The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  Proteus’s inner broadcast had subsided a little but it suddenly increased in volume – ‘Your Aunt Alicia was the most faithful of wives, the most loyal of women. And then she realized you had changed everything. She had paid the price demanded of Rose to have you. She had aided and abetted Rose in the punishment inflicted on your father. She had sworn to keep your identity a secret. The bond with the twin-Roses had become a contract – an agreement – to secure revenge in the end. And when the Syrian magus appeared on her doorstep she was impelled to face the full implications of your ascendancy over her (the legacy of responsibility you would be summoned to unravel sooner or later) and Rose’s judgement upon her dead husband.

  ‘Her private contract, her private bond, became a thread into the mystery of the law. How guilty was she? Should she have broken her word? What is the law of love? What is the law of revenge? Where lies the medium of sacrifice within love and revenge? How do dynasties rise and fall, fall and rise, with the murder, the assassination of kings?’

  There was a sudden hiatus within the airwaves, hiatus or subtle abyss, as the ancient/modern broadcast within my living Dream ceased. I was drawn into the complicated homecoming of human surrogates of divinity through the gateway of a piece of sculpture that had appeared on my aunt’s doorstep when I was a child. I felt the shadowy weight of self-reversible merchants and magi around the globe. It was as if the collective unit of piratical bodies (ancient Ithacan and post-war modern) in equation with the king of thieves – that I had sensed on the second bank of the river of space – had now become paradoxical merchants and magi. My aunt had paid them, those paradoxical and self-reversible magi, in tea, myrrh, gold, sugar, as if to give their trade an Imaginary sacred seal to redeem, she hoped, the revenge implications built into her contract with Rose.

  In this context of self-reversible sculpture it was not the magi who brought gifts but the Alician family of state who gave of its possessions to glimpse an involvement with a core of Being, a core of metamorphosis, in which Penelope’s unfinished garment of Presence and tradition overshadowing the globe – snatched from her by the king of thieves – had materialized into a shape, a form, a sculpted body that had arrived, it seemed, from the margins of the world.

  Not from great centres or establishments but from an obscure and marginal village in Palestine that possessed a thread of blood with ancient, long-forgotten family histories in Greece and upon Calvary.

  It was as if I had been deluged by a Waterfall of Dream in Agamemnon’s bath. I swam in the corridor of space into the charisma of the political family of Man, the complicated family of Man everywhere, divided in its allegiances out of necessity, fate, freedom. I struggled to find my footing and knew – as if I had been stabbed all over again by Canaima’s hand within myself – why Alicia had apparently run from herself, why – despite her courage – she had pushed the black Agamemnon into a dusty grave or bin.

  Even now in the revived murmuring echoing voices that had resumed their inner chorus within me on the airwaves, living chorus, long dead chorus, historical personages, mythical personages, speaking from the archives of chameleon space (staid spatial accents, sharp accents, lyrical accents, gentle tones, ringing spatial tones, grave accents, etc., etc.) I felt fear and uncertainty in facing black Agamemnon again as the long Day of the twentieth century drew to a close.

  Blackness was but a mask. Strip it away and one was left with features of blood on one’s doorstep.

  Did I not hear features of sacrifice on the airwaves in the voice of a great American president? One hears with the eyes of Dream, sees with the ears of Dream. I could not be sure. Sacrificial voices are faceless until the burden is shared through one and other, man and woman. ‘Politics is choosing between the inherited blunders of Adam and Eve.’ President Kennedy spoke again – I assumed it was he in Proteus’s genesis radio play – Adam and Eve at the Berlin Wall, homecoming Adam, Dallas. I dreamt I heard a sudden scramble of voices in the Fall, inherited blunders, the Waterfall, live rock-voices, a funeral procession, followed by deathly stillness. The drought of history! Assassination. Home after Troy’s Berlin, Troy’s Cuba, Troy’s latent Vietnam, criss-crossing radio tragedies past, present and future. ‘Humanity weds every great fallen commander or ruler,’ said Proteus, ‘within a tapestry of voices, the news, displaced quotations, memorable utterances.’

