The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  In regard to my status as a pork-knocker that is easily explained.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

  Knocking on the moonlit door …

  When I was short of food I tended to ascend oblivion’s ladder as if it were a fat shoestring to the moon. I scrambled around for a morsel of pork hidden in a pale moon-barrel. I would knock the bottom of the upturned moon-barrel until a splinter of silver roast fell to my feet. In compensation for such largesse from the invisible host of the moon I dreamt of palatial halls and feasts of civilization, feast days, feast nights, of the sacred pork-knocker wood.

  I was buried up to my lips in the bounty of hollow moon-roast (the fat shoestring dangling in my eyes) when Ghost appeared out of the sea. He clung to a moon-spade in the pit in which I lay, a sun-paddle as well on the brink of a setting wave, all this and more cemented into the ancient pen or quill of the sun with which I wrote.

  Sleep was the terrain of blind/seeing comedy, the terrain of the moon and the setting wave and the sun.

  In the wake of Ghost – as he scrambled ashore – lay a great, tall wreck of a ship battered and ribbed and gaping and glistening in the setting sun like a quicksilver goddess’s hatpins in steep, elongated disarray.

  Ghost had survived the assault of the sea in discarding his female hat and was emaciated and strange in a suit of gravity’s anti-gravity string; and yet it was the life of the body that struck me (hollow yet inexhaustible body), the mesmeric quality of artery and vein on the moon, on the setting sun, on the black earth of Old New Forest sacred wood.

  I was filled with the naïveté of intensest longing and love: was this an apparition of the resurrection of the body?

  I saw the new moon like a curved fingernail in the late, afternoon Old New Forest sky. I stared at it with intensity. As if my hollow voyager lost and lost and found again and again had pared it from ancient Homer’s webbed hand with immeasurable Joycean delicacy and drawn it on the sunset sky. Webbed Homeric hand. Impossible human bird. Impossible male, female animal. NIGHT WAS FALLING. My own fingernails were black with earthen light. I had been digging into a library of bone. Ghost approached me through my own pared extremities of Shadow and spoke in a foreign tongue (a mixture of vernaculars it seemed, bawdy verse and waste land poetry). I was baffled. Seeing my difficulty Ghost desisted and ceased to speak. Dumb Ghost. Illiterate Ghost. I was angry with him and with myself. I could not tell whether in playing dumb he wished to take on himself the constellation of a deprived humanity, deprived of dialogue with its innermost and fragile origins and with banished cultures of a half-sacred, half-profane truth. Was Ghost mocking himself or mocking me by taking upon himself the burden of an illiteracy of the imagination that plagued an age bordering Skull in the wake of lost quicksilver beauty and spiritual gold?

  Perhaps his quicksilver genius verged upon values that were alien in spiritual substance to crass bounty, crass gold. And yet I knew him and he knew me through sober soil and self-confessing bone. Should I hand him over to the police or to the immigration officers (dressed as great sailors, great admirals) who patrolled this section of beach between the north and the south? Ghost read my thoughts and shook his head.

  NIGHT WAS FALLING FAST and I led him up the quaking ground that shook with the impact of the sea into the house in the sacred wood where I lived. A lantern glowed there in the heart of starred bone, starred butterfly. We slept it seemed on the pillow of a wave. I dreamt with the dust of the ocean in my eyes of the coming of dawn. An immigration officer – Frog his name was – arrived at my door and knocked. Frog had the reputation of an inferior Don Juan Ulysses. He was accompanied by one of his painted mistresses, a black, white woman whose name was Calypso. (She belonged to the band of Tiresias Calypsonian Tigers whose fame had spread through many worlds.)

  ‘Have you laid eyes on any fellow travellers around here, Glass?’ Frog rasped. ‘A blasted ship – pirates I bet from the moon – hit the reef here late afternoon. The reports on my deck or desk speak of one or two swimming ashore on a pin from God’s hat that floated in a sea of hair.’

