Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

It seemed sensible advice. And yet…

‘We have come too far‚’ I said, ‘We have earned the right to go forward not into a Golden Age from which to retrace our steps, not into the return of a Golden Age (of which El Dorado in Guyana is a pertinent Shadow), but into profoundest self-recognition of ourselves in and through others: the interior anatomy, the true terrifying flesh of the Word, the true terrifying knowledge of the Heart that may set us free at last from fear.’

*

The fire-talk lucid conversation with its abrupt, wholly natural transitions, traceries, linked memories through polar opposites, faded into sudden darkness upon my lips. Nothing remained except a vague self-portraiture. The procession continued on its way. We camped further along the trail in a valley that was the gateway into the remote and small settlement from which the drowned child I carried had come. I laid the child (whose intricate face and body baffled my sight) on the ground. Sleep was a chasm, a fault in the landscape of Dream, and one wondered whether in falling more steeply or deeply into it everything would vanish forever in the future.

Despite our misgivings the sun rose with new morning in the fractionalized long Night, long Day, of fossil insight into the past. We clung to each feature of landscape as if it were a piece of live, bright coal that lit one’s mind anew. Whereas we had commenced our processional journey with the sensation of being sculpted shells of water, sculpted bodies composed of a fluid reality, now it was as if we had entered another dimension of the still Waterfall of space, a dimension of the future.

Here the great lofty precipitation of silvery bark upon the trees had given way to an open grassy savannah. Streams ran down from the hills. It was light itself that rained upon us: an inner texture of light as though the bark of the Forest had unclothed itself into naked brightness within the multidimensional fabric of the Waterfall.

I was excited by the light paint (restorative fossil paint, meticulous live fossil flesh) I placed anew on our lips in the resurrectionary canvas of space. Modern resurrected savage reflecting ancient primitive humanity within ourselves.

How far had we arrived in the future? We three, carriers of the dead?

‘Every Waterfall‚’ I said to Ross, ‘one enters in Dream or comes upon within a great continent such as this — a continent inhabited by lost or forgotten cultures one needs to see anew from the future, within an Imaginary future — is a veiled messenger of the womb of the sea, of the origins of life and technologies of death rooted in strangest innocence. I trust we shall learn and see. It stands and descends — that Waterfall — upon an escarpment; it appears at first sight to embody an absolute ridge between the past and the present, between the sea and the land … But look!’

Our camp lay within mountainous terrain, the valley itself— in its lofty right — however contained by the vessel of the land — possessed the escalating contours of a hill one million years above the sea: a fractionalized aeon’s perch in space above the tides of the ocean that still crawled in every rock garden.

‘Take the weight of a pebble in your hand. Strip away the mountains within the interior anatomy of space. Imagine ourselves as animate, beautiful, dancing skeletons perched here nevertheless in the ground of a valley that is no valley at all but a hill far up in Time above the rock garden of the sea that fertilizes itself as it splits into reversible lava or life-giving water.’

As I spoke I fished in my pocket for Inspector Robot’s glasses that I had used in ascending god-rock — glasses that fused a parallel between ‘artificial time’ and ‘quantum, simultaneous, microscopic eyes in all fabrics of existence whether flower or grass or tree’.

‘Now replace the mountains. Look through Robot’s glasses at the streams in the distance descending from the mountains we have fleshed into life again — skeleton, vanished mountains we have clothed into action again above the valley/hill on which we stand. Those streams become messengers of the ocean’s volcanic peace, the ocean’s tumult yet inherent quietude, raised above extinct devouring premises as valley is raised above running valley and cloud rains upon still cloud.

‘The mountains become a precipitate ridge, slow-motion Waterfall in space, half-solid appearance. A mountain is a slow-motion Waterfall within the simultaneous eyes of past/ future space. It is not an absolute ridge or monumental fortress between our past memories of the warring sea and our present occupation of the conquered land.

‘It is a fault that may imprison us in territorial conflict unless our eyes are opened to far future Imaginary expeditions when humanity takes its Shadowy rivers of the dead into the stars as new rain upon desert planets.’

Perhaps we were stealing a march into the future upon Inspector Robot in making such use of his glasses. I remembered he had tried to steal a march upon me when he sought to ape the features of the great judge at the trial on the third bank of the river of space.

We did not have long to wait. Gleaming, dazzling messengers were sighted on their way from the settlement we were seeking. The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses …

I STOPPED. All at once the lines — ‘Perhaps we were stealing a march, etc., etc.’ — that had been dictated to me within the theatre of the future — as it drew me to recall the past — seemed too inflexible ( inflexible fossil-humour?), lines steeped, I felt, in an aroma that filled me with unease. ‘Whyunease?’ said the dictating Voice, ‘why did you stop? I am no future dictator you have come upon, I am not dictating what you may continue to record on the fourth bank. Such apparent dictation and its aroma stemfrom — let me put it this way — transparencies of the unconscious. And these have an inimitable style of their own that seems dictation from an alien source. They can be very disturbing. Conscience is the spark you are seeking to trace within every dazzling transparency and within unique atmospheres and fossil-strata above you and beneath you. Fire was the atmospherichumour in which you read the nameless hand and its writings before you came through the trail to where you now are.

‘Now it’s not that strict fire which you experience in this reach of future time. It’s another element, an element that has evolved from imprints of fire, an element that is not fire in any ordinary sense yet it smoulders into a consciousness that does not burn but may for that very reason be unbearable, well-nigh unbearable, at times.

‘It is the spark of the living Word that you seek, the sacred Word. And that’s akin to a compulsion even as it indicates liberation. It’s upsetting. It’s a style that drives you on but leaves you unsettled, even unhappy. The touch of long-dead, buried masters who travelled into the future long, long ago and who are intent on helping you in the quest for truth, yes,truth I say — truth that is interwoven with a sacred kind of self-deception ( odd business I know ) but without which — without that peculiar interweave — conscience would not exist. You will see and it will shake you, Anselm. ’

I would see in due course. That was his promise. I wanted to close my ears to the voice or voices of the transparent unconscious. But it was impossible to do so. What was the last image I received when I saw‘the gleaming, dazzling messengers’ approaching?

The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses. It was the glistening drums they carried, and other adornments on their bodies, that made them shine. I recalled Proteus’s half-jesting remark to Rose in the hillside cabin on the third bank of the river of space: ‘infant lighthouse of science’. I was not sure I had remembered exactly but it helped us to feel partially at home with the savages of the past one perceived in a burning, non-burning light from a tower or tent in the future.