The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  After ten years I possessed the rudiments of a stage-discharge curve sloping upwards from left to right as shown below and this was identical with (one sees now) the diagrammatic voice of the flute (see page 45) rising from the first to the second rung and from the third to the fourth in the ladder of space. In crossing the subtle abyss from the second to the third the voice of the flute maintained the same curve in reversed direction.

  Music and numbers were (one sees it now) a revelation of a fluid skeleton, a ribbed body, to be associated with the flesh of the elements, the smooth flesh of water, the spark and the animal magnetism within the anatomy and the blood of ancient streams upon which many cultures had survived and above which they buried their dead in mounds and hills. Our antecedents from all races and peoples glimpsed that skeleton as they wrestled with floods and droughts, plenty and scarcity, from times immemorial, antecedents we also glimpse in the nightsky of the ancient river through the seed of moral legend, moral theatre that they sowed, primitive constellation and metamorphoses of the voice of the flute … Primitive antecedent. Intimate refugee.

  The vertical rib in the diagram was a record of river levels in the fossil or bone-pulse of our ancestors. The horizontal ancestral rib was marked to imply a multiplying volume of flow as the river rose and ran into the Waterfall. The initial volume becomes dual, triple, etc., in a library of carnival science. The small circular stars are plucked from that library to give the values of volumetric flow observed with quantum current meters as the river rose and fell, rose and fell again and again across the years. A sufficiency of close agreement or accord between the stars permitted me to trace a stage-discharge rib or curve in the river’s fluid skeleton. The eccentric stars that flew off above or below that rib provided an implicit nightsky or constellation in the river, a primitive violin in league with the diagrammatic voice of the flute, a dual bow, a heart, a head and a neck. It was but a glimpse into a library of illustrated dream within a theatre of science I had not realized then within the mid-twentieth century but perceived now.

  That glimpse empowered my pilgrimage upwards in space yet backwards in time within the Carnival Day of the twentieth century. The glimpse became a key into cross-cultural capacity to bear the dual, triple (sometimes self-reversible) content of some of the greatest myths of survival in the body of humanity.

  The Carnival Heir of Civilizations

  If there is such a mantle as ‘carnival heir of civilizations’ which one shares with others in a time of peril then one must kneel and pluck the carnival rib from the river’s side as darkness threatens to fall and encompass one’s mind and the world appears to slip away from one’s grasp. One plucks that rib as the foundation stone of an Imaginary Cathedral. The grave on the hillside is close to the burnt El Dorado Mission House that Penelope and Ross George occupied when they worked in the Potaro. It is fitting therefore to see the Cathedral encompassing both sites and arising now in my innermost library from dancing bone and fire to the music of the flute and the violin in the Waterfall. I arose from my knees with the magic rib. The music of recall, the music of solid soul, was so faint and strange and heartrending that it was a shock, the shock of terror and beauty, to see Penelope and Ross standing in the doorway of the Cathedral as if the long Day of the twentieth century were inscribed into the very day that the king of thieves had presided over the burial of the dead. It was as if their dinner invitation to me that day which I had been unable to accept remained nevertheless suspended in time within the Imaginary Theatre of a century that I was building. Such is the comedy of dreams. I dreamt I was meeting them for the first time on the second bank of the river of space whereas we had spoken not long before in the old, remembered Mission House.

  Now, however, this was a Cathedral and I saw them as the last missionaries in South America but the first reluctant guardians of the fire and the bone, the fire and the bread, the food of the world, on which we were about to sup. It was as if we were involved in a contract to conserve the resources of the earth and the sky, a contract between missionary queen of threatened El Dorado and every unconscious suitor in the womb of space and time who may be seduced by power or prosperity to waste her substance.

  Now it was as if they came forward to greet me as warmly as they would have done had I accepted their hospitality so long ago. Penelope was smiling the half-crooked enchanting smile I knew so well and Ross had his hand outstretched toward me. They had returned to England from South America in 1966 or thereabouts, had retired and died in the early 1980s. I had never travelled from Essex to Kent to visit them but we had kept in touch by letter.

