Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

In the wake of Ghost — as he scrambled ashore — lay a great, tall wreck of a ship battered and ribbed and gaping and glistening in the setting sun like a quicksilver goddess’s hatpins in steep, elongated disarray.

Ghost had survived the assault of the sea in discarding his female hat and was emaciated and strange in a suit of gravity’s anti-gravity string; and yet it was the life of the body that struck me (hollow yet inexhaustible body), the mesmeric quality of artery and vein on the moon, on the setting sun, on the black earth of Old New Forest sacred wood.

I was filled with the naïveté of intensest longing and love: was this an apparition of the resurrection of the body?

I saw the new moon like a curved fingernail in the late, afternoon Old New Forest sky. I stared at it with intensity. As if my hollow voyager lost and lost and found again and again had pared it from ancient Homer’s webbed hand with immeasurable Joycean delicacy and drawn it on the sunset sky. Webbed Homeric hand. Impossible human bird. Impossible male, female animal. NIGHT WAS FALLING. My own fingernails were black with earthen light. I had been digging into a library of bone. Ghost approached me through my own pared extremities of Shadow and spoke in a foreign tongue (a mixture of vernaculars it seemed, bawdy verse and waste land poetry). I was baffled. Seeing my difficulty Ghost desisted and ceased to speak. Dumb Ghost. Illiterate Ghost. I was angry with him and with myself. I could not tell whether in playing dumb he wished to take on himself the constellation of a deprived humanity, deprived of dialogue with its innermost and fragile origins and with banished cultures of a half-sacred, half-profane truth. Was Ghost mocking himself or mocking me by taking upon himself the burden of an illiteracy of the imagination that plagued an age bordering Skull in the wake of lost quicksilver beauty and spiritual gold?

Perhaps his quicksilver genius verged upon values that were alien in spiritual substance to crass bounty, crass gold. And yet I knew him and he knew me through sober soil and self-confessing bone. Should I hand him over to the police or to the immigration officers (dressed as great sailors, great admirals) who patrolled this section of beach between the north and the south? Ghost read my thoughts and shook his head.

NIGHT WAS FALLING FAST and I led him up the quaking ground that shook with the impact of the sea into the house in the sacred wood where I lived. A lantern glowed there in the heart of starred bone, starred butterfly. We slept it seemed on the pillow of a wave. I dreamt with the dust of the ocean in my eyes of the coming of dawn. An immigration officer — Frog his name was — arrived at my door and knocked. Frog had the reputation of an inferior Don Juan Ulysses. He was accompanied by one of his painted mistresses, a black, white woman whose name was Calypso. (She belonged to the band of Tiresias Calypsonian Tigers whose fame had spread through many worlds.)

‘Have you laid eyes on any fellow travellers around here, Glass?’ Frog rasped. ‘A blasted ship — pirates I bet from the moon — hit the reef here late afternoon. The reports on my deck or desk speak of one or two swimming ashore on a pin from God’s hat that floated in a sea of hair.’

I shook my head in disbelief. Calypso was humming a famous bawdy ballad — STONE COLD DEAD IN THE MARKET. ‘Don’t play dumb, Glass. Yes or no?’ Frog bellowed. Perhaps I should have said the same to Ghost! ‘Don’t play dumb, Ghost.’ Or perhaps I should have offered him a drop of roast from the dream-barrel of the moon. A drop of roasted blood loosens a ghostly man’s or a ghostly woman’s tongue! A drop of blood truly reflected in the mirror of the self to nourish ancestral conscience may well have unravelled Ghost’s speech when we met, and broken his silence, into words I could have read on the wall of the sunset sky. I had lost my head. I had not fed him. But surely the chance would come again. A chance to knock on the door of the moon again in search of every lost species in the oven of space. A chance to consume with Ghost a splinter of transubstantial creation in every chapel perilous of the heights and the depths …

Frog saw my distraction and faraway look. ‘Say a pork-knocker yes or no,’ he thundered like Admiral Ulysses Baboon. And then as if he too had lost his way and were distracted by untenanted worlds he whispered in my ear, ‘Have you seen the axe fall upon the neck of the Old New Forest sun and moon economies? Has the industrial revolution of the sea given up its unemployed dead?’

