The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  My state of self-confessional subjection to Alicia helped to lift her state of body and mind into a bond of emotion, in which she was able to resist the jealous soldier by associating herself with Poverty’s masks in a world foreign to her own childhood in Kent, where she grew up, yet pertinent to her deepest fantasies. It was an important treaty, it was the beginning of an important alliance, an important comedy, a maturity, a Wisdom, that would extend its implications within the reach of the four banks of the river of space.

  And yet I was suddenly cast down. Such extension into genuine Wisdom seemed now suddenly precarious, suddenly remote in a world in which we needed to acknowledge how little we knew ourselves, and how our lack of self-knowledge was threaded into our ignorance of others, our tendency to rely on so-called first impressions and upon superficial estimates of complicated capacity in others. At least – as an honorary spy upon the first bank of the river of space who had begun to retrace his steps into the heartland of the twentieth century – I was apprised of this. I knew I moved into the extremities, the hidden spaces in others, within the extremities, the hidden spaces in myself, upon a quantum materiality interwoven with the gross materiality and bankrupt realisms of my age. No wonder one tended at times to lose heart, to recoil from the task, to distrust oneself.

  Does one not fear to open oneself to energies, to risks, that may change one’s being radically, a radical change of heart? Does one not distrust a radical change of heart as the cornerstone of every Imaginary City of God? Distrust is contagious. It overshadows the medium of inner discourse, the medium of the soul.

  I had distrusted Ross, he had distrusted me, when we first met in 1948. I accepted our mutual dislike one of the other as the realism of ruling object (he was the friend of Governors and high-ranking Civil Servants) and ruled subject (I was susceptible to nursing grievances against the injustices of colonial order). He seemed to me a reserved, cold-hearted missionary and friend of the establishment. But now as I retraced my steps upon the ground of quantum materiality the shell of mutual distrust began to break.

  It broke within the door of the unconscious upon which was inscribed elaborate traceries of far-flung telepathic myth, far-flung intelligences within a theatre of ancient/modern soul.

  Penelope had been amused at the fantasies I entertained as a child about my aunt Alicia. So now too I found myself clapping, one hand clapping in the mirror of the soul. Ross had moved upon the stage within that mirror, that theatre. His reserve, his coldness, cracked to reveal another existence that was part and parcel of myself though I would never have suspected it when we first met. He was no base suitor at Penelope’s court. He was no ordinary missionary in the kingdom of El Dorado. His reserve was real. How real? There are many approaches to the real. And now I found myself weighing his real intraversions in mine.

  Guilt and fantasy are real. Guilt is rooted in the extraordinary life of fantasy, shared but suppressed fantasy. What better defences against an ignorant world than the appearances of distance from others, the appearances of reserve?

  I had known the ice of guilt as a child even under the blaze of the tropical sun. I had seen marvels of suppressed guilt in Proteus’s broken-backed laughter as he played the clown or the king and squeezed himself into another shape. I had seen buoyant guilt in Harold’s lusts. Harold was the womaniser of our family. Ross was no womaniser but he felt himself imprisoned within a pattern of angst and lust one tends to associate with the theft of love from another, another who cultivates jealousy and takes himself for granted as the sovereign master of a woman’s heart.

  He fell in love with Penelope during the War when her jealous soldier-husband was still alive. He burdened himself with the thought that this had demoralized Simon (at last I drew the name Simon from the crevices of his mind, the name of the shadowy officer and Governor who had placed himself between them as they descended the hill) when he returned from El Alamein and found them in bed together: that this had led to his death in Normandy in 1944. Simon may have thrown his life away!

  It was untrue, it was folly, it was a distortion. Ross had been scrupulous to a degree, wholly conscientious. Penelope needed him. He had stood by her, tried to heal the wounds her husband had inflicted. The marriage had ended (though a legal tie remained) long before he and Penelope met and made love in a room above a bombed garden in which a single rose bloomed. There was no need for guilt. He was no base suitor. Yet guilt and uncertainty remained like a formidable door into a complex and far-flung dimension that I – as a spy who retraces his steps within the long Day of the twentieth century – began to weigh, to assess, to evaluate in new lights, in the light of parallel and alternative existences, guilt in parallel with formidable myth, myth in parallel with duty and devotion, ancient Ithaca in parallel with ruined El Dorado, ruined kings, queens, suitors.

