The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  “The values of a civilization,” said Masters a little pontifically, as if to rile the devil, “need to rest on something much deeper than the mechanics of a frame to prolong the semblance of sovereign life.”

  The doctor found his tongue at last. “Is it impure science then, impure art or religion, impure societies, that you favour?”

  “I favour the saving desolation of spirit that differs from, though it resembles, despair; I favour the mystery of shocking truth or starkest spirit penetrating and reassembling evolutions, and then it is possible for a king to confess to native evil as inseparable from change – inseparable ingredient in the conscience of wisdom or maturity and change – to confess also to native bias and partiality as bitter travail, and to yield himself in ailing person and deed, through prayer and through necessity, to transfigurative dismemberment/rememberment and rebirth in community and of community.”

  The devil vanished as if he had been ousted but the riddling frames of temptation and revelation had not ceased and Masters found himself at the foot of a great palace that rose out of the hollow depression of a half-breathing, half-breathless organ or heart that plagued him still with parallel fires, the fire of the healer, the fire of the destroyer. He placed a tentative foot on a rung in the palatial ladder and recalled, in that instant, Thomas’s animated mask of curiosity glued to the bars and segments of the Alms House gate in New Forest through which he observed Aunt Alice dancing for her supper with faltering yet inimitably courageous steps.

  Like Thomas’s, Masters’ eyes were glued to the ladder. Ladder or giant wheel, giant heartbeat within deceptive hollows, deceptive heavens, and with hope beyond hope and hopelessness of true heaven. As he stared through the gate he saw the shadow of Alice gesticulating, warning him, but much more unexpectedly and oddly vivid was the face of the West Indian operator in the factory whom he thought he knew but had been unable to place. He shook the ladder or gate now, and it dawned on him then, as a sudden wheel rattled, who the operator was. A faded newspaper floated down the rungs of the ladder and settled on a cyclist’s brow. That was it. That was the man! Here was the young cyclist who had collided with Martin Weyl in Carnival year 1939. A College Boy then, seventeen years of age.

  Masters studied him closely, unable to trust his luck, unable to believe that after so many long weeks in the factory cudgelling his brains, now at last he remembered, now at last, upon the first rung of the dying ladder of an age in his body, he knew the identity of his fellow worker.

  The newspaper floated a little in a breath of wind. It was brown and faded. It lacked the meticulous print of the “leaves of grass” in Purgatory’s Who’s Who. But despite this the picture of the young cyclist was impressive as skeleton or ivory or bone that had been browned – if that were possible – by heart’s fire. Parchment invisible heart’s fire. He (the cyclist in bone-brown fire) was wearing a cricketer’s blazer and flannels. His features were curiously round as if ready to bounce … Ah yes! the plague of the heart that cuts into the soul of a brilliant athlete and makes him bounce into eternity. Masters knew him, yes, unmistakably. He had seen him running in the College grounds to catch a ball falling out of the sky from Philip Rodrigues’ bat. Ball. Heart. Bat. Philip of Spain. Remember? The Venezuelan high jumper! Masters was jolted through Carnival ladder of heaven to perceive the young cyclist clutch at the handle bar of his machine. He pulled his brakes hard but was unable to stop. He collided with the half-sleeping, half-dreaming advocate of a pagan body that Martin Weyl was.

  Advocate of a pagan body. How curious to see it like that, in such a light, with one apparently Christian foot on the rung of a ladder, of a gate, a palatial ladder, a palatial gate. As if that pagan body might restore his (Masters’) dying heart, might be of advantage to the kingdom he had glimpsed with mask glued to ladder and bar.

  Then came the additional shock. Martin Weyl was flung into the centre of the road. It was too late for him (Masters) to reach out and save his friend. He felt that if it were not for the acute pain in his chest he could have done it even now after nearly twenty years. He could have reached back through a hole in time and saved him. He could have reached through the ladder. He could have seized Martin by the hair, by a grain of fire, and saved him. But no! The dray-cart, the startled horse or mule, was upon him. He was dead. But that was not the end of the matter. Too late to save him but not too late to be saved by him, by the friend he dreamt he may have saved.