  The El Dorado Mission House in which they had lived for many crucial years had been abandoned after their departure. Canaima of the Macusi tribe had set it on fire soon after they left, when pictures appeared in the popular press of a child dying of starvation. No one had dared to touch the blackened shell of a Mission House until I perceived it in my Imaginary City of God as a museum loaf of bread within the fast of memory upon which transubstantial love floats up from the first bank to the second bank of the river of space. Transubstantial bread I could at last break with Penelope and Ross into parallel lives (parallel life and death as well) in the refectory of the Cathedral.

  Despite the warmth of their greeting I hesitated, drew back, a little uncertain whether it would all vanish into nothingness, the entire scene, the Imaginary Theatre, everything that I visualized. I clung to the genesis of hope in cross-cultural community around the globe, the solemn occasion, one’s entry into the first post-colonial, post-Christendom Cathedral on earth, as if I were about to receive a blessing from the last missionaries from Europe into Central and South America. I clung to the Cathedral I was building within myself on the ruins of an English Mission House, ruins of real/unreal cities in the compositional fabric of the elements.

  What does one mean by ‘last missionaries’ within the long Day of the twentieth century? Had there not been last governors, last governor-generals, etc., etc., of Spanish empires within the long Day of the nineteenth century? No one had truly visualized what the ‘last’ meant. The last was as much an ironic statistic as the first in the archives of chameleon politics. Would there come a moment when a chameleon newspaper would carry a vast headline, THE LAST CHILD STARVES TO DEATH. STARVATION ENDS. THE LAST BATTLE FOUGHT. WAR ENDS.

  I knew it appeared absurd. And yet within such absurdities may lie a reflection of terrifying truth. Unless one visualizes the impossible last descendant in the lineage of the tormented in every sphere one cannot do justice to the masses who have perished without a trace of self-recognition of their ancestry of spirit … In the last tormented may lie the fullest, truest, everlasting poignancy of the changed or changing heart of Man within the kingdom of heaven. For the last tormented suggests (or should suggest) something more than a harrowing transition from pain (the ancestral pain of the last child who starves to death) to a museum cradle, a museum refinement, a museum skeleton, a museum bone. For if one were to settle absolutely for the pains of starvation – absolutely for a museum refinement or sublimation of starvation when starvation seems a thing of the past – then one would have imprisoned oneself in one or the other false eternity and eclipsed the genuine mystery of parallel thresholds into sustaining otherness, parallel pain and release from pain, by which the architect in the City of God animates a gulf, an abyss, yet a crossing between the lack of food, on one hand, the meaningless bounty of food, on the other …

  I stopped and reconsidered the enigma of parallels, ‘pain’ in parallel with ‘release from pain’, ‘lack of food’ in parallel with ‘bounty’. The mystery of the abyss lay between such parallels. And it was as if one saw horizontals and verticals in a numinous light. ‘Parallels’ signified ‘depths’. One saw a vertical column or bar or shaft descending from each parallel on either side of the abyss. Take ‘pain’, giant pain in the world, giant ghost of pain, giant parallel. The vertical column that descended from ‘pain’ possessed a series of imprints one a
bove the other. Each descending imprint subtly, almost imperceptibly, altered the imprint of ‘pain’ above. Thus giant ‘pain’, giant ‘parallel’ that seemed eternal on its side of the abyss, underwent a series of accumulating, almost imperceptible, transformations in depth.

  Likewise ‘release from pain’ possessed its vertical shaft or column which in its layered or descending series of imprints possessed a curious echoic or vibrating spectre of gravity akin to the genesis of the conscience of the abyss. The column vibrated as if to a distant seismic eruption. Then it was still. So still I was able to read – Conscience is a blend of hunger and ecstasy and pain; and therefore there is no release from abysmal torment except …

  ‘Except what?’ I asked. ‘What reconciliation of opposites lies in the abyss?’

