Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

“Shut-in, a little opaque,” my father said, “whereas a black skin …”

“What about a black skin?” Jennifer asked.

“Well a black skin thrives under the straight noonday sun. It opens like a flower.”

“And at twilight?”

“It looks pallid then. Pallid as you look at noon. Black pools into pallid jam session shadow when twilight falls. White pools into shut-in cave when noon strikes.”

When noon strikes, when noon strikes … I stared at my hands. “So you see,” my father said, “there is a marriage of opposites in the family of the sun.”

*

When the trial was at its height Masters turned his blind/seeing eyes deep into New Forest and to the birthplace of the red king. I felt I was seeking myself as much as the doomed Amerindian who had been charged with matricide. Seeking myself in a labyrinth of rivers that fell from Waterfall Oracle. It was a journey into apparent desolations. The river of New Forest was unusually dry. It lay at the bottom of an ocean I had seen with the bouncing pupil of an eye from the crest of a wave — an ocean we had crossed or were still to cross. A long series of rapids, with intervening spaces and calms, lay before us. Insects descended at night like a plague. As day followed day, night night, Masters was subtly aware of the dream arch of the river beneath the ocean. It was as if he and his nebulous boat crew slid along the curvature of a feather that flew beneath my bouncing eye on its wave. No prospect of sliding from the duck’s back, the duck’s smooth feather, for a long time to come in the slow motion rain of the river. It took ages, it seemed, to drive the boat across a spine or a ridge or to haul it around a portage that lay equally at the bottom of the sea and in the sky. We made our way by infinitesimal degrees within the exposed rocks and naked sand banks of the drought-river.

The wide expanse of the feather cultivated an oceanic illusion as if one were descending in absurdity of flight into pools of sky that shone here and there, pools that were brittle oases in a desert of sand and rock. The ocean’s Carnival feather masked desert. Each rock masked the arid spine of flight tilted in space against a shimmering background of torment.

At night the curvature of the feather-wheel was subtlest yet paradoxically most pronounced. For then the duck’s apparently smooth, apparently oiled machine shed its rain of space like dry oceanic stars that clustered at the tip of our drowned nose and caused our bouncing eye to descend and concentrate upon a luminous fly with silver legs. I had sliced my mother the day I was born but now it was as if I had been sliced by inimitable guilt, inimitable passion, to give birth to a new curvature of time in space; as if we had been sliced — the entire boat crew — as we journeyed into Purgatory.

The tip of one’s nose! Was the tip of a fly on the tip of one’s nose the genesis of Waterfall Oracle?

Seers and saints had listened to the music of a silver fly on the tips of their noses. Each tip became a sensible organ, an ear beneath but in front of their eyes.

We listened with our slain noses to the music of chaos. PRICK. BULLET. Prick of a feather. Twinkling ear, twinkling nose. BULLET. PRICK. A member of the crew lay beside me. Sound asleep. Feigning life. Dead. In the flickering lamp I had lit I perceived another star or fly on his brow. It moved by degrees of which he was unconscious. The prick of a fly! Atrocity of a fly! Fly’s eye carcass! What did a fly see? Did a fly perceive an entire boat as it crawled on a dead man’s lips? Did a fly perceive an entire universe spiralling in space in a parcel of stars like silver blood on a dead man’s face?

After a hard day on the drought-river we slept like the Carnival dead on many a battlefield. New Forest ancient battlefield. African battlefield. Central American battlefield. Beirut battlefield. Belfast battlefield. We slept like a bandsman, a bombed horseman, in St James Park. We slept like a child, or an old man, half-aroused by the prick of a star, the silver legs of a fly. The atrocity of a fly illumined my open eyes; it made me susceptible to blindness in others, it made me susceptible to non-feeling, it made me susceptible to the grain of stone in flesh-and-blood, it imbued every fraction that it traversed with the curvature of genesis susceptible to desolations, the genesis of a cycle that knows its intractable material.

We had been lucky to secure a passage into the interior at this time of the year. Fortunately an ageing anthropologist and his family, his wife and his seven-year-old daughter, were making the trip with a small party of researchers, and Masters was received like an honoured guest. I was dimly recognized as coming from the future into the past in search of myself. No one knew (with the exception of Masters — who was my guide — and the child Amaryllis who was destined, like myself, to return to the land of the living from a dream of Purgatory) that they were dead. They swore they were still alive. They swore they were still proceeding on a journey they had once made or within activities they had once performed.

A sensitivity upon calloused form — god’s fly, god’s prick — that I had never perceived before created a minute constellation, a minute star, within the blaze of the sun. I was aroused to face the edge of that minute prick of visionary light within the blind wheel of dawn. It was a feather that tickled a bruised nerve back to life in my slain companions, though they remained unconscious of it. Masters awoke. His blind/seeing eye mirrored my lucid dream, lucid fly.

With dawn the lucid fly withdrew to heaven but left its disturbing light deposit upon the surface of the river. It was a light, an awakening, that differed from every other awakening that Masters had known. Light was imbued with a sensitivity that seemed to promote an aching sadness in silver and gold rays of the sun. That ache, that subtle pain, was a novel and incalculable experience. It put into reverse all models of sensation I had known. These had been adorned by flags of feeling whereas this aching light behind my brow arose from a genuine perception of non-feeling in me and others that had been illumined by the atrocity of a fly upon a dead man’s eyeballs.

“Why lie to myself when I am dead?” Masters was half-joking, I knew. He turned and stared at me from the duck’s back on which he sat, duck’s feather as wide as the river of the sky but retaining the point of a quill he placed in my hand.

“The truth is,” he said, “dip into me for the obsolescence of blood. I’m frozen. My planetary script is frozen. But‚” he hastened to add, “it’s a realistic advantage like witchcraft in this benighted corner of a foreign river, foreign ocean of space. Look how strong I am. Frozen blood gives me a stalwart frame. Look! Amaryllis is ill. But I lift her in my arms. She’s sad and that makes the universe all the heavier. Where would I be — how would I cope — without frozen blood to boost my flesh and strengthen my bones?

“Long, long ago on the Arawak foreshore I saw the eye of a fish mirror the light years. Now it’s the eye of a fly that winds its net into the abnormal repose of this child! I may have seen miracles in my time but have been blind to such abnormality upon a child’s fragile body. Take her. Love her. Your future bride of freedom and fate. I promise you she will unfreeze. She will return with you. She will help you through difficult times. She will be your guide in the future when I am gone. Wait and see. I will restore her to life. The others will die again and again and not know they are dead.”

He seemed so terribly upset I felt I should say something. “Why blind?” I asked. “Why did you say you were blind?”

“I was blind to our companions the first afternoon we set out,” Masters confessed. “And it was not until last nightfall and this strange sunrise that my eye pricked, and I saw how little of abnormality I had ever seen, how little of the abnormal world in which I lived I had ever truly felt. She is your future wife … remember my words. ”