  I touched the knife in Agamemnon’s body. I touched the thorn of the queen Rose my mother in Alicia’s hand. A president’s inherited wounds? A king’s inherited wounds? ‘Will the legacy of an American president, the legacy of uncrowned Martin Luther King (“I have a Dream”) turn by degrees in the sacrificial medium of an age into the root of futuristic American theatre, uncrowned Irish kings, uncrowned black kings? Or – to put it differently – will the blood of sacrifice, of martyrdom, witness for a universal and protective sovereignty within tragic republics around the globe that yearn in the dynastic pigment of the unconscious for the regeneration of saving kingship, saving queenship?’

  I was unable to reply except by raising another question. ‘Does there lie in the assassination of the Mahatma Gandhi a charisma of loss that fertilizes the seed of new sorrowing dynasties in Asia, a Nehru, sorrowing dynasty, a Bhutto, sorrowing dynasty, the rise of future, peasant ruling families from the soil of the “untouchables” whose champion Gandhi was?’

  ‘The homecoming play, political, religious,’ said the airwave voice of Proteus, ‘was Alicia’s dream of unconscious sacrifice lifting and surfacing into shared consciousness within cross-cultural, self-reversible, parallel existences. Within her own family she had experienced many sorrows, slavery, emancipation, grief, poverty, passion, the scaffolding of ruin, the pains of mortal and immortal humanity, every pattern of hunger one could name, the hunger of deprivation, the hunger of the rich, and all of this imbued her with a sense of bleak but real hope, a sense of transfigured bodies and ghosts, that led her to anticipate the need – a great abiding need – for a carnival procession in which all shades, all illuminations, all losses, all gains, deprivations, miseries, glories, may enter into a self-confessional treaty with democracy and sovereignty.

  ‘What she feared, Anselm, was that the sculpture of black Agamemnon on her doorstep was a premature manifestation of an evolution of creativity and of a reformation of the heart: premature because of a refusal to judge the self, to judge one’s frailty, and to entertain dualities, trinities, quadruple associations through which impossible stature, impossible divinity of character, may still come into the theatre of history when such “impossibility” is shared by many actors, broken into mutual parts, into mutual lives, shared lives, shared difficulties, shared obscurities, shared illuminations, shared compassion.’

  I understood. Yes, I knew now clearly why she ran from herself, why she looked into me as an extension of herself, extensive living dreamer and carnival heir retracing his footsteps in hers into a theatre of law, shared trial, the trial of the self. I was on trial, Alicia was on trial, Canaima, Rose, Proteus, Harold were on trial. Nameless others. The judge was on trial. The natures of art and science, man-made order, nature-made furies or daemons, were on trial. If I were not convinced they were all on trial I would have run away from myself into the dust of history and abandoned any hope whatsoever of comprehension of the core of Being, the core of metamorphosis.

  I could not leave it there. I felt the necessity to restate Alicia’s misgivings and anxieties, the anguish of women enslaved by the codes of men, the contracts, the bonds, instigated at a psychical level by men. What was Being? What was Presence? Black, white, ancient, modern Agamemnon was but a partial and bleak manifestation of sacrificed Being (to which women were subject) within a civilization disposed to War (whether violent war or non-violent war) and a humanity disposed to the betrayal of itself, the betrayal of what it appeared to admire or love. As much as to say sacrificed Being in its ancient fullness lay within immediacies of private grief, private betrayal, even as it moved beyond all narrow confinement o
r pigmentation, narrow gender, male, female, towards an infinite goal. Presence was the immensely and varied genius of the sacred. Presence (Alicia had made plain, Penelope too in the ceaselessly unfinished garment she wove) gave birth to characters of well-nigh impossible mythical stature in our midst whose roots lay (Alicia knew) beyond individual seizure, they lay in us, all levels of the politic and the private, all vocations, all despairs, all hopes …

  Yes, I was grateful to Alicia beyond formal understanding. Rose was my jealous mother, Alicia my spiritual womb and I had inherited all her misgivings about the codes of a male, aggressive society which nevertheless she had to bear in celebration and art and ritual, to translate, to puncture, to transform by subtle degrees into her own state.