  There came a moment in the stillness of conscience when the two columns descending from parallels ‘pain’ and ‘release from pain’ appeared to ‘sound’, to ‘utter’, to reflect a music of joint-resource so incredible one may only describe it as the inimitable ground of Being …

  Not simply a reconciliation of opposites. Such a formula was too uncreative or mechanical. Not just a mechanics of psyche. But a gathering up of all that had been experienced in every condition of existence, an accumulation of apparently imperceptible change into true change, in which nothing was lost and everything possessed an inimitable difference akin to joy … I knew then albeit still with dread what I had sensed earlier in relinquishing one or other false eternity locked in an assumption of absolute parallels.

  Giant ‘pain’ was real but it was not an absolute condition of time or timelessness. ‘Release from pain’ was an illusion until it became a joint-witness in yielding itself to a whole concert or design composed of paradoxical levels of altered imprint in depth, paradoxical architectural incarnation of the beauty of creative conscience.

  Inimitable architecture of the City of God one touches but never seizes is a resource I dreamt, through which one gathers vicariously (one becomes a vicar of truth) all parallels and columns of experience in what is yet other than every net or entrapment of the senses, what is graspable sensation yet ungraspable solid music …

  In the same token if one were to settle for the last missionaries on earth as a broken-backed Atlas (the desolation of love, the adventure of love unfulfilled) on one hand, a museum church or statistic of endeavour on the other, then one would have forfeited entirely the quantum mystery of parallel desolations through which the architect in the City of God animates a gulf, an abyss, yet a crossing between adventure unfulfilled and the visualization of love as the supreme creative power that holds the long, traveller’s day and the long, traveller’s night together within every envelope of soul or frailty of flesh and blood …

  In this way – by seizing upon the mystery of quantum, parallel lives, parallel formations – I found it possible to pull the last missionaries back into my canvases of imagination, sculptures, shapes with which I animated allegorical presences in the original Greek sense of speaking otherwise, presenting others in diverse shapes of myself, other selves within as much as without oneself. Penelope and Ross re-emerged from the margins of nothingness into which they had almost vanished. The depletions of spiritual memory, the curious fast of memory that I endured, strengthened in a paradoxical way the open, broken yet flowering seed of visualized presences within me, before me. As though the hollow materialistic age or day within which I lived revealed itself as possessing – in its uttermost cavities of renascent, cross-cultural myth, uttermost reaches of emptiness – unsuspected room for original sensation, unsuspected and piercing ironies of spirit that nailed one into the congregation of all one’s characters and even into the shoes of the king of thieves. One is obsessed by every being one visualizes whether apparently evil or apparently good. One bears the wounds of the past into the future and the present. One is oneself and other than oneself … It was thus that I limped, as though nailed upon an Imaginary walking tree in stained-glass window that I painted, into the presence of the last missionaries on earth in the post-Christendom Cathedral and refectory that I was building.

  I heard Penelope speak plainly but her voice seemed changed by the acoustic of spiritual being, the acoustic of hollow, echoing being, and this gave daemonic absurdity yet revelation to her utterance.

  ‘Three of us are here instead of two, Anselm. My two husbands and me! That is the beauty of breaking bread so late in this twentieth-century Day. Shadows acquire substance as the twentieth century draws to a close. Substance acquires new shadow. Ross is my second husband. Simon, my first, died in 1944 in the Normandy campaign. He was my epic lover, my epic soldier.’ Her lips crinkled a little with a trace of self-mockery and she whispered almost under her breath – ‘I shall tell you later about some of the terrible things he did to me despite the many decorations he wore on his chest. But that’s for another moment, another painted moment. Not now. Poor Simon!’ She paused for a fraction of an instant then spoke up loudly again – ‘Ross is my good angel. We got married in 1946. That very year we left England to work in South America. First in Brazil. Then we came to the Potaro in 1948, two of us ostensibly, but we hid Simon in ourselves.

