Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Deprivation was so real it festered into food, deceptive lotus and plague, plenty and poverty.

Hunger was so real that I ascended the moon as if it were Glass in a shoestring ladder and knocked on its door.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door.

Belly to belly

Back to back

Ah don’t give a damn

Ah done dead a’ready.

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

I who sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.

I could not believe it. Ghost was speaking at last. No formal message. A repetition of familiar texts become however strangely cross-cultural, the strangest subversion, where one least suspected or expected to find it in hollow convention or solemn usage. An edge, nothing more, above the malaise, the death-wish of an age: an edge born of temptation that one unravels, perceives, and sifts until it yields a value beyond the immediate taste of temptation, the remorse, the penalty, the rewards.

My mother died in 1961. I was sixteen. It was the year the Tiresias Tigers established a new theatre or tent in the magic wood. I heard their muffled drums. Drums swarming with spectres, spectres of the malaise of the twentieth century, a drum upon which the original dancer Tiresias Tiger tapped and tapped and tapped in my dreams. He had arisen from the grave with a hole in his chest when I was three years old.

I played with him (he was a ragged doll) on the drawing-room carpet until he vanished and I did not hear of him, or see him, again until I learnt of the Tiresias Tigers of the magic wood.

Absent or present he was often around the corner in my Sleep and through him I became a pork-knocker scientist who rattled the black hole of gravity in Tiger’s chest with a teaspoon.

A frightening eye of sugar or telescopic spoon with which to scrape the barrel of the cosmos, a frightening glimpse into the heart of Ghost. It was also a mystic dream and the beginning of faith. Yes, faith! But faith in what? Was it faith in one’s powers to measure prosperity or to be measured by prosperity, to save or to be saved, to know or to be known? Was it faith in heaven or in hell?

A recurring dream that came at least once a year across the waste land of childhood fantasy through the barrel at my gate into quantum quetzalcoatl mathematics in teaspoon and shoestring middle age.

A disturbing dream for it set into circulation all over again the origins of sensation — such as tasting, rattling silver in a teacup, slicing a bone or a piece of meat that cost a pretty penny.

I know for a fact that an industrial strike over starvation wages occurred on the sugar estates of Old New Forest in 1948 and several strikers were shot dead, one fell in the sugar bowl beneath our window embracing a woman and a child. A tight nightmare fit.

I was three years old when it happened. Three-year-old relic of memory on whose lips was a grain of sugar, on whose lips was a grain of temptation! Memory’s repetitive anatomy may lie in a grain of sugar one surreptitiously steals, forbidden sugar, forbidden sweetness! I witnessed the clash with the police from our window above the square. It could have been happening in our drawing room. Alice and Miriam were staring. Staring eyes. Everything and everyone tumbled into a relic of memory as I now write as if I was there yet absent from myself. Absent living body. I saw the hollow ambulance with Doctor Faustus at the skeleton wheel. The commotion of the skeleton bands. BOOM BOOM DOOM DOOM. Commotion, ceaseless sweetness/bitterness elaboration, movement, voices.

Thus I was moved across the years to sift unreliable fact from true play or fantasy and to reconsider the origins of sensation: an eye in the mouth of a sugar bowland in the bodyof Tiresias,the seer.

Take the seer’s eye: in the wake of the shot a blind silence enveloped every rattling teaspoon, every gun, every drum, every bone in the crowd in the square beneath our window. Then came an explosion of appetite and anger. I dreamt I saw the dead man move and eat the grain on my lip as he whispered in the hole in his chest, ‘Everything you have been tempted to consume recedes into me now, hollow me. See the sweets of violence in dead men’s chests, in dead men’s lungs, in dead men’s hearts, hear the bitterness of explosive suns.

Fifteen suns in a dead man’s chest

Yo-ho-ho and the taste of the lotus.

A different bottled ear or eye from the one I received when I reached out to seize the kingdoms of glass, the kingdoms of the globe, and was greeted by my mother’s exclamation of joy. An ear and a mouth and an eye in a ragged man’s chest … I was translated, I was confused, by the telescopic mind of Ghost in Tiger’s body.

The drums now spoke to the dead seer, the dead tiger, on the ground.

‘Fall down and die, Tiger. We shall pick you up. We shall drum. We shall measure the height of your dance and your fall through ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient America and ancient Africa into Robin Redbreast Glass waiting to see old Godot anew. Old Godot anew, Old Godot anew. Robin wants to know, wants to see, how far he must fall from the sky into old Godot anew. Why should a beast’s sudden death help us to map the ancient heavens anew within the radius of a star, a child’s star? One child’s star is another’s bullet.’

I dreamt I put the question to Ghost and thought I heard him murmur very faintly in the hollow of my ragged doll, ‘Life needs death. Life needs death if it is to be. But remember it is through death that life measures itself, measures its achievements, its glories. Remember it is through death not with death — not in league with death as the ultimate violence, the ultimate deprivation. The distinction is a crucial one — it bears on the fabric of the resurrection within every extremity, every hollow …’ His voice faded. And now it was as if the waiting room of Godot broke its commission with Death and illumined a ragged queue in Tiger’s body. Strings were vibrating very subtly, with incredible lightness, incredible touch — the sensation of ragged but mysterious alignment with the glories, the achievements, of which Ghost had spoken. I began to marvel across the years and the generations at the sensitivity that lies in the fingers of a ghostly musician touching the leaves of the trees into rhapsodic murmur, the fingers of a ghostly drummer sounding in the Sleep of space, the fingers of green (as they are called) of a ghostly gardener, the fingers of earth of a ghostly man or woman who sculpts a rock and makes it live.

Did I not dream that my own fingers were made of clay — of numb clay — until they scuttled on Glass and became the claws of a bird, then scuttled again, all of a sudden, into an intensity of feeling the instant I cried in my Sleep against the comedian of the machine who would have entrapped me, or seized me, as I alighted on a bell at the end of a rod?

I thought of my grandfather’s manuscript (and its ramifications in the simulated world and the real world) — of my mother’s staccato fingers drumming on a typewriter as I dreamt I lay within her — of Aunt Miriam’s plays revising the histories of the world — and wondered at the origins of perception, the relics of memory that lay as much in me as in ancestral re-visions of The Waste Land and of Faust in other, nameless, intuitive masterpieces since time began.

I remembered a journey I took when I was five years old through an ancient volume of Sleep. I remembered it all now as I arose from bed and brushed my teeth with the fin of a fish. I remembered my mother who died in 1961. She led me on that journey. She combed my hair with the honeycomb of the sea. She came into my dreams in a long swaying garment made of the sea, and of moss, and of countless stars sprung from the hollow yet resurrected body of Ghost.