The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  ‘What is spirit when it broods upon chaos, Alice? Ask the politicians, the ageing politicians of the world, who are henpecked in the sacred wood. I ask you, Alice. I ask you to come on stage on the crest of a wave – the name I have given our little theatre.’ (Aunt Miriam ran a school of drama (called The Crest of the Wave) in her home beside the sounding sea. It was but half a mile or so away from Alice’s house in which many rehearsals were conducted.)

  ‘Let’s begin. Let’s rehearse, Alice.’ She stopped again as if she were intent on dramatizing the part she wished Alice to play. ‘I ask again – what is spirit when it broods upon chaos? Don’t reply straightaway. Shrug your shoulders and point to the Sphinx. Then say – let me see – something like this: “when angry spirit becomes an incestuous block or riddle the food in our very mouths is susceptible to plague”.’

  ‘I have no intention of saying anything of the sort,’ said Alice. But this was her cue nevertheless in my sea of Sleep on the crest of a wave. She moved across the chapel perilous to the window on the waving street beneath our house. ‘I say the terror of the void,’ she cried in the heart of my dream. Her glass lips touched mine as fish flew through our hair like beautiful birds. ‘I say the terror of the void. The terror …’ and then she saw the spiritual (or the vile) dancer Tiger staring up at her from the street and listening intently. Her voice fell … ‘of the void.’

  Spiritual (or was it vile?) Tiger had heard every word. He leapt on the stage with his drum of thunder and his guitar. He leapt over the fence, raced to the front door and was inside in a flash. And then I knew. He had been manipulated by Faust, Faust’s machines, Faust’s technologies, to bang away at the terror of the void. My mother had pricked his animal spirit on the raw.

  ‘What a paradox,’ said Miriam. Her lips moved in the play that she and Alice had half-made-up, half-borrowed from my grandfather’s Faust in the last days of his beriberi wilderness.

  ‘What a paradox,’ said Alice. ‘This is the age of the masses, the age of the best-seller, the age of the popular arts, the popular bands, and yet it is the age of the death wish, the age of drugs.’ Alice was nodding as if they murmured the lines together.

  ‘The torment of spirit. The death wish of an age. True spirit never wars with true spirit but since nature and the values of nature are inextricably woven into every populace – and populace is vulgar spirit – every illness of mind and of spirit becomes the substance of bodily, addictive passion, bodily, addictive fury, ear-splitting, addictive BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM wrestling with itself for a violent/non-violent habitation.’

  Then Tiger spoke the lines my grandfather wrote for him. Lines written in his last days in the Bush of the magic wood. My grandfather consumed the shell of a Skull-orange. It tasted so wonderfully sweet that he knew he had been deceived and that Death, the Tempter, stood beside him with the lotus flower in his hand. No ordinary lotus flower. Not the luxuriousness and the inactivity of the grave. No, something much more insidious. Deprivation. The drug of deprivation that looks like the seed of black (or white) purity, the black (or white) seed of God, when the drummer of the senses protests in a fever against the ills of the world that are as much in him as in those he assaults. The lotus flower of addictive bias that hardens into terror! My grandfather chewed it, tasted it, knew its wonderful relish, then spat it forth into Tiger’s speech.

  ‘If I bang Ghost,’ Tiger said, ‘in a dead poet’s – a dead magician’s – shadow in the sacred wood I may grasp, may I not, the hidden malaise (and hidden revolutionary capacity) in the popular arts? I shall try to bang Ghost and make him talk to you, Robin. Make him unravel the masquerade of Death as the Tempter, the bringer of the lotus flower. It’s a narrow pass, very narrow indeed, that I must take, I the dancer, the rebel.

  ‘You dead poet, dead magician, dead Quetzalcoatl, dead priests and scientists of ancient time, understand – surely you do – the predicament of the popular yet doomed player, popular yet doomed rebel, in an illiterate world. You swing in a sea or a cradle where I blow my deadly trumpet that is wreathed still, I confess, in unawakened powers, unawakened sensibilities, and in the mystery of deprivations through which I must pass. I confess to a reluctance to pass. Such self-righteous deprivation, such pride, seduces me, fastens upon me, as if it were the seed of purity, the seed of God.’

