The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  ‘Saved you?’ I protested. ‘Saved you?’ I drew his features on the canvas of space. When one dreams one dreams alone. When one writes a book one is alone. The characters one re-creates may have died, or may have vanished into some other country, so one invokes them as ‘live absences’, absences susceptible to being painted into life, sculpted into life, absences that may arise in carvings out of the ground, from dust, from the wood of a tree, the rain of a cloud: paintings and sculptures that are so mysteriously potent in one’s book of dreams that they seem to paint one (as one paints them), to sculpt one (as one sculpts them), and in this mutual and phenomenal hollowness of self one and they become fossil stepping-stones into the mystery of inner space. Perhaps one needs a creative penetration of inner space in a space age if one is to save one’s world rather than, in some future time, abandon it – within technologies of flight – as a wreck.

  ‘Saved you?’ I protested again.

  ‘Conspired with me then, Anselm,’ said Lucius Canaima. ‘Do you prefer “conspire with” rather than “save”? You were in league with me one way or the other. Your reputation in the Potaro River of South America was that of a good man – something of a bloody saint’ – he was mocking me – ‘whereas I was bad, a devil. Good men who contemplate the mystery of creativity have a way of conspiring with furies. I killed. Does that make me a fury? I warn you, Anselm, you will have to define the nature of a “fury” in your book of dreams. But there’s time for that.’ He stopped. And yet his voice seemed to persist in the ground. The same voice. Yet not quite the same. As if in Lucius I perceived, however faintly, parallel lives, alternative existences. He was a common criminal. He was an uncommon creature. Did such distinctions touch on the disturbing reality of what one sometimes half-jokingly called ‘salvation’? Was this Canaima the same and identical human being I had known? Had he in returning from the dead changed despite appearances?

  ‘You knew I had killed the Macusi in the bird-mask. You knew I had enticed him from the tribe, from their ritual dance, and killed him. A threatened tribe. Some say on the verge of extinction within the twentieth century. It was as if I had plucked their bird-dancer from the air. I brought him in my arms to the riverbank and put him at the water’s edge. I sprinkled him with water as if he had been drowned. A drowned bird-creature. And then I put a cap on his head – the Alicia-cap – as if he were a member of my team. Perhaps I should say our team, Anselm.

  ‘You came upon me on the riverbank leaning over him. All you had to do was raise your voice, make an outcry, and I would have been caught. But you remained silent. Had you raised your voice, raised your hand, I may have been caught, and then I would have lost my soul.’

  ‘No, no,’ I shouted. ‘I cannot believe …’

  ‘Believe what?’

  ‘I cannot believe that I let you go, that I accepted such an appalling responsibility. I should have seized you, I should have shouted, I should have handed you over to Inspector Robot.’

  ‘But you did nothing of the sort,’ said Lucius. ‘You kept your tongue well in your head. Instead of making an outcry you listened. It was not the first time I had committed a crime in South America …’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I was a fool to let you go …’

  ‘But,’ said Canaima, ‘it was the first time anyone truly stopped and listened.’

  ‘Listened?’

  ‘You have forgotten. You will remember. I have returned to help you remember. You began to listen that early morning when you came upon me and my bird-victim to utterances that may now send you back into the very secrets of your childhood. But first you need to come to terms with what happened that day.’

  ‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Let me go as I once let you go. I have no desire to write a book of dreams, no desire to retrace my steps.’

  ‘I had to retrace my steps that day,’ said Canaima. ‘I would never have done so, Anselm, had I not seen that you – no one else had listened before – were attentive to the bird-text on the lips of the dancer I had taken from the Macusi tribe. You became a medium in the dance. The carnival heir of the dance!’ He stopped. I was astonished. I had never dreamt of myself before as a ‘carnival heir’. Perhaps there in that ‘heir’ lay alternative or parallel existences in myself I had suppressed across the years. How strange is one to oneself? How many ‘quantum strangers’ does one bear in oneself?

