Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

The ecstasies and torments that run parallel through the twentieth-century age made it inevitable that the dead king should descend into the living Inferno the moment Amaryllis and I glimpsed heaven and consummated our secret marriage vows. The Inferno lives when the dead retrace their steps around the globe. Our marriage was unique heart and mind but for that reason — unique tranquillity and ecstasy, unique revolution and peace — it was inevitable that a master spirit would return to counsel us and to bear the penalty of the Inferno that runs in parallel with heaven. Masters accepted the penalty. He became my guide and opposite (our guide and opposite) in arriving from the kingdom of the dead to counsel us in the land of the living and to guide my pen across the pages of this biography of spirit.

It started in this instance with property even as Amaryllis and I embraced. The shadow of property fell upon our ageless dream, the ageless dream of love. He had arranged for his properties in New Forest to be sold and for the money from the sale to be transmitted to him in London. He tended, however, to be lax in transmitting instructions to his agents and incessant delays occurred. The two-storeyed house in East Street was sold quite quickly but the money never came to him. It went instead to the New Forest Jane Fisher — Jane Fisher the First — who had stabbed him as they made love. I was angry and impatient with such quixotic generosity. Indeed for a prince of an overseer who could be hard as rock, it seemed a singular discrepancy of passion to give cash he urgently needed to a whore who had grossly attacked him. The truth was he regretted the privileges under which he had used the loose women of the estate, and was possessed by uncanny guilt.

I thought that was the truth in 1958 but I know now in 1982/83 when he wears the mask of the dead king that truth runs far deeper. A discrepancy of passion had haunted him through Waterfall Oracle and the legacy of property to the whore who had killed him was essential within the sacrament of a first death.

It was essential also in parallel with my marriage to Amaryllis and with the construction of other paradoxes and parallels such as hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt, the funeral-horse and the wedding-horse, the Inferno and Paradise. In all these the mind of fiction looks deeper than perverse hope into a dialectical hopelessness that releases us paradoxically from the hope of (the desire for) oblivion as guilt releases us to plumb the creative depths and riddles of innocence, as the funeral-horse releases us to unmask the lie of death in life and to embrace what is dearest in humanity, as the Inferno releases us and sets all parallels into motion so that Paradise may be found again and again within each age despite universal travail.

He told me — when he returned from the grave and became my guide — that the protracted delay in selling his other properties had been forecast by Waterfall Oracle as a symptom of the phantom horse that would crop the industries of the world over successive decades and generations. Prices had fallen in New Forest, South America, and he had been advised to descend into the Inferno and unravel a better climate for the stock market or wait until a better climate prevailed. That descent in itself would have appeared, in realistic terms, as nothing but a forecast of bleak economic growth in the late twentieth century but in parallel with the glimpse of Paradise that Amaryllis and I had achieved, it endorsed the mind of fiction again as an irony of forces subsisting upon opposites.

One doorway into the Inferno lay across Crocodile Bridge. In this moment, however, this moment of his return, this moment of suspended climax between heaven and hell, the dead king chose another. He entered the Inferno through a factory in North London that made Frigidaires and washing machines. I thought it perverse that Masters the Second should take a job as a common labourer and it was not until I saw my marriage to Amaryllis in a new light across the light years — not until the dead king returned into my book to enlighten me — that I perceived how he had glimpsed parallel opposites — parallels composed of apparently opposite tendencies — in Waterfall Oracle and in the golden chain he disclosed to me now as an element in his descent into the dancing human boulders upon whom he installed me as fiction-judge over him and others.

Poor judge I was! I was ignorant of the comedy, the comedy of parallel powers, high and low, upon which he relied to enlighten me as to the pawn I was when I had been elevated to the judgement seat.

Pawn and judgement seat! Here was another parallel of opposites I had missed. I had chalked up “hope and hopelessness” upon Mr Delph’s blackboard in Waterfall Oracle but “pawn and judgement seat” struck me as new, though upon reflection I saw it had subtly appeared in Mr Quabbas’s cave when he had elevated my father to wear the mask of Thomas. I reflected again and saw that “pawn and judgement seat” placed a special emphasis upon “freedom and unfreedom”. I drew Amaryllis into my arms. I was free to declare my love to her, free to marry her, free to live with her — a freedom that did not exist in other countries, in South Africa for example — and I suddenly saw with a shock that our two selves ran in parallel with unfree selves (unfree lives) in many spheres of hell, not only political hells but moral hells, the moral hell that Quabbas and unsuspecting Alice lived in in New Forest. He could not declare his sensuous love for her there, however intrinsically profound or poetic it was, but the depth of his affection, his unfreedom, in cosmic space nourished my insight into precious, invaluable freedom to love, freedom of spirit and mind and body in Amaryllis and me.

“Such,” he said to me, “is the law of initiations and the price of freedom in the vows you consecrate with Amaryllis. Freedom is partial and as such your private freedoms, the sacred inner vows you take for granted, relate you to — interlink you with — others who are in chains and whose vows are mute.

“Take the golden chain, my dear Weyl, upon which I descend again and again into hell.”

I held Amaryllis close to me.

“I hid it from you in Waterfall Oracle, Weyl, and had I attempted to explain my behaviour in 1958 it would have been premature. But now the two occasions may blend and move us anew through the lapses of dream, the lapsed dream of reality that is the theme of your book, the capacity to revisit occasions, to return again and again to vacancies of memory and to first things and last things that are neither last nor first in the kingdom of spirit.”

He suddenly broke off and spoke rather harshly.

“I was an overseer on a rich plantation, Weyl. Do I have to tell you that? You know it already. Yes, I do have to tell you, if only to endorse the obvious. The plantation is the corner-stone of the economy of the poor world. The factory is the cornerstone of the economy of the rich world.”

“Is it obvious?” I murmured as much to myself as to him. “You said rich plantation.”

“Rich, yes. Rich plantation, rich world, poor world. Rich sets up a dense echo or connection between the plantation and the sophisticated industrial inferno or factory. A connecting doorway. Follow me Weyl. It’s for your sake and Amaryllis’s that I descend. I bequeath you my wages.”

“What wages?”

“The wages of descent. They are my gift to you and to Amaryllis.”

“Gift!”

“Wedding gift,” he emphasized. I mouthed the words after him as if it was my turn to be dumb, as dumb as Quabbas. Laughter hit me, laughter and sorrow. It was unusual, to say the least, to bring a wedding gift to a man and his wife close on twenty-five years after the wedding. Unless the deed of coition, however marvellous and apparently complete, remains suspended in the parallels of royalty within servant and master, parallel losses and gains. Was the dead king our master guide, were we his servants who stood indebted to him? To see such losses and gains, such a debt, in a new light alerted us to the wages of freedom and unfreedom in every chain of being that ran through ourselves and others. Unbearable as all this was I began to link together three concepts in Masters’ chain — the law of initiations, private marriage or freedom to be with whom one wished, the intolerance of hell or unfreedom to be with whom one wished.