The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  “What wages?”

  “The wages of descent. They are my gift to you and to Amaryllis.”

  “Gift!”

  “Wedding gift,” he emphasized. I mouthed the words after him as if it was my turn to be dumb, as dumb as Quabbas. Laughter hit me, laughter and sorrow. It was unusual, to say the least, to bring a wedding gift to a man and his wife close on twenty-five years after the wedding. Unless the deed of coition, however marvellous and apparently complete, remains suspended in the parallels of royalty within servant and master, parallel losses and gains. Was the dead king our master guide, were we his servants who stood indebted to him? To see such losses and gains, such a debt, in a new light alerted us to the wages of freedom and unfreedom in every chain of being that ran through ourselves and others. Unbearable as all this was I began to link together three concepts in Masters’ chain – the law of initiations, private marriage or freedom to be with whom one wished, the intolerance of hell or unfreedom to be with whom one wished.

  What price did freedom pay to maintain its heart and mind? Amaryllis and I had purchased a legal certification of marriage a year or so after we consummated our private vows.

  Purchased! What wages did freedom need to earn in the purchase of privacy and the sacrament of body and mind?

  I saw in a flash within the golden chain of spirit upon which Masters seemed to dangle how necessary it was for him to descend into the Inferno. He sought to open new links in that chain, new equations and links and parallels beween the sweat of love and the sweat of industry, between the fires of hell and the fires of purification. Without master spirits who descend into hell the wages that make freedom possible would burn so fiercely that we would lose all distinction between grace and fury; we would become the prey of meaningless consumption, meaningless fire.

  *

  October was closing in when he led me down a hill to catch his first bus to the factory. He led me into an industrial labyrinth even before he came to the workplace. It was his mood. The labyrinth commenced the moment he boarded the bus. It would have been different, I dreamt, if he had been on his way to a great palace to receive the Order of Merit. The bus would have been overshadowed then by a kingdom or a throne. All doors, all stages, all buses, are multi-faceted, reversible frames of emotion in the chain that runs through parallels of humanity.

  Thus, that October evening, I sensed a frame of emotion upon him that was already draped by the huge cave of a factory at which he arrived an hour or so later.

  A lapse or disjunction of time marks every important appointment with fate. Had he been on his way to a palace – I saw again as he dangled on his golden chain above the Inferno – that timeless lapse, rooted in anticipation, would have embodied a degree of awe perhaps, a degree of pride or privilege perhaps interwoven with other curious emotions. No such luck. He was on his way to the factory and the timeless lapse encompassing him, as he drove to a place where he already was, embodied a degree of bleak present and presence.

  He blended the dying light of the evening sky into the faint arc of the new moon and into the chain by which he pulled me or led me to descend into the Inferno.

  The din in the factory was tremendous. And yet through it all I could hear the rush, the clamour, of phantom El Doradan rapids. It was drought, a drought that ignited a torrent etching its premises into rock utensils, smooth stripped half-bodied ice boxes, agitated washing machine souls, skeleton birthday funeral stream and dance. Each half-bodied boulder subsisted upon rhythmic cradle-in-epitaph, processional epitaph-in-cradle of industry, yet was a doorway into lapses of time. The dead king was on the threshold of despair in the intense racket but succeeded in slipping through a lapse and found himself walking at the edge of the still Round Pond in Kensington Gardens.

  It was as if he had lengthened the chain forwards into tomorrow’s noon and though lapsed time had taken us there I felt we were still in the factory and the noonday sun remained an arc-light in the roof of the cave. Masters was a new factory recruit but already he felt that he had worked in the cave of boulder-machines for years. I saw that his body was imbued with the rhythm of the factory floor as a sailor who comes ashore from his ship moves still upon an involuntary wave. Masters led me within lapsed time to gaze almost sightlessly across the beautiful parkland of Kensington Gardens, through the beautiful trees, across the beautiful water.

  Beautiful water! Sightless eyes. Deaf ears. Yes, sightless, deaf. But listen all the same to the distant roar of the traffic running toward and from Marble Arch. A sounding waterfall! Listen! Listen to the friction of wheels in the waterfall, listen to the gallop of horses in the waterfall, listen to the brakes and gears of engines in the waterfall.

