The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  My innermost speculations were hushed. I was dazzled. He was the same and yet not the same beggar or king. The burden had been lifted. Or was it a reversal of the live, fossil premises of myth? Lifted, reversed! One was unable properly to say. Hints, guesses! Surely humanity was literate enough to read the webbed volume in the rose tree? Here was the key to mythical wealth (I had retrieved my ridiculous possessions and seized the beggar’s rags as I lay against him). Here was the key in the distant bells to the music of mixed royal ancestry, mixed royal parentage, abused kith and kin, glorified kith and kin, legitimacy, illegitimacy, jealousies, hatreds, loves. All these were woven into the lifted burden of the dying hero and into the rags I had stolen which left him naked on the stage with the thorn of the Rose in his brow.

  Naked and crumpled as he appeared to be now, Proteus had given the part an inimitable and unique seed. As though in descending from the peak of lord and king and master he had acquired the ability of a mountaineer of God. Sheer paradox! Descent into the realm of the ‘poor in spirit’ was implicit spiritual muscle or extraordinary craft and power to cling to and make his way down the steepest face of the world’s abyss.

  I entered the Rose garden and made my way to the palace of the Rose. Aunt Alicia sat at a long table. As a child I had sometimes dined – when money was short – upon a crumb of bread: now in old age I dreamt of her presiding over the long table like an empress and a queen. The table groaned with sumptuous dishes, roast duck, crisp turkey, lamb, pork, fish, boiled and baked meats, shrimp, eggs, cooked-up rice, creamed, sweet potatoes, and other preparations and varieties of food. Aunt Alicia invariably cried in the Dream through the curtain of the years as it lifted into a theatre – ‘Eat, Anselm. It’s here for you. All for you.’ I felt she was tempting me in a peculiar way. ‘Not now,’ I told her, ‘not now. Sorry.’

  ‘But why, Anselm?’

  I tried to read her expression before I replied –

  ‘The face of the beggar! I can’t erase it from my mind! Such a strange face, a strange colour.’ I stared at the dishes on the table.

  ‘It’s his Macusi blood,’ Aunt Alicia cried. ‘He’s mixed. Like all of us. Like you. And as for his blighted, strange-coloured face – well, Proteus is a master at make-up, racial make-up, animal make-up.’

  ‘It’s real,’ I protested. ‘Human make-up. I see his face beside me. At the bottom of the abyss.’ I stared around the hall of dreams.

  ‘Continue, continue,’ Alicia cried. ‘Or everything will vanish. The Dream will vanish …’

  ‘As a real child I sometimes came upon real Dream-beggars in Camp Street. They never vanish. Always yellowish dark faces, dreadful haunted faces. Couldn’t eat a thing when I got home.’

  ‘I thought I had prepared a welcoming meal for you, Anselm,’ Alicia said coldly. ‘Fit for the carnival heir …’ Again I felt she was pushing me, tempting me. Then she continued so softly it was my turn to listen hard – ‘There are times when we have had to do with a crumb, a blessed crumb.’ She seemed to be relishing the flavour or thought of a ‘blessed crumb’ and the sumptuous banquet almost disappeared into a hole in the Dream.

  The great clock in the colonial mansion was striking twelve. And this pulled me up alive out of the hole into which I had almost slipped. But the danger remained. I felt I must say something. ‘It’s good to fast at times, Aunt Alicia. Good for the sculptor’s interior and the painter’s heart. Spiritual fasting is the seed of creation. In that seed within the earth one breaks bread – one’s fingers are roots to break bread – with living trees and living rocks. If we cease to fast in spirit, God forbid! the seed will lose its magical space, its inner space in the body of the mind …’

  I stopped with a gnawing sensation, a gnawing torment, and recalled the hole into which everything had appeared to slip but a moment ago and how it resembled the sculpture within the self (the inner hollow or fast that is the seed of art). Resembled as well the steep face of the abyss upon which the masked king or beggar had clung to illumine the profoundest distinction between the creative hollow of the fast (the ‘poor in spirit’) and the pit or hole of bottomless greed. They resembled each other but were subtly, complexly, miraculously different … I would have lost my Dream-footing entirely but for a tall vase on a small table close to where Alicia was sitting. I needed her strength at this time. A river wound its way up the vase through and beyond the hole of greed into which I had almost slipped. It wound its way through pages of etched manuscript upon it that were illustrated with hunting parties, naked game, naked meat. Antique river of blood. Antique pit. Yes, I remembered clearly now. It was one of Alicia’s prized possessions. She used to say to me – ‘It’s my pit, not as deep perhaps as the one you fear but a way of communicating with divided worlds, a way of crossing the river and still speaking to generations who think me dead. Speaking to you, Anselm.

