XI
It was the seventh day from Mariella. And the creation of the windows of the universe was finished. Vigilance stood at the top of the sky he had gained at last following the muse of love, and I looked over his dreaming shoulder into the savannahs that reached far away into the morning everywhere. The sun rolled in the grasses waving in the wind and grew on the solitary tree. It was a vast impression and canvas of nature wherein everything looked perfect and yet at the same time unfinished and insubstantial. One had an intuitive feeling that the savannahs – though empty – were crowded. A metaphysical outline dwelt everywhere filling in blocks where spaces stood and without this one would never have perceived the curious statement of completion and perfection. The work was truly finished but no one would have known it or seen it or followed it without a trusting kinship and contagion.
The eye and window through which I looked stood now in the dreaming forehead at the top of the cliff in the sky. The grave demeanour of cattle and sheep roamed everywhere in the future of distance, lurking in pencils and images of cloud and sun and leaf. Horsemen – graven signs of man and beast – stood at attention melting and constant like water running on a pane of glass. The sun grew higher still and the fluid light turned and became a musical passage – a dark corridor and summons and call in the network of the day. We stood there – our eye and shoulder profound and retiring – feeling for the shadow of our feet on the ground. The light rolled and burned into quicksilver and hair shining in the window of my eye until it darkened. I found the courage to make my first blind wooden step. Like the step of the tree in the distance. My feet were truly alive I realized, as were my dreaming shoulder and eye; as far flung and distant from me as a man in fever thinks his thumb to be removed from his fingers; far away as heaven’s hand. It was a new sensation and alien body and experience encompassing the ends of the earth. I had started to walk at last – after a long infancy and dreaming death – in the midst of mutilation and chaos that had no real power to overcome me. Rather I felt it was the unique window through which I now looked that supported the life of nature and gave it a full and invisible meaning and perfection in the way I knew my hands and feet were formed and supported at this instant.
I had never before looked on the blinding world in this trusting manner – through an eye I shared only with the soul, the soul and mother of the universe. Across the crowded creation of the invisible savannahs the newborn wind of spirit blew the sun making light of everything curious hands and feet, neck, shoulder, forehead, material twin shutter and eye. They drifted, half-finished sketches in the air, until they were filled suddenly from within to become living and alive. I saw the tree in the distance wave its arms and walk when I looked at it through the spiritual eye of the soul. First it shed its leaves sudden and swift as if the gust of the wind that blew had ripped it almost bare. The bark and wood turned to lightning flesh and the sun which had been suspended from its head rippled and broke into stars that stood where the shattered leaves had been in the living wake of the storm. The enormous starry dress it now wore spread itself all around into a full majestic gown from which emerged the intimate column of a musing neck, face and hands, and twinkling feet. The stars became peacocks’ eyes, and the great tree of flesh and blood swirled into another stream that sparkled with divine feathers where the neck and the hands and the feet had been nailed.
This was the palace of the universe and the windows of the soul looked out and in. The living eyes in the crested head were free to observe the twinkling stars and eyes and windows on the rest of the body and the wings. Every cruel mark and stripe and ladder had vanished. I saw a face at one of the other constructions and windows from my observation tower. It was the face of one of the crew that had died. Carroll, I said, nudging my shoulder, as one would address an oracle for confirmation. Carroll was whistling. A solemn and beautiful cry – unlike a whistle I reflected – deeper and mature. Nevertheless his lips were framed to whistle and I could only explain the difference by assuming the sound from his lips was changed when it struck the window and issued into the world. It was an organ cry almost and yet quite different I reflected again. It seemed to break and mend itself always – tremulous, forlorn, distant, triumphant, the echo of sound so pure and outlined in space it broke again into a mass of music. It was the cry of the peacock and yet I reflected far different. I stared at the whistling lips and wondered if the change was in me or in them. I had never witnessed and heard such sad and such glorious music. I saw a movement and flutter at another window in the corner of my eye like a feather. It was Schomburgh’s white head. He too was listening rapt and intent. And I knew now that the music was not an hallucination. He listened too, like me. I saw he was free to listen and to hear at last without fearing a hoax. He stood at his window and I stood at mine, transported beyond the memory of words.
The dark notes rose everywhere, so dark, so sombre, they broke into a fountain – light as the rainbow – sparkling and immaterial as invisible sources and echoes. The savannahs grew lonely as the sea and broke again into a wave and forest. Tall trees with black marching boots and feet were clad in the spurs and sharp wings of a butterfly. They flew and vanished in the sky with a sound that was terrible and wonderful; it was sorrowful and it was mystical. It spoke with the inner longing of woman and the deep mastery of man. Frail and nervous and yet strong and grounded. And it seemed to me as I listened I had understood that no living ear on earth can truly understand the fortune of love and the art of victory over death without mixing blind joy and sadness and the sense of being lost with the nearness of being found. Carroll whistled to all who had lost love in the world. This was his humorous whimsical sadness.
