Perhaps I had advanced the plea not simply out of the biased flare of instinct but in the light of the carnival crown, carnival heirloom or kingship conferred upon me. But Canaima and I were twins … Were we not both equally entitled to the crown? What did such entitlement and equality imply? Was carnival a legacy of escapism, licence and abandonment, suppressed criminality, or was it a profound universal theme and a reinterpretation of the great masks of legend and history, the progressions, digressions, reversals of great myth?
Were the two – suppressed criminality and reinterpretations of the great body of a civilization – linked together yet subtly divided within the cellular organs of carnival, the cellular chemistry of carnival, carnival guilt, carnival innocence?
The judge stared at me out of his dusty, deceptively matter-of-fact, sleeping (however apparently wide-awake) eyes. He seemed to know my mind. ‘Why should carnival cells assist us in these deliberations? Your uncle was a street-performer, an actor, a good-for-nothing, a sailor, a spendthrift, a gold miner, a man of no fortune. He died penniless in his early fifties. There’s derangement of cells for you!’
I was outraged by the jest. ‘My uncle was an immortal,’ I protested. I felt the pressure of eyes in the courtroom upon me. I felt I was on trial for the poor, the heartbreak of the poor who seek the seed of value, of religious value, in their excesses. I felt the absurdity of the occasion but I had to reply in the spirit of wine, with a tongue of wine (whatever that was). I had to do justice to Proteus.
‘Of such stuff are immortals made,’ I cried. ‘He drank, I know; he spent, I know; but he cared for the inner robustness of art, he faced great odds, he spoke philosophy as if it were mother’s milk. The very excess of his life sustained a moral tale. There were days when he went without food and drank nothing but wine and rum and water. It made him feel strong, it gave him a handle with which to grip the sensation of being poor but risen above greed. His larder then was the wilderness and that’s a moral tale …’ There was a murmur in the courtroom. I waited until it subsided and continued in the spirit of rum and wine, the spirit of excess. ‘As for my poor devil of a father, he was a brilliant womaniser until his eyes were blinded by Rose. He misconceived money and dreamt his purchase on life was strong. Stronger that Proteus’s. In him too lies a sobering morality and the veiled cornerstone of the sacred grotto that I now glimpse in everyman’s, everywoman’s, body in this burnt courtroom, I glimpse the chemistry of passion that may save or destroy at the heart of the law.’
I saw the Shadow of Sleep veiling the judge’s eyes. Was Sleep a theatre of excess for saint, for sinner? Either vocation involved far-reaching tone and passion. Proteus would have understood the judge. Harold would have understood the judge. ‘You may be right,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps there the transition is, the new (or is it old?) morality of which you speak. It lies in variety, subtlety, and unfixated wholeness.’ He was staring at me in the gloom of the grotto or grotesque courthouse. I knew he was mocking me. Mocking my appearance of a drunkard’s simplicity. He had cut me to the bone of outcast spirit. He saw my discomfiture and was sad. I felt as the wine coursed through my veins that he loved me as if he were my father in heaven, that he would err on my side in protecting me. And yet his curious biting mockery of himself and of me remained.
Why – I wondered – had the members of my family become immortals? ‘Perhaps,’ I said slowly, groping to find a true equation between the feast of love (wine and women) and immortality, ‘it was because every feast begins to grow too rich or too sour and one begins to absorb the immortal spirit of the creative fast and passion’s peace.’
I felt I had struck a chord of wisdom but the judge shot me down with a dusty glance. ‘Fasting is no defence nor is passion’s peace in the business of murder.’
Business of murder. Business again! Was murder business? He was eyeing me cryptically within the savage gloom. ‘You will have to do much better than that in Church, Anselm.’
I was amazed. ‘Why Church? What do you mean by Church?’
He ignored the question and I found myself shouting at him with a sphinx-like ardour that matched his. ‘Do queens spurn kings and judges and the fasting male to throw a new religious light on humanity’s fascination with crime?’
The judge smiled. A smile that shook the terraces of the court.
‘Fascination indeed,’ he said, ‘the fascination of religious judges like me in the bizarre sentences, bizarre freedoms, we sometimes mete out to sex offenders as if we see them with sudden irrationality against a backcloth of spiritual appetite, spiritual marrow, spiritual bone. You and Proteus and Harold should know what I mean.’
