Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Perhaps Peter and Emma knew of such beginnings and might be able to disclose some unsuspected shift in the priorities of Skull. For they (Peter and Emma) were themselves characters of myth. They had become this in peculiar, uncertain and groping — even self-contradictory — degrees in the midst of the desolations of Prosperity. One finds such characters in every city, in every throng of refugees. The odd survivors. They belong yet do not belong. In some quite lucid and strangely factual way I knew I existed in their dreams — that they were dreaming of me as I dreamt of them at a junction in the tunnel where the resurrection of the dead seemed to blend with the survival of the endangered living.

I knew that their dreams of me were intensely real, that their survival, their escape from drowning, had so affected them, that I was in the very fibre of their lives, an eternal question mark, an eternal misgiving. I was the seed of their terror and their uncertainty in Skull. What did survival truly mean when all those who are dearest to one have vanished? Equally they were for me the seed of religious hope. What did resurrection/revolution truly mean unless one could place it in living, uncertain flesh-and-blood within oneself/without oneself?

‘I have been looking for you for ages,’ I said to them. ‘And now at last …’ I hesitated but rushed on. ‘The resurrection’s a fact, Emma. It’s no panacea, Peter. It doesn’t stop the pain of living. That I now know. I can tell you this. If anything it intensifies mental anguish. For one sees into the shell of what one was. One sees into the bankruptcy of one’s civilization: a terrible business. And yet one loves one’s fellow woman and man as never before. One truly knows the fabric of compassion, of pity, of beauty. A terrifying kind of longing, of hope, within the hollowness of one’s age.’

Peter was staring hard at me. ‘That’s why I became an addict,’ he said. ‘Self-love. Egotistical love. Break all sound barriers. I drink the lotus, the opium of the masses. The death wish of an age. I am a popular singer and player and I feed on the lotus, belly to belly, back to back death wish in Calypso’s and Tiger’s band. A new lament, a new ballad of the soul, Robin!’ He was staring at me quizzically and I could not be sure how serious he was, whether he was testing me, mocking me, mocking himself, testing himself.

Emma tore the shred of incipient but mutual addiction, mutual self-pity from our eyes. ‘That’s not what Robin is saying, Peter,’ she said to me as though she were addressing him. Her voice softened. ‘Poor Peter! He’s an incurable romantic, Robin. But what would I do without him? Robin’s talking of a voice and an ear, Peter, we seldom hear or use. Not BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM. He’s saying it’s a voice and an ear we may come to perceive within ourselves when we return to ourselves and know ourselves for the first bleak and terrible time. Without fallacy. Without illusion. Nothing egotistical. Know suddenly at the heart of despair the true stranger in ourselves, Peter, beyond all our vanity in whom lies the promise of glory.’

She uttered the word ‘glory’ with reluctance, misgiving. An abused word. Napoleonic glory? The glory of lust? I knew she meant neither of these. What did she mean? It was as if she had read the question in my mind as I had read the question in hers in the tunnel of classical penetration, classical endurance, classical genius of love. I sawin a flash that she was a priest ,a female priest, she was hope in the city of Skull, revolutionary hope, unconventional hope.

‘It’s divine Communism,’ Peter murmured, ‘when the male priest sups with the female priest at the same high table in the tunnel of centuries …’ He stopped as if he had said too much. But even so it was a definition of ‘divine’ and of ‘Communism’ I had never heard before. Still I wondered. What was ‘divine Communism’? Like ‘glory’ it was of debased coinage, an abused term. Take ‘Communism’! What was ‘Communism’? Surely not the Communist Rome that burnt at Chernobyl while the Party fiddled. Take ‘divine’! What was the ‘divine’? Surely not the pomp and the robes in the theatre of Skull.

Emma, the priest, caught the drift of reflection. She turned to Peter as if he were me in the veil of the tunnel and I were he in the play of divinity. ‘When one breaks true bread,’ she said, ‘with the true stranger in oneself who knows one, is unsparing with one, yet perceives the creative conscience and potential in one, then one begins an ascent through the follies of one’s age to a vision of divine Communism. Alas it’s not easy.’ Her eyes were both dark and pale. I saw she wished to goad me, to startle me, within our pattern of lucid dream. She shot at me, ‘You, Robin, will need Peter as alter ego stranger — alter ego theatre — when you climb the Mountain of Folly above Skull.’

A beam shone through the tunnel that alerted us — Peter, Emma and I — to dateless day infinity comedy in which we were involved. Perhaps it was Emma’s allusion to ‘alter ego theatre’ that reminded me of the ruses and the labyrinths of Faust , the simulated voices, simulated scripts, that passed as normality in Skull. Imagine the various factories, pubs, bedrooms, drawing rooms, football arenas, offices, stages — imagine the elegant and violent puppetries, the strings that are pulled, the solemn manifestos, the rages, the brutalities, the sermons, the curses, the drunken fights, the programmes, the dangling shadow of bait — imagine the follies of which Emma had spoken. Follies of Skull! Circus of Skull! Reflexes of Skull!

We — Emma, Peter and I — were caught in the web of Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours that passed for normality. And yet … I paused, reflected again. Did I mean abnormality ? There lay a distinction between ourselves and the ‘normal’ world. We accepted our abnormality and the bizarre truths associated with ourselves as a capacity to mirror yet repudiate and breach Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours. Our apparent unreality — our very unreality — witnessed to a self-confessional reality in which we came to the edge of ourselves and looked through ourselves. To be true (to know truth) within an age of violence and lies, an age subject to the reflexes of Skull, was to sense a curious irreality in oneself, a curious originality, a curious divergence from the circus of the real (or what passed for the real).

All this made me scan Emma’s features closely. She was veiled by dateless day infinity comedy. I saw her innate sorrow. I suddenly saw how worn she was. It was as if a nail had woven its innermost weblike constancy into her flesh, an ecstatic nail, a sorrowing nail. Ecstatic and sorrowing! That was her bizarre truth, her divergence from what passed as the real in the circus of the normal and the real.

‘O Emma,’ I cried impulsively, ‘tell me please. How have you made out all these years? There were debts to pay, the old house was sold. Even Miriam’s theatre fell under the hammer though W. H. preserved it for a while.’

‘I have paid dearly,’ Emma said. ‘Survival is dear, it is beyond price, but it is worth it.’

‘It must have been a difficult time after Alice’s death, Miriam’s death, my death.’

‘A difficult time indeed,’ Emma confessed, ‘a difficult adjustment for Peter and me. We once shared everything, remember? We were part of your family, remember? We shared the little theatre in the magic wood, remember? We shared every meal. And then came the earthquake, the crash … It was as if we had been orphaned all over again. Flung out of the cradle all over again. But there was no one like Alice to take us in this time. As I lay on the beach I was pierced by the cry of the gulls, the laughing sea gulls. Were they gulls or were they cranes? I could not tell. It was a cry from heaven and yet it was a subtle, piercing, shaking laughter. A shaking note like strings of music in the sea. The motif of an incomparable composition. Music such as we had dreamt to hear in our little theatre.’ She stopped as if she remembered something I had forgotten. ‘Did you not ask Aunt Miriam, Robin, what is laughter’s mask? Did you not hunt through a trunk of dresses and costumes, etc., in an old cellar?’