The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  It was a blue morning, blue yet red with bruises of dawn-cloud. We set out from the Mission House around seven. The year was 1950. It was the week of the drowning fatality (as an El Dorado newspaper had put it). The Macusi lightning axeman (subdued now and shrunken) whom I had met on the first bank was our guide. We made our way uphill, up the blue, red, dawn-cloud world to the grave where Canaima’s dancer lay. It was as if we were venturing upon another planet to mourn our dead. I recalled the bird-text on the lips of the dancer when I had come upon him long ago on the riverbank. Here on the fourth bank of the river of space that bird-text had been uplifted from the first bank (uplifted grave as well) into our gateway into the planetary Forest. We stopped at the uplifted grave as our guide moved up ahead to clear a mass of fallen branches from the mouth of the trail.

  Ross had put an arm around Penelope. They stood beside the dancer’s epitaph in the very depression that the king of thieves had occupied when he poured shining rain into the ground. I saw the shadow of leaves touch their faces with the light bruise of a candle that seemed to sing in the wind. Shadow organ investiture of the technology of a candle or a bulb when one sets foot in unexplored realms. How else may one come abreast of what lies beyond one’s vocabulary of apprehension? Penelope grieved. The body of the child she carried began to slip from her arms. It was after all an alien burden that did not fit easily into the texts of her education in the world from which she had come. Was it an illusion to cherish the body of a drowned alien? Why not let it slip into oblivion? Why not let it resume its path upon the serpent-ladder into deep anfractuous caves and deeper still into the river of the dead? As Ross placed his arm around her her question was answered by the bird-text in the ground. She looked up into drought-planets, forest-planets, riverain-planets and into the fossil bodies of the living in their anfractuous, multi-layered, circuitous corridors of space. She heard the faint sound of aircraft far above and was able to see – from the clearing where we were – a white ribbon of frozen smoke in the wake of an aeroplane.

  We stood beneath the lines and circles of flight of hundreds of criss-crossing planes on their way to the uplifted graves of Rio or Buenos Aires or Ecuador or Caracas or Port-of-Spain or Kingston. A veritable hive of transparent or uplifted corridors and caves, uplifted by bird-men and women into space. Not to speak of satellites and perpetual debris afloat above us, immersed in an ocean of space around us, in perpetual suspension between us and the stars. Uplifted graves? Uplifted cradles? And all at once Penelope resumed the burden in her arms, she pulled it against her breasts in an ocean of space in which she swam in my Dream into a future from which she could not escape. All were involved, all were responsible, all were being tested to the core …

  It seemed to me then that she would have preferred not to be touched, not to be held by Ross. She accepted his arm because had she pulled away he would not have understood the singular tide, the complex labyrinth of emotion and passion in which the drowned child lay against her now, heavy as stone yet frail as an unimaginable feather from the wings of God’s angel as if to witness to untranslatable Innocence within the wastes of Time. I could not be sure that this was how she felt. And yet I knew. I knew how coiled one is into the ladder of lightning peace that runs midway between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’: so coiled that one may unwittingly embrace another and bring hurt to him or her – a hurt or an injury of which one is unconscious.

  One may embrace another when one’s arm or body is not desired at that particular moment. One should step back but one continues (sometimes apparently mindlessly) to step forward. Such is the dance of primitive nature that is intent on its goal. One’s touch is born of the riddle of possession (the desire to possess), the riddle of compassion (the desire to support or console). One may seek not to possess but to console and still bring the shock of pain or grief… The Dream intrudes. It makes one aware of what is happening and yet it does not disclose why sorrow or grief is a thread in the dancing fabric of innocence …

  The other submits (as Penelope does now to Ross in the Dream) because she is aware that the need to withstand the terrors of primitive nature runs deep: it runs in the voices of the blood in one’s veins into a whisper of untouchable beauty.

  ‘Touch what is untouchable. Dance to a music of genesis one scarcely remembers …’

  Perhaps in secretly withstanding Ross, yet accepting the consolation of his arm, Penelope was shaken by the voice of the drowned child she had taught to sing her English songs, shaken by another music, the music of genesis that triggered a response in the eel, the dance with the eel, the lightning dance, black lightning peace. Black lightning peace? Black lightning conception?

