Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘At the heart of the void of the machine lies a revolutionary spirit that exposes one’s zest for life within the fruits of temptation. That revolutionary spirit exalts us, yet chastens us, makes us see our deprivations (whether deafness or numbness or whatever) through a mysterious glass or composite of opposites reflecting seizure and liberation, invention and creation, the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead, the mortal and the immortal.

‘I am the comedian of the void in the machine … the void in you. I am the script within the machine.’

‘And my voice?’ I asked rudely, ‘is that in your script?’

It was a taunting question to put to a human machine or to a person embodying immortal dynamo replete with implacable marvel and terrible skill, terrible dialectic, but Faust to my astonishment replied, ‘Your voice is revolutionary spirit, Robin. I am glad of this, believe me! I too can rejoice.’ Was he mourning with me or laughing at me or had he been moved in spite of himself by considerations of the mystery of deprivation and its bearing on caught yet liberated senses of the imagination, the mystery of deprivation through which we unlock multi-faceted thresholds, landscapes, doors into being?

Some Reflections in 1985 on the Great Strike of the Animal Bands in the Magic Wood in the Year 1948. Ghost is at my Elbow as I Write in the Chapel Perilous of the Sea. He is the Spectre or Character of Time Unravelling Centuries and Decades.

*

THE MYSTERY OF DEPRIVATION. A key phrase in this fictional autobiography of (or is it by?) a drowned man. W. H. insists mystery is a divine comedy with an edge or positive direction to the movement of consciousness above the authorial fury of conflicting powers and the chaos of the world. Mystery is a stairway that takes me up yet back four decades in the comedy of time to the year 1948. I was three years old then. It was the year of the great strike in the sacred or magic wood. Memory’s building blocks under the sea (or upon a wave of land) are composed of reversible glass senses reflecting patterns of intimate sensation — no, patterns of temptation — to which one succumbs. I would never have acquired a literate ear, or literate responses to distinctive voices and sounds — literate self-criticism as well about my deficiencies of understanding in every nexus of intricate being — if I had not been tempted by a stroke of light to seize the kingdoms of space that sped before me in inmost animal and spiritual particles and waves of sound. I would never have given voice to creation if I had not been tempted by the comedian of the machine to become an immortal dream-body upon frontiers of simulated blood and real blood.

I laugh at myself now in 1985 in the light of the composite fruit of temptation that stains the mirror of my lips. Glass kisses glass at the bottom of the sea where fish roam in one’s hair like beautiful birds. My mother kissed me on the bed of the sea in the chapel perilous and said to a friend, ‘Miriam and I thought Robin was deaf, you know, but suddenly he reached out and held my breasts, he heard my voice, the noises in the street, everything, the telephone ringing in the room. It was funny. He began to speak as if he were conversing with someone at the other end of the line. A prodigy! He cried …’

She was right. I screamed and woke. After that speech came naturally. It was born out of an extremity, yes, extremity, Robin’s extremity, Redbreast Democratic Glass and multi-reflecting organ of the deprived senses. Yes, speech is born of extremity. It runs close to despair, demagoguery and authoritarian command, all functions of deprivation: deprivation or deprivations Aunt Miriam tended to call illiteracies of the heart and mind. I have never forgotten the phrase she used. It laps around me in the rain, in the water, in streams where one misreads time’s face.

Aunt Miriam was right in that we soon forget how strange and mysterious are our capacities, hearing extremity, listening extremity, speaking extremity, touching extremity, seeing extremity, knowing extremity; and that those capacities or extremities may never have come into being except through a dream-life that is steeped in temptations — pre-natal temptations as well as child-temptations — sexual temptations as well as lust-for-power temptations — to which we succumbed. Succumbed yes to the vitality of sensation but recoiled in converting the shadow of temptation into a source of original, self-confessing being in creation.

I remember the terror of the animal bands when they faced the repetitive fall of the Bomb in the shape of perverse manna and Skull-bread. They erupted in the magic wood in 1948. First came the band of the Tiresias Tigers. They were followed by other bands that included the Unicorns and the Horses of the Sea. It was a strike of international significance. It invoked a bullish mood (whatever that meant) in that sugar cane shares rocketed and fell, rocketed again with stone cold dead in the market. Rice shares became animalcule balloons and bullets. Oil shares battled coal. Diamond and gold investments laced the bullet’s horns. That a Tiger could stand on a platform (or a tall sheep or Red Riding Hood or Sister George the Bald Horse) toss a drum or a claw to the winds, and thereby cause millions of ammunition and dollars to roll up the creek, or roll down the creek, was a measure of economic illiteracy and of the deprivations of simulated cities of Skull.

‘BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, all the time,’ my mother said. ‘Enough to drive you mad!’

Aunt Miriam — despite her misgivings, her sense of spiritual malaise — was more generous. ‘It’s all in a good cause,’ she said. And pondered the uncertainty of good causes. ‘Bang, Drum, Strike, to keep the evil spirits at bay.’

‘What evil spirits?’

‘Shame on you, Alice. You should know. The legacies of war. The legacies of fear and corruption. Malnutrition. It’s a strike to win grain.’

My mother looked dubious, even doleful. ‘Corruption,’ she said. ‘Grain,’ she said. ‘Vile bodies.’

Aunt Miriam was nonplussed. She could not tell whether Alice was saying ‘corruption is vile’ or ‘grain is vile’ or ‘the strike of the animal bands is vile’.

‘I tell you, Miriam,’ Alice continued, ‘it’s the terror of the void. That’s the twentieth century.’

‘You mean the terror of angry and confused spirit,’ Aunt Miriam said and tried to look absurdly reasonable though she was scared. ‘The animal bands are dancing like nemesis below in the street. What a sea of faces. I hate crowds.’

A change had occurred in the element of Sleep. The privileged and fashionable strikers and bangers, privileged bands and dancers who preyed upon — or were able to exploit — the illiteracy of the economic imagination and move grain around the globe to starving peoples were dissatisfied with themselves and their entanglement in systems they both supported (profited from) and loathed (or bled in the name of the good cause). They swung around in the book of Sleep into rebellious subversives inciting masses. I sailed upon a tide of popular art, street animal dancers, street animal rebels, street animal poems of protest. Their simulation of an industrial and cultural strike seemed suddenly real. The comedian of the circus who pulled the strings and profited from each calculation of unrest had misjudged the chaos in the magic wood. Time’s countenance darkened into a mirror of involuntary feud on the stairway backwards and upwards, forwards and downwards, upon which I dreamt I climbed.

‘What is spirit when it broods upon chaos, Alice? Ask the politicians, the ageing politicians of the world, who are henpecked in the sacred wood. I ask you , Alice. I ask you to come on stage on the crest of a wave — the name I have given our little theatre.’ (Aunt Miriam ran a school of drama (called The Crest of the Wave) in her home beside the sounding sea. It was but half a mile or so away from Alice’s house in which many rehearsals were conducted.)