The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  ‘The life of the dear seed in a blind world intent on excess, addicted to excess, addicted to poverty as much as to glamour, sharpens, I fear,’ said the seer of the underworld, ‘the edge of overturned expectations, the edge of terror in cities, the edge of terrifying pathos in cultures doomed by nature itself, if nature is to survive as a phenomenon of value and therapy of the blind soul.

  ‘True survival costs dear, Robin Redbreast Glass, true survival should measure its technologies, its investments, against the light of an overturning of expectations and within a capacity to look and move beyond immediate place, immediate time. True survival should be aware of the temptations of prosperity in fabulous ghettos, fabulous concentration camps. True survival should measure the price we have begun to pay to the Beast in the garden of life as we gambol with it, dance with it, and exploit it to our apparent heart’s content.’

  NINE

  The dance of the vortex staged by the Tiresias Tiger band was now over and I found myself once again in the throngs of Skull. I was aware of the divisions in the population. There were the doomsters and the boomsters. Skull was doomed (that was the logic of the doomsters). Skull was invincible concentration camp (that was the message of the boomsters). They sang together DOOM, DOOM, BOOM, BOOM. I stood amongst them with the unfinished thread Beast had woven reflected in my Glass. Unfinished climax with Being. Unfinished thread that ran through the recesses of merriment to illumine all the more vividly the divisions of which I was aware in every city, every village, that floated before me in the panorama of Tiresias.

  ‘And both,’ said the seer of the underworld, ‘both groups, doomsters and boomsters, must suffer the reversal of expectation. You will not see Emma today, Robin Redbreast Glass. The climax between yourself and the new priest, the new archbishop, remains in suspension. Until humanity can gauge its defeats and the reversed sail by which it moves, one hopes, towards a philosophy of true survival.’ There was a clamour in the air, horns and trumpets and drums that issued from the recesses of existence.

  ‘What is true survival?’ I said in dismay as if even I (the resurrected body) had forgotten everything the dark seer had said. I looked for Emma but she was not to be seen.

  ‘You must sail towards her,’ said Tiresias. ‘Have I not already implied what true survival is?’

  He paused for a fraction and considered. ‘Let me rehearse again before I vanish some of the implications of true survival. To sail in the nuclear rigging of Skull – in anticipation of the raising of Tiger and its reversed sail – is to sight all the more vividly the earthquake regions or the volcanic regions or the flood regions or the famine/drought regions of the earth.

  ‘Not that I, Tiresias, need any reminder. Over the centuries it has been my lot to patrol wrecked villages and cities and pastures where dead sheep nibble the lava from the sun in a mountain top.

  ‘It has been my lot to mediate between all expectations. And in the teeth of flame I have learnt that someone always survives, some group always survives. The survivors may come (it is ironical) from those who lived in the expectation of doom. Equally many who vanish may have been possessed by a conviction of infallible ground. I – as their mediator – had no alternative but to encompass all groups in the underworld and stress a reversed sail, and a spiritual necessity to look into the heart of true survival, into a shadow linking those who were apparently saved and those who were apparently not.

  ‘I attempt, shall I say, to sow a seed in the survivor that runs through his reversed expectation of doom into the shadow of the non-survivor. It is as if they embrace like man and woman and the shadow comes into the light. It is indeed a seed or frail bond between light and shadow, a frail window of strangest flesh-and-blood between the visible and the invisible. That seed is the primitive impulse of the resurrection of the body. For how can there be a true resurrection without a true balance between opposites by which we measure the human in the divine, the divine in the human? To measure or weigh ourselves against the light-in-the-shadow, the shadow-in-the-light of others is to deepen a reality that breaches the ailing premises of time.’

  Tiresias stopped.

