The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  ‘Eruption is a measure of a healing process in nature,’ I cried. I felt tears in my eyes. His logic seemed unanswerable. ‘The globe cleanses itself when it quakes and spews forth lava. There would be no flowers to spy on without the quake, the lava.’ I could not stop the tears welling up and pouring from me in the Dream. ‘The gods are an eruption within and from humanity‚’ I said haltingly, ‘that may set in train …’ I hesitated, ‘set in train a process of healing once we turn, face events, and make distinctions.’

  He stared at me against the mirror of fire-music (‘delirium of power’, he had called it) as if I were a child. I had brought him no release from misgiving. And yet I could not be sure but I sensed that a tension of true counterpoint lay between us in the abyss of our age: a deeper self-confessional edge to our lips in self-portraitures and the sculpture of others. His mind about the nature of history, the nature of nature, was apparently made up. Mine was too. And yet I felt the very divisions between us were a catalyst (if ‘catalyst’ were the word) of far-flung change and of the translation of ourselves on to another level of being that would assist us to see ourselves differently in different shades and lines and fragments of existence.

  ‘Rid yourself of myth, Anselm‚’ he said softly. ‘It’s a dangerous addiction, this business of eruptive yet healing nature. A manifesto of anarchy. Reform of our institutions is necessary of course. Everywhere. But we need discipline and control. I have seen eruptive human nature, revolutionary activity, and it’s a fruitless bargain. No one wins.’

  ‘You’re turning your back on what I am saying, Ross‚’ I cried.

  ‘What are you saying, Anselm?’ His manner was cold despite the leaping tongues of fire.

  ‘I am saying that eruptive being has now reared its head in all of us (conservatives have become radicals, radicals pseudo-conservatives) – whether we admit it or not – in all sorts of ways. Not the old revolutionary compulsions. Reared its head because of technological uncertainties, the clash of cultures, the susceptibility of masses to charismatic leadership …’ I blurted out almost crudely, crude Word, yet desire for truth – ‘The gods are not God‚’ I cried. ‘That much we know, Ross.’

  ‘Do we?’ he spoke like a complete stranger in the Dream.

  I turned and looked into the fire as if I spoke from it, in it, as if I leapt from broken ladder of flame to broken ladder of flame in danger of falling into a pit. I held a charred volume in one hand and read from it in the Dream. ‘God does not imbue us with the power of delirium but with a capacity for infinite, creative distinctions at the heart of all relationships, relationships of sorrow or joy, bitterness or sweetness …’ The page was crumbling but I was still able to read –’ … invaluable distinctions we need to make when the gods overshadow our world. The gods are in phenomena that excite us to mindlessness, mindless self-abandon, mindless superstition, the gods erupt in charismatic lusts and leadership, charismatic radicalism to purge our ranks, expel our enemies, charismatic conservatism to bind, to entrap, charismatic self-interest, charismatic mutiny or strike. The gods are dangerous, sometimes notoriously fickle and amoral. But they open the way to distinctions we scarcely ever make until their shadow darkens our path. A terrifying lesson. If we bundle together God, gods, daemons, furies in a uniform and gross package then we misinterpret sacred balances and forfeit the instructive bite of music, the interior anatomy, the creative fast that is required of us…’

  ‘Bundle together,’ said Ross drily. ‘The language of fascism, Anselm, the language of uniformity, regimentation. Bundle together! The gods like that. Easier than making distinctions.’

  The dream-volume slipped from my hands but its utterance was imprinted on my mind. I did not reply. I found myself staring hard at the blackened fossil flesh of the marvellous Orchid in Ross’s hand. As though his hand lay in mine, mine in his, within the abyss of our age. I saw a library of interior counterpoint no one could destroy replete with the rhythmic tapestry of the City of God, leaf, petal, bone, shell. The resurrection of fossil eternities into living diversity! A library that lay in the future, within us, beyond us. I would have given my sight to open a visionary page, to read a visionary line, to enter the future: the future’s miraculous community of souls born of the divisions of the past.

