The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  I scarcely heard what he was saying except that my books had secured him a bed in space. ‘You?’ I demanded. ‘Bought you a bed?’

  ‘Why yes me and alter ego you in a manner of speaking, Robin,’ said Peter mildly. ‘How could I be here ascending the Mountain of Folly, how endure its riddles in the heart of a dying age, except I had died to the machinations of Skull? A creative dying! A shared mask with the dying living in every theatre of conscience. Emma’s alive. She wears the mask of an archbishop in AD 2025. Her coronation’s today. Eighty years old. She like ourselves was born in 1945 when the Bomb fell.’

  ‘But when I dreamt I saw you and her in the tunnel … She dropped an ancient letter in my pocket and you were a book in her hand whose pages she turned …’

  ‘You were digging in your library and theatre of Sleep, Robin. You saw her through Death’s quantum eyes. And the quantum imagination risks everything to know the truth. Death becomes something of a classic when we fictionalize it, the classic penetration of all our ills and a revolutionary moment in our submission to the resurrection.’

  ‘You have not understood, Peter!’ I cried. ‘I am saying that when I saw her I sensed something, I sensed a struggle with ancient plays and texts and letters – I knew she was worn – she confessed her difficulties of an intimate nature – but she seemed so incredibly close to my immortal youth, immortal drowned Glass youth and mirror of space through which all things flit in the alchemy of the imagination.’

  ‘I know, I know, immortal Robin. The machinations of Faust. Beware of the Glass that may mesmerize you. And yet in another light immortality is the comedy of a changeless romance between true, inner flesh and true, outer spirit. Immortality is a feather in the Nightfall of the sea and the land. A feather by which we know that a stone and a ring and other relics that seem unequal may float and link themselves into a chain. Infinity’s chain. That that chain remains unbroken despite everything is our slender passion and hope of the transformation of injustice that we inflict on ourselves and upon others. Should it sever then we are lost. Then we fall into the abyss. But it will not, it cannot.’

  His words were the cue for us to move up to another room in space. Ghost had given this ward or room to his chauffeur of infinity who was tinkering at this moment with the rocket of which Doctor Faustus had spoken, the rocket band that had fallen from the sky.

  ‘It’s a fast car,’ I said to Peter. ‘It’s a still drum or band or something yet it’s moving at a fantastic speed. How can anyone hold on and work! Gravity’s – anti-gravity’s – miracle. I see it as if my eyes are glued into a camera yet flying in a moving fast photographic lens and object in a dark night beyond Mars and Venus.’

  ‘Planets are ailing fast cars in the hospital of infinity. They’ve been struck by giant meteors. A meteor’s a BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM band. This rocket fell at the foot of the Mountain of Folly. Then it was transported here. And it’s flying still on a film. Such is the genius of Faust.’ Peter was joking with his usual solemn, long face that I knew from long, long ago when we drew planets with chalk on blackboard in Miriam’s childhood theatre.

  ‘Each planet is the car of an imaginary greatness. Greatness rides again in the West! If you and I sit still, Robin, and wait long enough we may enter into orbit with Alexander and Napoleon and Captain Cat from Under Milk Wood.’

  ‘Captain Cat is crying,’ I said. ‘Do you remember that line? Captain Cat is dancing to the music of a sad Rosy guitar.’

  ‘Napoleon’s too fat to dance. The car or the ship or the chariot or the planet on which he lies is a dusty or a waterlogged campaign. It needs to be refurbished with glory. And as a consequence Ghost is driven to employ an army of doctors, chauffeurs of infinity, engineers, programmers, etc., etc., to build new beds, new experimental bunks in tanks, in submarines, in aeroplanes. New cannon poking out of featherbed pillows.’

  ‘Employment,’ I cried, ‘it’s employment for millions.’ But then I was stricken by the unemployment of the soul. ‘What is greatness,’ I asked Peter, ‘if the soul itself falls into disuse?’

  ‘And another thing,’ I said, ‘where lies the unbroken chain, the slender hope of which you spoke, in the débâcle of greatness that threatens to break the back of the earth?’