  ‘I walked away, that is true, but each step I made was crucial, a crucial rehearsal in an ultimate relationship to test the nature of violence. Terrible but true. And so here I am.’ What did he mean by, ‘And so here I am’? Was he implying that the music, the dance, that he claimed to accept through me (when I stopped for the first time in his experience and listened to the inner voice of the slain dancer) lay in a sphere of the unconscious/subconscious I had sought to eclipse over the years in order to reside within the shallows of consciousness? A sphere of the unconscious I could no longer deny?

  I bowed my head. I tried to close my ears. The nature of violence! It was abhorrent to be drawn into such a dialogue. But Canaima’s presence remained. His voice was penetrated I felt by the musical and antiphonal utterance of the bird-creature, his victim, half-coffined in soil and water; I found it almost unbearable. No wonder I had apparently forgotten what I had heard in 1948. It was less an utterance and more the rhythm of space: as if the striking and the stricken soul – the anima of conflict-in-suffering – were speaking in terms ecstatic (as much as to say ‘salvation is real if we retrace our steps into a visionary cradle of being’) yet so disturbing, so unusual, so strange, I wanted to forget absolutely a medium of discourse I dreamt I had entered and knew.

  I continued to bow my head but Canaima’s presence remained. He was dancing slowly, dancing intricately. He was dancing away from me into the past, into 1948, up the Potaro riverbank, even as he circled and returned afresh under my bowed head in 1988 within the frame of the present moment. He danced again away from me into the mid-twentieth century, vanished up the hill but returned as upon a curve in intricate space.

  And it became essential now to recover a medium of inner/outer response that had triggered the dance long ago, dance as flight, dance as escape, dance as a visitation of terrifying responsibility for one’s deeds. Dance as lightning wings … Lightning was a sudden vision that I associated with the masked corpse on the ground long ago and I could not account for it now except in an unravelling of memory, in recalling the past, in recalling the way I had let Canaima escape into the mist-laden sun up the hill, the way I had seen the face of his victim within a shell of paint, shell-like lips that appeared to glisten and whiten and redden in the rising sun reflected in the water-top at my feet.

  My silence had lodged itself in those lightning frail wings on a dancer’s lips: harnessed lightning discourse that we infuse into a suspension bridge, or into a rocking vessel on the high seas, or a distant aeroplane that flashes like a bright insect in the sky within a thin trail of snow-cloud, or a stairway into space, a ladder, the crossing of many a subtle abyss, vertical crossing, horizontal crossing, cyclical crossing.

  Perhaps I was the medium of the dance in touching the earth, in touching the light, in touching the sculpture of appearances as if every structure one shaped, or ordered, or visualized, was a sacred infusion of slow-motion lightning into substance, substance into life.

  Canaima had returned in that dangerous dance of the soul originating in spatial rhythms and music one rarely listens to. And when one does one tends to forget. Perhaps it is only possible to stop and to listen when one is drawn by a thread or a key to the door of the unconscious as it lifts into slow-motion lightning consciousness.

  Had I saved him in order to find him again dancing on the threshold of that uplifted door that I now began so faintly to recall, to see in everything …?

  I remembered the wings that had fluttered on the dancer’s lips. A thread ran from them now into the dark melodic door that I had glimpsed as my entry into the first bank of the river of sp
ace. It was a curious and a peculiar door of associations but such peculiarity of composition was inevitable in my situation. The truth was I had forgotten so much in myself, I had eclipsed so much in myself. I was beginning to remember now …

  It is indeed essential to retrace one’s steps within the long Day of the twentieth century. It is essential to test one’s vocation as an architect. The door of dreams is my achievement, is it not?

  ‘Your achievement, Anselm? You seem frightfully eager to set out, to go through the door. No doubt you will clothe yourself in invisibility as the ancient epic heroes did in many a long odyssey.’ He was mocking me. ‘Have you forgotten, do you remember?’

  ‘I almost forgot how fearful I was when you returned. You were so perfectly visible! I asked you to leave me alone. Now I know that whatever form we take it may be an initiation into extending

  ‘Extending our senses, Anselm. We cannot solve the world’s terrifying problems otherwise.’

