The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  “But Aimée refused …”

  “Someone higher than Aimée or anybody else in this club say it’s okay, sir. So it’s okay.”

  “Do you mean …”

  “The same.”

  Masters instantly looked around for his mysterious benefactor but he had vanished in a Soho side street. “I missed him,” he cried. “Oh god, so close yet so far.”

  The doorman held Masters and pulled him in. Lazarus was reluctant yet glad to enter the club. It was a chill evening outside. Through a crack in the door he could see – fifty yards or so away – the gleam of a street-light upon the bare arm of a tree. Beneath it the cloth of night had been cut into a square. And beyond the square a church tower loomed black and still. Masters shed his coat and passed it to a young woman with a red ribbon in her hair. He settled at a table inside and ordered a whisky. In a flash – as if a subtle torch had flared or signal been given – the curtains over the stage were up and Masters beheld a winding stairway that rose into heaven. It was a replica, he thought, of the ladder or gate through which Aunt Alice Bartleby had looked down on earth. Aimée now appeared with her dancing partner. They were still, as if frozen, while someone made an announcement to the effect that the real dancer, Aimée’s true partner, was ill and an understudy would perform the part.

  “Understudy!” Masters cried with impatience, with confusion, but his voice was lost in the music. He felt cheated. Who was this new understudy who took not only the place of the “real or true dancer” but his (Masters’) place as well? He was exactly the same build, the same height, as Masters. Masters half-rose from the table to leave the club, then sat down again. The path to the door was blocked. His heart was beating fast with sudden anger. My heart was beating fast. I had anticipated another dance between Masters and Aimée in succession to the one he had performed with her on the red-ribboned car. But the cue that the mysterious overseer had delivered at the Nightbridge door had changed the rhythm of Carnival theatre into a form I had not anticipated.

  The dance or play now revolved around a core of creative anger in lieu of vanity, genuine creative anger that sometimes runs close to fierce love or fierce hate to offset the illusion of vanity.

  It was the dance of purgation through creative anger in which Aimée was now involved and though Masters was not with her on the actual stairway into the stars on Nightbridge stage I suddenly saw how profoundly he was involved in the play, in the dance of anger.

  All at once the dance enlisted great heaps of soil piled high at the foot of the stairway. These vibrated. A series of dancing mudheads, freshly risen puppets-Lazarus, appeared. They sprang from the stage on to the floor where Masters sat. They occupied tables there. They formed a great circle around him. And as I stared at them closely I remembered Masters’ distinction between bloody puppets and the art of freedom.

  Yes, they were bloody puppets. It was a subtle comedy. They were dead, however active, triggered by strings, manipulated. Masters was alive. Alive? Risen? Yes, I dreamt that he was alive, that he was risen from the humus of a civilization. His anger was real. That was my only proof that he had risen. He had come to the club to seize … Seize whom? The mysterious overseer. Yes, but there was more to it than that. He had come to seize a slender motif, an inner vein, an inner artery in that overseer, an inner current within the wound he carried, a wound that really belonged to the other. His anger was therapy, the therapy of justice he needed to create within his own being through the other.

  He might never see his enemy – the enemy – face to face, deceptive face within deceptive face, but the originality of therapeutic anger, therapeutic blood rather than bloody puppets was a form of seizure to withstand every ape of the resurrection.

  Even as I perceived this, I also perceived that Aimée’s anger, her resentment at the injustice of being labelled vain and hollow, was equally potent. Lazarus – the risen, alive Lazarus rather than puppets-Lazarus – had aroused her. Not that she was beyond the hysteria of manipulated being but her anger was so real that an original transfusion of justice possessed her. I saw those faint wonderful eyes of hers. The languor of her limbs, her faint arms, reached out not only to the immediate dancer on the stairway but towards the puppets-Lazarus on the floor or pit of the theatre. That reach endorsed her outer gaze on the edge of manipulated being. But her inner faint body glanced at Masters as well with the rage of longing, with the certainty of the genius of love, the genius of vocation within her blood, true blood not bloody puppet. She was a dancer of freedom’s cousinship to epitaphs of fate.