  ‘This is as far as I – the mediator in every crisis of expectation – may go with you, Robin Redbreast Glass. I illumine the seed of fire to enhance the regeneration of wheat. I illumine the shifting plates within the globe to engage civilizations in movements and migrations of threatened peoples and species upon an earth that is still the nursery of hope. In the fire of spirit let us wrest a therapy of the heart and the mind. Let us steep every inch of the resurrection in a capacity to weigh a reversed sail that arises and moves above the seas of chaos.’

  It was his last word. He vanished, it seemed, upon the blowing of a horn or the roll of a drum.

  I stood still amongst the moving pageants and throngs. I held the unfinished thread in the Glass of spirit. I remembered Canterbury in the magic wood of childhood, the play of Canterbury that Miriam and Alice had written and which Peter and I and other children had performed when we crowned Emma in our little theatre. The little theatre of remembered/forgotten history one encompasses in a lifetime but must pursue into the future with reversed sail.

  I turned another page in my fictional autobiography. A blank page upon which I had not yet written. Whose hand would seek mine, whose mask become my age in the future? I saw a shadow upon the page, I saw an extension from Ghost. Spirit is one’s ageless author, ageless character, in the ceaseless rehearsal, ceaseless performance, of the play of truth. The fictionalization of the self in age and in youth is a multi-faceted caution of the universal imagination against the tyranny of hard, partial fact.

  A wave arose that bore me up. Bore the drowned boat up from the sea-bed. I was launched upon my voyage towards Emma.

  POSTSCRIPT BY GHOST

  AD 2025 Remember me

  When Robin set sail I returned to the sea from whence I had come. I am the ghostly voyager in time, in space, in memory, but always I return to the vast ocean, the rolling seas and the great deeps.

  I converse now with the mind and the hand of the new mid-twenty-first-century drowned voyager who is to be reflected in Redbreast Glass. Young in mind he shall be as Alice’s son was. And his hand? It shall swim both wet and dry as it turns W. H.’s drifting narrative to the stars, drifting between worlds. It shall weigh the obvious with care. For the obvious is sometimes an elusive reality.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the drowned voyager,

  Knocking on the moonlit ship …

  ‘I am here, I am Ghost, as Robin sails. Listen!’

  He listened with a strange ear, a seeing ear, a listening eye, as we tossed on a wave. I gathered together the fragments of a history …

  W. H. sold Miriam’s theatre in the nineteen-sixties (close on three-quarters of a century ago). He sold when others were shouting ‘independence and prosperity’. Alice’s and Miriam’s untimely deaths had left a mortgage on house and theatre. Had they lived that mortgage could have been concealed for a decade or two. In that sense W. H. was ahead of his time. Fate drove him to discharge a debt of tradition while others were basking still in a dubious El Dorado.

  What he could not foresee was the moment when Billionaire Death would be driven to loosen his purse strings and multiply the proceeds from the sale of the magic theatre a thousandfold and more to finance the salvage of the wreck of the boat Tiger.

  This compulsion upon Billionaire Death was astonishing. It sprang from the nerve-end of the resurrection body – the thread of divinity’s nerve through all the cavities and the chasms of nature – a nerve-end (or nerve-beginning) that spelt a complex revival of buried resources arching through many cultures and civilizations towards a true voice, a true ear, a true dialogue that the resurrection body nourishes as its ultimate originality. Here at last W. H. felt he could face the world with a dialectic of psyche and imagination. Here at last he saw how Alice’s and Miriam’s debts drew him to look with uncanny laughter and sorrow into the meaning of
the economy he served. To see the mortgage as a debt to sorrow and ecstasy – a debt to (or of) tradition – was to sight and to weave a thread that ran back into the past as it moved into the cross-cultural humanities of the future.

