When Alicia and I received a telegram of his death in the interior of the Guyanas, he climbed into my childhood as if this had become another stepping-stone into an audience within me which would write his obituary in film. We watched him avidly as the camera rolled within us on his last expedition for gold and diamonds, we watched him, he watched us, watchman of the golden abyss, watchman of the diamond abyss, weather charts, subtly rising oceans, subtly melting ice-caps. He was, some said, a notorious gambler and drunkard in the global village. Beardless as an infant yet crafty as a hermit. Adept at many games, God’s amoeban mountaineer of tragic/comic theatre, capable of uprooting many a family tree. He had tricked me when he gave me parents who were susceptible to many divisions and sub-divisions. He used chalks of glittering ice and snow-flesh in the tropics (as if to counsel one on the priceless family tree of the rainforests that were in danger), inks as black as midnight (as if to counsel one on the necessity to nurse the sun into a new lease of day). He painted me black at times, painted himself white at times.
After such trials (carnival ecologies, carnival inverted/subverted racism) I became a hollow man who had no alternative but to fast in spirit to become well: ‘Fasting is primordial insight into the hollow Day of the twentieth century as one retraces one’s steps.’
It was my turn now to mock him, to join hands with his tormentors, stitch a few famous last words on his lips, a four-letter word or two, an expletive or two, an inane gesture or two, by which posterity would remember him on television or radio as Comedian Uncle.
‘Damn you, blast the world,’ he said, as if to oblige me from within Poverty’s ghetto. There was faint applause. I lifted his hand in Carry-On Cardboard Cinema to everyone’s uproarious delight and let it fall on Rose’s backside as he ascended the hill. I placed him on quantum television hill in 1922. It was a triumph of science. ‘Poor devil! Poor scientist of the theatre, poor uncle Proteus, we’ve got him by his tail at last, he’s dead.’
He seemed to know it all in the throng of human/divine apes that viewed him as if he were rehearsing with us the tributes we paid him, the evolution of self-mockery. We were his spectatorial Shadows. He was elusive yet concrete and in seeing him through ourselves he immersed us in epic – absurd epic yet epic of conscience – and put us on trial. The screen or stage on which I saw him gave extremity to the curvature or line upon which he had come into our midst, an extremity of self-knowledge we could bear in our abuse of him. Such is the shared burden of divine comedy in responsive clowns. The clowns we abuse, in taking our abuse, shoulder our evolutionary deprivations, make light of our box-office stupidities, our best-seller orgies, regard us with supreme however self-deprecating character, supreme metamorphic insight into our self-love, self-hate, and eccentric malice.
Yes, I was grateful to my uncle Proteus as I had never been before for an enlightenment on the nature of clowns, sacred clowns, profane clowns, I would not have been able to bear until now in the wake of the Voice of Presence, the Voice I had heard that came from no painting or sculpture on earth. I knew my wild uncle confessed to his partiality in the shadow of such Presence, and in so doing revealed his flaw and the flaw in every solid trickster, solid (in contradistinction to elusively concrete) absolute, every flaw that is mediated through genuine theatre and narrative extremities in intoxicated flesh or intoxicated wood or stone or marble or pigment to warn us of the abysses, gaps, divisions of and in space, that lie between us and the invisible measures of the sacred.
I knew that he knew that the intoxicated obituary of him that we wrote (dancing scripts, dancing camera) as he ascended the hill in oceanic river of space reflected a growing tension that lay between him (as human/animal abused advocate of the invisible sacred) and us (as the ones who would nurture his advocacy even as we abused it) until the tension or marriage between the caricature of the divine and the dialectic of partial being precipitated inevitably daemonic furies within a society whose courtship of the Dead (as if the Dead were to be manipulated into the deprivations of the structured living) became a serial indictment of itself; became also an irony within the arts of the Imaginary City of God I dreamt I was building. ‘Such arts work through indirections, indirections that appear at first to promote the triumph of nihilism and realism only to bring home the taste of crumbling age and nakedness in our mouths. Does one’s age need to consume a body of Shadow to unclothe itself into the visionary life of a Child, ancient truly marvellous Child it once was?’