  I shook my head in disbelief. Calypso was humming a famous bawdy ballad – STONE COLD DEAD IN THE MARKET. ‘Don’t play dumb, Glass. Yes or no?’ Frog bellowed. Perhaps I should have said the same to Ghost! ‘Don’t play dumb, Ghost.’ Or perhaps I should have offered him a drop of roast from the dream-barrel of the moon. A drop of roasted blood loosens a ghostly man’s or a ghostly woman’s tongue! A drop of blood truly reflected in the mirror of the self to nourish ancestral conscience may well have unravelled Ghost’s speech when we met, and broken his silence, into words I could have read on the wall of the sunset sky. I had lost my head. I had not fed him. But surely the chance would come again. A chance to knock on the door of the moon again in search of every lost species in the oven of space. A chance to consume with Ghost a splinter of transubstantial creation in every chapel perilous of the heights and the depths …

  Frog saw my distraction and faraway look. ‘Say a pork-knocker yes or no,’ he thundered like Admiral Ulysses Baboon. And then as if he too had lost his way and were distracted by untenanted worlds he whispered in my ear, ‘Have you seen the axe fall upon the neck of the Old New Forest sun and moon economies? Has the industrial revolution of the sea given up its unemployed dead?’

  I stepped back from him with loathing yet intimacy of scorched heart and mind. ‘No,’ I said at last, ‘I have not seen any strangers or travellers around here.’ I moved close to him again to reflect in the mirror of self the moth-eaten Skull tie he wore around his neck like an insect-spangled halter or noose.

  As an inferior magistrate, as a piratical statesman, as an immigration great sailor or trickster officer, he could not help subsisting on a sea of griefs, on moth-eaten paradises. I understood (as I stared at Frog) another aspect of Ghost’s dumb lips, Ghost’s silence. For in mirroring Frog in myself it was as if the blood of the moon had turned to dead sea fruit on every political mouthpiece of my age.

  Frog snapped at me now. He knocked on the door of my sea chest of books, and peered at the lantern-butterfly I carried within. He bared his teeth and his diamond-sharp eyes feasted on impossible glass in which he saw himself entangled in the multiple desires and waves of space and time.

  ‘I hope for your own sake, Glass,’ he cried at last, ‘that you are telling the truth.’ He turned away, mounted a parapet, and slid with Calypso into a battered ship of a car. As they drove away I tried to glance at myself as into the flesh of ‘Glass’. One placated or withstood one’s enemies or friends by reflecting their greed and offering it to them as the largesse of the moon. Much harder, of course, to reflect their virtues and astonish them as if manna were falling from heaven upon robin redbreast glass in the body of the mother of humanity.

  Glass by name, yet lost golden species I was, lantern-butterfly or illuminated black pulse like a will-o’-the-wisp birthmark/birdmark upon a page of the sacred wood.

  Ghost was sitting on a bench when I returned to the book in which we slept. He arose and came close to me and his curious, wide-awake dreaming eyes appeared to comprehend the trials of inner and outer consumption of virtuous blood or greedy blood or dead sea fruit that had commenced. It was my trial as much as his. Should I continue to protect him, to shelter him?

  WAS I STORING UP TROUBLE I COULD NOT FORESEE? Or would it lead to a revelation of the mystery of technologies of emotion in flesh-and-blood, complicated space virtues, complicated space greeds, threaded into human bias and the ascendancy of truth as sweetness or light yet bitterness or longing?

  THE SEA BROKE IN MY TEETH. DROWNED TEETH. I DISLODGED A SPLINTER AND CLAMBERED UP THE STAIRWAY OF TIME INTO THE JAWS OF THE RESURRECTION. Ghost belonged. He may have appeared or risen in a sea-chanty book but he belonged to the oven of civilization: the burning sea; the oceanic fires; erosions and accretions. Belonged to the soil and the bone and the sea, to the butterfly page and to the lantern page, to the regime of the moth and to the dere
lictions of lust, to iridescent natures and to the gloom of planets with electric axes shining as if lit by primitive instinct.

  The trial in which I was involved ran much deeper than simply concealing apparently illiterate Ghost from inferior Ulysses Don Juan Frog who patrolled the world in every national costume, east, west, north, south, Marxist, Capitalist.

  NIGHT WAS FALLING FAST AS I TURNED A PAGE OF SLEEP AND WROTE: Were the sailing men who circumnavigated the globe nothing but ancient chauffeurs, mechanics and technicians? Or were they so drunk with the spirit of value they had forgotten their motivation? Was God nothing but a giant chauffeur, a giant astronaut at the wheels of fire in space? Or did we need to read his ecstasy in the snake that takes wings and flies to heaven, the bird that takes scales and dives into the sea? Was the lamp by which the sun sailed nothing but a hollow fire? Or was it a light by which I dreamt my way backwards in time into the ancient workshop of the gods?

