The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  ‘New El Dorados?’ I was sceptical. ‘There is growing unemployment. There is the rise of labour-saving devices, new clocks whose every tick manufactures redundancy. And this is Skull. It is the archetypal Colony in the magic wood. It stands in or over a swamp.’

  ‘The archetypal Colony may seem remote from the West but it is an extension of the West. The refugees will come. Indeed they have never ceased to come, sometimes as a trickle, sometimes as a wave. Look deep! Look deep into the heart of the swamp that stains every page of history. Look deep into the necessity to manufacture asylums for refugees, ghetto asylums, god knows what. Scrap a couple of rockets, a couple of nuclear bombs, half a dozen submarines and battleships, an extra penny or two on income tax, and heigho, Skull may be converted into a prosperous concentration camp.

  ‘Think of the prospect of cheap energy. Look deep, I say, into the swamp. Look deep into the cheap electric stars and the cheap electric suns reflected there in the mirror of coming technologies, coming at any price, any human price. Look into the brave new world. Look into the faeryland promise of Chernobyl. Time lifts its skirt like a radioactive whore.’

  All my ancient and modern loathing or detestation of Ghost returned. ‘This is a joke, an obscene joke,’ I cried. ‘Face the facts. Don’t exaggerate. Chernobyl is a disaster complex in the Soviet Union. What has it got to do with the free West and the choices that lie before the electorates of the free West? Are you saying such choices are an illusion?’ I felt the shadow of terror in my resurrected body. ‘What bearing has faeryland on Skull?’

  ‘Hush-hush disaster, dateless day bearing,’ said Ghost. ‘When Communist Rome burns an empire of souls inhales its ash. But no one sees the fire or the brute faery at the extremities of our fingertips. So too when faeryland burns (and the absent body you wear and loathe and which you and I share, as a multi-faceted investiture with which to address and warn the world, looms into theatre) the building blocks of heaven are shaken by the storm. But no one sees or hears the earthquake – not even those who are experimenting with human souls. Skull, dear Robin Glass, is our coming asylum for the refugee spirit. Skull is the dateless day that Faust simulates. Skull is the transformation of the swamp of history into an electric paradise. Cheap energy is the opium of the masses, the new lotus.’

  I felt the hordes of the future rush through me into Skull. I pencilled some notes into my book.

  Dateless Day Play. Dateless Day (plucked from a pre-Columbian infinity calendar) relics of memory. Hollow humanity.

  Tooth and ring. Chapel perilous of the sea (AD 1961–2).

  Bridge into Skull. Chapel perilous of the flatlands (AD 1962).

  Indistinct clamour of refugees of spirit. Cheap energy is all (AD 1962–86).

  Faeryland burns at Chernobyl (AD 1986).

  Capital investment for Play of Humanity begins in Skull. Asylum for refugees. Marvellous glittering tomb-shaped edifice. Twenty-first century sophisticated concentration camp. Fodder of generations (AD 2000–2050).

  I re-read my notes. My loathing of Ghost intensified. I tore the notes into scraps but they floated over the water like a measure of the dancing city, the dancing theatre, of Skull.

  Towers were built. Promenades. Halls. Shopping precincts. Streets. Etc., etc., etc. It was a grand play, a grand village. One matter had been omitted from my notes. And now I found myself pencilling it with invisible lead on to the brow of Skull.

  Plutonium has been found. Sophisticated Third World/First World dump in the text of the magic wood.

  I tried to tear this up too but the bone in the masks of Skull that some of the players wore in the Play of Humanity resisted my touch.

  Yet the sensation reminded me of the enigma of time, time’s bone as well as time’s page, and I found myself tracing a calendrical road that ran into the theatre of Skull. It was called Dateless Day Infinity Route or Tunnel. I moved along it to its junction with Prospero Mall. And here it was that I came upon Peter and Emma in the year AD 2025. Was this an arbitrary calendrical year or was it a provocative and lucid dream-choice reflecting the measureless yet ironically pinpointed canvas in the drama of the future within the life of the creative present?

  I reached out to them from within the tunnel: I back from the drowned dead in each year, each century; they hovering still, it seemed, at the margins of the pinpointed living where the spray of the sea in every leaf, in every flower, broke our lips into a kiss.

