Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Philip of Spain was the nickname given to the Boy Rodrigues, whose antecedents were Venezuelan. He was loose-limbed, sorrowful-looking, and his tutors concentrated on making him spell “crocodile tears” on every page of his exercise book until he had accumulated a body of waves he scaled in the mental high jump. He jumped with a priestly cassock on his head over the bar of the world, into other people’s hearts, other people’s Milky Way entrails.

Each contestant was given three chances to clear the bar or to retire from conquest. Each clearance ran into decades, generations, even centuries, and was a signal for the referees or guardians to take the bar up another inch, another generation. And thus the mouth of the cave heightened into an interior darkness in which a drama of the soul festered or transfigured the elements, the constellations.

Philip was set to win. He had cleared every vertical extension of the cave in which Masters dreamt he discerned the ghostly donkey cart of Christ and the ghostly wheel of revolution that ran through Christ’s imperial masks. There were other relics as well in the cave. What a distance lay between a donkey ride and an emperor’s Byzantine saddle in heaven. It was this thought that drove Masters to face his opponent when the high jump seemed lost. The bar had been raised still another inch, another generation, and Philip had cleared it but Masters had knocked it flat. He jumped, knocked it flat again. Should he fail in the third attempt, he would have lost.

He looked at his priestly opponent. He perceived nothing really “priestly” about him. He was more of an engineer or an architect than a priest. His faculties were primed to structural measures, to siftings, to making adjustments, making divisions, to creating a shield over his interests, an archaic mask, modern adjustments in the archaic shield, partitions, edifices, boundary lines, division of spoils; except that, in an odd way this time, diseased, archaic high jump Ambition was such that it had begun to speculate on diseased frontiers, on a clearance into all or nothing.

“What do you mean by all or nothing?” Masters wanted to ask the budding twentieth-century Philip of Venezuela in a collegiate Inferno or colony. (“Spain” was a nickname for Venezuela. Venezuela, it was said, contemplated invading New Forest. Indeed Philip Rodrigues was loose-limbed and athletic enough to accommodate many skeletons in the cupboard of America, many invaders, many old and new invasions.)

Masters gauged the bar for the last time. He ran at it. He leapt into the air like a daemon. He cleared window and gate and bar to come abreast of Rodrigues’ performance that he had endowed with proportions of contradiction and fantasy to drive him to mental and physical victory. He had seen into Philip, as it were, and profited from conscious, subconscious, unconscious, savage motivation beneath cassock and slide rule. He felt almost sorry for Philip now. His opponent’s powers, his drive to rule the roost, to build upon the bones of the defeated, was a necessary moral evil. Was evil sometimes moral, was evil the moral ground of frames that claim to be absolute? Did such absolutes conscript the imagination until alternatives diminished into lesser and greater evils, and the lesser evil became the moral imperative?

The high jump bar or frame had been raised again. This time Philip faltered. He failed to make the clearance. Masters soared over the cave by an extra inch or two. Philip tried a second time, struck the bar to the ground. He limped as if he were psychically maimed. Perhaps he had been caught off guard — though he was unaware of it — by Masters’ philosophic gymnasium. He ran and jumped again. There was a roar from the spectators. His ankle caught the bar and sent it spinning to the ground. He had lost and yet he had won. He had lost the event but he had secured a premise of “moral evil” that was to haunt Everyman Masters all his life. It was not just that Rodrigues’ high jump — his military, economic or whatever ascendancy — would have proven the greater evil, that his (Masters’) was the lesser. It was the realization that revolution — that the wheel that expands into the door of a problematic cave — required a complex relationship to the tyrant-psyche one overcomes, a complex apprehension of the tyrant’s blood as native to oneself and to the wounds of transfigurative inner/outer being, transfigurative architectures of the Carnival body of space.

“Can you tell me something about the cave,” I suddenly asked Masters, “into which you ran at the end of the race? It seemed so dark when you led me in. I saw nothing.”

The dead king stared at me in my dream.

“It was the cave of the tyrant-psyche,” he said at last. “Do you follow?”

I did not reply. He continued, “It was the cave of relics, it was the cave of heartfelt competition and divine right. It was also — and this was strange — the cave of abortive revolutions. You were actually in,” he paused, gestured, searched for an image, “a hollow shell symbolizing an embalmed god.” He paused again. “May I qualify what I have just said? Not necessarily a god in strict logic, no, that hollow shell may symbolize a beloved atheist or a beloved despot or an ambiguous saint, each or any of these may be embalmed into a god. Cast your eyes around the world and you will see. It was like running, I repeat, into an embalmed shell, into a comedy of excavations.”

“Comedy of excavations!” I was struck by the expression.

“Yes,” said Masters. “Place your ear to the shell and you will hear the echo of an excavated heart, lung, organ. We ran into all these. I tried to make you see but you were hypnotized by the semblance of immortality. Yes, hypnotic semblance of immortal regime.”

His voice faded and I was left to ponder the implications of what he had said. Indeed it was a confession, a deep-seated, far-reaching confession. Rather than accept the lesser of two evils as the nature of order, Masters sought a confessional frame through which to illumine the counterpoint between tyrant-psyche and age-old deception or semblance of immortality. Such illumination — he appeared to imply — might pave the way for a fiction of grace that led through the restrictions of alternative evils within the parameters of conquistadorial deity, conquistadorial morality; led through to a deeper comprehension and rebuttal of conquest in the creativity of underestimated moral being. It was a goal that lay unfulfilled and far in the distance in the race of humanity, and in the meantime I saw that Masters was depressed, chastened, beaten, even though he had won the two events in the collegiate Athletic Meet.

When he received the silver cups that were the prizes for the high jump and the hundred yards he turned and looked at Rodrigues and Merriman and his body hardened all of a sudden (as if it had received the embalmer’s knife) with the conviction that they had won, he had lost. It was the avid way they stared at the silver in his hands and the fact that he kept it close to his heart (as if that too had been sliced); they stared at him as if he were a thief, as if he had stolen the prize from them, as if his heart were in their breasts and he were the shell of the race, not they.

They could not perceive the distinctions he wished to coin in the realm of the state between false shaman and true shaman, between diseased Ambition and confessional frame. It was their currency, their conquest, that he received in accepting the prize. He had robbed them. It was plain to him now. He could not make them see the springs, the torments, that had given him the edge to outwit their diabolic pressure upon him. What they saw was that he had profited from a native alliance, native savagery, and he was one of them, a king of athletes.