The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  I touched the ring with the light of my eyes. I felt my mother’s lips on my eyes: were they still bitter or were they now sweet?

  ‘If ever you are in trouble,’ my mother says – and leans down and lets the sand and the water run through her fingers – ‘just brandish it like an asset of state or pawn it for that matter if money’s short. Remember it’s here to save your life.’

  I laughed. Alice laughed. The comedy of an invisible ring, an invisible barrel, an invisible fortune. And yet the tragedy … In 1961 when the sea cracked without warning and closed over my mother’s hair that fell like lightning to her waist (she was an excellent swimmer and no one at first believed she had drowned) I was left without a blind penny. The house had to be sold to pay off her debts. I remember my Aunt Miriam saying in one of her plays, ‘Your mother is extravagant, Robin. Your grandfather left her a treasure. Come and live with me before the world ends.’ Was she speaking to me or to W. H.? I went to live with her for a spell on my way to Skull but the house was empty, always empty – she resided now in the waves – and the shadow of W. H. dogged her footsteps as he sought to revive her theatre in the magic wood. They had been close friends, perhaps lovers, and he knew her well. She was sensuous and practical. Sensuous in her deeply grained imagination. Practical in her wit. ‘Accept the day-to-day calendar of doom, doom,’ she said like a housewife scribbling a list on her pad, ‘it’s a style the calypso invented for the BBC and all the grand newspapers. They never acknowledge their debt but that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?’ The word debt pricked me and I half-awoke to Alice’s carelessness and extravagance. Why had I not pawned the invisible ring I wore and raised the money to save our old home from the depredations of strangers?

  Too late! Such magical security born of the Ghosts of the sea and the sky comes too late. Too late to save an old house or a lost kingdom.

  Lost? Is anything ever absolutely lost? May one not find one’s ancestral treasure again by the light, the spirit, the self-mocking humour of vulnerable humanity, self-mocking yet self-revealing visionary touch?

  A paradoxical marriage or contract or rehearsal of the origins of tradition runs through all bawdy and sacred generations, the living, the dead, the unborn, to activate the glories of the present and the past and to imply that the body of the resurrection is a medium of ceaseless rapport between original deprivation and original mystery, between newfound being and insensible being, between the tender apparition of hope and derelict, institutional trappings, between past, present and future time and timeless comedies of time.

  Between birthday ghosts and old age.

  ‘Come,’ Alice and Miriam are saying to me, ‘now that you have touched the ring it is time to celebrate your birthday as if it is a royal event. The world shakes with violence. We live in chapels perilous at the bottom of the sea that we must taste like a piece of cake, on the flatlands, in the valleys, on the mountains, on the moon, and in sight of the masquerade of long-haired Halley’s comet that we must taste right royally. Here are the origins of the games that children play.’

  They hold me and lead me to cosmic theatre in the magic wood. We walk on the crest of the sea and the waves leap and jump and make rain. We are on our way to celebrate my fifth boomsday birthday on a fading dusty calendar. A relic of a newspaper blows at our feet. September 1950 turns to mould in June 1961. The paper twists into spray April 1986 and the apparition of Birthday Ghost. I touch my ring and taste the wreck of civilizations.

  164 BC Birthday Ghost is Babylonian cake.

  12 BC Birthday Ghost is Chinese and Roman cake.

  AD 66 Birthday Ghost is broadsword cake over Jerusalem.

  AD 295 Birthday Ghost ices the constellation of Andromeda.

  AD 451 Birthday Ghost adorns Attila the Hun.

  AD 684 Birthday Ghost ices a Nürnberg Tiger.

  AD 1066 Birthday Ghost divides William and Harold.

  AD 1910 Birthday Ghost submits to photographers.

  AD 1985–6 Birthday Ghost dresses up for many a party around the globe.

  ‘Taste it,’ said Alice. ‘Taste a comet and live. Taste the ridiculous fantasies that are the seed nevertheless of history and tragedy. Taste illusion. Taste everything that mirrors childhood and old age. Taste until it hurts, it enlightens, it revives a nebulosity of spirit, the nebulous contract with an apparently doomed humanity ingrained into life. That is your royal birthday Robin Redbreast Glass. The merriment of the lost … What does it mean?’