  Tunnel of immortality? Tunnel of death? Tunnel of the resurrection?

  As our hands and lips met and parted I felt I had aged not a whit since AD 1962. Peter and Emma, on the other hand, were my own age yet they seemed older than I in the tunnel or the relic or the passageway of memory in which we stood. Was it ten years older? Was it twenty years older? I puzzled over the difference. What is five years or ten years or twenty years between friends? And yet – since Peter and Emma and I were actually the same age – it became important to know why they seemed older, I younger, why in another light of dream-theatre I might become older, they younger. Were such values of time purely arbitrary, purely conventional aspects of story line in the play of a civilization? Or were they a reflection of absent bodies entering time, excavating time, changing our innermost grasp of fate and of freedom within the veil of time?

  I knew it all signified a measure of ironic spirituality and dream-choice in the way one excavates the biases of time, the tyrannies of time. Each relic of time, each built passageway, each sculpted tunnel or bowl or room, each cell, each cradle, glimmered with the cruelties of the past yet with a theatre of new-born spirit to breach or transform a moment of terror.

  Each minute distinction of years between me and Peter and Emma in the theatre of spirit reflected our vision or capacity to see or feel or grasp the urgencies and the consequences in the architectures and connective rooms of our age. And in opening a dream-tunnel that ran from the middle of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century we were involved not only in generations but in the pinpointed canvas of the years, in one’s illusory yet immortal youth as much as in one’s illusory and immortal old age.

  One was involved in the nature and the meaning of survival as much as in unravelling a distinction in minute accretions in the value of time within childhood theatre, within resurrectionary theatre, within political theatre.

  I knew there was a distinction between simulated immortality or youth or old age and the terrifying insights associated with a resurrection/a revolution of inner mind, inner spirit.

  In this instance – in reaching out to Emma and Peter – I was assailed by the enigma of authorship and charactership across the years in the Play of Humanity and in my fictional autobiography.

  One loomed large (the play of humanity) whereas the other, my book, was minute but intensely real, intensely poignant.

  In AD 1962 – when I came within hailing distance of Skull – I was aware of Ghost’s extension of himself into W. H.’s ageing mask through which I wrote my fictional autobiography.

  Now, however – in AD 2025 – though I remained as young as ever (my hair was immaculately black and I was dressed to a t or a T in the paradox of time/Time) I knew that W. H. himself had vanished and that someone else – some other ageing mask – played the role of authorship/charactership in my book as if I were he, he me. The name or the initials on this new ageing mask eluded me. Yet they marked a further and crucial development in my book. They implied the secretion of ageless myth in the theatre of the world as a subtle rebuttal of an authoritarian realism – however sophisticated – an authoritarian story line or sophisticated dumping ground in the theatre of Skull for an irrelevant and a doomed humanity held in thrall by the logic of violence, the logic of hell. In that subtle rebuttal lay the foundations of religious hope. But even so I could not be sure how precarious such foundations were, how costly they might prove. How possible, or impossible, it was to make a beginning – nothing more – in switching the priorities of Billionaire Death away from the cinematic danc
e and extermination of the brutes (that claimed the bright lights of Broadway Skull) into scenarios of a hospital of infinity at the heart of space.

  Perhaps Peter and Emma knew of such beginnings and might be able to disclose some unsuspected shift in the priorities of Skull. For they (Peter and Emma) were themselves characters of myth. They had become this in peculiar, uncertain and groping – even self-contradictory – degrees in the midst of the desolations of Prosperity. One finds such characters in every city, in every throng of refugees. The odd survivors. They belong yet do not belong. In some quite lucid and strangely factual way I knew I existed in their dreams – that they were dreaming of me as I dreamt of them at a junction in the tunnel where the resurrection of the dead seemed to blend with the survival of the endangered living.

  I knew that their dreams of me were intensely real, that their survival, their escape from drowning, had so affected them, that I was in the very fibre of their lives, an eternal question mark, an eternal misgiving. I was the seed of their terror and their uncertainty in Skull. What did survival truly mean when all those who are dearest to one have vanished? Equally they were for me the seed of religious hope. What did resurrection/revolution truly mean unless one could place it in living, uncertain flesh-and-blood within oneself/without oneself?