  I would have given my sight to see backwards into a desolate age from the future. Curious self-contradiction! I would have given my sight to see with eyes acquainted with every extremity, to see myself as a living, resurrected fossil steeped in diversity not eternity-for-the-sake-of-eternity, to see my own blindness now from an unravelled, penetrative standpoint within the distant future, to know myself in all my limitations and through such paradox to live within yet beyond the present frame or burning moment …

  The wish or prayer had scarcely touched my lips when the blaze subsided. The trail was clear. A doorway into the future. I felt fear then. How easy to slip into the future’s complacency and dream one has escaped the past and the present. No, that was not my intention. My hope was to retrace my steps from the future into the present and the past and know oneself – know the everlasting stranger within oneself – as never before. I had seen Ross for an instant as a total stranger who then became profoundly meaningful within the tension of interior counterpoint. It was this thread I wished to pursue through and beyond all measure of complacency. Perhaps in breaking a formula of complacency – in becoming a stranger to oneself – one would gain the strength to bear the full complication of relationships one had begun to unveil in ascending from bank to bank in the four banks of the river of space.

  Should I shrink from such insight into a tapestry of responsibilities, a community of souls (saints and sinners) that – in tearing complacency to rags – could shake me to the core of being?

  Had I not already come forwards/backwards a far way in my pilgrimage? Was it not wise to leave it there? Leave them there? Ross, Penelope, the drowned children?

  I thought I heard Ross say, as the last embers of the blaze subsided, ‘Let’s stop, Anselm. Let’s go to the riverbank and bury our drowned children in the ruined Mission House that lies in the future, a future we know in the Dream as you retrace your steps from 1988 into 1950. We know Canaima will burn the House in 1966 though this is 1950. Why go forward still more into an uncertain, perhaps threatening, future that may take us back beyond what we already know?’

  It seemed sensible advice. And yet…

  ‘We have come too far‚’ I said, ‘We have earned the right to go forward not into a Golden Age from which to retrace our steps, not into the return of a Golden Age (of which El Dorado in Guyana is a pertinent Shadow), but into profoundest self-recognition of ourselves in and through others: the interior anatomy, the true terrifying flesh of the Word, the true terrifying knowledge of the Heart that may set us free at last from fear.’

  *

  The fire-talk lucid conversation with its abrupt, wholly natural transitions, traceries, linked memories through polar opposites, faded into sudden darkness upon my lips. Nothing remained except a vague self-portraiture. The procession continued on its way. We camped further along the trail in a valley that was the gateway into the remote and small settlement from which the drowned child I carried had come. I laid the child (whose intricate face and body baffled my sight) on the ground. Sleep was a chasm, a fault in the landscape of Dream, and one wondered whether in falling more steeply or deeply into it everything would vanish forever in the future.

  Despite our misgivings the sun rose with new morning in the fractionalized long Night, long Day, of fossil insight into the past. We clung to each feature of landscape as if it were a piece of live, bright coal that lit one’s mind anew. Whereas we had commenced our processional journey with the sensation of being sculpted shells of water, sculpted bodies composed of a fluid reality, now it was as if we had entered another dimension of the still Waterfall of space, a dimension of the future.

  Here the great lofty precipitation of silvery bark upon the trees had given
way to an open grassy savannah. Streams ran down from the hills. It was light itself that rained upon us: an inner texture of light as though the bark of the Forest had unclothed itself into naked brightness within the multidimensional fabric of the Waterfall.

  I was excited by the light paint (restorative fossil paint, meticulous live fossil flesh) I placed anew on our lips in the resurrectionary canvas of space. Modern resurrected savage reflecting ancient primitive humanity within ourselves.

  How far had we arrived in the future? We three, carriers of the dead?

  ‘Every Waterfall‚’ I said to Ross, ‘one enters in Dream or comes upon within a great continent such as this – a continent inhabited by lost or forgotten cultures one needs to see anew from the future, within an Imaginary future – is a veiled messenger of the womb of the sea, of the origins of life and technologies of death rooted in strangest innocence. I trust we shall learn and see. It stands and descends – that Waterfall – upon an escarpment; it appears at first sight to embody an absolute ridge between the past and the present, between the sea and the land … But look!’

