Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

What are the origins of such merriment? What are the origins of such bitten/biting laughter, such laughter at death or through death?

It is a game we play in the chapel perilous under the sea at Aunt Miriam’s parties. The children dress as rocks, as waves, as moss, as fish, as birds.

I bite into the premises of laughter. I chew the laughing fish and pause in mid-air as if I stand on a balloon in an animal’s lung. Boomsday comet or balloon, boomsday lung, boomsday love affair with the pretty girls dressed as fish. Shall I dive into the heart of the balloon and sing, make faces at the chorusing birds? Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

‘Come, come Robin,’ Aunt Miriam says. ‘It’s your turn to play. Such a rich costume. Such a glorious balloon.’

I stand awkwardly on the stage. Perhaps I was the envy of the other children. Perhaps — on the other hand — I envied them, I envied the part they were about to play. Aunt Miriam had rigged up a sheet and a blanket as a curtain behind which we stood, Alice and I. Aunt Miriam gave a jerk and the curtain rose like a cloud from the sky. There was a shout and the children swarmed upon us. Fish, animate rocks, birds, animate moss, all came. Indiscriminate laughter. I reached for Alice and she had gone under the wave. I saw her far down in the sea beneath the sheet and the waving blanket, beneath the merry children whose empty graves — untenanted still — are marked with crosses in the sacred wood. I saw the fish dive for her as I dived into my balloon of space. Nothing united us but the tooth of death we shared with all creatures. Nothing now. I nibbled at a bird in the sky. I nibbled at myself. The fish stroked her, the fish stroked itself, the fish stroked Miriam. How sharp, how bitter, is the merry stroke of death at the heart of self-love that cracks at last into the mysterious reflection of others? How sweet, how bitter, is life, the gravity of heart-rending compassion in life? We must laugh with one another or die. We must laugh at our own incompleteness, our grotesqueries, our absurdities, our fallacies, our proneness to despair, our innermost corruption, our innermost violence.

The biter bitten is the tooth of infinite rehearsals of chapels perilous, of the children in Alice’s and Miriam’s arms under the sea.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I was wakened by voices I could not fathom. Were they human, were they other than human? I felt an irrational shock that my college education was over. It was a blow. I felt the hollowness of the humanity to which I returned. My mother was an excellent swimmer. Why had she drowned? The afternoon had been blissful. She had taken our boat Tiger to sea and we were drifting lazily a mile or two off the coast. Such trips were not unusual. This was the third excursion in June 1961. Aunt Miriam was there. Five children were there including Peter and Emma, two close friends of my own age, orphaned in early childhood, who lived with Alice and me. I was there. (No! I am confused. I would have been there but was down with flu and lay in bed at Aunt Miriam’s. W. H. insists that it was he who lay in bed with flu and has another tale to tell that I shall disclose in due course.)

From my bed in Miriam’s house I could see the sky and the sea. I could see Peter and Emma whose lives my mother saved. It was they who brought the news to me, messengers of the roaring laughter of the deep through which they came. I could see the wall and the floor and the window that Miriam used as a stage from which to launch her chapel perilous plays in which I had participated, forever participated, even before I was born, or time appeared to begin.

The blanket and the sheet she erected as a curtain were now missing. Yet they lay on me. I was in them. I was in the sea. I was their being of Sleep. I was the absent players, absent body yet present relic of memory. Sleepwalking relic on a wave of Sleep where my mother played a role that was to recur again and again within my dreams. Dream chapel perilous under the sea as a prelude to chapel perilous of the flatlands, chapel perilous Skull, chapel perilous of the Mountain of Folly, chapel perilous of space.

The boat sailed across the floor. It cracked. Was it a fist of wind shaking the house? Was it the floor that heaved, was it the boat? One of those unexpected tremors or earthquakes that shook the magic wood across the years. Just a tremor but it drove the boat upon the reef.

Fever inflates one’s perceptions of things. High fever. My finger grew large (or was it small) as a tooth clawing at a rock. My lung ballooned and I dived at a bird skimming a wave. The weather suddenly changed. The window on the stage shook. Tiger overturned into a ragged chest, ragged inner sail, inner curtain, ragged cross-currents. Alice bobbed up in Tiger’s tail and swam with Peter and Emma to land. She swung back and dived through grandfather’s ring to save the others. It was the last I saw of her from my wave of Sleep. I held her close. She fell into the Glass of time. Timelessness.

*

Within a year I packed a ghostly pork-knocker bag, secured a spiritual compass, sharpened my drowned ghost-pen, and set out into the sacred wood to make my way in the world, the hollow world, and in the multi-textual regions of space.

The old house in which Alice, Peter, Emma and I had lived belonged now to strangers. Before I left I scouted in a cellar in Miriam’s playhouse and little theatre (occupied now by W. H.) and unearthed a trunk of masks from Tiger’s bobbing chest on a wave of Sleep.

I recalled our last New Year’s Eve party (celebrated in Hogmanay style), my echoing voice in Miriam’s at midnight.

We twa hae paddl’d in the burn

Frae morning sun till dine,

But seas between us braid hae roared

Sin’ auld lang syne.

‘Where is laughter?’ I asked Aunt Miriam. ‘Laughter’s mask?’ but she hid her face in the seas. I saw her tears despite the running waters but these too were woven into another mask in Tiger’s broken body. I left it there out of tenderness and respect. At the bottom of an old man’s cargo of dreams when he revisits the past.

My eye fell on another mask on which W. H.’s shadow fell and this I pulled from the trunk. Shadow and substance. It imbued me with a sensation of renewed inner substance, inner fictional being.

‘I am a stranger,’ I said to the mask of Shadow and Substance in which I was reflected even as I reflected it.

‘Why a stranger?’

I looked at it closely. It was indeed a mask that I knew as if from a great distance. I knew I would come to inhabit it in the future as ageing fictional author in fictional youth, fictional character mirroring and mirrored by transformative relics of memory. It was the mask in which I would write my life, my fictional autobiography.

It was adorned by the tooth I had seen in the chapel of the sea, the tooth I shared with all creatures, a tooth sharper than any pen that I would come to possess. It had eaten its lines, its poetries, its scripts, into the flesh of my spirit. It had cut a long ravine along my brow. It had cut chasms and gulfs. It had shaped my mouth, my lips, to register the miracle of innermost address, innermost self-judgement. It was the tooth of judgement day, ceaseless judgement day I both longed for and dreaded.

‘I am a stranger to you,’ I said to the mask. ‘I reflect you and that is all. I wander the highways and byways of time in search of a gesture that rejects you entirely. I loathe you. I loathe the future. I want to be eternally young, eternally strong.’

‘Can you reject the future?’ the mask replied. ‘Even the dead must reckon with the future if there is to be justice, justice for the unborn son, the unborn daughter, the unborn stranger. You call yourself a stranger! Even the dead … Much more so the stranger who comes from the dead, dead fictions, dead legacies, dead traditions, that are not as dead as they seem but alive , alive as a threat or a challenge we have not yet absorbed, alive as revisionary fabric, revisionary truth.’