  I held Amaryllis close. I knew. And yet … I could not be sure. Aimée was no puppet but I wondered whether the flick of a die on the stairway might tighten the strings around her and about us and change the batteries of anger in the theatre of the world into a strike at humanity that would ape our rage, our longing, our tenderness, and lose the therapeutic originality of inner justice, inner transfusion, inner blood born of transformative organs of power and lust.

  A flood of music swept the theatre and lifted Aimée into the sky upon the stairway of Nightbridge, into the arms of the dancer who resembled the overseer of god.

  “There is anger and anger,” Masters cried to the dancer with his own body on the stairway of god. “I know the limits of anger. I have ruled and served, have commanded labour and been a labourer myself, have stood high and stood low.”

  “Never high enough, never low enough,” said the terrible dancer. “And that is why we deceive ourselves. We project ourselves into the stars but fall far short of the mind, the original mind of angry creation, angry for justice. We project ourselves into the grave but fall far short of the original sobriety, the original seed of the spirit of life. Never high enough to mind, never low enough to original humility, original spirit.”

  I saw that the mask of Lazarus had slipped a little from Masters’ face and that it floated between Amaryllis and me. “Is this your gift?” I cried to him, “the gift of true fiction, the gift of the understudy, the living understudy of heights we have not yet achieved and depths we have not yet plumbed? Is this your gift, Masters?”

  *

  An impulse of obscure anger wrecked Nightbridge Club in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Someone tossed a cigarette end into an accumulation of puppet-rags, a fire blazed, the building was gutted. The stage or stairway on which Aimée had danced shot up virtually uncharred in a charred shell of a building. It was curious and bizarre.

  I gained the impression that the stairway or ladder was an intact piece of dream-theatre. The uncharred stage of hell or heaven was a curious rocket. Ribbons of fire had played around it but left it intact. Ribbons of fire! Bonnets of fire! I recalled the car on which Aimée had danced. That car was now a wreck, a mere cinder in Nightbridge. But the stairway-rocket was its uncharred vehicular counterpart, its uncharred vehicular understudy in Nightbridge space. How extraordinary that a proud rocket should understudy a humble motorcar!

  Extraordinary, yes, but it helped me to distinguish between fire and fire, the fire that reduces a car to cinders, the fire that hesitates to overwhelm a stairway into the stars, or a rocket into outer space, as if to imply that the resources of creative anger were such that they needed to align themselves with avant-garde technology in resurrection theatre in order to highlight the dangers to humanity, the dangerous, virtually impossible, stairway it would need to climb if traffic on Earth ceased forever.

  That core of paradoxical anger – that leaves intact a pattern of access into the heights and into the depths upon Aimée’s stairway – drew me back to Crocodile Bridge in New Forest. There I had witnessed the resources of confused anger in coal pot fires and in the eyes of a living dinosaur aroused from its grave in a canal.

  There I had also witnessed Masters’ resurrection from fire and the seed of anger, the seed of the wound, he inherited.

  It was Carnival 1957. It was the evening when Masters visited the fisherman’s wife. I was possessed by foreboding and decided to drive to Crocodile
Bridge. As I stood there I saw a tongue of lightning strike the roof of the fisherman’s cave. I raced to the scene to find Everyman collapsed in the mouth of cannon in which the workers lived. He had succeeded in crawling out of bed. Naked as he was, lying unconscious, he epitomized miraculous flesh-and-blood ammunition that had been fired, but had escaped being burnt alive. It was a singular distinction between puppet human tyrant rocketed into the depths of plantation space and unconscious human survivor in the mouth of cannon.

  In point of fact the fisherman and his wife Jane, after inflicting the wound on the overseer, had vanished in alarm at the strange angry fire that had consumed the roof of the cave but had hesitated, it seemed, to descend. And indeed it was only when I had pulled Everyman from the rocket-cannon that the fire descended in my dream and consumed the rest of the cave.