I was suddenly aware of other faces at other windows in the Palace of the Peacock. And it seemed to me that Carroll’s music changed in the same instant. I nudged the oracle of my dreaming shoulder. The change and variation I thought I detected in the harmony were outward and unreal and illusory: they were induced by the limits and apprehensions in the listening mind of men, and by their wish and need in the world to provide a material nexus to bind the spirit of the universe.
It was this tragic bond I perceived now – as I had felt and heard the earlier distress of love. I listened again intently to the curious distant echo and dragging chain of response outside my window. Indeed this was a unique frame I well knew now to construct the events of all appearance and tragedy into the vain prison they were, a child’s game of a besieged and a besieging race who felt themselves driven to seek themselves – first, outcast and miserable twins of fate – second, heroic and warlike brothers – third, conquerors and invaders of all mankind. In reality the territory they overwhelmed and abandoned had always been theirs to rule and take.
Wishrop’s face dawned on my mind like the soul of all. He was obviously torn and captivated by Carroll’s playing that lifted him out of his mystical conceit. I felt the new profound tone of irony and understanding he possessed, the spirit that allowed him to see himself as he once lived and pretended he was, and at the same time to grasp himself as he now was and had always been – truly nothing in himself.
The wall that had divided him from his true otherness and possession was a web of dreams. His feet climbed a little and they danced again, and the music of the peacock turned him into a subtle step and waltz like the grace and outspread fan of desire that had once been turned by the captain of the crew into a compulsive design and a blind engine of war. His feet marched again as a spider’s towards eternity, and the music he followed welled and circumnavigated the globe. The sadness of the song grew heart-rending when he fell and collapsed though his eye still sparkled as a wishing glass in the sun – his flashing teeth and smile – a whistling devil-may-care wind and cry, a ribald outburst that wooed the mysterious cross and substance of the muse Carroll fed to him like the diet of nerve and battle to induce him to find his changeless fortress and life. It was a prodigal web and ladder he held out to him that he climbed again and again in t
he world’s longing voice and soul with his muted steps and stops.
XII
The windows of the palace were crowded with faces. I had plainly seen Carroll and Wishrop; and now as plainly I saw Cameron, the adversary of Jennings. I saw as well the newspaper face and twin of the daSilvas who had vanished before the fifth day from Mariella after making an ominous report and appearance. The music Carroll sang and played and whistled suddenly filled the corridors and the chosen ornaments of the palace; I knew it came from a far source within – deeper than every singer knew. And Carroll himself was but a small mouthpiece and echo standing at the window and reflecting upon the world.
In the rooms of the palace where we firmly stood – free from the chains of illusion we had made without – the sound that filled us was unlike the link of memory itself. It was the inseparable moment within ourselves of all fulfilment and understanding. Idle now to dwell upon and recall anything one had ever responded to with the sense and sensibility that were our outward manner and vanity and conceit. One was what I am in the music – buoyed and supported above dreams by the undivided soul and anima in the universe from whom the word of dance and creation first came, the command to the starred peacock who was instantly transported to know and to hug to himself his true invisible otherness and opposition, his true alien spiritual love without cruelty and confusion in the blindness and frustration of desire. It was the dance of all fulfilment I now held and knew deeply, cancelling my forgotten fear of strangeness and catastrophe in a destitute world.
This was the inner music and voice of the peacock I suddenly encountered and echoed and sang as I had never heard myself sing before. I felt the faces before me begin to fade and part company from me and from themselves as if our need of one another was now fulfilled, and our distance from each other was the distance of a sacrament, the sacrament and embrace we knew in one muse and one undying soul. Each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever seeking and what he had eternally possessed.
PURSUING THE PALACE OF THE PEACOCK
by Kenneth Ramchand
Palace of the Peacock is set in the sixteenth century and goes back to earlier times. One of the main characters is Donne. Donne can be thought of as a sixteenth-century character – Elizabethan adventurer or Spanish conquistador. The book deals with breakdowns of community that are historical and disturbingly modern. It is about imperialism and fragmentation, about desire and death, about the abuse of native peoples and the endless search for wholeness. It is a book about now.
I still have the copy I read in 1963. I hadn’t read anything else by Wilson Harris. I hadn’t read any reviews. I was drawn into the work. Even now, after another twenty books or so and after a lot of writing about his work, Harris is still inviting. I don’t see how anybody can say he is hard to read. Not when he is at his best, as he is most of the time in Palace of the Peacock. Not if you realise that you are dealing with a writer who uses his material like a film-maker, painter and musician. Not if you have a sense of rhythm and can feel the beat that does so much of the work in the later writings.
The descriptions of landscape and nature were striking, sometimes overwhelming: “The trees rose around me into upward flying limbs when I screwed my eyes to stare from underneath above. At last I lifted my head into a normal position. The heavy undergrowth had lightened. The forest rustled and rippled with a sigh and ubiquitous step. I stopped dead where I was, frightened for no reason whatever. The step near me stopped and stood still. I stared around me wildly, in surprise and terror, and my body grew faint and trembling as a woman’s or a child’s. I gave a loud ambushed cry which was no more than an echo of myself – a breaking and grotesque voice, man and boy, age and youth speaking together.”