  ‘My advice now is concentrate on the banquet you have rejected. Then perhaps I may be able to help you read the crumb of the Word.’

  I perceived the wisdom in what she was saying and concentrated upon the duck on its plate of gold. The broken wings suddenly began to stir. The naked bird flew towards the guarded pit of my stomach. Then on realizing I had no intention of eating it it flew up into the ceiling of the great hall. It hesitated just beneath the smoky timbers then settled there and imprinted its wings in gold. In that instant of Dream in which I was a child I yet remembered Canaima’s lightning knife which I flung as a man in early middle age into the sky when Inspector Robot and I ascended god-rock. I remembered the future. The strangest epic licence of Dream … ‘Is memory a medium of epic slaughter, epic hunt, through which to sculpt or paint golden futures one has already made extinct or is it the seed of past, mutilated being, hunted being, one recalls, which acquires new branches, new wings, new life?’

  The duck had settled on the ceiling of the hall and I turned the focus of my concentration upon the other dishes on the table but the faintness within me now was such that I knew I needed sustenance.

  ‘Fasten your mind, your intelligence, your soul, upon the crumb of the Word.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘a crumb or a crust of bread will suffice.’

  And so across the intervening, criss-crossing years in the tapestry of Memory within the long Day of the twentieth century I was back where I began with a mere crust, a mere crumb. The entire hall, the entire scene, began to glow: well-dressed crumb, well-dressed Word at the heart of bread through which ran the antique river of blood upon Aunt Alicia’s vase; antique river of the hunt that one needed to cross from death to life, from death to death.

  ‘Never take the pit for granted, Anselm,’ Alicia was saying, ‘it takes many forms. Never take life for granted, or heaven, or hell, or death. Hell has its pitiful game one pursues forever and forever until one is gorged by extinction, heaven but bread, and death … Death can become the tautology of the hunted soul, death is death is death, whereas life is the breaking of a mould into divinity’s morsel.

  ‘When I died in 1929, Anselm, I broke the mould, I broke through a crust, a crumb. Bread and water from the river of the hunt was my diet. And I crossed the pit. I floated upon a crumb into the strangest library in which I was a portion in the Word of Bread. I read myself there in others who hunted with Cleopatra and were hunted by Caesar, hunted with Dido of ruined Carthage and were hunted by Aeneas of ruined Troy, still others seduced by brute desire, brute game, nameless El Dorados. Well-dressed queens and kings at the heart of sacred ruin, re-awakening souls upon their plate of gold.’ She turned all at once and spoke with almost irrational absurdity, irrational humour. ‘You know how I love royal pageants, grand clothes, Anselm.’ She was laughing now. Her voice was music.

  I caught a glimpse of marvellous books within the heart of bread through and beyond the meat of brute desire; marvellous dresses spun from a crumb of delicate craft and labour evolving across the river through and beyond all ruined, sacred fabric, ruined industrial fabric (ghost towns, the colonizati
on of a civilization by ghosts), the ruined fabric of War (the governorship of a civilization by field marshalls), ruined fabric of passion (proprietorship of flesh and blood) …