  In questioning those who sailed in drunken boats across the ocean to me, and to my savage antecedents long before I was born, I knew I questioned my deepest bottled instincts, deepest bottled intuitions, deepest bottled fears, deepest bottled hopes. I knew I questioned my savage antecedent of Old New Forest. Drunken Quetzalcoatl. Drunken wing. Drunken serpent. (I WAS ASHAMED I MUST CONFESS OF THE ECSTASY OF THE WING AND THE ECSTASY OF THE SNAKE, THE ECSTASY OF THE EGG FROM WHICH I HAD BEEN HATCHED. I WAS ASHAMED OF THE POTION I HAD DRUNK IN SUBCONSCIOUS REALMS IN THE BOOK OF SLEEP FROM A SEED OF BLOOD IN THE YOLK OF SPACE.)

  Drunken Quetzalcoatl was the source of all philosophy – the source of the hunt, the source of architecture – and in attuning his appetites to the mystery of the elements had coined the first vowel in evolution – curled egg-shaped snake coatl and curled egg-shaped bird quetzal – only to puncture or unravel the concept into a lightning shoestring potion, lightning artery, lightning vein, lightning intercourse between the rich and the poor, lightning mystery of deprivation as well as palatial conceits, lightning intercourse between himself and the woman of space, lightning mother of space from which he sprang into existence virtually without shelter, without food.

  Had he forgotten the original spark, the original draught of ecstasy? Was this the source of his hunger, the source of his greed, the source of his guilt at divine incest? Or was it a measure of creative rehearsal, incompletion, half-spirit, half-flesh, elusive origins of unity, elusive origins of sex, elusive wholeness?

  Ghost had nothing to say in reply to my questions except that I recalled when we had first met he had appeared to utter a curious bawdy confession that I had failed to understand. I had hoped he would tell me something however alarming, however incongruous, however chastening. But he had not. I had failed to comprehend. I had not fed him. Except with dead sea fruit that aped a spark of Homeric blood in the underworld of the twentieth century with its twittering shadows, its persecutions, its crucifixions. And I was left, therefore, to sense through his intricate gestures webbed with meaning – and the implicit masks he wore, the implicit disguises, deceptions – the immensity of bottled cargo he brought with him from every corner of the globe: not only bird-cargo, snake-cargo, but Christ-cargo, Socrates-cargo, male, female Tiresias cargo, ancient Egyptian, African cargo, modern, scientific European cargo … I was left to delve for the mystery of the resurrection from the bottled sea within myself, my intimate book. Bottled foetus in the body of the mother of humanity. Bottled seed in the black earth. Bottled page and bone upon which I wrote the music of the spheres.

  The book of modern Europe possessed its roasted pigment in the adventures of Faust, Caliban and Magellan. It was a quantum book in which a particle of roast on the moon became a plunging horse saddled with all diasporas, all middle passages. Resurrection from a particle or a wave was a quantum saddle upon which a new physics rode into Bethlehem. I knew for in the country of Sleep I had seen a spade unlock a grain of sand into a towering beast of a wave upon which Ghost came with unwritten, written volumes for my library in the sacred wood.

  I KNEW EVERYTHING. I KNEW NOTHING. I WAS THE SUBJECT OF AN INFINITE REHEARSAL OF A PLAY OF THE BIRTH OF HISTORY. Ghost slid from his towering wave of a horse in my library of dreams. He came to me with the head of Sir Walter Raleigh riding on his left hand. A giant El Doradonne brow upon which I read, ‘History revises itself within the intervals of consciousness and unconsciousness that it takes for the economies of our age to fall again and again from the block and to touch the ground, consume a spark of dust, and rise into dream-orbit around the sun.’

  I was dissatisfied with this. It was true. And yet it seemed too seductive, too charismatic. Ghost understood my dilemma and turned the brow of El Doradonne Economy around until it gleamed with the eyes of Prospero and I read in those pupils of brilliant dust:

  ‘Revised spark. Revised histories of the world.’ The brow darkened (NIGHT WAS FALLING) but cleared again into constellated peacock eyes and I read a ghostly script: ‘1832–3, emancipation of the slaves, the axe falls on plantation El Dorado. Landowners protest on behalf of the homeless, houseless slaves. Where will they go?’