  Ross’s intense reserve sustained him in all his tasks, heightened his sense of duty. Such reserve became a hidden door, a door of the Dream I shared with him (I felt myself an imaginary suitor in Penelope’s court, I was struck by her beauty): a door into the kingdom of the heart, a kingdom Ross distrusted and equated with primitive fantasy, primitive humanity. All the more necessary it was for him to work hard, to prize the vocation of a missionary in an alien South America. He was no base suitor in Penelope’s court, no base thief of love here in El Dorado nor there in Europe from which they had come. Indeed the structure of formidable proprietorship of the ancient kingdom of the heart began to suffer a curious reversal. The Shadow of Simon, the Governor, haunted them (I had not realized it before) as it haunted me now though his status as a hero was no longer absolute. It was as if the nature and authority, the ironies of love, choice and fate, were in suspension. And the outcome now lay in re-visionary theatre.

  The queen of El Dorado accepted the necessity to weave a tapestry of counterpoint, guilt and innocence, poverty and wealth, that made it impossible for her to conform to a convenient climax with a potent ghost or with a dutiful, conscientious suitor or with an imaginary suitor. The fulfilment of longed-for ecstasy had suffered a measure of eclipse within arts of freedom: freedom of association, yes, freedom to live with whom one wished to live, yes, freedom to declare one’s need of another, yes, but freedom for what, what values, what truths in oneself and others?

  Here lay the nature of a discourse in which my fantasies were joined to Penelope’s, to Ross’s, to those of the king of thieves in whom gold was the obsessional guilt of love …

  It was astonishing how in glimpsing the complicated features of Ross through a shell of reserve I became a stranger to myself even as he drew paradoxically closer to me in quantum territory. In knowing him better my self-portrait became stranger and truer. I glimpsed my own strangeness. Who was I? Was it a question I would ever be able to answer?

  For one moment – the instant I heard Ross inwardly utter the name ‘Simon’ – it almost seemed that he touched the knife in my side, the knife in the body of my mind. Indeed I felt a stab, a twist of pain. He was but one step away from unveiling the portrait I had painted in myself of my early morning encounter with Canaima. I was alarmed. I knew I must divert the action of his thought.

  ‘My parents, grandparents, great-aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., etc. – Alicia, Proteus, Harold, the Rose sisters, etc., etc. – stored their most secret dreams in the English language, Ross. Their prayers were uttered in the English language. English was their mental tongue – it became their landscape of psyche – whatever the colour of their skin.’ My inner voice – the action of telepathy – struck his ears. I saw he was drawn. He lifted his unconscious hand away from the knife and the veil that lay over my portrait of Canaima. His attention had been diverted from the bird-victim (the masked dancer) Canaima had plucked from the dance and killed. He would learn of it when they returned to the Mission House. In the meantime I felt I needed to learn a great deal more in order to give a full account of the forces that had inspired me not to raise an outcry when I came upon Canaima and the Macusi he ha
d killed. The compulsions that had driven me, the thread of the dance linking all creatures, all spheres, all places – the antiphonal discourse – were so mysterious, so unpredictable, that I needed more time to let them act upon me in my pilgrimage. I needed to retrace my steps more deeply into the past before I could sculpt the dance, paint it in greater range and depth. I needed time even as they needed time to impart to me their particular crisis and its far-flung bearing on the nature of freedom, the innermost authority of the values of love without which freedom would be but nihilism, but a dead-end in a wilderness of licence and permissive abuse.