  There was a crash in the distant waterfall, a muted explosion, a back-firing engine, water on rock. A collision! Was it a bus, was it a car, was it a cyclist, was it a dray-cart in a parade of ancient vehicles? Carnival gait of redressed machines, bus into masked cyclist, car into masked dray-cart, led me to ponder whether I saw or did not see someone crawling out from under a wheel …

  “Hey you, give me a hand here. Stop dreaming.”

  Masters was back upon his chain from Waterfall Oracle. We stood in the factory, lapsed noon had fallen back into the brilliantly lit night of the cave. A stack of guillotined sections of metal had slipped, half-crashed, onto the floor and needed to be shored up again.

  Two West Indians who had come to England in the 1940s and worked with the ground staff of the RAF, operated Madame Guillotine. They were, Masters surmised, around forty, his own age (or two or three years younger perhaps). It was a responsible job. He had been assigned to them. Not as an operator. He was unskilled in the slicing and the execution of metal. His job was to collect the sliced sections and transport them by degrees across the factory to a corridor where they were treated, passed on, treated and fashioned again, before being passed on once more to the assembly line.

  There had been an acute shortage of labour and that was how it happened that a great stack of guillotined material had accumulated over the past week. It was this that had partially crashed on the floor to jolt him back from the Round Pond. His first task was to deplete the pile. Though it had been restored it seemed on the verge of slipping again.

  “Go easy‚” he was told. “Tricky beast. Use them fucking gloves over there. It’s a night’s job to get it half-way down.”

  The night (the factory day) wore on under its manufactured stars and suns. It was during the midnight (the midday) lunch break that he was conscious of peering through another lapse into the faces of his two companions as if day sliced night night day. He knew them in that light. One of them. He had seen him somewhere ages ago. Carnival time. It heightened and sharpened an inner profile, an inner memory, of redressed faculties. It was the edge of blood, the inner sweat of the sun, in an unfamiliar yet familiar shadow of light, that made him know he knew one of them though he could not remember where or when it was that they had met. Perhaps it was the ordeal of unaccustomed labour in transporting the metal with gloved yet wretched hands that evoked some placeless connection between them. He could not say.

  Gloved wretchedness was the driving force, the itch or the climax, of industry. It illumined a cloak of savage or savaged memory that ties the worker’s hands, the worker’s bruised body, to his task with almost religious, fatalistic devotion. The sweat of industry was a phenomenon of darkest coniunctio, the marriage of man and material, boulder and boulder upon a chain that stretched from heaven to hell over which he had ruled in Plantation New Forest but as a labourer now himself – tied to Madame Guillotine – the sweat of intercourse infused him with a sensitivity that seemed to split and break every prick, every gloved nail.

  His gloves were already cut to tatters – a dead king’s, a dead bridegroom’s, from the grave. He held them up to me, a living bridegroom, a Carnival mask of parallel dream.

  Within a fortnight, the mask of the body, darkest coniunctio or marriage to industry, had forged a new skin,
a new glove, a new letter that seemed to run at the edges of bone into english letter, french letter, welsh letter, irish letter, west indian letter – and all the other gloved accents, sexual imprecation, blasphemies, curses, one hears on a factory floor.

  He was unable to place or identify the West Indian he thought he knew. Perhaps he was deceiving himself. Perhaps he was seeking to create a lapse into fictional memory in order to make game of the night’s/day’s labour. Lapsed night was day. Lapsed day was night. The lapsed unfamiliar was familiar. The lapsed unknown was known.

  Each man secretly played his own game of lapses or doorways into time with the devil. Religious devil. Religious pay-packet. So much for rent to keep the devil from the door, so much for the motorcycle or the motorcar to outrun the false shaman, so much for the devil’s cigarettes, for lovely beer, so much for vistas of the Round Pond within the pools in which El Doradan millions shone, so much for hire purchase …

  There were moments when the devil took a worker by surprise in the game they played. Was it the worker’s mask or the mask of the devil that crumpled a little? Was it the worker or the devil who seemed to lose his grip? The dual mask slipped and another face appeared, slightly ecstatic, slightly depressed, slightly dark, slightly brilliant, vaguely attuned to home thoughts (an Englishman’s home is his castle), home thoughts of wife or mother or child. Then the castle would darken into irrational siege, irrational casualty, injury, the unemployed, the unemployable.