  I was filled with amazement that such a question had been directed at me. Was I a king or a prince in disguise? Alice seemed so close. Alice, the queen in Miriam’s play, is speaking now. She spoke now, she speaks now in a wave, she will speak now in a wave.

  ‘Now is never,’ Alice says. ‘Now is forever. Now is old age. Now is infancy. Now is Rome. Now is Athens. Now is Babylon. Now is Byzantium. Now is Number Ten. Now is the Kremlin. Now is the White House and a black band playing the blues. Now is the flight of the swallow from summer to winter and back. Now is this precious day in which we live or in which we die.’ She is laughing at me. I know she is laughing at me. Alice is laughing at me. And the merry waves jump and subside at our feet under a sea wall.

  Her laughter is close and merry, I feel the bite of a wave, I feel bitten by laughter. Does one bite the flesh of a wave when one drowns, when one is borne by the sharp tooth of merriment through death?

  What are the origins of such merriment? What are the origins of such bitten/biting laughter, such laughter at death or through death?

  It is a game we play in the chapel perilous under the sea at Aunt Miriam’s parties. The children dress as rocks, as waves, as moss, as fish, as birds.

  I bite into the premises of laughter. I chew the laughing fish and pause in mid-air as if I stand on a balloon in an animal’s lung. Boomsday comet or balloon, boomsday lung, boomsday love affair with the pretty girls dressed as fish. Shall I dive into the heart of the balloon and sing, make faces at the chorusing birds? Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

  ‘Come, come Robin,’ Aunt Miriam says. ‘It’s your turn to play. Such a rich costume. Such a glorious balloon.’

  I stand awkwardly on the stage. Perhaps I was the envy of the other children. Perhaps – on the other hand – I envied them, I envied the part they were about to play. Aunt Miriam had rigged up a sheet and a blanket as a curtain behind which we stood, Alice and I. Aunt Miriam gave a jerk and the curtain rose like a cloud from the sky. There was a shout and the children swarmed upon us. Fish, animate rocks, birds, animate moss, all came. Indiscriminate laughter. I reached for Alice and she had gone under the wave. I saw her far down in the sea beneath the sheet and the waving blanket, beneath the merry children whose empty graves – untenanted still – are marked with crosses in the sacred wood. I saw the fish dive for her as I dived into my balloon of space. Nothing united us but the tooth of death we shared with all creatures. Nothing now. I nibbled at a bird in the sky. I nibbled at myself. The fish stroked her, the fish stroked itself, the fish stroked Miriam. How sharp, how bitter, is the merry stroke of death at the heart of self-love that cracks at last into the mysterious reflection of others? How sweet, how bitter, is life, the gravity of heart-rending compassion in life? We must laugh with one another or die. We must laugh at our own incompleteness, our grotesqueries, our absurdities, our fallacies, our proneness to despair, our innermost corruption, our innermost violence.

  The biter bitten is the tooth of infinite rehearsals of chapels perilous, of the children in Alice’s and Miriam’s arms under the sea.

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  SIX

  I was wakened by voices I could not fathom. Were they human, were they other than human? I felt an irrational shock that my college education was over. It was a blow. I felt the hollowness of the humanity to which I returned. My mother was an excellent swimmer. Why had she drowned? The afternoon had been blissful. She had taken our boat Tiger to sea and we were drifting lazil
y a mile or two off the coast. Such trips were not unusual. This was the third excursion in June 1961. Aunt Miriam was there. Five children were there including Peter and Emma, two close friends of my own age, orphaned in early childhood, who lived with Alice and me. I was there. (No! I am confused. I would have been there but was down with flu and lay in bed at Aunt Miriam’s. W. H. insists that it was he who lay in bed with flu and has another tale to tell that I shall disclose in due course.)

  From my bed in Miriam’s house I could see the sky and the sea. I could see Peter and Emma whose lives my mother saved. It was they who brought the news to me, messengers of the roaring laughter of the deep through which they came. I could see the wall and the floor and the window that Miriam used as a stage from which to launch her chapel perilous plays in which I had participated, forever participated, even before I was born, or time appeared to begin.

