The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  Mr Delph turned to me. I saw he pitied me. He seemed suddenly outrageously youthful, outrageously sober, despite his unshaven mask and Antipodean smile. Sober geography master’s blood! Sober Mr Quabbas’s blood! Delphic thirst of the holy oracle. He spoke a little pontifically but journalistically like a good schoolmaster-oracle with his tongue in his chalk.

  “Put it all down to trade,” he said, erasing a touch of chalk with a touch of spit. It made a smudge or scar on his lips as if he had dipped into a sugar bowl of rice. “Put it all down to bitter-sweet trade.”

  “Trade!” I was outraged. He was poking sober chalk at me.

  “Trade is one translation, Weyl, of the message of feud. A simple one, I grant, but people want simple answers, don’t they? So let’s be simple. Chalk, rice, sugar,” he said. “Oil, diamonds, you name it. Mudheads, timberheads. Simplicity’s masks of trade.” He tried to clean simplicity’s lips with a handkerchief but only succeeded in smearing his moustache and cheeks afresh. “That’s how they make me up,” he confided, “when I give a television broadcast in yes and no minister for the oracle of trade. Holy trade! Come, come, Weyl, don’t sulk. Trade is holy, who would deny it, and therefore many holy fires have been lit to maintain old, or secure new, markets.

  “There you stand, Weyl – English sobriety and geography lesson combined – on the deck of your burning schooner. You love it, you loathe it, it’s the scene of a holy love affair with peoples, their wealth, their customs, a holy hate affair with power and Ambition. It’s a sea-going church within the middle passage, Inferno and Paradiso. It’s the red, blue moon, all tides, all pigmentations, it’s holy crime.”

  “There are no churches on the moon,” I said sullenly. He stopped sketching for a moment and looked at me.

  “But there will be,” he said, “sooner or later. There will be supermarket churches on the backside of the moon.”

  FEUD IN PARALLEL WITH INTACT GLORY IS THE WOMB OF METAPHORS OF SPIRIT.

  “Take the holy man, the martyr you saw upon the blackboard of space. He thirsted for wine of an imported Earth-variety. He saw a bottle he desired in a moon shop across from the supermarket church.” Mr Delph’s mask had slipped a little and he was laughing yet grave, utterly grave. It was the strangest sensation. Comedy of martyrdoms on the moon when humanity emigrates into outer space? “The wine was a signal of ordeal, conflict, that he endured. Was he being tempted, or manipulated even then, in his pain, to sell his soul to feuding moon merchants, space captains, feuding Vega field-marshals, generals, who bottle new wine in bulletproof lunar glass?

  “Such a bottling is hell, my dear Weyl, but the thirst for truth, for intact glory, remains. Thirst – translated into inner trade between body and spirit – is the womb of fire from which Everyman arises. Thirst is the womb of justice, foetal sponge and human affinity to god that we project into the drought of space. Thirst – translated into inner/outer space famine – is the urgency of grain here on earth. Thirst is the palate of inner earth sacrifice, inner earth revolution, in parallel with absurd supermarket churches and martyrdoms on the moon. We trade with absurdities, my dear Weyl, infinities, distant planets, distant satellites, new-found constellations, galaxies – why do we do it? So that we may come home to ourselves at last, who knows, in every far viewing, intimate self-judgement and moment of truth.”

  *

  Mr Delph’s blackboard of space, into which he had sketched us, turned from the relic of spring in bridges of fire, to the relic of summer in mutual bridges of ocean. Each relic faced the other yet turned at a slight tangent away from the spiralling coil of the other into the ground-swell of numinous bodies.

  Amaryllis and I perceived ourselves once more in the core-cathedral in which we had celebrated Easter with Masters in New Forest before Amaryllis left for Europe. (It had been rumoured that her ship had been sunk by a German submarine in the summer of 1940.)