  ‘Yes,’ I continued rapidly, ‘my relatives and antecedents composed poems, sermons, etc. in English. Proteus sometimes fancied himself as a minister of religion. Like you, Ross. And as for Alicia, Great-Aunt Alicia! What a scream she was. I am quoting one of her retinue of servants amongst her admiring neighbours from whom she cast many a play. English was her mansion, English was a stage, a ladder, a curtain to be lifted on a variety of objects. It was a landscape populated by dancing figures involved in complicated gestures, imageries and steps. Not easy to describe. I remember when I first saw an L. S. Lowry ballet or painting within a backcloth of depression I thought of Aunt Alicia. But that’s an insufficient and inadequate comparison for her daring and penetrative vision of inner space theatre.’

  Ross was smiling now. The comparison fascinated him and I knew I had turned his mind away from the metaphoric knife in my side and from Canaima.

  ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘every object she unveils she addresses in English. Subject she may be but she becomes the soul of the object. There’s a wonderful vase, a tall vase inscribed with histories of the world – I hope to come upon it in due course on the second bank of the river of space – in which she resides now playing that she rules the world from within the very objects that ruled her. It’s her moral comedy, her version of moral irony. I dream of her as if she were a living empress who truly knows the tribulations of every subject, who is both within and without every object-masquerade, every mask, every furniture of being that passes before her; who hears the buried voices within the English language, the voices of her mixed antecedents, her mixed ancestry, bringing a new quality of incantation into the language of object and subject.’ I stopped. Despite everything one declares I sensed the divide between sophisticated ‘object’ and carnival ‘subject’. It was present in us all, in Penelope and Ross as much as in me. But Penelope and Ross were so seized by their commanding native tongue they would have accepted the divide as fate’s sealed discourse were it not for the rising subjectivity of Poverty’s queens such as Alicia and honorary spies such as myself. It was the new stresses on ‘native ruling tongue’ that drew us together within a shared telepathy of ruler and ruled, a shared intuition of linked foreign and native sovereigns within the dangerous plaster of ruling object: drew us together in such a way that the plaster became susceptible to unravelling by a carnival spy or ‘kingdom of heaven subject’ within the Sleep of history.

  The living dreamer knows in some indefinable way he could rely on them to help him or me respond to Canaima even as they could rely on him or me – in Poverty’s ancestral epic masks – to help them respond to Simon’s shadowy manifestation of malaise, the malaise of a civilization in the wounded, jealous archetype of authority as it returned again and again into the kingdom of the heart to ravage the senses. Penelope possessed her sovereign, cruel master and her guilty, innocent suitors within her own mind’s ruling body and in perceiving this the theme itself, the theme of sovereignty itself, the theme of the suitor, required reversal in cross-cultural frames of theatre. I had, however faintly, begun to recall the theatre of my childhood: Aunt Alicia as a player in a body of dual or triple queenships, King Harold in league with Uncle Proteus. Yes I remembered the beggar Ulysses played by both Proteus and Harold in the gates of Home, native and foreign Home, intact yet scarred. The strangest paradox of theatre lay before me as I retraced my steps apparently backwards, apparently forwards … ‘We may only heal the wounded archetype when we live the divide at the heart of language and place its enormity on many shoulders, when several players – whether Simon, Harold, Proteus – take a share in performances and portrayals of inner ungraspable majesty, inner immensity of craft, inner power.’

  I knew I still had a long way to go to encounter Proteus, Harold and the others. Penelope and Ross vanished along the trail on their way to the Mission House. Vanished but I heard their voices calling out to me to join them for dinner that evening. I declined. The invitation remained suspended in the air. It floated towards me across the years. I had almost forgotten. It returned now with immense poignancy. It was to take close on forty years for me to fulfil that summons. I did not break bread with them in the Mission House until 1988 when I retraced my steps into an imaginary refectory in the ruins of the old Mission. The old house had been burnt to the ground in 1966 by Canaima.

  *

  The way was clear now for me to continue my journey along the first bank of the river of space. I heard the organ of the Macusi Waterfall through the trees and came at last to god-rock, a huge sculpture with a winding stairway like a coiled serpent or eel up into space. It towered above the Waterfall.