  ‘I have been looking for you for ages,’ I said to them. ‘And now at last …’ I hesitated but rushed on. ‘The resurrection’s a fact, Emma. It’s no panacea, Peter. It doesn’t stop the pain of living. That I now know. I can tell you this. If anything it intensifies mental anguish. For one sees into the shell of what one was. One sees into the bankruptcy of one’s civilization: a terrible business. And yet one loves one’s fellow woman and man as never before. One truly knows the fabric of compassion, of pity, of beauty. A terrifying kind of longing, of hope, within the hollowness of one’s age.’

  Peter was staring hard at me. ‘That’s why I became an addict,’ he said. ‘Self-love. Egotistical love. Break all sound barriers. I drink the lotus, the opium of the masses. The death wish of an age. I am a popular singer and player and I feed on the lotus, belly to belly, back to back death wish in Calypso’s and Tiger’s band. A new lament, a new ballad of the soul, Robin!’ He was staring at me quizzically and I could not be sure how serious he was, whether he was testing me, mocking me, mocking himself, testing himself.

  Emma tore the shred of incipient but mutual addiction, mutual self-pity from our eyes. ‘That’s not what Robin is saying, Peter,’ she said to me as though she were addressing him. Her voice softened. ‘Poor Peter! He’s an incurable romantic, Robin. But what would I do without him? Robin’s talking of a voice and an ear, Peter, we seldom hear or use. Not BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM. He’s saying it’s a voice and an ear we may come to perceive within ourselves when we return to ourselves and know ourselves for the first bleak and terrible time. Without fallacy. Without illusion. Nothing egotistical. Know suddenly at the heart of despair the true stranger in ourselves, Peter, beyond all our vanity in whom lies the promise of glory.’

  She uttered the word ‘glory’ with reluctance, misgiving. An abused word. Napoleonic glory? The glory of lust? I knew she meant neither of these. What did she mean? It was as if she had read the question in my mind as I had read the question in hers in the tunnel of classical penetration, classical endurance, classical genius of love. I saw in a flash that she was a priest, a female priest, she was hope in the city of Skull, revolutionary hope, unconventional hope.

  ‘It’s divine Communism,’ Peter murmured, ‘when the male priest sups with the female priest at the same high table in the tunnel of centuries …’ He stopped as if he had said too much. But even so it was a definition of ‘divine’ and of ‘Communism’ I had never heard before. Still I wondered. What was ‘divine Communism’? Like ‘glory’ it was of debased coinage, an abused term. Take ‘Communism’! What was ‘Communism’? Surely not the Communist Rome that burnt at Chernobyl while the Party fiddled. Take ‘divine’! What was the ‘divine’? Surely not the pomp and the robes in the theatre of Skull.

  Emma, the priest, caught the drift of reflection. She turned to Peter as if he were me in the veil of the tunnel and I were he in the play of divinity. ‘When one breaks true bread,’ she said, ‘with the true stranger in oneself who knows one, is unsparing with one, yet perceives the creative conscience and potential in one, then one begins an ascent through the follies of one’s age to a vision of divine Communism. Alas it’s not easy.’ Her eyes were both dark and pale. I saw she wished to goad me, to startle me, within our pattern of lucid dream. She shot at me, ‘You, Robin, will need Peter as alter ego stranger – alter ego theatre – when you climb the Mountain of Folly above Skull.’

  A beam shone through the tunnel that alerted us – Peter, Emma and I – to dateless day infinity comedy in which we were involved. Perhaps it was Emma’s allusion to ‘alter ego theatre’ that reminded me of the ruses and the labyrinths of Faust, the simulated voices, simulated scripts, that passed as normality in Skull. Imagine the various factories, pubs, bedrooms, drawing rooms, football arenas, offices, stages – imagine the elegant and violent puppetries, the strings that are pulled, the solemn manifestos, the rages, the brutalities, the sermons, the curses, the drunken fights, the programmes, the dangling shadow of bait – imagine the follies of which Emma had spoken. Follies of Skull! Circus of Skull! Reflexes of Skull!

