Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Each man secretly played his own game of lapses or doorways into time with the devil. Religious devil. Religious pay-packet. So much for rent to keep the devil from the door, so much for the motorcycle or the motorcar to outrun the false shaman, so much for the devil’s cigarettes, for lovely beer, so much for vistas of the Round Pond within the pools in which El Doradan millions shone, so much for hire purchase …

There were moments when the devil took a worker by surprise in the game they played. Was it the worker’s mask or the mask of the devil that crumpled a little? Was it the worker or the devil who seemed to lose his grip? The dual mask slipped and another face appeared, slightly ecstatic, slightly depressed, slightly dark, slightly brilliant, vaguely attuned to home thoughts (an Englishman’s home is his castle), home thoughts of wife or mother or child. Then the castle would darken into irrational siege, irrational casualty, injury, the unemployed, the unemployable.

“You’ve never had it so fucking good,” the devil said to me. “Masters has bequeathed you his wages. Why are you moping, making up fictions?”

The roof of the great hollow cave of a factory was littered with arc lights, manufactured suns, some with moon satellites but in a particular area of the lofty cave there shone a single star that an educated wag had christened Vega. This was devoid, as far as waggish eye could see, of the rings or planets circling Earth’s sun.

Factory Earth therefore, the wag declared, need fear no competition from planets around Vega, the nearest sun in space and time to Planet Earth’s sun.

It was light-year comedy and Masters was well acquainted with the importance of such games to preserve morale within the work forces of Factory Earth and Plantation Earth and to humour or lighten anxieties within a fiercely competitive world. In Vega — in the arc-light of Vega within the cave of the factory — lay the narrative seed of a constellation within a twentieth century biography of spirit. It was a seed in parallel, through distances of psyche, with the hunter/huntress Orion and the male/female Crab nebula.

Such seed of necessity, such predilection for games, was a form of telepathy between worker and worker around the globe. Long before mock-constellations or satellites, invented by science, encircled the earth, cultures had invoked their own satellites and images in the stars through which they bridged distances and separations and spoke silently to each other. They saw without proof each other’s masks, they felt without touching each other’s edged tools, they pooled each other’s tears in the ghost of rain and made a sacrament of vision. The telepathy of the soul. They peered into the night-time live-coal eyes of the crocodile stars in search of a modern telescope to place in Thomas’s hands long before Thomas dreamt of investigating the wounds in the body of space.

Late in November Masters found himself staggering under Vega with a satellite bride of metal from Madame Guillotine in his arms. He was suddenly visited by a revelation that was to be confirmed by science. His mind lapsed into fiction and he saw that there were foetal rings and planets around Vega and that these constituted not just a competitive threat to Factory/Plantation Earth but a new wheel or foothold for life should the golden chain to which he clung be so apparently severed or blasted it flung him — it flung him — through one of its links on to that wheel. HE COLLAPSED AND FAINTED.

This was his first minor heart attack and it was to bring him face to face with the devil. It was time to say goodbye to the factory. He fell through the floor upon his golden chain (or was it up into the roof of the cave?) and lay at the edge of a great fire within a chain of reversible gravities, ups/downs, downs/ups, in Waterfall Oracle. He raised himself nevertheless to his feet to confront a gentleman with a smooth, polished mask.

“What the devil?” said Masters. “Where in god’s name am I? Who are you?”

The devil chuckled. “You called me first,” he said, “so here I am. A mask — the self-same mask — can be worn by parallel angels and monsters.”

“Did I call you? I have forgotten.”

“It’s a game of lapses of memory,” the devil said. “Read the newspapers around the globe. See how they put gory morale into their customers’ breasts — the spy games, the war games, the sex games, the power games. But sometimes a foul, a hideous lapse, is declared and the game almost ceases to exist.”

Masters was stricken with the masquerade of the devil as something or someone he had summoned to play death and life and rebirth. In calling him, in saying “What the devil?” — albeit in the way one cries, “Oh god” or “To hell with you” — had he indeed, however involuntarily, invoked a fiery response in the cosmos, fiery death threatening him here on Earth, on one hand, fiery rebirth, foetal circulation of life around Vega, on the other? If the game stopped with a dreadful foul here on Plantation and Factory Earth would it start all over again somewhere else upon the wheeled chain of mutated spaces, mutated fires?

Masters felt an undoubted attachment to, a longing for, the great beautiful fire beside which he stood with the devil. That longing stemmed from a curious hollowness and depression within him, a desire not just to be purified in hackneyed senses but to be rendered therapeutically impure, therapeutically mixed game (water and fire), so that the measure of his cosmic disease would match the sacrament, or miracle, of a cure. It was a formidable equation between “impurity of the game” and “sacrament or cure” (as if one were integral to the mystery of the other), and it made him see fire as a wonderful bride, a wonderful game, to be embraced, to be courted, to be loved. He lapsed through holed time. It was 1945 in New Forest. He had just donated blood to the Brickdam Alms House and to the State Hospital. The doctor (attired in calendrical mask 1945) who had drawn the blood resembled the devil of Vega’s fire (calendrical mask 1958). Reversible memory, the future in the past, the past in the future. Waterfall Oracle. Delph’s blackboard/white chalk. They were both polished, courteous plantation gentlemen. Except that the plantation doctor in New Forest was Carnival black, the devil (or daemon of souls on Vega) Carnival white.

The doctor in the State Hospital rubbed the dead king’s arm with a piece of cotton wool, offered him a drink, and then, seeing how little affected he was by the blood-letting ritual, ventured to ask him whether he (as a prince of the estate) would take the lead in signing a petition.

“What petition?” asked Masters.

“I need cadavers,” said the doctor bluntly. “Freely donated. Sign please!”

Masters was not sure that he had heard aright. “Whose cadaver?” he asked. He was drawn to the devil’s fire, he was drawn by a lust for purification and yet he shrank away now within a confusion of place and mind, heart and soul, science and religion.

“Whose cadaver?” the doctor repeated. “Why yours, of course. Sign here and I will give you a card marked Atonement. Keep it in your pocket as your good deed to the State. I shall then be able to claim your royal frame in collective instalments, the State’s kidneys, the State’s lungs, the State’s blood bank, the State’s everything.” He shook Masters’ chain.

“No, no, I’m sorry,” the dead king cried quickly. “NO!”

“What, what? Don’t you see that if you — a prince of the State — gave your frame, it would inspire millions?”

“They would give their souls,” the devil confessed.

Masters felt guilt. He had given royal blood. The royal sweat of industry. The royal guilt of industry. He had given all these. But his compulsive desire to marry or to wed fire created a terrible beauty in parallel with a terrible danger and as he resisted the devil’s temptation the fire retreated a little into an organ of mystery that overruled all blind gift of body or soul before or after death in the name of pure science or in the name of pure religion.