Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘I remember.’

‘Aunt Miriam wept when you asked her on the bed of the sea. Well let me tell you, Robin, that the answer lay in a bird’s cry, a bird’s feather that pierces heaven and strings the music of laughter into the grief of rain. It was a nail, a half-rending sound, that rose from the sea, from Tiger ’s broken body, from the shattered boat, from the ships of all the navies of all the oceans, from a broken barrel, an invisible barrel on which Alice leaned into the crest of a wave. It was a nail. And it pierced me. I was nailed into the ground.’

‘My God, Emma!’ I was confused. I recalled the apparition of Ghost, multi-faceted Ghost, innermost Ghost, outermost Ghost, arising from the sea.

‘My God, Emma!’

‘In such a nail that shatters one’s prepossessions I knew the construction of a sound that echoed in the air and in the sea. It was the music of the priest, of the God of nature. One comes,’ said Emma, ‘to a beloved creation, to the divine, in every moment that one survives in the inimitable textures of nature, truly lives and survives.’

I shook myself hard. I tried to reason with myself. I almost felt that I had taken advantage of her, that I knew her secrets because I had lain with her there on the beach, with my lips within the cover of her hair yet on her breasts. I shook myself. I tried to reason with myself. ‘You were desolated, Emma. You had narrowly escaped drowning. One understands.’

‘One understands,’ said Emma and looked at me as if she were addressing Peter, ‘that a priest in a desolate age, in a drowned age, must pay dear for an illumination of ecstasy, Robin. How can one surrender oneself to laughter in the midst of survival that leaves one bereft? How can one sing in the midst of survival that leaves one bereft? How can one play? Yet one does. Peter sings. Peter plays. Calypso sings. Calypso dances. And you and Alice and Miriam paid with your lives for them to be merry in the light of a stranger ecstasy. As for me I became a priest. I dedicated myself to simplicity’s tasks, simplicity’s meals, and to a butterfly-lantern at the heart of the globe.’

I felt her lips upon mine. The kiss of all loves and all true lovers.

THE SCENE CHANGES. We are now in the elaborate promenade of Prospero Mall. Emma pulls a veil like the sea around her eyes. She slips away but not before depositing a note in the pocket of my coat. I pull it out. The note is faded as if it had been written long, long ago. In an age of childhood when we were encouraged by Miriam and Alice to write letters to one another about fabulous journeys to the ends and the beginnings of time. I smooth the note slowly and read:

Dear Robin,

The next leg of your journey will take you up the Mountain of Folly. And Peter’s assistance will prove invaluable. Do not ask me how I know! Let us say we are privy to one another’s secrets. We are, if you like, lovers in infinity. When Peter lay beside me on the beach before the ambulance arrived I dreamt it was you! (Aunt Miriam says I am an imaginative letter writer.) What I have to say now will come as a shock. Peter’s addicted to three bands in the sacred wood. One is Calypso’s and Tiger’s band which he joined a year or so after your imaginary (it seems so real now — or is it in the future?) death. The second is called the rocket-crucifixion band. The third is Faust’s circus band.

Peter joined the rocket-crucifixion band and Faust’s circus band not very long ago and decided not to give his own name this time but to use an alias. Indeed he used your name — Robin Redbreast Glass. A parcel of cheek! Shocking alter ego Glass cheek! Faust calls him Robin! So don’t be surprised when he addresses him by your name. Miriam says it’s a kind of test between ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ when you climb. Peter, of course, chose your name because it was dead simple. He knew everything about you. It was easy to secure your birth certificate and to answer any questions that Faust might ask.

Faust (he calls himself Doctor Faustus in Prospero Mall) has his surgery — as it is called — at the end of the Mall.

Surgery! An odd name, I know, but it relates to Faust’s alchemy (Aunt Miriam explained things about alchemy), his phantom nooses, phantom crosses, and also (this is important) ‘ a shift that is occurring in the priorities of Billionaire Death from whom Faust borrows capital to invest in themes of simulated immortality. ’(I have copied this last from a dusty old book that W. H. reads when he assists Aunt Miriam in staging our plays.) The shift — the book goes on to say — in the priorities of Skull extends through all generations. It’s a frail shift — the book says — but it may build up suddenly into a creative breakthrough. I like that. Don’t you? (W. H. says we are becoming literate imaginations!) The Mountain of Folly, for instance — according to Alice’s legend — has been riddled or penetrated by the vision of a hospital of infinity in which refugees of spirit may reside. (I am a bit frightened by all this, aren’t you? But excited.)

The book also says that the poor doomed people in our theatre of Skull may no longer be doomed as before, that the hospital of infinity is an unexpected blessing in coming space programmes.

On the other hand I heard Tiger growling, ‘it’s too damned early to be sure.’ Things may slip back again. A lot may depend on you and Peter when you climb the Mountain. It’s up to you to save them. And I shall do my best. Remember me.

Emma

PS One thing more. Make your way to Faust’s surgery. You will find Peter there and hear news of the rocket band in which (Miriam whispers) Faust has an interest.

I folded the letter with care and replaced it in my pocket. Dateless Day Infinity Road had brought me now to the end of the Mall. I heard Doctor Faustus’s voice just above me in the Mountain of Folly.

‘Don’t fall this time, Robin. Take your time. It’s a new invention. It’s a new rocket nursery in the stars. A new band blew up above Skull on its way to Mars. Lives were lost. But you can count on me now. So take your time, Robin.’

I was on the point of protesting — ‘I am not a member of a rocket band or of Tiger’s band for that matter.’ And then I recalled Emma’s note from long, long ago in Miriam’s childhood theatre. How remarkable that a childhood/adolescent love affair should blossom into a female priesthood and nourish the resurrection body. What a shift, a frail shift, yet intimate revolutionary breakthrough into the prospect of a divine Communism in which all generations reflected one another at the heart of anguish yet consummate wisdom.

I recalled Emma’s note. Faust was addressing alter ego Glass Robin in Peter. And yet was he not also speaking directly to me, my absent body yet dream-presence, dream re-entry into the theatre of life?

‘When the rocket blew,’ Faust continued, ‘it opened like a cross. It tautened into a rope. I saw it through my ancient eyes in the workshop of the gods. My ancient eyes that blaze like a comet at the end of time, the beginning of time. Who can say which end, which beginning? I have forgotten so much, have forfeited so much, to become the comedian of the machine in this end or beginning of time.’

It almost seemed to me as if Faust were pleading with Peter and me. ‘It tautened into a marvellous rope, Robin,’ he said.

He stared at Peter from his windowsill above the Mall. A wind blew down the Mountain of Folly. The terror of his smile was lost upon Peter but I was aware of it, all the more aware of it after the mystical laughter of which Emma had spoken (our arms around one another by the sea). I saw it lucidly now (as if for a moment I had borrowed Faust’s ancient eyes, Faust’s remembering/oblique forgetting eyes, Faust’s Quetzalcoatl eyes in which were entwined the marriage of heaven and earth). I saw the backward shift, the forward shift, the folly, the creativity, the parallel laughters of the universe, the laughter of grace and mystery for which one pays dear, the laughter of the electric machine, of mechanical stimulation, one buys cheap.