  It was Good Friday when we knelt in the cathedral. My memories, or Mr Delph’s far sketches, were an imperfect wave of recollection. And yet such imperfection seemed now to embody a moment of resistance in ourselves against the ritual crucifixion of love year after year, peace after peace, war after war. The cathedral subsided into the sea in which I had dreamt Amaryllis’s ship had been hit by a torpedo. From within the sea where I lay with her we observed holiday-makers lying on the beaches around us above the ocean wave that was littered with the epitaph of many seasons. We were suddenly uplifted towards them like fluid bone wreathed in stars and leaves to pipe the sweetest saddest music into the absent-minded reverie of lovers. Our bone became flesh. Nibbled bone under the sea, kissed bone, fleshed wave of bone, core-artefact, cross-artefact, of summer blending into autumn flesh, bone under star, under leaf, under flesh, all graves, all cradles of mankind. And despite the passivity, the resignation, of summer’s and autumn’s beached populations, a subtle resistance to the perpetual murder of species in a chain of existences linked to our Easter pulse flitted through the ocean wave and dashed within and against the cathedral of space in which we dwelt under the sea and in risen bone upon the land.

  In the arousal of the bone in a wave of flesh lay the strategy of resurrected mind, a rendezvous with resistance movements. I recalled now – with sudden sharpness – the childlike sensation I had had that my father lay in the Trojan Horse of Christ: it was a deep-seated obsession that never left me in the years that followed. It confirmed itself in the core of every summer wave, autumn penetration, in my union with Amaryllis, a union that embodied the mane of oceans upon which we rode, mane of rivers, continents, islands. Mane of sorrow. Mane of gladness.

  *

  Spring and summer moons had gone and autumn was upon us at last. As though in Mr Delph’s imperfect oceanic sketches Amaryllis and I glimpsed ourselves as we would look, or dress, at the turn of the century. Once again we floated on the mane of time, fashionable or unfashionable bone clad in fashionable or unfashionable flesh. We had discarded not just youth but fabrications of youth, the disguises of old age.

  “Resist the seductive death-wish. Cultivate the sober life-wish wherever you happen to be in outer space or under the tides of the moon. Weigh the tyrannies of sex in ageing puppets fascinated with the rejuvenation of the ape of the human body. Weigh nostalgic old age and foetal ambition. Weigh all these to unravel tyranny, to unravel the humour of the birth-wish, the humour of fertility that translates lust into imagination’s harvest. Ploughing, reaping, cultivating, enfolding, embracing, infinite rapture of soil and water and light and darkness that glows in the body of the mind, not as nostalgic puppetries of helpless desire (helpless desiring, helpless desired, and pathos of rape) but as illumined senses in non-senses beyond apparently inevitable fate, apparently inevitable death.”

  Masters’ voice in Delph, Delph in Masters, faded. The oceanic curtain of Carnival theatre began to fall. I saw the red-ribboned car upon which Aimée danced. It had been repainted a glowing yellow in the depths of the sea. Glowing, deceptive yellow. It was a spring moon 1983 (or was it 2083?) and we could barely discern it through the mane of the waters. Masters thrust me into the driver’s seat of the inner-coated, red-ribboned, visibly yellow moon-car. I had been drawn aloft to the topmost rung of Alice’s fluid ladder where the sun and the moon are possessed of many intimate, open colours but upon finding myself thrust almost unceremoniously by the dead king into the car, I was astonished to find that the stage on which it stood, adjoining the ladder, seemed to melt into space; the great car descended like a feather. It floated in the air and the tide until it bumped gently upon the ground, a huge rectangular balloon upon wheels and springs. I was safe in the balloon and on gently releasing the gears it moved forward in Addison Road where Amaryllis and I lived in our ocean wave.

  It was then, only then, that I knew I had seen the last of my guide and that Amaryllis was seated beside me with a child in her arms.

  It had been raining but the rain had ceased as the feather, the balloon of a car moved. The windscreen was covered
by the faintest waves that glistened with tears of shadow. Everyman and I had come a long way around the comedy of the globe and I attempted to peer up into the spatial ladder to see if I could perceive him again anywhere at all between the vanished stage and the ground on which we drove. But nothing, no one, could be seen. Alice’s fluid gate had vanished. Mr Delph had vanished. All I could fathom was a rainswept world lit by the memory of bridges of ocean, masks, dances, Waterfall Oracle, arising and painting the great city of London that Amaryllis and I knew in our hearts.

