The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  “Long, long ago on the Arawak foreshore I saw the eye of a fish mirror the light years. Now it’s the eye of a fly that winds its net into the abnormal repose of this child! I may have seen miracles in my time but have been blind to such abnormality upon a child’s fragile body. Take her. Love her. Your future bride of freedom and fate. I promise you she will unfreeze. She will return with you. She will help you through difficult times. She will be your guide in the future when I am gone. Wait and see. I will restore her to life. The others will die again and again and not know they are dead.”

  He seemed so terribly upset I felt I should say something. “Why blind?” I asked. “Why did you say you were blind?”

  “I was blind to our companions the first afternoon we set out,” Masters confessed. “And it was not until last nightfall and this strange sunrise that my eye pricked, and I saw how little of abnormality I had ever seen, how little of the abnormal world in which I lived I had ever truly felt. She is your future wife … remember my words.”

  “But why?” I asked again, unable to think of anything else to say.

  He gave a slight shrug like the ripple of cloth upon the abnormal psyche of stone that possessed him. A slight wind blew in the wake of sunrise upon the abnormal river of El Dorado.

  “Not so astonishing,” he said, “when one thinks soberly upon things. We’re all in the same boat, Weyl. Aren’t we – it’s a popular enough cliché – on the same burning ship of the globe?

  “But how much do we feel, can we feel, are we really able to feel of the abnormality of peace in a century of war, the abnormality of food in a century of hunger? We think we know repose but do we know the sudden repose of a dead child like this in a bombed house? She will return. She will live. Take her, love her, my dear Weyl, when the time comes.”

  He paused but I felt myself unable to speak. I was staggered.

  “I say at last quite brutally, quite honestly, my dear Weyl, that I have established defences against abnormality, my own abnormality to which I am largely blind, and the abnormal and sudden repose of others. I have subsisted on noise – noise is normal, the noise of traffic, aeroplanes, everything – I have listened to the noises of television and radio, the noise of canned gunfire, incessant chatter; but the stillness that follows an explosion, the lightning stillness, the bizarre reverie, the bizarre visualization of the flight of the soul from sudden stilled monument, still body – that I have run from until now.

  “Confess to it all, my dear Weyl, and in so doing, let your abnormality become a paradox, a moral vision of insensible power, insensible strength. Let abnormality mirror itself in abnormality to see through itself, let your abnormality match or subtly inflame Amaryllis’s, so that you see each other’s fragility. Then you will sustain her, she will sustain you. Such sustenance is the soul of love, love’s shelter at the edge of abnormality that is perceived, confessed to, and therefore subtly transfigured within the fiction of the self.”

  As he spoke he struck a sudden match and I watched its reflection flare in Amaryllis’s eyes – as if this were the first impulse to restore her to life – the impulse of a human dawn within the glare of the sun that had increased in the stream of the drought-river at our feet.

  Masters settled my future wife in the boat. We had scarcely set out when there was the sound of a shot and her father, the anthropologist, fell dead at our feet. No one knew. No one saw the hole in his temple. No one remembered the clash with an Amerindian tribe, the people of the red prince, and their anger at events in New Forest. No one saw the slice of the bullet save a faintly aroused Amaryllis and blind/seeing Masters and me (also faintly aroused from contagious abnormality).

  It was as if Amaryllis accepted the guilt for her father’s death (as I had accepted myself as my mother’s slayer) and slid her fingers in his dishevelled temple. She saw him now in several lights within the flare of Masters’ match in the kingdom of the dead.

  The first light disclosed him as abnormally alive though dead. That was how the rest of the crew saw him. She herself saw him faintly aroused, alive beyond the abnormal cloak he wore in the others’ blind sight, a live thread of mind in her sight, a thread that pricked her fingers like a needle and wound its way into the anthropology of the pagan soul. She also saw him faintly, very faintly, in a deeper, farther, stitched dimension of soul, a thread of spirit this time (rather than mind), true spirit, true life. That farther vision of spirit faded and the match that Masters had lit into a needle pricking aroused flesh settled upon the prospect of “mind” the prospect of investigative research her father had pursued into the “pagan soul” (as he used to put it in his lifetime). In settling upon “mind” the match endowed his investigative research with new life, it imbued the dead man with a mental life beyond the apprehension of those in the boat who were conditioned by a repetitive cycle of deeds that seemed absolute, a repetitive cycle of violence that seemed immortal regime.

