The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  ‘I have taken the liberty,’ I said with a dryness that matched Robot’s flare of contempt, ‘taken the liberty of putting A and B and C at the three lines on the diagram at the base of god-rock. The Macusi worship the architecture of the tides. They seek a bird’s-eye view of the geology of the tides in the City of God.’

  The Inspector stared at me blankly.

  ‘A is flood level, C drought level, B is an outline of stone or rock in the Waterfall, peak and valley, through which a precipice of water thunders when the river’s full.’

  The Inspector listened intently. I felt he had cast a sudden net around me, blank gaze, intent Robotic instinct and listening ear, coldness, calculation that pushed me on the defensive.

  ‘B is also,’ I continued, ‘a procession of draped bodies in the Waterfall: rock sculptures that harness the river. The Macusis see them as the work of the God of all weathers; they also see them as clothing inner bodies that wait to come alive, a living procession, when the tribe is approaching extinction. So though the rock procession may become their epitaph, the epitaph of the tribe within the Waterfall, something else will step forth into the world, a magical art born of “live absences”, a magical procession of living interior bodies sculpted at the heart of the Waterfall.’

  ‘You spoke earlier of a bird’s-eye view, Mr Anselm. Can you explain?’ He was tightening the net upon me. I hesitated. I dreaded his deadly curiosity, blank stare, intent listening ear, abstract precision.

  ‘The soul dreams,’ I said at last and struggled in his net, ‘to dance up from the Waterfall. It dreams it may come to stand tiptoe upon the wing of a bird, that it may wear the feathers and the glory of all winged creatures, and gaze through the eyes of the masked being of space …’

  ‘What does it see?’

  ‘It sees the geology of the tides.’

  ‘Is that all?’ said Robot. He smiled with indifference. He was baiting me, pushing me along.

  ‘It sees the distant Atlantic coast far below us,’ I sought to explain, ‘where the ocean tides rise and fall. It sees the ease with which the coastal rivers (they look like veins and arteries in the body of distance, earth and space) would run unchecked into the salt sea were it not for every day’s reversal in the pulsation of the tides, the reversed pulse or animate door or fluid wall of the tides that rise where they fell before and ride back up the rivers, push back and conserve the precious fluid of the sky, the drinking fluid, the irrigation fluid.

  ‘Outflow into the salt sea occurs with every falling tide. Then comes the reversal, the conservation of the river’s resources, with the rising tide that builds itself into a fluid door uplifted on the reversed tracery or re-tracery of the dancing falling/rising body of arterial rivers.

  ‘I say a fluid door, a fluid wall, to bring home to us – where we now stand (you, Inspector, and I) far inland and above the ocean – the miraculous parallels, the miraculous architecture of the Waterfall. Look closely at the diagram! The sculptured procession of peak and trough, of carven rock, in the Waterfall has been uplifted here by a geological upward displacement of the ocean tides. The ocean tides are a fluid door, the processional rock is an active tide however stationary it seems. You may remember my telling you that this processional rock will become the epitaph of the tribe even as it releases a new magical art. But to return to the action of geological tides within the Waterfall! When the Macusi River (it’s also known as the Potaro River) falls as you see in the diagram from flood to drought, from A to C, it conserves itself because of the sculpture of rock within the Waterfall to release, yet implicitly reverse or hold the flow from above the Waterfall to the plain of the river beneath.’

  Inspector Robot placed his finger of bone on the starred portions in the diagram beneath the drought level of the Macusi River.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘The starred portions under C are all the down-flow through the Waterfall that the action of geological tide releases in time of drought. The river conserves itself within a miraculous architecture and balance of parallel forces. The starred portions or selective down-flow become the nightsky of drought in every fable or constellation of the survival of the river.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the Inspector. His skeleton face was alert. ‘How truly picturesque! Picturesque behaviour! That’s all that poetry is. The nightsky of the drought river! I like that. Bird’s-eye view?’ He came close to me and suddenly I felt the net tighten upon my limbs. ‘Not bird’s-eye view, Mr Anselm. I dispute that. Gaoler’s view! That’s better. Gaoler’s view I tell you. And so perhaps we may yet restrict the movements of Canaima and seize him when the door of the law bangs shut.’

