Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘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.

‘Eruption is a measure of a healing process in nature,’ I cried. I felt tears in my eyes. His logic seemed unanswerable. ‘The globe cleanses itself when it quakes and spews forth lava. There would be no flowers to spy on without the quake, the lava.’ I could not stop the tears welling up and pouring from me in the Dream. ‘The gods are an eruption within and from humanity‚’ I said haltingly, ‘that may set in train …’ I hesitated, ‘set in train a process of healing once we turn, face events, and make distinctions.’

He stared at me against the mirror of fire-music (‘delirium of power’, he had called it) as if I were a child. I had brought him no release from misgiving. And yet I could not be sure but I sensed that a tension of true counterpoint lay between us in the abyss of our age: a deeper self-confessional edge to our lips in self-portraitures and the sculpture of others. His mind about the nature of history, the nature of nature, was apparently made up. Mine was too. And yet I felt the very divisions between us were a catalyst (if ‘catalyst’ were the word) of far-flung change and of the translation of ourselves on to another level of being that would assist us to see ourselves differently in different shades and lines and fragments of existence.

‘Rid yourself of myth, Anselm‚’ he said softly. ‘It’s a dangerous addiction, this business of eruptive yet healing nature. A manifesto of anarchy. Reform of our institutions is necessary of course. Everywhere. But we need discipline and control. I have seen eruptive human nature, revolutionary activity, and it’s a fruitless bargain. No one wins.’

‘You’re turning your back on what I am saying, Ross‚’ I cried.

‘What are you saying, Anselm?’ His manner was cold despite the leaping tongues of fire.

‘I am saying that eruptive being has now reared its head in all of us (conservatives have become radicals, radicals pseudo-conservatives) — whether we admit it or not — in all sorts of ways. Not the old revolutionary compulsions. Reared its head because of technological uncertainties, the clash of cultures, the susceptibility of masses to charismatic leadership …’ I blurted out almost crudely, crude Word, yet desire for truth — ‘The gods are not God‚’ I cried. ‘That much we know, Ross.’

‘Do we?’ he spoke like a complete stranger in the Dream.

I turned and looked into the fire as if I spoke from it, in it, as if I leapt from broken ladder of flame to broken ladder of flame in danger of falling into a pit. I held a charred volume in one hand and read from it in the Dream. ‘God does not imbue us with the power of delirium but with a capacity for infinite, creative distinctions at the heart of all relationships, relationships of sorrow or joy, bitterness or sweetness …’ The page was crumbling but I was still able to read —’ … invaluable distinctions we need to make when the gods overshadow our world. The gods are in phenomena that excite us to mindlessness, mindless self-abandon, mindless superstition, the gods erupt in charismatic lusts and leadership, charismatic radicalism to purge our ranks, expel our enemies, charismatic conservatism to bind, to entrap, charismatic self-interest, charismatic mutiny or strike. The gods are dangerous, sometimes notoriously fickle and amoral. But they open the way to distinctions we scarcely ever make until their shadow darkens our path. A terrifying lesson. If we bundle together God, gods, daemons, furies in a uniform and gross package then we misinterpret sacred balances and forfeit the instructive bite of music, the interior anatomy, the creative fast that is required of us…’

‘Bundle together,’ said Ross drily. ‘The language of fascism, Anselm, the language of uniformity, regimentation. Bundle together! The gods like that. Easier than making distinctions.’

The dream-volume slipped from my hands but its utterance was imprinted on my mind. I did not reply. I found myself staring hard at the blackened fossil flesh of the marvellous Orchid in Ross’s hand. As though his hand lay in mine, mine in his, within the abyss of our age. I saw a library of interior counterpoint no one could destroy replete with the rhythmic tapestry of the City of God, leaf, petal, bone, shell. The resurrection of fossil eternities into living diversity! A library that lay in the future, within us, beyond us. I would have given my sight to open a visionary page, to read a visionary line, to enter the future: the future’s miraculous community of souls born of the divisions of the past.

I would have given my sight to see backwards into a desolate age from the future. Curious self-contradiction! I would have given my sight to see with eyes acquainted with every extremity, to see myself as a living, resurrected fossil steeped in diversity not eternity-for-the-sake-of-eternity, to see my own blindness now from an unravelled, penetrative standpoint within the distant future, to know myself in all my limitations and through such paradox to live within yet beyond the present frame or burning moment …

The wish or prayer had scarcely touched my lips when the blaze subsided. The trail was clear. A doorway into the future. I felt fear then. How easy to slip into the future’s complacency and dream one has escaped the past and the present. No, that was not my intention. My hope was to retrace my steps from the future into the present and the past and know oneself — know the everlasting stranger within oneself — as never before. I had seen Ross for an instant as a total stranger who then became profoundly meaningful within the tension of interior counterpoint. It was this thread I wished to pursue through and beyond all measure of complacency. Perhaps in breaking a formula of complacency — in becoming a stranger to oneself — one would gain the strength to bear the full complication of relationships one had begun to unveil in ascending from bank to bank in the four banks of the river of space.

Should I shrink from such insight into a tapestry of responsibilities, a community of souls (saints and sinners) that — in tearing complacency to rags — could shake me to the core of being?

Had I not already come forwards/backwards a far way in my pilgrimage? Was it not wise to leave it there? Leave them there? Ross, Penelope, the drowned children?

I thought I heard Ross say, as the last embers of the blaze subsided, ‘Let’s stop, Anselm. Let’s go to the riverbank and bury our drowned children in the ruined Mission House that lies in the future, a future we know in the Dream as you retrace your steps from 1988 into 1950. We know Canaima will burn the House in 1966 though this is 1950. Why go forward still more into an uncertain, perhaps threatening, future that may take us back beyond what we already know?’