  Tiger had succumbed to the Tempter, to the lure and fallacy of black (or white) purity, and as a consequence the confused and confusing diet of the world, half-vile, half-spiritual, rushed into his Shadow and mine even in the last moments of his life, the ticking voice of the suddenly energized clock, ticking invisibly/soundlessly within the roar of passing time.

  Tiger was dying though he had not yet realized it. He was dying within my grandfather’s shadow on the page of a book in which history revised itself, the deprivations of Democracy and popular art revised themselves into cautionary ink, the dangers of fascist order, fascist purity, fascist white, fascist black. He knocked on the door of the page to elicit further lines from the dead magician’s hand. My grandfather may have heard. His dead hand, the hand of the magical dead, responded. It wrote some lines that it recalled from its youth before I was born. It could not write its own lines at that moment so it leant on the riddle of the Traveller from another time. As much as to say ‘you may knock Tiger and even though I hear I must be silent in order to stress that there are no easy answers to the predicament of a dying age within its most obvious, most telling biases and assumptions.’

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

  Knocking on the moonlit door;

  And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

  Of the forest’s ferny floor:

  And a bird flew up out of the turret,

  Above the Traveller’s head:

  And he smote upon the door again a second time;

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

  I repeated the lines now as if they were an unconscious charm directed at Death, the Tempter. I had hardly whispered to myself and to Tiger and to Alice and Miriam when there was the sound of a gunshot. Was it (that gunshot) the cry of the suddenly reawakened drum? Or was it Tiger’s shout? Tiger gasped. A hole appeared in his chest into which Death crawled. The blood trickled down and stained his trumpet. He lifted the music of dream-life rebellion, dream-life blood, to his lips and appeared to drink. Well of deprivation. Well of purity. Thus he would slip into popular divinity, popular martyrdom. He spun in the dance. His knees buckled. He clung to a dancing woman in the street and they fell together. In the folklore of the dancing Tiresias Tigers the passage to the underworld is adorned by twining snakes: psychical glass snakes in which are reflected the mystery of the male deprived mask and the mystery of the female deprived mask that Tiresias wears in turn within the logic of the terrible seer.

  ‘O God!’ Aunt Miriam cried. ‘The police are in the street. And an ambulance driven by Doctor Faustus. The police have been attacked. They have fired at the strikers, Alice.’ She stopped and turned to W. H. who advised her on occasions on the direction of her plays. ‘May not the shot that kills Tiger signify in our play a prophecy of coming wars, coming battles, in which men, women and children will die?’

  ‘What coming battles?’ Alice was sceptical.

  Miriam had no reply but I could have written the lines for her: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Uganda, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nicaragua. I could have added, ‘Alice thinks it’s just a play! Just fiction! Is fiction meant to be real as inner problematic truth, as unpredictable fact, as a blend of the two to stagger our deformities of insight, of perception, of heart and mind?’

  Tiger was dead but for a moment it seemed he had not yet breathed his last on ‘the crest of a wave’ in Miriam’s and Alice’s little theatre. The ecstasy of purity had cleared his vision for a brief spell. Deprivation of the senses was too real to be pure. The villain of the heart was too real to be pure white or pure black or pure red. The saint was too real to be divine e
xcept when divinity invokes a visionary humanity that sees through the veil of its crimes.

  Deprivation was so real it festered into food, deceptive lotus and plague, plenty and poverty.

  Hunger was so real that I ascended the moon as if it were Glass in a shoestring ladder and knocked on its door.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

  Knocking on the moonlit door.

  Belly to belly

  Back to back

  Ah don’t give a damn

  Ah done dead a’ready.

  And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

  I who sat by Thebes below the wall

  And walked among the lowest of the dead.

  I could not believe it. Ghost was speaking at last. No formal message. A repetition of familiar texts become however strangely cross-cultural, the strangest subversion, where one least suspected or expected to find it in hollow convention or solemn usage. An edge, nothing more, above the malaise, the death-wish of an age: an edge born of temptation that one unravels, perceives, and sifts until it yields a value beyond the immediate taste of temptation, the remorse, the penalty, the rewards.

