Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I remembered Aunt Alice’s Magna Carta limbs and wondered what archaic revolution she would achieve when she leapt from the belly of Purgatory’s horse into the kingdom of the sun.

We sailed past the Alms House and came to the College. No sign of Quabbas or young Alice or Becks or Delph. They were hidden in the slate that had been crunched by the horse. We sailed on Brickdam river to the New Forest race course and turned right. This was the last leg of the journey to the cemetery. I descended with Masters from the principal mourners’ carriage but the labyrinthine sensation of having been cropped by the Carnival horse possessed my bones, and when the coffin was lowered into the grave I felt neither I nor my father was in it. He belonged to the past, it was true, I to the future, but I felt neither his death in the past nor mine — whenever it came in the future — had absolutely occurred or would absolutely occur. He had been — I would be — framed to appear non-existent. But the fact was we resided in the womb of the phantom horse as a seed of archaic revolution more enduring than novel or fashionable non-existences that perpetuate a lie.

His coffin was his frame — dray-cart wheel lashed into hollow trunk of a tree in which an apparition resembling himself had been sealed — and the robed shell of a creature lying there was desolation’s fiend masquerading as the masked parent, the masked advocate, I once knew.

*

My father’s death left an indelible scar on my mother’s breasts and heart. It coincided with the beginning of the cancer from which she died in the early 1940s. Masters became my foster-father. And yet I felt parentless when Martin became an ape of soul dressed in bleached snow in the trunk of a tree that served as his epitaph and coffin. How else may I describe the shock of incredulity, of incredible parting from someone of whom I had been jealous when he lay in bed with my mother and yet upon whom I had come to rely as if he were a god?

Such parentless eventuality is the origin of the paradoxes in this book on which I have been engaged for twenty-five years and more. For instance, Masters was my foster-father over the years following my father’s death, yet I became his fiction-parent — and the fiction-parent of Thomas and other characters — in embarking upon a biography of spirit in them, through them, overshadowing them all. I grew by involuntary stages to appreciate the significance of the “mask of the cuckold” that he (Masters) identified with his legal father through whom, in fact, his survival in his mother’s glass womb was assured when she contemplated Abortion and he protected her and her unborn child by another man.

GLASS BODY. PHANTOM HORSE.

The conjunction arose in my mind intuitively, secretively, like the seed of opera or symphony one Easter Friday when Masters, Amaryllis and I visited the Portuguese Cathedral in Main Street, New Forest.

It was the year after my father’s funeral. The Portuguese were renowned for the Carnival theatre they staged at Easter. The Good Friday Christ was nailed into, then taken from, the cross. The painted blood on his hands and feet, and in his side, seemed astonishingly real. I was struck, however, less by painted blood than by the gloom and shadow, the radiance and dazzle, of glass windows arching up to the roof of the world. I was in the mutuality of the divine, I was in mother-horse, I was in father-glass, father-horse, mother-glass, I ascended, descended, into a mysterious constellation of evolutionary spaces.

Amaryllis was a Catholic by upbringing and it was through her, I believe, that Masters thought of taking us to the Easter Carnival Mass. I dreamt she was covered with autumn leaves within the phantom horse of the glass-cathedral. Was it a good or a bad omen that the rain of leaves covering her had been cropped by space? We were in the same broad church, the same narrow boat, the same vicarious coffin, the same ultimate cradle, and the digestive rumbling organs of space enlivened, rather than extinguished, the fire of her spirit. I did not see her again until 1957 when I came to London. Masters arranged her passage to England from South America in 1940 and there were rumours that the vessel in which she sailed had been torpedoed by a German submarine and that the sea was strewn by leaves and feathers (akin to fish and scales and stars) of oceanic tree or epitaph. My dream-premonition come true! But the rumours were false. We met in the year Masters and I arrived in England and were married in 1959 at the Registry Office in Kensington.

Amaryllis had by then left the Catholic Church. In fact our true marriage — if I may so put it — occurred in 1958. No priest then, lay or robed, no official of the State or the Church, presided. Spirit presided. And that is the only mark of a true marriage. She lived in Maida Vale. We had been seeing each other for several months when, one autumn evening, we returned to her rooms. These were at the top of a building overlooking Regent’s Canal. The bedroom was spacious. A fire blazed in the grate. And it seemed to me that we lay in a curious luminous splinter of the cathedral-horse in which we had knelt an age ago in New Forest.

The illusion — if illusion of mist and space it was — sprang out of the fire in the autumn grate of the cosmos. That fire had been cropped by the horse of space but it had achieved the miracle of a flower in which we perceived the mystery of cosmic digestion and evolution, the first seed eaten by revolutionary spirit ages ago, the first leaf phantom god (phantom animal) tasted, the first plant upon the tongue of the sea, the first rose in the lips of soil. We were drowning together in fire and in water, the strangest taste of dying into elements we consumed, the strangest climax, reality of paradise, reality of intercourse; inimitably transparent yet dense bodies were ours. We lived in yet out of our frames, we touched each other yet were free of possession, we embraced yet were beyond the net of greed, we were penetrated yet whole, closer together than we had ever been yet invisibly apart. We were ageless dream.

We subsisted upon genius of revolution of sensibility within the phantom animal in which we lay, a phantom animal that was so ancient it filled us with awe. Our naked flesh was inhabited by mutual generations clad in nothing but obsolescent organs, obsolescent youth. What obsolescence! What intimate renewal of being beyond age and youth! We were intimate, ageless being, we were four years short of thirty, we were young, we were old as the coition of the hills and waves miniaturized in our bodies. We were a dying fall into deeper orchestration of mutual spaces.

In the fire and in the flower, in the rain of autumn leaves that the cosmic horse eats, lies the thrust of revolutionary peace within two beings alone, yet encompassed by an invisible third, an invisible fourth, an invisible fifth, sixth, seventh, in the belly of space, the invisible army of humanity.

Amaryllis’s father had given his “leaves of brain” to us as a stratagem of invisible humanity arising through heart and lungs into imperishable armour and contemplation.

My poor mother framed by a mist of tears was also there in the horse with us. She vanished but left us ammunition in the sorrows of humanity with which to drench the world in the spirit of truth.

Amaryllis’s father led my poor mother through Purgatory within a form that translated the elements of feud into both sorrow and love.

I was translated but unable to read in its entirety the secret and terrible and profound army of invisible humanity within the horse in which Amaryllis and I lay.

Masters knew it all when he knocked on my book long after in 1982 and 1983 to help me revise and to illumine the depths of coniunctio or complex marriage of cultures within the organs of the self. He had been involved, I perceived, in initiating Amaryllis and me into a distinction between transfigured seed of passion and calloused immunity from evil that is embodied in sexual gymnastics, sexual consumerism, sexual escapism from the reality of love in all its depth of beauty and awe and terror.