The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  ‘Are you satisfied with your Imaginary paintings, sculptures, etc.? Are you satisfied with your subversive creation? The enigma of love! Tell me. Are you satisfied?’

  I was astonished. Penelope was weeping. Her tears broke into my heart, such gentle tears yet such a shocking revelation of the enigma of love. ‘It’s not only the enigma of love,’ I declared, as I tried to comfort her, ‘It’s the enigma of creation. Do you not see that I am as vulnerable as you? I have pulled you back from the margins of nothingness but it’s as if you too have pulled me, have drawn me, into your tapestry and canvas within (I am not sure), across (I am not sure) an abyss.’

  Suddenly I felt a stab, the stab of parallel ages. ‘You may remember your suitors in another age. Another Penelope! Suitors, lovers, call them by any name. The truth is your husband may have returned from the Trojan war to vanquish your suitors. But you remained central to every canvas. You were Wisdom, feminine Wisdom. You pulled him there across the seas into the loom that you wove, unravelled, stitched … And who were the suitors in your elaborate design? Thieves! They hoped to gain your hand in marriage and to rob you of everything you possessed. As far as they were concerned you were little more than a black slave on a new world/old world auction block.

  ‘They (the suitors) are – in my Imaginary Cathedral – a collective equation across the long Night of the centuries to the king of thieves with whom you say you now travel.

  ‘A collective parallel to one of the thieves beside Christ – our king of thieves in my Imaginary Theatre – who turned his face away from paradise.

  ‘Fate crucified that collective, your suitors, when Ulysses returned, when Ulysses was drawn into the loom that you wove. But fate, in the shape of your all-conquering design, never entirely vanquished them. For they were to descend from the pagan rafters of their woven cross and set alight new wars, new slave raids, new piracies in the long day, or is it the long night, of the centuries.

  ‘The distinction between being vanquished and returning again stronger than ever to man the bastions of trade and industry is one we know only too well as the twentieth century draws to a close across the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean.

  ‘As a consequence – in drawing you out of the margins of nothingness into visualized being – I needed to bridge the centuries-long Night, the Night of ancient Greece into North African desert Night where Simon, your first and jealous husband, fought in Montgomery’s army, the Night of Spain into the Night of South America where the reincarnated thief ransacked the gold of the Incas. As for Ross – good angel he is, yes, but his curious missionary guilt resides in the fact that he (like all of us, like me and my relatives) may have one foot in one camp – the epic camp – and the other in another camp – the camp of reformed thieves; half-thief of love, of your love, half-epic Ulyssean beggar in the gates of Home is his fate, my fate too, the fate of my relatives who scraped to make ends meet. It is this shared burden, in the light of the abyss, which requires us to unclothe self-reversible perspectives within a civilization we take for granted, self-reversible pride into responsibility as we ponder our predicament.

  ‘I needed a dark comedy of blind warriors and suitors, half-epic guilt, half-theft of love. You are an emancipated queen, an emancipated centre, around whom and which your husbands, your lovers, and the thief – the thief who stole the coat you made – revolve on the second bank of the river of space. Who comes first, who comes last? In this late cycle of cosmic Capital are there not rich, desirable slave women (enslaved to systems of money) with a dozen suitors, divorced husbands and lovers, rich, desirable slave men (enslaved to the Stock Market) with two dozen mistresses, all fighting, arguing, over fortunes that have been made or spent by this or that besieged spouse they loved, loathed, envied?

  ‘It is true you Penelope – as inimitable twentieth-century spouse of missionary endeavour whose vocation lay in a foreign and a starved continent – know in your heart of hearts that a genuine choice is necessary. A true sacrament, a true marriage, is necessary. That is the purpose of the loom, the coat of tradition.

  ‘But how can you discover the chosen one unless you weave unsuspected variations upon the pain and ecstasy of freedom? How can you know what true sacrament is unless you find the key that the king of thieves let slip from a pocket in the coat that he snatched from you as you stood under the pagan rafters of every cross?’

  I was startled by the sudden question that came upon my lips like an inspiration. ‘Did you really put that key there, Penelope, in the loom of tradition without knowing you had done so – the coat of tradition that never quite seems to fit the globe? And as a consequence we travel, we all travel, in search of … of what?’