  Alicia stood on the other bank of the river or pit that ran through the banqueting hall. ‘I am glad you broke your fast and drew me back from nothingness, Anselm. A gulf stands between us. But still we can converse. Such a pity if your book of dreams had hardened into a blind banquet, if you had succumbed to temptation and a welcoming feast that was poison. No chance then to continue retracing your steps. No chance to meet Harold. I know you detested him as a child. I know you loved Proteus. But you cannot go forward and back without them both. Harold has a confession to make. Proteus gave you a glimpse of the mountaineer of God, Harold (I know it’s difficult to believe) will bring you a glimpse of the priest of God. He and Proteus understood each other when they were alive.’ She stopped for she saw the incredulity on my face. She was laughing now with a grain of sadness upon her lips. ‘I know, Anselm. I know how you feel. Proteus (you forgave him as a child because you loved him even when you dreamt of killing him) was a drunkard, a bit of a wastrel. He could have made life so much easier for you and for all of us. He made a small fortune in the diamond fields but spent it all. Harold was a womaniser. I know. I was his wife. Write it all down, Anselm. The seed of true bread, true mountaineer, true priest, lies in the apparent ruin of many a career once we accept the grace we are given to see it, grace to climb, grace to ascend and descend the ruined scaffolding of our lives.

  ‘And you have made a beginning. You have glimpsed the marvellous seed of Bread, you are still to pursue your glimpse of the terrifying (however curiously ecstatic) thorn of the Rose.’

  She began to fade and I drifted now through a door in the great hall into the scene of one of Proteus’s failed industrial projects. Proteus was a sacred socialist (metamorphoses of socialism was the name of his business) and socialism was destined to harden, grow brittle, and fall. The scene into which I had come may have been an ancient warehouse or a cinematic project of paradoxes and resources linking heaven and earth. I remembered the axeman I had filmed into moral imperative, moral proportion, on the first bank of the river of space when we contemplated the prospect of ruin – or one’s capacity to avert the ruin – of great tropical forests. The axeman had felled a tree with a single, lightning blow; now from within the heart of that tree emerged an unfinished, a ruined, ladder. Jacob’s ladder theatre.

  The hall was dark as a sacred Bible of epic prophecies and I lit a candle. Its flickering light (there was a faint draught in the huge warehouse) caught the shadow of the lightning stroke of the axe. And as I looked up at the dim, lightning, shadowy stairs of the felled yet arisen tree I was reminded of an escalator in a great city such as London or Paris, of gigantic excavations, of my apprehensions on arriving there, of venturing for the first time into the great underground, into a concrete riverbed beneath a fluid riverbed.

  That apprehension of woven or cemented spaces within spaces at the heart of a global community gave substance to retraced steps within ancient and modern Dream, crossings, ascendings, descendings, substance to echoing footsteps upon Jacob’s ladder that resembled the hollow passages, the hollow shoes of childhood that one sometimes abandons as one runs barefoot through a whispering tide within whispering floorboards, whispering palaces of achievement.

  Proteus’s ‘escalator’ had been long abandoned in the body of Alicia’s museum-whispers, museum-voices, fading pageants, vases, banquets. And now in barefoot candlelight I dreamt of a distinction between true bread and trodden bread at the edges of the ladder of space: trodden bread like candle-grease: trodden tears. Barefoot candlelight was an expensive commodity in the making of a film of palaces and cardboard boxes. ‘It burns a hole in space. It burns into a pit at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Barefoot candlelight lights the way to bed in a cardboard box on the pavement of a great city.’

  Proteus envisaged an economic leap despite recession in the 1920s and 1930s when money would become so plentiful (one hundred dollars for a loaf of bread) that it would serve as a drunkard’s walkway in space. It would serve as one of the planks he would employ to cross the river or strengthen the ladder on his death. ‘A great film,’ he confided, ‘a funeral pageant.’

  I perceived now that at the heart of Proteus’s humour lay the economic necessity to gauge the scaffolding of his business career.

  ‘Business‚’ he said, ‘is more than business, capital more than capital, labour more than labour. Visualize the innermost heart of a lightning tree, visualize the necessity to scale heights and depths one may otherwise overlook.’

  Beyond a shadow of doubt my memories of Proteus’s ‘warehouse of civilization’ were the intricate substance that I threaded later into Inspector Robot’s glasses, into the axeman’s blade, into the camera that I used on the first bank of the river of space.

