Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

The mask paused but continued before I could speak: ‘I am the future in which you will write of this moment, this present moment, and of the past. I am you when this century draws to a close. I am you in the twenty-first century. I am the memory of the future. You are fortunate, Robin Glass.’

‘How so?’ I demanded. ‘I am a stranger. Of that I am sure.’

‘A fortunate stranger,’ said the mask. ‘To speak through the stranger in yourself means this: you are actually in the present moment and yet outside of/beyond the present moment by a fraction — shall I say — by an edge … But that is enough to be in the world yet to move by a fraction above the chaos of the world; it is — let me put it this way — to see yourself in an infinite body lying still with Alice and Miriam and the other children in the sea yet, at liberty, by a hair’s breadth to approach yourself as in a play, relate to yourself in the memory of the future, be in yourself yet move — as I have said — just a fraction beyond a stranger’s death, out of your stillness, your death. One day you will come upon Peter and Emma in the stranger city of Skull that stands upon a simulated arch or bridge between true voice and true ear, true response to the everlasting intimate stranger in yourself.

‘Ah Stranger! you move within yet without yourself. You dream in every age of the womb from which you came as if the womb were a theatre of existence and you are steeped in it even as you surface from it or fall to the edge of time, visionary backwards fall, visionary downwards fall, visionary upwards fall, visionary forwards fall. To transform the vertigo of a stranger birth, a stranger death, in yourself is to fall into the resurrectionary/revolutionary Glass of your age …’

Ghost’s voice faded. For it was Ghost I suddenly saw masquerading as my future self.

I looked at Ghost and knew, despite everything he had said, I loathed his appearance, his sagging cheeks, his age, his apparitional freedom. Yes freedom ! One is afraid of the coming of old age because one hates one’s stranger capacity for freedom, for spiritual justice through and beyond one’s trappings, cultural trappings, etc. One dreads the heartrending call of supreme insight, the pain and the anguish of stranger maturity, the slow but inevitable dissolution of the ego, the dissolution of the proud but unfree state or body in its tantrums and rages and incurable desires. One dreads a true marriage with the stranger beloved in all creation — a beloved creation one may learn to touch anew, to sense anew, to know anew beyond all self-deception or arrogance. A beloved creation that astonishes, disturbs: it brings a mirror into the heart of creaturely terror and addictive lust. It asserts anew within the perversities of ambition a necessary quest for the foundations of religious hope where one least suspects these to exist. For some unaccountable reason I thought of poor Emma and Peter. What had they made of their lives, of their survival? Would they disturb me profoundly (yet illumine my quest for religious hope) when I came upon them in the city of Skull?

One is afraid to drown before one’s time (yet live), one is afraid to glimpse the age of the earth (yet descend into the womb), the age of faltering economies (yet arise into the spirit of value), the age of the tides, the age of ageless fall into apparent nothingness … all before one’s time … the age of terrifying responsibility, the necessity to create a true and intimate life of conscience, life of authority within the body of the waste land.

TOWARDS DROWNED SUNRISE IN JUNE 1962 — A YEAR AFTER TIGER STRUCK THE REEF AND BROKE — I (ROBIN REDBREAST GLASS) CAME TO THE EDGE OF A BLACK SWAMP OR LAKE, THE EDGE OF THE CHAPEL PERILOUS OF THE FLATLANDS. The chapel or city (it had not yet been transformed into a wealthy city) was called skull. It stood above an ancient sea-bed. The ocean had rolled here long, long ago on its way to the foot of the Angel Falls escarpment in the magic wood. Boomsday Skull. Boomsday Tiger. I stared into the mirror of the swamp and saw Skull’s future, its lavish prosperity. I heard the voice of Ghost nevertheless. ‘I am in all decrepit humanity. I am in the broken Tiger. I am in the sad dancers who ride on the waves. I am in all lost loves and lost lovers. I am ghost within ghost within ghost.’ I saw my reflection in a ghostly wave, my seventeen-year-old drowned reflection in the water, half-in the sleeping tides that pillowed my eyes, half-out yet in the biting mask of Ghost, half-in my seventeen-year-old shredded skeleton — dressed to look beautiful now, immortal now, in the theatre of Faustian history — half-out yet in the memory bank of the future and in the ageing global mask that Ghost had employed as me in the 1980s and the 1990s and in the year 2000 when Skull would have achieved the status of a faeryland Chernobyl tomb, cheap electricity and deceptively abundant goods.

‘Why me?’ I cried. ‘Why choose me ? Who is it — let us be truthful, Ghost — that writes of me as if he is me in the future? Some damned expert no doubt. (They have ruined the water table in many a flatland, they have despoiled and exploited resources, triggered erosion in global theatres — experts they call themselves, experts in everything cheap though God knows how dear one’s embalmed species may ultimately prove.) Did I not happily drown when Alice and Miriam drowned? Whose body of expertise am I? Whose dear poverty, whose cheap prosperity, am I?’

I uttered the questions without thinking. I spoke, it seemed, in a dream without knowing I had spoken. I was alive yet dead. Why had I spoken as I had? Dream-reflex? Skull-protest? Simulated freedom of speech? Such speech (such uncertainty of motivation) sprang out of a fear, an ambivalence, a distrust of futures that come upon one before one knows the choices one is making, before one knows one’s potential age, one’s deepest age, one’s cross-cultural heritage and body of wisdom to come abreast of the tools that may damn or save (one cannot say) the human race.

Such involuntary speech (half-simulated, half-unscripted) sprang out of the dilemmas of a post-colonial civilization, out of Third Worlds, and bewildered First Worlds. Out of ancient conquests and legacies of evil that Alice and Miriam and all the Calypsonians had danced and played in all apparent and perverse innocence.

I repeated my questions and added automatically, ‘Can one trust the experts who write the fictions of the future?’

Ghost hid his Birthday/Deathday humours in a cloud then spoke above the chapel of the flatlands. ‘I shall call upon W. H. in a moment or two to speak of the book of your life. No expert is he but an adversary.’

‘Adversary!’ I exclaimed.

‘Are the truths of fiction,’ said Ghost, ‘not rooted in an adversarial spirit? Take the fictional houses of God! We call them cathedrals. Admirals and generals and soldiers everywhere. And the saints. Where are they? In a stained-glass window or two where they resist oblivion.’ Ghost was jesting but I experienced a stab of fear. ‘Perhaps W. H. will elbow me …’

‘And you will elbow him,’ Ghost interrupted, ‘into revisionary strategies in which you live as if your hand, your being, your touch, your seeing, your hatreds and fears for that matter, your innermost fantasies, become a medium in which life and death wrestle with one another.’

‘What are revisionary strategies?’ I was uncertain.

‘I say revisionary strategies to imply that as you write of other persons, of the dead or the unborn, bits of the world’s turbulent, universal unconscious embed themselves in your book. Do you see?’