  Our camp lay within mountainous terrain, the valley itself– in its lofty right – however contained by the vessel of the land – possessed the escalating contours of a hill one million years above the sea: a fractionalized aeon’s perch in space above the tides of the ocean that still crawled in every rock garden.

  ‘Take the weight of a pebble in your hand. Strip away the mountains within the interior anatomy of space. Imagine ourselves as animate, beautiful, dancing skeletons perched here nevertheless in the ground of a valley that is no valley at all but a hill far up in Time above the rock garden of the sea that fertilizes itself as it splits into reversible lava or life-giving water.’

  As I spoke I fished in my pocket for Inspector Robot’s glasses that I had used in ascending god-rock – glasses that fused a parallel between ‘artificial time’ and ‘quantum, simultaneous, microscopic eyes in all fabrics of existence whether flower or grass or tree’.

  ‘Now replace the mountains. Look through Robot’s glasses at the streams in the distance descending from the mountains we have fleshed into life again – skeleton, vanished mountains we have clothed into action again above the valley/hill on which we stand. Those streams become messengers of the ocean’s volcanic peace, the ocean’s tumult yet inherent quietude, raised above extinct devouring premises as valley is raised above running valley and cloud rains upon still cloud.

  ‘The mountains become a precipitate ridge, slow-motion Waterfall in space, half-solid appearance. A mountain is a slow-motion Waterfall within the simultaneous eyes of past/ future space. It is not an absolute ridge or monumental fortress between our past memories of the warring sea and our present occupation of the conquered land.

  ‘It is a fault that may imprison us in territorial conflict unless our eyes are opened to far future Imaginary expeditions when humanity takes its Shadowy rivers of the dead into the stars as new rain upon desert planets.’

  Perhaps we were stealing a march into the future upon Inspector Robot in making such use of his glasses. I remembered he had tried to steal a march upon me when he sought to ape the features of the great judge at the trial on the third bank of the river of space.

  We did not have long to wait. Gleaming, dazzling messengers were sighted on their way from the settlement we were seeking. The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses …

  I STOPPED. All at once the lines – ‘Perhaps we were stealing a march, etc., etc.’ – that had been dictated to me within the theatre of the future – as it drew me to recall the past – seemed too inflexible (inflexible fossil-humour?), lines steeped, I felt, in an aroma that filled me with unease. ‘Why unease?’ said the dictating Voice, ‘why did you stop? I am no future dictator you have come upon, I am not dictating what you may continue to record on the fourth bank. Such apparent dictation and its aroma stem from – let me put it this way – transparencies of the unconscious. And these have an inimitable style of their own that seems dictation from an alien source. They can be very disturbing. Conscience is the spark you are seeking to trace within every dazzling transparency and within unique atmospheres and fossil-strata above you and beneath you. Fire was the atmospheric humour in which you read the nameless hand and its writings before you came through the trail to where you now are.

  ‘Now it’s not that strict fire which you experience in this reach of future time. It’s another element, an element that has evolved from imprints of fire, an element that is not fire in any ordinary sense yet it smoulders into a consciousness that does not burn but may for that very reason be unbearable, well-nigh unbearable, at times.

  ‘It is the spark of the living Word that you seek, the sacred Word. And that’s akin to a compulsion even as it indicates liberation. It’s upsetting. It’s a style that drives you on but leaves you unsettled, even unhappy. The touch of long-dead, buried masters who travelled into the future long, long ago and who are intent on helping you in the quest for truth, yes, truth I say – truth that is interwoven with a sacred kind of self-deception (odd business I know) but without which – without that peculiar interweave – conscience would not exist. You will see and it will shake you, Anselm.’

  I would see in due course. That was his promise. I wanted to close my ears to the voice or voices of the transparent unconscious. But it was impossible to do so. What was the last image I received when I saw ‘the gleaming, dazzling messengers’ approaching?

  The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses. It was the glistening drums they carried, and other adornments on their bodies, that made them shine. I recalled Proteus’s half-jesting remark to Rose in the hillside cabin on the third bank of the river of space: ‘infant lighthouse of science’. I was not sure I had remembered exactly but it helped us to feel partially at home with the savages of the past one perceived in a burning, non-burning light from a tower or tent in the future.

