The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  In the outrageous liberties I took with him I was their ambassador, the ambassador of invisible millions, invisible to the savage I shot with my camera.

  I inscribed on my film the following caution – ‘Read the ironies of technology in the haunted spaces of civilization’s mind, a mind infused with metaphors of the hunt and the kill, the seizure of others within every museum or cinema.’

  The door of associations through which I had come had now swung wide. It was so close I saw something I had not seen before. There were subtle etchings of three crosses. I was prompted to ask the Macusi axeman (though he did not understand a word) – ‘Who is the king of thieves? Look! there he is. He’s descending from his cross as if to retrace his steps backwards into previous centuries, forwards into later centuries, into our century. Odd of me to say “retrace”. Retrace one’s steps into the past. But can we retrace our steps in the coarse soil of the future? He is the thief who mocked Christ and turned his face away from paradise’s door. Such a thief lives in us all and in a door that haunts us in every century.’

  I saw he was listening and I continued as I touched the knife in my ribs. ‘Perhaps my door is rooted in a subtle abyss between Christ’s cross and that of the king of thieves, the door in the cross, the cross in the door.’

  ‘He is behind you,’ I said suddenly to the axeman. ‘He stands between your raised axe and the tree you are about to fell. I am not sure but he reminds me … I think I know. I remember something from childhood when I played in Alicia’s garden theatre with my uncle Proteus who was adept at all sorts of masks and disguises. The sun would glint on his brow like a cord of bright sixpences. Clever devil! I remember once he stole my pocket money. It wasn’t much but it was a fortune to me. Fortunes are made when one astutely delves into the pockets of infants. It was a moral lesson that Proteus intended.

  ‘Look axeman! The thief turns in your Shadow within the futuristic television box I have infused into a bead that you wear. Some say he stole the atom from the thorn of a Rose on Christ’s brow. He turns, axeman! he turns in your box and faces millions. Look! how they cheer, how they applaud.’

  But the axeman was blind to the past and the future. And yet I was not sure. There was a glint to the blade of his axe that half-blinded my sight as well. Perhaps he was on the brink of disclosing himself in another light. I did my best to keep my eyes fastened upon him. I followed the are that he drew with his blade: slow yet lightning poise of a blade in the darkness of my own mind. The axe stood high in space. He gave a sudden ringing cry. ‘TIMBER, HUMAN TIMBER.’ Then struck. It was a miraculous blow. With one stroke he felled the tree. I scarcely believed what I saw. It was as if his blindness was now – in a flashing instant – a mask that he wore even as my invisibility was a cloak. I was a different person in retracing my steps. He was a different person in striking a blow that was so unusual, so immaculate, it made me abnormally sensitive to the responsibilities that are implicit in every cross one bears, every door one builds. Human timber!

  I touched the blade. I marvelled at its subtlety and complex force. I remembered the knife, Canaima’s knife, that had metaphorically killed me yet had pierced me to the core of the body’s waking instrument – as if the knife were an extension of the human hand – so pierced me that I became an heir of civilizations (carnival heir) and was imbued with living dream or inner space to pass through the door of the unconscious, to become sensitive to the abuse of others, to the perils that encompass the globe.

  The high stump of the felled tree began to move in the soil of the earth. It drew itself up. It was human timber. It arose from the roots of the cross. My eyes cleared. I remembered. Someone I knew yet did not know. It was the king of thieves. He – unlike the other thief on Calvary’s hill – had rejected paradise. I had glimpsed him on the first bank of the river of space at the heart of the long Day of the twentieth century between the raised axe and the tree. I had glimpsed him in childhood theatre. I had glimpsed him in the protean body of my own family. Such parallels or alternative existences had come into sharpest focus now, quantum axe, quantum camera, quantum knife.