  She (Amaryllis), in slicing her ailing father’s leaves of brain (as I had sliced my mother’s body and breasts) – in slicing them with a match, stitching them with a divine needle – subsumed the bullet he had received (as the writer’s quill, the painter’s knife and brush, subsume the savage light of the sun) and drew forth a number of volumes that her father had written on earth and which he began to busy himself with all over again, to rewrite, to revise now, in Purgatory.

  Such volumes were a deed, the deed of the anthropologist’s mental life and – however illusory they were – they foreshadowed the life of spirit, true spirit, he had not yet achieved though Amaryllis had glimmeringly perceived it as his goal in a foreseeable but distant age when he would truly come alive past all abnormality of mind that is oblivious of spirit as the well-fed are oblivious of the starving.

  One such volume I saw was entitled, in letters of subtle fire, Purgatory’s Who’s Who.

  I was aware all at once of the shelter Amaryllis and I occupied in an abnormal world that is oblivious of spirit. We were both seven years old in 1939 when Masters made his trip into the interior of New Forest, a trip he was to recover or to retrace as our guide in 1982 after his death in London. That Amaryllis and I were susceptible to his guidance, his shelter, in our lucid dream of Purgatory – where I met her for the first time, she me, before we returned to the land of the living on Earth – was witness to the abnormality of childhood cultures I shared with her and which Masters began to puncture or complexly redress.

  Childhood has always been an abnormal condition within the mind of the adult who has grown oblivious of pagan labour, pagan womb from which civilization comes. Purgatory made no bones about this I discovered. One of the aberrations of the pagan soul, the pagan womb from which we all derive, was Purgatory Cinema in which flashed child labour across the centuries, across the ages, in the field, in the home, in the temple, in the factory, everywhere, womb of the field, womb of the factory.

  Great admirals aged ten sailed in Purgatory Cinema beneath my bouncing eye. (I lodged a protest and was told that though they were not formally great at ten their nuclear apprenticeship began even earlier and this was to lift them upon columns of state in great squares and in great cities). Housewives attired themselves in the garments of children in Purgatory Cinema. They toddled around looking after tyranical elders. Another instance of the nuclear state, the nuclear household.

  “Yes,” said Masters, “childhood is always abnormal when the child becomes an adult overnight. We seem more humane, more civilized (whatever that means) in our treatment of children in the twentieth century. Perhaps we are. Provided we see that the difference between ourselves and the Infernos of the past may lie in the subtle arousal of the twentieth-century child to the edges of abnormal existence upon which it stands or within which it shelters.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, glancing at my reflection and Amaryllis’s in the mirror of the water where Masters had lit another match.

  “I mean,” said Masters glancing at us, at our red hands, red with our parents’
blood in the mirror he had lit, “that a child can tyrannize its parents, kill them, execute them – and such tyranny seems normal (in playing at being abnormal) in an enlightened state or family – a child can draw in reverse the models of the infernal past and sense the perversity of tyranny, the absurdity of tyranny, when the tyrant-child feeds on, is sustained by, is clothed by, fed by, cared for by, the subject-parent it abuses.

  “Thus, as I implied a moment ago, the child is faintly aroused to an absurdity in its abnormal ascendancy over the subject-parent and that breeds a rare affection between them, a rare tenderness, a rare game between tyrant-child and subject-parent. Thus it is that Amaryllis dreams of her dead beloved father and slices his temples into books. It was she who insisted on accompanying him into the interior. And he was so completely under her thumb, under her spell, that he yielded to her entreaty, indeed her command. He told himself what an education it would be, anything to salve his conscience and satisfy her whims. He never foresaw his death, his wife’s death – indeed her death (he thought she had died) – when his party were attacked in 1939 by the angry tribe.”

