Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

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Thomas and the marble woman had come to the Crocodile Bridge. It had been so named because of the canal that ran from the great Crocodile Swamp into New Forest to provide irrigation and drinking water. The canal was the lifeline of New Forest. It had been designed and built — so legend claimed — by an eighteenth-century antecedent of Everyman Masters. It supplied the Municipal Water Works and the Sugar Estate Reservoir of New Forest. The latter was constructed to hold a special reserve supply for overseers and other top staff in the dry season of the year when water was rationed.

The occasional crocodile or alligator tended to make its way into the canal and was sometimes seen basking at the edge of the water under the noonday sun.

When the Boy and the masked woman arrived on the Bridge it was past six o’clock. The quick tropical twilight was dying and darkness fell in a flash. But not before Sir Thomas had glimpsed in the black water, black as coal, streaked by a pointed flame from the long arm of the dying Carnival sun, a crocodile that floated like a log of wood. The log moved, it dipped, it rose again, it oscillated slightly, it submerged, emerged afresh, no longer wood but an iron body, a piece of cannon drawn by the denizens of the Inferno. That was the instant when night fell. Everything was still save for the moving shadows of Thomas and the marble woman on the Bridge against the glow of an antiquated street lamp.

The woman delved into an antiquated Carnival basket, pulled out an antiquated torch, pressed the switch to replicate the long arm of Carnival. A beam shot forth and played upon the canal. Everything was black. And then the play of light caught something. Two miniature fires gleamed suddenly like lit coals or stars in the underworld sky and the darkness under the Bridge. They were the eyes of the crocodile illumined now, luminous now — as never during the day when they seemed opaque — by the long arm of Carnival exercised by the marble woman. They seemed to rise out of the water, a wounded constellation, until they pierced Sir Thomas with astonishment and uncertainty about the animal age, the iron and metallic fossil riddles, in the paradox of a constellation, in the birth of a star within the depths of space.

There was a faint mist over the water. The pencil of light falling from the Bridge, and igniting the crocodile’s eyes, gave to the atmosphere a faint turbulence, an uneven sensation of fabric vibrating almost imperceptibly. Imperceptible as this was, Sir Thomas perceived it. It reminded him of the ragged cloth or bandage with which he had staunched the cut that Masters had received that day on the foreshore when as Carnival Boy-King he crawled in the mask of a crab. Thomas too had crawled in the king’s shadow — a shadow himself — as they played at El Doradan age within the pencil of light years that illumined not only the crab but also the atomic button or eye of a stranded fish upon the gallows of god.

No ostensible gallows arose before him now save that standing on the Bridge, Thomas could trace the shadowy cannon of the crocodile in the water, the coals for eyes, as another investiture or mask of god, another game that Masters was playing in the wake of the Crab nebula. The god of Carnival had slipped off the crab and the fish to don a dinosaur rocket resembling cannon as much as crocodile. It stirred Sir Thomas deeply, it stirred layers of insubstantial and sculpted emotion within him; it stirred the seed of unconscious jealousy within him of the masks of god. It was the greenness and fertility of god in concert with the apparent obsolescence one reads into the ancient shell of a crab, or the dinosaur hide of a crocodile, or the hoary metal of cannon, that troubled Thomas most deeply.

I was troubled as I followed my Carnival guides.

Did the greenness of god mask a terrible age or was it a terrible age that had built into itself the reflexes of fertility? Did the wound or cut, I wondered, that Thomas had seen earlier in the day on the child-deity El Dorado fester incorrigibly into fortress money or obliterate itself within hardened ages of ingrained ferocity aping spirit and the death of spirit?

I was troubled and jealous of such terrible powers within apparently obsolescent institution and privilege. Above all I was deeply troubled by the wound Thomas had touched in the body of his master but scarcely proven because of its vanishing proportions: a wound that not only festered in a rotting garden but whose transfigurative potential was eclipsed in the reflexes of a puppet, the reflexes of fertility.

I tried to grasp a parallel between wounded constellation and ferocity that apes spirit or the death of spirit. For example, Masters’ ferocity was such that it led him to expose the cut he received, to adventure on with a flag or a bandage; it equipped him equally to run or escape from the false shaman. Such Carnival good fortune, such Carnival fierce capacity to encounter evil, profit from it, learn from it, yet fly from it, exacted a formidable price upon all species, all arts, all being. For the psychology of flight floated a scar that resembled the wound others less fortunate than child-Masters or green god, less equipped to run, received. That scar was the foundation of a series of Carnival callouses across generations or evolutions into the obsolescence and festering disease of territorial imperatives that the armoured crab or crocodile sustained.

I felt that Thomas’s uncertainty sprang from a wound that lay so deeply buried in the armour of a civilization that he almost doubted his original perception and wondered whether it had existed at all. So poignant and heart-rending is Doubt when Faith congeals into a fortress that blocks our vision of the starving and the emaciated in every corner of the globe.

Jealousy — on the other hand — was no fortress. It was the cancerous adoration and envy of establishment heroes or masters whose ransacking of species and cultures Sir Thomas found himself unable to achieve under any banner, Christian or Marxist, except as Everyman’s unwitting shadow. If, for instance, Masters instead of himself had collided with the marble/market woman that noon, he (Masters) — I am sure — would have had no compunction in running even more deeply into her, in accusing her of being as blind as he. And so in accompanying her across the Town and the Plantation, he would have clung, I perceived, to their mutual blindness as the foetus in the female body of humanity clings to blind fate, and the female — whose body it is, after all, that the flying or clinging foetus inhabits — is blind to the accumulating scars of aborted antecedents in a fragmented humanity, a humanity that will turn upon itself at some despairing, later, phallic stage of civilization and penetrate itself as if nothing had happened in the past, as if the deed of coitus between man and woman — as if the intercourse of trade between cultures — is totally functional, totally without sensuous imagination or guilt.

(Thus it was that Masters at the age of seventeen as an apprentice-overseer had visited the neighbourhood in which the marble women lived. He had slept with one of them, a compliant marble prostitute, twice his age. Her flesh may as well have been egg or juicy fashion plate or glass. He had penetrated her with scarcely a thought for unseen companions, the echoes of shared human mask, the reverberations of hidden conscience his action provoked in Thomas — the cousinly shadow that he trailed behind him in history — and in me, his clerk or biographer of spirit.)

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Thomas envied Masters; he envied him his capacity to run, to fly, to act, and it almost seemed as if such regression into the body of the glass-mother, or the marble-mistress, were substantial with Faith. Whereas he (Thomas), I felt, remained at the mercy of profoundest misgiving. If it were possible I would sculpt his arrival upon the Crocodile Bridge with the liquid tool I had seen that afternoon upon the crest of a wave. It was 1926. A common-or-garden year. Why should I wish to sculpt a passing moment into the Bridge? Precocious as Thomas was, biographer of spirit that I was, we could not say why each and every common-or-garden year or moment cries out to be sculpted in paradoxical contradiction to insane eternity, as if each sculpted fragile year is kin to a spirit one may ape or misconceive but whose innovative reality, whose foreshadowings, naïvetés, whose warnings, cannot be entirely suppressed by the logic of a uniform infinity.