Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

“Judge Quabbas’s death and its aftermath,” my guide said to me in the labyrinth of dream that redresses the past in the present in the future, “illumine the genesis of social cults of violence that feed on sex as diseased territory within which the exploitation of sweetness and light, innocence and daring, become commonplace. Yes, commonplace. For within such commonplace all are in chains, all are in gaol. Nothing can change. We must — I beg of you Weyl— put such commonplace into profound reverse if we are to run through the erection of hollow ideal, hollow example, that imprisons us.”

He waved his hand as if to greet the ocean on which we sailed in 1957. Three or four days off Limbo (or was it Lisbon on the map of dream?) a storm began to brew. Masters said to me as the lightning flashed, “You know, Weyl, Quabbas’s death should be a leap in your book from the Inferno into Purgatory and into, may I say it, paradise.” Was he joking, was he mocking me? I was astonished at such optimism in the light of the sorry and unhealthy state of mind that he himself had deplored in his reminiscences of Quabbas’s befouled name. We descended the stairway into a saloon. Masters ordered a drink. The severity of the wound he had received had in no way diminished his cast-iron stomach and its immunity to fiery drink.

“It’s time, Masters‚” I said, “it’s time I confess something to you.” His face darkened as if he anticipated the coming storm.

“Go on, Weyl, go on.”

“Perhaps it’s nothing but …” I stopped. He ordered another drink and waved at me impatiently. The saloon seemed curiously dark, curiously veiled, but imbued with the oddest luminosity as if a bell at the heart of the storm rang with muffled light rather than sound. Masters waved his hand and for a moment the body of the ship turned to glass, womb of glass, flesh of glass, and I dreamt I saw Christ walking on the sea through the side of the ship. I plucked up the courage to speak.

“You speak of hollow example,” I said, “and of exploiting sweetness and light …”

“Yes,” he said, “go on, my dear Weyl.”

“Well then,” I said, “let me confess. I am troubled by guilt that I may unwittingly exploit sacred figures and turn them into romantic concretions of violence. I know there is a distinction between hollow ideal and disturbing truth, and you speak of the necessity for reversibles or reverses within the hollow ideal. I am not sure I understand fully. Take Thomas. He is a sacred figure, a disciple of Christ.” I was staring through the body of the ship into the coming storm. “His hand is upon Christ’s wounds. His hand is also that of the revolutionary who stabs the Carnival czar, the Carnival representative of Christ. An inferior Christ, no doubt — there am I speaking of doubt … It was involuntary. Perhaps such a vision of Thomas, Doubting Thomas, with dual hands, is pertinent to a colonial age lacking in genuine revolutionary hope and deceived by all sorts of fallacies and ideologies. And yet I wonder whether Thomas the disciple can carry the burden of such extreme paraphrase?”

I felt as uneasy and perturbed and crest-fallen as Masters sometimes was. The ship flashed again and I saw through its glass sides, through glass flesh-and-blood, through marble flesh-and-blood, into the rising waves upon which Christ walked as if he understood my guilt, my awkward confession, as if he knew me, as if he forgave me. Masters seemed blind to all this yet he was my guide into space. He looked at me with his sunken blind eyes, pregnant with the mystery of the womb and the grave. “It’s the price you must pay, my dear Weyl,” he said at last, “to reverse non-vision into vision, the blind ornament into the seeing vision.”

He paused; his blind eyes seemed to burn. He continued, “To put into reverse the obsolescence of institutions, the obsolescence of dead languages, that accumulate upon the sacred and clothe it with false clarities.” He paused again as if he heard, even as I saw, the rising waves. “A reversible fiction,” he said softly as if he spoke to himself, “unsettles false clarities … reopens the profoundest human involvements and perspectives to illumine a truth.”

“What is that truth?” I demanded.

“Violence is not the corner-stone of a civilization.”

“But, but,” I began to protest.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Violence seems irreversible in a desperate age where alternatives are fearsome and we appear to have no option but the lesser of two evils. But that is why we need a dual hand,” his voice choked a little then cleared, “a dual hand within an irreversible function to yield an edge, if nothing more, a subversive edge, that turns into the terror of pity, the terror of beauty, the terror of gentleness, to ravage our minds and purge us through violence of violence.”

The storm hit the vessel at last. The glass sides of the ship darkened and it was as if I saw it now, I saw the sea, in Masters’ eyes. The sea was black and white fire ran along the ridges and valleys of space. I held to my dream-support for bleak life and yet this was my leap into Purgatory all over again, purgation through the terror of beauty.

I saw through his eyes into a mystery in which hills tumbled and the plates of the sea-bed arose. The storm clung to pupils of devastation everywhere and nowhere. I looked into the ghost of chaos as into a raging, human cosmos. And a shuddering response to the intensity of limits suddenly seized me. The dead king’s eyes were those of a conquering hero secreting everlasting peril. Everlasting peril? I questioned his gaze and the blind/seeing pupils flashed. “Our conquering heroes are crystal balls in reverse. You shake them and raise a cloud of particles, a cloud of finite scale to hubris, the hubris of infinity.”

The sea, the storm, had been staggeringly miniaturized in the dead king’s sight; it had been converted into the terror of beauty. If he had walked on the sea at that moment I would have followed. For I would have been reduced to a pupil jumping from trough to crest, weightless eye, weightless pupil. The eye of beauty and terror bottles a head of emotion yet floats above fear upon astonishing elements.

The eye of the terror of pity, the terror of gentleness, walked with me on water, slipped, ran into a cave, emerged, half-capsized bottled head, righted itself, walked with me again on the wave above the majesty of storm. Blind eye that had been uplifted, reversed into visionary gravity’s anti-gravity, visionary violence’s non-violence‚ storm’s peace.

There was terror still within storm’s peace in the depths of the visionary sea beneath me. I walked to the edge of beauty, the edge of finite/infinite desolation. I held that edge and prayed. I offered it, I offered that edge to Christ. It was a gift, my gift to Christ who would ultimately save me by building on my premise of human, fallible generosity.

I walked in Purgatory upon water’s sparked fire. The vessel rode the sky, walked. I clung, prayed, walked again with Purgatory’s matchbox ship, Purgatory’s rocket to the stars. It was the dawn of the space age wreathed in fiercest element. I walked to the edge of gravity.

“Purgatory is all,” said the dead king. “Purgatory is endless.”

“And what about heaven?” I asked.

“Heaven requires your gift, your gift of originality. It is but a straw but god will cherish it in the midst of the storm.”

The storm abated, the seas grew calm. I dreamt I was led back by Everyman Masters to the edge of my seventh year. It was 1939, the place was East Street to which my parents, Martin and Jennifer Weyl, had moved. We occupied the house in which the Masters family had lived in the 1920s. They had moved into a two-storeyed mansion next door. I was seven, Masters was twenty-two; Martin, my father, was thirty-two and Jennifer, my mother, was thirty-three.