  “You’ve never had it so fucking good,” the devil said to me. “Masters has bequeathed you his wages. Why are you moping, making up fictions?”

  The roof of the great hollow cave of a factory was littered with arc lights, manufactured suns, some with moon satellites but in a particular area of the lofty cave there shone a single star that an educated wag had christened Vega. This was devoid, as far as waggish eye could see, of the rings or planets circling Earth’s sun.

  Factory Earth therefore, the wag declared, need fear no competition from planets around Vega, the nearest sun in space and time to Planet Earth’s sun.

  It was light-year comedy and Masters was well acquainted with the importance of such games to preserve morale within the work forces of Factory Earth and Plantation Earth and to humour or lighten anxieties within a fiercely competitive world. In Vega – in the arc-light of Vega within the cave of the factory – lay the narrative seed of a constellation within a twentieth century biography of spirit. It was a seed in parallel, through distances of psyche, with the hunter/huntress Orion and the male/female Crab nebula.

  Such seed of necessity, such predilection for games, was a form of telepathy between worker and worker around the globe. Long before mock-constellations or satellites, invented by science, encircled the earth, cultures had invoked their own satellites and images in the stars through which they bridged distances and separations and spoke silently to each other. They saw without proof each other’s masks, they felt without touching each other’s edged tools, they pooled each other’s tears in the ghost of rain and made a sacrament of vision. The telepathy of the soul. They peered into the night-time live-coal eyes of the crocodile stars in search of a modern telescope to place in Thomas’s hands long before Thomas dreamt of investigating the wounds in the body of space.

  Late in November Masters found himself staggering under Vega with a satellite bride of metal from Madame Guillotine in his arms. He was suddenly visited by a revelation that was to be confirmed by science. His mind lapsed into fiction and he saw that there were foetal rings and planets around Vega and that these constituted not just a competitive threat to Factory/Plantation Earth but a new wheel or foothold for life should the golden chain to which he clung be so apparently severed or blasted it flung him – it flung him – through one of its links on to that wheel. HE COLLAPSED AND FAINTED.

  This was his first minor heart attack and it was to bring him face to face with the devil. It was time to say goodbye to the factory. He fell through the floor upon his golden chain (or was it up into the roof of the cave?) and lay at the edge of a great fire within a chain of reversible gravities, ups/downs, downs/ups, in Waterfall Oracle. He raised himself nevertheless to his feet to confront a gentleman with a smooth, polished mask.

  “What the devil?” said Masters. “Where in god’s name am I? Who are you?”

  The devil chuckled. “You called me first,” he said, “so here I am. A mask – the self-same mask – can be worn by parallel angels and monsters.”

  “Did I call you? I have forgotten.”

  “It’s a game of lapses of memory,” the devil said. “Read the newspapers around the globe. See how they put gory morale into their customers’ breasts – the spy games, the war games, the sex games, the power games. But sometimes a foul, a hideous lapse, is declared and the game almost ceases to exist.”

  Masters was stricken with the masquerade of the devil as something or someone he had summoned to play death and life and rebirth. In calling him, in saying “What the devil?” – albeit in the way one cries, “Oh god” or “To hell with you” – had he indeed, however involuntarily, invoked a fiery response in the cosmos, fiery death threatening him here on Earth, on one hand, fiery rebirth, foetal circulation of life around Vega, on the other? If the game stopped with a dreadful foul here on Plantation and Factory Earth would it start all over again somewhere else upon the wheeled chain of mutated spaces, mutated fires?