  I sought to pull away but it was impossible in this instant. I felt the twist of Canaima’s knife in my mind. How strange are the responsibilities of knowledge, the imparting of knowledge. Does one impart knowledge by imposing it (and thereby falsifying it) upon others? Or did I, through the knowledge I imparted to a juggler of artificial intelligence, give him a chain or a net to bind me?

  I suddenly felt angry yet infused with a bitter wisdom. Knowledge illumined the enigma of the self. Was the imparting of knowledge a falsification of its own apparently real but innermost premises? Was the imparting of knowledge a confession of frail humanity upon which an order of machines, the rule of machines, could be built? Knowledge as painful truth subsisted upon contraries, contrary spirit, contrary artifice. I knew I could only be free of Robot by embracing contraries within an unfathomable unity of being, unfathomable self-mockery yet access to unfathomable grace through all patterns, all shapes one may inhabit at various times.

  ‘Gaoled waters you say, Inspector? Gaoler’s view?’ I could not help the rising passion in my voice. Robot turned and stared intently. ‘Look, see!’ I pulled Canaima’s knife from my side. ‘Look, see.’ It was all I could say. Robot recoiled a little. Perhaps he felt threatened. Then I threw the knife far up into space. It glittered. It flashed. It was a conveyor, a satellite of knowledge. Inspector Robot was startled. And yet perhaps he had been waiting … It glittered. It flashed. Then all at once it shot like lightning into the body of a flying creature. The Inspector and I heard (as with a single yet cloven ear) the flying creature’s long, sweet, poignant, bitter lament as if a note had been struck in the darkest recesses of melodic Conscience. The lightning knife had found its mark. The winged, dancing, flying bird appeared to pause in the twinkling of an eye within us, within inner space, glimmering stillness yet lightning apprehension of the geology of the tides through which to build the architecture of the City of God or to topple El Dorado into further ruin.

  The angelic dancer fell with open, outstretched wings. It fell downwards (or was it backwards into the upturned vessel of the sky in which the sun shone like a pooled star within a drought of cloud?). Glimmering star/sun or floating eyelid of the abyss. Did it fall into the Waterfall? I listened for the splintering note of the knife upon a head of rock but heard nothing. We were unsure. Inspector Robot was unsure. I was unsure.

  ‘Did the dancer and the knife fall and rise upon an ozone door, a toppled, ruined, tidal door in the greenhouse drought-spectre of earth and sky? Every epitaph for a dying savage tribe’s angel of beauty witnesses to an abyss we need to visualize, distances and architectures we have befouled, an abyss between a knife in the sky and a knife on the earth. A double-edged knife! It pierces us with the necessity for a visionary change of heart, for a new sculpture of being.’

  It was time to ascend god-rock. We made our way up the serpent stairway and stopped when we possessed a good view of the spectral river and the Waterfall of dreams beneath us. Inspector Robot unslung his telescopic glasses from his shoulders and passed them to me. There was a sly and a terrible look in the bone-sockets of his eyes as if the glasses he passed to me were equally embedded in them. I looked through. Everything was black. It was the grave (but a grave such as I had never dreamt existed) into which I looked. A re-constructed grave, a re-constructed cosmos from which a master-brain, a man-made
brain had arisen. I was gripped by uncanny temptation. ‘Wear the eyes of the master-brain, the man-made brain of a skeleton-god. Become a nihilist. Your strength will be prodigious. Arm yourself. No one will dare to touch you, to attack you. You may become, if you wish, a forerunner of revolutionary order and sterile morality, a great man, the masses at your feet.’

  A well-nigh irresistible temptation and yet since all knowledge is suspect then knowledge of power over the masses is the most suspect of all temptations, all vanities, the most dangerous to entertain.

  One comes close to being crushed by a skeleton-lord of revolutionary technology but clings nevertheless to a thread of liberation through one’s scepticism of absolute power exercised in the name of religion or science or politics or whatever.

