Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘Let’s begin. Let’s rehearse, Alice.’ She stopped again as if she were intent on dramatizing the part she wished Alice to play. ‘I ask again — what is spirit when it broods upon chaos? Don’t reply straightaway. Shrug your shoulders and point to the Sphinx. Then say — let me see — something like this: “when angry spirit becomes an incestuous block or riddle the food in our very mouths is susceptible to plague”.’

‘I have no intention of saying anything of the sort,’ said Alice. But this was her cue nevertheless in my sea of Sleep on the crest of a wave. She moved across the chapel perilous to the window on the waving street beneath our house. ‘I say the terror of the void,’ she cried in the heart of my dream. Her glass lips touched mine as fish flew through our hair like beautiful birds. ‘I say the terror of the void. The terror …’ and then she saw the spiritual (or the vile) dancer Tiger staring up at her from the street and listening intently. Her voice fell … ‘of the void.’

Spiritual (or was it vile?) Tiger had heard every word. He leapt on the stage with his drum of thunder and his guitar. He leapt over the fence, raced to the front door and was inside in a flash. And then I knew. He had been manipulated by Faust, Faust’s machines, Faust’s technologies, to bang away at the terror of the void. My mother had pricked his animal spirit on the raw.

‘What a paradox,’ said Miriam. Her lips moved in the play that she and Alice had half-made-up, half-borrowed from my grandfather’s Faust in the last days of his beriberi wilderness.

‘What a paradox,’ said Alice. ‘This is the age of the masses, the age of the best-seller, the age of the popular arts, the popular bands, and yet it is the age of the death wish, the age of drugs.’ Alice was nodding as if they murmured the lines together.

‘The torment of spirit. The death wish of an age. True spirit never wars with true spirit but since nature and the values of nature are inextricably woven into every populace — and populace is vulgar spirit — every illness of mind and of spirit becomes the substance of bodily, addictive passion, bodily, addictive fury, ear-splitting, addictive BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM wrestling with itself for a violent/non-violent habitation.’

Then Tiger spoke the lines my grandfather wrote for him. Lines written in his last days in the Bush of the magic wood. My grandfather consumed the shell of a Skull-orange. It tasted so wonderfully sweet that he knew he had been deceived and that Death, the Tempter, stood beside him with the lotus flower in his hand. No ordinary lotus flower. Not the luxuriousness and the inactivity of the grave. No, something much more insidious. Deprivation. The drug of deprivation that looks like the seed of black (or white) purity, the black (or white) seed of God, when the drummer of the senses protests in a fever against the ills of the world that are as much in him as in those he assaults. The lotus flower of addictive bias that hardens into terror! My grandfather chewed it, tasted it, knew its wonderful relish, then spat it forth into Tiger’s speech.

‘If I bang Ghost,’ Tiger said, ‘in a dead poet’s — a dead magician’s — shadow in the sacred wood I may grasp, may I not, the hidden malaise (and hidden revolutionary capacity) in the popular arts? I shall try to bang Ghost and make him talk to you, Robin. Make him unravel the masquerade of Death as the Tempter, the bringer of the lotus flower. It’s a narrow pass, very narrow indeed, that I must take, I the dancer, the rebel.

‘ You dead poet, dead magician, dead Quetzalcoatl, dead priests and scientists of ancient time, understand — surely you do — the predicament of the popular yet doomed player, popular yet doomed rebel, in an illiterate world. You swing in a sea or a cradle where I blow my deadly trumpet that is wreathed still, I confess, in unawakened powers, unawakened sensibilities, and in the mystery of deprivations through which I must pass. I confess to a reluctance to pass. Such self-righteous deprivation, such pride, seduces me, fastens upon me, as if it were the seed of purity, the seed of God.’

Tiger had succumbed to the Tempter, to the lure and fallacy of black (or white) purity, and as a consequence the confused and confusing diet of the world, half-vile, half-spiritual, rushed into his Shadow and mine even in the last moments of his life, the ticking voice of the suddenly energized clock, ticking invisibly/soundlessly within the roar of passing time.

Tiger was dying though he had not yet realized it. He was dying within my grandfather’s shadow on the page of a book in which history revised itself, the deprivations of Democracy and popular art revised themselves into cautionary ink, the dangers of fascist order, fascist purity, fascist white, fascist black. He knocked on the door of the page to elicit further lines from the dead magician’s hand. My grandfather may have heard. His dead hand, the hand of the magical dead, responded. It wrote some lines that it recalled from its youth before I was born. It could not write its own lines at that moment so it leant on the riddle of the Traveller from another time. As much as to say ‘you may knock Tiger and even though I hear I must be silent in order to stress that there are no easy answers to the predicament of a dying age within its most obvious, most telling biases and assumptions.’

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

I repeated the lines now as if they were an unconscious charm directed at Death, the Tempter. I had hardly whispered to myself and to Tiger and to Alice and Miriam when there was the sound of a gunshot. Was it (that gunshot) the cry of the suddenly reawakened drum? Or was it Tiger’s shout? Tiger gasped. A hole appeared in his chest into which Death crawled. The blood trickled down and stained his trumpet. He lifted the music of dream-life rebellion, dream-life blood, to his lips and appeared to drink. Well of deprivation. Well of purity. Thus he would slip into popular divinity, popular martyrdom. He spun in the dance. His knees buckled. He clung to a dancing woman in the street and they fell together. In the folklore of the dancing Tiresias Tigers the passage to the underworld is adorned by twining snakes: psychical glass snakes in which are reflected the mystery of the male deprived mask and the mystery of the female deprived mask that Tiresias wears in turn within the logic of the terrible seer.

‘O God!’ Aunt Miriam cried. ‘The police are in the street. And an ambulance driven by Doctor Faustus. The police have been attacked. They have fired at the strikers, Alice.’ She stopped and turned to W. H. who advised her on occasions on the direction of her plays. ‘May not the shot that kills Tiger signify in our play a prophecy of coming wars, coming battles, in which men, women and children will die?’

‘What coming battles?’ Alice was sceptical.

Miriam had no reply but I could have written the lines for her: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Uganda, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nicaragua. I could have added, ‘Alice thinks it’s just a play! Just fiction! Is fiction meant to be real as inner problematic truth, as unpredictable fact, as a blend of the two to stagger our deformities of insight, of perception, of heart and mind?’

Tiger was dead but for a moment it seemed he had not yet breathed his last on ‘the crest of a wave’ in Miriam’s and Alice’s little theatre. The ecstasy of purity had cleared his vision for a brief spell. Deprivation of the senses was too real to be pure. The villain of the heart was too real to be pure white or pure black or pure red. The saint was too real to be divine except when divinity invokes a visionary humanity that sees through the veil of its crimes.