Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘The life of the dear seed in a blind world intent on excess, addicted to excess, addicted to poverty as much as to glamour, sharpens, I fear,’ said the seer of the underworld, ‘the edge of overturned expectations, the edge of terror in cities, the edge of terrifying pathos in cultures doomed by nature itself, if nature is to survive as a phenomenon of value and therapy of the blind soul.

‘True survival costs dear, Robin Redbreast Glass, true survival should measure its technologies, its investments, against the light of an overturning of expectations and within a capacity to look and move beyond immediate place, immediate time. True survival should be aware of the temptations of prosperity in fabulous ghettos, fabulous concentration camps. True survival should measure the price we have begun to pay to the Beast in the garden of life as we gambol with it, dance with it, and exploit it to our apparent heart’s content.’

The dance of the vortex staged by the Tiresias Tiger band was now over and I found myself once again in the throngs of Skull. I was aware of the divisions in the population. There were the doomsters and the boomsters. Skull was doomed (that was the logic of the doomsters). Skull was invincible concentration camp (that was the message of the boomsters). They sang together DOOM, DOOM, BOOM, BOOM. I stood amongst them with the unfinished thread Beast had woven reflected in my Glass. Unfinished climax with Being. Unfinished thread that ran through the recesses of merriment to illumine all the more vividly the divisions of which I was aware in every city, every village, that floated before me in the panorama of Tiresias.

‘And both,’ said the seer of the underworld, ‘both groups, doomsters and boomsters, must suffer the reversal of expectation. You will not see Emma today, Robin Redbreast Glass. The climax between yourself and the new priest, the new archbishop, remains in suspension. Until humanity can gauge its defeats and the reversed sail by which it moves, one hopes, towards a philosophy of true survival.’ There was a clamour in the air, horns and trumpets and drums that issued from the recesses of existence.

‘What is true survival?’ I said in dismay as if even I (the resurrected body) had forgotten everything the dark seer had said. I looked for Emma but she was not to be seen.

‘You must sail towards her,’ said Tiresias. ‘Have I not already implied what true survival is?’

He paused for a fraction and considered. ‘Let me rehearse again before I vanish some of the implications of true survival. To sail in the nuclear rigging of Skull — in anticipation of the raising of Tiger and its reversed sail — is to sight all the more vividly the earthquake regions or the volcanic regions or the flood regions or the famine/drought regions of the earth.

‘Not that I, Tiresias, need any reminder. Over the centuries it has been my lot to patrol wrecked villages and cities and pastures where dead sheep nibble the lava from the sun in a mountain top.

‘It has been my lot to mediate between all expectations. And in the teeth of flame I have learnt that someone always survives, some group always survives. The survivors may come (it is ironical) from those who lived in the expectation of doom. Equally many who vanish may have been possessed by a conviction of infallible ground. I — as their mediator — had no alternative but to encompass all groups in the underworld and stress a reversed sail, and a spiritual necessity to look into the heart of true survival, into a shadow linking those who were apparently saved and those who were apparently not.

‘I attempt, shall I say, to sow a seed in the survivor that runs through his reversed expectation of doom into the shadow of the non-survivor. It is as if they embrace like man and woman and the shadow comes into the light. It is indeed a seed or frail bond between light and shadow, a frail window of strangest flesh-and-blood between the visible and the invisible. That seed is the primitive impulse of the resurrection of the body. For how can there be a true resurrection without a true balance between opposites by which we measure the human in the divine, the divine in the human? To measure or weigh ourselves against the light-in-the-shadow, the shadow-in-the-light of others is to deepen a reality that breaches the ailing premises of time.’

Tiresias stopped.

‘This is as far as I — the mediator in every crisis of expectation — may go with you, Robin Redbreast Glass. I illumine the seed of fire to enhance the regeneration of wheat. I illumine the shifting plates within the globe to engage civilizations in movements and migrations of threatened peoples and species upon an earth that is still the nursery of hope. In the fire of spirit let us wrest a therapy of the heart and the mind. Let us steep every inch of the resurrection in a capacity to weigh a reversed sail that arises and moves above the seas of chaos.’

It was his last word. He vanished, it seemed, upon the blowing of a horn or the roll of a drum.

I stood still amongst the moving pageants and throngs. I held the unfinished thread in the Glass of spirit. I remembered Canterbury in the magic wood of childhood, the play of Canterbury that Miriam and Alice had written and which Peter and I and other children had performed when we crowned Emma in our little theatre. The little theatre of remembered/forgotten history one encompasses in a lifetime but must pursue into the future with reversed sail.

I turned another page in my fictional autobiography. A blank page upon which I had not yet written. Whose hand would seek mine, whose mask become my age in the future? I saw a shadow upon the page, I saw an extension from Ghost. Spirit is one’s ageless author, ageless character, in the ceaseless rehearsal, ceaseless performance, of the play of truth. The fictionalization of the self in age and in youth is a multi-faceted caution of the universal imagination against the tyranny of hard, partial fact.

A wave arose that bore me up. Bore the drowned boat up from the sea-bed. I was launched upon my voyage towards Emma.

AD 2025 Remember me

When Robin set sail I returned to the sea from whence I had come. I am the ghostly voyager in time, in space, in memory, but always I return to the vast ocean, the rolling seas and the great deeps.

I converse now with the mind and the hand of the new mid-twenty-first-century drowned voyager who is to be reflected in Redbreast Glass. Young in mind he shall be as Alice’s son was. And his hand? It shall swim both wet and dry as it turns W. H.’s drifting narrative to the stars, drifting between worlds. It shall weigh the obvious with care. For the obvious is sometimes an elusive reality.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the drowned voyager,

Knocking on the moonlit ship …

‘I am here, I am Ghost, as Robin sails. Listen!’

He listened with a strange ear, a seeing ear, a listening eye, as we tossed on a wave. I gathered together the fragments of a history …

W. H. sold Miriam’s theatre in the nineteen-sixties (close on three-quartersof a century ago) . He sold when others were shouting ‘independence and prosperity’. Alice’s and Miriam’s untimely deaths had left a mortgage on house and theatre. Had they lived that mortgage could have been concealed for a decade or two. In that sense W. H. was ahead of his time. Fate drove him to discharge a debt of tradition while others were basking still in a dubious El Dorado.

What he could not foresee was the moment when Billionaire Death would be driven to loosen his purse strings and multiply the proceeds from the sale of the magic theatre a thousandfold and more to finance the salvage of the wreck of the boat Tiger.