Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Was it a journey into her death or was it a journey we made when I was five years old? She comes to me when I am old, one hundred years old. The year is 2045. No, not old! Just five, a relic of memory. Five-year-old relic. The year is 1950 on a dusty calendar in an old trunk of books and masks.

We make our way through the trunk and through the barrel at my gate, the round ship, the round coffin of my ancestors. The year is 1950. I am five years old. My mother gives me a ring. I slip it on to my hand. But as I run on the beach it falls from my finger and is lost forever. Alice is angry. ‘You will find it some day,’ she says. ‘I promise you.’ Her voice is sad and angry and I am pierced by foreboding. It was a ring my grandfather had given her. An heirloom or something. Surely she was grossly careless to give it to me before I knew or understood.

Good Ghost! The barrel at our gate was built by me in 1961 a month or two before my mother was drowned. It was built as a memorial to great navigators, great pork-knockers. How could we have made our way through it in 1950 with the lost ring? One is obsessed by time, one is obsessed by the timeless comedy of time. Perhaps the barrel I built in 1961 was invisible to us though it was already there flung up from the bottom of the sea on the crest of a wave of the future as my mother and I stood on the beach facing our grave when I was but a child and she a beautiful, angry woman.

My mother leans on the invisible barrel now.

‘It’s grandfather’s memorial,’ I say.

‘And the ring?’

‘What ring?’ I had forgotten.

‘A ring of spiritual gold studded with minute diamonds on the inside where it touches your skin. On the inside is the flesh of infancy. On the outside is the wreck of a ship.’

The wreck of a civilization? I was astonished. I lay under the wave of old age and looked up to the sky. I held my five-year-old hand up in the sea to the light of moon-shells, star-shells, sun-shells, and saw for the first time a ring on my mother’s skeleton left hand. Had she salvaged it from the sea the day she was drowned? I touched the ring in astonishment. Had I worn it all along and never known it was there?

I touched the ring with the light of my eyes. I felt my mother’s lips on my eyes: were they still bitter or were they now sweet?

‘If ever you are in trouble,’ my mother says — and leans down and lets the sand and the water run through her fingers — ‘just brandish it like an asset of state or pawn it for that matter if money’s short. Remember it’s here to save your life.’

I laughed. Alice laughed. The comedy of an invisible ring, an invisible barrel, an invisible fortune. And yet the tragedy … In 1961 when the sea cracked without warning and closed over my mother’s hair that fell like lightning to her waist (she was an excellent swimmer and no one at first believed she had drowned) I was left without a blind penny. The house had to be sold to pay off her debts. I remember my Aunt Miriam saying in one of her plays, ‘Your mother is extravagant, Robin. Your grandfather left her a treasure. Come and live with me before the world ends.’ Was she speaking to me or to W. H.? I went to live with her for a spell on my way to Skull but the house was empty, always empty — she resided now in the waves — and the shadow of W. H. dogged her footsteps as he sought to revive her theatre in the magic wood. They had been close friends, perhaps lovers, and he knew her well. She was sensuous and practical. Sensuous in her deeply grained imagination. Practical in her wit. ‘Accept the day-to-day calendar of doom, doom,’ she said like a housewife scribbling a list on her pad, ‘it’s a style the calypso invented for the BBC and all the grand newspapers. They never acknowledge their debt but that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?’ The word debt pricked me and I half-awoke to Alice’s carelessness and extravagance. Why had I not pawned the invisible ring I wore and raised the money to save our old home from the depredations of strangers?

Too late! Such magical security born of the Ghosts of the sea and the sky comes too late. Too late to save an old house or a lost kingdom.

Lost? Is anything ever absolutely lost? May one not find one’s ancestral treasure again by the light, the spirit, the self-mocking humour of vulnerable humanity, self-mocking yet self-revealing visionary touch?

A paradoxical marriage or contract or rehearsal of the origins of tradition runs through all bawdy and sacred generations, the living, the dead, the unborn, to activate the glories of the present and the past and to imply that the body of the resurrection is a medium of ceaseless rapport between original deprivation and original mystery, between newfound being and insensible being, between the tender apparition of hope and derelict, institutional trappings, between past, present and future time and timeless comedies of time.

Between birthday ghosts and old age.

‘Come,’ Alice and Miriam are saying to me, ‘now that you have touched the ring it is time to celebrate your birthday as if it is a royal event. The world shakes with violence. We live in chapels perilous at the bottom of the sea that we must taste like a piece of cake, on the flatlands, in the valleys, on the mountains, on the moon, and in sight of the masquerade of long-haired Halley’s comet that we must taste right royally. Here are the origins of the games that children play.’

They hold me and lead me to cosmic theatre in the magic wood. We walk on the crest of the sea and the waves leap and jump and make rain. We are on our way to celebrate my fifth boomsday birthday on a fading dusty calendar. A relic of a newspaper blows at our feet. September 1950 turns to mould in June 1961. The paper twists into spray April 1986 and the apparition of Birthday Ghost. I touch my ring and taste the wreck of civilizations.

164 BC Birthday Ghost is Babylonian cake. 12 BC Birthday Ghost is Chinese and Roman cake. AD 66 Birthday Ghost is broadsword cake over Jerusalem. AD 295 Birthday Ghost ices the constellation of Andromeda. AD 451 Birthday Ghost adorns Attila the Hun. AD 684 Birthday Ghost ices a Nürnberg Tiger. AD 1066 Birthday Ghost divides William and Harold. AD 1910 Birthday Ghost submits to photographers. AD 1985–6 Birthday Ghost dresses up for many a party around the globe.

‘Taste it,’ said Alice. ‘Taste a comet and live. Taste the ridiculous fantasies that are the seed nevertheless of history and tragedy. Taste illusion. Taste everything that mirrors childhood and old age. Taste until it hurts, it enlightens, it revives a nebulosity of spirit, the nebulous contract with an apparently doomed humanity ingrained into life. That is your royal birthday Robin Redbreast Glass. The merriment of the lost … What does it mean?’

I was filled with amazement that such a question had been directed at me. Was I a king or a prince in disguise? Alice seemed so close. Alice, the queen in Miriam’s play, is speaking now. She spoke now, she speaks now in a wave, she will speak now in a wave.

‘Now is never,’ Alice says. ‘Now is forever. Now is old age. Now is infancy. Now is Rome. Now is Athens. Now is Babylon. Now is Byzantium. Now is Number Ten. Now is the Kremlin. Now is the White House and a black band playing the blues. Now is the flight of the swallow from summer to winter and back. Now is this precious day in which we live or in which we die.’ She is laughing at me. I know she is laughing at me. Alice is laughing at me. And the merry waves jump and subside at our feet under a sea wall.

Her laughter is close and merry, I feel the bite of a wave, I feel bitten by laughter. Does one bite the flesh of a wave when one drowns, when one is borne by the sharp tooth of merriment through death?