Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I gained the impression that the stairway or ladder was an intact piece of dream-theatre. The uncharred stage of hell or heaven was a curious rocket. Ribbons of fire had played around it but left it intact. Ribbons of fire! Bonnets of fire! I recalled the car on which Aimée had danced. That car was now a wreck, a mere cinder in Nightbridge. But the stairway-rocket was its uncharred vehicular counterpart, its uncharred vehicular understudy in Nightbridge space. How extraordinary that a proud rocket should understudy a humble motorcar!

Extraordinary, yes, but it helped me to distinguish between fire and fire, the fire that reduces a car to cinders, the fire that hesitates to overwhelm a stairway into the stars, or a rocket into outer space, as if to imply that the resources of creative anger were such that they needed to align themselves with avant-garde technology in resurrection theatre in order to highlight the dangers to humanity, the dangerous, virtually impossible, stairway it would need to climb if traffic on Earth ceased forever.

That core of paradoxical anger — that leaves intact a pattern of access into the heights and into the depths upon Aimée’s stairway — drew me back to Crocodile Bridge in New Forest. There I had witnessed the resources of confused anger in coal pot fires and in the eyes of a living dinosaur aroused from its grave in a canal.

There I had also witnessed Masters’ resurrection from fire and the seed of anger, the seed of the wound, he inherited.

It was Carnival 1957. It was the evening when Masters visited the fisherman’s wife. I was possessed by foreboding and decided to drive to Crocodile Bridge. As I stood there I saw a tongue of lightning strike the roof of the fisherman’s cave. I raced to the scene to find Everyman collapsed in the mouth of cannon in which the workers lived. He had succeeded in crawling out of bed. Naked as he was, lying unconscious, he epitomized miraculous flesh-and-blood ammunition that had been fired, but had escaped being burnt alive. It was a singular distinction between puppet human tyrant rocketed into the depths of plantation space and unconscious human survivor in the mouth of cannon.

In point of fact the fisherman and his wife Jane, after inflicting the wound on the overseer, had vanished in alarm at the strange angry fire that had consumed the roof of the cave but had hesitated, it seemed, to descend. And indeed it was only when I had pulled Everyman from the rocket-cannon that the fire descended in my dream and consumed the rest of the cave.

In contrast to the depths into which Masters had been fired, the uncharred ladder in Soho ascended into the sky. I became conscious of a figure at a blackboard sketching the outer shell of Nightbridge and the intact inner stairway on which Aimée had danced.

It was an early spring morning when I visited the scene of the fire, the shell of Nightbridge. The light air and the music of space shone everywhere despite the busy river of Oxford Street that I had left behind to draw close to the backwater square near Nightbridge.

That the music of space shone was a nervous vibration and fire I had long accepted. I tended to explain it to myself as the phenomenon of the “understudy” that resides in one’s blood.

With each lucid dream I appeared to stand outside of myself, to understudy a self akin to myself yet other than myself. In short I knew Amaryllis and I were involved in a series of infinite rehearsals, infinite in material but true (however elusive), unswerving (however paradoxical) in spiritual mind.

The music of space was conducted by an understudy whose passion lit a flame of response in one’s being. And it seemed to me that I conducted the inner, ecstatic, silent orchestra of light and sprung leaves everywhere except for a fiery moment of release from such hubristic self-identification when the superior “I” seemed to recede, the supreme “I” I thought I was moved into the distance, and in fact I (shrunken me) was conscious of lapsed places, lapsed times, through which understudy/understudies moved.

In becoming “shrunken me”, I saw the lapsed places, the lapsed times achieve the mystery of intact reality. It was as if the supreme “I” that was fading into the distance bestowed upon “shrunken me” a fantastic inner gift. Something or someone (whatever or whoever it was) remained unbroken, intact, in material absurdity, spiritual irony. At Nightbridge Club that something was the absurd stage and ladder into the sky. At Crocodile Bridge that someone was the absurd, unburnt body of Everyman Masters that I — in understudying a fantastic conductor of orchestrated lightnings or science of dreams linking the human person to the heights and the depths of the cosmos — had rescued.

However absurd the uncharred ladder was in a blackened building, however absurd the unburnt king of dreams in the mouth of cannon, they established a link between me and indefatigable understudies of the genius of creation resembling myself but differing from myself to leave the community of the future open to others linked to me but untrammelled in spirit. It was a temptation to dream one was utterly close at points, places, instants of being, to absolute bliss, absolute terror, in creator and creation. But the fact that creation broke into halves, namely, absolute bliss/absolute terror, love/hate, beauty/dread (or whatever Carnival dualities one perceived) was a manifestation of unbroken but untouchable wonder, intact but unstructured mystery (within fractions of material, elusive, concrete destiny), through intricate understudies in mutual reality, omnipresent reality, that glowed at one’s fingertips, in one’s blood, only to fade but never die in visible reflections and in music that shone, never sounded.

I had drawn close to the figure at the blackboard and easel which were peculiarly familiar to me. He stood at the edge of the street and sketched for an invisible class of twentieth-century students the shell and the intact stairway of Nightbridge Club. I suddenly knew him. Antipodean man. Delph! An old man now. He had been sacked — you may recall, gentle reader — from New Forest College in the 1930s and had come to London instead of returning to Australia.

Yes, it was he. Poor Oracle! He was unshaven. His hair was bleached snow. My father’s lawyer’s wig! Within a shadow and a doubt, it was he. Could one be dogmatically certain about the masquerade of the soul, the shadows and lights and investitures of the soul? I studied the blackboard. He did not appear to mind. In one corner he had listed the following: Lazarus character-masks (puppet and truly risen). Aimée. Rocket. Car. Crocodile Bridge. Then he had written beneath: make up a story containing all these. But what held my eyes even more were the sketches-within-sketches that I perceived.

A kind of far viewing. That was what Delph was up to. He sketched places he had never seen, distant places around the globe. Some I did not know. Others I recognized. He saw through the shell of Nightbridge into Crocodile Bridge into a fisherman’s cave into the music of spring that gave to all these the dazzle of rhythmic responses one to the other, through yet beyond the given senses of purely possessive touch, purely possessive hearing, possessive smell, possessive taste.

I stared as Delph sketched oblivious of me, I thought, until we were both immersed in intimate yet far viewing. He could not, or was disinclined, to explain to me the moral and the meaning of such far viewing, but I suddenly saw that moral almost precipitately, excitedly, as if I had climbed into space with him, in the ceaseless understudies of a universal fathomless actor to whom belonged every spiritual vocation or role, every spiritual stage, that we invoked with partial grasp but inimitable originality. I saw the absurd constancy of the theatre of the globe, absurd comedy of intercourse between multi-faceted rehearsed place, or rehearsed theatres of place — overlapping textures of graspable, ungraspable place — and the genius of creation.