  Peace became, conception became – against that sounding backcloth of the music of genesis within the whispering tide – a measure of our mutual acceptance of fate (when fate voices its legend, the legend of the dance of genesis), our mutual acceptance of freedom (when freedom voices its legend, the legend of ultimate insight, ultimate consolation), melodic Conscience.

  I reached out too to touch and support Penelope as she seemed on the verge of toppling into a faint. The Dream had not disclosed to me or to her or to Ross or to our savage guide why sorrow and grief were a thread in the fabric and the dance of innocence but it offered a clue now to the grain of the hollow Word. Hollowness needs to clothe itself again with heaven’s dance and then it may plumb the flesh of genesis that we carry everywhere in the body of the unconscious. Melodic Conscience is the subtle flesh of the Word that clothes a child one bears on earth … Such is the prayer of the Word, the intimate, ultimate dance of the Word, the renewed Word, the ecstatic Word.

  I was driven by a glimmering understanding of the voices heard in mutual blood yet could not fully articulate: voices of fate and freedom one hears as if they were a breach in a vocabulary of fear and apprehension, the breach that clothes one’s deprivations with fire-music, water-music, earth-music …

  We were at last in a position to face our expedition on the fourth bank of the river of space. It was as if – whatever divisions stood between us – a new dialogue had commenced as the twentieth century drew to a close and we retraced our steps.

  Our guide was signalling to us. The mouth of the trail had been cleared and we climbed and entered the Bush. The fantastic, planetary greenheart trees rose into marvellous silvery columns on every hand. Clothed in water-music. The trail was narrow. We walked in single file. The cracked silvery veil of greenheart possessed the texture of slow-motion rain falling within the huge Bell of a still Waterfall in which whispering leaves of fluid sound ran up into veil within veil of Shadow-organ gloom towards the highest reaches of the Forest and the slits of the Sky far above. Subtle fire-music.

  I had never before seen the shining bark of greenheart columns in this slow-motion raining light (nor the Sky clothed in frail ribbons of fire-music within the lofty gloom of a Bell) in all my remembered Dream of Forests I had travelled in my youth. How young was I, how old was I? We had entered it seemed – the Macusi guide first, Penelope second, Ross third, I last – an innermost chamber of the magical Waterfall beneath god-rock. It encompassed the globe, the ancient world, the modern world. As if the Waterfall had been uplifted from the river and transferred within us in the music of space, around us in Shadow-organ imperceptible (not wholly imperceptible for we were aware of it) dance of genesis.

  I recalled the funeral procession when the inner bodies in the rocks in the Waterfall had left their shell to guard the waters even as they arose within the king of thieves and others who bore Canaima’s bird-text victim to his grave. It seemed now that the dancer’s text was a further conversion or alchemy of inner sculpture into living Memory. Penelope, Ross, the Macusi guide and I had been sculpted or painted not from rock but from the silvery text of rain within the fluid, still Bell of the Waterfall to bear the absent bodies of the drowned children to their homes within the tapestry of the Word.

  I began to pray – ‘May the daemons and the furies and the archan
gels help us,’ I prayed, ‘to make unique and far-reaching global distinctions in fabrics of sorrow and innocence, the fabric of names by which we name ourselves, saint-names, king-making names, queen-making names, etc., etc. We have a long way to go backwards into all these names, the names we have given flowers, trees, stars, the names with which we have tagged genesis (though the music of genesis still breaks through); we have a long Dream to take back into our callouses, into the complacent formulae by which we live (whether of stock heroism or stocks-and-shares salvation), a long Dream to take forwards into our addiction to mass prosperity, the ethics of mass prosperity, before we turn and confront our two selves (our many-rooted, many-branched two selves), past and future selves in the present, and confess to an unique and sacred Poverty that makes us susceptible to the regenerated eye, the regenerated ear within the very grain of things and possessions, places native and foreign that we take for granted in our history books.’