When news came of my uncle’s death I ran and curled myself into a body of newborn Shadow at the foot of Jacob’s ladder in the great warehouse. I lay in a cardboard box there and sailed on the pavement of a great city towards a bush house on the tilted side of the oceanic Potaro which Proteus was ascending through inbuilt tidal rock and wave.
He came to the bush house and entered the waving door. It was a makeshift cabin, as in the body of a wrecked ship deposited by geologic fable on a hillside. It stood half-way up the giant wave of the hill: half-way up from the Potaro to the ceiling of the sky reflected in stained-glass river cathedral Dream as if the river itself ran through the blue fire of heaven. He broke a loaf of bread and poured himself a glass of star-studded liquid.
The cabin was sparsely furnished. I lay in my cardboard palace upon the Hill of the Sea. There was another child in the cabin. He was several years younger than I but seemed my twin. Rose’s sister’s child. My half-brother and cousin. He lay on the solid surf of a cloud with a glittering knife in his hand. The years melted away between us as if we were twin-born – I in my cardboard palace, he quite still yet afloat on the crest of a still wave. Proteus glanced at us, touched the other child then my head with a gentle finger.
I saw the shadow of his finger in my infant dream-book writing through me in my old age. One was conscious of a curious combination of faculties in oneself: the sheer ordinariness of things – whether bread or cardboard palace – fused into miraculous fire and sea and cloud. Was this blend, this fusion, the character of infant-perception, infant-vision, one thought one had lost or forfeited for ever? I was immersed then and there through infant-vision in the truth of a resurrection that reverses and extends the rhythm of time, the music of time.
The frames of time slipped into curious musical twinship, extension, reversibility. It was as if as Proteus ascended he was drowning in the black, orchestrated depths of the river of space. As he drowned his past life began to unwind its loom within me. The reel of events – the drunken boat or tapestry of time – stopped at 1912 (the year I was born), within the martial drum-beat of post-World War 1920, when my half-brother Canaima was born. I knew the parallel, fused year (1912 in 1920) as an ordinary event, even as I saw the drunken boat afloat on the oceanic Potaro, buried in the sea, yet uplifted into the sky, even as I saw millions of soldiers on the skyline of War fused into a giant Child, a killing Child, a twin-Child that bears the burden of killing in each of us, each of us destined through our ancestral Dead to reinterpret anew the miracle of life, a crumb of substance, a glass of unpolluted water.
A woman with Asian-flu pigmentation, a twin-Rose, had entered the cabin. ‘It’s too much, Proteus,’ she said. ‘You ask too much of me. You travel as you drown, I ride as I die. I can take care of him’ – she was pointing at me – ‘I can fly with him on my saddle. You ask me to give him up … Millions have died. Does one frail child matter?’
‘Millions are dying, will die, in the long Day of the twentieth century, from twin-glorious-revolution-and-massacre, twin-prosperity-and-hunger, in Africa, South America, China, but a child – the conception of a child – still matters. A child clothed in its animal skin, the animal skin of endangered species … Hush! he’ll swim. Let him come with me.’
‘Swim and be damned my flat backside country,’ said the woman. ‘Better for him to ride hard, to fly hard with me.’
She stopped. They faced each other. I was able to see her now through a crevice in my cardboard palace. I accepted their uncanny, strange conversati
on as native fabric, as native blend of ordinary reality and ecstatic reality, disease and the evolution of fury. They spoke a strange yet everyday tongue, the loosened tongue of flesh and blood that stitches itself into bizarre peasant or aristocratic costume. Had not Marie Antoinette amidst a diseased Europe played at being a shepherdess or a virgin milkmaid? So too dying Rose – dying of post-war Asian flu that had drifted across the Atlantic into Alicia’s colonial garden – had dressed herself in riding boots and the spurs of heaven or hell. Her arms were bone-bare, her breasts bare, and the colour of apples of sunrise. Her hair was full and rich, a great mass of curls upon her head. Her lips were queen-roses and her eyes glistened into the imaginary precipitation of ancient rainfall upon a parched landscape. A desert appeared, a desert of famine, then clouds arose upon her skin far out in thin vistas of space. A thorn of sweetest, bitterest fire ran through her fever-lips and from eye to eye. I could see it through the flesh and high bone of her nostrils that pointed at me across the navel of the world to which I was tied.
