Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

My birth in 1932 had been a catalyst of change for the Weyls who had been forced to marry — you may recall, gentle reader — when Jennifer was three months pregnant. My arrival had invoked a stimulus to sharpen Martin’s perception of pawns of fate. It also invoked a post-natal crisis in Jennifer that lingered on and turned into bouts of ecstasy, bouts of depression, over the years. My mother and father moved to the edge of themselves; they were cast down yet peculiarly, devastatingly reborn, when I arrived. They miniaturized two proportions of dread in themselves — even in miniature such edges or proportions are formidable — when I came.

Jennifer dreamt she gave birth to me when she was three months pregnant, three aeons pregnant. I leapt into her arms from the future fully formed. I leapt across the time-lapse of nine months gestation, as if gestations, ages, were edges in eternity. It was a dream that plagued her. My father embraced her tenderly, he sought to console her. But with the passage of time — as her bouts of depression intensified — he could not resist the feeling that he and I (he as her husband, I as her son) were responsible for her ecstasies and alarms. I saw it all through Masters’ blind/seeing eyes. I saw my father anew. He was intent on unravelling a cosmic seed of law, a cosmic reversal of suffering from those who suffer to those who blandly witness suffering, a cosmic reversal of judgement from those who are judged to those who judge, from those who are accused to those who counsel. That was his proportion of dread, that he would suffer at the edge of the law (the birth of the law) as she had suffered, in her proportion of dread, at the edge of the future (the birth of the future).

I saw my mother anew. I saw her awakening to a maternal value of dread that she never knew she possessed towards the stranger at the gate. I saw myself as the stranger. And I was imbued with some measure of her charisma that I would never forget. She loved me, she cared for me, but somewhere within body and mind, there was an obsessional edge or gate that witnessed to my arrival backwards from the future and out of the deeps, out of the storm, of life. I had come to her with a knife in my hand. It was a novel post-natal depression. Novel ecstasy. Novel terror of pity, terror of gentleness (my mother was the gentlest of creatures) in the log-book of Mother Blood, Mother Flesh, Mother Spirit, overshadowing the vessel of the soul.

Mixed families were native to New Forest. The terms “black” or “white” or “coloured” were indeterminate and mutual in privileged or biased or acceptable tone. One saw what one dreaded or wished to see. My mother was fair, perhaps white; my father was coloured; and I was of indeterminate origin or pigmentation. A cloud arose at the heart of the sun in April to drape all savage pigmentation. My father had been appointed defence counsel for a red Amerindian male from the deep New Forest, South American interior. It was the trial of a lifetime, the trial of the family. The Amerindian spoke no English and the matter was complicated by interpreters, kith and kin, who were not altogether at home in the English tongue or in the Amerindian’s tongue.

The charge was matricide. It was a ritual killing. The red man — as a prince descended from El Dorado — was commanded by Kanaima, the “savage heart” of the family, to kill his mother. She was sick and in great pain. It was cancer. “Release her from torment. Purge the people, purge the language of the heart,” Kanaima said. “Give her body and her breasts to the sun.” I was deceived by Masters’ deaf ears, blind eyes, as proportions of divine irony as much as dread, in his guidance of me through the trauma of the law. I thought I heard SON — “give her breasts to the son” — rather than “to the sun”.

What does one hear, what does one see, at the edged proportions of the past and the future, when the quest for redemption from violence arouses the profoundest self-questioning, profoundest honesty, profoundest self-judgement, self-confession, within a family of pigmented soul, pigmented bone?

It was a luminous red ball of a sun when the mother was slain by the child. Queen Jennifer stepped out of a shower, out of a waterfall, out of an ocean, into the bedroom. I was lying half-asleep, half-awake, on her bed. She handcuffed me to her body as to the mast of a ship. My father came on to the deck and touched her lightly. “You’re the loveliest creature on earth Jennifer,” he said. Indeed lightning had struck, had congealed. She was beautiful. She turned to him and to me and she smiled.

“Smile if you like but it’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“ You, you’re true.” The tone of his voice changed. “I’ve had the devil of a day defending my poor devil of a son in court. He’s killing you, you know. Look how you spoil him.”

Lightning softened. The congealed lightning mast softened. Queen Jennifer had sailed to the bed and I lay against her. The wonderful canvas of her body seemed to crumple a little, to trail a little into a towel across her legs with edges pointing to the floor.

“What translucency!” he murmured. “Translucent blood. Sheer marvel. It’s the light you know. Twilight gives a luminous halo, a luminous inner paint to your breasts. Madonna ship.” He added almost ominously, “It’s the way the sun invests itself with a brush and a knife to slice into flesh.”

I started. I freed my hands. They were red.

“It would be different at cloudless noon‚” my father continued, pacing the floor and the deck. He stared at me pointedly. “The sun’s rays are vertical then.” He stared at my mother’s breasts. “Each slice of sailing naked body turns opaque at cloudless noon, opaque wedding to light, opaque funeral of blood. Pallid, slightly shut-in.”

I felt I was beginning to glimpse what my father was saying to me across the difficult years. The dread, the irony, of the holy family of mankind to which someone as unholy, as pagan, as I belonged! That was a crude translation, I knew, but it helped. Were there not proportions of dread, proportions of unsuspected truth, unsuspected beauty, residing everywhere in our most intimate guilts, intimate memories, intimate fallacies, intimate dreams, intimate selves?

“I look as I feel then,” said Jennifer quietly, so quietly I alone heard what she was saying. She felt pallid, shut-in, but amenable to sailing in space again through waterfall or ocean when the lightning-knife I invested in the sun struck and she congealed. I knew her pain. I knew I had wakened her to the cancer of ecstasy and depression from the day I was born. I knew that every canvas of the holy family of mankind invested in human, ailing, shut-in skins and bodies that a painter or a daemonic child slices anew into brilliant conversions of the womb of space. Each slice becomes an indictment of assumptions that clothe our eyes, assumptions of hopelessness, of loss, of absolute peril, absolute evil, absolute bias. What are the roots of the holy family of mankind save that the roots of hope lie through hopelessness that is sliced, transfigured, sliced and sliced again and again?

I knew her pain. I also knew my father’s joy and sorrow in addressing me through my guide Masters. I knew the faintest bridge, the faintest curvature or shoreline, glimmering in the depths of terror, the faintest potential for coniunctio or true marriage between Masters — the dead king — and the slain Amerindian queen, slain in themselves and in their surrogates and substitutes yet each requiring the conversion of the red ball of the sun upon civilization’s canvas. Did not young Alice slay her uncle Quabbas and give him light? Alice had been blissfully unconscious of the deed whereas I … How unconscious/conscious was I of killing my mother from the day I was born? My hands were red in the dying sun.