  The prayer had barely crossed my lips when the perils and dangers we faced dawned upon me within the gloom and the Bell of the forested Waterfall. We were making an ancient journey, we were making a modern journey. We were still rooted in the deprivations of the Word though we sensed a breach that clothed these in paradoxical senses. Had not Penelope implied on the second bank of the river of space that her mission was woven into the tapestry of the ‘adventure of love unfulfilled’? Now on the fourth bank (as we bore the Shadows of the drowned in our arms) that mission was as much a penetration of local sentiment as of non-local and universal grave and cradle in the interwoven aspects of incarnated text. It was idle claiming within the divisions and sub-divisions of the Word that haunted us, within the spaces that lay between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’, between ‘fate’ and ‘freedom’, between ‘endurance’ and ‘passion’, that the language of identity was not fraught with questions we still had to answer, questions of electric mood, ecstasy, electric depression. Melodic Conscience was on our side within each frail candle that shone in the Bush as the breath of music but it was not to be taken for granted. It possessed hidden darknesses, hidden teeth. I felt them biting now into the soil of my mind. Soil of mind! Earth-music. Painful soil, mind, earth-music. Our way was barred I swore by the teeth of music dressed in a sudden, unpredictable downfall of weather and mood. I felt myself an enemy of nature and Mankind as the rainy high mouth of the Forest descended and closed in. Was it morning, was it noon, was it premature Night? Absurd ultimatum. Slightly shivering ultimatum of the enemy within a wave of heat that subsided but left us drenched, bitten to the skin, and cold. Absurd teeth within a Dream that is the simultaneous exposure of untranslatable fear and bias in ourselves. In such exposure, such unearthly music of devouring impulse, melodic Conscience bit deep, bit so deep, it jested with us, it painted us into enemies of the very nature and Mankind we wanted to serve. Bitten artist, bitten engineer, bitten saint, bitten sinner, civilization’s bitten missionary and teacher, civilization’s bitten savage.

  We had been walking for several hours. It seemed an age in the mouth of space. The trail ahead of us was blocked again. Fire was needed to clear a path. I tried to disabuse myself of devouring impulse within and without but the tangled branches raised their arms imploringly into a Shape, a woman’s Shape (I could see the fern of her hair and her lustrous black eyes like pools reflected upwards from the ground) crowned by an Orchid. It was not Queen Rose this time. It was bitten-by-fire Queen Orchid. Our guide had set a match to the heaped branches across the trail.

  ‘The Dido Orchid,’ cried Ross. He seemed in this instant of fire-music immune to the flame in my Dream as if his spontaneous, aroused curiosity or excitement was so strong it baffled the mouth of space in which we stood. He leaned over the Orchid, smiled, I saw the glitter of his teeth this time, touched by flame, kissed by flame. The volumes on South America he had brought from England shaped themselves into brilliant ashes, brilliant intercourse of incandescence and human curiosity that has sustained many a fiery adventurer in the desert, at the Poles, in the depths of the rain-forest, military high-flying adventurers as well before they unleash their bomb. Each volume, each page, was clothed by running music, the cautionary fire-music that breaches the heart of Dream. I could still read the ghostly names of ghostly authors in the subtle furnace, some had lodged themselves in a crackling chorus of high-flying nineteenth-century super-power map-makers, botanists, biologists, evolutionists, soldier-civil servants, anthropologists, chroniclers, etc., etc.: Schomburgk, Horsman, In Thurm, Beebe, Boddam-Whettam, Humboldt, Roth, Waterton … A page fluttered, turned in the fire-music and I read, as page intertwined itself with page, the hand of another nameless writer –

  The Dido Orchid was christened by a German botanist. It takes its name from Queen Dido of Carthage and Libya. Note the flaming, wondrous, flaxen, yet blackened, ferny leaves and petals. Queen Dido built her own funeral pyre in Libya as though she had been bombed by fate when Aeneas abandoned her.

  I peered into the fire as the nameless hand dissolved in the brilliant ashes of classical investitures upon the flora of the fourth bank of the river of space in which lies the ancient, unconscious, epic seed of modern botany and modern warfare.

