Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘And I revise around these and through these. I see.’ I was filled with a sudden animosity towards W. H. ‘It is my life — not W. H.’s. I shall spit in his eye when we next meet for a rehearsal at Aunt Miriam’s in her chapel perilous play of the flatlands.’

Ghost was laughing soundlessly. ‘Did not Christ heal a blind man with spittle and clay? It’s an elaborate strategy simple as it appears. In your case, Robin, it implies that your backward fall into Miriam’s childhood theatre is the visionary substance and the bitter flavour of memory, a relic of memory on your tongue that fills you with such uneasiness you project it upon W. H. And in so doing you help him to see deeper into the fabric of intuitive theatres, theatres of clay as of sea, light and darkness, air and element, theatres of the past, theatres of the present, theatres of the future.’

I was struck by the parallels Ghost had drawn.

‘ Intuitive theatres?’

‘Just so,’ said Ghost. ‘They illumine the blind life (the unconscious bits) of the imagination whose roots run deep into the diverse substance of the intimate stranger in yourself Robin Glass, the clay, the claws, and everything that translates into innermost perception. The truths of fiction, yes! They validate you. You are the substance of stranger quarrels — love’s quarrel with time is a healed passageway into God — stranger myth, untameable reality, and renaissance of faculties within the womb of space. You live and write your fictional autobiography from the other side of W. H.’s blind/seeing mind, Robin Glass. He is a character in your book. You are no invention of his. You are no pawn of his. You validate and contest his discoveries. They are your discoveries as much as his.’ Ghost was laughing but deadly serious. ‘I merely confer upon him a body and a mask that are an extension of my paradoxical Being and of your youth into fictional middle and old age in which you lift your pen and write as you now do of your adversary W. H.’

I was conscious suddenly of W. H.’s presence and mask in my book.

‘May I give you the facts?’ said W. H. ‘I may be a character in your book but still …’

‘Facts?’ said I.

‘You — Robin Glass — your mother Alice, your aunt Miriam, and three children were drowned in June 1961, the afternoon of the earthquake. The boat Tiger overturned at sea. Alice, brave woman, assisted Peter and Emma, helped them to the land and returned.’

My hatred of W. H. welled into fury. ‘It’s not true,’ I shouted. ‘You know damn well I was in bed with flu at Aunt Miriam’s.’

‘It was I,’ said W. H. gently.

‘ You? ’

‘Shadow and substance ail everywhere in adversarial contexts of history. And out of that illness is born the resurrection of the body of the soul that we share with one another, black with white, humanity with humanity. What more can you ask of me, Robin Glass, what greater quest, what greater truth? We share an enduring tradition.’

‘You spoke of facts,’ I insisted.

‘Facts, yes, in that fate is the mask authorial freedom wears — the fate of a realistic end or extermination — until it yields to true myth we share with one another, the future with the past. When I arose from bed on hearing news of your death my illness vanished. I knew that time itself had changed and I had become the character of true myth in your book. Not that I was surprised. I had been rehearsing the part for a long time. I had been your aunt’s lover (I had grown to care for you as if you were my nephew) and the producer, the director, of her plays — a background figure. Background yet close as a shadow is to its substance. (Are not authors — forgive me for calling myself an author in this instance — shadow relatives in the book of life? And thus as shadows indispensable to the body of life, the fiction of the body?) When I heard the news I ran, ill as I was, healed nevertheless, blind, seeing nevertheless, down to the sea. The waves were high. The reef — a mile or so away — was a mass of turbulent ocean. A terrible commotion of water. Emma and Peter had already been taken away. It was rumoured your mother Alice swam ashore with them and returned for Miriam and the others. I thought I heard a voice from the ocean cry: “Remember me as I remember you. Become a character in my book. Fiction is real when authors become unreal. Fiction reveals its truths, its genuine truths that bear on the reality of persons, the reality of the world, when fiction fictionalizes authors and characters alike. Thus is archetypal myth resurrected. Thus am I your nephew if not in blood in the language we share.”

‘The voice in the ocean ceased,’ said W. H., ‘and yet I had been so stirred that a crowd seemed to flock out of the waves into my heart and mind. “Fiction relates to presences and to absences,” they said. “Fiction gives buoyancy to us. Fiction explores the partiality of the conditioned mind and the chained body, chained to lust, chained to waste. Fiction’s truths are sprung from mind in its illumination of the sensible body again and again and again, in its illumination of our grasp of intuitive theatre and of deprivation in the materials with which one constructs every quantum leap from the sick bed of humanity.”’ The crowd of voices subsided and W. H.’s confession faded into the page on which I wrote. I moved along the edge of the swamp to the Skull-shaped simulated city of the flatlands. And experienced the oddest vertigo — the vertigo of one’s precipitous age, the heady manifestos, the ambitions, the ideal fallacies, the intoxications, the addictions, the heights — though walking on the flatlands! I — Robin Glass — should have ‘walked tall’ as the President of the United States or as the Chairman of the Soviet Union but sagged instead (when no one was looking). Was it a necessary terror of the resurrection to experience oneself as a young man in a hollow body? Hollow-looking glass marvel in every television box! Such is the illusion of power the resurrected body faces as it ascends from the grave. It is encrusted with illusions of power, illusions of freedom, that it needs to unravel as a prelude to a genuine revolution.

I loathed Ghost as if he had occasioned the vertigo of my arousal. My loathing had intensified when he began to speak a variety of uncomfortable home truths. ‘Better a dumb Spirit than a speaking God. Such are the paradoxes born of the Word and of the possession of a voice by a stranger exercised in true capacity or spiritual right.’

Ghost had made an enemy of me by speaking the language of the judging heart. God had made an enemy of Mankind with every commandment that he uttered. The earth became a battlefield of fanaticisms, one party fighting another, each defending but attacking God in mauling the stranger at the gate. Each was convinced it possessed a duty to maim or to kill in upholding the laws of God. Such is the terror and the ambiguity of the Word. No wonder God tended to keep a silent tongue in His head. Or was it in Her head? (The matter of gender was a sore point amongst male priests and female priests.) Ghost had ventured to speak through a variety of masquerades and utterances that seemed to mock yet to reveal, to discount yet to make visible innermost feuding reality that is masked by self-righteous accent or idiom, self-righteous deprivation.

Indeed this was Ghost’s strategy on behalf of a lost or half-remembered humanity on the edge of the abyss, on the edge of hollow intelligences, hollow prides, into which I moved as resurrected flesh-and-blood within the age of the waste land.

It was this uncertainty about the Word, about truth, in my resurrected body invoking the half-remembered shell I once was that tormented me most of all in returning to the land from the sea and intensified once again my indictment of Ghost. Was I now more than human shell, less than human hollow, other than human shell, in tending to forget (within the grave from which I had arisen) an everlasting strangeness in creaturely divinity’s essence, an everlasting saturation of fabric and necessity for a spiritual irony in all renascent formations, animal and soul, angel and fish and bird?