Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

This compulsion upon Billionaire Death was astonishing. It sprang from the nerve-end of the resurrection body — the thread of divinity’s nerve through all the cavities and the chasms of nature — a nerve-end (or nerve-beginning) that spelt a complex revival of buried resources arching through many cultures and civilizations towards a true voice, a true ear, a true dialogue that the resurrection body nourishes as its ultimate originality. Here at last W. H. felt he could face the world with a dialectic of psyche and imagination. Here at last he saw how Alice’s and Miriam’s debts drew him to look with uncanny laughter and sorrow into the meaning of the economy he served. To see the mortgage as a debt to sorrow and ecstasy — a debt to (or of) tradition — was to sight and to weave a thread that ran back into the past as it moved into the cross-cultural humanities of the future.

‘IT IS A NERVE OR A THREAD IN THE FABRIC OF A SEAMLESS ROBE FAR OUT UPON THE WATERS OF SPIRIT TO WHICH ONE MOVES (I MOVE IN YOU, YOU IN ME) BY INFINITE DEGREES.’ Thus I impelled him to dream as I lay within his shadow. Thus I impel you to dream as I converse with the future …

May I pause and reflect again upon the obvious. I am Ghost. I have never before written a line. But I did utter certain cautionary fragments of text to Robin in the magic wood some time after he hid me in his shadow from the immigration officer Ulysses Frog. If I do write now I do not claim to be original but to tap the innermost resources of eclipsed traditions in the refugee voices that W. H. heard in the sea. I counsel you likewise — with whom I specifically converse — to remember the scripts of foaming water (foaming with constellations) within the traceries of the skeleton marches of the sea. And through these, and this fictional autobiography, I write to you of a seamless robe but find it necessary to stress that such seamlessness is not to be equated with the bounty of conquest. Rather its fabric lies in the spinning vortex of the sea, the still vortex of the sea; as if the still vortex of air, earth and sky — the spinning vortex of dream — secretes a corridor or passageway through every wave and overturning of rigid expectation.

I write in a wave that capsizes into a deformity of vision possessing such ascendancy it tends to conceal its hollowness. Think of that hollow wave as a debt to space! As the fee many a poor soul paid for a ticket to paradise. In the reversal of that hollow wave, space becomes an asset in breaking moulds of prepossession.

It is as if the bill of sale of the magical theatre of childhood that W. H. enacted becomes the currency of spirit. Money is the hurricane that may subside nevertheless into a gentle spray in a realm of ancestral yet new-born space or it is nothing. It may drive a hard bargain between the dead sailor and the living pilot, or a compassionate bargain between the born and the unborn navigator, but its true myth and value lie on the scales of the sea it may never dispense with within a revivification of the spaces of meaning that tie one voyaging generation to another.

How can one sell or put a price on the map of heaven, the map of earth, without incurring an irony that multiplies the purse strings of Billionaire Death? Think of this — you with whom I converse — as you look back from your ship of life and death to the dunning world you have left behind, the landlord or landlady, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, etc., etc.

As the hollow wave breaks, the chorus of the world becomes all at once a sacramental self-confession.

Robin Redbreast Glass began his voyage towards Archbishop Emma in the year of grace AD 2025 in which I am now writing to you. He carried with him a portion of the seamless robe she is to wear. I plucked it from Beast and gave it to him.

Beast’s thread is the seamless garment one carries in ailing nature yet seeks from another source (a healing or healed source) upon the waters of spirit. Carries through arts of sorrow towards the consummation of bliss.

How to find a true balance between such carrying in vessels of nature and such seeking from vessels of spirit!

A wave arises. Look! Here are the scales that Billionaire Death offered Robin and Peter: scales upon which to weigh Alice’s ring against the killing stone from a hillside. Look! Do they not compose a perfect match? The stone is purged of terror in the ring of a sacrament upon the scales on the waters of healing spirit.

But alas the stone begins to drift away from the ring into the Night of civilization. As they drift, the thread one carries towards the thread one seeks, appears to be broken or lost.

And yet it remains, it exists. But I, Ghost, know now — I cannot deceive you — that the price to be paid to gain and regain such a perception of a balance between ‘terror’ and ‘sacrament’ is greater than one imagines. It is a price that may redeem the sale of the earth and the sky in our nuclear age, our nuclear pawnshop, by drawing us — you and me — to the nerve-end fabric in the resurrection body where it touches the sliced purse strings of Billionaire Death.

Weigh that slice against the apparent severance of reality in the thread one carries towards the thread one seeks.

And perhaps one may see again in another light the infinite rehearsal in the economy of the resurrected body, an economy that may still, despite everything, salvage a civilization …

On one scale lies the terror of the broken thread or the drifting stone, the explosive rocket, in the seamless garment of God. On the other the sliced purse strings of Billionaire Death.

It is an extreme balance, an extreme purgation of terror in sacramentalized money, in an extreme age. Another wave arises as I address you. Remember me, remember Ghost.