  They were the sharpest extension of breath-in-sculpted-body-senses. But simultaneously they made me acutely aware of the king of thieves as burdened with prizes and punishments. The Macusi axeman – whose blade seemed now a lightning extension of my own hand in the sudden darkness that falls over one’s mind in the wake of a staggering event – had vanished. I was left to reflect upon a thief, upon the punishments inflicted upon him, a thief whom I knew or thought I knew. I should have recognized him in the mid-twentieth century when I worked in the Potaro River and he was a miner there but I was blind then, I was deaf then. He was a miner-pork-knocker (in the idiom of the region). Pork-knockers live by the skin of their teeth when the payload, the paydirt, declines. They beat a drum in the Bush for comfort, they scrape the last morsels from every drum or barrel of pork. It was a punishment with which many a great adventurer was familiar in the age of Homer or Virgil or Defoe. And on such scraps I perceived a possibility for – the meditative genesis of – a symphony and a film on the incarnations of the king of thieves.

  His nickname in 1948 was ‘Black Pizarro’. It was a tribute to his obsession with gold and to his great namesake, the Spanish conquistador of the sixteenth century, who ransacked the treasuries of the Incas. He was the living mascot of his crew. They hated him yet he was indispensable to them. None was as gifted as he in concealing a stone in the crevices of his flesh or gold under his tongue. He told tales of rich widows and he boasted that he had rubbed shoulders in Georgetown or Rio or Paris or Greece with many a suitor in carnival palaces who waited on queens and wasted their substance. The ruins of El Dorado – whose location tended to shift from region to region, continent to continent, from the present into the remote past, even as it hovered over the future – encompassed he declared the proportions of formidable live fossil (cross-cultural) theatre: ancient Ithaca (with its suitors or millionaire-thieves and its queen Penelope) and modern doors, the door of the modern unconscious uplifted into consciousness, the door of lost paradises, stolen paradises. As a consequence, in sculpting him back from the high stump of a felled tree as multi-existential fabric, as an actor or creature of many incarnations, I placed a stolen diamond in his flesh and a stolen nugget of gold over his heart.

  I chiselled him as a thief who sought to steal in every century on earth the heaven he had lost on Calvary’s hill. It was a magnificent obsession. It glimmered in the seed of many an epic, in pre-Christian ages, in many an Odyssey, many an implicit crucifixion upon the high mast of a wrecked ship on the high seas, or beneath the pagan rafters or pagan crosses of buried kingdoms. I chiselled his head into magnificence and plastered the bone and the flesh with ageing leaves (a man in his forties), grey leafy mane or the fleece of cloud or animal hair. This conjunction of fleece with cloud with animal hair with a horse’s mane and with the brilliant, sometimes riotous flow of sun and breeze that stream through a forest of leaves from time to time (before the leaves fall and become sodden or grey or yellow or black) was an indication that the king of thieves sought (however parlous his condition) to ride high in space.

  In this extreme context he was both rider and ridden, golden man and slave. He was civilization’s universal puppet, a civilization that took Poverty for granted, Wealth for granted, took the millionaire for granted, took the net that confined them for granted. Until the net snaps in Canaima’s hand. And the diamonds and the gold spill out and breathe in their own right, breathe on high within the forested saddle of space, fall into the ground and rot with every leaf to become emblems of a riotous soul, riotous elements that ride in space, in cloud, in storm, in every landscape, every tide, riotous elements in our mistranslation of the energies of a majestic tempest.

  As the net breaks the leaf rides in the sky, as the net breaks the gold flashes in the rain, as the net breaks one’s blindness melts. One sees through the thief’s mask, the thief’s eyes, and he sees th
rough one’s cloak of invisibility. The honorary scarecrow thief on the first bank of the river of space meets the honorary ghost who comes through the door of dreams into a collaboration of elements, a collaboration of poverty and wealth within live fossil theatre.

  He is possessed of an insight into levels of being that touch upon all extremities, all prizes, all punishments. The thief and the millionaire – in this commotion of forested and winged elements, streaming and falling rotting leaves in space, gold and silver – come to the verge of surrendering everything into the SLEEP OF HISTORY’S DREAM BOOK in which they encounter themselves as strangers, as intimates. But the gold is heavy (it cannot easily be given up), the rotting leaf is a source of profit, and they find they are addicted still to the charisma of punishment, the charisma of prizes.