  The blanket and the sheet she erected as a curtain were now missing. Yet they lay on me. I was in them. I was in the sea. I was their being of Sleep. I was the absent players, absent body yet present relic of memory. Sleepwalking relic on a wave of Sleep where my mother played a role that was to recur again and again within my dreams. Dream chapel perilous under the sea as a prelude to chapel perilous of the flatlands, chapel perilous Skull, chapel perilous of the Mountain of Folly, chapel perilous of space.

  The boat sailed across the floor. It cracked. Was it a fist of wind shaking the house? Was it the floor that heaved, was it the boat? One of those unexpected tremors or earthquakes that shook the magic wood across the years. Just a tremor but it drove the boat upon the reef.

  Fever inflates one’s perceptions of things. High fever. My finger grew large (or was it small) as a tooth clawing at a rock. My lung ballooned and I dived at a bird skimming a wave. The weather suddenly changed. The window on the stage shook. Tiger overturned into a ragged chest, ragged inner sail, inner curtain, ragged cross-currents. Alice bobbed up in Tiger’s tail and swam with Peter and Emma to land. She swung back and dived through grandfather’s ring to save the others. It was the last I saw of her from my wave of Sleep. I held her close. She fell into the Glass of time. Timelessness.

  *

  Within a year I packed a ghostly pork-knocker bag, secured a spiritual compass, sharpened my drowned ghost-pen, and set out into the sacred wood to make my way in the world, the hollow world, and in the multi-textual regions of space.

  The old house in which Alice, Peter, Emma and I had lived belonged now to strangers. Before I left I scouted in a cellar in Miriam’s playhouse and little theatre (occupied now by W. H.) and unearthed a trunk of masks from Tiger’s bobbing chest on a wave of Sleep.

  I recalled our last New Year’s Eve party (celebrated in Hogmanay style), my echoing voice in Miriam’s at midnight.

  We twa hae paddl’d in the burn

  Frae morning sun till dine,

  But seas between us braid hae roared

  Sin’ auld lang syne.

  ‘Where is laughter?’ I asked Aunt Miriam. ‘Laughter’s mask?’ but she hid her face in the seas. I saw her tears despite the running waters but these too were woven into another mask in Tiger’s broken body. I left it there out of tenderness and respect. At the bottom of an old man’s cargo of dreams when he revisits the past.

  My eye fell on another mask on which W. H.’s shadow fell and this I pulled from the trunk. Shadow and substance. It imbued me with a sensation of renewed inner substance, inner fictional being.

  ‘I am a stranger,’ I said to the mask of Shadow and Substance in which I was reflected even as I reflected it.

  ‘Why a stranger?’

  I looked at it closely. It was indeed a mask that I knew as if from a great distance. I knew I would come to inhabit it in the future as ageing fictional author in fictional youth, fictional character mirroring and mirrored by transformative relics of memory. It was the mask in which I would write my life, my fictional autobiography.

  It was adorned by the tooth I had seen in the chapel of the sea, the tooth I shared with all creatures, a tooth sharper than any pen that I would come to possess. It had eaten its lines, its poetries, its scripts, into the flesh of my spirit. It had cut a long ravine along my brow. It had cut chasms and gulfs. It had shaped my mouth, my lips, to register the miracle of innermost address, innermost self-judgement. It was the tooth of judgement day, ceaseless judgement day I both longed for and dreaded.

  ‘I am a stranger to you,’ I said to the mask. ‘I reflect you and that is all. I wander the highways and byways of time in search of a gesture that rejects you entirely. I loathe you. I loathe the future. I want to be eternally young, eternally strong.’

  ‘Can you reject the future?’ the mask replied. ‘Even the dead must reckon with the future if there is to be justice, justice for the unborn son, the unborn daughter, the unborn stranger. You call yourself a stranger! Even the dead … Much more so the stranger who comes from the dead, dead fictions, dead legacies, dead traditions, that are not as dead as they seem but alive, alive as a threat or a challenge we have not yet absorbed, alive as revisionary fabric, revisionary truth.’

  The mask paused but continued before I could speak: ‘I am the future in which you will write of this moment, this present moment, and of the past. I am you when this century draws to a close. I am you in the twenty-first century. I am the memory of the future. You are fortunate, Robin Glass.’