  The nameless hand revived itself in the ashes of Dream and Ross and I read –

  Jupiter forbade Aeneas to wed Dido and settle in Africa. All well and good to dally with her, to sleep with her, but it was implied that ‘miscegenation’ would come of such a union. And yet Virgil painted the African queen with white skin and flaxen hair. Such was the formula of epic evolution. Was it a formula that inevitably sustained the transmission of errors in the oral material that great epic poets use?

  The blaze settled. White teeth, red fire’s black voice! Nameless muse or chorus of the imagination that runs in one’s blood. Ross’s eyes had darkened. I saw him for a flashing moment in the bombed garden in which Simon had come upon him and Penelope long ago. His love of her had been translated into a curiosity that tied him to a foreign landscape and the phantom South American orchid of ancient Libya and Carthage. I sensed the music of the unconscious in him, unconscious seed underlying the vocabulary of the imperial travellers who were our predecessors.

  Indeed I could be sure of nothing. How conscious was I of the imperial legacies that tended to frame the environment of my mind? I may have read in the nameless hand in the fire a paraphrase of Schomburgk’s German prose which I had seized intuitively and made into my own. On the other hand – other nameless hand – I may have tapped the rhythm of Im Thurm’s sensuous English dialogue with the rivers of Guyana and found it native to fire, my fire, my blood. What was clear was the necessity to penetrate, replay, reinterpret, and not succumb to, formulae of static evolution: to respond to the true, multiple voices – familiar, unfamiliar, native, alien – that run in one’s mixed inheritance, mixed blood. The fire-music, the earth-music, had illumined the mouth of space that we (and our imperial predecessors) had entered long before a voyage to the moon had been contemplated.

  Those true voices in the live fossil blood of music could turn nevertheless and tear one’s convictions into shreds, into a beggar’s rags, with jesting translations, with jesting paraphrase, of flawed history, flawed anthropology, flawed biology, enshrined by cultural habit into pure white, pure black, frames. Deprivation’s frames.

  ‘She bars our path,’ the voice in my blood cried. The blaze was high. The black African queen with white skin and flaxen hair split into two pictures. One was a constellation of Botanic lore transferred into the soil of the Americas. The other was a crucial moment in the womb of the human imagination when the queen gives up the ghost of black or white purity and biased fossil, biased formula, on her funeral pyre in the heart of future generations.

  Ross was aroused. He shared my vision but distrusted it. He was staring at the Macusi guide who tended the blaze that had been lit in the blocked trail of fallen branches and trees. He stroked the enigmatic Orchid flesh of the queen. The stoic demeanour of the savage who led us reminded h
im of the pupils in his classroom and drew a veil as it were between him and the fire with its frail implications of passion’s peace on the delicate singed bloom in his hand.

  ‘Peace is an illusion,’ he murmured, ‘without massive deterrence. It is unfair, no doubt, to equate the young Macusis in my classroom, their slightly sombre and entrenched expression, with the dread efficiency and uniformity of the Nazis or the Japanese in World War Two. And yet it is the Shadow in the mirror, the Shadowy conflagration of a queen or a king or an imperial dynasty that fills me with misgiving. I see not peace there in primitive fires and implicit holocausts but xenophobia. I hear no music except the delirium of power. Alas, people fear people everywhere, Anselm. I wish it were otherwise.

  ‘Natives fear immigrants, immigrants natives. It has taken nearly a century and a half for the French and the Germans to relinquish a pattern of feud that may have had its roots in the Napoleonic wars. I have seen my friends and relations engulfed in two great wars on European soil in this century. I have French and German antecedents – though I am English – and (let me say in jest) I sometimes see myself as my own worst and best enemy with whom – thank God – a treaty is now possible but at a price, Anselm…’

  ‘What price?’

  ‘A price that involves an awareness of savage idealism. I wish it were possible to enter a laboratory (not a monastery, mind you) and devote the rest of my life to training a telescope or a microscope on forests and constellations, flowers and stars. A blissful existence! Instead my job is to educate a tribe, a generation, I cannot fix, do not – in heaven’s name – wish to fix. For then I would have betrayed everything I hold dear.’ He was laughing at himself and yet I felt he was asking a question of me. Not of me! Of the substance of Dream that divided and united us.