At last the blackened room within our mutual unconscious, my unconscious, the judge’s unconscious, loomed bright. I saw the strange humour of the occasion quite distinctly now. I had been aware of the judge’s self-mocking eyes before but now he seemed wired to the skeleton of a sexual bottle in my mind though he was not Inspector Robot. Each jesting bone in his bottled face quivered as if it were waiting to be drawn from a Bird’s wing and placed between the lips of the Queen of Roses. A bone is a lightning conductor of sexual freedom, sexual wine, and of the parole of furies in dusty graves, furies arriving suddenly on a judge’s lips and speaking irrationalities through him that occasion laughter. Thus a monster of the deeps may hope to be set free when the Dead speak in high court museum. I felt there was a chance for the drunkard in me. A chance for Proteus. A chance for Harold. I felt I needed no apology to speak on behalf of the immortals in my family.
The judge sat in a box-like Chair with great extended wings on which to rest his arms. And I remembered the lightning Bird of the Macusis, the dancing Bird I had shot down with Canaima’s knife on the first bank of the river of space. How curious are the emblems that mark the fallen species, the unconscious species, the complex slaughter of a beast or a bird or a dancing angel in the animal enthronement of the law, the majesty of the law, the occasional lapse or parole of a monster!
Does the judge see an emblematic beast and is filled with uncanny compassion, or uncanny lust, when he grants parole to a monster? Does he see a fiery angel within the mutual unconscious of hunted species, mutual Sleep, the judge’s sleep (on one hand), and the unconscious of a tilted bone in a wing of space (on the other), bone-bottle in my Dream of wine, bone-sex in his courtroom of love within the famished lips of a Rose?
Yes, I remembered how Rose had listened to drunken Proteus, had accepted his plea for my life, as if he were a judge who desired that I should be set free. I remembered the monstrous Horse on which Rose would have taken me. I saw its majesty in a new and native light now: I saw the prospect of an incarnation of species I was unable to grasp or bear – though it was native to me – and from which Proteus dislodged me in the nick of time to live, to contemplate the mystery of the law in every lived life, however extreme.
Had not Ulysses’s gift of the law to his cousin Aeneas taken the extreme form of a monstrous and pregnant Horse in advance of its time, in advance of the Incarnation of species that civilization was unable to sustain or bear except in the conflagration of war between gods (masquerading as men) and men seeking the art of the divine as a token of grace beyond their comprehension?
‘The animal Home of the law, throne of the law, sustains emblematic compassion, emblematic lust and the emblematic wound that mirrors all hunted creatures. It sustains heartbreak and the chemistry of the animalesque and the divine. Speak the truths of that heart-breaking, heart-changing chemistry, that unresolved chemistry, Anselm, and you approach the mystery of the Incarnation. God will hear your prayers.’
I was filled with awe at such unpredictable association and colour to the law. And yet the very frailty of the judge, his lightness, his capacity for metamorphosis, the paradoxes he revealed within transparencies of the unconscious that cloaked him – that made him into my object as well as my subject – his attachment to someone as marginal or extreme as me, gave me courage to cling to the edges of fu
sed yet broken civilizations. Perhaps he was a creature of labyrinthine jest but all at once he was near and dear to me. In him I saw a sponge of the absurdities yet truths of the Incarnation of the law. He dripped the wine of curiosity into my mouth as I stared at him, the risks that arose from a measure of addiction to the highest form of ecstasy and hope, communion with what could prove a misconception, a misinterpretation, in identifying deity with an animal frame.