  Black Pizarro had served, I knew, a sentence of imprisonment in 1947 in Alicia’s gaol of live fossils of history. Six months’ hard labour in the garden theatre. My childhood museum home had become a famous theatre, a prison, a library, it possessed an immortal vase inhabited by queen Alicia’s spirit, it possessed an unfinished Jacob’s ladder. Alicia and my uncle Proteus would have loved it all were they alive in the 1940s, they would have approved the evolution of Poverty – of poor men’s and women’s religion – into carnival masks of wealth.

  On his return to the Potaro goldfields in 1948 after he had served his sentence he was chosen leader by the miners. They beat him within a fortnight of his return for a piece of gold he inserted between his toes as they dug the yellow metal in a ravine or a creek close to the Macusi Waterfall.

  Even as they beat him they embraced him. They were wed to him, they were wed to an obsession imprinted on the door of the unconscious. The golden man, the golden thief. It did not matter whether gold was black or white.

  I remembered now. I saw it now as I retraced my steps upon fossil leaf, fossil gold, fossil diamond, and glimpsed in high heaven, through the body of the forest, the flashing light of a Horse that I was to encounter much later and on another bank in the river of space in my pilgrimage. At the present moment, however, the horse’s mane stood on the thief’s head as an apparition of his fall across the centuries into my age.

  *

  The king of thieves had pierced my cloak of invisibility (as I had pierced his eyes of blindness), and as a consequence I became a curious honorary telepathist or spy of the heart and the mind, as I continued my journey. The telepathist on the first bank of the river of space is a spy, who dreams of building an Imaginary City of God by accumulating necessary intelligences in every sphere, through all alternatives and parallels. I felt I stood now within a medium of exchange with ‘live absences’, with those who had vanished or died but were returning now into the Sleep of object, as much as the Sleep of subject, the Sleep of ruler, as much as the Sleep of ruled. As though the substance with which I now sculpted them into life was shared thought, a mutual exchange of secrets, a mixture of philosophy and reverie.

  I did not have far to go before I came upon the English missionaries, Ross and Penelope George. I had been thinking of them when I met Pizarro. I was sure they had been thinking of me too across the abyss that lay between us. I drew them up, as it were, from within the darkness of my own mind and the darkness of theirs within half-grave, half-cradle of mutual instinct and memory.

  I saw them descending a hill towards me. Just behind them came a soldier, a high-ranking officer I perceived from the many decorations that he wore on his chest. The medals and decorations were vibrating almost imperceptibly to the faint rhythm of military music running through Penelope’s mind. She was humming a marching song silently to herself and I picked up an intelligence of the strains and echoes in myself as telepathic spy. A song that left her pensive, uneasy, burdened by something or someone she could not easily shake off. Her reverie ceased when she saw me. (I was now visible to all as my previous cloak had been pierced by the king of thieves.) She stopped humming or beating the strains of the tune silently within herself as she saw me and the soldier who stood so close to her – his hand on her arm, squeezing her arm – stepped away from her into the Bush. I lost sight of him.

  But his appearance and abrupt disappearance made me uneasy. It did not yet occur to me that he was a ghost I had sculpted into existence by spying into the materiality of Penelope’s silent song, Penelope’s uneasy military body of thought that possessed her in that instant. My first idea was that he had come to visit Ross and herself (whom I gathered he had known in England) to tell them he was a candidate for the Governorship of the Colony. Perhaps some such odd fantasy – fantasy to do with the dead who haunted their thoughts powerfully – had been relayed to me by them. Or perhaps I had picked up some early ambition, some early hope for a seat in the administrative hierarchy of empire, entertained by the officer himself before his death, of which they knew and which lingered in their subconscious or unconscious.

  The tasks of a spy who dreams to build the City of God are complex, sometimes they border upon meaningful self-deception. The notion that he was a candidate for Governorship – indeed much more, a Ulysses returned into his private kingdom, private possession – gripped me. I wondered whether he would know something of my brief in the Potaro as Government Surveyor and Architect. Perhaps he had visited my head office in Georgetown which was set in Queen Alicia’s theatre of history in which I had grown up as a child with Proteus and Harold.

