The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  Proteus’s cabin had slipped down the waving hillside of Dream into a pit or a stage within a great clearing in the sea of grasses. Our captors had brought us there. The sun was held still in a painted net within its path of descent. Everything looked fixed and still. The yellow golden paint lay unmoving on the stage and cabin. And the pit seemed but an extension of the mouth of space in which we stood. A reconstructive job. Beautifully determined and reassembled. I had seen scientists cement the bones of a fish, or a long-dead animal whose scattered pieces had been excavated from the bottom of a sea or from within a hill or valley or bog, until its gleaming frame, one million years old (a-gleam as if still conscious of the glow of vanished suns and stars), seemed strangely alive however motionless or passive. Ready to swim or plunge into the forest.

  So too shone Proteus’s cabin. We had been taken half-way up the hill by our captors within the painted transparency of the unconscious sun that lay on the stage beneath us. The passive, motionless light illumined a sign on the door of the cabin.

  HISTORIC CABIN IN THE PSYCHE OF SPACE.

  COMMUNITY OF SOULS. ANSELM WAS BORN HERE.

  CANAIMA DIED HERE. BOTH IN THE SAME YEAR.

  Every letter was stark and clear.

  ‘It’s not true‚’ I protested, unable to credit my eyes. I tried to strike a stationary drum in a savage’s hand and raise an outcry but was unable to do so. It was as if we were their captors, they were ours, in the reassembly of bone and mask and drum in the life of ancient theatre. I turned – despite the regime of stillness – to Penelope and Ross.

  ‘It’s not true‚’ I insisted. ‘They have made a mistake. Surely scientists can make a mistake across a million years or fifty years or a hundred years. We are a fallible species blessed with imagination in sensing our fallibility and breaking subtly, miraculously, a one-track frame of existence.’ I had almost forgotten my complaint but then I insisted again. ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘What’s not true?’

  ‘My Dream-cradle, yes, science may say of this cabin. Science is a species of art after all. I survived. Canaima’s cradle too. He also survived. He did not die here. He was very much alive in 1948 when he killed a man and I let him escape. I have told you the story.’

  Proteus’s million-year-old cabin, one hundred-year-old cabin, eighty-year-old cabin, revealed itself from within. It was the stable of Rose’s Horse. It was a fossil White and Black Colonial House, fossil Mansion, fossil Palace, fossil Inn, fossil Hospital. A million years of modern art, modern architecture rooted in kingship, tribal hierarchy, tribal medicine, tribal hospitality.

  It was hollow, beached, it seemed to levitate a little, Newton’s gravity, Einstein’s counter-gravity, it was the painted light of an apple in a sun-ship, cave-rocket-apple to the moon, it was the painted bone-light of a night-ship, cave-rocket-bone to Venus, it was everything one salvages and nets from the body of a man or a woman akin to ours in palaeolithic corridors of space, savage electricity in fingers and joints, savage umbilicus or eel encircling the stars.

  The cabin was still as a whisper in the river of the dead. It was furnished with emblems of immemorial wreckages, immemorial forests, hills. It mirrored the still light of voyages on inland sun-seas within the Waterfall of space. It reflected the sun in the mouth of space, the dragon of space in which we stood. It was host to painted newborn, newdead pilgrims, newborn, newdead pirates, newborn, newdead slaves, newborn, newdead priests – newborn, newdead populations wired into a ribcage. It was the still dance of the robin and the dove, the dolphin and the whale.

  I was awakened in the Dream of captivity, captivity in the past, captivity in the future, by the emphasis in Proteus’s cabin on newborn, newdead species. I wanted to shout –

  ‘It’s the passivity, the acceptance of a glittering museum one enshrines again and again, that makes it so testing – if not unbearable – in this reach of future time from which one looks back, from which the living dreamer looks back.

