Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘Their lust for prosperity and their despair are such (and who amongst us can blame them?) that they turn from the brutalities of the sovereign state and the phoney placards of newfound independence and fall on their knees before the new El Dorados of the West.’

‘New El Dorados?’ I was sceptical. ‘There is growing unemployment. There is the rise of labour-saving devices, new clocks whose every tick manufactures redundancy. And this is Skull. It is the archetypal Colony in the magic wood. It stands in or over a swamp.’

‘The archetypal Colony may seem remote from the West but it is an extension of the West. The refugees will come. Indeed they have never ceased to come, sometimes as a trickle, sometimes as a wave. Look deep! Look deep into the heart of the swamp that stains every page of history. Look deep into the necessity to manufacture asylums for refugees, ghetto asylums, god knows what. Scrap a couple of rockets, a couple of nuclear bombs, half a dozen submarines and battleships, an extra penny or two on income tax, and heigho, Skull may be converted into a prosperous concentration camp.

‘Think of the prospect of cheap energy. Look deep, I say, into the swamp. Look deep into the cheap electric stars and the cheap electric suns reflected there in the mirror of coming technologies, coming at any price, any human price. Look into the brave new world. Look into the faeryland promise of Chernobyl. Time lifts its skirt like a radioactive whore.’

All my ancient and modern loathing or detestation of Ghost returned. ‘This is a joke, an obscene joke,’ I cried. ‘Face the facts. Don’t exaggerate. Chernobyl is a disaster complex in the Soviet Union. What has it got to do with the free West and the choices that lie before the electorates of the free West? Are you saying such choices are an illusion?’ I felt the shadow of terror in my resurrected body. ‘What bearing has faeryland on Skull?’

‘Hush-hush disaster, dateless day bearing,’ said Ghost. ‘When Communist Rome burns an empire of souls inhales its ash. But no one sees the fire or the brute faery at the extremities of our fingertips. So too when faeryland burns (and the absent body you wear and loathe and which you and I share, as a multi-faceted investiture with which to address and warn the world, looms into theatre) the building blocks of heaven are shaken by the storm. But no one sees or hears the earthquake — not even those who are experimenting with human souls. Skull, dear Robin Glass, is our coming asylum for the refugee spirit. Skull is the dateless day that Faust simulates. Skull is the transformation of the swamp of history into an electric paradise. Cheap energy is the opium of the masses, the new lotus.’

I felt the hordes of the future rush through me into Skull. I pencilled some notes into my book.

Dateless Day Play. Dateless Day (plucked from a pre-Columbian infinity calendar) relics of memory. Hollow humanity.

Tooth and ring. Chapel perilous of the sea (AD 1961–2).

Bridge into Skull. Chapel perilous of the flatlands (AD 1962).

Indistinct clamour of refugees of spirit. Cheap energy is all (AD 1962–86).

Faeryland burns at Chernobyl (AD 1986).

Capital investment for Play of Humanity begins in Skull. Asylum for refugees. Marvellous glittering tomb-shaped edifice. Twenty-first century sophisticated concentration camp. Fodder of generations (AD 2000–2050).

I re-read my notes. My loathing of Ghost intensified. I tore the notes into scraps but they floated over the water like a measure of the dancing city, the dancing theatre, of Skull.

Towers were built. Promenades. Halls. Shopping precincts. Streets. Etc., etc., etc. It was a grand play, a grand village. One matter had been omitted from my notes. And now I found myself pencilling it with invisible lead on to the brow of Skull.

Plutonium has been found. Sophisticated Third World/First World dump in the text of the magic wood.

I tried to tear this up too but the bone in the masks of Skull that some of the players wore in the Play of Humanity resisted my touch.

Yet the sensation reminded me of the enigma of time, time’s bone as well as time’s page, and I found myself tracing a calendrical road that ran into the theatre of Skull. It was called Dateless Day Infinity Route or Tunnel. I moved along it to its junction with Prospero Mall. And here it was that I came upon Peter and Emma in the year AD 2025. Was this an arbitrary calendrical year or was it a provocative and lucid dream-choice reflecting the measureless yet ironically pinpointed canvas in the drama of the future within the life of the creative present?

I reached out to them from within the tunnel: I back from the drowned dead in each year, each century; they hovering still, it seemed, at the margins of the pinpointed living where the spray of the sea in every leaf, in every flower, broke our lips into a kiss.

Tunnel of immortality? Tunnel of death? Tunnel of the resurrection?

As our hands and lips met and parted I felt I had aged not a whit since AD 1962. Peter and Emma, on the other hand, were my own age yet they seemed older than I in the tunnel or the relic or the passageway of memory in which we stood. Was it ten years older? Was it twenty years older? I puzzled over the difference. What is five years or ten years or twenty years between friends? And yet — since Peter and Emma and I were actually the same age — it became important to know why they seemed older, I younger, why in another light of dream-theatre I might become older, they younger. Were such values of time purely arbitrary, purely conventional aspects of story line in the play of a civilization? Or were they a reflection of absent bodies entering time, excavating time, changing our innermost grasp of fate and of freedom within the veil of time?

I knew it all signified a measure of ironic spirituality and dream-choice in the way one excavates the biases of time, the tyrannies of time. Each relic of time, each built passageway, each sculpted tunnel or bowl or room, each cell, each cradle, glimmered with the cruelties of the past yet with a theatre of new-born spirit to breach or transform a moment of terror.

Each minute distinction of years between me and Peter and Emma in the theatre of spirit reflected our vision or capacity to see or feel or grasp the urgencies and the consequences in the architectures and connective rooms of our age. And in opening a dream-tunnel that ran from the middle of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century we were involved not only in generations but in the pinpointed canvas of the years, in one’s illusory yet immortal youth as much as in one’s illusory and immortal old age.

One was involved in the nature and the meaning of survival as much as in unravelling a distinction in minute accretions in the value of time within childhood theatre, within resurrectionary theatre, within political theatre.

I knew there was a distinction between simulated immortality or youth or old age and the terrifying insights associated with a resurrection/a revolution of inner mind, inner spirit.

In this instance — in reaching out to Emma and Peter — I was assailed by the enigma of authorship and charactership across the years in the Play of Humanity and in my fictional autobiography.

One loomed large (the play of humanity) whereas the other, my book, was minute but intensely real, intensely poignant.

In AD 1962 — when I came within hailing distance of Skull — I was aware of Ghost’s extension of himself into W. H.’s ageing mask through which I wrote my fictional autobiography.

Now, however — in AD 2025 — though I remained as young as ever (my hair was immaculately black and I was dressed to a t or a T in the paradox of time/Time) I knew that W. H. himself had vanished and that someone else — some other ageing mask — played the role of authorship/charactership in my book as if I were he, he me. The name or the initials on this new ageing mask eluded me. Yet they marked a further and crucial development in my book. They implied the secretion of ageless myth in the theatre of the world as a subtle rebuttal of an authoritarian realism — however sophisticated — an authoritarian story line or sophisticated dumping ground in the theatre of Skull for an irrelevant and a doomed humanity held in thrall by the logic of violence, the logic of hell. In that subtle rebuttal lay the foundations of religious hope. But even so I could not be sure how precarious such foundations were, how costly they might prove. How possible, or impossible, it was to make a beginning — nothing more — in switching the priorities of Billionaire Death away from the cinematic dance and extermination of the brutes (that claimed the bright lights of Broadway Skull) into scenarios of a hospital of infinity at the heart of space.