  The moment had come to enter the room where the judge sat. I turned before doing so to scan black Agamemnon for the last time. He was about to fade, to vanish into nothingness. I saw him for the last time as a prime refugee of war (I recalled my scientific mission in the Potaro to advise, survey the river, map, report to Alicia’s government in the palace of the Rose, on the possibilities of a settlement for refugees). I saw him not only in the Potaro but in Palestine. He was running through a hail of bullets. Slain child, slain dancer, slain man, slain woman. They were all part of me, part of my team, part of Canaima’s team. They wore the slightly pulled down, evasive bandage or cap of dreams, cap of my private family on their brow.

  Once again the Dream trembled on the verge of extinction and one was tempted to run from oneself, run from the past and the future. I saw the glimmering seed of a new dynasty in resurrected family from the body of a slain child, slain man, slain woman even now in some dusty corner of a Palestinian/Potaro-esque/El Dorado-esque garden or Bush or hillside within the estate of nature.

  I saw the bloodstained curtain of Haiti, of the Middle East, of the South Americas. ‘There are alternatives,’ I cried. ‘Quantum parallels imply self-recognitions across hard-and-fast barriers as well as subtle alternatives within a ruling frame or pattern of fate. The birth of the state is already possessed of a royalty of the Imagination that is prepared to surrender itself to us. Why must we kill and subsist on martyrdoms?’

  I touched the knife in Agamemnon’s body as he vanished into hovering Presence beyond structured gender or appearance, through Rose, through every stained-glass window I visualized in post-Christendom cathedral, through every Protean riddle of Being. My trial had commenced. Not as I may have expected. The noble judge for whom I looked in the room I had entered had apparently not yet arrived. Or if he were here (as I thought he was) he was invisible to me. It would have been impossible to entertain such a paradox but I had – as epic ancient yet futuristic character on the first bank of the river of space – been cloaked by invisibility when I turned from Canaima’s victim and made my way to the Waterfall.

  Was invisibility a form of grace one shares unaccountably with daemons and furies? I had shared it with the terrifying Canaima.

  Was invisibility the hidden curvature of the art of God one clings to unknowingly? Such curvature raised issues of the imagination of the unimaginable. In less daunting terms it raised issues of marginality, of our capacity to stand upon the margins of our world, to know ourselves as absent from yet present in the world, to free ourselves from a rigid category of vested interests, and thus with profoundest disinterestedness to realize potentials we scarcely dream we may call upon in tapping beginnings that reach into priorities that are so faint we have forgotten how pertinent they are to us, reach equally into endings or endlessness: the marriage of faint conception to a faintness that seems extinction but is not extinction …

  Christ’s Presence was there, I knew, but as the strangest spectator of the funerals and the cradles of civilization. I was unable to see him except in the degree that he assisted me to perceive the serial bodies, or serial funerals, processions, serial cradles, conceptions, that moved on the third bank of the river of space.

  My translations of an art I pursued through partial pigmentation, colour, tone, etc., an art that lay therefore beyond total seizure, were the beginnings of an essential humility but I knew one must persist even if one were accused of pride.

  I framed the measure of persistence into temporary scaffoldings in which it seemed that each killed serial body was an abstract spectator at its own funeral, each unborn or gestating metaphor a window backwards into the spark of life. Here was the marriage of purely visualized architectures and sculptures to the genesis of the Word. In such a marriage the invisible Word of creation becomes concrete or the seminal proportion of Dream, the seminal proportion of the music and the rhythm of vision by abstract spirit, abstract substance.

  ‘Face the concrete,’ the Voice in the corridor said, a Voice that was attached to no absolute beginning, no absolute ending, within alternatives, parallel spaces, sculptures of myth and history. I could not resist the quantum humour of paradox. Without the invisible one would lose the seminal secret that resides in vision (the birth of vision as deathless life), would lose the medium or spark of divine comedy, abstract self-judgement, abstract fertility clothed by apparent nothingness.

  It was a thought, an intuition, an inspiration that I could not yet fathom though the Voice of invisible Christ had spoken with such authority.

  My mind was inhabited by questions of the architectures of birth and extinction, the locality and non-locality of ideas, questions of the origins of space (somethingness-in-nothingness) that I could not frame.