  THE BROW DARKENED. NIGHT WAS FALLING. BUT STILL I WAS ABLE TO DECIPHER A GHOSTLY FINGER OF INK. ‘1914–18. The axe falls on dynasties and privileges. Where will the unemployed go? They march to the sound of a patriotic drum. If you could see them as I do,

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  NIGHT FALLS BUT THE BROW FLICKERS AGAIN. ‘1939, the axe falls on Chamberlain’s peace in our time …’

  I could read no further but cried in desperation, ‘WHY, WHY?’ The brow relented and flashed a page in my book – ‘Eat the Word of God in the twinkling of an eye when the axe falls and the Globe tumbles from the block to roll within the stars. Globe, yes, my El Doradonne globe in your heart, your privileged economy in my body which is susceptible to time’s axe when systems are evil, the evil for which the innocent suffer. For the innocent (as well as the guilty) are you and me

  I was filled with rage. ‘No,’ I cried, pushing Ghost away, ‘I shall hand you over to Frog. You are my conscience. I fear this quest for the nature and the meaning of value. Why must we axe evil and hurt ourselves? Evil is rich with prosperity and promise.’ I stopped, filled with terror and shame. ‘Don’t pay any attention to me. I shall hide you, Ghost. I shall hide you IN MY SHADOW. in my shadow. Where else?’

  Ghost and I slept. Frog and Calypso appeared early on a page of shadow: page, yes, of the dripping sun that rains its ambivalent light upon the sacred wood. They kicked open my rusty book or gate and hammered upon the giant barrel I had built there to house a number of pork-knocker texts.

  ‘Where are you hiding him, Glass?’ Frog shouted. ‘My information is that some God rode ashore here, near here, that the new moon darkened over the Middle Passage …’

  ‘Christ!’ I thought in some bewilderment.

  ‘Don’t look so damned outraged,’ snapped Frog. ‘I have my scouts. Some say they saw a man or a woman with a long plait of hair. Others say they saw a Beast or a Comet with a Snake around its neck.’

  I could not help crying aloud in my sleep at Ghost’s outrageous tricks and Frog’s credulity. ‘A snake around your throat is better than a moth-eaten cravat,’ I said to Ghost.

  ‘What’s that, what’s that?’ cried Frog. ‘If I catch Beast I shall interrogate him about the map of heaven. Do you hear me, Glass? It’s my privilege. I interrogate strangers. I have built a traditional system and network. And another thing. I don’t like you, Glass. You tangle me up in myself, in my own wildness, my own reflection in you. It’s dangerous to see myself reflected in you, intimately black, intimately white. It’s as if I have found the Beast of heavenly and hellish adventure in a subtle redbreast creature like you and do not know it. It’s as if I’m in your dream. I may sentence you, I may judge you, but I’m an inferior at last. Poeti
c justice! You know me – you fleck of scum from the sea – much better, more deeply, irreverently, terrifyingly, than I ever knew you.’

  I could not help shrinking a little at Frog’s schizophrenic claws and diamond eyes that seemed to scuttle upon the mirror of a wave.

  ‘I shall send you down, Robin Redbreast Glass, to the bottom of the sea. Do you hear me? I shall sentence you. I have sentenced you.’

  ‘And I shall rise again,’ I cried, ‘into the map of heaven.’

  I could have bitten Ghost’s tongue in half. Had he spoken or had I? I had gone too far. Frog swung away and left me to ponder the sentence he had passed. The sea and the wood lightened into imminent Skull and Calypso began to hum ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’. Then she stopped. Began afresh in a deep waving voice:

  Belly to belly

  Back to back

  Ah don’t give a damn

  Ah done dead a’ready.

  Don Juan Ulysses Frog was enlivened by the song. He returned to the gate to beat time with his fist on the pork-knocker barrel or drum. As he beat the sea responded and crashed into music. It was as if – despite everything – he had been transported to another world, a world unshackled from intrigue and treachery, the world of the map of heaven, the map of the Beast, the glorious Beast he wished to entrap from time immemorial. Indeed it was this steep longing – blunted, deformed – that had led him blindly into the uniform he wore as magistrate, admiral and immigration officer patrolling the beach of the sacred wood.

  I had built the great drum or vessel of a barrel as a memorial to my grandfather who died in 1945 in the depths of Old New Forest sacred wood. I associated my grandfather with the early giant navigators who pork-knocked the high seas in search of the Beast of Paradise surviving somewhere, they dreamt, in the headwaters of time.

  Sometimes becalmed in a wilderness of ocean reflecting a jungle of stars and suns they prayed for miraculous beast-fish to nibble at their bait – a parcel of stellar beast-shrimp if nothing else – when provisions ran low and hunger stared them in the eyes in the Glass of the sea.