  Perhaps he had been informed that I had been sent to reconnoitre the area as a likely settlement for refugees, to assess the hydro-electric potential of the Potaro River above the Macusi Waterfall … I felt the curious tremor of a subject who faces the object of power, the dress, the decorations for military prowess, the uniform, the high masquerade to which one owes allegiance.

  I felt the strains of such object-power, heroic personality, lingering in the loom and tapestry of Penelope’s mind. I felt the thread of her song stitching kings and queens upon the Bush around us and into my carnival temperament.

  Aunt Alicia was a carnival queen (her imprint was clear to me now on the painted Bush) and Penelope responded to this lightning telepathy by assuming the burden of becoming a queen herself – the queen of the El Dorado Mission House of the Potaro in which she and Ross taught and worked. Burden indeed! The El Dorado Mission narrowly escaped being in the red. It needed funds and though it succeeded – with the help of international charities – in defraying expenses it was driven at times to exceed its slim budget. The War had left us all poor.

  I seemed to learn all this as Penelope’s and Ross’s stream of inner sometimes disjointed reflection circulated within a medium of legend that I associated with Alicia. Aunt Alicia knew all about slim budgets. But her humour, her ironic charity, was such that she converted Poverty into a moral comedy. ‘Ask the poor,’ she would say, ‘how they see the world! They will tell you it’s a village

  ‘A village?’

  ‘A global village, Anselm. Remember the Beatitudes – “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”’

  I never fully understood what my formidable aunt was driving at when she associated her carnival queenship at home when I was a child with the ‘poor in spirit’, but now it became curiously obvious to me that masks of Poverty in her theatre (slim budgets etc. that she shared not only with hard-driven neighbours and members of her own family but with august missions, high enterprises of art or religion or education) embodied the visionary importance of the complex unity of Mankind through dual or triple queenships in order to illumine the necessity to cross frontiers, to break polarizations. ‘When one is poor in spirit,’ she used to say, ‘one is rich in giving a helping hand to others whoever they may be, wherever they may have come from. We’re not just puppets on a string, Anselm. Someone we ourselves put on a pedestal may pull a string or two – I know that – and catapult us into an arena where we fight one another even though we scarcely know whom it is exactly we are fighting. It’s easy to fall into line like helpless idiots, A
nselm. Until helplessness becomes the cement of the state … Yes, helplessness is a form of subconscious cement, helplessness is a block that we build in which the state imprisons us. The poor in spirit know they have to reach out. And that’s carnival. Reaching out. Reaching through legacies of helplessness into dual and triple kingships and queenships across frontiers. Kingship or queenship becomes a shared privilege, a shared burden.’

  There flashed in my mind, as I remembered the staccato rhythm of her sermon to me – when she wrestled with varieties of distress – a distinction between ‘prizes and punishments’ (in the king of thieves) and ‘shared privilege, shared burden’ in a theatre of Spirit.

  I was astonished at the curious wealth of association running through my mind: a spy into world Poverty’s metamorphoses invokes a store of secrets (open secrets) that come thick and fast from everywhere and nowhere.

  Penelope was smiling. She shared the material substance of my thoughts even as I penetrated hers. She knew I was an absurd spy for the ‘kingdom of heaven’ (‘absurdity is sometimes a bleak, a terrifying measure of creative hope, creative truth’), and it amused her, even as it helped to lift from her the shadow of unhappiness and anxiety that I had witnessed in her when the soldier had held her hand with his insubstantial but bruising fist, with a kind of brutal force, a kind of jealous rage.

  It was as if we shared a range of childhood secrets, within a language of poetry and epic that was ours. She saw plainly imprinted on the Bush – as in a lightning portrait of mind that I painted there within the gallery of the first bank of the river of space – how Alicia had governed me in childhood even as the ‘soldier’ had been her implicit hero or standard-bearer as far back as she could remember in the games they played in childhood. (She had known him as a child. Their families had been neighbours.)