  ‘IT IS A NERVE OR A THREAD IN THE FABRIC OF A SEAMLESS ROBE FAR OUT UPON THE WATERS OF SPIRIT TO WHICH ONE MOVES (I MOVE IN YOU, YOU IN ME) BY INFINITE DEGREES.’ Thus I impelled him to dream as I lay within his shadow. Thus I impel you to dream as I converse with the future …

  May I pause and reflect again upon the obvious. I am Ghost. I have never before written a line. But I did utter certain cautionary fragments of text to Robin in the magic wood some time after he hid me in his shadow from the immigration officer Ulysses Frog. If I do write now I do not claim to be original but to tap the innermost resources of eclipsed traditions in the refugee voices that W. H. heard in the sea. I counsel you likewise – with whom I specifically converse – to remember the scripts of foaming water (foaming with constellations) within the traceries of the skeleton marches of the sea. And through these, and this fictional autobiography, I write to you of a seamless robe but find it necessary to stress that such seamlessness is not to be equated with the bounty of conquest. Rather its fabric lies in the spinning vortex of the sea, the still vortex of the sea; as if the still vortex of air, earth and sky – the spinning vortex of dream – secretes a corridor or passageway through every wave and overturning of rigid expectation.

  I write in a wave that capsizes into a deformity of vision possessing such ascendancy it tends to conceal its hollowness. Think of that hollow wave as a debt to space! As the fee many a poor soul paid for a ticket to paradise. In the reversal of that hollow wave, space becomes an asset in breaking moulds of prepossession.

  It is as if the bill of sale of the magical theatre of childhood that W. H. enacted becomes the currency of spirit. Money is the hurricane that may subside nevertheless into a gentle spray in a realm of ancestral yet new-born space or it is nothing. It may drive a hard bargain between the dead sailor and the living pilot, or a compassionate bargain between the born and the unborn navigator, but its true myth and value lie on the scales of the sea it may never dispense with within a revivification of the spaces of meaning that tie one voyaging generation to another.

  How can one sell or put a price on the map of heaven, the map of earth, without incurring an irony that multiplies the purse strings of Billionaire Death? Think of this – you with whom I converse – as you look back from your ship of life and death to the dunning world you have left behind, the landlord or landlady, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, etc., etc.

  As the hollow wave breaks, the chorus of the world becomes all at once a sacramental self-confession.

  Robin Redbreast Glass began his voyage towards Archbishop Emma in the year of grace AD 2025 in which I am now writing to you. He carried with him a portion of the seamless robe she is to wear. I plucked it from Beast and gave it to him.

  Beast’s thread is the seamless garment one carries in ailing nature yet seeks from another source (a healing or healed source) upon the waters of spirit. Carries through arts of sorrow towards the consummation of bliss.

  How to find a true balance between such carrying in vessels of nature and such seeking from vessels of spirit!

  A wave arises. Look! Here are the scales that Billionaire Death offered Robin and Peter: scales upon which to weigh Alice’s ring against the killing stone from a hillside. Look! Do they not compose a perfect match? The stone is purged of terror in the ring of a sacrament upon the scales on the waters of healing spirit.

  But alas the stone begins to drift away from the ring into the Night of civilization. As they drift, the thread one carries towards the thread one seeks, appears to be broken or lost.

  And yet it remains, it exists. But I, Ghost, know now – I cannot deceive you – that the price to be paid to gain and regain such a perception of a balance between ‘terror’ and ‘sacrament’ is greater than one imagines. It is a price that may redeem the sale of the earth and the sky in our nuclear age, our nuclear pawnshop, by drawing us – you and me – to the nerve-end fabric in the resurrection body where it touches the sliced purse strings of Billionaire Death.

  Weigh that slice against the apparent severance of reality in the thread one carries towards the thread one seeks.

  And perhaps one may see again in another light the infinite rehearsal in the economy of the resurrected body, an economy that may still, despite everything, salvage a civilization …

  On one scale lies the terror of the broken thread or the drifting stone, the explosive rocket, in the seamless garment of God. On the other the sliced purse strings of Billionaire Death.

  It is an extreme balance, an extreme purgation of terror in sacramentalized money, in an extreme age. Another wave arises as I address you. Remember me, remember Ghost.