But as I drank I saw as well the necessity to endure the wine and the jest, to endure the risks, to disabuse myself of the sensation that I or anyone possessed the sacred in a solid bubble. I saw the necessity to persist in a dialogue with every spark of divine administration of justice in all masquerades however apparently unprepossessing …
‘Your Chair,’ I cried, ‘possesses an ancient savage lineage that drips lightning. Your Chair is symbolic of the incarnation of a drunken storm, the incarnation of lightning. You and the chair together become celebratory flesh on bone in animate wood as the lightning wires lip to heart. The spiritualization of bottled wood, the spiritualization of bottled wing and feather in one’s carnival thirst for the angel of the divine. Lightning strikes the wings of the Macusi Bird and your Chair floats in the Sky. ‘Look!’ I cried, ‘it is there among my charts and diagrams of god-rock, there on the table of the feast, the savage feast before you. Lightning strikes and illumines a winged stairway from sky to earth as the Chair and the table tilt into an abstract diagram and a Bird. See how the wings become a lightning arc or miracle-chalk upon a blackboard. Outspread drunken wings tilt between sky and earth, fold, stretch out again into the spiritualization of wood that is carven into the arms and wings of your Chair.’
Sobriety is always a shock, the sobriety of an individual visionary who faces the passion of faith, the sobriety of the state which turns at last to face itself, the sobriety of a world that has suffered many crises, the sobriety of a saint, or an artist, or a sinner, who suddenly sees in a wounded Bird that falls from the sky, in the lightning of a storm, in paint or ink or chalk or wood that has been sculpted, cut, chiselled, visualized in its grain, grained tree (all these and more), an infinite equation with the Incarnation of the law.
Sobriety, true sobriety, is an awareness of the edges of the chasm in the mind of order, the mind of the incarnate law (how priceless is such visionary understanding of mind and order). Order means risk. Order is a glimpse of the risks to all creatures inherent in creation. Creation is a storehouse of terrifying energies that imply risk. And the law incarnates itself within a chasm of risk as it broods in the storm upon every frail messenger of being that climbs or falls.
The courtroom was still, so still I almost forgot where I was, what I was saying.
‘Every theatre of judgement and trial is a theatre of Dream in its exposure of the language of order that pierces our mind to instil us with orchestrated varieties of the partial translation of sleeping hunger and waking thirst. As the Bird falls it incorporates that chasm of pierced consciousness into itself and revolves into a constellation that is neither pure hunger nor pure thirst.’
I clung as before to the edges of the chasm until hunger and thirst released the apparition of daemons glistening on the wings of the law, one on each wing. They were nameless and I could only identify them from memories of the environment of my childhood. My uncle’s abstention from food (his kind of order) on his alcoholic rounds and drinking bouts had invoked the morality of the creative fast within me as I grew up. Creative fast was one daemon of order upon one of the wings of the law. My father’s obsession with women – with the taste and colour and beauty of women – had reduced him to a shell (a shell of grief, a shell of innermost contrition) within which one hears the murmur of a Voice from an ocean of storm: passion’s peace at the heart of the storm. Passion’s peace was the other daemon of order on the other wing of the law.
And those daemons now turned into an intricate capacity for order and balance within the terror of lightning creation and storm, lightning art, as they stood or rested on the wings of a falling Bird in the judge’s Chair.
‘How strange,’ I replied, ‘that the daemons on the wings of the law, the daemons of order, are as familiar to me as the moral legacies I have drawn from my kith and kin.’
There was a murmur in the courtroom. The Voice of an organ murmured – ‘The daemon of the creative fast rides on one antiphonal wing of the law, the daemon of passion’s peace rides on the other, to sustain a balance when the storm rages and the sky appears to mirror the extinction of all creatures.’
*
There was a long interval of silence as hunger and thirst rearranged their element in the theatre of Memory and Imagination. I felt the trial was over but all at once the judge stirred and awoke. He rustled the papers before him into a gentle, sighing wind. His gaze had lightened from dusty corridors into the reflection of a feast. His self-mocking eyes were upon me. I was sobriety. Sobriety was on trial. I had often seen Proteus solemn as a judge. I had often seen him raise a tissue of dialectical ecstasy and argument with a straight face, a face of glass, a face to sip glass and glass’s reflection of the flea that bites the drunken dog.
