Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘Planets are ailing fast cars in the hospital of infinity. They’ve been struck by giant meteors. A meteor’s a BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM band. This rocket fell at the foot of the Mountain of Folly. Then it was transported here. And it’s flying still on a film. Such is the genius of Faust.’ Peter was joking with his usual solemn, long face that I knew from long, long ago when we drew planets with chalk on blackboard in Miriam’s childhood theatre.

‘Each planet is the car of an imaginary greatness. Greatness rides again in the West! If you and I sit still, Robin, and wait long enough we may enter into orbit with Alexander and Napoleon and Captain Cat from Under Milk Wood. ’

‘Captain Cat is crying,’ I said. ‘Do you remember that line? Captain Cat is dancing to the music of a sad Rosy guitar.’

‘Napoleon’s too fat to dance. The car or the ship or the chariot or the planet on which he lies is a dusty or a waterlogged campaign. It needs to be refurbished with glory. And as a consequence Ghost is driven to employ an army of doctors, chauffeurs of infinity, engineers, programmers, etc., etc., to build new beds, new experimental bunks in tanks, in submarines, in aeroplanes. New cannon poking out of featherbed pillows.’

‘Employment,’ I cried, ‘it’s employment for millions.’ But then I was stricken by the unemployment of the soul. ‘What is greatness,’ I asked Peter, ‘if the soul itself falls into disuse?’

‘And another thing,’ I said, ‘where lies the unbroken chain, the slender hope of which you spoke, in the débâcle of greatness that threatens to break the back of the earth?’

‘It lies in this seam we are pursuing through the Mountain of Folly,’ said Peter. ‘Look! Captain Cat is dancing. Old as a crafty waste land seer but not fat.’ And as he spoke I remembered the lament of Tiger and Calypso in the magic wood. I also remembered Tiger , Alice’s boat, that had toppled into the breaking sea. I remembered Tiresias, the seer, whose spectacles I now placed on my eyes like a tourist under a black sky. I saw the negative film of Thebes, I saw the negative film of ancient walls under the sea through which Tiger fell. I saw Napoleon’s negative crown and Alexander’s sceptre and Captain Cat’s tombstone floating with Alice’s ring and with the stone from a Jamaican hillside. Except that they lay now far below the Wave on the glittering scales that the fictionalization of Death had brought to me.

It was an uncanny vortex. The flotsam and jetsam of empires! Everything moving fast yet still. Everything balanced yet toppling.

‘All I can say,’ I began but stopped and appealed to Ghost. He saw my plight and put words on the page of my lips.

‘All I can say is that the scales are set to weigh an imaginary substance, the imaginary substance of greatness that lies in a fabric we can never wholly grasp.

‘When I saw the ring and the stone in equilibrium at Death’s window I was involved in a religious equation between violence (the slain child) and sacrament (the ring). It was as if the speeding universe slowed for a moment into marvellous poise and equilibrium of spirit within relics of memory. But higher up now — with Ghost’s chauffeur — I cannot dodge or escape the fact of chaos (and so must relate to it as a factor in the marvellous equation of spirit): must relate to it through history that expands into the vision of the seer, visionary motion in motionlessness, the ironies of full employment yet the unemployment of the soul; and this involves me as much in the day I was drowned — when the boat Tiger sank — as in the day ancient Rome fell or Byzantium became a mirage and Greece vanished.

‘Imagine the refugees of spirit across the centuries. Imagine the marriage of turbulence and stillness in every dying mask, imagine vast waves and still bodies, moving hordes and etched caravans against a sky that topples into space. Imagine the literacy of the seer at the heart of chaos, a literacy that reads the beauty of God in every delicate web within the seamless robe of eternity.’

*

Seam and seamlessness! Peter and I had pursued the seam or the delicate web between remembering and forgetting faculties in our ascent through and above the Mountain of Folly. Through and above! Within and without ! Here lay the paradox of the seamless garment upon Emma’s shoulders. Peter vanished. I thought I saw him ascending the wave of the rock and then it was as if his shadow melted into the air.

‘I shall take you through the city,’ Tiresias said, ‘to Emma’s coronation. It’s quite an event. Sculpture, song, dance. Millions all over the world, in villages, on mountaintops, in valleys, in bars, in hotel rooms, may be able to view it. I shall take you in a little while. I am not sure her brother Peter fully approves. After all he is her twin. He played in Tiger’s band. He became the pope of the calypso. An odd title I know. But it’s common knowledge that the calypsonian bands adorn themselves with curious titles. The name I bear (Tiresias) figures as you know and once or twice I have danced with them, danced the dance of the twining snakes, half-man, half-woman. The seer needs to know, to see everything from within the heart of chaos — if that is at all possible.’

‘You were speaking,’ I said, ‘of the bands.’

‘Ah yes, the bands! There’s the black Napoleon band. There’s the Persian Ayatollah Alexander band. There’s Peter’s band. Indeed, as I said before, he was the pope of the bands in Skull until his death the afternoon that you met him in the tunnel. Emma would tell you he had been ailing for some time. Ailing science, ailing religion. No wonder Doctor Faustus warned him of a meteor rocket, a meteor drum, falling from heaven. Part of his trouble was that he was a bit of a woman-hater. A long-standing taint in the body of our civilization. It fouls the nest of religion. And of economics though you wouldn’t think it at first. But what is the soul of the unemployed but an implicit extension of the whoredom of money we cultivate subconsciously? I tried, therefore, to mediate between him and the whoredom of money long, long ago — when Greece and Rome were doomed — by egging on Frog to play an inferior modern Ulysses and magistrate and pygmy shadow of the giant of the heartland.

‘In that way I involved you , Robin Redbreast Glass, as the son and the heir of a divided tradition. It was the best I could do in the licentious theatre of Skull. Thus it was that I edged myself into half-man, half-woman masks (even Ghost is not immune to such masquerades) in my mimicry, in my rehearsals, of divine equilibrium that is beyond our grasp. All this, by the way, is implicit in Emma’s book which she attempted to read to you in staggered passages when you met in Dateless Infinity Day in your dream. Emma’s theology vindicated my and Ghost’s disguises. It is rooted in the necessity to bring a sacramental urgency to the ancient and perennially fertile body of sex. Not promiscuity, not cheap stimulation. But something we scarcely understand. The miracle of the senses, touch, taste, echoing waves and particles and penetration.

‘Her task, from this day forward, is to make the body of the resurrection beautiful to the woman in the man, the man in the woman. It’s a formidable vocation. You should know that, Robin. You lay with your head on her breasts by the sea.’

‘Was it not Peter who lay with her? I was drowned, Peter had been saved.’ And yet, even as I spoke, I did seem to remember …

‘Peter, yes, but your shadow slowly took shape out of every refugee of spirit. Took infinite and rehearsible form. It drew Peter into imitating you. He took your name, remember? Alias Robin Redbreast Glass. He was universally popular in Skull in love’s death-wish bands. All fanaticism is rooted subconsciously in love’s terrible death wish! But by degrees you triumphed. Your original sensuousness, your true passion, triumphed. And by the time Emma came to write her intimate book of you and Peter after your death it was you she drew into her arms. Your true passion in nature. And then by degrees in your ascent of the Mountain Peter himself — despite his discomfiture, his reservations — was imbued by the miracle of equilibrium between all genders, all opposites.