Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

In questioning those who sailed in drunken boats across the ocean to me, and to my savage antecedents long before I was born, I knew I questioned my deepest bottled instincts, deepest bottled intuitions, deepest bottled fears, deepest bottled hopes. I knew I questioned my savage antecedent of Old New Forest. Drunken Quetzalcoatl. Drunken wing. Drunken serpent. (I WAS ASHAMED I MUST CONFESS OF THE ECSTASY OF THE WING AND THE ECSTASY OF THE SNAKE, THE ECSTASY OF THE EGG FROM WHICH I HAD BEEN HATCHED. I WAS ASHAMED OF THE POTION I HAD DRUNK IN SUBCONSCIOUS REALMS IN THE BOOK OF SLEEP FROM A SEED OF BLOOD IN THE YOLK OF SPACE.)

Drunken Quetzalcoatl was the source of all philosophy — the source of the hunt, the source of architecture — and in attuning his appetites to the mystery of the elements had coined the first vowel in evolution — curled egg-shaped snake coatl and curled egg-shaped bird quetzal — only to puncture or unravel the concept into a lightning shoestring potion, lightning artery, lightning vein, lightning intercourse between the rich and the poor, lightning mystery of deprivation as well as palatial conceits, lightning intercourse between himself and the woman of space, lightning mother of space from which he sprang into existence virtually without shelter, without food.

Had he forgotten the original spark, the original draught of ecstasy? Was this the source of his hunger, the source of his greed, the source of his guilt at divine incest? Or was it a measure of creative rehearsal, incompletion, half-spirit, half-flesh, elusive origins of unity, elusive origins of sex, elusive wholeness?

Ghost had nothing to say in reply to my questions except that I recalled when we had first met he had appeared to utter a curious bawdy confession that I had failed to understand. I had hoped he would tell me something however alarming, however incongruous, however chastening. But he had not. I had failed to comprehend. I had not fed him. Except with dead sea fruit that aped a spark of Homeric blood in the underworld of the twentieth century with its twittering shadows, its persecutions, its crucifixions. And I was left, therefore, to sense through his intricate gestures webbed with meaning — and the implicit masks he wore, the implicit disguises, deceptions — the immensity of bottled cargo he brought with him from every corner of the globe: not only bird-cargo, snake-cargo, but Christ-cargo, Socrates-cargo, male, female Tiresias cargo, ancient Egyptian, African cargo, modern, scientific European cargo … I was left to delve for the mystery of the resurrection from the bottled sea within myself, my intimate book. Bottled foetus in the body of the mother of humanity. Bottled seed in the black earth. Bottled page and bone upon which I wrote the music of the spheres.

The book of modern Europe possessed its roasted pigment in the adventures of Faust, Caliban and Magellan. It was a quantum book in which a particle of roast on the moon became a plunging horse saddled with all diasporas, all middle passages. Resurrection from a particle or a wave was a quantum saddle upon which a new physics rode into Bethlehem. I knew for in the country of Sleep I had seen a spade unlock a grain of sand into a towering beast of a wave upon which Ghost came with unwritten, written volumes for my library in the sacred wood.

I KNEW EVERYTHING. I KNEW NOTHING. I WAS THE SUBJECT OF AN INFINITE REHEARSAL OF A PLAY OF THE BIRTH OF HISTORY. Ghost slid from his towering wave of a horse in my library of dreams. He came to me with the head of Sir Walter Raleigh riding on his left hand. A giant El Doradonne brow upon which I read, ‘History revises itself within the intervals of consciousness and unconsciousness that it takes for the economies of our age to fall again and again from the block and to touch the ground, consume a spark of dust, and rise into dream-orbit around the sun.’

I was dissatisfied with this. It was true. And yet it seemed too seductive, too charismatic. Ghost understood my dilemma and turned the brow of El Doradonne Economy around until it gleamed with the eyes of Prospero and I read in those pupils of brilliant dust:

‘Revised spark. Revised histories of the world.’ The brow darkened (NIGHT WAS FALLING) but cleared again into constellated peacock eyes and I read a ghostly script: ‘1832–3, emancipation of the slaves, the axe falls on plantation El Dorado. Landowners protest on behalf of the homeless, houseless slaves. Where will they go?’

THE BROW DARKENED. NIGHT WAS FALLING. BUT STILL I WAS ABLE TO DECIPHER A GHOSTLY FINGER OF INK. ‘1914–18. The axe falls on dynasties and privileges. Where will the unemployed go? They march to the sound of a patriotic drum. If you could see them as I do,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

NIGHT FALLS BUT THE BROW FLICKERS AGAIN. ‘1939, the axe falls on Chamberlain’s peace in our time …’

I could read no further but cried in desperation, ‘WHY, WHY?’ The brow relented and flashed a page in my book — ‘Eat the Word of God in the twinkling of an eye when the axe falls and the Globe tumbles from the block to roll within the stars. Globe, yes, my El Doradonne globe in your heart, your privileged economy in my body which is susceptible to time’s axe when systems are evil, the evil for which the innocent suffer. For the innocent (as well as the guilty) are you and me

I was filled with rage. ‘No,’ I cried, pushing Ghost away, ‘I shall hand you over to Frog. You are my conscience. I fear this quest for the nature and the meaning of value. Why must we axe evil and hurt ourselves? Evil is rich with prosperity and promise.’ I stopped, filled with terror and shame. ‘Don’t pay any attention to me. I shall hide you, Ghost. I shall hide you IN MY SHADOW. in my shadow. Where else?’

Ghost and I slept. Frog and Calypso appeared early on a page of shadow: page, yes, of the dripping sun that rains its ambivalent light upon the sacred wood. They kicked open my rusty book or gate and hammered upon the giant barrel I had built there to house a number of pork-knocker texts.

‘Where are you hiding him, Glass?’ Frog shouted. ‘My information is that some God rode ashore here, near here, that the new moon darkened over the Middle Passage …’

‘Christ!’ I thought in some bewilderment.

‘Don’t look so damned outraged,’ snapped Frog. ‘I have my scouts. Some say they saw a man or a woman with a long plait of hair. Others say they saw a Beast or a Comet with a Snake around its neck.’

I could not help crying aloud in my sleep at Ghost’s outrageous tricks and Frog’s credulity. ‘A snake around your throat is better than a moth-eaten cravat,’ I said to Ghost.

‘What’s that, what’s that?’ cried Frog. ‘If I catch Beast I shall interrogate him about the map of heaven. Do you hear me, Glass? It’s my privilege. I interrogate strangers. I have built a traditional system and network. And another thing. I don’t like you, Glass. You tangle me up in myself, in my own wildness, my own reflection in you. It’s dangerous to see myself reflected in you, intimately black, intimately white. It’s as if I have found the Beast of heavenly and hellish adventure in a subtle redbreast creature like you and do not know it. It’s as if I’m in your dream. I may sentence you, I may judge you, but I’m an inferior at last. Poetic justice! You know me — you fleck of scum from the sea — much better, more deeply, irreverently, terrifyingly, than I ever knew you. ’

I could not help shrinking a little at Frog’s schizophrenic claws and diamond eyes that seemed to scuttle upon the mirror of a wave.