  ‘It lies in this seam we are pursuing through the Mountain of Folly,’ said Peter. ‘Look! Captain Cat is dancing. Old as a crafty waste land seer but not fat.’ And as he spoke I remembered the lament of Tiger and Calypso in the magic wood. I also remembered Tiger, Alice’s boat, that had toppled into the breaking sea. I remembered Tiresias, the seer, whose spectacles I now placed on my eyes like a tourist under a black sky. I saw the negative film of Thebes, I saw the negative film of ancient walls under the sea through which Tiger fell. I saw Napoleon’s negative crown and Alexander’s sceptre and Captain Cat’s tombstone floating with Alice’s ring and with the stone from a Jamaican hillside. Except that they lay now far below the Wave on the glittering scales that the fictionalization of Death had brought to me.

  It was an uncanny vortex. The flotsam and jetsam of empires! Everything moving fast yet still. Everything balanced yet toppling.

  ‘All I can say,’ I began but stopped and appealed to Ghost. He saw my plight and put words on the page of my lips.

  ‘All I can say is that the scales are set to weigh an imaginary substance, the imaginary substance of greatness that lies in a fabric we can never wholly grasp.

  ‘When I saw the ring and the stone in equilibrium at Death’s window I was involved in a religious equation between violence (the slain child) and sacrament (the ring). It was as if the speeding universe slowed for a moment into marvellous poise and equilibrium of spirit within relics of memory. But higher up now – with Ghost’s chauffeur – I cannot dodge or escape the fact of chaos (and so must relate to it as a factor in the marvellous equation of spirit): must relate to it through history that expands into the vision of the seer, visionary motion in motionlessness, the ironies of full employment yet the unemployment of the soul; and this involves me as much in the day I was drowned – when the boat Tiger sank – as in the day ancient Rome fell or Byzantium became a mirage and Greece vanished.

  ‘Imagine the refugees of spirit across the centuries. Imagine the marriage of turbulence and stillness in every dying mask, imagine vast waves and still bodies, moving hordes and etched caravans against a sky that topples into space. Imagine the literacy of the seer at the heart of chaos, a literacy that reads the beauty of God in every delicate web within the seamless robe of eternity.’

  *

  Seam and seamlessness! Peter and I had pursued the seam or the delicate web between remembering and forgetting faculties in our ascent through and above the Mountain of Folly. Through and above! Within and without! Here lay the paradox of the seamless garment upon Emma’s shoulders. Peter vanished. I thought I saw him ascending the wave of the rock and then it was as if his shadow melted into the air.

  ‘I shall take you through the city,’ Tiresias said, ‘to Emma’s coronation. It’s quite an event. Sculpture, song, dance. Millions all over the world, in villages, on mountaintops, in valleys, in bars, in hotel rooms, may be able to view it. I shall take you in a little while. I am not sure her brother Peter fully approves. After all he is her twin. He played in Tiger’s band. He became the pope of the calypso. An odd title I know. But it’s common knowledge that the calypsonian bands adorn themselves with curious titles. The name I bear (Tiresias) figures as you know and once or twice I have danced with them, danced the dance of the twining snakes, half-man, half-woman. The seer needs to know, to see everything from within the heart of chaos – if that is at all possible.’

  ‘You were speaking,’ I said, ‘of the bands.’

  ‘Ah yes, the bands! There’s the black Napoleon band. There’s the Persian Ayatollah Alexander band. There’s Peter’s band. Indeed, as I said before, he was the pope of the bands in Skull until his death the afternoon that you met him in the tunnel. Emma would tell you he ha
d been ailing for some time. Ailing science, ailing religion. No wonder Doctor Faustus warned him of a meteor rocket, a meteor drum, falling from heaven. Part of his trouble was that he was a bit of a woman-hater. A long-standing taint in the body of our civilization. It fouls the nest of religion. And of economics though you wouldn’t think it at first. But what is the soul of the unemployed but an implicit extension of the whoredom of money we cultivate subconsciously? I tried, therefore, to mediate between him and the whoredom of money long, long ago – when Greece and Rome were doomed – by egging on Frog to play an inferior modern Ulysses and magistrate and pygmy shadow of the giant of the heartland.

