Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

What price did freedom pay to maintain its heart and mind? Amaryllis and I had purchased a legal certification of marriage a year or so after we consummated our private vows.

Purchased! What wages did freedom need to earn in the purchase of privacy and the sacrament of body and mind?

I saw in a flash within the golden chain of spirit upon which Masters seemed to dangle how necessary it was for him to descend into the Inferno. He sought to open new links in that chain, new equations and links and parallels beween the sweat of love and the sweat of industry, between the fires of hell and the fires of purification. Without master spirits who descend into hell the wages that make freedom possible would burn so fiercely that we would lose all distinction between grace and fury; we would become the prey of meaningless consumption, meaningless fire.

*

October was closing in when he led me down a hill to catch his first bus to the factory. He led me into an industrial labyrinth even before he came to the workplace. It was his mood. The labyrinth commenced the moment he boarded the bus. It would have been different, I dreamt, if he had been on his way to a great palace to receive the Order of Merit. The bus would have been overshadowed then by a kingdom or a throne. All doors, all stages, all buses, are multi-faceted, reversible frames of emotion in the chain that runs through parallels of humanity.

Thus, that October evening, I sensed a frame of emotion upon him that was already draped by the huge cave of a factory at which he arrived an hour or so later.

A lapse or disjunction of time marks every important appointment with fate. Had he been on his way to a palace — I saw again as he dangled on his golden chain above the Inferno — that timeless lapse, rooted in anticipation, would have embodied a degree of awe perhaps, a degree of pride or privilege perhaps interwoven with other curious emotions. No such luck. He was on his way to the factory and the timeless lapse encompassing him, as he drove to a place where he already was, embodied a degree of bleak present and presence.

He blended the dying light of the evening sky into the faint arc of the new moon and into the chain by which he pulled me or led me to descend into the Inferno.

The din in the factory was tremendous. And yet through it all I could hear the rush, the clamour, of phantom El Doradan rapids. It was drought, a drought that ignited a torrent etching its premises into rock utensils, smooth stripped half-bodied ice boxes, agitated washing machine souls, skeleton birthday funeral stream and dance. Each half-bodied boulder subsisted upon rhythmic cradle-in-epitaph, processional epitaph-in-cradle of industry, yet was a doorway into lapses of time. The dead king was on the threshold of despair in the intense racket but succeeded in slipping through a lapse and found himself walking at the edge of the still Round Pond in Kensington Gardens.

It was as if he had lengthened the chain forwards into tomorrow’s noon and though lapsed time had taken us there I felt we were still in the factory and the noonday sun remained an arc-light in the roof of the cave. Masters was a new factory recruit but already he felt that he had worked in the cave of boulder-machines for years. I saw that his body was imbued with the rhythm of the factory floor as a sailor who comes ashore from his ship moves still upon an involuntary wave. Masters led me within lapsed time to gaze almost sightlessly across the beautiful parkland of Kensington Gardens, through the beautiful trees, across the beautiful water.

Beautiful water! Sightless eyes. Deaf ears. Yes, sightless, deaf. But listen all the same to the distant roar of the traffic running toward and from Marble Arch. A sounding waterfall! Listen! Listen to the friction of wheels in the waterfall, listen to the gallop of horses in the waterfall, listen to the brakes and gears of engines in the waterfall.

There was a crash in the distant waterfall, a muted explosion, a back-firing engine, water on rock. A collision! Was it a bus, was it a car, was it a cyclist, was it a dray-cart in a parade of ancient vehicles? Carnival gait of redressed machines, bus into masked cyclist, car into masked dray-cart, led me to ponder whether I saw or did not see someone crawling out from under a wheel …

“Hey you, give me a hand here. Stop dreaming.”

Masters was back upon his chain from Waterfall Oracle. We stood in the factory, lapsed noon had fallen back into the brilliantly lit night of the cave. A stack of guillotined sections of metal had slipped, half-crashed, onto the floor and needed to be shored up again.

Two West Indians who had come to England in the 1940s and worked with the ground staff of the RAF, operated Madame Guillotine. They were, Masters surmised, around forty, his own age (or two or three years younger perhaps). It was a responsible job. He had been assigned to them. Not as an operator. He was unskilled in the slicing and the execution of metal. His job was to collect the sliced sections and transport them by degrees across the factory to a corridor where they were treated, passed on, treated and fashioned again, before being passed on once more to the assembly line.

There had been an acute shortage of labour and that was how it happened that a great stack of guillotined material had accumulated over the past week. It was this that had partially crashed on the floor to jolt him back from the Round Pond. His first task was to deplete the pile. Though it had been restored it seemed on the verge of slipping again.

“Go easy‚” he was told. “Tricky beast. Use them fucking gloves over there. It’s a night’s job to get it half-way down.”

The night (the factory day) wore on under its manufactured stars and suns. It was during the midnight (the midday) lunch break that he was conscious of peering through another lapse into the faces of his two companions as if day sliced night night day. He knew them in that light. One of them. He had seen him somewhere ages ago. Carnival time. It heightened and sharpened an inner profile, an inner memory, of redressed faculties. It was the edge of blood, the inner sweat of the sun, in an unfamiliar yet familiar shadow of light, that made him know he knew one of them though he could not remember where or when it was that they had met. Perhaps it was the ordeal of unaccustomed labour in transporting the metal with gloved yet wretched hands that evoked some placeless connection between them. He could not say.

Gloved wretchedness was the driving force, the itch or the climax, of industry. It illumined a cloak of savage or savaged memory that ties the worker’s hands, the worker’s bruised body, to his task with almost religious, fatalistic devotion. The sweat of industry was a phenomenon of darkest coniunctio , the marriage of man and material, boulder and boulder upon a chain that stretched from heaven to hell over which he had ruled in Plantation New Forest but as a labourer now himself — tied to Madame Guillotine — the sweat of intercourse infused him with a sensitivity that seemed to split and break every prick, every gloved nail.

His gloves were already cut to tatters — a dead king’s, a dead bridegroom’s, from the grave. He held them up to me, a living bridegroom, a Carnival mask of parallel dream.

Within a fortnight, the mask of the body, darkest coniunctio or marriage to industry, had forged a new skin, a new glove, a new letter that seemed to run at the edges of bone into english letter, french letter, welsh letter, irish letter, west indian letter — and all the other gloved accents, sexual imprecation, blasphemies, curses, one hears on a factory floor.

He was unable to place or identify the West Indian he thought he knew. Perhaps he was deceiving himself. Perhaps he was seeking to create a lapse into fictional memory in order to make game of the night’s/day’s labour. Lapsed night was day. Lapsed day was night. The lapsed unfamiliar was familiar. The lapsed unknown was known.