  Yet an answer began to unfold on the third bank of the river of space through the memory of concrete Shadows that had visited me, or I them, on the first and second banks of the tilted rivers of the epic Guyanas, epic cosmos. I had been fortunate to gain through them a spark or grain of the seminal concrete of which Christ had spoken.

  Suddenly it were as if radio-voiced, radio-armed Proteus slid into quantum television along the curvature of the arc of God in partial response to my unspoken questions or prayers. He (Proteus) turned into a spectator at his own funeral. He was there before me, he was here beside me, in the throng that viewed him. He had split himself into a versatile primordium or television amoeba, television irony, through which to contemplate a divided human/divine self, contemplate his and humanity’s funeral as a compartment nevertheless in a train of action and reflection within the sub-divided and mirroring mass-media eye of Protean age in myself and others. A drama unfolded, astonishing, unpredictable in its grain of living moment. Space (visual space, visualized space) became a stepping-stone into other dimensions.

  Proteus was ascending a hill within a Waterfall, within a river, within a series of tides from which he arose as from a coffin and bottomless cradle into our self-made victim, our self-made actor, his self-made audience.

  I reflected on the curvature along which he had come out of the depths as much as the heights: chiselled, as it were, into the ‘last comedian in space’ by an unfathomable and concrete Creator. I saw the tracery of peculiar self-knowledge in him, peculiar self-trial, peculiar sorrow, peculiar humiliation … For nothing was to be taken for granted in the ‘last sacred clown’ one associates with one’s intimate relatives, intimate family, intimate humanity. Neither the stereotypes of the box office nor the story-line of birth and death. To take such a story-line for granted was to surrender oneself to a conjurer’s unchanging universe. Whereas this unpredictable mythmaker was miracle and metamorphosis though so abused by us, so misunderstood, so exploited by advertisers, he had become the strangest ‘first’ rather than ‘last’ grotesque within which the seed of a resurrection lay buried in us, deep in us, in advance of its time. Invisible concrete (partially visible seed) was the art of the resurrection of humanity.

  ‘To stand on the brow of a quantum television hill in advance of one’s time requires one to gaze backwards in space into a mist in which one discerns through every veil an event that has already happened but which is so curiously suspended in the present moment it seems utterly native to the future.’
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  My Dream appeared to retreat a little into the Voice I had just heard and then to re-emerge with greater strength. Proteus died in 1922 but he seemed more alive now within the language of Memory. The old man (he seemed old to me in 1922 although he was less than fifty-five) had lived a full life – whatever that means – when I was a child.

  ‘What is a full life?’

  ‘A full life entails a body or bodies that lie so deep – and beyond a one-track frame of existence – that their true complexity and potency live and relate to the future.’

  Proteus was more alive now than he ever was. More alive within an immediacy of Dream that drew part, indeed much, of its revolving content from barbarisms, killings, terrorisms everywhere. More alive and real now because the innermost suspended body of the past, through the veil of the present and the future, drew him invisibly/visibly into millions and millions whose hopes are threaded into a fabric of menace and dread, a fabric of absurdities and trivialities as well, through which they survive (their hopes gain bodily, wounded substance in survival) from day to day: bitter day, trivial day, happy day, unhappy day, overshadowed by the ephemeral solidity of the news, the black news, the television soul, the radio homecoming of the maimed around the globe.

  All this edged itself into a Dream in which ‘space’ becomes Proteus’s ‘stepping-stone’ into a theatre of conception and birth I would soon encounter on the hillside he was ascending: becomes so because when I knew him it was so, he was a native of the abyss (whether I understood this or not). The germ of the abyss was there in his masks (adding new and unsuspected content to these), in the rags (divinity’s, humanity’s rags) that he wore, the inks, sketches, bottles, vessels of every shape and form, the warehouses, churches, schools, the business he conducted with the profane and with the sacred, the abuse he allowed others to heap upon him, in the intoxications of existences that he played – it was there in all these – in Poverty’s, El Dorado’s, primitive cinema, primitive radio, which I now perceived in Memory’s leap into quantum proportions.