  ‘How so?’ I demanded. ‘I am a stranger. Of that I am sure.’

  ‘A fortunate stranger,’ said the mask. ‘To speak through the stranger in yourself means this: you are actually in the present moment and yet outside of/beyond the present moment by a fraction – shall I say – by an edge … But that is enough to be in the world yet to move by a fraction above the chaos of the world; it is – let me put it this way – to see yourself in an infinite body lying still with Alice and Miriam and the other children in the sea yet, at liberty, by a hair’s breadth to approach yourself as in a play, relate to yourself in the memory of the future, be in yourself yet move – as I have said – just a fraction beyond a stranger’s death, out of your stillness, your death. One day you will come upon Peter and Emma in the stranger city of Skull that stands upon a simulated arch or bridge between true voice and true ear, true response to the everlasting intimate stranger in yourself.

  ‘Ah Stranger! you move within yet without yourself. You dream in every age of the womb from which you came as if the womb were a theatre of existence and you are steeped in it even as you surface from it or fall to the edge of time, visionary backwards fall, visionary downwards fall, visionary upwards fall, visionary forwards fall. To transform the vertigo of a stranger birth, a stranger death, in yourself is to fall into the resurrectionary/revolutionary Glass of your age …’

  Ghost’s voice faded. For it was Ghost I suddenly saw masquerading as my future self.

  I looked at Ghost and knew, despite everything he had said, I loathed his appearance, his sagging cheeks, his age, his apparitional freedom. Yes freedom! One is afraid of the coming of old age because one hates one’s stranger capacity for freedom, for spiritual justice through and beyond one’s trappings, cultural trappings, etc. One dreads the heartrending call of supreme insight, the pain and the anguish of stranger maturity, the slow but inevitable dissolution of the ego, the dissolution of the proud but unfree state or body in its tantrums and rages and incurable desires. One dreads a true marriage with the stranger beloved in all creation – a beloved creation one may learn to touch anew, to sense anew, to know anew beyond all self-deception or arrogance. A beloved creation that astonishes, disturbs: it brings a mirror into the heart of creaturely terror and addictive lust. It asserts anew within the perversities of ambition a necessary quest for the foundations of religious hope where one least suspects these to exist. For some unaccountable reason I thought of poor Emma and Peter. What had they made of their lives, of their survival? Would they disturb me profoundly (yet illumine my quest for religious hope) when I came upon them in th
e city of Skull?

  One is afraid to drown before one’s time (yet live), one is afraid to glimpse the age of the earth (yet descend into the womb), the age of faltering economies (yet arise into the spirit of value), the age of the tides, the age of ageless fall into apparent nothingness … all before one’s time … the age of terrifying responsibility, the necessity to create a true and intimate life of conscience, life of authority within the body of the waste land.

  TOWARDS DROWNED SUNRISE IN JUNE 1962 – A YEAR AFTER TIGER STRUCK THE REEF AND BROKE – I (ROBIN REDBREAST GLASS) CAME TO THE EDGE OF A BLACK SWAMP OR LAKE, THE EDGE OF THE CHAPEL PERILOUS OF THE FLATLANDS. The chapel or city (it had not yet been transformed into a wealthy city) was called skull. It stood above an ancient sea-bed. The ocean had rolled here long, long ago on its way to the foot of the Angel Falls escarpment in the magic wood. Boomsday Skull. Boomsday Tiger. I stared into the mirror of the swamp and saw Skull’s future, its lavish prosperity. I heard the voice of Ghost nevertheless. ‘I am in all decrepit humanity. I am in the broken Tiger. I am in the sad dancers who ride on the waves. I am in all lost loves and lost lovers. I am ghost within ghost within ghost.’ I saw my reflection in a ghostly wave, my seventeen-year-old drowned reflection in the water, half-in the sleeping tides that pillowed my eyes, half-out yet in the biting mask of Ghost, half-in my seventeen-year-old shredded skeleton – dressed to look beautiful now, immortal now, in the theatre of Faustian history – half-out yet in the memory bank of the future and in the ageing global mask that Ghost had employed as me in the 1980s and the 1990s and in the year 2000 when Skull would have achieved the status of a faeryland Chernobyl tomb, cheap electricity and deceptively abundant goods.