  FIVE

  My mother died in 1961. I was sixteen. It was the year the Tiresias Tigers established a new theatre or tent in the magic wood. I heard their muffled drums. Drums swarming with spectres, spectres of the malaise of the twentieth century, a drum upon which the original dancer Tiresias Tiger tapped and tapped and tapped in my dreams. He had arisen from the grave with a hole in his chest when I was three years old.

  I played with him (he was a ragged doll) on the drawing-room carpet until he vanished and I did not hear of him, or see him, again until I learnt of the Tiresias Tigers of the magic wood.

  Absent or present he was often around the corner in my Sleep and through him I became a pork-knocker scientist who rattled the black hole of gravity in Tiger’s chest with a teaspoon.

  A frightening eye of sugar or telescopic spoon with which to scrape the barrel of the cosmos, a frightening glimpse into the heart of Ghost. It was also a mystic dream and the beginning of faith. Yes, faith! But faith in what? Was it faith in one’s powers to measure prosperity or to be measured by prosperity, to save or to be saved, to know or to be known? Was it faith in heaven or in hell?

  A recurring dream that came at least once a year across the waste land of childhood fantasy through the barrel at my gate into quantum quetzalcoatl mathematics in teaspoon and shoestring middle age.

  A disturbing dream for it set into circulation all over again the origins of sensation – such as tasting, rattling silver in a teacup, slicing a bone or a piece of meat that cost a pretty penny.

  I know for a fact that an industrial strike over starvation wages occurred on the sugar estates of Old New Forest in 1948 and several strikers were shot dead, one fell in the sugar bowl beneath our window embracing a woman and a child. A tight nightmare fit.

  I was three years old when it happened. Three-year-old relic of memory on whose lips was a grain of sugar, on whose lips was a grain of temptation! Memory’s repetitive anatomy may lie in a grain of sugar one surreptitiously steals, forbidden sugar, forbidden sweetness! I witnessed the clash with the police from our window above the square. It could have been happening in our drawing room. Alice and Miriam were staring. Staring eyes. Everything and everyone tumbled into a relic of memory as I now write as if I was there yet absent from myself. Absent living body. I saw the hollow ambulance with Doctor Faustus at the skeleton wheel. The commotion of the skeleton bands. BOOM BOOM DOOM DOOM. Commotion, ceaseless sweetness/bitterness elaboration, movement, voices.

  Thus I was moved across the years to sift unreliable fact from true play or fantasy and to reconsider the origins of sensation: an eye in the mouth of a sugar bowl and in the body of Tiresias, the seer.

  Take the seer’s eye: in the wake of the shot a blind silence enveloped every rattling teaspoon, every gun, every drum, every bone in the crowd in the square beneath our window. Then came an explosion of appetite and anger. I dreamt I saw the dead man move and eat the grain on my lip as he whispered in the hole in his chest, ‘Everything you have been tempted to consume recedes into me now, hollow me. See the sweets of violence in dead men’s chests, in dead men’s lungs, in dead men’s hearts, hear the bitterness of explosive suns.

  Fifteen suns in a dead man’s chest

  Yo-ho-ho and the taste of the lotus.

  A different bottled ear or eye from the one I received when I reached out to seize the kingdoms of glass, the kingdoms of the globe, and was greeted by my mother’s exclamation of joy. An ear and a mouth and an eye in a ragged man’s chest … I was translated, I was confused, by the telescopic mind of Ghost in Tiger’s body.

  The drums now spoke to the dead seer, the dead tiger, on the ground.

  ‘Fall down and die, Tiger. We shall pick you up. We shall drum. We shall measure the height of your dance and your fall through ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient America and ancient Africa into Robin Redbreast Glass waiting to see old Godot anew. Old Godot anew, Old Godot anew. Robin wants to know, wants to see, how far he must fall from the sky into old Godot anew. Why should a beast’s sudden death help us to map the ancient heavens anew within the radius of a star, a child’s star? One child’s star is another’s bullet.’