  Inspector Robot was waiting for me there in the shadow of the rock as within the shadow of time that lengthens mysteriously within us when an age is passing its zenith.

  A skeleton-man to be feared in one’s dreams, a remarkable clown, a remarkable detective, a technician of artificial intelligence. He tapped me on the shoulder with a bony finger and conferred on me the extended title ‘honorary doctor, spy and Christian gnostic’. His bony finger reminded me of Canaima’s hand and the knife in my side. The links between violence (bony finger/knife), healing (doctorate of the soul), intelligence (spy), and knowledge as sacrament were disturbing and enigmatic. Were they rooted in some area of insoluble conflict that we needed to visualize in all its proportions if we were to create a changed heart within ourselves, a radical change of heart within a grossly materialistic civilization?

  Robot was smiling quizzically. The bones in his face quivered a little. It was as if he were testing me, or mocking me, by implying through channels of twisting telepathy in the network of apparently grave-made, man-made brain that his realm (the realm of ‘artificial intelligence’) was superior to gnosis or to intuitive bodies of original mind and spirit, that he alone was realistic enough to offer no quarter, no parole, to criminals. And yet he seemed equally to be saying that we needed one another, we could profit from an understanding one of the other. I believed in ‘freedom’ (did I not?), he believed in the necessity of the ‘prisonhouse’. Our beliefs were but frames of the vanity of power within a world of sovereign polarizations and clashes of cultures bent on deceiving (if not destroying) each other.

  On the other hand those beliefs could genuinely change when one began to perceive the subtle abyss that existed between them, between the vanity of ‘freedom’ and the vanity of the ‘prisonhouse’. How potent was that abyss? That was the Inspector’s prime inquiry of me. Could that abyss alter the features of both time and eternity?

  ‘Freedom’ by itself could prove a baseless ‘eternity’ that consumes all as the elements become polluted and the fabric of moral order capitulates to an atrophy of being, the ‘prisonhouse’ by itself could prove the cement of baseless ‘time’ through which one flits helplessly into limbo.

  How strange if the abyss then that lies between ‘freedom’ and the ‘prisonhouse’ could so extend the range of our perceptions that eternity yielded itself to us not as a consuming and polluted furnace in opposition to passing time but as the parent of vital, original time – re-cast time – within a range of architectures, rooms, doors, walls, cycles, beams that draw themselves up from the very abyss that we begin to contemplate into pregnant consciousness? Draw themselves up into visionary splendours, visionary fragments of a dreaming Creator, a true Creator, whose unknowable limits are our creaturely infinity?


  ‘Is it possible that the abyss between freedom and the prisonhouse is a source of renewal? Do we need to contemplate the nature of every abyss between patterns and forms that we take for granted?’

  I shook my head. I knew he was fencing with me. I knew he believed in nothing. He wanted to pick my brains. He wanted to cannibalize every organ of spirit … He stared at me with his quizzical, cynical smile. A sophisticated tormentor. Man-made, grave-made brain which could utter genuine truths at times but falsify them into instruments of exploitation because they were void of a spiritual ancestry. A sovereign nihilist capable of putting ‘intelligent’ questions in order to extract what substance he could from his victims. In a way, a fascinating and remarkable way, he resembled Canaima. One was a detective and manipulator of souls, the other was the captain of his team of victims.

  Perhaps he felt the burden of my distrust for he mopped his bony skull and shot a sudden question at me – ‘There’s reason to believe this wretched thing’ – he pointed to the god-rock – ‘may help us to unlock the code of Canaima’s hiding place.’ He was staring at me now accusingly (his earlier slightly ingratiating manner had vanished) as if he knew I knew something. I decided to fence with him, to lean into the abyss that stood between us.

  ‘Take this.’ He pointed to a diagram at the foot of the rock. ‘What do you as a spy, God’s engineer’ – his dry lips flared with his contempt for all religions (yet his desire to exploit all religions) – ‘make of it?’

  He knelt beside me as I took a sharp pencil and eased its point into each line of the diagram he had indicated to remove an accumulation of faint mould.