  He was assured after his apparently total recovery on the last day of November 1958 that the heart attack he had suffered had been a minor one despite the hole or lapse or black-out into which he had fallen. But he knew differently when he stood in the palace gate or ladder pointing to the bride of heaven within a cricket bat or cricket ball floating toward Vega in space. In part he was saved by the shadow of Aunt Alice, by her ageing Bartleby humour, crumbling gesticulation through the bars of heaven, and by the cautionary mask she provided for the young, sensuous flying Alice whose wings encircled Quabbas, the young fiery Amaryllis to whom I made love when Masters descended into the Inferno. Aunt Alice cautioned him not to be tempted by the brilliance of such fiery intercourse; to turn back to archaic Earth, to seek to wed the museum of the elements that needed him still. She pointed to Martin Weyl, to his Carnival posture – under wheel or horse or mule – as advocate of a pagan body.

  “Yes,” said Aunt Alice, “too late to save your friend but not too late to be saved by him, to have his pagan confessional heart lodged in your breast.”

  Her shadow had solidified. She seemed suddenly to become a divine gossip – how else may I describe it? – of heaven. “Do you know, Everyman,” she said to Masters, “that he’s still toiling away at his precious ‘charisma of the law’ theorem?”

  “That was the main plank in his defence of the red prince,” said Masters. “I recall how passionate he was – the law is valid, he said, indispensable, even in Purgatory and hell, not to speak of heaven – but because of territorial imperatives, absolute or rigid frontiers above and below (on sea, land, in the air), there is a hideous charisma, a moribund authoritarian fixture of emotion that bars or excludes even as it confines peoples. Moribund it may be, he declared, but in actual practice it remains terrifyingly constant and it underpins all liberal codes – even those liberal codes that attempt to argue sensibly that security is mutual, never one-sided.”

  “Ah yes,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby, “if I were allowed, my dear, to take you up and through the ladder, I would show you where he sits writing day and night. Sometimes I find him arguing with a judge, the shadow of a judge, who assumes all sorts of shapes. Sometimes the judge looks like young Weyl, the son judges the father. It’s too absurd! It’s a dream. It’s amazing. His own son sitting there with Amaryllis.” Aunt Alice was laughing and weeping, I thought.

  “Sometimes,” she said sombrely, “he plays the scene of his death all over again. Like a kind of cosmic cinema. Why, bless my heart, there he is now. He’s descended the ladder! He’s playing the scene. Look! There’s the newspaper cyclist. There’s the ancient donkey or horse or mule, the wheel, the cart.”

  There he was indeed. I saw him, my father. I could see him through the bars of the ladder, even through Aunt Alice Bartleby’s solid, gesticulating, crumbling shadow. It was as if an unforeseen rumbling of the law made itself manifest in his advocacy of a pagan body. His frame, his chest, was suddenly rent before my eyes to illumine savage unconscious realms in which the innocent advocate pays for the guilty court he addresses. Was he falling – as the wheel caught him – through the ladder of the sky from a murdered aeroplane to illumine territorial charisma he had sought to unravel, had he been shot to ribbons under the divinity of the sea’s ladder to illumine Carnival bandages, had he been crushed on a battlefield to illumine a mask of shell?

  He had paid the price for deliberating upon territorial imperatives to an indifferent, largely insensible court. He had become the savage hollow he sought to explicate and unravel. He had been
broken on the wheel. He had trespassed beyond conventional pavements into the traffic of deadly highways. Or so it seemed to me as I contemplated Masters on his chain that wound itself into many worlds, past, present and to be.

  My father had defended a pagan El Doradan whose hideous imperatives could be traced far up, far back, into ancient fires when statesmen-priests broke the organ in their victims’ chest and offered it to the sun or – should the sun fail – to unknown fires far out in space, to foetal plants around Vega.