  So though at first everything was black, black temptation, black power within technology, I was able to approach Robot with understanding if not love. His telescopic glasses became a medium of shared intelligences, artificial and intuitive. I was able to salvage the unfathomable quantum address of every resurrection of the Imagination that runs in parallel with the seductive artifice of the grave as a laboratory of monsters. I was able to reassemble what I knew, or thought I knew, namely, the convertibility of technologies into quantum mechanics, knife into quantum knife, axe into quantum axe, camera into quantum camera, and now telescopic glasses into quantum vision.

  ‘They’re gathering,’ I cried suddenly. ‘Look! The Waterfall.’

  ‘Gathering?’ said Robot.

  ‘The processional rocks in the Waterfall are coming alive. You do see, don’t you?’

  The Inspector gave his ingratiating and permissive smile. As much as to say, ‘Have it your own way for the time being.’ He did not actually reply. But I sensed that his perception of the activity of the rocks beneath us conformed to a statistical revelation of geological behaviour. In the laboratory of the grave he was at liberty to exploit all religions and to simulate the life of the earth within the void of his socketed eyes. The ascension of the rocks was possessed of no genius or innermost leap, innermost duration. It was a spectacle that confirmed the avid curiosity and power of the skeleton-brain to give picturesque momentum to a state of ultimate arrest.

  It was different with me. I was no giant and little match for Robot. But as I looked through his glasses I became genuinely involved – as if the innermost genius of the planet were at state – in uplifted veil upon veil of darkness until I possessed a glimmering apprehension of the magic of creative nature, the life of sculpture, the genesis of art, the being of music.

  The living sculptures were arising from the Waterfall and making their way along the bank of the river. They left the cloak or shell they had worn in place in the Waterfall: cloak or tidal clock through which to conserve another spirit, another existence within the rocks, the spirit of time that remained to invoke protective cover for the river and the Waterfall.

  I concentrated upon the particular existential sculptures that had arisen or been plucked from the rocks to make their way along the riverbank to the body of Canaima’s victim, the murdered dancer. They lifted him up and placed him in a box. He was light as a feather. The procession was led by the king of thieves.

  I had sculpted the king of thieves that morning from the stump of a felled tree. But now it was as if within the cloak of processional rock in the Waterfall he had eaten of the pooled stars in the Macusi river of drought. Sculpted wood then became unclothed rock, rock visionary flesh and blood in the creation of ‘live absence’ into ‘presence’ upon the first bank of the river of space.

  He led the procession up the hill past the El Dorado Mission House. He stood at the head of the grave on the hillside. The corpse of the dancer was laid to rest. I saw Robot’s eyes fixed there. Each detail confirmed his concept of arrested being. None would escape their fate. And that fate was the power of the grave, the power of the prisonhouse, the toleration of a measure of fantasy in chained millions and millions who stood in a long but inevitable queue around the globe awaiting their turn to bury their dead or to be buried by those they hate, fear or even love, to kill or to be killed in a battle, on the street, in the air, on land or water. It was the abyss within those who bury and those who are buried, those who kill and are killed, that divided the Inspector and me: the subtle abyss of an incalculable, inner reformation.

  The king of thieves had brought with him a cup of the diagrammatic pooled stars in or under the drought-body of the Macusi/Potaro River. He poured it now over the dancer. It was shining rain. The survival of humanity. The survival of the river of space. It was as if in so doing he released for an instant the heavy burden of gold he had stolen across the centuries, the heavy obsession that tormented him and his fellow miners whom he led. He became the last tormented thief in the world in that miraculous instant. He was eternally alive in that instant. Vital time, newborn time. A curious reformation of the instant heart within the subtle abyss that lies within those who bury and those who are buried.

  THE SECOND BANK

  (Carnival Heir of Civilizations)

  Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  Matthew 5:7

  In 1933 I was ‘green and carefree’, I still thought quality and merit, however hardly achieved, the only yardstick. I had yet to hear of Bartók dying, impoverished and forlorn in some foreign field; of Berg whose life might have been spared if he could have afforded a specialist; of Webern, with works known to a handful …; of Schoenberg’s death, aged seventy-seven, worth £100.

  from A Goldfish Bowl, Elisabeth Lutyens (Cassell, 1972)

  The voices of Macusi children returned to me across the years as I retraced my steps past the grave on the hillside and into the El Dorado Mission House. There were twelve children in the choir Penelope assembled in 1948, seven to eight years old, three of whom were drowned in the Potaro/Macusi tapestry of waters in 1950.