  I glanced again at Amaryllis. The new match that Masters had lit was bringing tears to her eyes. Yes, I was sure now. She would return. She would return whether I looked back or looked forward. True tears. True love. True sorrow. True gladness. Those tears seemed to melt the oceanic brittle fly that traced a line on her dead father’s brow from which she assembled “leaves of grass” and “leaves of brain”, Volume 1, Purgatory’s Democratic Poem, Purgatory’s Who’s Who.

  “Did she or her father borrow the title ‘leaves of grass’ from Whitman?” I asked Masters.

  “If they did it was because Whitman had passed this way.” He was poking fun at me but still I cried, “Did he pass here, where we are now?”

  “He left a line on a rock requesting the adoption of ‘leaves of grass’ in counterpoint to ‘leaves of brain’.”

  “But why, why?” I insisted like a child of abnormal democracy in a world of authoritarian structure.

  “Perhaps,” said Masters gently, “he was accompanied by his Amaryllis and he felt something was missing, something was incomplete in the game they played together, something needed to arouse itself in the game you play with your parents, in the game this Amaryllis beside you plays with hers, something may falter in the game of democracy when we elect others to rule us who are oblivious of the blood on their hands, the red blood, the pagan blood, and thus may unwittingly lead us into hell.”

  We were approaching a region of phantom rocks that had been vaguely discernible at the start of the expedition but were clearer than ever now.

  Each rock witnessed to an ancient river-bed that the stream and rains of volcanic memory and non-memory had cut and abandoned in favour of more advantageous cuts or later channels over long centuries and geologic ages of Purgatory.

  What was peculiar about the current phenomenon was the translation of these rocks (each belonging by hypothesis to an abandoned or diverse channel) into the same river upon which we presently moved. Thus we moved in lucid dream upon many river-beds, in many channels, all stitched into one. Perhaps they had all been uplifted by a gigantic fault, by a giant geologist – a cousin of the dead anthropologist in our boat – who had signed his name in Purgatory’s Who’s Who a long time ago by heaping all previous channels, or parent rivers, into their present offspring upon which our boat now moved.

  It dawned upon me also that the paradoxical game between parent-creator and child-creation gave a luminous tone to some of the phantom rocks in the river. It was an argument that Masters and I ceaselessly conducted through many character-masks. Was he my phantom guide, my spirit-parent, or was I his divine clerk, his fiction-parent. Had I been nursed into becoming a writer through contact with him or had I nursed him into becoming an incalculable guide into being?

  I returned to my inspection of the luminous tone or rock within the phantom ancient riverbed rock, and detected, I thought, a coagulation of flame from the match that previous guides with their crews – subject, as Masters and I were, to ambiguous parent/child relationships – had lit and deposited in the river (or the rivers) within expeditions they had led. Each such match or prick of vision into calloused fates was a measure of pagan blood, a revelation of native tyranny or game of tyranny native to the family of Mankind.

  The matches Masters had lit were already assembling themselves into slender shapes or pinnacles of subtle coagulated flame as though in our expedition, in ourselves, in our immediate crew, we witnessed to many phantom countries in one purgatorial landscape, many phantom images in one foreign river, many geographies in one theatre of psyche.

  Was it a game of self-inflicted parent/child wounds, self-aroused parent/child revelations, in which we were involved? Was Purgatory the region of regions, was it a democracy of soul unravelling itself by faint degrees and redressing tides of obliviousness that had accumulated upon humanity into the erection of an abnormal callous upon the frame of being?

  I dipped my hands into the tides of obliviousness around our boat and in concert with match or luminous rock began to perceive the stain that the Governor Pilate (once voted popular administrator of Purgatory) may have seen when he washed his hands in pagan blood. (I say “pagan blood” for the Christ he condemned was no “Christian” for him or for the Roman world to which he belonged.)