  Masters felt an undoubted attachment to, a longing for, the great beautiful fire beside which he stood with the devil. That longing stemmed from a curious hollowness and depression within him, a desire not just to be purified in hackneyed senses but to be rendered therapeutically impure, therapeutically mixed game (water and fire), so that the measure of his cosmic disease would match the sacrament, or miracle, of a cure. It was a formidable equation between “impurity of the game” and “sacrament or cure” (as if one were integral to the mystery of the other), and it made him see fire as a wonderful bride, a wonderful game, to be embraced, to be courted, to be loved. He lapsed through holed time. It was 1945 in New Forest. He had just donated blood to the Brickdam Alms House and to the State Hospital. The doctor (attired in calendrical mask 1945) who had drawn the blood resembled the devil of Vega’s fire (calendrical mask 1958). Reversible memory, the future in the past, the past in the future. Waterfall Oracle. Delph’s blackboard/white chalk. They were both polished, courteous plantation gentlemen. Except that the plantation doctor in New Forest was Carnival black, the devil (or daemon of souls on Vega) Carnival white.

  The doctor in the State Hospital rubbed the dead king’s arm with a piece of cotton wool, offered him a drink, and then, seeing how little affected he was by the blood-letting ritual, ventured to ask him whether he (as a prince of the estate) would take the lead in signing a petition.

  “What petition?” asked Masters.

  “I need cadavers,” said the doctor bluntly. “Freely donated. Sign please!”

  Masters was not sure that he had heard aright. “Whose cadaver?” he asked. He was drawn to the devil’s fire, he was drawn by a lust for purification and yet he shrank away now within a confusion of place and mind, heart and soul, science and religion.

  “Whose cadaver?” the doctor repeated. “Why yours, of course. Sign here and I will give you a card marked Atonement. Keep it in your pocket as your good deed to the State. I shall then be able to claim your royal frame in collective instalments, the State’s kidneys, the State’s lungs, the State’s blood bank, the State’s everything.” He shook Masters’ chain.

  “No, no, I’m sorry,” the dead king cried quickly. “NO!”

  “What, what? Don’t you see that if you – a prince of the State – gave your frame, it would inspire millions?”

  “They would give their souls,” the devil confessed.

  Masters felt guilt. He had given royal blood. The royal sweat of industry. The royal guilt of industry. He had given all these. But his compulsive desire to marry or to wed fire created a ter
rible beauty in parallel with a terrible danger and as he resisted the devil’s temptation the fire retreated a little into an organ of mystery that overruled all blind gift of body or soul before or after death in the name of pure science or in the name of pure religion.

  “I am a rude king,” he said at last to the doctor, “a king who descends and who labours.”

  “I know. I know. That’s why I ask you, of all persons.”

  “You do not understand,” Masters said.

  “Understand what?”

  “A king is reborn for humanity’s impure sake …”

  “What the devil does that mean?” the doctor cried.

  “Let’s put it like this.” Masters was fencing with the devil. “A king sharpens the sword of religion and science in fire to test how incorrigible is his suit of hate or love, his longing, his insane longing, to wed the bride of heaven. Does he give his earthly body to science because he loathes it, hates it, or adores it for selfish, cynical heaven’s sake, cynical rejuvenation of worn out, obsolete, royal organs in a manufactured Paradise where lust is both eternal and incorrigible?”

  The doctor did not know whether to express approval or alarm or disdain. One word stuck in his throat. “You said incorrigible. Why incorrigible?”

  “If the fire of religion or science becomes incorrigible lust, incorrigible lust for purity or purity’s goods, if the beauty of art becomes so absolute that it cancels the marriage of the impure body to the impure body, impure ages to impure ages, impure cultures to impure cultures, then it means that the prospect of rebirth, therapeutic rebirth, falls into the void and in that case what use is it, doctor, for you to patch up a wretched soul in the name of wretched eternity, to patch up a wretched society in the name of wretched purity, by cannibalizing the constitution of a dead king?”

  The devil was so outraged he could scarcely speak. Purity that masks the extermination of others, pure religion that masks fanaticism, pure science that masks its military consequences, unfreedom and terror, absolute mechanics that mask exploitation, were his bastions and they had been stormed, it seemed to me as I hung upon Masters’ chain, at a heart’s blow.