  I touched Amaryllis and the child beneath the wave and the rain on the curtain of Carnival. The car was a measure of Masters’ wedding gift to us twenty-five years after we were married. Despite its red inner coat and yellow moon paint, it was a cinder, a luminous cinder light as a feather, marvellous as a balloon, the slenderest inflatable, deflatable motif of crossed bridges, burning yet intact, bridges of fire, bridges of ocean, bridges of earth; the bridges and wages of ascent and descent upon which I dreamt we had been led by the master spirit who had been our guide.

  “She says she will breast-feed the child,” Amaryllis said suddenly. It was Jane Fisher’s child! Not Jane Fisher the First, the fisherman’s wife, who lived several blocks away (not dreadfully far from Jane Fisher the Second) beneath the wave into which we had charted not only the core of the bone and the cinder of the sun but the core of maps, the core of streets, cities half-forgotten, half-remembered, great cities, small cities, townships, market-places around the globe’s balloon.

  “Jane Fisher the First would have killed him,” I said, “after she lost the child, the mysterious overseer’s child.”

  “Why do you call your character-masks first and second and third and fourth and so on as if they are the Carnival kings and queens of vanished times?” Amaryllis was poking fun at me with the bone of her finger that shone like the faintest dagger under the sea. She gave me a sharp stab. I felt I had been miniaturized where the three bridges crossed, fire and earth and water, to re-imagine the cinder of a wound in Masters’ side.

  “Tell me, tell me,” Amaryllis insisted.

  “Not only vanished times,” I said. “Times of succession as well. Every puppet of disaster moves in parallel with a spark of redemption, the spark of succession.”

  “And the spark of pregnancy?”

  I was taken aback by the sharp retort.

  “Carnival queenship, Carnival kingship, illumine the sacrament of pregnant form in art as in life. She stands,” I pointed to the baby girl in my wife’s arms, “at a point where the three bridges cross. It’s a point of greatest peril and greatest promise. Should she, this child, survive into a new century of mind we may all recover …” I was unable to continue. I felt plagued by subtle doubts. How could I be sure this child was Masters’ child? Jane Fisher the Second’s child, yes! We knew that. We were godparents. We had witnessed the birth in a cave in the sea, dream-cave, dream-sea. Born exactly nine months after the day she had slept with Masters, the day of his second death in the summer of 1982 (or was it 2082?). Time lapses under the sea as it does on the foetal planets around the sun and moon of Vega.

  It would be the happiest of coincidences if Jane had conceived for him, if Jane had indeed borne his child, his daughter, the child of a pagan and a Christian master. Both! Pagan and Christian! Such a blend, such profound self-confession, would illumine and redeem, I felt, the cinder of the wound I re-imagined in the globe’s side, it would illumine, I felt, every global fall from colonial plantation into metropolitan factory. It would illumine and redeem, I dreamt, global meaninglessness that stems from fear, the rule of fear, that threatens all, that threatens to abort submarine as well as superstellar civilization.

  “Whether she is Masters’ child or not,” said Amaryllis, taking my hand with one of hers and holding the child to her breast with the other, “she runs in parallel with all wasted lives to be redeemed in time. And in that spirit she is his child. She is our child. We killed our parents, remember, in Carnival logic even as they, besieged by fear, fear of a blasted future, were tempted to destroy us. And now in mutual heart, mutual uncertainty across generations, across seas and spaces, as to who is divine parent, who human child, who will parent the future, who inherit the future, we surrender ourselves to each other. The love that moves the sun and the other stars moves us now, my dearest husband, my dearest Jonathan, to respond with originality to each other’s Carnival seas of innocence and guilt, each other’s Carnival lands of subterfuge and truth, and each other’s Carnival skies of blindness and vision.”

  The Infinite Rehearsal

  FOR MARGARET,

  HELEN AND CHRIS

  NOTE

  W. H. has stolen a march on me and put his name to my fictional autobiography. So be it. I do not intend to sue him for my drowned rights. Call it character licence on his part.