  We – Emma, Peter and I – were caught in the web of Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours that passed for normality. And yet … I paused, reflected again. Did I mean abnormality? There lay a distinction between ourselves and the ‘normal’ world. We accepted our abnormality and the bizarre truths associated with ourselves as a capacity to mirror yet repudiate and breach Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours. Our apparent unreality – our very unreality – witnessed to a self-confessional reality in which we came to the edge of ourselves and looked through ourselves. To be true (to know truth) within an age of violence and lies, an age subject to the reflexes of Skull, was to sense a curious irreality in oneself, a curious originality, a curious divergence from the circus of the real (or what passed for the real).

  All this made me scan Emma’s features closely. She was veiled by dateless day infinity comedy. I saw her innate sorrow. I suddenly saw how worn she was. It was as if a nail had woven its innermost weblike constancy into her flesh, an ecstatic nail, a sorrowing nail. Ecstatic and sorrowing! That was her bizarre truth, her divergence from what passed as the real in the circus of the normal and the real.

  ‘O Emma,’ I cried impulsively, ‘tell me please. How have you made out all these years? There were debts to pay, the old house was sold. Even Miriam’s theatre fell under the hammer though W. H. preserved it for a while.’

  ‘I have paid dearly,’ Emma said. ‘Survival is dear, it is beyond price, but it is worth it.’

  ‘It must have been a difficult time after Alice’s death, Miriam’s death, my death.’

  ‘A difficult time indeed,’ Emma confessed, ‘a difficult adjustment for Peter and me. We once shared everything, remember? We were part of your family, remember? We shared the little theatre in the magic wood, remember? We shared every meal. And then came the earthquake, the crash … It was as if we had been orphaned all over again. Flung out of the cradle all over again. But there was no one like Alice to take us in this time. As I lay on the beach I was pierced by the cry of the gulls, the laughing sea gulls. Were they gulls or were they cranes? I could not tell. It was a cry from heaven and yet it was a subtle, piercing, shaking laughter. A shaking note like strings of music in the sea. The motif of an incomparable composition. Music such as we had dreamt to hear in our little theatre.’ She stopped as if she remembered something I had forgotten. ‘Did you not ask Aunt Miriam, Robin, what is laughter’s mask? Did you not hunt through a trunk of dresses and costumes, etc., in an old cellar?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Aunt Miriam wept when you asked her on the bed of the sea. Well let me tell you, Robi
n, that the answer lay in a bird’s cry, a bird’s feather that pierces heaven and strings the music of laughter into the grief of rain. It was a nail, a half-rending sound, that rose from the sea, from Tiger’s broken body, from the shattered boat, from the ships of all the navies of all the oceans, from a broken barrel, an invisible barrel on which Alice leaned into the crest of a wave. It was a nail. And it pierced me. I was nailed into the ground.’

  ‘My God, Emma!’ I was confused. I recalled the apparition of Ghost, multi-faceted Ghost, innermost Ghost, outermost Ghost, arising from the sea.

  ‘My God, Emma!’

  ‘In such a nail that shatters one’s prepossessions I knew the construction of a sound that echoed in the air and in the sea. It was the music of the priest, of the God of nature. One comes,’ said Emma, ‘to a beloved creation, to the divine, in every moment that one survives in the inimitable textures of nature, truly lives and survives.’

  I shook myself hard. I tried to reason with myself. I almost felt that I had taken advantage of her, that I knew her secrets because I had lain with her there on the beach, with my lips within the cover of her hair yet on her breasts. I shook myself. I tried to reason with myself. ‘You were desolated, Emma. You had narrowly escaped drowning. One understands.’

  ‘One understands,’ said Emma and looked at me as if she were addressing Peter, ‘that a priest in a desolate age, in a drowned age, must pay dear for an illumination of ecstasy, Robin. How can one surrender oneself to laughter in the midst of survival that leaves one bereft? How can one sing in the midst of survival that leaves one bereft? How can one play? Yet one does. Peter sings. Peter plays. Calypso sings. Calypso dances. And you and Alice and Miriam paid with your lives for them to be merry in the light of a stranger ecstasy. As for me I became a priest. I dedicated myself to simplicity’s tasks, simplicity’s meals, and to a butterfly-lantern at the heart of the globe.’