Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

We looked through Robot’s glasses within transparencies of the unconscious at the ancient masquerade of a newborn tribe. They wore a long subtly woven belt — or shining umbilicus-eel — that issued from the region of their navel and coiled itself around their bodies to reach their shoulder and neck.

It was as if they bore the brunt of a fault within the inner/outer body of brightest innocence one could scarcely visualize except as a jest of nature. The bright umbilicus or eel brought home the drowned children (the Shadowy obscure bodies of the drowned children) we had brought to them for ritual burial. And the ease with which the eel had coiled itself around them suggested an intimacy with the elements (with the fluid electricity of the elements, animal electricity, animal ‘lighthouse’) that revived in me an attachment to the mother of light and darkness (the twin-Rose) who had spared my life.

Were they pitiless phantoms in the fossil-strata of the unconscious or harbingers of hope?

‘Eel’ or ‘umbilicus’ equalled ‘electricity’.

That was the nature of their innocent jest, innocent transgression into consuming technology, consuming spires of electricity that would pierce the heavens and rival the stars. The gift of life was a gift of terrifying responsibility.

‘Eel’ or ‘infant lighthouse’ equalled a ‘fault’ in the generation of innocence within the depths of nature and as a consequence one was prone to worship nature and yet to recoil from it.

Before we knew what had happened they had surrounded us. They flattened our tower or tent in a flash and we were pulled without further ado into the long grasses as into a river of passions. The green swell of the grassy tide hemmed us in yet swept us along. The white waving crest of the sun sang with non-burning heat. It was a river as well as a lake or sea into which the band or tribe took us. The Shadow of my ‘drowned child’ had been snatched from my arms but Ross and Penelope still held theirs. I dreamt of long ancient spars and the rigging of sailing ships sprouting from the bodies of men. I dreamt of the wrecked cabin on a waving hillside in which my uncle Proteus had pleaded with my twin-mother Rose for my life.

It was a Dream of such power the cabin became preternaturally real. It became the grain of expeditions in space seen from a newborn standpoint of truth and self-deception. Truth in that it was a vivid articulation from within the unconscious of the perils I faced when my mother was taken ill and I was infected by the very Asian flu epidemic in Alicia’s household: an illness that occurred in the very year or month that my mother’s twin sister gave birth to my half-brother Lucius Canaima. The two happenings were so blended — my mother’s and my illness (on one hand) and the pregnancy of the other Rose and the birth of her child (on the other) — that I was deceived by patterns of memory into dreaming my recovery from illness occurred in a cabin on a waving hillside the day I was born and that my half-brother (five years younger than I) was my ageless twin born on the same day. His age tended to vary in the recurring Dream, five years, six years younger, five years, six years older than I. Sometimes born in my skin, I in his. He was ageless. He was elusive. Our mother was the twin-Rose …

How had I come into such knowledge of hidden family relationships (Harold and the Rose sisters) in my Aunt Alicia’s household? Had I overheard her and Proteus talking? Had I known it all in childhood and suppressed it into symbolic truth, symbolic distortion, symbolic displacement of seniority (saints/sinners) until it erupted in the corridor of the third bank of the river of space in my book of dreams?

I dreamt that Proteus pleaded with the twin-Rose my mother for my life the day I was born and that Canaima lay not far from me in the cabin. It was all utterly real — my recovery from illness in Proteus’s plea — and yet as I retraced my steps I perceived a magical and profound self-deception. I saw now what the Voice had been implying but a short while ago: conscience would not exist, the spark of conscience that apprises us of the invaluable texture of life, the gift of creative life, the necessity to give an account of our thoughts and our deeds, would vanish were it not for truth (the vividness of eternal truth) and magical self-deception to which we confess, a magic that opens the way to reshape, revise, penetrate again and again, unravel, ravel again and again the materials of age and youth and childhood and desire (the materials of experience) that we build into a cabin or a ship or a house or whatever tapestry of implicit being asserts our pilgrimage in space.

Proteus’s cabin had slipped down the waving hillside of Dream into a pit or a stage within a great clearing in the sea of grasses. Our captors had brought us there. The sun was held still in a painted net within its path of descent. Everything looked fixed and still. The yellow golden paint lay unmoving on the stage and cabin. And the pit seemed but an extension of the mouth of space in which we stood. A reconstructive job. Beautifully determined and reassembled. I had seen scientists cement the bones of a fish, or a long-dead animal whose scattered pieces had been excavated from the bottom of a sea or from within a hill or valley or bog, until its gleaming frame, one million years old (a-gleam as if still conscious of the glow of vanished suns and stars), seemed strangely alive however motionless or passive. Ready to swim or plunge into the forest.

So too shone Proteus’s cabin. We had been taken half-way up the hill by our captors within the painted transparency of the unconscious sun that lay on the stage beneath us. The passive, motionless light illumined a sign on the door of the cabin.

HISTORIC CABIN IN THE PSYCHE OF SPACE.

COMMUNITY OF SOULS. ANSELM WAS BORN HERE.

CANAIMA DIED HERE. BOTH IN THE SAME YEAR.

Every letter was stark and clear.

‘It’s not true‚’ I protested, unable to credit my eyes. I tried to strike a stationary drum in a savage’s hand and raise an outcry but was unable to do so. It was as if we were their captors, they were ours, in the reassembly of bone and mask and drum in the life of ancient theatre. I turned — despite the regime of stillness — to Penelope and Ross.

‘It’s not true‚’ I insisted. ‘They have made a mistake. Surely scientists can make a mistake across a million years or fifty years or a hundred years. We are a fallible species blessed with imagination in sensing our fallibility and breaking subtly, miraculously, a one-track frame of existence.’ I had almost forgotten my complaint but then I insisted again. ‘It’s not true.’

‘What’s not true?’

‘My Dream-cradle, yes, science may say of this cabin. Science is a species of art after all. I survived. Canaima’s cradle too. He also survived. He did not die here. He was very much alive in 1948 when he killed a man and I let him escape. I have told you the story.’

Proteus’s million-year-old cabin, one hundred-year-old cabin, eighty-year-old cabin, revealed itself from within. It was the stable of Rose’s Horse. It was a fossil White and Black Colonial House, fossil Mansion, fossil Palace, fossil Inn, fossil Hospital. A million years of modern art, modern architecture rooted in kingship, tribal hierarchy, tribal medicine, tribal hospitality.

It was hollow, beached, it seemed to levitate a little, Newton’s gravity, Einstein’s counter-gravity, it was the painted light of an apple in a sun-ship, cave-rocket-apple to the moon, it was the painted bone-light of a night-ship, cave-rocket-bone to Venus, it was everything one salvages and nets from the body of a man or a woman akin to ours in palaeolithic corridors of space, savage electricity in fingers and joints, savage umbilicus or eel encircling the stars.