Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Was this spiritual irony part and parcel of the seed of Ghost in the Word of God?

Did that seed in its grain of self-mockery and profoundest utterance sustain a true placelessness, a true freedom on land and water and air ( not a technological roar or self-righteous bias), profoundest change, profoundest imagination ( not ten feet tall cliché-ridden idols and derivatives of global conquest)?

I saw it all now with heartrending insight and remorse such as only the dead who return to the living may know. I had come back from the chapel of the sea with Ghost long, long ago. In dreaming of him on the beach I had been involved in a rehearsal of perfectible order, perfectible industry, perfectible state, that I shared with him from the beginning of time. But in my obliviousness of the ambiguity of the Word and the nature of absence that the dead endure (absence from a hollow humanity) and absence’s ramifications in native presence, I had had to dream again and again of obsessional need, obsessional wealth, obsessional poverty, obsessional expectation of a supreme prosperity as if prosperity were its own perfectible Ghost, perfectible commander of the futures of the race.

‘Supreme prosperity?’ Ghost said to me now from within the masquerades of dream. ‘Supreme irony! The perfectibility of the state, the perfectibility of command, the perfectibility of industry, leads to a growing tide of refugees of spirit in flight from themselves to an illusory benefactor. And your resurrection — each rehearsal in which I am involved with you — is as much a warning of the sickness of the expectant soul as it is a vision of a divine and terrifying love. My fear is, Robin, that the sickness of expectant souls may prevail for a long, long time to come (with increasingly dangerous consequences) in a disordered and chaotic world in flight to a prosperity it confuses with the genius of love. But then have we not sown obsessional desire, obsessional folly, in the waste land that we cherish?’

I thought I had sown the origins of sensation, dance, touch, flowering of poetry … Yes, I thought I had sown such occasions in my library of dreams but everything seemed hollow now. I strove to articulate that hollowness into the ‘withinness’ of the Word, a ‘withinness’ that was transformative wholeness in the vessel of space, the hollow vessel of space; and failed. I sought to articulate that hollowness into the ‘withoutness’ of Spirit, Spirit that immerses itself in the fabric of being yet moves at the edge of the fury of hypocritical slogan and quarrelsome rhetoric upon a plane of reality; and failed. But in failing I knew that that hollowness was the ground of creative conscience and value, the ground of an absence from the world that re-enters the world without illusion, without ideal self-deception. Did the absent body — in re-entering the theatre of the world — begin to acquire its own true echoing voice in a hollow humanity whose hollowness became an unsuspected creative faculty in the vitalized conscience of tradition, the vitalized conscience of the dead?

Did the absent body — in re-entering the theatre of the world as resurrected presence — begin to acquire a capacity to dislodge prepossession and formidable bias within a hollowness of humanity whose conscription of value inevitably shifts or cracks or moves before the breath of Spirit?

One cannot return from the dead, return to the present, without sensing in some degree — however ambiguously — through failure or achievement — that the miracle of a re-entry into a hollow humanity is a subversive reality one has neglected to explore in its ramifications within the origins of value.

I had come to the bridge of wisdom. It arched across the flatlands and across the swamp of adventure through which Raleigh and Cortes and Middle Passage Rastafarian Magellan and many others had moved to the block or the fire or to the grave. Were they in essence refugees of spirit bound together in the chaos of the world? Black refugees. White refugees. Conquistadorial adventurers and refugees. Victimized emigrants or immigrants or refugees. No wonder W. H. had heard such a clamour in the sea whose voices he barely caught and faintly translated.

The bridge was a simulated arch in my Faustian dream of Third Worlds running hand in hand with First or Second Worlds. It stretched between the true (however faint) voice of the absent body and the true (however remote) ear of the absent body, the true voice in and the intimate response from the everlasting stranger in oneself.

I was greeted by an illumination that seemed nevertheless fraught with danger: the cheap light of the sun, the cheap light of a furnace, in a drowned man’s refugee eyes as he arises from the chapel perilous of the sea and is tempted by Prosperity Ghost in the city of Skull.

How cheap is the light of the sun, how cheap is the electricity of the stars?

‘Cheapness is all,’ said Ghost. But I saw that his eyes were sad. Intimate, knowing, sad eyes within the everlasting stranger in oneself. ‘Cheapness is all,’ the refugees roared and would have rushed into Skull but their way was barred as if Time itself were considering their plight before it yielded to their demand.

‘Why should Time yield to such temptation?’ I said to Ghost. ‘You should know since you raise the issue in this masquerade …’

‘Prosperity Ghost you mean!’ he was laughing soundlessly.

‘Yes! Indeed. You raise the issue in this masquerade as a moral aesthetic, I take it — a piece of moral theatre. Miriam loved moral theatre! And I — resurrected bone and flesh that I am — cannot shake it out of my veins. Hollow veins in which I taste nevertheless an impulse to regenerative vessel, regenerative capacity. And so I ask as if the tooth I bring from the grave bites so fiendishly, so terribly, I cannot resist asking (I cannot resist hunting the truth): would it not be kinder, much kinder, of Time to resist the will of the hordes who rush into the lap of exploiters and into the arms of illusory benefactors? Would it not be kinder, much kinder, of Time to assist the growing tide of refugees to draw closer to their innermost conscience, to resist the cheap and the tawdry, to resist the ruthless calculation, the ruthless, the unprincipled?’

‘Time yields,’ said Ghost so softly I could scarcely hear (I held my resurrected ear now to the deck of the Faustian bridge to catch the true and bitter voice of hollow self, the true and bitter response to hollow self) ‘because it is endemic part and parcel of the fodder of generations. Time is not love, divine love. Time is a character of universality incorrigibly stained by partial, biased and cruel forces. Because of its partiality its biases are susceptible to excavation and to the true action of redemptive love, redemptive wholeness. But that is another matter. A matter for the creative and aroused conscience within the graves of history. In regard to your immediate question that bears on the logic of time, Time as an answering device, a speaking device, a machine in the chaotic soul, Time (note I sometimes spell it with a common t, sometimes a capital T) is but a measure of partial events.

‘Look! Look into the swamp of the centuries within your own book that is stained by invisible creek water, invisible river water, invisible pork-knocker barrels, pork-knocker ships; just look! What do you see?’

Before I could answer — as if I were an answering clock — Ghost continued: ‘You see when you scan closely your own death and the deaths of your mother and aunt (whose antecedents came into the magic wood from other continents) that the refugee count in the clock of the sea has moved from adventurers and slaves, from those who fled the sword and the fire, from those who stood on the auction block, into disrupted twentieth-century populations broken by famine or civil war; tyrannized by military regimes; deceived by politicians who rig the ballot when there are elections in the Third World.