  Such charisma, he argued, had survived within the civilization of twentieth-century age as the reverberating shock of pagan body-ritual of which we were oblivious. Witness our predilection for black-out Carnival and games of nuclear holocaust we have played with computers, with robots, fallen numbers, surviving numbers, underground caves. And thus it was not to be wondered at that humanity, in its subconscious or unconscious advocacy of the body as fodder for the State, was articulating an ancient ritual dressed up in the vestments of purist obsession; it was not to be wondered at that societies were suicidal and accident-prone, and that even those who wrestled to enlighten us with parallel formations fell asleep and stumbled under Christ’s Trojan donkey or resurrection mule.

  Christ’s Trojan donkey! What a parallel! Could one bear the shock of such a parallel, I wondered? Could such a parallel bring a new beast, a new heart, a new love, upon which to ride …? Was this my father’s gift, the gift of the beast he dreamt he entered the moment he fell under shadow and hoof?

  In an accident-prone, suicidal and conflict-ridden age, violence is a savage masquerade, is it not? It feeds on a void of sacrament and on the infliction of humiliation and shadow. It not only feeds on these but remains blind to the pressures to which it is addicted.

  “I know, I know,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby. “I see massacres on earth when I look through the bars of heaven, so many pathetic bodies.”

  “What has all this to do with Weyl and me?” Masters demanded. He knew the answer but it was difficult to shoulder such terrible knowledge, that an equation existed between Christ’s pagan donkey and the human beast of love upon which the universe rides.

  He touched his own body, his own beast. It seemed to reflect the rent in Weyl’s frame. He had used labouring men and women in his plantation, overseering days as beasts of burden. But the heart of the beast was now his. Weyl had given it to him to pass on to me within the golden chain of existence. It was his, it would renew him, it would save him, imbue him with unbearable and bearable insights as time rode on his back.

  “If you see that, my dear Masters, a spiritual evolution in the law may suddenly thrust you into the stars, as into the labyrinth of the Earth, to plumb the equation between fire and fire. If you cannot see it, or plumb it, accidents will pile up everywhere around you. For those accidents are your soul that remains oblivious of its parallel heritages and weeps with a thousand eyes on every battlefield, on every roadway.

  “Unless you see yourself as paradoxically enriched by savage pathos, savage dream, you cannot break the spell of motiveless crime, you cannot overcome Hades, you cannot see God.”

  *

  Early in December, apparently fully recovered – new mystical “savage heart” lodged in his body from Weyl’s rent side and resurrection mule – Masters telephoned the factory in North London and discovered that his West Indian colleagues had been transferred to day shift. He felt he should visit them and say goodbye.

  It was curious to reflect, I thought, upon the chain of being through life into death and back again and the necessity for a revisualized chain in the dead king of whom I dreamt and whose steps I had retraced into childhood light year in parallel with the ancient game of the crab. I heard again the mysterious voice that had addressed him and me a moment ago, saying this time, “In El Doradan light-year crab the spirit or half-obliterated cosmic pattern cries out to be completed or fulfilled, cries from the other side of the womb or death-in-life. Cries to be reborn or resurrected. Such rebirth or resurrection is a mystery that resides in parallel shapes and riddles.”

  Through the chain of being I began to treasure the commingling of elements in the marriage of Earth and sky, and thus I was able to visualize something I may only describe as “phenomenal resurrection”, healed character, enveloping Masters when he returned for the last time to the factory.

  I dreamt the rain ceased the morning he set out on a bus from Notting Hill Gate, but everywhere the light seemed to drip into overcast translucency, mutated silver, mutated pearl. Space within the dead, resurrected king and space without him and me was diffuse, it was a web draping the bare, sculpted branches of trees. The conjunction of inner and outer space was a token of healed hollow or recovery from depression, from illness.

  I felt silences within that hollow despite the sound of the traffic. Not only recovered heart but recovered ear encompassed those silences. Silent music. How did one respond to silent music? There it was. Seen music, unheard music. Recovered eye. Recovered ear. Recovered heart. Sight, sound, memory etched themselves into silences replete with harmony: etched themselves through recovered being yet ran upon the fine branches of trees that the dead king perceived as the bus moved, stopped, moved again in the vicinity of Kensington Gardens.