  Penelope hesitated. As if the words I had spoken had been on her lips as well. We were so close I felt I could seize her breath. She was searching into the depths of hollow yet brimming religious impulse by which she was led to travel into foreign lands, the lands of the living, the lands of the dying.

  We were searching together for the key to the adventure of love unfulfilled, a key inscribed into the foundations of blind empires, still blind in this Day to the past and to the present but susceptible nevertheless as never before to a new crumb or piercing light in the mutual body of Wisdom that one broke into bread.

  Wisdom is strong meat. It rocks the imagination to the foundations of memory. The imaginary Cathedral around you fades, Anselm. The window of time grows black. The bone and the fire subside into a rose, a rose tree, a garden. At the heart of the black/red rose you dream you see the ancient Macusis feasting and dancing. They too fade. But you will see them again. The rose remains, the roses of childhood in Aunt Alicia’s garden-city theatre. Listen to what Uncle Proteus is now saying – ‘Watch the river of space, watch this dream space, dream-rib, metamorphoses, watch the live processional sculptures from the Waterfall. They bring the key …’

  Yes, the key. I remembered the key in the loom of tradition of which I or Penelope had spoken but it was nowhere in sight in the kingdom of the Rose. And yet … I was still to retrace my steps into the body of the Rose.

  ‘In the land of the Rose,’ Proteus said, ‘you will find the key.’ He was laughing. Better Proteus’s laughter than his anger.

  ‘The key to carnival,’ Proteus said, ‘is rooted in imperial and colonial disguises. The key to carnival lies in a displacement of time-frames to break a one-track commitment to history. The key to the reformation of the heart breaks the door of blind consciousness into shared dimensions, the dimension of subconscious age and the dimension of childhood. They cross and re-cross each other within levels of Dream. The key to the unconscious future lies in shared burdens of intuitive Memory, shared volumes written by mutual science and art within the Spirit of age, dual and triple beggars and kingships and queenships. Listen for a commotion of bells in the abyss, in the clouds, in cloud-rocks, in the precipitation of biological and mythical antecedents, the precipitation of living masks in Aunt Alicia’s live fossil museum theatre.’

  ‘Here, take this. Sup,’ said the king of thieves. He held the vessel of the pooled stars to my lips. ‘Retrace your steps into childhood when you dreamt the skies were a living garden, Anselm. Here’s a programme of plays, a feast of the Imagination. Uncle Proteus plays the beggar Ulysses, remember? You,’ the thief was laughing, ‘are something of a robber-baron yourself, Anselm. You steal the beggar’s rags, remember? Then there’s Harold whom you loathe when he tells you … (You will find out in due course.) He shares the burden of Ulyssean carnival kingship with Proteus when he plays the part at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Not quite the top! One of your Aunt Alicia’s conceits. Conceit or not it is rooted in the Wisdom of theatre. Strong meat. Then you will meet black Agamemnon and when he vanishes you will hear the voice of Presence. Then comes the Antiphon of the … But no. I must leave you to make your own discoveries as the dimensions of childhood and old age cross and re-cross each other. It’s epic habit to summarize the progress of coming events and to
recapitulate the flight of past events as if they were one and the same true, timeless yet changed, changing fabric … Prophetic conceit some would say. I would say the creative riddle of the abyss. Homer was versed in this. Homer the greatest of all epic imaginations. I knew him once long, long ago. I ate every blind crumb, every blind tear, that fell from his eyes. Poor thief I was even then long before Calvary’s hill.’ His voice faded into the global village garden theatre, Georgetown theatre (had it been named after Ross and Penelope George?), I was about to enter.

  The programmes, the broken tapestry of forthcoming plays, sculptures, paintings slipped from my fingers and fluttered to the ground. The programmes were torn and as I sought to retrieve them in the Dream the eclipsed portions drifted into the subconscious from which a child emerged nine years old. I was that child clothed in the epic tears of memory. Tears were habitual to epic character … My parents had died in a road accident in 1914 when I was two. Aunt Alicia died in 1929, Harold in 1920, Proteus in … Now I was unsure for whom I truly wept in the past and in the present as the Imaginary Cathedral faded into Alicia’s Garden City Theatre.