  His mood suddenly changed as if he were a different person, a fury disguised, a god disguised in ‘visibility’. Perhaps only human heroes on this side of the grave, in the land of the living Dream, need the protection of ‘invisibility’. I was uncertain. Perhaps ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ were biased configurations susceptible to a sacred humour that offered to redeem one’s imperfect grasp of the miracle of time and space: biased configurations within human gods, godlike humans, that the weak artist or saint or architect may bear to express the unbearable divine: weak, yes, but inwardly strengthened through multiple sharers in every field of endeavour in the translation of epic fate into inimitable freedom within the unfinished genesis of cross-cultural moment.

  I knew but I was fearful to accept what I knew. I wished to place a seal upon the innermost realms, the innermost cliff of Being that exists everywhere.

  ‘Anselm, Anselm,’ he cried. ‘Architect, engineer, painter, lover, sculptor, saint!’ He was mocking me again. ‘All these extensions help you to conceal yourself in your various properties. But remember they are suspended by a thread of music in the abyss. That thread is woven out of ages of prayer.’

  ‘Where did you learn all this rubbish?’ I demanded.

  ‘The sanity, the humour of the dead who return as themselves, their wicked or their innocent selves, inhabited nevertheless by the fragility of knowing themselves otherwise! You will understand in due course when you go through the door as a living dreamer. It’s time the living entered into a true discourse with the reformative disguises of the dead everywhere amongst them.’

  ‘Madness,’ I said. ‘Sanity,’ he replied. We were talking within the curious comedy, the curious cross-purpose of incantation and Dream. ‘Let me put it bluntly. We need strange cross-purpose, strange self-contradiction, to open the fabric or prisonhouse of existence. If crime is forever crime, if tautology rules in our dogmas and poetries and statecraft, if violence is the only armour against the violent, then the door is obsolete, the drum is obsolete, the organ engages in nothing but the business of doom. But you know that is not true. The thread of the dance may bring us together again and again, Anselm. But the dance is no absolute enclosure. It is freedom’s re-visionary step, however difficult, into unimaginable truth and beauty.’

  I was fascinated by the unfashionable word ‘beauty’. What is beauty in an ugly world, I asked myself. Perhaps he had stumbled and I had gained the upper hand over him, over the fury or the god that inhabited him. Beauty was worthless! He gave a sudden bark and poked me in the ribs as if his finger were truth’s knife. I recoiled. My complacency appeared to bleed as if I had received a wound. Was I a creature – an unwitting creature no doubt – of the nihilist philosophy of a civilization? Did I deserve to die at the hands of Canaima?

  ‘Not to die. Not to die. You will recover. The thread never snaps. And yet sometimes it appears to snap. It snaps, I tell you. It never snaps. It snaps, I tell you. It never snaps. It snaps, I tell you. Does it ever snap?’ His voice had grown terrible, and I suddenly recalled the way he had stared at his victim on the ground when I came upon them on the riverbank. As though he were shaking him with his glance, shaking him free, yet binding him in a secret net.

  ‘I want the world to understand,’ he spoke softly now as if his rage were written into the spectre of a river I recalled, ‘how precious he is. How invaluable you are, Anselm. I came close to taking your life. To killing you in the Dream and flinging you back into the mid-twentieth century upon him. I want you to know who I am not. I am not a mischief-maker. I am a manifestation of a conflict of values that I nurse within my victims. No ordinary criminal, Anselm. You should know within your childhood heart of hearts! We need to puncture one another’s dramatic misconceptions from the day we were born that feed the theatre of the world. You saved me, yes, when you remained silent. I released you when I could have easily, so easily, killed you when I appeared to mother (or was it to father?) my victim on the ground. We are twins …’

  I was stunned by Canaima’s outrageous address, the address of a spiritual tormentor. I had set him free and yet he was my prisoner. He had killed, he had come close to killing me. I still felt his knife in my ribs. The dancer he had killed lay within the net of his (and my) mind and heart. The cap of Alicia – a family badge I associated with childhood – had been stuck on the dead man’s head. So he was part and parcel of a childhood – half-forgotten – theatre as well. The knife and the cap were an incomplete badge and signature I suddenly remembered.