  We looked through Robot’s glasses within transparencies of the unconscious at the ancient masquerade of a newborn tribe. They wore a long subtly woven belt – or shining umbilicus-eel – that issued from the region of their navel and coiled itself around their bodies to reach their shoulder and neck.

  It was as if they bore the brunt of a fault within the inner/outer body of brightest innocence one could scarcely visualize except as a jest of nature. The bright umbilicus or eel brought home the drowned children (the Shadowy obscure bodies of the drowned children) we had brought to them for ritual burial. And the ease with which the eel had coiled itself around them suggested an intimacy with the elements (with the fluid electricity of the elements, animal electricity, animal ‘lighthouse’) that revived in me an attachment to the mother of light and darkness (the twin-Rose) who had spared my life.

  Were they pitiless phantoms in the fossil-strata of the unconscious or harbingers of hope?

  ‘Eel’ or ‘umbilicus’ equalled ‘electricity’.

  That was the nature of their innocent jest, innocent transgression into consuming technology, consuming spires of electricity that would pierce the heavens and rival the stars. The gift of life was a gift of terrifying responsibility.

  ‘Eel’ or ‘infant lighthouse’ equalled a ‘fault’ in the generation of innocence within the depths of nature and as a consequence one was prone to worship nature and yet to recoil from it.

  Before we knew what had happened they had surrounded us. They flattened our tower or tent in a flash and we were pulled without further ado into the long grasses as into a river of passions. The green swell of the grassy tide hemmed us in yet swept us along. The white waving crest of the sun sang with non-burning heat. It was a river as well as a lake or sea into which the band or tribe took us. The Shadow of my ‘drowned child’ had been snatched from my arms but Ross and Penelope still held theirs. I dreamt of long ancient spars and the rigging of sailing ships sprouting from the bodies of men. I dreamt of the wrecked
cabin on a waving hillside in which my uncle Proteus had pleaded with my twin-mother Rose for my life.

  It was a Dream of such power the cabin became preternaturally real. It became the grain of expeditions in space seen from a newborn standpoint of truth and self-deception. Truth in that it was a vivid articulation from within the unconscious of the perils I faced when my mother was taken ill and I was infected by the very Asian flu epidemic in Alicia’s household: an illness that occurred in the very year or month that my mother’s twin sister gave birth to my half-brother Lucius Canaima. The two happenings were so blended – my mother’s and my illness (on one hand) and the pregnancy of the other Rose and the birth of her child (on the other) – that I was deceived by patterns of memory into dreaming my recovery from illness occurred in a cabin on a waving hillside the day I was born and that my half-brother (five years younger than I) was my ageless twin born on the same day. His age tended to vary in the recurring Dream, five years, six years younger, five years, six years older than I. Sometimes born in my skin, I in his. He was ageless. He was elusive. Our mother was the twin-Rose …

  How had I come into such knowledge of hidden family relationships (Harold and the Rose sisters) in my Aunt Alicia’s household? Had I overheard her and Proteus talking? Had I known it all in childhood and suppressed it into symbolic truth, symbolic distortion, symbolic displacement of seniority (saints/sinners) until it erupted in the corridor of the third bank of the river of space in my book of dreams?

  I dreamt that Proteus pleaded with the twin-Rose my mother for my life the day I was born and that Canaima lay not far from me in the cabin. It was all utterly real – my recovery from illness in Proteus’s plea – and yet as I retraced my steps I perceived a magical and profound self-deception. I saw now what the Voice had been implying but a short while ago: conscience would not exist, the spark of conscience that apprises us of the invaluable texture of life, the gift of creative life, the necessity to give an account of our thoughts and our deeds, would vanish were it not for truth (the vividness of eternal truth) and magical self-deception to which we confess, a magic that opens the way to reshape, revise, penetrate again and again, unravel, ravel again and again the materials of age and youth and childhood and desire (the materials of experience) that we build into a cabin or a ship or a house or whatever tapestry of implicit being asserts our pilgrimage in space.