More than that even, one was hooked at once by character and event. The book begins with a startling act of violence: “A horseman appeared on the road coming at a breakneck stride. A shot rang out suddenly, near and yet far as if the wind had been stretched and torn and had started coiling and running in an instant. The horseman stiffened with a devil’s smile, and the horse reared, grinning fiendishly and snapping at the reins. The horseman gave a bow to heaven like a hanging man to his executioner, and rolled from his saddle on to the ground.”
The language drew attention to itself. It was literal and sensuous, and eye-openingly figurative at the same time. Once or twice in the opening pages it seemed to be at war with itself, drawing the reader at least two ways at once. Seeming opposites or unrelated things (operating theatre, maternity ward, murderer’s cell) are yoked together in spite of the superficial tension that accompanies such yoking. One sense is described as if it were another. So the sound of the shot in the wind had turned into a rope; the straight line of the bullet was now a screaming menacing spiral; the teeth of the devilish horseman and the teeth of the fiendish horse grinned in concert; the horseman became a man with a noose around his neck biting at the rope, like the horse snapping at the reins.
I read the opening paragraph with a sense of recognition. I had seen the episode in many a black-and-white movie. Mouthed the drumming of the hooves, nasalised the sound of the bullet ricocheting. The horseman stiffened as if he had been lassoed, the horse rearing and whinnying, the theatrical and slow-motion fall from the saddle. I had acted all of them out in childhood games. But this was no imitation Western. What was one to make of the horseman bowing to heaven as if to his executioner? I came to Harris in enough innocence to suspend my biases about what a novel should be, and what it ought to be about. I was greedy for story. I read it very fast. Then I started over.
Ignoring the historical calendar and the tensions arising directly out of the forced and voluntary movements over five centuries, a crew consisting of all the peoples who came to the Caribbean at different times are journeying together by boat into the heart of Guyana. The da Silva twins of Sorrow Hill; old Schomburgh the bowman, living in a condition of “silent stoical fear that passed for rare courage”; the young African boy Carroll, “gifted with his paddle as if it were a violin and a sword together in Paradise”, and his cousin the black-haired Amerindian Vigilance, “reading the river’s mysterious book”, the red-skinned man Cameron, “faster than a snake in the forest with his hands”; the mechanic and wooden-faced Jennings, “cursing and reproving his whirling engine in the unearthly terrifying grip of water”; and finally, Wishrop, assistant bowman and captain’s understudy.
When it is too late to make a difference to our involvement, the novel speaks to us about its assumption that waking and dreaming, the living and the dead, can exist side by side: “The odd fact existed of course that their living names matched the names of a famous dead crew that had sunk in the rapids and been drowned to a man, leaving their names inscribed on Sorrow Hill which stood at the foot of the falls. But this in no way interfered with their life-like appearance and spirit and energy.”
Although this vivid and matter-of-fact crew are driven by their own separate lusts, they are united in pursuit of gold and the Indians (“the folk”) who can serve as guides and slaves. They are heading towards a mission or inland station called Mariella. In the journey beyond Mariella, which takes seven days, they press-gang an old Amerindian woman as their guide. Their captain is the rapacious Donne. The boat eventually crashes and is abandoned at the foot of a breathtaking waterfall, and the crew ascend the steep sides of the cliff to look out and in from the windows of the palace of the universe.
The ascent to the palace comes after the death of Carroll, who slips and falls into the water. This death comes over as a sacrifice, and it is associated with the emergence of an ancient music. The novel tells us that the eyes and ears of the crew are suddenly opened to the possibilities of wholeness: “In an instant it were as if we saw with our own eyes as well as heard with our own ears an indestructible harmony within the tragedy and sorrow of age and the malice and the nature of youth. It was Carroll’s voice that turned to stone and song, and the sadness of the baptismal lamentation on his lip
s which we heard in the heart of the berserk waters was our own almost senseless rendering and apprehension of the truth of our art and our perfection in the muse.” It is interesting that in a note to the 1988 re-issue of Palace of the Peacock, Harris plays on Carroll’s music, linking its function to that of the Carib bone flute which he read about years after writing the Guyana novels. This tells us something about the intuitive process involved in creation and about the hidden order in art, both of which give Harris’s writings their unpredictable imagery and insights.
From the start this kind of difference between Harris’s work and the productions of his contemporaries drew attention to itself. The difference in artistic disposition is connected with differences in attitudes to history. Summing up in 1970 the Harris oeuvre up to The Waiting Room (1967), I wrote that “the ground of loss or deprivation with which most West Indian writers and historians engage is not for Harris simply a ground for protest, recrimination and satire; it is visualised through the agents in his works as an ambivalent condition of helplessness and self-discovery, the starting-point for new social structures … Susan Forrestal, blind, helpless and deprived, involved in The Waiting Room in the development of new resources and capacities for relationships with people and things, becomes the exciting ambivalent emblem of a so-called ‘hopeless’, ‘historyless’ West Indian condition.” Harris was concerned with West Indian history but was trying to move away from the usual attitudes. The link between Susan’s blindness and the blindness theme in Palace is another illustration of the continuity between the first novel and the later ones.
Palace of the Peacock Page 10