  In contrast to the depths into which Masters had been fired, the uncharred ladder in Soho ascended into the sky. I became conscious of a figure at a blackboard sketching the outer shell of Nightbridge and the intact inner stairway on which Aimée had danced.

  It was an early spring morning when I visited the scene of the fire, the shell of Nightbridge. The light air and the music of space shone everywhere despite the busy river of Oxford Street that I had left behind to draw close to the backwater square near Nightbridge.

  That the music of space shone was a nervous vibration and fire I had long accepted. I tended to explain it to myself as the phenomenon of the “understudy” that resides in one’s blood.

  With each lucid dream I appeared to stand outside of myself, to understudy a self akin to myself yet other than myself. In short I knew Amaryllis and I were involved in a series of infinite rehearsals, infinite in material but true (however elusive), unswerving (however paradoxical) in spiritual mind.

  The music of space was conducted by an understudy whose passion lit a flame of response in one’s being. And it seemed to me that I conducted the inner, ecstatic, silent orchestra of light and sprung leaves everywhere except for a fiery moment of release from such hubristic self-identification when the superior “I” seemed to recede, the supreme “I” I thought I was moved into the distance, and in fact I (shrunken me) was conscious of lapsed places, lapsed times, through which understudy/understudies moved.

  In becoming “shrunken me”, I saw the lapsed places, the lapsed times achieve the mystery of intact reality. It was as if the supreme “I” that was fading into the distance bestowed upon “shrunken me” a fantastic inner gift. Something or someone (whatever or whoever it was) remained unbroken, intact, in material absurdity, spiritual irony. At Nightbridge Club that something was the absurd stage and ladder into the sky. At Crocodile Bridge that someone was the absurd, unburnt body of Everyman Masters that I – in understudying a fantastic conductor of orchestrated lightnings or science of dreams linking the human person to the heights and the depths of the cosmos – had rescued.

  However absurd the uncharred ladder was in a blackened building, however absurd the unburnt king of dreams in the mouth of cannon, they established a link between me and indefatigable understudies of the genius of creation resembling myself but differing from myself to leave the community of the future open to others linked to me but untrammelled in spirit. It was a temptation to dream one was utterly close at points, places, instants of being, to absolute bliss, absolute terror, in creator and creation. But the fact that creation broke into halves, namely, absolute bliss/absolute terror, love/hate, beauty/dread (or whatever Carnival dualities one perceived) was a manifestation of unbroken but untouchable wonder, intact but unstructured mystery (within fractions of material, elusive, concrete destiny), through intricate understudies in mutual reality, omnipresent reality, that glowed at one’s fingertips, in one’s blood, only to fade but never die in visible reflections and in music that shone, never sounded.

  I had drawn close to the figure at the blackboard and easel which were peculiarly familiar to me. He stood at the edge of the street and sketched for an invisible class of twentieth-century students the shell and the intact stairway of Nightbridge Club. I suddenly knew him. Antipodean man. Delph! An old man now. He had been sacked – you may recall, gentle reader – from New Forest College in the 1930s and had come to London instead of returning to Australia.

  Yes, it was he. Poor Oracle! He was unshaven. His hair was bleached snow. My father’s lawyer’s wig! Within a shadow and a doubt, it was he. Could one be dogmatically certain about the masquerade of the soul, the shadows and lights and investitures of the soul? I studied the blackboard. He did not appear to mind. In one corner he had listed the following: Lazarus character-masks (puppet and truly risen). Aimée. Rocket. Car. Crocodile Bridge. Then he had written beneath: make up a story containing all these. But what held my eyes even more were the sketches-within-sketches that I perceived.

  A kind of far viewing. That was what Delph was up to. He sketched places he had never seen, distant places around the globe. Some I did not know. Others I recognized. He saw through the shell of Nightbridge into Crocodile Bridge into a fisherman’s cave into the music of spring that gave to all these the dazzle of rhythmic responses one to the other, through yet beyond the given senses of purely possessive touch, purely possessive hearing, possessive smell, possessive taste.

