Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Perhaps it was the sculpture of coming events that Carnival felt in 1926, the economic depression of the 1930s, the war that would follow that depression. Perhaps it was the gestation of a nuclear age to be sculpted in the atom that Carnival felt in 1926. Perhaps it was a nameless foreboding that Carnival felt about independence for the colonies of the Inferno, an independence that would lay bare a variety of stigmata that would bleed in the 1950s and 1960s, but succumb to a brute hardening of the flame of blood, to tribal institutions that made all the more ironclad every ritual grievance of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982 when Everyman Masters died, Carnival’s premonitions in the mask of Sir Thomas had come to a head, I felt, around the globe, and the writing on the Bridge I had nebulously sculpted in backward dream in the labyrinth of time turned into a climate of fear.

*

Thomas was now alone on the Bridge with the faint prophetic sculpture, the bandaged year, falling everywhere into the mist. The Bridge was the naive yet overshadowed vessel of Night, he was the rebel saint, rebel lover, rebel captain of humanity. The mist was ragged sail and bandage, the coal-black waters were timbered with the burnt schooner that had stood beside the Market-place. Crocodile bags were sold to tourists and well-to-do people for six shillings apiece, half the cost of the capsized basket of eggs.

“Charlotte Bartleby,” the marble woman said to Thomas before she vanished, “fond of crocodile to store her lipstick in, her sacred nail varnish, mirror, kerchief, and other items and wisps of paper. You can go home now, Boy. No use to come another step with me. My cave is at the bottom of the lane.” She pointed along the false dawn of the dimly lit path with its antiquated road lamp. “You see that lantern like a half-moon down there?” Thomas barely saw the flash of her teeth. She was laughing in the misty darkness. “It hanging by a wire under the belly of a donkey cart that Flatfoot Johnny inscribe ‘Orion chariot’. When you come next time with a piece of gold for each egg,” she was laughing again, “remember, whether it’s in the day-sky or the night-sky the donkey cart’ll be there by the parapet where I be. You understand, Boy? I easy to find once you pass the Crocodile Bridge constellation.” Before he could protest she was gone. He made an attempt to follow but she waved him back.

Within an afternoon resembling an age he dreamt of defending her against all sovereign powers that sought to ride her, or run into her, all overbearing masters.

Perhaps he had been moved more deeply and dangerously than he understood by the net of counterpoint (HE SAYS, SHE SAYS) that the market woman had flung over Flatfoot Johnny when he raised his fist to crush Charlotte in the Carnival Market-place. Perhaps from that moment he became a dangerous rebel. Perhaps rebellion upheld the invisible net in which Flatfoot was caught, upheld it and converted it into the sparked basket of incipient sexuality or pubertal age interwoven with mist and sail and bandage. Sparked basket! Capsized basket!

Thomas was about to go, albeit reluctantly, when he and I perceived Flatfoot Johnny approaching the Crocodile Bridge. Johnny had been drinking in the late afternoon and his movements were even more cramped and shuffling than usual. The restraints of the net bit into his soul. He was angry. Thomas and I were possessed by a sinking feeling at the pit of our basket stomach, capsized feeling, sparked feeling, acute foreboding. Flatfoot’s powers, however shackled or netted, were extraordinary. Not only because of his formidable back but because of mutual incapacities between himself and us, between rulers and rebels, mutual Byzantine masquerade in which the net of majesty that Johnny trailed around his limbs was a sieve of longing in ourselves. We knew through porous basket, or sparked tapestry of Night, the frustrations that Johnny endured as Carnival czar of Russia in New Forest.

Every shilling, every dollar the czar spent on rum matched the capsized basket of eggs Thomas had blindly engineered in involuntary social experiment or collision of cultures. The art of Carnival revolution lay in involuntary match, involuntary equation, matched sovereign and common peoples. One throne makes another footstool visible. The czar’s indulgences matched the gold, wounded El Dorado, Thomas had agreed to pay.

I sought to read Thomas’s comedy of values in “art of Carnival revolution”. I sought a link between the puberty of the twentieth century — the growing pains of adolescent humanity — and the uncertain desire, the uncertain necessity, to right age-old wrongs everywhere. I sought a link between vulgar relief and comedy, between comedy and tragedy, a link so curious that one blended into the other or lapsed into the other, the serious into the absurd, the absurd into terror or blood or revolution.

The die was cast when the czar passed Thomas on the Bridge. Johnny was drunk. Thomas smelt danger for the marble woman. He kept pace with the czar along the path where primitives trundled, or lived in, cannon. It was a curious scene, but, in point of fact, Thomas dreamt he was descending a ladder or a bandage of mist into the sky of the canal under the Bridge where he had seen the natives move rockets or crocodile weaponry.

What astonished us as we descended the ladder was not the awesome power of such weaponry but — because of Johnny’s shuffling netted footsteps — a sense of absurdity as if Thomas and Johnny and I were inside Charlotte’s bag, in the lipstick, in the mirror, in the other items of sacred toiletry within a crocodile’s belly.

We would have laughed at Jonah in the whale of a crocodile but the idiot giant might have turned upon his unseen companions, seen us in spite of everything, seized us, bled us. Lipstick blood! Eaten us! In the false dawn in which we had paused for a moment of vulgar relief Johnny seemed an ancient woman wiping her falsely reddened lips and seated upon a black chamber-pot with murder in her heart.

The intimacy of Carnival murder executed in a closet, in Charlotte’s crocodile bag, gave way all at once to blazing coal (as if we had flown around the globe from Iron Age sugar mills in black canals to electronic faeces). Johnny arose. Thomas and I stood now somewhere in the roof or the palate of the crocodile, under its night-sky eyes or stars. The inmates of the caves had ceased to trundle crocodile and were cooking their night-time meal in the open barracks of the plantation.

Johnny seemed oblivious of their activity, but they called out to him as to a foul emperor they adored.

“Hey Flatfoot Mask, hey Strong Boy, you drunk or what? You lips stick together or what? Say a damn word. You don’t hear we praying to you night after night as we sit on coal?”

Flatfoot Mask saw nothing, heard nothing, he was already a dead man, and his progress was so slow that Thomas and I had ample time (like an archaeologist, an anthropologist, excavating the body of space, assessing its cracks, its crevices) to inspect the coal pots on which the natives cooked and in which the lighted eyes of darkness shone to miniaturize far-away storms blown by cosmic winds in the anatomy of god. Strips of iron or some nameless metal rested on each coal pot and these supported a frying pan, in some instances, or a vessel with rice or a saucepan with beans or with meat for those who were phenomenally lucky.

The strips of iron created the effect of a laced mask. Within each open segment of the mask, the deposit of an animal face glowered at us. The coal sometimes lay lumpy and naked in its concave bed. Tripods were then constructed above it from which the saucepans hung. Where neither tripod stood nor mask lay above the eyes of the crocodile, the long arm of Carnival had fashioned a metal bar or spit.