Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

“I am a rude king,” he said at last to the doctor, “a king who descends and who labours.”

“I know. I know. That’s why I ask you, of all persons.”

“You do not understand,” Masters said.

“Understand what?”

“A king is reborn for humanity’s impure sake …”

“What the devil does that mean?” the doctor cried.

“Let’s put it like this.” Masters was fencing with the devil. “A king sharpens the sword of religion and science in fire to test how incorrigible is his suit of hate or love, his longing, his insane longing, to wed the bride of heaven. Does he give his earthly body to science because he loathes it, hates it, or adores it for selfish, cynical heaven’s sake, cynical rejuvenation of worn out, obsolete, royal organs in a manufactured Paradise where lust is both eternal and incorrigible?”

The doctor did not know whether to express approval or alarm or disdain. One word stuck in his throat. “You said incorrigible. Why incorrigible?”

“If the fire of religion or science becomes incorrigible lust, incorrigible lust for purity or purity’s goods, if the beauty of art becomes so absolute that it cancels the marriage of the impure body to the impure body, impure ages to impure ages, impure cultures to impure cultures, then it means that the prospect of rebirth, therapeutic rebirth, falls into the void and in that case what use is it, doctor, for you to patch up a wretched soul in the name of wretched eternity, to patch up a wretched society in the name of wretched purity, by cannibalizing the constitution of a dead king?”

The devil was so outraged he could scarcely speak. Purity that masks the extermination of others, pure religion that masks fanaticism, pure science that masks its military consequences, unfreedom and terror, absolute mechanics that mask exploitation, were his bastions and they had been stormed, it seemed to me as I hung upon Masters’ chain, at a heart’s blow.

“The values of a civilization,” said Masters a little pontifically, as if to rile the devil, “need to rest on something much deeper than the mechanics of a frame to prolong the semblance of sovereign life.”

The doctor found his tongue at last. “Is it impure science then, impure art or religion, impure societies, that you favour?”

“I favour the saving desolation of spirit that differs from, though it resembles, despair; I favour the mystery of shocking truth or starkest spirit penetrating and reassembling evolutions, and then it is possible for a king to confess to native evil as inseparable from change — inseparable ingredient in the conscience of wisdom or maturity and change — to confess also to native bias and partiality as bitter travail, and to yield himself in ailing person and deed, through prayer and through necessity, to transfigurative dismemberment/remembermentand rebirth in community and of community. ”

The devil vanished as if he had been ousted but the riddling frames of temptation and revelation had not ceased and Masters found himself at the foot of a great palace that rose out of the hollow depression of a half-breathing, half-breathless organ or heart that plagued him still with parallel fires, the fire of the healer, the fire of the destroyer. He placed a tentative foot on a rung in the palatial ladder and recalled, in that instant, Thomas’s animated mask of curiosity glued to the bars and segments of the Alms House gate in New Forest through which he observed Aunt Alice dancing for her supper with faltering yet inimitably courageous steps.

Like Thomas’s, Masters’ eyes were glued to the ladder. Ladder or giant wheel, giant heartbeat within deceptive hollows, deceptive heavens, and with hope beyond hope and hopelessness of true heaven. As he stared through the gate he saw the shadow of Alice gesticulating, warning him, but much more unexpectedly and oddly vivid was the face of the West Indian operator in the factory whom he thought he knew but had been unable to place. He shook the ladder or gate now, and it dawned on him then, as a sudden wheel rattled, who the operator was. A faded newspaper floated down the rungs of the ladder and settled on a cyclist’s brow. That was it. That was the man! Here was the young cyclist who had collided with Martin Weyl in Carnival year 1939. A College Boy then, seventeen years of age.

Masters studied him closely, unable to trust his luck, unable to believe that after so many long weeks in the factory cudgelling his brains, now at last he remembered, now at last, upon the first rung of the dying ladder of an age in his body, he knew the identity of his fellow worker.

The newspaper floated a little in a breath of wind. It was brown and faded. It lacked the meticulous print of the “leaves of grass” in Purgatory’s Who’s Who. But despite this the picture of the young cyclist was impressive as skeleton or ivory or bone that had been browned — if that were possible — by heart’s fire. Parchment invisible heart’s fire. He (the cyclist in bone-brown fire) was wearing a cricketer’s blazer and flannels. His features were curiously round as if ready to bounce … Ah yes! the plague of the heart that cuts into the soul of a brilliant athlete and makes him bounce into eternity. Masters knew him, yes, unmistakably. He had seen him running in the College grounds to catch a ball falling out of the sky from Philip Rodrigues’ bat. Ball. Heart. Bat. Philip of Spain. Remember? The Venezuelan high jumper! Masters was jolted through Carnival ladder of heaven to perceive the young cyclist clutch at the handle bar of his machine. He pulled his brakes hard but was unable to stop. He collided with the half-sleeping, half-dreaming advocate of a pagan body that Martin Weyl was.

Advocate of a pagan body. How curious to see it like that, in such a light, with one apparently Christian foot on the rung of a ladder, of a gate, a palatial ladder, a palatial gate. As if that pagan body might restore his (Masters’) dying heart, might be of advantage to the kingdom he had glimpsed with mask glued to ladder and bar.

Then came the additional shock. Martin Weyl was flung into the centre of the road. It was too late for him ( Masters ) to reach out and save his friend. He felt that if it were not for the acute pain in his chest he could have done it even now after nearly twenty years. He could have reached back through a hole in time and saved him. He could have reached through the ladder. He could have seized Martin by the hair, by a grain of fire, and saved him. But no! The dray-cart, the startled horse or mule, was upon him. He was dead. But that was not the end of the matter. Too late to save him but not too late to be saved by him, by the friend he dreamt he may have saved.

He was assured after his apparently total recovery on the last day of November 1958 that the heart attack he had suffered had been a minor one despite the hole or lapse or black-out into which he had fallen. But he knew differently when he stood in the palace gate or ladder pointing to the bride of heaven within a cricket bat or cricket ball floating toward Vega in space. In part he was saved by the shadow of Aunt Alice, by her ageing Bartleby humour, crumbling gesticulation through the bars of heaven, and by the cautionary mask she provided for the young, sensuous flying Alice whose wings encircled Quabbas, the young fiery Amaryllis to whom I made love when Masters descended into the Inferno. Aunt Alice cautioned him not to be tempted by the brilliance of such fiery intercourse; to turn back to archaic Earth, to seek to wed the museum of the elements that needed him still. She pointed to Martin Weyl, to his Carnival posture — under wheel or horse or mule — as advocate of a pagan body.