Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I was the foetus revised, the unborn grandson revised, entangled in the waters of mirrored death revised in the unconscious fluid of my coming birth. There was a turbulence in that revised fluid and I knew what my mother knew. I shared with her — in a kind of void yet potent revisionary abstraction — her concerns, her anxieties, the postman’s knock bringing letters from my grandfather in the distant heartland.

I knew he thought of us — and had heard of me — from the letters Aunt Miriam wrote to him and received from him, the letters my mother Alice wrote to him and received from him. I could not be sure in those turbulences when the dream of diamonds and gold gave way to me, to Glass, and he saw me like a fluttering redbreast bringing its hat (or was it its head?) to Faust and skimming the creek in which he dug for spiritual wealth as well as crass bounty. (Years later when I read his book I saw he had dedicated it to me, his unborn grandson Robin Glass.)

At first he would have given his soul, he would have bartered my head, Robin’s head, for offspring of crass gold, for the diamonds in the eyes of Ulysses Frog that sometimes clouded mine as I slept. (‘Frog’s eyes,’ my mother once said when we peered into the mirror together, ‘are your eyes, Robin. No wonder you invent such terrible guardians of the beach.’) He would have bartered his soul for crass gold, he would have bartered Ulysses’ head in my self-loathing, self-reflecting Frog’s mirror of the injustice of epic plunder, epic statecraft but was stopped. Something happened. He wrote to Alice and Miriam to say he heard voices singing ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’ and within those voices a whisper that may have been the faint voice of Robin Redbreast foetus revised in the book of humanity, the book of the Beast of heaven and hell, far up in layer upon layer of sleeping trees. It was the whisper of ironic singing temptation offering him elusive orchid-kingdoms worth a million, elusive toucan-kingdoms worth a million, elusive parrot-kingdoms worth a million in the zoos of the east and the west.

Elusive head of time as well. It was then he began to prize me, prize the ironies of strangest hidden conscience everywhere, the Glass of multi-reflecting telegraph of soul. I knew when he died because my mother knew. I tasted a melon or an orange on her lips. It tasted sweet. Whereas on his it had become a dry shell, the shadow of Skull, in the beriberi zoo that claimed his life. A strange animal he seemed to me at the end as I dipped within my mother’s body into the script, the illuminated script, of her dreams. I saw him roaming the palaces of the peacock-orchid and the unicorn-amaryllis in search of his limbs as they crumbled into the fire and Shadow of Glass, my Shadow. I was a shadowy revised foetus and I gathered those limbs together into a giant dream, giant reconstitution and moved paradoxically upon a fragile arch. I was a shadowy Robin Redbreast revised Glass drifting by uncertain degrees towards a twin desolation or waste land through which to plumb the rebirth of my age.

That desolation, that dismemberment, was bland economic malaise indistinguishable from bland twin prosperity or from bland twin necessity.

It was a blandness I sometimes reflected when the Brutes hid their faces in my Glass. It was the blandness of a spiritual malaise, economic malaise … As though the mirror atrophied into a paradise without fruit … Was Faust in league with the bland, with the Brutes?

Before I could put the question to Mother or to Aunt Miriam or to Ghost a turbulence within the years since 1945 washed over me, over Glass, over Robin Redbreast, and I saw an incongruous feast of numbers, a new mathematics of the hollow soul. Bountiful numbers in a starving bland universe through which I flew with headless cranes and headless doves in my Sleep before settling again once more into the belly of the waving wood.

When did it first dawn on me in scanning the new Faust by my giant parent that he (my grandfather) was a mathematician as well as a poet of the magical dead? Take the following equation. Giant equals pygmy in the incestuous bomb of the divine. He had become a distant, unreachable giant when my biological father vanished and diminished in my consciousness into a pygmy. Distant giant yet close at hand in the turbulences I knew within my mother’s flesh. I mixed them up (giant with pygmy) since I had seen neither; that mixture was at the heart of all the fiction I was to write ;my pygmy vanished the night I was conceived, my giant died the day I was born but grew large as God nevertheless.

He was the God of the heartland who had sent pots of gold to us. He was an alchemist whose pay dirt was gold or the diamond eyes of Frog of whom I was to dream (Frog, the inferior shadow of the giant, Frog, the Don Juan trickster pygmy who resembled my vanished father) over the years of childhood, adolescence and maturity when I reconnoitred the beach of Old New Forest and waited for Ghost to arise from the sea.

It was God who inspired me not to be entrapped in a trauma of losses (or in the bounty of ill-gotten gains) but to build through Sleep the resources for a complex autobiographical fiction reflecting both execution and rebirth, holy/unholy parentage and the resurrection of the body built into inimitable being, inimitable species and masquerades of creation … I shall write of my mother later and the crucial part she played … indeed never ceased to play. How else could I have known the quantum womb, the quantum turbulences, through which Ghost came out of the grave of the sea?

*

That year, when my mother was great with child, my grandfather sent her the manuscript of Faust to read and to type. Then came the telegram. It was the end. I knew.

The staccato rhythm of the typewriter punctuated my sleep like muffled gunfire. Her heartbeat quickened as she read and typed. Commotion piled itself into commotion. The giant slipped from the mask of the Faustian poet into the mathematicians’ code of nuclear rape. Did I dream it then or was it years later? Was it a recurring nightmare? I asked Ghost; how was I involved though still in my mother’s body in a dream of pure poetry, pure mathematics, yet nuclear rape? Was I an internalized cipher in the corruption of ‘pure’ mathematics, ‘pure’ inner space God? Or an internalized gene in the corruption of the ‘pure’ humanities, ‘pure’ humanities God? Bland mathematics. Bland humanities. Soulless machine. I asked Ghost. From faraway in the heartland, poetry and mathematics extended their fist to prod my mother in her ribs. Her contractions began. The Bomb fell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was rushed to hospital. I was born within the instant hour — or flash of eternity — the Bomb fell. I knew an anguish I could scarcely fathom. I attribute it now — that anguish — within the Glass of time and the Blast that happened to an effulgence of birth threaded into death, a white blistering fist or axe of light coming so close it was as if pure poetry and pure mathematics died in the instant I was born.

I bowed to my mother’s ghostly legs as I emerged through them into the blinding light, the blinding axe, as they (poetry’s glass legs, mathematics’ glass legs) seemed to break and fold under her yet in other women’s bodies reflecting my mother’s, through other women’s bodies reflecting my mother’s. They gave birth to me even as she did.

A poem’s glass legs, mathematics’ glass legs, reflect the terror and the ecstasy of the new-born. New-born hubris in mirroring birth-in-death, death-in-birth?

‘Not absolute hubris,’ I said to Ghost. ‘Surely not! Profoundest desire to unravel hubris I would say in a quest for original value, original spirit, in a dangerous world.’