Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘I shall send you down, Robin Redbreast Glass, to the bottom of the sea. Do you hear me? I shall sentence you. I have sentenced you.’

‘And I shall rise again,’ I cried, ‘into the map of heaven.’

I could have bitten Ghost’s tongue in half. Had he spoken or had I? I had gone too far. Frog swung away and left me to ponder the sentence he had passed. The sea and the wood lightened into imminent Skull and Calypso began to hum ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’. Then she stopped. Began afresh in a deep waving voice:

Belly to belly

Back to back

Ah don’t give a damn

Ah done dead a’ready.

Don Juan Ulysses Frog was enlivened by the song. He returned to the gate to beat time with his fist on the pork-knocker barrel or drum. As he beat the sea responded and crashed into music. It was as if — despite everything — he had been transported to another world, a world unshackled from intrigue and treachery, the world of the map of heaven, the map of the Beast, the glorious Beast he wished to entrap from time immemorial. Indeed it was this steep longing — blunted, deformed — that had led him blindly into the uniform he wore as magistrate, admiral and immigration officer patrolling the beach of the sacred wood.

I had built the great drum or vessel of a barrel as a memorial to my grandfather who died in 1945 in the depths of Old New Forest sacred wood. I associated my grandfather with the early giant navigators who pork-knocked the high seas in search of the Beast of Paradise surviving somewhere, they dreamt, in the headwaters of time.

Sometimes becalmed in a wilderness of ocean reflecting a jungle of stars and suns they prayed for miraculous beast-fish to nibble at their bait — a parcel of stellar beast-shrimp if nothing else — when provisions ran low and hunger stared them in the eyes in the Glass of the sea.

Belly to belly

Back to back

Ah don’t give a damn

Ah done dead a’ready.

Calypso sang more deliberately — as if to supply longer intervals or spaces between lines than on the first occasion. This was astonishing as her song seemed to arise from the bowels of a slave ship becalmed a million light years from home.

Frog was suddenly discomfited. He ripped open the vessel or barrel in search of his Beast. He peered into the dark as into an organ of humanity. I walked over to him. My Shadow followed.

‘The organ’s a text,’ I said, ‘cinematic music, cinematic text. Calypso’s lament with its implicit unshackled dead is as much about death as about self-abandonment, birth. It’s a prelude to my grandfather’s revised text of Faust. He read Faust , he loved Faust, and he re-wrote it in his own image. It was his last trip in the heartland. He was short of fresh fruit, greens, vegetables, and so on. Beriberi got him in the end. But as he starved by infinite degrees he tasted all the bitterness, all the sweetness, all the hope, all the despair in the world. And touched Faust the Beast. Faust the half-circus man, the half-mechanical soul. Faust of the womb and the grave. Faust the slave and Faust the self-mocking engineer of the gods …’

I was unable to finish. Frog was startled. His diamond eyes flashed with terrible jealousy and rage. All of a sudden he raised his mottled hand and before I could say Peter or Emma or Doctor Faustus or Beast or Angel he struck me a blow on the back of my neck. Poor Robin Redbreast, I thought instinctively, as blood flew through my Shadow and rested on Ghost’s right hand. It was so sharp I felt the stillness of the blade pour and coil within me. My head toppled into the Globe. I saw the civilization of Skull and the Mountain of Folly that I needed to climb and transcend if I were to arise from the sea.

I was innocent. I was guilty. I was good. I was evil. I was solipsistic (autobiographical) character. I was polyphonic (fictional) author. Solipsistic (autoreflective) in seeking to mirror the frailest, deepest origins or unity of the self underpinning all creation. Polyphonic in reflecting alien voices, alien voices in familiar texts, internal/external counterpoint, deformities of spiritual gold and mystical silver, perversities of epic, blind rendezvous with Ghost, diverse masquerades, self-revelations, self-deceptions …

The many conflicting versions of the coming and the arousal of Ghost, the leaden-tongued yet silver-tongued expressions of Ulysses Frog (epic lover yet doomed, jealous scavenger of humanity), the dumb lips of Ghost, the lament of Calypso’s unshackled dead, the country of Sleep that I inhabited as if I lay on a pillow of the ocean yet walked upon waves of land, the breaches of convention, the overturning of expectation, were all the substance of chaos edged by redemptive passion, redemptive hope, in the body of the resurrection that I reflected in myself as the price of an infinite rehearsal of value and spirit.

The sentence of chaos had been inflicted on all species the year I was born, 1945, the year the Bomb fell and history changed, revised itself backwards, never to be the same again.

FROG’S MOTTLED HAND HAD FALLEN LIKE AN AXE IN MY SLEEP. Fallen on many a reflected economy in Mirror and Shadow of Flesh-and-Blood in the flight of the crane or the swallow or the dove from north to south. Shadow-crane, shadow-dove, shadow-fish, with broken neck floating high on a wave or high on the land. I, Robin Redbreast Glass, flew headless then spun with a feather and a scale into the turning Globe, the turning wave, the turning hills, the turning valleys. Put my head and my hat on again and bowed in my Sleep to Prosperity’s block and Necessity’s block.

Capital block prosperity? I asked Ghost who flew in the shadow of a wave and a hill but his lips were sealed though a Strange cry trembled in the recesses of coming Skull but remained short of utterance.

Marxist block necessity then? I asked Ghost: ‘Tell me, Ghost — how deceptive, how real, are Necessity and Prosperity? Are they disguised ballrooms and cells of evil in which the heads of the unemployed roll? Are they in essence the polarizations of a Faustian morality that we need to untangle until the Beast smiles and points to heaven rather than to hell?’

I raised my hat to Faust as the flock of my terrors skimmed a wave and settled on the ground and in the belly of the sacred wood.

‘We are reborn with the fish and the bird, Ghost. We are reborn through the sword that severs the umbilical cord and flashes in the light of the sun and the moon with sudden estrangement from a body of darkness, foetal terror revised, foetal hope revised, revisionary edges of subsistence upon light and darkness, subsistence upon the brute world, subsistence upon the bland world.’

The wood was in a state of alarm. And indeed I sensed a change in the disposition of the tenant in my Shadow. Ghost was alarmed and uneasy at the intrusion of brute climates, brute absolutes, in the communication of ideas under the sea and over the sea that Faust had converted into a machine, fish of steel, fish of lead, fish of iron, birds of steel, birds of lead, birds of iron.

The mechanics of the circus of power on sea and on land made Ghost tremble on his flying trapeze in the belly of the sacred wood, the mechanics of domination in the name of Brute Prosperity or in the name of Brute Necessity.

Was this opposition between Brute and Brute a prelude to an era of temptation in which one Brute devised ruses of tenderness and humour to tempt the Other? ‘Bow down to me, dear fellow Brute, and the kingdoms of earth are yours. Save in the degree that I keep my options open to save the world and to bring you to heel.’

Faust — both Goethe’s and Marlowe’s — had been a priceless possession in my grandfather’s stock of books. He was still mentally athletic and young when he died aged fifty-five in the heartland of the sacred wood. He had pored over Goethe and Marlowe nights under an uncertain fuel lamp after labouring days in the creeks of the rainforests that ran through his barred consciousness. Ran like a woman’s fluid constellation born of the reflected moon and the reflected sun. Golden offspring born of the inimitable self-penetration of the reflected moon and the reflected sun. Such was the Glass in which he dipped his pen to write his own version of the Beast of immortality, the Beast of the circus and of the machine. I was there in that new version, the Glass child in the golden woman my mother. I was born (may I say it again) in 1945, the year my grandfather died. It was the year of the Bomb, the year of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. ‘We are born with the dead, with the fish and the bird.’