  ‘So much has happened yet no one claims moral responsibility except that I was born there in that shell or cabin or cave: a helpless infant. How may an infant see himself or herself as subsisting upon a frail thread of moral responsibility in all peoples for the world of tomorrow? And I insist – Canaima was born there too. He was my twin. He was forced on me, as if he were a different race, a different pigmentation; I never wanted him, never welcomed him as a brother or a twin.’

  There was no reply but the enormity of responsibility threaded into infant life, infant conscience, infant humanity, began to dawn upon me. As if I had received a staggering blow from one of my motionless captors. Staggering in that the living dreamer knows himself as an infant lighthouse in space because of polarities of the conscious and unconscious that are lifted to another level of counterpoint, passive/active counterpoint, newborn/newdead counterpoint. No fossil reconstruction of skeleton or frame is a purely technical achievement: for what is rebuilt by fallible manoeuvre walks or swims or flies again within the universal unconscious of nature to question itself, to question every formula by which its scales or feather or hair were stitched together. Thus it is that an infant lives again within a body of unconscious wholeness that questions every enterprise of the fallible imagination that would fix it, or pin it, to the wall of a cabin or a museum.

  A staggering blow of re-awakened spirit is built into the vicarious essence that runs through our visualizations of reconstructed presences in nature. A staggering blow lies at the heart of the early Church, early art, which begins to clothe itself with the unfinished fabric of an infant lighthouse and vicar of Time, vicar of the primordial imagination.

  He held me; my motionless subtly active captor – within an aeon of unconscious wholeness that drew us to face one another – held me, forced me to look again into the depths of the cabin at the drowned child I had pulled up the serpent-ladder from the river of space. Pulled up, sheltered in my arms as vicar of Time, and borne across a landscape one thousand million years old into an uncertain and threatened future. Pulled up and borne and placed upon the stage of Proteus’s cabin.

  The transparency of the unconscious sun broke in my eyes and made clear to me beyond belief whose face and body I had borne. I studied every feature as if it were imprinted on ancient yet modern canvas. There was no doubt as to who it was. A child of indeterminate age. Five to ten years old. Five, six, seven, eight. How indeterminate is the age of a child, how starved is age, how thin is agelessness? It was Canaima. But how could it be? Canaima had not died in this cabin when he was eight years old or I was eight years old. Was I not eight years older than he? Or was it five or six? My unwanted brother had survived. As I had survived. Lucius had not died or been drowned as a child. Perhaps I had painted him or sculpted him as a child – when I was eight or ten – painted him as an infant and buried the paper or wood. It was a Dream of such power it made me feel I had killed him then if not in the flesh then as a vivid being – however delicate – vivid artifact of presence I wished to suppress and forget for ever. But here he was. Back again. The umbilicus-eel or belt had straightened itself into a knife in his hand. The technology of a knife. A tall electric knife or spire pointing to the invisible stars in a still blazing sky. Blazing, setting, unmoving sun.

  ‘I threw Canaima’s knife – my twin-brother’s knife – into the heavens on the first bank of the river of space. Inspector Robot and I were climbing god-rock at the time. God-rock’s spire it seems now to me! God-rock’s spire is the spire of my Imaginary City of God. How strange are the foundations of the sacred, sacred reciprocity between innocence one nurtures with all one’s heart and guilt one has suppressed or buried from the day one was born. Sacred reciprocity that provides a vertical bridge through the faults of tilted nature, tilted banks which move the spoil of passive being, the passive Word, to transcend a levelling proclivity. Sacred reciprocity between art and science, between the vertical and the horizontal.

  ‘I struck the dancing angel or Macusi Bird. The knife became
a form of human lightning, man-made lightning. At the time I could not tell whether the knife continued up or whether it fell back into the Waterfall stained with ozone and the blood of punctured atmospheres. Or whether it fell in my unconscious to erupt into the Dream of this cabin. Canaima’s knife! Now I know. It fell here. It was his Shadow – my brother’s indeterminate Shadow (twin-Shadow, older Shadow than I, younger than I?) – that I drew into my arms up the serpent-ladder. He wanted to tell me – indeed he wants to tell me that the knife I threw may never be purified until he comes Home to me within my deeds (however involuntary, however secret, however buried or forgotten). The Macusi god-rock is the spire of the City of God that floats on a cornerstone encompassing the knife of civilization, that is in need of ceaseless purification, and the thorn of the Rose.’