Her nakedness in her bed of illness was a kind of fire, she had ridden upon a Horse of fire to bring me (or was it Canaima?) into the world. It was my life she sought to bear away with her in a joint illness (I too was ill when she gave birth to my twin).
Horses are naked creatures of primordial sex whose unselfconscious majesty clothes them with the mystery of privacy, a privacy one glimpses and fears. Except for the shelter it sometimes brings. The nakedness of the Horse – that seeks to erase in oneself all traces of the thighs of darkness through which one comes into the light of birth – is still miraculously, in the body of the unconscious, one’s cloth and shelter of grace.
‘You do overshadow him with the terror of a love he cannot yet bear. Let me have him,’ said Proteus. ‘I shall see to his upbringing with Alicia’s help. Believe me! we shall find him parents, we shall bring him up as our own. And Harold will never know who he is until your sister tells him. If you take him now you will inflict upon him a passion from which he shrinks’ – he was pointing at me, I had retreated into my box of naked flesh and away from the terrible Horse-woman, the dying Rose of the sky and the sea, my mother in Canaima’s twin-mother …
‘But he’s mine,’ said the woman with the thorn in her eyes and on her lips. She would have taken me with her if Proteus had not pleaded for my life. Even now in old age it seemed so real it was touch and go. Perhaps I had known it all as a child and had suppressed the knowledge in myself, suppression of unwelcome news, synaesthesia of the body of Dream, dying limb? newborn limb? Or perhaps I had learnt it all in later years, in censored letters, censored diaries that Alicia kept. Such staggered (or staggering) knowledge exists on a borderline between knowing and not knowing one’s mother, between riding and swimming through a multiple sensation of mothering spaces, between walking and running backwards into a mothering past that becomes the living uncertain present in the sisters with whom one’s father slept. Alicia had taken her into the house, the Rose who was apparently my mother. She nursed her. She nursed me. She nursed us under the shadow of a great Horse. I too had been infected by the fever, by the deadly Asian flu. It was the year the other Rose, my dying mother’s sister, gave birth to Canaima. And when my mother died – despite Alicia’s care – the other Rose appeared over my bed as the Horse reared, swam, flew. The fever in my limbs began to subside, running limbs, swimming limbs, bird-limbs. The gift of survival! The gift of a twin-mother!
‘I am a king of oceans and skies,’ said Proteus to Rose. ‘I swam, flew the Atlantic through Middle Passage Africa, India, Greece, Rome, multiple Christian/pagan motherhood of carnival. I reached the margins of the world, I came to El Dorado, all in Jest. What a golden Jest colonialism and post-colonialism are. What untold riches! He knows as he dreams in his cradle. What a gift for a newborn child. Let us give him the riches of the Imagination for we have nothing. We are poor. Give him a chance, Rose. Let him live to create his Imaginary City of God.’
But Rose was still unconvinced. ‘I shall chain him,’ she said. ‘I shall tie him to the other child, Harold’s other child, the child with the knife in his hand.’
Once again as I listened I was aware of the orchestrated fabric of the unconscious, the language of the eloquent – however absurd, however comedic – unconscious: ordinary accents arisen from the abyss into Dream-life, fragmentation’s organ and tone, the self-mockery of wholeness and Jest within a cradle of Memory, prodigious infant-perception.
Infant-perception floats within age and youth to fuse remembered illnesses, my illness and recovery in 1920, my mother’s and Harold’s death in the same year, Proteus’s in 1922, Alicia’s in 1929, etc., etc., the dying and the living in the twentieth century into whom one arrives when one is twin-born. I possessed the thorn, Canaima the knife.
The thorn and the knife were fused yet subtly broken, subtly transformed illnesses within ourselves and others in theatre of Memory; such breach, such transformation, became a window of hope in Imaginary City of God where the thorn and the knife float into self-judgement, self-comprehension, when greed and lust and idolatry and revenge appear absolute or triumphant in a violent age.
It was a glimpse into the sanctuary, the sanctuary of Presence that dwells so deep it sometimes appears to inflict a wound, a wound that instils the mystery of the law in flesh and spirit.