‘I accept the miracle,’ the judge said at last, ‘I accept the miracle of insight into your early background and environment. Let us be clear. The balance you imply is threaded into natural events, into nature as a vessel of creation that may overwhelm us. The fiery liquid is not of our brew. All well and good. But surely, Anselm, you need to touch upon another kind of balance within man-made perils, man-made disasters as distinct from any kind of natural catastrophe …’
I stared into the vessel of the sky through the veiled fabric of the courtroom. ‘The daemons that provide a balance within the risks of creation help us to perceive another kind of balance within man-made engines, a man-made cosmos (so to speak). There I tend to see furies rather than daemons as agents of balance. But those furies alas are in a state of disarray, diseased genius
I stopped. The judge was waiting like a policeman at a feast that is scattered on a pavement in the cold blue light of the dawn. Ulysses sat there in rags and chewed a sandwich. I saw Rose’s majestic Horse in the Shadows of the courtroom. It loomed on the veiled terraces of the sanctuary. The sounding hooves ran into my mind. I felt close to being trampled but arose and faced the judge.
‘I felt myself,’ I said to him, ‘so close to the hooves I could have been lying in the throng on the pavement of Troy amidst those who were trampled as they ate and drank. What a craft that Horse was. In it was the diseased genius of a civilization. And yet how close it came to sheer divinity. Pregnant wood. Divine wood. It was the gift of the law. But a law that had eclipsed its true proportions of peace. The furies in the saddle were in disarray. And yet as I lay under the hooves I perceived them. I perceived human excess interwoven with lightning storm, lightning fear and passion, lightning excess. A terrifying blend! How difficult to unravel.’
The judge appeared to be growing smaller in his Chair. Curious foetal object? Curious child?
‘The first fury or mistress of the saddle,’ said the judge, ‘is Rose.’
‘The second,’ said the Shadow-organ of the living and the dead, ‘is fire, fire’s naked grace.’
‘Fire,’ said the judge, ‘is an emanation of the storm of creation that lingers in Memory at the moment of birth. It vanishes and we tend to forget we saw it but it reappears on the pavement in the feast that is abandoned by the trampled masses.’
‘The third rider is a craftsman of diseased genius‚’ I said quietly. ‘That is obvious. He built the Horse. He harnessed the Rose sisters (their lust for revenge) to naked fire, naked grace.’
As I spoke I could hear the singing voices of the Rose sisters afire in my mind. Sober mind. Incandescent mind.
‘Such craftsmanship is so magnificent, so marvellous, it mimics the incarnation of the law but falls short and becomes an engine of conquest.
‘It is ridden sometimes by missionaries, by priests who
bless guns. One could enumerate the fascinations of such engines in every fable or legend in every land. Wheels in the Biblical sky, Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines, medieval submarines, etc., etc..’
The Rose-music was subsiding.
‘Rose knows this. I can hear the echo of her involuntary complaint as she rides every man-made legend. Her existence is at stake. Her hopes within my gestating unconscious lie in the craft of the animal body, its unique frailty, its beauty (not beauty in fashionable abortion), beauty as life, as the inimitably crafted seed of life.
‘Thus – more so than anyone else – it is Rose in my gestating unconscious (rather than my foetal unconscious in her as a judge) who must question ailing genius. On one hand Rose possesses the thorn.’
‘Tell me more of the thorn,’ said the judge.
I was silent for a moment listening to the distant music of agricultural and industrial revolutions in the blood of the thorn.
‘The thorn is an inoculation at the feast that brings Home to us the severity of the illness of genius. To be pierced in one’s cradle by the thorn is to imbibe a trace of the harvests our antecedents have sown and reaped in the past in all ignorance, ignorance of continuing consequences, ignorance of the furies they conscripted, the mutual traumas of enslaver and enslaved, broken forests in the flesh of the world, polluted rivers, etc., etc….’
‘Does this mean,’ said the judge, ‘that genius must reckon with the womb of the unconscious, with hope that a spark in the body of the living dreamer will erupt, a spark that will be fleshed by furies in balance …?’
‘Such a spark or Home is the Spirit of the kingdom of truth we have scarcely begun to build ….’
I felt I was being swept along by Shadow-organ music built of filaments of rain, flashes of sun in illuminations of soil, dark and red soil, the catspaw of the stars in the soil, rippling and pinpointed gold within the ground on which I stood. The ground had spoken through me and I felt I was on the edge of tilting into an incredible chorus but the judge drew me back. He reminded me of the thorn. ‘What else does Rose have?’ he asked.
The Carnival Trilogy Page 40