  The church bells were ringing in the distance. I felt dejected but buoyed up nevertheless by the distant Waterfall music.

  Depression is a disease but I was strangely afloat within the music of the distant bells.

  They were the faraway voice of eternity through and beyond time, God was eternity. Eternity was buried in my longings, in my anxieties. That faraway voice melted into the liquid pulse of vanishing sound that resuscitates itself, faint, marvellous, descending, ascending.

  Uncle Proteus had told me that the garden city theatre’s global village was on the brink of hard times. ‘Charles Dickens,’ said the voice of God. ‘Recession’s coming,’ said the bells. ‘Ask in Wall Street in 1929.’ The chimes came in separate lines (Ask in one line or dream-year, In in the line or year below that, Wall in the third line, etc., etc., etc.), as if the voice of God possessed a comic slant, innermost humour I sought to nourish in an illiterate world, in becoming a best-selling poet’s utterance in the prosperous heavens.

  I stood in Camp Street with the flowering trees on either hand. I tore the poem into the scraps of dollar bills. Proteus appreciated that. There was a breath of quickening air in the bright morning light. No wonder the pace, the occasional disparity, the occasional break or self-mockery in the voice of the bells made one float into anticipating anything, everything, the anticipation of terror, the anticipation of peace.

  The voice unrobed itself, drew a naked shadow within a blossom or leaf that fell and seemed to bruise my head with a trace of red ink. Proteus was adept at such preparations and markings. I had seen many of his sketches for Alicia’s plays, the naked shadows he appeared to create as if in these nature reversed itself into the true substance of a dream that left its mark upon us everywhere. To dream of being killed was to dream we had ourselves killed others, to dream of being attacked was to know simultaneously that we were ourselves attacking others. Such was the naked shadow, self-reversible shadow, in the substance of dream that Proteus employed as his moral design.

  He had smeared the blood-red ink on his Ulyssean brow for the play and, as if it were an afterthought, leaned towards me so that a trace or bruise or shadow of my aggression fell on my head and hand. My aggression? His blood?

  Now as the leaf fell – upon the identical trace or shadow I had received when he leaned towards me – the Rose-queen in the garden sent her shaft or thorn straight to his brow. The thorn drew blood, his blood. The leaf danced in the wake of the thorn and settled upon him, his blood.

  I knew the scene by heart after several rehearsals but a new element had arisen which took me by surprise. The despatch of the thorn by the queen had never before coincided with the stroke of the leaf, the naked shadow of blossom. Had I been bruised by – or had I occasioned – the shadow of his wound as the thorn pierced the leaf before lodging itself in his flesh and bone? Had I secured her line of sight by balancing the leaf on my brow and upon my hand? If so it were a feat of unconscious Shadow, a feat of Dream.

  Proteus’s Ulysses appreciated my dilemma. What is nakedness? When one dreams of nakedness does one dream of aggression, or of the nature of birth, the nature of dying, the nature of humility? He was dressed in rags, a beggar in rags, and this was also a new element in the naked play. He had discarded the robes of lord and master, king of the Rose garden of Home. The thorn in his brow grew sharp, the agonized tongue of the brain that stuck forth from his wound and spoke now on behalf of its lord and master – ‘The Rose that pierced me secretes your Shadow in her body, Anselm. I wish I could lift you in my arms and tell you the secrets of nature, a nature that recoils upon us, the conflicts we need to understand, our roots in nature, our ignorance of nature … tell you that true heroism is founded in accepting the poverty of our understanding through which we may at last perceive our mutual deprivations and begin a transformation of our (I should say your) inheritance … I wish I could tell you the secret of your birth within a society addicted to lust, to fleshly property, fleshly acquisition. Harold will tell you when you ascend Jacob’s ladder in another scene of the play.’

  I stared at him with a sense of awe and peculiar apprehension, peculiar understanding I could not now express. I had expected him to worm his way into the Rose garden and slay his enemies. But instead the imperial design of the homecoming lord and master had been converted into a colonial fable that spun its web in reverse order in the branches of the lofty rose tree over my head. The queen lay hidden in its branches.