  The Four Banks of the River of Space

  FOR MARGARET

  AND TO KATHLEEN RAINE

  The landscape then looked strange, unearthly strange,

  to the Lord Odysseus …

  …

  He rubbed his eyes, gazed at his homeland

  …

  then cried aloud:

  …

  Whose country have I come to this time? Rough

  savages and outlaws, are they, or

  godfearing people, friendly to castaways?

  from The Odyssey by HOMER (translated by

  Robert Fitzgerald, Collins Harvill, 1961)

  I am a part of all that I have met;

  Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

  Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

  For ever and for ever when I move.

  from ‘Ulysses’ by ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  Quantum reality consists of simultaneous possibilities, a ‘polyhistoric’ kind of being … incompatible with our … one-track minds. If these alternative (and parallel) universes are really real and we are barred from experiencing them only by a biological accident, perhaps we can extend our senses with a sort of ‘quantum microscope’ …

  from Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by

  NICK HERBERT (Hutchinson, 1985)

  The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other …, the flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediate links of perfect naturalness and propriety – all this magical imponderable dreaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery.

  from Association of Ideas by WILLIAM JAMES

  (first published 1880)

  THE FIRST BANK

  (The King of Thieves)

  And with him they crucify two thieves; the one on his right hand, and the other on his left.

  Mark 15: 27

  I was amazed, to say the least, when I saw him in the theatre of Dream. Had he emerged from an abyss? I was dreaming of peaceful Admiral’s Park, one summer evening, late June 1988, Essex, England. And there he was. I knew him at once in the complicated mirror of a dream after forty years. Lucius Canaima. He came through a door of space into memory and imagination. It was impossible to run. Nailed to the ground. Human tree? He knew me, I him. My heart beat and loosened the nail in one’s foot. The nail that fear had hammered there fell out. The world was a stage for every walking tree and I advanced upon it. Unsure of my lines, my part in the play of a civilization.

  For play it was. Play of truth.

  I should have memorized my lines in anticipation of this moment, lines written by ‘daemons’ and ‘furies’, lines written within me that seemed familiar yet were profoundly alien in my own ears, lines that seemed unlike words in their material substance, pressure, intensity, lines written by spirits of wood and water, animal, bird, cloud sailing in space.

  ‘I
t’s you, Canaima. I know you within the long Day of the twentieth century, a long Day composed of years that are like elongated minutes. We last met on the bank of the Potaro River, South America. 1948. A stage then. A stage now.’

  Stage? Why stage? Why theatre? Theatre of freedom’s responsibilities? I wanted to fling such questions at him. ‘You play a murderer, Canaima, and the part you play terrifies me.’ I stopped and thought I heard him reply but I was unsure. Now it’s high time the sky spoke, the rain spoke, the acid rain, the broken leaf. High time they grew within us, they changed us, they made us see how endangered, how polluted our globe is.

  Canaima stared at me from within the ageless shadow of sky and wind that I etched into theatre, into grassy curtain, backdrop of trees, tides, oceans. ‘Forty years,’ I said ritualistically, callously, as if ‘forty’ were a mere symbol. I sought to evade him as a statistic or a mere symbol, to cancel him out within myself, to reduce him to nothingness. Why should the living dead return to plague one’s peaceful dreams? What is peace? What is prosperity? He was no ordinary criminal. His victims reflected the moral dilemmas of an age. As if they were carefully chosen to bring home to us our involvement in threatened species, a threatened globe, within the apparently common-or-garden materials we employed or used as architect, sculptor or engineer.

  ‘I am an architect still, an engineer still.’ I was ashamed to have boasted. ‘And you, Lucius,’ I cried, ‘what are you now?’

  ‘You saved me,’ Canaima said softly at last. So softly it could have been the breath of an instrument, a strange, disturbing and confessional music interwoven with echoic gravity and fury.