Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Was far viewing an invisible fire that ran along the mind’s contours through lapses and intricacies of universal place? For despite the measure of intact royalty and place, the clues on the blackboard were sometimes elusive and convoluted as if the fire of the mind in an unburnt place, an unbroken king of dreams, possessed no illusions about the fire of self-destructive order and warned us again — as music without voice or instrument had done before — of the hubris of self-identification with an absolute idol or creator, absolute evil, absolute good, that we appropriate into our institutions and project upon others. I saw that intact being, intact survival, was a curious joy but also a terrible warning, a paradox, a shattering of complacency.

I saw myself in Delph’s sketches standing upon a burning schooner. Where was this, when was this? I had forgotten, I was astonished, as if I were looking at someone else in a place I had never known. As a general perhaps returns to a battlefield long years after and finds it exactly as in the moment the guns cease firing, intact dead, intact flowers on blackened trees, and is horrified to see a face resembling his but alien in expression and manner. As a saint sees himself martyred all over again, sees a bottle of untouched wine in a shop window across the street, and is unable to believe it is he in whom such an unbearable thirst exists. I caught my breath at last. I was the half-puppet, half-living human bread Delph drew on the blackboard, bread and wine; I had been broken/spilt in all these, broken and spilt yet unknown, intact puppet captain of ships, broken and spilt yet puppet general of armies, broken and spilt yet puppet saint of Christendom. Puppet trinity of empires.

Yes, of course, the Market-place! The czar of New Forest! What clues Carnival provided on Delph’s blackboard to jolt one’s memory into living philosophy, living fiction! Had not Thomas and the marble woman arrived on the day of the capsized eggs in East Street to find the schooner, a smoking hull, moored to pier or Stelling, and traces of a pall of smoke still lingering in the air over New Forest? Whose martyrdom, whose ship, whose battlefield did they perceive at that moment, intimate place, far viewing, in the Carnival of history? It was as if I saw the puppet nature of cosmic time, puppet histories, puppet pasts, puppet presents, puppet futures, all affecting each other, so that the puppet future bore upon the puppet past — puppet bore upon puppet — to modify all totalities or apparent finalities of event in a shrunken humanity that was aroused to see how small it was yet capable of charting a distinction between apehood or puppetry of soul and true self-reflective immortal spark of fiction.

I (shrunken me) bore upon the puppet trinity of empires. I saw the core within that trinity in Delph’s sketches, untainted core, unblemished core, within the burning schooner, within the burnt schooner, as I had seen uncharred stairway, resurrected king in the mouth of cannon, intact flower on a blasted tree, untouched and bottled wine.

What was this core that Delph seemed so intent on sketching into play? Was it a kind of vegetable, human, architectural black box, was it a cosmic flower ticking with the voices of seed? Did one have to dig within schooners and crashed aeroplanes, trains and coffins, to find a messenger, intact, mysterious, miniaturized technology, miniaturized seed of the tree of space?

Delph’s purgatorial humour of translated puppets into living fiction in parallel with resurrected spirit deepened my curiosity. FEUD. That was it! The core Mr Delph sketched reminded me of the intact equation with glory — intact mystery of beauty — I had seen before but in shattering my complacency on the deck of the burning schooner it became a message of feud. I knew I needed to translate that message again and again, and the tension between such parallels — intact glory and feud — drew me back to masked feud in concert with — in conflict with — the thirsts of holy men.

Mr Delph turned to me. I saw he pitied me. He seemed suddenly outrageously youthful, outrageously sober, despite his unshaven mask and Antipodean smile. Sober geography master’s blood! Sober Mr Quabbas’s blood! Delphic thirst of the holy oracle. He spoke a little pontifically but journalistically like a good schoolmaster-oracle with his tongue in his chalk.

“Put it all down to trade,” he said, erasing a touch of chalk with a touch of spit. It made a smudge or scar on his lips as if he had dipped into a sugar bowl of rice. “Put it all down to bitter-sweet trade.”

“Trade!” I was outraged. He was poking sober chalk at me.

“Trade is one translation, Weyl, of the message of feud. A simple one, I grant, but people want simple answers, don’t they? So let’s be simple. Chalk, rice, sugar,” he said. “Oil, diamonds, you name it. Mudheads, timberheads. Simplicity’s masks of trade.” He tried to clean simplicity’s lips with a handkerchief but only succeeded in smearing his moustache and cheeks afresh. “That’s how they make me up,” he confided, “when I give a television broadcast in yes and no minister for the oracle of trade. Holy trade! Come, come, Weyl, don’t sulk. Trade is holy, who would deny it, and therefore many holy fires have been lit to maintain old, or secure new, markets.

“There you stand, Weyl — English sobriety and geography lesson combined — on the deck of your burning schooner. You love it, you loathe it, it’s the scene of a holy love affair with peoples, their wealth, their customs, a holy hate affair with power and Ambition. It’s a sea-going church within the middle passage, Inferno and Paradiso. It’s the red, blue moon, all tides, all pigmentations, it’s holy crime.”

“There are no churches on the moon,” I said sullenly. He stopped sketching for a moment and looked at me.

“But there will be,” he said, “sooner or later. There will be supermarket churches on the backside of the moon.”

FEUD IN PARALLEL WITH INTACT GLORY IS THE WOMB OF METAPHORS OF SPIRIT.

“Take the holy man, the martyr you saw upon the blackboard of space. He thirsted for wine of an imported Earth-variety. He saw a bottle he desired in a moon shop across from the supermarket church.” Mr Delph’s mask had slipped a little and he was laughing yet grave, utterly grave. It was the strangest sensation. Comedy of martyrdoms on the moon when humanity emigrates into outer space? “The wine was a signal of ordeal, conflict, that he endured. Was he being tempted, or manipulated even then, in his pain, to sell his soul to feuding moon merchants, space captains, feuding Vega field-marshals, generals, who bottle new wine in bulletproof lunar glass?

“Such a bottling is hell, my dear Weyl, but the thirst for truth, for intact glory, remains. Thirst — translated into inner trade between body and spirit — is the womb of fire from which Everyman arises. Thirst is the womb of justice, foetal sponge and human affinity to god that we project into the drought of space. Thirst — translated into inner/outer space famine — is the urgency of grain here on earth. Thirst is the palate of inner earth sacrifice, inner earth revolution, in parallel with absurd supermarket churches and martyrdoms on the moon. We trade with absurdities, my dear Weyl, infinities, distant planets, distant satellites, new-found constellations, galaxies — why do we do it? So that we may come home to ourselves at last, who knows, in every far viewing, intimate self-judgement and moment of truth.”

*

Mr Delph’s blackboard of space, into which he had sketched us, turned from the relic of spring in bridges of fire, to the relic of summer in mutual bridges of ocean. Each relic faced the other yet turned at a slight tangent away from the spiralling coil of the other into the ground-swell of numinous bodies.