I stepped back from him with loathing yet intimacy of scorched heart and mind. ‘No,’ I said at last, ‘I have not seen any strangers or travellers around here.’ I moved close to him again to reflect in the mirror of self the moth-eaten Skull tie he wore around his neck like an insect-spangled halter or noose.

As an inferior magistrate, as a piratical statesman, as an immigration great sailor or trickster officer, he could not help subsisting on a sea of griefs, on moth-eaten paradises. I understood (as I stared at Frog) another aspect of Ghost’s dumb lips, Ghost’s silence. For in mirroring Frog in myself it was as if the blood of the moon had turned to dead sea fruit on every political mouthpiece of my age.

Frog snapped at me now. He knocked on the door of my sea chest of books, and peered at the lantern-butterfly I carried within. He bared his teeth and his diamond-sharp eyes feasted on impossible glass in which he saw himself entangled in the multiple desires and waves of space and time.

‘I hope for your own sake, Glass,’ he cried at last, ‘that you are telling the truth.’ He turned away, mounted a parapet, and slid with Calypso into a battered ship of a car. As they drove away I tried to glance at myself as into the flesh of ‘Glass’. One placated or withstood one’s enemies or friends by reflecting their greed and offering it to them as the largesse of the moon. Much harder, of course, to reflect their virtues and astonish them as if manna were falling from heaven upon robin redbreast glass in the body of the mother of humanity.

Glass by name, yet lost golden species I was, lantern-butterfly or illuminated black pulse like a will-o’-the-wisp birthmark/birdmark upon a page of the sacred wood.

Ghost was sitting on a bench when I returned to the book in which we slept. He arose and came close to me and his curious, wide-awake dreaming eyes appeared to comprehend the trials of inner and outer consumption of virtuous blood or greedy blood or dead sea fruit that had commenced. It was my trial as much as his. Should I continue to protect him, to shelter him?

WAS I STORING UP TROUBLE I COULD NOT FORESEE? Or would it lead to a revelation of the mystery of technologies of emotion in flesh-and-blood, complicated space virtues, complicated space greeds, threaded into human bias and the ascendancy of truth as sweetness or light yet bitterness or longing?

THE SEA BROKE IN MY TEETH. DROWNED TEETH. I DISLODGED A SPLINTER AND CLAMBERED UP THE STAIRWAY OF TIME INTO THE JAWS OF THE RESURRECTION. Ghost belonged. He may have appeared or risen in a sea-chanty book but he belonged to the oven of civilization: the burning sea; the oceanic fires; erosions and accretions. Belonged to the soil and the bone and the sea, to the butterfly page and to the lantern page, to the regime of the moth and to the derelictions of lust, to iridescent natures and to the gloom of planets with electric axes shining as if lit by primitive instinct.

The trial in which I was involved ran much deeper than simply concealing apparently illiterate Ghost from inferior Ulysses Don Juan Frog who patrolled the world in every national costume, east, west, north, south, Marxist, Capitalist.

NIGHT WAS FALLING FAST AS I TURNED A PAGE OF SLEEP AND WROTE: Were the sailing men who circumnavigated the globe nothing but ancient chauffeurs, mechanics and technicians? Or were they so drunk with the spirit of value they had forgotten their motivation? Was God nothing but a giant chauffeur, a giant astronaut at the wheels of fire in space? Or did we need to read his ecstasy in the snake that takes wings and flies to heaven, the bird that takes scales and dives into the sea? Was the lamp by which the sun sailed nothing but a hollow fire? Or was it a light by which I dreamt my way backwards in time into the ancient workshop of the gods?