  I dreamt I put the question to Ghost and thought I heard him murmur very faintly in the hollow of my ragged doll, ‘Life needs death. Life needs death if it is to be. But remember it is through death that life measures itself, measures its achievements, its glories. Remember it is through death not with death – not in league with death as the ultimate violence, the ultimate deprivation. The distinction is a crucial one – it bears on the fabric of the resurrection within every extremity, every hollow …’ His voice faded. And now it was as if the waiting room of Godot broke its commission with Death and illumined a ragged queue in Tiger’s body. Strings were vibrating very subtly, with incredible lightness, incredible touch – the sensation of ragged but mysterious alignment with the glories, the achievements, of which Ghost had spoken. I began to marvel across the years and the generations at the sensitivity that lies in the fingers of a ghostly musician touching the leaves of the trees into rhapsodic murmur, the fingers of a ghostly drummer sounding in the Sleep of space, the fingers of green (as they are called) of a ghostly gardener, the fingers of earth of a ghostly man or woman who sculpts a rock and makes it live.

  Did I not dream that my own fingers were made of clay – of numb clay – until they scuttled on Glass and became the claws of a bird, then scuttled again, all of a sudden, into an intensity of feeling the instant I cried in my Sleep against the comedian of the machine who would have entrapped me, or seized me, as I alighted on a bell at the end of a rod?

  I thought of my grandfather’s manuscript (and its ramifications in the simulated world and the real world) – of my mother’s staccato fingers drumming on a typewriter as I dreamt I lay within her – of Aunt Miriam’s plays revising the histories of the world – and wondered at the origins of perception, the relics of memory that lay as much in me as in ancestral re-visions of The Waste Land and of Faust in other, nameless, intuitive masterpieces since time began.

  I remembered a journey I took when I was five years old through an ancient volume of Sleep. I remembered it all now as I arose from bed and brushed my teeth with the fin of a fish. I remembered my mother who died in 1961. She led me on that journey. She combed my hair with the honeycomb of the sea. She came into my dreams in a long swaying garment made of the sea, and of moss, and of countless stars sprung from the hollow yet resurrected body of Ghost.

  Was it a journey into her death or was it a journey we made when I was five years old? She comes to me when I am old, one hundred years old. The year is 2045. No, not old! Just five, a relic of memory. Five-year-old relic. The year is 1950 on a dusty calendar in an old trunk of books and masks.

  We make our way through the trunk and through the barrel at my gate,
the round ship, the round coffin of my ancestors. The year is 1950. I am five years old. My mother gives me a ring. I slip it on to my hand. But as I run on the beach it falls from my finger and is lost forever. Alice is angry. ‘You will find it some day,’ she says. ‘I promise you.’ Her voice is sad and angry and I am pierced by foreboding. It was a ring my grandfather had given her. An heirloom or something. Surely she was grossly careless to give it to me before I knew or understood.

  Good Ghost! The barrel at our gate was built by me in 1961 a month or two before my mother was drowned. It was built as a memorial to great navigators, great pork-knockers. How could we have made our way through it in 1950 with the lost ring? One is obsessed by time, one is obsessed by the timeless comedy of time. Perhaps the barrel I built in 1961 was invisible to us though it was already there flung up from the bottom of the sea on the crest of a wave of the future as my mother and I stood on the beach facing our grave when I was but a child and she a beautiful, angry woman.

  My mother leans on the invisible barrel now.

  ‘It’s grandfather’s memorial,’ I say.

  ‘And the ring?’

  ‘What ring?’ I had forgotten.

  ‘A ring of spiritual gold studded with minute diamonds on the inside where it touches your skin. On the inside is the flesh of infancy. On the outside is the wreck of a ship.’

  The wreck of a civilization? I was astonished. I lay under the wave of old age and looked up to the sky. I held my five-year-old hand up in the sea to the light of moon-shells, star-shells, sun-shells, and saw for the first time a ring on my mother’s skeleton left hand. Had she salvaged it from the sea the day she was drowned? I touched the ring in astonishment. Had I worn it all along and never known it was there?