  Salvation is the mystery of unfathomable grace yet torment, the mystery of the net, of the thread, of the key to a door whose obsolescence or inestimable value I was soon to know within a body of living, sculpted, painted ghosts arising from the past into a Dream of presence.

  *

  I walked through the door of the dream-unconscious as an honorary ghost in the wake of Canaima’s metaphoric knife in my ribs. As such, as a living dreamer, I was able to don – in true ancient epic style within the late twentieth century – the cloak of invisibility that I needed in retracing my steps and embarking upon my pilgrimage upon the first bank of the river of space.

  I turned in the morning light – wholly unseen by the people in the region who were now astir – and took an intricate path along the riverbank in the direction of the Macusi Waterfall and Rapids.

  The river was angry as if it had been stirred by Canaima’s glance which shook the dead bird-man at his feet. Its sudden, passionate foam led me to paint the soil of the place with a degree of coarseness that I instantly regretted. I looked everywhere for monsters as I touched the knife in my ribs. What monsters? The masses of the river (miniature masses, I may add, since the population was small) were made up of ordinary folk, gold and diamond miners, everyday faces one would meet in the footpaths through the forest or on the water-top, Macusis whose children were attending the Mission Church and the School, Inspector Robot and his police force, Penelope and Ross George the English missionaries.

  I came upon a Macusi woodman with an axe on his shoulder. He was – in the circumstances of my invisibility – unable to see me but I possessed the outrageous liberty of scanning his features and inspecting him from top to toe. There was a faint sweat in his eyes like a spider’s web or the distilled breath of the river upon glass. He was sturdy as rock. His employment was to fell several acres of rainforest timber. A mere drop these were on my canvas of space that invoked the mid-twentieth century into which I had come. But one wondered how it would spread in the future. The rainforests were the lungs of the globe. Trees needed to be felled, yes, but the breath of the rivers and the forests was a vital ingredient in space. It was an issue of living contrasts interwoven by the soul of the dance through every monstrous desert that lay hidden in the coarse soil of place – deserts that had not yet happened in South America but which we could inflict on ourselves if we were not watchful and capable of attending to the voices of the dead in our midst.

  I – as Government Surveyor, Government Architect, Government Sculptor
and Painter of the City of God, an Imaginary City within the fabulous ruins of El Dorado – had submitted a report on the preservation of the rainforests to my employers in Alicia’s museum of fossils in Georgetown.

  I said to the woodman – ‘Your people were here before Columbus dreamt he had touched the shores of India. That is why you and your people are called Indians. History is a book of dreams. And it’s time we scanned the pages afresh and woke up to patterns of Sleep in which we stumble upon each other in the masks of many existences. When we fight one another – whom do we fight? When we love or hate one another – whom do we love or hate? Be careful, axeman! Remember the crosses on Calvary’s hill. They were felled trees, carven trees, felled by living, sleep-walking ghosts like you.’

  He did not understand a word but stopped and listened, astonished at my voice. It was the trick of an honorary ghost who sighed in the trees. Was it phantom cinema, phantom radio, imported into savage and remote realms? There was a black bead or ritual charm on his lips that he could blow into a curious kind of balloon in which to trap visual spirits. I took advantage of him. I touched the bead and converted it into a television box over his head that was as transparent as his balloon. Its transparency matched the faint sweat or breath of glass arising from the river into his eyes.

  Trick of breath in my sculpture of him it may have been but it was authentic comedy or retrace of unimaginable genesis I sought nevertheless to infuse into the arts of life as a moral counterpoint to civilization’s addiction to technology. I moved within the Painted Bush and threw the net of an unseen camera around him. Startled all at once in recalling the way Canaima had thrown his net around his victim on the ground! The correspondence was indeed startling. It gave an extra edge to the film I was suddenly involved in making with the epic media of the gods who had thrust me on to the first bank of the river of space. The Macusi woodman was in process of becoming a bright Shadow on a screen (in a box-balloon) to millions of invisible viewers within a net of the future (invisible to him as I now was) who would feast on him in their sitting-rooms, feast on him and on the nearextinction of his savage tribe, feast on him as on a rare bird, exotic fish, butterfly.