  In the winter light that seemed to echo with intimate yet far-away vistas arching through Waterfall Oracle, I felt the imprint of black fire, black tone, numinous wonderful shadow. That imprint or sensation was so acute, so deep, Masters was caught by the Carnival mask of Lazarus, mind of Lazarus in his mind, as the heart of Weyl stood in his heart. Yes, mind, heart, shadow! Imprint of fire, shadow, was the mind of Lazarus in his mind to attune him to ivories of sensation, russets, and other alphabets of the elements within every hollow epitaph of memory, every hollow grave.

  Winter lapsed into the carpet of autumn leaves under the bole of a tree that the bus was passing. The trampled leaves appeared to smoke with an arousal of spirit, trampled greenness, trampled yellow paint, in the hollow depression of time and place from which one arises to discourse with silent music within the roar of a great city …

  The factory seemed different to Masters’ Carnival Lazarus’ eyes in this actual day of arousal of spirit; different from how it had appeared to him during night shift. Yet night shift had seemed to him but manufactured day, susceptible, at the same time, to blazing stars and constellations.

  In the winter day the factory was susceptible to artificial noon. The lights were still on as at night but they were different, he perceived again, from the illuminations he recalled when he blacked out. They were deceptively natural, less glaring. Why should night glare and day time industry under the same manufactured stars be deceptively natural sky or cave of illumination in this late twentieth-century age?

  The walls of the factory seemed sharper somehow, greyer somehow, to Masters’ Lazarus’ eyes. They seemed composed of slices and excavations, raw material blood that was white or grey not red, sliced pallor of noon, real noon (whatever that was), artificial noon (whatever that was).

  It was this elusive distinction between noon as universal artifice and sliced bread of reality that sobered the Carnival dead king Masters – if he needed sobering at all – and drew him to perceive how close his shadow was to all industrial revolutions, ghost towns, ghost factories, ghost cradles, all hollows, all realms, within the emotion of transplanted arousal of spirit.

  Double arousal. Transplant. Resurrection.

  It was a liberation yet a burden, transplant/resurrection. He perceived the sadness of a world that was resourceful yet deprived, he perceived the roots of aching memory, the cave, the nursery fable that the dead bring on their backs to be patented anew in Santa Claus commercials, the study, the skin transplants of Christmas, the masks, the oddest commotion in aroused blood, the humour of lust, as workers idled a little and contemplated their coming holiday.

  It was the objectivity of Lazarus-spirit, yes, but in the reanimation of mystical organs, it evoked vistas of shocking illusion
, shocking power to be all things to all men, power to deceive the corruptible with the corruption of magic. “Oh mind of Lazarus,” said Masters, “what a temptation it is: to see through all things, all peoples, to rule with the power of the grave.”

  He looked across the apparently real, the apparently artificial light of noon and waved to one of the West Indians he had come to see. He had cultivated a good accord with the two operators of Madame Guillotine but was astonished – despite his insight into the powers he now possessed – when Jackson, the older operator, rushed across tempestuously to greet him, to seize his magnetic Lazarus hand, and to shake it staunchly with a great demonstration of affection. Affection? No, something else. It was awe, I dreamt. Expectation of wonders. “I sorry James ain’t here to greet you, Everyman,” Jackson cried, “he had a narrow shave. Lucky devil! He swears your magic did the trick, that you pulled him back from the pit.”

  “Me?” Masters felt his misgivings were being confirmed. “What did I do?” He smiled secretly, self-mockingly, with sudden pleasure that enormous as his powers appeared to be he was helpless in this instant and could not see into Jackson’s mind and read the tale of James whom he (Masters) – it would seem – had pulled back from the pit. Jackson was having a late tea break close to noon and he drew Masters to a table. “You gave him some damn frozen bubble to wear on his chest, remember?”

  Masters had forgotten. “Did I?” then he remembered. “Something from Waterfall Oracle, shaped like a horse?”

  “Horse, yes, he was driving home on the highway and dropped off into a doze at the wheel. When he wake he was in a kind of ravine, at the bottom of an embankment. The car lay on its back.”