  It was a forbidden area. Proteus’s religious socialism was dangerous. He had warned me to stay away. Dangerous ladder, he said. A drunkard’s pitfall. When the sacred business crashed he blamed no one but himself. He had invested in a joy-ride to the stars that involved expenditures and proportions that had sliced into the core of his genius. He had invested in a waxworks museum that threatened to come overwhelmingly alive, vulnerable, entombed, yet active spectacle within the subconscious and unconscious. His intention was to paint the ceiling with stars and galaxies and to build secret corridors in which great, historical, wounded personages would stand in an eerie light and point the way to the ladder … or to the plank afloat on the river …

  He was suddenly taken ill after a bout of excessive drinking, whisky, rum, wine, champagne. The waxwork figures moved and became his epitaph. The last time I saw him it seemed as if he had been beheaded, his arms and his body from the neck down were so hidden under a sheet. I dreamt his head addressed me now from the top of a mountain. ‘Time to brave the ladder, Anselm‚’ he said. ‘The living dreamer may ascend and descend and return to life. Time to be born again within the Shadow of truths we have little understood about ourselves and others.’ He was one of the strangest sculptures I drew forth in the secret corridors that took me to the ladder.

  The ladder shot up through the roof of the theatre into the sky. As I climbed I kept my eyes glued on the bright pit of the heavens above, all the brighter for the dark tunnel and walls on either side of me. I tried to touch these. Were they steel or waxwork or cardboard? Could one punch one’s way through them? The thought had scarcely settled in the Dream when I came to a corridor. Perhaps every mental probe into the substance of space begins with visualizations of the familiar, familiar absurdity, familiar structure or shape, living waxwork epitaph, slow-motion joy-ride to the stars in Alicia’s museum.

  I had forgotten the candle that I still carried. Its eye of flame was now strong: as strong as the familiar sun in the sky into which the ladder shot far above me and the corridor into which I had come.

  The corridor was at blessed room temperature, deceptively comfortable, deceptively relaxing, as I contemplated the business of the sacred above the warehouse of civilization from which I had come.

  Haroldian Ulysses was waiting for me here like a ragged merchant-warrior and landowner. As if to emphasize the concept of ruined business career in the scaffolding of the Play, the concept of familiar being, he wore the very rags I had stolen from Proteus’s Ulysses in the gates of Home.

  Alicia’s warning rang in my ears. ‘Take nothing for granted.’ I listened and thought I heard her voice again on the other side of the river upon her prized vessel or vase, a faint flute or piping voice this time within a chorus of drowned children – ‘Masks of wood or stone or wax or clay appear identical hardware/software at times within a strange universe to sustain us in our recovery of a dialogue with the past. It is the music, however faint, of inner spaces that tells of furies and daemons, intimate catastrophe’s, intimate ecstasy’s unpredictable substance and duration, high fever yet saving grace.’<
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  Everything in the corridor was familiar yet everything was incalculably strange.

  ‘I died when you were eight‚’ Harold said suddenly. ‘I know you hated me, Anselm.’

  He was trembling. He was biting his lips fiercely but no blood came. I was taken aback at the accusation. Had I hated him? Feared him, perhaps! I was unsure. ‘I shrank from you, Uncle Harold.’ It was the only way I could voice my distress. ‘I wanted to run whenever you struck Aunt Alicia.’

  ‘I struck her when you came. She was never the same after that. You were the beginning of my downfall.’

  ‘Me?’ I could not believe my ears even as I was driven to ponder the word ‘downfall’. It echoed in my mind as a focus of ‘destitution’ that resembled though it differed radically from Proteus’s Ulyssean ‘steep face of the abyss’. It was as if a contrasting link between ‘downfall’ and ‘steep face’ had appeared in the overwhelming Ulyssean body shared by two masters of the Dead, dead antecedents, dead but living figurations of Memory, one possessing the instinct of the mountaineer of God, the other (Harold) replete I felt with the anguish and terror of royal and possessed, bought and sold, flesh and blood.

  Haroldian Ulysses was staring at me now and somewhere in his familiar/unfamiliar eyes, his buying/selling eyes in the marketplace of a corridor of space, I knew that he knew he was tempting me, tempting me to consume not a physical but a mysteriously elusive poison, a dish of hate, the spirit of hate. It was a desperate ploy on his part. ‘Hate sometimes masks love.’ Did he desire me to love him after all this time and felt he must feed me with the entrails of bitter passion, passion to hate, as a prelude to a confession of love, terrifying love, love for one’s enemy?