Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

“But why?” I asked again, unable to think of anything else to say.

He gave a slight shrug like the ripple of cloth upon the abnormal psyche of stone that possessed him. A slight wind blew in the wake of sunrise upon the abnormal river of El Dorado.

“Not so astonishing,” he said, “when one thinks soberly upon things. We’re all in the same boat, Weyl. Aren’t we — it’s a popular enough cliché — on the same burning ship of the globe?

“But how much do we feel, can we feel, are we really able to feel of the abnormality of peace in a century of war, the abnormality of food in a century of hunger? We think we know repose but do we know the sudden repose of a dead child like this in a bombed house? She will return. She will live. Take her, love her, my dear Weyl, when the time comes .”

He paused but I felt myself unable to speak. I was staggered.

“I say at last quite brutally, quite honestly, my dear Weyl, that I have established defences against abnormality, my own abnormality to which I am largely blind, and the abnormal and sudden repose of others. I have subsisted on noise — noise is normal, the noise of traffic, aeroplanes, everything — I have listened to the noises of television and radio, the noise of canned gunfire, incessant chatter; but the stillness that follows an explosion, the lightning stillness, the bizarre reverie, the bizarre visualization of the flight of the soul from sudden stilled monument, still body — that I have run from until now.

“Confess to it all, my dear Weyl, and in so doing, let your abnormality become a paradox, a moral vision of insensible power, insensible strength. Let abnormality mirror itself in abnormality to see through itself, let your abnormality match or subtly inflame Amaryllis’s, so that you see each other’s fragility. Then you will sustain her, she will sustain you. Such sustenance is the soul of love, love’s shelter at the edge of abnormality that is perceived, confessed to, and therefore subtly transfigured within the fiction of the self.”

As he spoke he struck a sudden match and I watched its reflection flare in Amaryllis’s eyes — as if this were the first impulse to restore her to life — the impulse of a human dawn within the glare of the sun that had increased in the stream of the drought-river at our feet.

Masters settled my future wife in the boat. We had scarcely set out when there was the sound of a shot and her father, the anthropologist, fell dead at our feet. No one knew. No one saw the hole in his temple. No one remembered the clash with an Amerindian tribe, the people of the red prince, and their anger at events in New Forest. No one saw the slice of the bullet save a faintly aroused Amaryllis and blind/seeing Masters and me (also faintly aroused from contagious abnormality).

It was as if Amaryllis accepted the guilt for her father’s death (as I had accepted myself as my mother’s slayer) and slid her fingers in his dishevelled temple. She saw him now in several lights within the flare of Masters’ match in the kingdom of the dead.

The first light disclosed him as abnormally alive though dead. That was how the rest of the crew saw him. She herself saw him faintly aroused, alive beyond the abnormal cloak he wore in the others’ blind sight, a live thread of mind in her sight, a thread that pricked her fingers like a needle and wound its way into the anthropology of the pagan soul. She also saw him faintly, very faintly, in a deeper, farther, stitched dimension of soul, a thread of spirit this time (rather than mind), true spirit, true life. That farther vision of spirit faded and the match that Masters had lit into a needle pricking aroused flesh settled upon the prospect of “mind” the prospect of investigative research her father had pursued into the “pagan soul” (as he used to put it in his lifetime). In settling upon “mind” the match endowed his investigative research with new life, it imbued the dead man with a mental life beyond the apprehension of those in the boat who were conditioned by a repetitive cycle of deeds that seemed absolute, a repetitive cycle of violence that seemed immortal regime.

She (Amaryllis), in slicing her ailing father’s leaves of brain (as I had sliced my mother’s body and breasts) — in slicing them with a match, stitching them with a divine needle — subsumed the bullet he had received (as the writer’s quill, the painter’s knife and brush, subsume the savage light of the sun) and drew forth a number of volumes that her father had written on earth and which he began to busy himself with all over again, to rewrite, to revise now, in Purgatory.

Such volumes were a deed, the deed of the anthropologist’s mental life and — however illusory they were — they foreshadowed the life of spirit, true spirit, he had not yet achieved though Amaryllis had glimmeringly perceived it as his goal in a foreseeable but distant age when he would truly come alive past all abnormality of mind that is oblivious of spirit as the well-fed are oblivious of the starving.

One such volume I saw was entitled, in letters of subtle fire, Purgatory’s Who’s Who.

I was aware all at once of the shelter Amaryllis and I occupied in an abnormal world that is oblivious of spirit. We were both seven years old in 1939 when Masters made his trip into the interior of New Forest, a trip he was to recover or to retrace as our guide in 1982 after his death in London. That Amaryllis and I were susceptible to his guidance, his shelter, in our lucid dream of Purgatory — where I met her for the first time, she me, before we returned to the land of the living on Earth — was witness to the abnormality of childhood cultures I shared with her and which Masters began to puncture or complexly redress.

Childhood has always been an abnormal condition within the mind of the adult who has grown oblivious of pagan labour, pagan womb from which civilization comes. Purgatory made no bones about this I discovered. One of the aberrations of the pagan soul, the pagan womb from which we all derive, was Purgatory Cinema in which flashed child labour across the centuries, across the ages, in the field, in the home, in the temple, in the factory, everywhere, womb of the field, womb of the factory.

Great admirals aged ten sailed in Purgatory Cinema beneath my bouncing eye. (I lodged a protest and was told that though they were not formally great at ten their nuclear apprenticeship began even earlier and this was to lift them upon columns of state in great squares and in great cities). Housewives attired themselves in the garments of children in Purgatory Cinema. They toddled around looking after tyranical elders. Another instance of the nuclear state, the nuclear household.

“Yes,” said Masters, “childhood is always abnormal when the child becomes an adult overnight. We seem more humane, more civilized (whatever that means) in our treatment of children in the twentieth century. Perhaps we are. Provided we see that the difference between ourselves and the Infernos of the past may lie in the subtle arousal of the twentieth-century child to the edges of abnormal existence upon which it stands or within which it shelters.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, glancing at my reflection and Amaryllis’s in the mirror of the water where Masters had lit another match.

“I mean,” said Masters glancing at us, at our red hands, red with our parents’ blood in the mirror he had lit, “that a child can tyrannize its parents, kill them, execute them — and such tyranny seems normal (in playing at being abnormal) in an enlightened state or family — a child can draw in reverse the models of the infernal past and sense the perversity of tyranny, the absurdity of tyranny, when the tyrant-child feeds on, is sustained by, is clothed by, fed by, cared for by, the subject-parent it abuses.