  I hear them now. I see them in a loom that Penelope weaves. I hear their faint voices in the deep interior. It is as if the voice of the dancer sings through the soil of his grave. Sings within the voices of the three drowned children I have sculpted into a flute.

  Music possesses such solidity one may hold it in one’s mind, sculpt it into a mysterious flute, a flute that is akin to a spiral or a curious ladder that runs into space.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to Penelope, ‘a living language is a precious ladder, it’s the antiphon of the flute in which the dead and the living discourse in the heights and the depths. Listen to the voices of the drowned children. They live again within solid music and within the elusive story they tell. They brush past my ears as if the dancer in the grave on the hillside hears the rhythm of the pooled stars that the king of thieves tilted upon him. That tilt is important. You shall see. That tilt tells of a ladder.’

  I knelt on the ground and meditated upon a grain of dust as light as a feather.

  ‘The flute sings of an ancient riverbed one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned into the river of the dead. The flute tells that the river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks. We shall see!

  ‘So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill. Then the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children.

  ‘Listen to the voice of the flute. It sings and tells its tale in the English language yet solid (however whispering) music gives the Word that echoes in one’s frame as one kneels uncanny twists, uncanny spirals, that relate to ancestral tongues, Macusi, Carib
, Arawak, Wapishana pre-Columbian tongues that have been eclipsed.

  ‘From such eclipse emerges the rich spoil and upheaval of the Word, upheaval into banks of the river of space. As though the flute is a paradox, it arrives at the solidity of music by processes of excavation within a living language.

  ‘One cannot tame the voices of the flute, voices of such uncanny lightness yet miracle of being that they are able to tilt the two rivers, the visible and the invisible rivers, into diagrammatic discourse; and in so doing to create the four banks of the river of space into a ladder upon which the curved music of the flute ascends. Those banks are dislodged upwards into rungs in the ladder and into stepping stones into original space.

  ‘The tilted banks convert the river of space into a sieve that spills its contents. That sieve is the antiphon of the Waterfall, it constitutes a discourse between the rocks in the Waterfall and the clouds in the sky. The spilt water evaporates into cloud, evaporates into the promise of new rain, into cloudkinship to latencies of precipitation in and of the Waterfall through rock. And the voice of the spiralling flute mirrors within solid music the ascension of the spirits of the living and the dead through rock and cloud into space.’

  It was in this way through abnormal care and attention, by donning the mask and the ears of the dancer, that Penelope, Ross and I were able to follow the spiral of the flute upwards from the first bank to the second bank of the river of space.

  Equally through his masked and bandaged eyes in the hill where he lay (half-artifice, half-Christian mound of gnosis) we gained a perception of the crumbling yet renascent spirit – evaporative, precipitative – of the tapestry of the Macusi/Potaro overground/underground rivers dislodged now into a visionary and wide ladder within and beyond our dreams.

  Proof of the reality of the curvature of the music that rose upon the ladder of space from rung to rung lay in my work as an engineer in the 1940s and 1950s when I gauged the Potaro/Macusi River for hydro-electric power potential. Electricity culled from the dark waters by harnessing and building upon the architecture of the Macusi Waterfall was a vital ingredient in contemplating a new settlement for refugees in the wake of the Second World War. Nothing was to come of it but though I remained unconscious of a metamorphosis at the time my life had changed in its innermost fabric when I met Canaima and his team of victims and spiritual refugees. The truth was (I had long suppressed the knowledge in myself) I had known Canaima long before we ‘first’ met on the bank of the Potaro River in 1945. As I retrace my steps now in this book of dreams I hear the music and the footsteps of generations upon the ladder of science and spirit as if for the first time, the first truly attentive ear I place to the ground and to the body of the turning globe.