Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘You know, Robin,’ Faust said to Peter, ‘I like to think of my surgery as a window upon heaven. Except that heaven’s changing. (Indeed the workshop I knew in ancient times has long vanished.) The crucifixion’s changing. Technology’s changing. And quite frankly I’m not sure what investitures the devil now wears. If there’s a shift in the radius of a star, in the radius of the soul, who can say on which side one’s bread is buttered?’ He pointed to a plate on his windowsill and I read: Doctor Faustus, fallen angel from the workshop of the gods, ambivalent sceptic of the purposes of evil, reluctant doctor of the soul. He was smiling with the blandness of his forgetting/remembering eyes and I felt a chill. ‘I am on Emma’s side, Robin,’ he said.

He saw my disbelief and continued to press his argument. My disbelief? No, Peter’s. ‘For the fact is, Robin, if I’m not careful I shall have nothing to work with — the materials I employ will become sterile — I shall lose everyone and everything. And live in an empty shell from which labour has vanished, machines doing everything, thinking machines, acting machines, killing machines. And so let’s seek a lull in our space wars on earth and in heaven. A respite from computer voices and computer generals and computer admirals in the twenty-first century. Let’s give ourselves a chance to define our terms anew, rehearse the technologies of the crucifixion. Turn them round and round, upside down, downside up, make a rope, a rope and a rocket cross into heaven.’

I saw he was playing with Peter, playing with some ancient design of hope he may have abandoned. He was wooing him with the irreverence, the self-mocking humour, for which the comedian of the machine was universally famous. He knew he was taking a risk, that there might be something in what he was saying that Peter might remember and take to heart but this was a chance he had to accept on behalf of the new spatial cross of humanity. ‘Come, come, Robin,’ he said to Peter, ‘I’m on your side, believe me. We’re making the world safe for mankind. I’m up here to receive you. You’ve hesitated long enough. Seize the glory rope and climb into heaven. I promise you no one will burn this time.’

I kept still and virtually invisible beside Peter like a child playing hide-and-seek in a resurrection cupboard. I saw what Emma had meant. I saw the curious pitch, the curious darkness of a spiritual irony within a destitute world enriched by the oddest parallels, sophisticated technologies running side by side with rickety cupboards, barrels, worn blankets, sheets, chalk to make a seam or line on diagrams of the sky and the sea depicting the intimate recesses of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ — all substance of the shoestring budget of childhood theatre.

Priorities were changing but so peculiarly, so involuntarily it seemed, that the resurrection body could easily be lured from its true seam or true line in the heart of creation with promises that only It (masked Peter and masked me and others of linked generations) could make valid in the light of the rehearsed values within the deaths of Alice and Miriam and grandfather and others lying in the refugee sea or in the refugee forest or up in the refugee stars (their untenanted graves memorialized in a pork-knocker barrel on earth).

For we had been empowered in our nursery rhymes to weigh the doors and windows of heaven, to knock on them and seek assurances of the nature and the meaning of value.

What was the true seam or the true line that Peter and I needed to understand in our ascent and our overcoming of the Mountain of Folly?

I gave Peter a slight nudge and at last he gripped the rope and began to ascend to Doctor Faustus’s surgery. He drew close to the windowsill. Faust leaned out to seize him. I shouted.

‘Peter,’ I cried (and forgot to call him Robin), ‘swing away from the rope or the cross to the true seam in the wave of rock.’

My forgetfulness in this instance may have saved Peter’s life. Faust hesitated for a fraction of an instant. He had heard my voice as if it came from nowhere yet from another source, another line, another thread in space. He was taken aback by all this (by the repudiation of his deadly rope) and by the name ‘Peter’ of which he was unaware. He knew only of ‘Robin’. Who was Peter? Nobody (or absent body) was Peter. Impossible parallels! And in that flash of lightning bemusement that fell over the Mountain of Folly Peter slipped from Faust’s grasp as if he were made of Glass: made of alter ego Robin Glass, alter ego kingdoms of space.

As he gained the seam or divide in the wave of rock I remembered my earliest temptations threaded into the first time I dreamt I heard voices and sounds. I remembered how I had succumbed to the temptation to seize the kingdoms of space. Had I then — without knowing it — stored up a shift in the priorities of life and death? Had I anticipated Faust in miniaturizing the creation in myself? Had I been in league with my grandfather’s revisionary book as I now stood in league with Emma’s Peter? I had stored, I felt now, in frail treaty with the past and the future, a lightning caution by which or through which to outwit the comedian of the machine when he sought to pull all generations into a window of heaven that was ambiguous if not false, an enchainment of the mind if not an extinction of the soul.

A political parable of mind and soul born of childhood remembered visions in an age of dangerous superpowers professing the good intention out of cunning self-interest, the good life out of expedient design.

Peter and I pursued the seam in the wave of rock until a glimmering window in the Mountain of Folly, like a flag one sticks on the moon beneath a black sky, and a white imaginary sea spelt our approach to a ward in space from which Billionaire Death inspected the cosmos. His imaginary eyes met mine. They were shockingly large and black and deep as if I mistook a West Indian black-coated vista of Mars for Columbus’s Venusian India. I tried to adjust my world-weary resurrected gaze within those imaginary eyes. I dreamt I saw them change and turn subtly green, subtly marvellous within love’s murmuring death wish on earth ascending to the hospital of space. I thought of sunset as if it had been painted on a child’s ball in the depths of space at the heart of a long summer vanished day when imaginary veil upon veil of light speaks of the birth of unremembered glory. I thought of the imagination of twilight at the heart of equatorial sunset and the cry of a vanished bird when the rustle of wings ties one’s breath into a feather that floats unconsumed into the darkness.

I thought of the sensation of pain and of benevolent oblivion. I was confused, bewildered, by a sensation of music, a sensation of beauty (as if an unwritten symphony shrouded my eyes, unwitting revolutionary creativity entertained by Billionaire Death). And I recalled Emma’s perception of laughter’s mask as she lay in my arms by the sea. Her perception, I knew, was also saturated by the imaginary cry of an incredible bird born in the workshop of heaven at its margins with the waste land. And I was struck now in Billionaire Death’s presence by what seemed an intermediate vibration between parallel musics of which I already knew: Emma’s dear music of mystery and grace and the cheap music of the electric machine in the circus of hell. Now — between these parallels that were so unlike one another — lay the imaginary chord I had glimpsed in Billionaire Death’s eyes. Love’s death wish . It was as if in seeing this, hearing this, I glimpsed again a reluctant shift in the priorities of life and death.

‘Life is blind spirit, death is love,’ Billionaire Death said in the voice of a strange organ. I knew I must shake off the dreadful fascination and responded almost without thinking: ‘One needs to convert love’s death wish into generations that are capable of such intimate rapport with one another’s frailties that love leads them through death not into oblivion’s space adventure. Life leads them into spirit as if the passage through spirit is the infinity of invisible spirit itself.’