  ‘In that way I involved you, Robin Redbreast Glass, as the son and the heir of a divided tradition. It was the best I could do in the licentious theatre of Skull. Thus it was that I edged myself into half-man, half-woman masks (even Ghost is not immune to such masquerades) in my mimicry, in my rehearsals, of divine equilibrium that is beyond our grasp. All this, by the way, is implicit in Emma’s book which she attempted to read to you in staggered passages when you met in Dateless Infinity Day in your dream. Emma’s theology vindicated my and Ghost’s disguises. It is rooted in the necessity to bring a sacramental urgency to the ancient and perennially fertile body of sex. Not promiscuity, not cheap stimulation. But something we scarcely understand. The miracle of the senses, touch, taste, echoing waves and particles and penetration.

  ‘Her task, from this day forward, is to make the body of the resurrection beautiful to the woman in the man, the man in the woman. It’s a formidable vocation. You should know that, Robin. You lay with your head on her breasts by the sea.’

  ‘Was it not Peter who lay with her? I was drowned, Peter had been saved.’ And yet, even as I spoke, I did seem to remember …

  ‘Peter, yes, but your shadow slowly took shape out of every refugee of spirit. Took infinite and rehearsible form. It drew Peter into imitating you. He took your name, remember? Alias Robin Redbreast Glass. He was universally popular in Skull in love’s death-wish bands. All fanaticism is rooted subconsciously in love’s terrible death wish! But by degrees you triumphed. Your original sensuousness, your true passion, triumphed. And by the time Emma came to write her intimate book of you and Peter after your death it was you she drew into her arms. Your true passion in nature. And then by degrees in your ascent of the Mountain Peter himself – despite his discomfiture, his reservations – was imbued by the miracle of equilibrium between all genders, all opposites.

  ‘I put it crudely of course. But you know the subtleties of chaos and history that you have drawn into yourself Robin Redbreast Glass. Peter too was converted but he’s her brother. He’s fixated in a kind of incest. When brothers and sisters marry – whatever the traditional or dogmatic excuse – it’s incest. Or if not incest it’s purity masturbating. And there’s been enough of that I say from my standpoint in the underworld. And that’s where I come in as your guide, Robin, on this day. You need to descend from the Mountain and to start from below in your voyage into a new unity.’

  I looked up the Mountain. I missed Peter. I missed the pope of love’s death wish. I had never, I confessed to myself, seen him in that light in the magic wood or in the theatre of an infinite rehearsal of values but I was now prepared to accept the guidance of the stranger seer who stood between the deformities of the popular religion of the bands and the sacrament of sensuous marriage between heaven and earth for which I had suffered in the sea and on the land.

  *

  Tiresias led me down the Mountain along the other side of the seam and within the hospital of infinity. I caught a glimpse of ailing stars, of meteors gouging holes in planets, of ailing moons and constellations, of ailing civilizations far out in space whose residual and imaginary glow had been simulated by Doctor Faustus, the reluctant doctor of the soul.

  We came down to Skull with a bump. Not with a bang but with a bump like a boat that oscillates in a wave. The streets were swarming with refugees of soul and spirit, refugees of heart and mind. And my first vision was of the Beast with the map of heaven in its claws or its hands. No, his claws, his hands.

  I had seen the Beast before when I hid Ghost in my shadow and outwitted Frog. But in this instance or imminent rehearsal of values he seemed quite different. I dreamt he turned his gaze upon me as if he remembered me from the day I was born. And I drifted into his psychical glass eyes and perceived the vortex of the Tiresian dance. It was the dance of bone and flesh within and without the Beast in the mystery of the resurrection body. I was aware of the wreck of Tiger in the mirror of the sea beside the magic wood. The vortex grew steady as a rock. The vortex was a sleeping, spinning, steady top in my dream.

  The crew upon Tiger were masked in bone as they danced.

  ‘You have seen them before, these dancers,’ said Tiresias, ‘in your grandfather’s pork-knocker theatre of great navigators and conquistadores. Becalmed above an impossible garden.’

  ‘But this is Tiger,’ I said, ‘the wreck of Tiger beside the magic wood and under the sea. This is – or was – my grave.’

  ‘All graves are becalmed vessels above an impossible garden. Until I mediate in the underworld and sprinkle the lips of bone with Beast-food. So I repeat, Robin Glass, you have seen them before. You saw them the moment you died. I moistened your eyes then with an appetite for visions. And the grain of all foundered ships came alive. You have seen them before I say – the crew of bone that fish for a morsel, a Beast-morsel, Beast-fish, Beast-grain, Beast-shrimp.’

