Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

“Thus, as I implied a moment ago, the child is faintly aroused to an absurdity in its abnormal ascendancy over the subject-parent and that breeds a rare affection between them, a rare tenderness, a rare game between tyrant-child and subject-parent. Thus it is that Amaryllis dreams of her dead beloved father and slices his temples into books. It was she who insisted on accompanying him into the interior. And he was so completely under her thumb, under her spell, that he yielded to her entreaty, indeed her command. He told himself what an education it would be, anything to salve his conscience and satisfy her whims. He never foresaw his death, his wife’s death — indeed her death (he thought she had died) — when his party were attacked in 1939 by the angry tribe.”

I glanced again at Amaryllis. The new match that Masters had lit was bringing tears to her eyes. Yes, I was sure now. She would return. She would return whether I looked back or looked forward. True tears. True love. True sorrow. True gladness. Those tears seemed to melt the oceanic brittle fly that traced a line on her dead father’s brow from which she assembled “leaves of grass” and “leaves of brain”, Volume 1, Purgatory’s Democratic Poem, Purgatory’s Who’s Who.

“Did she or her father borrow the title ‘leaves of grass’ from Whitman?” I asked Masters.

“If they did it was because Whitman had passed this way.” He was poking fun at me but still I cried, “Did he pass here, where we are now?”

“He left a line on a rock requesting the adoption of ‘leaves of grass’ in counterpoint to ‘leaves of brain’.”

“But why, why?” I insisted like a child of abnormal democracy in a world of authoritarian structure.

“Perhaps,” said Masters gently, “he was accompanied by his Amaryllis and he felt something was missing, something was incomplete in the game they played together, something needed to arouse itself in the game you play with your parents, in the game this Amaryllis beside you plays with hers, something may falter in the game of democracy when we elect others to rule us who are oblivious of the blood on their hands, the red blood, the pagan blood, and thus may unwittingly lead us into hell.”

We were approaching a region of phantom rocks that had been vaguely discernible at the start of the expedition but were clearer than ever now.

Each rock witnessed to an ancient river-bed that the stream and rains of volcanic memory and non-memory had cut and abandoned in favour of more advantageous cuts or later channels over long centuries and geologic ages of Purgatory.

What was peculiar about the current phenomenon was the translation of these rocks (each belonging by hypothesis to an abandoned or diverse channel) into the same river upon which we presently moved. Thus we moved in lucid dream upon many river-beds, in many channels, all stitched into one. Perhaps they had all been uplifted by a gigantic fault, by a giant geologist — a cousin of the dead anthropologist in our boat — who had signed his name in Purgatory’s Who’s Who a long time ago by heaping all previous channels, or parent rivers, into their present offspring upon which our boat now moved.

It dawned upon me also that the paradoxical game between parent-creator and child-creation gave a luminous tone to some of the phantom rocks in the river. It was an argument that Masters and I ceaselessly conducted through many character-masks. Was he my phantom guide, my spirit-parent, or was I his divine clerk, his fiction-parent. Had I been nursed into becoming a writer through contact with him or had I nursed him into becoming an incalculable guide into being?

I returned to my inspection of the luminous tone or rock within the phantom ancient riverbed rock, and detected, I thought, a coagulation of flame from the match that previous guides with their crews — subject, as Masters and I were, to ambiguous parent/child relationships — had lit and deposited in the river (or the rivers) within expeditions they had led. Each such match or prick of vision into calloused fates was a measure of pagan blood, a revelation of native tyranny or game of tyranny native to the family of Mankind.

The matches Masters had lit were already assembling themselves into slender shapes or pinnacles of subtle coagulated flame as though in our expedition, in ourselves, in our immediate crew, we witnessed to many phantom countries in one purgatorial landscape, many phantom images in one foreign river, many geographies in one theatre of psyche.

Was it a game of self-inflicted parent/child wounds, self-aroused parent/child revelations, in which we were involved? Was Purgatory the region of regions, was it a democracy of soul unravelling itself by faint degrees and redressing tides of obliviousness that had accumulated upon humanity into the erection of an abnormal callous upon the frame of being?

I dipped my hands into the tides of obliviousness around our boat and in concert with match or luminous rock began to perceive the stain that the Governor Pilate (once voted popular administrator of Purgatory) may have seen when he washed his hands in pagan blood. (I say “pagan blood” for the Christ he condemned was no “Christian” for him or for the Roman world to which he belonged.)

I dipped my hands and saw Pilate’s signature in mine. Not leaves of grass that grow from buried flesh nor leaves of brain but the passion of the innocent that mingles in the rain, in the elements, that also clothe the guilty. Rose-red emotion upon innocence and guilt. Sunset emotion in the middle of the day when the sun stands despite sunset straight overhead, noonday sunset, in the pagan body of phallic rocket, phallic love, rocket discordance of sunset and sunrise to prick the sovereignties of heaven and hell.

I shrank from the administration of such a blow with my scorched hand that broke through Pilate’s, such a blow to sovereignties I tended to cherish, the sovereignty of hell no man dares breach, the sovereignty of heaven no man dares breach, except when these are perceived as pagan and therefore opening themselves to a profound game between creator and creature, parent and child, governor and governed, culture and culture, age and age, civilization and civilization, science and art.

Had I, I wondered, been promoted governor of Purgatory?

“No,” Masters explained, “something akin to a fiction-judge who judges himself as much as others and therefore judges governors — and indeed kings like me — as well. It’s an awful responsibility that the living — the living from Earth, that is, who journey in Purgatory — may have to perform. For remember to live — or to dream one is alive — is to be subject to various frames of existence that masquerade as life. The Earth-frame you know well — or do you? Anyway there are the purgatorial treadmills or frames that we have seen so far in our journey. There are those who hold on to an abnormal condition or treadmill of life and cannot fathom the cycle of death or repetitive violence to which they cling; there are those who are faintly aroused to the life of the mind; there are those who aspire to a true life, a true spirit, beyond all frames.”

I dipped my hands into all these apparitions and frames of existence that Masters had enumerated. As if to elaborate further he struck another match. It flared this time into volcanic activity. Volcanic spheres of dust, veil upon veil, tone within tone, exquisite theatres, unfolded themselves in space. Majestic gowns hung upon frames of the living and the living dead at various removes from true life. Faint crimson anxieties were suspended within yellow lampshades and refinements of purple.

I thought I saw boulders dancing together, embracing each other. At first they looked terribly sad, terribly sad, and then I was astonished to see their elation, profligate or extravagant mood, drunken abandon. They were drunk. That was plain to me. Drunk! I too was drunk. They had infected me.