of fiction again as an irony of forces subsisting upon opposites.

  One doorway into the Inferno lay across Crocodile Bridge. In this moment, however, this moment of his return, this moment of suspended climax between heaven and hell, the dead king chose another. He entered the Inferno through a factory in North London that made Frigidaires and washing machines. I thought it perverse that Masters the Second should take a job as a common labourer and it was not until I saw my marriage to Amaryllis in a new light across the light years – not until the dead king returned into my book to enlighten me – that I perceived how he had glimpsed parallel opposites – parallels composed of apparently opposite tendencies – in Waterfall Oracle and in the golden chain he disclosed to me now as an element in his descent into the dancing human boulders upon whom he installed me as fiction-judge over him and others.

  Poor judge I was! I was ignorant of the comedy, the comedy of parallel powers, high and low, upon which he relied to enlighten me as to the pawn I was when I had been elevated to the judgement seat.

  Pawn and judgement seat! Here was another parallel of opposites I had missed. I had chalked up “hope and hopelessness” upon Mr Delph’s blackboard in Waterfall Oracle but “pawn and judgement seat” struck me as new, though upon reflection I saw it had subtly appeared in Mr Quabbas’s cave when he had elevated my father to wear the mask of Thomas. I reflected again and saw that “pawn and judgement seat” placed a special emphasis upon “freedom and unfreedom”. I drew Amaryllis into my arms. I was free to declare my love to her, free to marry her, free to live with her – a freedom that did not exist in other countries, in South Africa for example – and I suddenly saw with a shock that our two selves ran in parallel with unfree selves (unfree lives) in many spheres of hell, not only political hells but moral hells, the moral hell that Quabbas and unsuspecting Alice lived in in New Forest. He could not declare his sensuous love for her there, however intrinsically profound or poetic it was, but the depth of his affection, his unfreedom, in cosmic space nourished my insight into precious, invaluable freedom to lov
e, freedom of spirit and mind and body in Amaryllis and me.

  “Such,” he said to me, “is the law of initiations and the price of freedom in the vows you consecrate with Amaryllis. Freedom is partial and as such your private freedoms, the sacred inner vows you take for granted, relate you to – interlink you with – others who are in chains and whose vows are mute.

  “Take the golden chain, my dear Weyl, upon which I descend again and again into hell.”

  I held Amaryllis close to me.

  “I hid it from you in Waterfall Oracle, Weyl, and had I attempted to explain my behaviour in 1958 it would have been premature. But now the two occasions may blend and move us anew through the lapses of dream, the lapsed dream of reality that is the theme of your book, the capacity to revisit occasions, to return again and again to vacancies of memory and to first things and last things that are neither last nor first in the kingdom of spirit.”

  He suddenly broke off and spoke rather harshly.

  “I was an overseer on a rich plantation, Weyl. Do I have to tell you that? You know it already. Yes, I do have to tell you, if only to endorse the obvious. The plantation is the corner-stone of the economy of the poor world. The factory is the cornerstone of the economy of the rich world.”

  “Is it obvious?” I murmured as much to myself as to him. “You said rich plantation.”

  “Rich, yes. Rich plantation, rich world, poor world. Rich sets up a dense echo or connection between the plantation and the sophisticated industrial inferno or factory. A connecting doorway. Follow me Weyl. It’s for your sake and Amaryllis’s that I descend. I bequeath you my wages.”