  One could hear a murmuring vibration in Shadow-organ space. One could hear one’s voice issuing from the body of a stranger.

  ‘It is a sounding cornerstone that exists everywhere, in the soil, in the air, in the fire, in the water. It exists in the singing chorus of the Waterfall, in the greenhouse Shadow of the drowned in space whose indeterminate age makes them as much our victims as our attackers, as much our killed as our killers.

  ‘Are we too old, too young, to dream of the knife and the Rose? When do dreams commence? In the womb or in the seed of the womb? I have drawn the Shadow of my brother from the river of the dead. And still I ask myself: whose Shadow? whose brother? whose stranger? A life or a death that baits the unconscious is not to be equated with conventional structures, or conventional hubris, or conventional uniformities and clarities. The sweetest song of unconscious beauty may turn and rend a theatre of technicalities, technical apparatus, technical nudity, technical descriptions of the act of love or death, purely technical climax that averts its head from the anatomy of the abyss.

  ‘Is it the anatomy of the abyss that I glimpse in myself, in him, in nameless others one bears – who bear one – into the parentage of Being? Have I borne a spatial being that is capable of taking upon itself familiar/unfamiliar resemblances? Does the burden of art involve a confrontation with an ultimate loss of fear? Nothing that is or was, nothing that bears or is borne, was created in the beginning from fear, fear of one or fear of the other, though fear may come in the wake of a Presence with which one needs to be reconciled through stages of haunted masquerade, the haunted sinner in one’s arms, or in the cradle, or on the stage of Memory …

  The uncanny, unfinished body of music within us ceased. But it had invoked a change in the transparencies of the unconscious. The paint of the sun began to lift. Everything had been passive, fixed. Now a spark in the sun lifted, the sun itself moved and began to fall. The spark unravelled the sky to touch the high precipice of the globe in the Dream. Night was soon falling.

  *

  ‘Where are your drowned children?’ I cried to Penelope and Ross, ‘Do you know who they are? Have you recognized them? Mine was the Shadow of my twin-brother Canaima.’ I laughed. Laughter seems a spring of irresistible and uncanny merriment in the gravity of a Dream. ‘You saw him lying on the stage. Incredible! It’s not true of course. Yet it’s true. A true parable! Parable employs meaningful self-deception as the strange humour, the essence of the spiritual irony that imbues the nature of the arts in the City of God.’

  The laughter faded from my lips. I had spoken with some urgency. It dawned on me within the starlit Night that now lay about us like a fabulous cloak that Ross and Penelope were clinging to the Shadowy drowned children they had drawn up the serpent-ladder from the river of the dead. I saw they would continue to do so until they surrendered themselves to their captors. A curious phrase! Surrendered themselves to their captors. I understood their hesitation, their difficulty, their anguish. These grew from the fact of their idealism (in Penelope’s case), agnosticism (in Ross’s), idealism and agnosticism that signified a freedom (self-deception?) they took for granted. They were free people, freer than I was. When is freedom fate, fate freedom? One may be held by a captor and yet so resist him, so resist captivity, one learns nothing about oneself, about one’s fate in falling into his or her hands.

  So it was with Ross and Penelope within the great Night of the savage encroachment of space in which the very texture of the universe had begun to change and the stuff of reality drew us back into reconsiderations of our private selves and of the past and the present we had never entertained. They had been seized but their resistance was such that they could not part, or give, any portion of themselves that could provide them with a new threshold into a testing and hazardous community. Freedom, their ideal freedom, became a curious obstacle.

  Ross knew what I was implying and he turned upon me with a dry, almost angry, smile.

