Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

It was a colonial dance that responded to his deprivations; it symbolized hunger for proof, thirst for proof of genuine survival. It seemed to imply that he too, like Masters, had come close to extinction, and Alice’s breast proffered to him now in the dance was a gesture of succour after all that he had forgotten he had received. It matched Masters’ assumption of kingship. It matched that dream-kingship with a dream-knighthood for Thomas, a dream-enterprise of the milk of freedom that he (Thomas) so desperately needed to prove.

Thomas bowed, he knelt to Alice. He was the plantation king’s knight. In the milk of freedom, the breast of freedom, he perceived the obscure Magna Carta of the womb. And of the grave. Thomas reached out through the bars of dream but he could not quite seize her or touch her. He wished to prove her reality by sculpting her to embrace the rose and the lily in the straggly Alms House garden. He wished to sculpt the shadows of great knights, great ladies, great households buried in her eclipsed breast.

“Take the measure of any statue in a formal square or garden,” Masters said to me. “It weeps with bird droppings. If you doubt those tears then you need to poke a finger into a bird’s hindquarters for the tear duct of a stone knight or a stone lady. But Thomas’s comedy and tragedy was that much as he tried, Alice’s eyes defeated him in the sculptures he sought to make of the animal/human kingdom. No material tear rose there, neither faeces nor fire. The shadow of a rose, perhaps, the decrepitude of a lily, that was all. They wept for mankind. And that Thomas could not prove. She was the one creature, shadow of a dancing rose, he could not touch. And yet she was drawn to him, she pitied him (as my mother pitied me), she loved him, she loved him ,imagine that! with the kind of love that is incapable of destroying its siblings. Some say she was a fraud that only a colonial, barren age could fabricate. I say she was the catalyst of fame at the heart of families of non-existence. She was the mystery of genius within the most unpropitious economic circumstances, a mystery that ran deeper than proof or parody of the evolution of limbo into heaven.”

*

There were three stages remaining after the Alms House in Sir Thomas’s journey with the market woman: first, the great Market-place of New Forest; second, the Bridge over the Crocodile Canal; third, the tenement plantation range in which the market woman lived with the czar of Carnival, Flatfoot Johnny.

These stages constituted, Masters said, a descent into the modulated Inferno, modulated Purgatory, of twentieth-century colonial limbo. I have no technologic recording of Sir Thomas’s progression as Child of the Carnival year, precocious human child of 1926. All I have are my conversations with Masters and a profusion of notes I shall endeavour to paraphrase. I hear his voice as if it were yesterday. I remember the hot summer day in the 1970s when he invited me to visualize the three remaining stages as further evidence of what he called a “twentieth-century divine comedy of existence”.

It was indeed a hot June day in London. I drank lemonade and orange; Masters drank beer and spoke with staccato bursts of energy in reply to my questions. I sensed his depression. He suffered often from acute depression, the lineaments of which drove him to compose the paradoxical masks of Carnival that he inwardly wore or perceived upon others arising from the depths into the heights and vice versa. Towards evening our discourse became more even, more resigned (if that is the word), yet deep and many-layered. The day had cooled and the sky was tender, frail with quintessential smoke. There were brush-strokes across that aerial smoke suggesting a curious moderation of fire. The air was still and as the evening deepened, that strange moderation drew Masters’ attention. His inwardly masked face looked eager now, crest-fallen yet ecstatic. (The sensation of many series of inward masks, as if his naked face were dressed inwardly, never outwardly, was something I could never shake off when I met him.)

He was pointing to the trees along Holland Villas Road. “Sponges of shadow,” he declared, “porous with a darkening rain of light that breathes stillness.” It all intimated a quality of fire that we needed to translate, he said. “Take the irregular line of the dark bunched trees over there against the evening sky. Follow that line with your eyes. Look! it shoots up here and there into points resembling the edges of flame still and black. In such apparent immobility, such tone, I detect a version of moderation and fire.” As he spoke I remembered the sponge and its mysterious ingredient of “light-rain”. Was rain too a translation of liquid fire that stabs and blackens the earth as the trees blacken the sky?

I saw and felt inwardly what he meant by “moderation”. I saw the cosmos of my age as an inward series of gradations of flame resembling fire, yet other than fire, as the cloth of night upon the evening sky differs from ultimate night.

“Fire consumes but when veiled or rendered apparently opaque in substance and action, it imbues the bursting seed, the veined leaf, the arteried wood, with fertility and regenerative being. Each seed is the flaming birth of a star across light years that are rendered opaque in the veils of a tree. That tree comes from within the spaces of a seed replete with invisible light years. We need to sense the veils within veils within us and around us to see how everything burns so intricately, so imperceptibly, that it seems utterly still, utterly solid, rather than the phoenix of judgement day spirit aroused in the ash of space.”

“What about the seasons,” I asked him, “how do these gradations vary from season to season?”

“There is an opaque fire or veil of spring, another opacity or veil of winter, another of summer, another of autumn. Each is an intricate torch into seasonal and non-seasonal forces that resemble each other but differ from each other. The fire that consumes the dead beast resembles the fire that regenerates or fertilizes the life of the imagination, but they are not the same. That was Thomas’s difficulty in sculpting Alice, in weighing each tear that fell from her eyes to water the rose garden of paradise.”

As he spoke I thought of winter, how the boles of the trees along Holland Villas Road and Addison Road turn black in the winter raining light, a blackness or tone that contributes to a wonderful transparency in contrasting flesh-and-blood. Indeed what is blackness, what is whiteness, what is opacity, what is transparency, but variations of intricate fire within the heart of memory and emotion?

I thought of autumn and its fossil burning nest in which the phoenix of the year lays its eggs. I thought of spring and the nest of snow from which the sun arises. Masters intervened in the midst of the silence that had descended upon us.

“There is light and light,” he said. “Noonday under the Northern sky is closer to twilight in the Tropics than to the identical hour to which it corresponds under the Equatorial sky. If the blaze of noon at the Equator were to fall in a flash on the Northern world our eyes of dream would scorch. Noon in the Northern hemisphere falling equally suddenly at the Equator would be a signal of coming night … And if we are to travel back in time, as we speak, you and I, and meet Sir Thomas and the marble woman in the Market-place, then we need to mix light with light, noon with coming night, fire with winter, spring with summer and spring with autumn. We need to sense in paradoxes of light the extended and multi-layered luminosities of the cosmos.” As he spoke to me he seemed to reach with the long arm of Carnival and seize the pointed stillness of flame in the sky before us. He plucked that stillness like a subtle torch and waved it in my eyes …