  This much I was able to read in the web of a volume – ‘The lord or master disguised as a beggar dies in colonial and post-colonial fable. The virtuous Rose betrays him because she wishes to goad him into reflecting upon innermost nature, pregnant nature, innermost potential, innermost peril, innermost craft. Such is the divine comedy of the master’s homecoming, a comedy that pierces convention to break a complacent mirror of conquest, the conquest of love by the master (when love cannot be conquered or else it ceases to be a gift truly given, truly taken), the conquest of the suitors of the beloved by the master: suitors who may take the most unpredictable form in pregnant natures, natures one has abused or exploited sometimes in perversity, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in blind lust.’

  Ulysses stared up at me with a plea, a curious plea, in which he confessed that true heroism and a true Homecoming was a burden too great to be borne by any single warrior or lover or actor or individual in the theatre of twentieth-century history. Alicia and Proteus were aware of this in the early twentieth century within their live fossil museum. So was I in the Imaginary Theatre I was building and in the incorporation of Alicia’s and Proteus’s early plays into my pilgrimage within the long Day of the twentieth century. The truth was that the enormity of lordship that Ulysses implied needed to be borne and shared by several (all partial) performances by different actors within different contexts of fate or freedom. The residue or fall-out from such performances implied a quantum reality that slipped forever into the future though it sustained immense pertinence for a Being of true hope within the recurring present moment. Proteus’s Ulysses needed support from Haroldian Ulysses as from Simon’s Ulysses whatever the inadequacies of each, each one’s sins, each one’s shortcomings. In each lay a door into unexplored realms, unexplored suit of God conducted by intimates as well as strangers whose conscious or unconscious role it was to challenge all assumptions of proprietorship of soul, proprietorship of flesh and blood. Such was the moral design of epic/allegoric theatre.

  Simon’s implicit governorship of an Imaginary Colony in order to haunt Penelope and Ross, Harold’s proprietorship of Imaginary estates and slave-women within the Rose garden, were part and parcel of the enigmatic texture of fate, freedom, authority, industry, tyranny, that constituted the psyche of twentieth-century civilization.

  Proteus’s early twentieth-century Ulysses needed still others, as I would discover, to share the burden
of the thorn of the Rose in the gates of Home. I was involved in this and I recalled his prophecy that Harold would tell me something important that I needed to know when we met in the theatre of Jacob’s ladder.

  Now – in the curious, abrupt and realistic absurdity of Dream – I realized that a small bag I had been carrying, when I stumbled upon the masked lord and king, had opened and spilt its contents on the ground between us. A shirt, a pair of socks, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, a draughtsboard and two dozen pawns, lay scattered so close to the beggar that they seemed an extension of his rags.

  He stretched out his hand: it seemed possessed of a mysterious nail that grows on a tree side by side with Rose’s thorn and Canaima’s knife. Our eyes met. And I felt a moment of shattering peace. As if I saw through him into a future when one would indeed relinquish one’s ridiculous possessions, a future Home, a future Garden. But now they seemed so precious to me that I tried to push him away, to seize my own goods, to seize his rags as well. All of a sudden he held me and drew me close to him. My head lay against his heart. I heard the faint chiming of the bells in the distance in place of his heart. Curiously hollow yet brimming pulse of music. Had he died, was he still alive? Had I unwittingly helped to kill him? Had I been involved in the killing of the lord and master who returns to a broken, half-ruined fable of a Colony? What was the time and where and what was the Colony? Alicia in her absurdity would have said global colony, global prosperity, global poverty, global secretion within carnival history. Each hour or day one gave (early twentieth-century Day, late twentieth-century Day) crisscrossed into a pattern of Dream, Dream-Play within history, the depletions of history, the hungers of history, the desperations of history, the great and small wars from which the multi-faceted hero returns again and again and again … And the object of his return? He returns, it is said, to serve God, to make God his absolute beloved in every mission of peace, God the Mother of all men and women … Alicia was famous for such absurdities, absurdity plays, morality plays. Absurdity equals morality …