  I stared as Delph sketched oblivious of me, I thought, until we were both immersed in intimate yet far viewing. He could not, or was disinclined, to explain to me the moral and the meaning of such far viewing, but I suddenly saw that moral almost precipitately, excitedly, as if I had climbed into space with him, in the ceaseless understudies of a universal fathomless actor to whom belonged every spiritual vocation or role, every spiritual stage, that we invoked with partial grasp but inimitable originality. I saw the absurd constancy of the theatre of the globe, absurd comedy of intercourse between multi-faceted rehearsed place, or rehearsed theatres of place – overlapping textures of graspable, ungraspable place – and the genius of creation.

  Was far viewing an invisible fire that ran along the mind’s contours through lapses and intricacies of universal place? For despite the measure of intact royalty and place, the clues on the blackboard were sometimes elusive and convoluted as if the fire of the mind in an unburnt place, an unbroken king of dreams, possessed no illusions about the fire of self-destructive order and warned us again – as music without voice or instrument had done before – of the hubris of self-identification with an absolute idol or creator, absolute evil, absolute good, that we appropriate into our institutions and project upon others. I saw that intact being, intact survival, was a curious joy but also a terrible warning, a paradox, a shattering of complacency.

  I saw myself in Delph’s sketches standing upon a burning schooner. Where was this, when was this? I had forgotten, I was astonished, as if I were looking at someone else in a place I had never known. As a general perhaps returns to a battlefield long years after and finds it exactly as in the moment the guns cease firing, intact dead, intact flowers on blackened trees, and is horrified to see a face resembling his but alien in expression and manner. As a saint sees himself martyred all over again, sees a bottle of untouched wine in a shop window across the street, and is unable to believe it is he in whom such an unbearable thirst exists. I caught my breath at last. I was the half-puppet, half-living human bread Delph drew on the blackboard, bread and wine; I had been broken/spilt in all these, broken and spilt yet unknown, intact puppet captain of ships, broken and spilt yet puppet general of armies, broken and spilt yet puppet saint of Christendom. Puppet trinity of empires.

  Yes, of course, the Market-place! The czar of New Forest! What clues Carnival provided on Delph’s blackboard to jolt one’s memory into living philosophy, living fiction! Had not Thomas and the marble woman arrived on the day of the capsized eggs in East Street to find the schooner, a smoking hull, moored to pier or Stelling, and traces of a pall of smoke still lingering in the air over New Forest? Whose martyrdom, whose ship, whose battlefield did they perceive at that moment,
intimate place, far viewing, in the Carnival of history? It was as if I saw the puppet nature of cosmic time, puppet histories, puppet pasts, puppet presents, puppet futures, all affecting each other, so that the puppet future bore upon the puppet past – puppet bore upon puppet – to modify all totalities or apparent finalities of event in a shrunken humanity that was aroused to see how small it was yet capable of charting a distinction between apehood or puppetry of soul and true self-reflective immortal spark of fiction.

  I (shrunken me) bore upon the puppet trinity of empires. I saw the core within that trinity in Delph’s sketches, untainted core, unblemished core, within the burning schooner, within the burnt schooner, as I had seen uncharred stairway, resurrected king in the mouth of cannon, intact flower on a blasted tree, untouched and bottled wine.

  What was this core that Delph seemed so intent on sketching into play? Was it a kind of vegetable, human, architectural black box, was it a cosmic flower ticking with the voices of seed? Did one have to dig within schooners and crashed aeroplanes, trains and coffins, to find a messenger, intact, mysterious, miniaturized technology, miniaturized seed of the tree of space?

  Delph’s purgatorial humour of translated puppets into living fiction in parallel with resurrected spirit deepened my curiosity. FEUD. That was it! The core Mr Delph sketched reminded me of the intact equation with glory – intact mystery of beauty – I had seen before but in shattering my complacency on the deck of the burning schooner it became a message of feud. I knew I needed to translate that message again and again, and the tension between such parallels – intact glory and feud – drew me back to masked feud in concert with – in conflict with – the thirsts of holy men.