Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

The uncanny, unfinished body of music within us ceased. But it had invoked a change in the transparencies of the unconscious. The paint of the sun began to lift. Everything had been passive, fixed. Now a spark in the sun lifted, the sun itself moved and began to fall. The spark unravelled the sky to touch the high precipice of the globe in the Dream. Night was soon falling.

*

‘Where are your drowned children?’ I cried to Penelope and Ross, ‘Do you know who they are? Have you recognized them? Mine was the Shadow of my twin-brother Canaima.’ I laughed. Laughter seems a spring of irresistible and uncanny merriment in the gravity of a Dream. ‘You saw him lying on the stage. Incredible! It’s not true of course. Yet it’s true. A true parable! Parable employs meaningful self-deception as the strange humour, the essence of the spiritual irony that imbues the nature of the arts in the City of God.’

The laughter faded from my lips. I had spoken with some urgency. It dawned on me within the starlit Night that now lay about us like a fabulous cloak that Ross and Penelope were clinging to the Shadowy drowned children they had drawn up the serpent-ladder from the river of the dead. I saw they would continue to do so until they surrendered themselves to their captors. A curious phrase! Surrendered themselves to their captors. I understood their hesitation, their difficulty, their anguish. These grew from the fact of their idealism (in Penelope’s case), agnosticism (in Ross’s), idealism and agnosticism that signified a freedom (self-deception?) they took for granted. They were free people, freer than I was. When is freedom fate, fate freedom? One may be held by a captor and yet so resist him, so resist captivity, one learns nothing about oneself, about one’s fate in falling into his or her hands.

So it was with Ross and Penelope within the great Night of the savage encroachment of space in which the very texture of the universe had begun to change and the stuff of reality drew us back into reconsiderations of our private selves and of the past and the present we had never entertained. They had been seized but their resistance was such that they could not part, or give, any portion of themselves that could provide them with a new threshold into a testing and hazardous community. Freedom, their ideal freedom, became a curious obstacle.

Ross knew what I was implying and he turned upon me with a dry, almost angry, smile.

‘You capitulated, Anselm, as soon as you saw the savages of space erupting not from the heart of darkness but from the heart of the unconscious. You are no Conradian idealist! Idealists always make the best pessimists. You are something different. Closer to a saint perhaps? I wonder. God knows who the devil you are. Penelope thinks you are half in love with her. El Dorado is a fitting place for a queen and her suitors and revelations of ancient kingship through which to revive a concept of sainthood. It starts with your capitulation! Your capitulation to the savages is such that your brother’s evil deeds may well become yours in the history books of another age.

‘You need to be careful, Anselm! Soon it may be said that Canaima never existed at all. What potent non-existence! So potent every saint stands to lose his good name. You stand to lose your good name. You performed the things he did. You become the actor within his mask. Do not say I did not warn you, Anselm, of such terrible myth. Possession! That’s the bleak word. That’s what it is. The acceptance of another’s crimes and sins.’

He stopped and I listened in the starlit Night for the winged feather of angelic species as the globe moved and the stars faintly altered their course.

‘Danger, yes,’ I said at last. I pondered the fires far out in space. I pondered the nature of captor and captive. I pondered my ignorance of ultimate freedom, ultimate fate.

‘Danger yes, terrifying myth. You are right, Ross. But in such danger lies a catalyst of purification. Creation is a risk! You know that. Daemons and furies are a measure of balance within the lightning storm of creation that binds us to sky and earth. And at the heart of every trial, within every danger of possession — possession by what appears to be evil — lies a catalyst of purification in weighing the fabric of deeds performed by another. Without that weighing, that intricate balance, without the necessary truth of purification that applies to all of us, we may march a hundred, a thousand abreast, and we are still pilgrims of the void. We are lost. We may swear we have clean hands in the marketplace of freedom, that we are untainted by evil, and still we are lost, lost in the hubris of consciousness.

‘And so I plead again. Surrender yourselves to your captors before it is too late and you forfeit a true scrutiny of the Shadows that you bear. I know your pride in the appearances of freedom. Take Penelope!’ I stared into the heart of the starlit Night and into the drowned child upon her breasts whose outline was becoming clear to me now. ‘I see something there. I see a different kind of catalyst from mine. Another form of balance, another factor of necessary truth in weighing the fabric of possession.’

I stared into her arms and almost recoiled.

‘Tell me, Anselm! What do you see?’

‘I see the corpse of heroism,’ I said gently, ‘weighed in a balance that demarcates men and women.’

She gave a start as if her memory had been jolted.

‘What is true heroism, Penelope? What balance divides heroism into sheer possession of others, the sheer hunt, on one hand, and necessary sacrament, on the other, the necessary ritual burial of the stranger one bears who brings news of the chains that bind us, chains we hide from ourselves, for they have been upon us so long we have forgotten they are there.

‘To break those chains we need to see ourselves as captives in the hand of a stranger. We need to see our acceptance of a hidden state of unfreedom masked by ideal freedom in an eruptive light, the light of the strangest self-surrender. And that’s where the intricate balance lies between heroism that possesses and inner courage that liberates

I was unsure of the intricate design I had seen and of the words that had come upon my lips. Nevertheless they had scarcely dropped into the starlit Night when the savages encircled Penelope. They took the frail body from her arms. The stage was clear. The shape of Canaima had vanished. And now in its place appeared Penelope’s child.

‘Black,’ she said wonderingly. ‘It’s black.’

Ross came forward and placed an arm around her.

‘It’s the light of the stars in this curious transparency, this strange atmosphere, that makes it appear black. It’s so ancient.’

‘How could my child be ancient?’

She wanted to rush upon the stage and lift the child back upon her. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep. But Ross held her close. The savages made a wall around her. We turned and stared once again at the child. The light of the constellations had changed and it was as if we were looking now at the skeleton, starred, infant stature of a king. There were bracelets of gold on his ankles and wrists.

‘Impossible,’ said Penelope. ‘It’s a trick. They took my child and replaced it with the Macusi fossil of a prince.’ And then she gave a faint scream that clothed itself in the echo of a drum. There was a silence. She was pointing to another adornment we had failed to see. Medals on the young king’s chest! They glittered like marvellous coins in the constellations of the Night. And before she spoke I knew. I had seen those medals on a warrior-ghost, on the Governor of a Colony, as he came over a hill on the first bank of the river of space. Simon’s medals!