  I dreamt I now saw Alice and Miriam on the deck of the Beastship of life under the sea. They were masked in flesh. Not bone. But as I scanned their curious bodies in ‘sleeping top’ dance of stillness and flesh with sailors of bone I saw the stillness for what it was. Stillness was a ‘hole’ in each body through which I looked beyond the dance into vistas of oceanic spirit. There was a shout like a hoarse drum and one of the bone sailors heaved upon his fishing rod and drew in his line. Beast-fish at last! They cooked and ate. As the fire subsided in the orchestra of the sea, and the spray darkened into musical coal, I was startled profoundly by another ‘hole’ in Miriam’s body. The bone-sailors in their dance, in eating the fish, had subtly cannibalized the spectre of death and eaten into the gravity – or the anti-gravity – of Miriam’s flesh, animal flesh, female flesh. Eaten into the dance and into themselves as well, into their male bone and acquired in consequence a crack or tooth-mark, a sparkling intensity or flute of soul.

  And I recalled the tooth of creation that I had brought with me from a sparkling wave when I arose from the sea. I had not understood its innermost music of appetite for vision until now as I moved in the Glass and the mirror of the Beast with the map of heaven in its hands.

  ‘The resurrected body consumes a vision in every morsel of meat or fish it reflects or cooks,’ said Tiresias. ‘For every disciple of vision dies and dies again and again with an ailing creation. One dies because one lives a visionary life beyond the cannibal consumption of dancing grain, dancing fruit, dancing flesh. The gardens of the Beast are signposted with visionary signals of death and resurrection in the agriculture of the soul, the hunting grounds of the soul that loom in the stylized drink and the stylized meat of the soul.’

  As he spoke I remembered the unemployed soul of humanity in the stylized munition factories of Skull. What stylized teeth and jaws did such an unemployed soul wear? Were they stylized iron teeth, stylized iron jaws, with little or no apprehension of the dead shrimp in a mouth chewing aimlessly, violently? I saw the stylized body of the unemployed soul of humanity turning within a deeper and deeper chaos of insensible vision, a deeper and deeper blindness, a deeper and deeper grave.

  ‘Visionary employment beyond the grave,’ said Tiresias (and I wondered in what degree he was mocking all civilizations), ‘is an alteration in the biases of the soul, it is a threshold into the resurrection of the body.’

  Were not mockery and self-mockery a measure in themselves of the changing shroud,
the changing investitures, of bias? I saw all at once – in the psychical Glass eyes in which I stood within the giant grave of the underworld – that the Beast was involved in weaving a portion of Emma’s seamless garment and that such a weave was a pointer into the tasks of the employed soul.

  I followed the light, almost invisible, thread along Tiger’s deck and into every minuscule eye of bone, every faint crack, every ‘hole’ in the flesh of the vortex, the spinning top of sleep in the garden of the remembered sea, every fissure, every sailor, until I was aware of its still match within the flame and the bite of the water, within the flame and the bitten water, as if the light thread turned on itself into an intricate reversal of expectations.

  When Tiger sailed Alice and Miriam and I and the others who were drowned that day had invested in a safe return to harbour. When Navies sail the crew invest in a safe return to harbour. When civilizations harness the swamp or the earthquake-hillside or the volcanic plateau, humanity invests in safe walls and cities. How safe? How doomed? That the Beast had spun its portion of Emma’s seamless robe in such a context was a pointer into the choices one makes (or which one should perceive one is involved in making), the price one pays at every level of existence (or may find one is called upon to pay when one lives by choice apparently on the edge of the abyss).

  ‘The Beast-thread in the vortex and the stillness is the life of the dear seed one should visualize as a warning of the spirit against monstrous excess, the life of dear energy one should visualize as an illumination of true body and mind (a grain of light in a dark world is sustenance indeed), the life of the dear corn, the dear flower, the dear fruit, one should read with the eyes of the heart and the mind as frail extensions of the body of the earth, the convulsive power of the body of the earth that writes of itself with ecstatic petal or cloth of beauty by which it heals its ceaseless ailments and sustains its paradoxical fertility.