‘It’s never too late to catch a glimpse of the sanctuary,’ I said. ‘To be born is to begin to learn the complex wound one suffers in all innocence. One touches fire in all innocence, one touches the splinter of the knife or the sharp bone of the thorn in all innocence. One touches the parentage of the wound in the fabric of the sanctuary.’
I had spoken in all prodigious innocence, innocent yet prodigious wisdom that wells from unconscious birth, of being born despite uncertainty as to the motherhood of values one inherits within a divided civilization.
‘He’s a talking infant,’ cried Rose suddenly. I felt her rage, her jealousy. I felt an incredible atmosphere, the terrifying Shadow of the parentage of the Imagination, and it was all I could do to retain my breath. Rose could have squeezed me into a ball, she could have placed me on her breast, and galloped into space.
‘A talking infant is the lighthouse of music, the lighthouse of the unconscious, the lighthouse of the Dead,’ said Proteus.
They laughed and the spell of danger was broken. And thus in Jest, as it were, as if to marginalize a burden of perception, to give it the status of a feather, a drum of lightness in the cradle, I was allowed the chance for which Proteus had pleaded, a chance to live and to ‘speak’ within an Imaginary temple, an Imaginary courtroom.
*
One had entered, to my astonishment, a blackened hall as though a fire had touched the walls of the courtroom, but I was convinced still of everlasting Presence. I perceived the enigma of the sanctuary in its veiled proportions within water or fire or soil or air. The sanctuary or courtroom may have apparently receded but was to be glimpsed through ordinary places, within ruins, within desolations where exists a self-accusing logic: self-accusing chemical warfare, man-made viruses, etc., etc., that touch the lives (threaten to consume the lives) of all species. One glimpses a kingdom, an animal haven, a human haven, that is close to us in the elements of nature, the chemistry of Being, yet barred from us by the perversity (criminal perversity?) that runs hand in hand with the marvels of science.
At the far end of the blackened hall sat the noble judge. Was he a scientist? Was he a saint? I could not tell. Inspector Robot was seated amidst the congregation in the fire-stained room. I recognized him from the shining bone above his socketed eyes. He was a master of artificial intelligences with whom one could play ball, the spinning ball of the globe. I felt the profoundest gratitude in not having to answer to him within living Dream as my judge though his bone-Shadow reminded me of the intricacies of the trial of body and soul one faced.
The year of the spinning globe was ostensibly 1988. The cradle of infant-perception (my cardboard
palace) had lodged itself within a bounce of the ball to lie still upon the dark ground of the sanctuary. It confirmed the Jesting play and footfall of age, the age of Dreams, the agelessness of Dreams. Had I not stood within the box, within the palace, had I not lain within it as a child in a fusion of years or chemistry of intoxicated being? Chemistry, yes! the chemistry of the sanctuary one glimpses through perversity and risk, through every hazard of creation. ‘Why me?’ I cried to the noble judge, ‘why have I survived? It’s close on seventy years since my life was spared. Indeed it seems longer. As if the broken fever bears on the very moment, the very crest or wave in the moment I was born. It was then – in that crested moment – that Rose set me free. Danger, survival, was but the reflex of a deeper miracle, a deeper wave. Life’s the miracle. Creation’s the tide that runs through us into every excess.’
‘You are on trial,’ said the noble judge matter-of-factly, ‘because Rose set you free even as you let Canaima escape. Is the gift of life but a pattern of escape from death, a pattern of escapism? How guilty are you, how guilty is Rose, how guilty is Canaima in leading an escapist dance?’
I was bowled over by the question – its configuration took me completely by surprise – but managed to reply – ‘Rose was my mother, Canaima my brother.’ I spoke softly, automatically. No one heard me except the judge. I was glad no one did, I was ashamed to advance such a plea or revelation of bias. Indeed – even if I had known how related I was to Canaima and Rose – I had never really welcomed it, I had suppressed the knowledge in childhood, suppressed it over the long years until it flared into the obituary notice or film of Proteus’s death, flared into scorched sanctuary and blackened courtroom.
The Carnival Trilogy Page 39