  He and I are adversaries, as my book will show, but we share one thing in common, namely, an approach to the ruling concepts of civilization from the other side, from the ruled or apparently eclipsed side in humanity.

  Not that my grandfather, my mother Alice, my aunt Miriam, or my close friends Peter and Emma saw themselves as ruled or afflicted subjects of an imperial establishment. And their voices, their plays, their dances and the theatre they created are immanent substance in this book. Yet my grandfather’s Faust (which he wrote or brought to completion in the year I was born) possesses roots as much in the modern age as in the pre-Columbian workshop of the gods and therefore addresses a European myth from a multi-faceted and partly non-European standpoint.

  All of which goes to show that my family were profoundly concerned with the original nature of value and spirit and for them there was no final performance to the ‘play of humanity’ or the ‘play of divinity’.

  Each apparent finality of performance was itself but a privileged rehearsal pointing to unsuspected facets and the re-emergence of forgotten perspectives in the cross-cultural and the universal imagination.

  Robin Redbreast Glass

  ONE

  Let me begin this fictional autobiography with a confession. The values of a civilization – the hope for a universally just society, for the attainment of the mind and heart of love, the genius of care – are an impossible dream …

  I repeat ‘impossible dream’, impossible quest for wholeness. In the same token, however, I know that those values are true and that the impossibility of their achievement nurses, prompts, gives reality to the creative imagination and instils one with profoundest paradox, with insight into the numinous character of all things, all features, all aspects of being.

  Indeed I find it essential to trace the burden of value within apparitions that seem virtually irrelevant to moulds of prosperity, the apparition of the numinous scarecrow, the numinous victim, who (or is it which?) secretes himself, herself, itself in our dreams.

  It is in the obvious partial being of the scarecrow – half-thing, half-person – dangling between daylight consciousness and the nightfall of civilizations that we sense a light (is it the light of remorse or of self-confession?) which may consume our biases and deposit fabric linking us to the extremities of humanity. For I know that the scum of the world cannot be divorced from myself or from my body in creation.

  I know that in unravelling the illusory capture of creation I may still apprehend the obsessional ground of conquest, rehearse its proportions, excavate its consequences, within a play of shadow and light threaded into value; a play that is infinite rehearsal, a play that approaches again and again a sensation of ultimate meaning residing within a deposit of ghosts relating to the conquistadorial body – as well as the victimized body – of new worlds and old worlds, new forests and old forests, new stars and old constellations within the workshop of the gods.

  Thus it was that I welcomed Ghost, conquistadorial and victimized Ghost (was (s)he male/female? I could not tell) when it appeared on a beach in Old New Forest (a lofty beach hovering somewhere within south and central and northern Old New
Forest) not far from where I earned a subsistence wage as a grave-digger in a library of dreams and a pork-knocker in the sacred wood. I decided to accept IT as male persona and trust that new fragile complications of divinity’s blood would drive me to see the phenomenon I had encountered in the wholeness of a transformative light bearing upon all genders, all animates and inanimates, all masks and vessels in which a spark of ultimate self-recognition flashed … faded … flashed again.

  Modern phenomenon or ancient magic? He (Ghost) wore a long, rich plait of hair on the back of his neck. It was covered with glittering salt from the sea and immaculate grime from a comet or from the stars. It was so long and marvellous it could have been the wonderful text of a woman’s hair through which to read the mysterious birth of spirit.

  (I need to be as accurate as I can in this fictional autobiography in order to balance uncertainties with a spectre of wholeness that has become the ironic substance of pure science in intercourse nevertheless with the impurities of wisdom and art.)

  The graves I dug were libraries of myths of gold, silver, bone within a community of convertible soils and dreams that appeared in my Sleep, the living and the dead, texts of space travel, texts of sea travel, texts of the sacred wood, texts also of descent into the foetus, into the new-born and the unborn, descent into famine, texts that broke a uniform narrative domination by the conquistadores of history in inserting themselves into my book despite the apparent eclipse they endured, despite voicelessness or oblivion.