  I dipped my hands and saw Pilate’s signature in mine. Not leaves of grass that grow from buried flesh nor leaves of brain but the passion of the innocent that mingles in the rain, in the elements, that also clothe the guilty. Rose-red emotion upon innocence and guilt. Sunset emotion in the middle of the day when the sun stands despite sunset straight overhead, noonday sunset, in the pagan body of phallic rocket, phallic love, rocket discordance of sunset and sunrise to prick the sovereignties of heaven and hell.

  I shrank from the administration of such a blow with my scorched hand that broke through Pilate’s, such a blow to sovereignties I tended to cherish, the sovereignty of hell no man dares breach, the sovereignty of heaven no man dares breach, except when these are perceived as pagan and therefore opening themselves to a profound game between creator and creature, parent and child, governor and governed, culture and culture, age and age, civilization and civilization, science and art.

  Had I, I wondered, been promoted governor of Purgatory?

  “No,” Masters explained, “something akin to a fiction-judge who judges himself as much as others and therefore judges governors – and indeed kings like me – as well. It’s an awful responsibility that the living – the living from Earth, that is, who journey in Purgatory – may have to perform. For remember to live – or to dream one is alive – is to be subject to various frames of existence that masquerade as life. The Earth-frame you know well – or do you? Anyway there are the purgatorial treadmills or frames that we have seen so far in our journey. There are those who hold on to an abnormal condition or treadmill of life and cannot fathom the cycle of death or repetitive violence to which they cling; there are those who are faintly aroused to the life of the mind; there are those who aspire to a true life, a true spirit, beyond all frames.”

  I dipped my hands into all these apparitions and frames of existence that Masters had enumerated. As if to elaborate further he struck another match. It flared this time into volcanic activity. Volcanic spheres of dust, veil upon veil, tone within tone, exquisite theatres, unfolded themselves in space. Majestic gowns hung upon frames of the living and the living dead at various removes from true life. Faint crimson anxieties were suspended within yellow lampshades and refinements of purple.

  I thought I saw boulders dancing together, embracing each other. At first they looked terribly sad, terribly sad, and then I was astonished to see their elation, profligate or extravagant mood, drunken abandon. They were drunk. That was plain to me. Drunk! I too was drunk. They had infected me.

  What was less plain to see was the nature of the drunken elation within them and me. “L
ook again into the mirror of frames you share with them,” Masters said. “Look at those people over there. They want to embrace death and life together. They want the edges of death to become the wages for an existence they hate or find virtually unbearable. Such wages, they believe, would secure them relief from meaningless tasks and employments. Indeed release from hell. They admit as they dance – and this is curious – to the mind of oblivion, a mind that will release them and grant them a haven of nothingness, a haven longed-for, hoped-for, in the dance. Look! I can see from your face how drawn you are to them.” His voice faded but I knew what he said was true. I was almost seduced by the dance. I too began to long for oblivion.

  But as the dance began to embrace nothingness, each boulder shifted its weight a little. I shifted my weight a little as I embraced Amaryllis. And the mind of oblivion began to resist oblivion. How could it be mind and do otherwise than resist the folly of courting an absolute extinction?

  And so it was that a dance that encompassed the hope of oblivion grew hopeless of achieving oblivion. Such paradox! Such hopelessness! It was a hopelessness that rested on inimitable tip-toe function within volcanic upheaval, inimitable breaches of function, inimitable ballet I had never before so greatly enjoyed and I wondered if somewhere in the elements, at the epicentre of the elements, seismic elements, that clothed both hope and hopelessness, lay the genesis of the dance.

  Had the dance started when human boulders moved towards sovereign night but breached that sovereignty, that night, by an evolution of mind, an evolution of partial release pointing through and beyond an absolute night, an absolute release, that falsifies itself in framing itself, in framing its desire, absolutely? How could I participate in movements for release if I have been released so absolutely that I forfeit the memory, the process, the life, the struggle for ongoing release? I could not tell but the ecstasy of such discoveries caused me to topple into another dance.