Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

What was less plain to see was the nature of the drunken elation within them and me. “Look again into the mirror of frames you share with them,” Masters said. “Look at those people over there. They want to embrace death and life together. They want the edges of death to become the wages for an existence they hate or find virtually unbearable. Such wages, they believe, would secure them relief from meaningless tasks and employments. Indeed release from hell. They admit as they dance — and this is curious — to the mind of oblivion, a mind that will release them and grant them a haven of nothingness, a haven longed-for, hoped-for, in the dance. Look! I can see from your face how drawn you are to them.” His voice faded but I knew what he said was true. I was almost seduced by the dance. I too began to long for oblivion.

But as the dance began to embrace nothingness, each boulder shifted its weight a little. I shifted my weight a little as I embraced Amaryllis. And the mind of oblivion began to resist oblivion. How could it be mind and do otherwise than resist the folly of courting an absolute extinction?

And so it was that a dance that encompassed the hope of oblivion grew hopeless of achieving oblivion. Such paradox! Such hopelessness! It was a hopelessness that rested on inimitable tip-toe function within volcanic upheaval, inimitable breaches of function, inimitable ballet I had never before so greatly enjoyed and I wondered if somewhere in the elements, at the epicentre of the elements, seismic elements, that clothed both hope and hopelessness, lay the genesis of the dance.

Had the dance started when human boulders moved towards sovereign night but breached that sovereignty, that night, by an evolution of mind, an evolution of partial release pointing through and beyond an absolute night, an absolute release, that falsifies itself in framing itself, in framing its desire, absolutely? How could I participate in movements for release if I have been released so absolutely that I forfeit the memory, the process, the life, the struggle for ongoing release? I could not tell but the ecstasy of such discoveries caused me to topple into another dance.

Here the elation of the human boulders sprang from complex vocation, complex labour, complex originality. Which dance, I wondered, came first — this or the one Amaryllis and I had danced before in the company of the others? Did an originality of cosmic vocation anticipate the elements that clothed hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt?

Such vocation, such originality, such labour, was desired and desirable beyond all other desire or conviction we felt as we danced. Dancing boulders. Dancing and collapsing. Yes — dancing and collapsing! For the task on which they and we were engaged drained us of immense resources and the most curious fatigue enveloped our limbs. It was a pattern or form of fatigue secreting undreamt-of gaiety. It reflected a drain or loss of energies, yes, but it also reflected — in that loss — an incubation of new forces, new energies.

Perhaps here was the answer to my question as to which of the two dances came first! In the incubation of new energies, the cycle or frame of human dancing boulders oscillated into a humour where first and last things were deceptively first and last, they were clothed by the self-same elements. The very intricacy of the dance of genesis lay in exposing a riddle of infinite parallels between so-called first things and so-called last things‚ between innocence and guilt, between hope and hopelessness.

Such an enigma of parallel opposites moved therefore into the mind of oblivion as incubation of sleeping energies, sleeping originality through frames of mind, through frames of oblivion into undreamt-of resources of spirit …

I looked around for Masters and it seemed I had lost him in Waterfall Oracle, that he had seen things he could not disclose, other dancers, other boulders, beyond my imagination. I felt Amaryllis and I were on the verge of toppling into an abyss. But he reappeared in the nick of time and led us back.

My father, Martin Weyl, was caught upon his treadmill, fixed, pinned to a wall of space, in early September 1939 when the trial of the red prince ended. The Amerindian was found guilty and sentenced by the judge in the New Forest courtroom, Brickdam, “to be hanged by the neck until he was dead”.

Martin was beside himself with grief and disappointment. The jury had taken three days to bring in their verdict. He had slaved like a fiend across many months in the presentation of his case. He had lain wide awake night after night. He exercised every muscle in pursuing the case. He delved into subconscious realms, consulted volumes of Purgatory’s Who’s Who. He depleted his own pockets to bring witnesses from every corner of the globe to testify to the archaic charisma of the law built into the El Doradan “ghost peoples” or “ghost assassins” (as the New Forest Argosy dubbed them).

All to no avail. With the passing of the sentence, he left the courtroom, he was exhausted, he was barely awake on his feet, he was a figure of Carnival dance, a secretive chained boulder drenched in Waterfall Oracle. He had forgotten to disrobe and still wore his gown and wig like sackcloth and bleached autumn snow. He blundered into the road and was knocked to the ground by a cyclist before receiving a frightful blow on the head (crushed dream-eggshell) from the iron wheel of a dray-cart. It ran over him even as the alarmed shadow of the half-prancing donkey or mule or horse that drew the cart engulfed him. Was it shadow-animal or shadow-cart? (The personality or shadow of the animal that pulled the shadow-vehicle was never established, as if to embroider into sphinx-like proportion the profligacy of the boulder-dance written into my father’s death. Pinned to a wall, pinned to a road, yet limbs flung apart, dancing, collapsing in space.)

I see him after all these years as if he too were arraigned before me now in Purgatory’s halls in the mirror of the river and I were at last in a position to begin to revise the sentence of the wheel and the sphinx. The treadmill on which my father found himself in the wake of his death I judge now to belong to phantom Martin Weyl the First (1932–39). Martin Weyl the Second had been partially released from the first frame by 1982–83 and was closer in texture and truth and spirit to the anthropologist’s “leaves of brain” that Amaryllis had been teaching me to ponder and assemble, and I am able to read now the epic defence he waged to interpret Carnival divine right, divine law, in an archaic people, in the archaic king of a “lost” people we judge to be savages, who judge us nevertheless as blind to the enormity of the moribund absolutes, moribund law, we bury in our own institutions.

In the wake of his sudden death, however, in 1939 I was aware of nothing but my mother’s weeping. She was inconsolable. And I felt so guilty it was as if I had condemned her even as the red prince had dismembered his sick queen in the heart of his tribe. My mother’s hair streamed to her waist in Purgatory’s river. Her breasts were cold in the starshine and sun of Purgatory’s bleached snow. She had to be constrained and kept at home when my father’s funeral took place in late September 1939. She was a phantom of solid grief permitted only to stand at a window in which she seemed framed like a picture observing the hearse and the long procession of carriages and cars that accompanied my father’s coffin to the grave.

Was he in that coffin? It all seemed terribly unreal to me in 1939. One ingredient of my father’s defence of the Amerindian — that cut my phantom mother to the heart in 1983 when Masters revisited Waterfall Oracle and found her there — revolved around questions that seemed directed at her as much as at the regime that had sentenced a savage to death for matricide.