Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Amaryllis and I perceived ourselves once more in the core-cathedral in which we had celebrated Easter with Masters in New Forest before Amaryllis left for Europe. (It had been rumoured that her ship had been sunk by a German submarine in the summer of 1940.)

It was Good Friday when we knelt in the cathedral. My memories, or Mr Delph’s far sketches, were an imperfect wave of recollection. And yet such imperfection seemed now to embody a moment of resistance in ourselves against the ritual crucifixion of love year after year, peace after peace, war after war. The cathedral subsided into the sea in which I had dreamt Amaryllis’s ship had been hit by a torpedo. From within the sea where I lay with her we observed holiday-makers lying on the beaches around us above the ocean wave that was littered with the epitaph of many seasons. We were suddenly uplifted towards them like fluid bone wreathed in stars and leaves to pipe the sweetest saddest music into the absent-minded reverie of lovers. Our bone became flesh. Nibbled bone under the sea, kissed bone, fleshed wave of bone, core-artefact, cross-artefact, of summer blending into autumn flesh, bone under star, under leaf, under flesh, all graves, all cradles of mankind. And despite the passivity, the resignation, of summer’s and autumn’s beached populations, a subtle resistance to the perpetual murder of species in a chain of existences linked to our Easter pulse flitted through the ocean wave and dashed within and against the cathedral of space in which we dwelt under the sea and in risen bone upon the land.

In the arousal of the bone in a wave of flesh lay the strategy of resurrected mind, a rendezvous with resistance movements. I recalled now — with sudden sharpness — the childlike sensation I had had that my father lay in the Trojan Horse of Christ: it was a deep-seated obsession that never left me in the years that followed. It confirmed itself in the core of every summer wave, autumn penetration, in my union with Amaryllis, a union that embodied the mane of oceans upon which we rode, mane of rivers, continents, islands. Mane of sorrow. Mane of gladness.

*

Spring and summer moons had gone and autumn was upon us at last. As though in Mr Delph’s imperfect oceanic sketches Amaryllis and I glimpsed ourselves as we would look, or dress, at the turn of the century. Once again we floated on the mane of time, fashionable or unfashionable bone clad in fashionable or unfashionable flesh. We had discarded not just youth but fabrications of youth, the disguises of old age.

“Resist the seductive death-wish. Cultivate the sober life-wish wherever you happen to be in outer space or under the tides of the moon. Weigh the tyrannies of sex in ageing puppets fascinated with the rejuvenation of the ape of the human body. Weigh nostalgic old age and foetal ambition. Weigh all these to unravel tyranny, to unravel the humour of the birth-wish, the humour of fertility that translates lust into imagination’s harvest. Ploughing, reaping, cultivating, enfolding, embracing, infinite rapture of soil and water and light and darkness that glows in the body of the mind, not as nostalgic puppetries of helpless desire (helpless desiring, helpless desired, and pathos of rape) but as illumined senses in non-senses beyond apparently inevitable fate, apparently inevitable death.”

Masters’ voice in Delph, Delph in Masters, faded. The oceanic curtain of Carnival theatre began to fall. I saw the red-ribboned car upon which Aimée danced. It had been repainted a glowing yellow in the depths of the sea. Glowing, deceptive yellow. It was a spring moon 1983 (or was it 2083?) and we could barely discern it through the mane of the waters. Masters thrust me into the driver’s seat of the inner-coated, red-ribboned, visibly yellow moon-car. I had been drawn aloft to the topmost rung of Alice’s fluid ladder where the sun and the moon are possessed of many intimate, open colours but upon finding myself thrust almost unceremoniously by the dead king into the car, I was astonished to find that the stage on which it stood, adjoining the ladder, seemed to melt into space; the great car descended like a feather. It floated in the air and the tide until it bumped gently upon the ground, a huge rectangular balloon upon wheels and springs. I was safe in the balloon and on gently releasing the gears it moved forward in Addison Road where Amaryllis and I lived in our ocean wave.

It was then, only then, that I knew I had seen the last of my guide and that Amaryllis was seated beside me with a child in her arms.

It had been raining but the rain had ceased as the feather, the balloon of a car moved. The windscreen was covered by the faintest waves that glistened with tears of shadow. Everyman and I had come a long way around the comedy of the globe and I attempted to peer up into the spatial ladder to see if I could perceive him again anywhere at all between the vanished stage and the ground on which we drove. But nothing, no one, could be seen. Alice’s fluid gate had vanished. Mr Delph had vanished. All I could fathom was a rainswept world lit by the memory of bridges of ocean, masks, dances, Waterfall Oracle, arising and painting the great city of London that Amaryllis and I knew in our hearts.

I touched Amaryllis and the child beneath the wave and the rain on the curtain of Carnival. The car was a measure of Masters’ wedding gift to us twenty-five years after we were married. Despite its red inner coat and yellow moon paint, it was a cinder, a luminous cinder light as a feather, marvellous as a balloon, the slenderest inflatable, deflatable motif of crossed bridges, burning yet intact, bridges of fire, bridges of ocean, bridges of earth; the bridges and wages of ascent and descent upon which I dreamt we had been led by the master spirit who had been our guide.

“She says she will breast-feed the child,” Amaryllis said suddenly. It was Jane Fisher’s child! Not Jane Fisher the First, the fisherman’s wife, who lived several blocks away (not dreadfully far from Jane Fisher the Second) beneath the wave into which we had charted not only the core of the bone and the cinder of the sun but the core of maps, the core of streets, cities half-forgotten, half-remembered, great cities, small cities, townships, market-places around the globe’s balloon.

“Jane Fisher the First would have killed him,” I said, “after she lost the child, the mysterious overseer’s child.”

“Why do you call your character-masks first and second and third and fourth and so on as if they are the Carnival kings and queens of vanished times?” Amaryllis was poking fun at me with the bone of her finger that shone like the faintest dagger under the sea. She gave me a sharp stab. I felt I had been miniaturized where the three bridges crossed, fire and earth and water, to re-imagine the cinder of a wound in Masters’ side.

“Tell me, tell me,” Amaryllis insisted.

“Not only vanished times,” I said. “Times of succession as well. Every puppet of disaster moves in parallel with a spark of redemption, the spark of succession.”

“And the spark of pregnancy?”

I was taken aback by the sharp retort.

“Carnival queenship, Carnival kingship, illumine the sacrament of pregnant form in art as in life. She stands,” I pointed to the baby girl in my wife’s arms, “at a point where the three bridges cross. It’s a point of greatest peril and greatest promise. Should she, this child, survive into a new century of mind we may all recover …” I was unable to continue. I felt plagued by subtle doubts. How could I be sure this child was Masters’ child? Jane Fisher the Second’s child, yes! We knew that. We were godparents. We had witnessed the birth in a cave in the sea, dream-cave, dream-sea. Born exactly nine months after the day she had slept with Masters, the day of his second death in the summer of 1982 (or was it 2082?). Time lapses under the sea as it does on the foetal planets around the sun and moon of Vega.