Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Let me now confess to the gravity of finding myself face to face with questions I hoped to duck but which have been the substance of recurring dreams throughout my life and from the day I was born.

Old questions yet new.

Who am I? What is fragile humanity? What is poetry? What is science? Can they save creation in complex and ceaseless rehearsal of the birth of spirit? What is the value of survival — is it arbitrary chance or partisan mould — or does it open doors into innermost, self-reflecting and reflective being? Have I been asking these questions all along in this fictional autobiography? If so I need to return to them again and again, to sense new emphases, new edges, new extremities, new proportions.

Take the question of survival. Does survival imply an inner mirroring capacity in league with the magical dead who move in one’s blood, the magical unborn who move through one’s blood, magical yet tainted antecedents, magical giants, magical pygmies?

THE BOMB HAD FALLEN. Its consequences were with us into eternity. Nothing would ever be the same again. An awesome dream.

Where lie the roots of such hubristic knowledge in an infant such as I — infant mankind in infant womankind? Where lie the seeds of such peculiar transparency — the one in the other — such peculiar transparency enfolding all creatures? I find myself positing quantum legs, quantum glass in the building blocks of the universe.

Such astonishing and daring fragility that is susceptible to an inimitable self-reflection of all faltering achievement and power may still give us an edge or a particle or a grain of ascendancy over chaos and bring us abreast of the subtle race, the subtle shadow, the subtle and complex majesty of the genius of paradoxical spirit.

I BEGAN TO CLIMB THE MIRROR OF SLEEP THE MORNING I WAS BORN.

It is a source of incredible wonder — that borders on cruelty all the same (the cruelty of the innocent new-born in the guilty new-dead) to be possessed by a recurring dream of accusation through childhood into maturity, accusation that apparently starts from the day one is born, the silent accusation of the species.

BORN DEAF — the dream declares. THE BOMB IS FALLING. No music anywhere. The harps of the angels are numb or dead. But one climbs each silent string. Ghost was as silent as the glass robins hopping in my room, silent robins, amongst whom I stood. Silent unicorns. Silent seals. Silent blackbirds. Silent larks.

They had flown or run or swum on a wave into the room on the blast of the wind and the wood and the sea from pole to pole.

Glass Red Riding Hood lambs and wolves from the building blocks of the universe were loping into the room, transparent but scorched, across the windowsill. A glass unicorn in a building block within the staggered tenses of time, present and past. The unicorn is. The unicorn was. Not a bay. Not a sound. Not a horn. An eerie deafness, eerie silence, eerie destitution of music. THE BOMB FALLS.

Glass toucans perched on my cradle and pecked at my eyes and ears in the building blocks of the universe. Yet not a tap, not a hammer, not a nail, could break the silence in the Looking Glass space I had become. I was all reflected creatures flying on glass wings, swimming with glass wings, walking upon feet of glass in the building blocks of the universe.

I saw the dove’s addiction to propaganda and to war enlarged into immutable plague, immutable silent discord, deaf mute of silence. I saw the tiger’s susceptibility to false knowledge enlarged into immutable flame, silent discord, deaf mute of the sun. I could not hear or fathom its roar, its blaze. I turned to Ghost across the years and understood at last the cautions that had been threaded into his enigmatic and muffled tongue. He had been telling me of the silence and the deafness that would encompass my age if I failed to sound the origins of spirit. AND THEN WHEN ALL SEEMED LOST — WHEN I HAD SURRENDERED MYSELF TO TOTAL SILENCE — I REMEMBERED THE REVISIONARY FAUST THAT MY GRANDFATHER HAD WRITTEN AND THAT I HAD SCANNED WITH REDBREAST EYE AS MY MOTHER TYPED. I had been possessed of an eye, it seemed, that shone in her breasts, an ear that flowered in the tunnel of her body. I had swum within turbulences and reflected oceans of space. Not oceans now but bombed woods in this recurring dream with its whisper of temptation aloft in the trees at the heart of a chorus singing ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’. Singing ‘seize the species, seize the kingdoms of the earth, grab, plunder, possess.’ It was then — as if there had been a clap of thunder in the grave — that my deafness vanished and I heard the bustle, the movement, the traffic of the kingdoms of the earth. All mine, mine to seize. I had been tempted by a whisper in the trees in my mother’s body to ‘seize the species, seize the kingdoms of the earth’ and had responded instantaneously. Those kingdoms took the form in my dream of quantum, psychical glass, psyche’s glass tigers, psyche’s glass seals, psyche’s glass unicorn (and all the other creatures that had loped or swum into my room) in the building blocks of the universe. I reached out to seize them and I heard the bustle, the movement, the traffic of time, as they slipped from my grasp.

I felt a complex guilt, a complex shame. And yet I was grateful, grateful to someone or something (whoever, whatever, had tempted me). I was glad that I had responded, that I had succumbed, that I had attempted to seize the kingdoms of earth and space. Yes, I had succumbed to the temptation but had also seen through the veil of the moment into the roots of life with which I moved with all creatures that one seeks to seize, the roots of strangest whispering transparency that is the seed of the listening heart in every self-confessional fabric of the birth of truth, the birth of creative conscience.

Was I glad, was I sorry, that the kingdoms of space had slipped from my grasp? I was glad. I was sorry. And within the nexus of such ambivalence almost forgot the whispering Shadow of temptation to which I had succumbed until I stepped with Faust into it, into that now bristling, telephonic Shadow. A telephone was ringing in my mother’s heart or ear into which the creatures of glass had swum or run before they vanished into a whisper of music. I heard it distinctly whereas before I had heard nothing. I heard the clamour of church bells in the sacred wood. I heard them so mysteriously, so potently, it was as if a flock of mighty bell birds flew from down under and encircled the globe. It was so insistent, so wonderful, that I was seduced by another curious and strange bell at the end of a long fishing rodwhich Faust held over my grandfather’s creek in the sacred wood.

‘Faust,’ my grandfather had written (I scanned the page with an eye in my mother’s breasts), ‘is the comedian of the kingdom bell. The fisherman-bell is the kingdom bell. The fisherman-king is the comedian of the machine. Pay attention please.’ THE TEXT CONTINUED: Robin Redbreast’s revised foetus, glass bird, flew in his mother’s cinematic body and alighted on Faust’s fisherman-rod. It (the cinematic foetus, tiny bird) settled on the rod, sidled along it with numb claws until it gained a foothold, a claw-hold, on Faust’s kingdom bell. It fluttered its numb feathers and danced on the bell like kingdom come. The fisherman-rod swayed as it danced. The line descending from the rod dipped sharply in the water as if it had been bitten by a fish. The swaying and the motion were enough to awaken a multiple ripple on Robin’s mother’s belly. But the kingdom bell on the fisherman-rod did not make a sound. ‘It’s not ringing,’ Robin protested, ‘it should have rung to say that the fish in the water is biting …’