Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘I put it crudely of course. But you know the subtleties of chaos and history that you have drawn into yourself Robin Redbreast Glass. Peter too was converted but he’s her brother. He’s fixated in a kind of incest. When brothers and sisters marry — whatever the traditional or dogmatic excuse — it’s incest. Or if not incest it’s purity masturbating. And there’s been enough of that I say from my standpoint in the underworld. And that’s where I come in as your guide, Robin, on this day. You need to descend from the Mountain and to start from below in your voyage into a new unity.’

I looked up the Mountain. I missed Peter. I missed the pope of love’s death wish. I had never, I confessed to myself, seen him in that light in the magic wood or in the theatre of an infinite rehearsal of values but I was now prepared to accept the guidance of the stranger seer who stood between the deformities of the popular religion of the bands and the sacrament of sensuous marriage between heaven and earth for which I had suffered in the sea and on the land.

*

Tiresias led me down the Mountain along the other side of the seam and within the hospital of infinity. I caught a glimpse of ailing stars, of meteors gouging holes in planets, of ailing moons and constellations, of ailing civilizations far out in space whose residual and imaginary glow had been simulated by Doctor Faustus, the reluctant doctor of the soul.

We came down to Skull with a bump. Not with a bang but with a bump like a boat that oscillates in a wave. The streets were swarming with refugees of soul and spirit, refugees of heart and mind. And my first vision was of the Beast with the map of heaven in its claws or its hands. No, his claws, his hands.

I had seen the Beast before when I hid Ghost in my shadow and outwitted Frog. But in this instance or imminent rehearsal of values he seemed quite different. I dreamt he turned his gaze upon me as if he remembered me from the day I was born. And I drifted into his psychical glass eyes and perceived the vortex of the Tiresian dance. It was the dance of bone and flesh within and without the Beast in the mystery of the resurrection body. I was aware of the wreck of Tiger in the mirror of the sea beside the magic wood. The vortex grew steady as a rock. The vortex was a sleeping, spinning, steady top in my dream.

The crew upon Tiger were masked in bone as they danced.

‘You have seen them before, these dancers,’ said Tiresias, ‘in your grandfather’s pork-knocker theatre of great navigators and conquistadores. Becalmed above an impossible garden.’

‘But this is Tiger ,’ I said, ‘the wreck of Tiger beside the magic wood and under the sea. This is — or was — my grave.’

‘All graves are becalmed vessels above an impossible garden. Until I mediate in the underworld and sprinkle the lips of bone with Beast-food. So I repeat, Robin Glass, you have seen them before. You saw them the moment you died. I moistened your eyes then with an appetite for visions. And the grain of all foundered ships came alive. You have seen them before I say — the crew of bone that fish for a morsel, a Beast-morsel, Beast-fish, Beast-grain, Beast-shrimp.’

I dreamt I now saw Alice and Miriam on the deck of the Beastship of life under the sea. They were masked in flesh. Not bone. But as I scanned their curious bodies in ‘sleeping top’ dance of stillness and flesh with sailors of bone I saw the stillness for what it was. Stillness was a ‘hole’ in each body through which I looked beyond the dance into vistas of oceanic spirit. There was a shout like a hoarse drum and one of the bone sailors heaved upon his fishing rod and drew in his line. Beast-fish at last! They cooked and ate. As the fire subsided in the orchestra of the sea, and the spray darkened into musical coal, I was startled profoundly by another ‘hole’ in Miriam’s body. The bone-sailors in their dance, in eating the fish, had subtly cannibalized the spectre of death and eaten into the gravity — or the anti-gravity — of Miriam’s flesh, animal flesh, female flesh. Eaten into the dance and into themselves as well, into their male bone and acquired in consequence a crack or tooth-mark, a sparkling intensity or flute of soul.

And I recalled the tooth of creation that I had brought with me from a sparkling wave when I arose from the sea. I had not understood its innermost music of appetite for vision until now as I moved in the Glass and the mirror of the Beast with the map of heaven in its hands.

‘The resurrected body consumes a vision in every morsel of meat or fish it reflects or cooks,’ said Tiresias. ‘For every disciple of vision dies and dies again and again with an ailing creation. One dies because one lives a visionary life beyond the cannibal consumption of dancing grain, dancing fruit, dancing flesh. The gardens of the Beast are signposted with visionary signals of death and resurrection in the agriculture of the soul, the hunting grounds of the soul that loom in the stylized drink and the stylized meat of the soul.’

As he spoke I remembered the unemployed soul of humanity in the stylized munition factories of Skull. What stylized teeth and jaws did such an unemployed soul wear? Were they stylized iron teeth, stylized iron jaws, with little or no apprehension of the dead shrimp in a mouth chewing aimlessly, violently? I saw the stylized body of the unemployed soul of humanity turning within a deeper and deeper chaos of insensible vision, a deeper and deeper blindness, a deeper and deeper grave.

‘Visionary employment beyond the grave,’ said Tiresias (and I wondered in what degree he was mocking all civilizations), ‘is an alteration in the biases of the soul, it is a threshold into the resurrection of the body.’

Were not mockery and self-mockery a measure in themselves of the changing shroud, the changing investitures, of bias? I saw all at once — in the psychical Glass eyes in which I stood within the giant grave of the underworld — that the Beast was involved in weaving a portion of Emma’s seamless garment and that such a weave was a pointer into the tasks of the employed soul.

I followed the light, almost invisible, thread along Tiger’s deck and into every minuscule eye of bone, every faint crack, every ‘hole’ in the flesh of the vortex, the spinning top of sleep in the garden of the remembered sea, every fissure, every sailor, until I was aware of its still match within the flame and the bite of the water, within the flame and the bitten water, as if the light thread turned on itself into an intricate reversal of expectations.

When Tiger sailed Alice and Miriam and I and the others who were drowned that day had invested in a safe return to harbour. When Navies sail the crew invest in a safe return to harbour. When civilizations harness the swamp or the earthquake-hillside or the volcanic plateau, humanity invests in safe walls and cities. How safe? How doomed? That the Beast had spun its portion of Emma’s seamless robe in such a context was a pointer into the choices one makes (or which one should perceive one is involved in making), the price one pays at every level of existence (or may find one is called upon to pay when one lives by choice apparently on the edge of the abyss).

‘The Beast-thread in the vortex and the stillness is the life of the dear seed one should visualize as a warning of the spirit against monstrous excess, the life of dear energy one should visualize as an illumination of true body and mind (a grain of light in a dark world is sustenance indeed), the life of the dear corn, the dear flower, the dear fruit, one should read with the eyes of the heart and the mind as frail extensions of the body of the earth, the convulsive power of the body of the earth that writes of itself with ecstatic petal or cloth of beauty by which it heals its ceaseless ailments and sustains its paradoxical fertility.