  ‘You capitulated, Anselm, as soon as you saw the savages of space erupting not from the heart of darkness but from the heart of the unconscious. You are no Conradian idealist! Idealists always make the best pessimists. You are something different. Closer to a saint perhaps? I wonder. God knows who the devil you are. Penelope thinks you are half in love with her. El Dorado is a fitting place for a queen and her suitors and revelations of ancient kingship through which to revive a concept of sainthood. It starts with your capitulation! Your capitulation to the savages is such that your brother’s evil deeds may well become yours in the history books of another age.

  ‘You need to be careful, Anselm! Soon it may be said that Canaima never existed at all. What potent non-existence! So potent every saint stands to lose his good name. You stand to lose your good name. You performed the things he did. You become the actor within his mask. Do not say I did not warn you, Anselm, of such terrible myth. Possession! That’s the bleak word. That’s what it is. The acceptance of another’s crimes and sins.’

  He stopped and I listened in the starlit Night for the winged feather of angelic species as the globe moved and the stars faintly altered their course.

  ‘Danger, yes,’ I said at last. I pondered the fires far out in space. I pondered the nature of captor and captive. I pondered my ignorance of ultimate freedom, ultimate fate.

  ‘Danger yes, terrifying myth. You are right, Ross. But in such danger lies a catalyst of purification. Creation is a risk! You know that. Daemons and furies are a measure of balance within the lightning storm of creation that binds us to sky and earth. And at the heart of every trial, within every danger of possession – possession by what appears to be evil – lies a catalyst of purification in weighing the fabric of deeds performed by another. Without that weighing, that intricate balance, without the necessary truth of purification that applies to all of us, we may march a hundred, a thousand abreast, and we are still pilgrims of the void. We are lost. We may swear we have clean hands in the marketplace of freedom, that we are untainted by evil, and still we are lost, lost in the hubris of consciousness.

  ‘And so I plead again. Surrender yourselves to your captors before it is too late and you forfeit a true scrutiny of the Shadows that you bear. I know your pride in the appearances of freedom. Take Penelope!’ I stared into the heart of the starlit Night and into the drowned child upon her breasts whose outline was becoming clear to me now. ‘I see something there. I see a different kind of catalyst from mine. Another form of balance, another factor of necessary truth in weighing the fabric of possession.’

  I stared into her arms and almost recoiled.

  ‘Tell me, Anselm! What do you see?’

  ‘I see the corpse of heroism,’ I said gently, ‘weighed in a balance that demarcates men and women.’

  She gave a start as if her memory had been jolted.

  ‘What is true heroism, Penelope? What balance divides heroism into sheer possession of others, the sheer hunt, on one hand, and necessary sacrament, on the other, the necessary ritual burial of the stranger one bears who brings news of the chains that bind us, chains we hide from ourselves, for they have been upon us so long we have forgotten they are there.

  ‘To break those chains we need to s
ee ourselves as captives in the hand of a stranger. We need to see our acceptance of a hidden state of unfreedom masked by ideal freedom in an eruptive light, the light of the strangest self-surrender. And that’s where the intricate balance lies between heroism that possesses and inner courage that liberates

  I was unsure of the intricate design I had seen and of the words that had come upon my lips. Nevertheless they had scarcely dropped into the starlit Night when the savages encircled Penelope. They took the frail body from her arms. The stage was clear. The shape of Canaima had vanished. And now in its place appeared Penelope’s child.

  ‘Black,’ she said wonderingly. ‘It’s black.’

  Ross came forward and placed an arm around her.

  ‘It’s the light of the stars in this curious transparency, this strange atmosphere, that makes it appear black. It’s so ancient.’

  ‘How could my child be ancient?’

  She wanted to rush upon the stage and lift the child back upon her. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep. But Ross held her close. The savages made a wall around her. We turned and stared once again at the child. The light of the constellations had changed and it was as if we were looking now at the skeleton, starred, infant stature of a king. There were bracelets of gold on his ankles and wrists.