  ‘A wise precaution, for had we declared that all three of us were solidly there (Simon’s shadow was quite solid, believe me!) on the banks of the river of space, why – think of it – everyone would have said we had come to South America, the three of us, not to be missionaries but to live in sin. One woman and her two husbands! Imagine the pain and the scandal of love.’ Penelope was laughing and Ross and I and Simon (with the king of thieves inserted between us upon a slab of gold that floated in space) could not help laughing too. Laughter echoes sometimes on the lips of solid grief and frail men and women within the feast day music of the gods whether ancient Greek or ancient pre-Columbian allegory.

  We were now within the refectory and had taken our places at a great dining table.

  ‘Look,’ Penelope said, ‘I have been slaving at a coat for many a month, many a year, in this day or century. A coat that is woven of the fabric of sunset, the stillness, the transience of flame. A coat that is as much a tapestry of the world, as of fire and water, to fit the shoulder of a hill, or the body of rock in a Waterfall. A coat that sometimes looks like a beggar’s divine rags! A coat that is woven of every long rift in the cloudy blue of space that precedes the suspended fall of night. The coat of Wisdom when impermanence is well-nigh graspable beauty. This has been my task since Ross died in 1981 and I in 1982. You painted me into the Day of my age, the cathedral of stained-glass window sunset, as if the needle with which I work and sew were a match. The match of sunset. And because of the impermanence of darkness and light the match of sunrise as well. The coat never fits Ross or Simon perfectly. I must tell you all this, Anselm. For it is the way you appear to see us. The coat never quite fits. Always a sleeve of element or a fluid stitch that’s out of joint.’ She moved as she spoke and I saw the faint but indelible colour of bruises on the soft, bright flesh of her arm as she lifted it away from the side of her body. The gesture appeared to tighten a close-fitting garment upon her breasts.

  ‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘always a discrepancy. And as a consequence I unravel the work I have done, unstitch everything, and start all over again from the very beginning whenever that was. I unravel my Day and start all over again. Who knows, the coat may at last fit Ross perfectly – or Simon (who can say) – and then,’ she paused with a triumphant smile, ‘I shall be an emancipated woman in heaven. Ageless sunset and sunrise woman for all I know. A status of Wisdom, a status of elemental Wisdom, not easily achievable on earth! The perfect fit, the perfect marriage between light and darkness, Night and Day. No divorce, no separation from the obscure beauty one loves best out of many ephemeral lights with which or whom one may have slept in anticipation of dawn.

  ‘And he – the husband or lover whom the coat fits – may then vanquish the king of thieves forever. Not so! I am joking. You know that, Anselm, don�
�t you? Seriously joking or is it joking seriously? Creation’s a curious and a serious comedy, and divine comedy (as I see it) is more genuinely disturbing than tragedy. For in divinity’s shadow arises the daemon of freedom that rends the human imagination with a sense of lost paradise, a sense of miraculously regained entry into paradise … As I said, I was joking when I spoke of my husband or lover – whom the coat may fit – as the one who would vanquish the king of thieves. Not so! For the king of thieves is a reformed character in the City of God. And though I also spoke of heaven a moment or two ago I perceive certain distinctions in your city. It’s a city of inner regeneration, the inner and slowly changing heart, is it not? Not to be confused with a complacent outer paradise or state of prosperity.

  ‘So even my perfect coat may be an approximation when measured in other inner, unsuspected lights. All tradition is an approximation … It may prove a garment that the king of thieves pulls away from me, within his reformation, to cover the rags of a hollow materialism. Thus I may find myself in the company of three men, rather than two, on my pilgrimage. Ross, Simon, and the thief I call king, who turned his face away from Christ and was to pursue his lost paradise in many incarnations across the centuries into this very Day. He possessed an even older line of descent that you bring to light in your Imaginary Theatre, don’t you, Anselm? And perhaps even four – in the company of four – if I include you. But I am not sure. You may have other plans for yourself.