Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I was amazed, to say the least, when I saw him in the theatre of Dream. Had he emerged from an abyss? I was dreaming of peaceful Admiral’s Park, one summer evening, late June 1988, Essex, England. And there he was. I knew him at once in the complicated mirror of a dream after forty years. Lucius Canaima. He came through a door of space into memory and imagination. It was impossible to run. Nailed to the ground. Human tree? He knew me, I him. My heart beat and loosened the nail in one’s foot. The nail that fear had hammered there fell out. The world was a stage for every walking tree and I advanced upon it. Unsure of my lines, my part in the play of a civilization.

For play it was. Play of truth.

I should have memorized my lines in anticipation of this moment, lines written by ‘daemons’ and ‘furies’, lines written within me that seemed familiar yet were profoundly alien in my own ears, lines that seemed unlike words in their material substance, pressure, intensity, lines written by spirits of wood and water, animal, bird, cloud sailing in space.

‘It’s you, Canaima. I know you within the long Day of the twentieth century, a long Day composed of years that are like elongated minutes. We last met on the bank of the Potaro River, South America. 1948. A stage then. A stage now.’

Stage? Why stage? Why theatre? Theatre of freedom’s responsibilities? I wanted to fling such questions at him. ‘You play a murderer, Canaima, and the part you play terrifies me.’ I stopped and thought I heard him reply but I was unsure. Now it’s high time the sky spoke, the rain spoke, the acid rain, the broken leaf. High time they grew within us, they changed us, they made us see how endangered, how polluted our globe is.

Canaima stared at me from within the ageless shadow of sky and wind that I etched into theatre, into grassy curtain, backdrop of trees, tides, oceans. ‘Forty years,’ I said ritualistically, callously, as if ‘forty’ were a mere symbol. I sought to evade him as a statistic or a mere symbol, to cancel him out within myself, to reduce him to nothingness. Why should the living dead return to plague one’s peaceful dreams? What is peace? What is prosperity? He was no ordinary criminal. His victims reflected the moral dilemmas of an age. As if they were carefully chosen to bring home to us our involvement in threatened species, a threatened globe, within the apparently common-or-garden materials we employed or used as architect, sculptor or engineer.

‘I am an architect still, an engineer still.’ I was ashamed to have boasted. ‘And you, Lucius,’ I cried, ‘what are you now?’

‘You saved me,’ Canaima said softly at last. So softly it could have been the breath of an instrument, a strange, disturbing and confessional music interwoven with echoic gravity and fury.

‘Saved you?’ I protested. ‘Saved you?’ I drew his features on the canvas of space. When one dreams one dreams alone. When one writes a book one is alone. The characters one re-creates may have died, or may have vanished into some other country, so one invokes them as ‘live absences’, absences susceptible to being painted into life, sculpted into life, absences that may arise in carvings out of the ground, from dust, from the wood of a tree, the rain of a cloud: paintings and sculptures that are so mysteriously potent in one’s book of dreams that they seem to paint one (as one paints them), to sculpt one (as one sculpts them), and in this mutual and phenomenal hollowness of self one and they become fossil stepping-stones into the mystery of inner space. Perhaps one needs a creative penetration of inner space in a space age if one is to save one’s world rather than, in some future time, abandon it — within technologies of flight — as a wreck.

‘Saved you?’ I protested again.

‘Conspired with me then, Anselm,’ said Lucius Canaima. ‘Do you prefer “conspire with” rather than “save”? You were in league with me one way or the other. Your reputation in the Potaro River of South America was that of a good man — something of a bloody saint’ — he was mocking me — ‘whereas I was bad, a devil. Good men who contemplate the mystery of creativity have a way of conspiring with furies. I killed. Does that make me a fury? I warn you, Anselm, you will have to define the nature of a “fury” in your book of dreams. But there’s time for that.’ He stopped. And yet his voice seemed to persist in the ground. The same voice. Yet not quite the same. As if in Lucius I perceived, however faintly, parallel lives, alternative existences. He was a common criminal. He was an uncommon creature. Did such distinctions touch on the disturbing reality of what one sometimes half-jokingly called ‘salvation’? Was this Canaima the same and identical human being I had known? Had he in returning from the dead changed despite appearances?

‘You knew I had killed the Macusi in the bird-mask. You knew I had enticed him from the tribe, from their ritual dance, and killed him. A threatened tribe. Some say on the verge of extinction within the twentieth century. It was as if I had plucked their bird-dancer from the air. I brought him in my arms to the riverbank and put him at the water’s edge. I sprinkled him with water as if he had been drowned. A drowned bird-creature. And then I put a cap on his head — the Alicia-cap — as if he were a member of my team. Perhaps I should say our team, Anselm.

‘You came upon me on the riverbank leaning over him. All you had to do was raise your voice, make an outcry, and I would have been caught. But you remained silent. Had you raised your voice, raised your hand, I may have been caught, and then I would have lost my soul.’

‘No, no,’ I shouted. ‘I cannot believe …’

‘Believe what?’

‘I cannot believe that I let you go, that I accepted such an appalling responsibility. I should have seized you, I should have shouted, I should have handed you over to Inspector Robot.’

‘But you did nothing of the sort,’ said Lucius. ‘You kept your tongue well in your head. Instead of making an outcry you listened . It was not the first time I had committed a crime in South America …’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I was a fool to let you go …’

‘But,’ said Canaima, ‘it was the first time anyone truly stopped and listened.’

‘Listened?’

‘You have forgotten. You will remember. I have returned to help you remember. You began to listen that early morning when you came upon me and my bird-victim to utterances that may now send you back into the very secrets of your childhood. But first you need to come to terms with what happened that day.’

‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Let me go as I once let you go. I have no desire to write a book of dreams, no desire to retrace my steps.’

‘ I had to retrace my steps that day,’ said Canaima. ‘I would never have done so, Anselm, had I not seen that you — no one else had listened before — were attentive to the bird-text on the lips of the dancer I had taken from the Macusi tribe. You became a medium in the dance. The carnival heir of the dance!’ He stopped. I was astonished. I had never dreamt of myself before as a ‘carnival heir’. Perhaps there in that ‘heir’ lay alternative or parallel existences in myself I had suppressed across the years. How strange is one to oneself? How many ‘quantum strangers’ does one bear in oneself?

‘I walked away, that is true, but each step I made was crucial, a crucial rehearsal in an ultimate relationship to test the nature of violence. Terrible but true. And so here I am. ’ What did he mean by, ‘And so here I am ’? Was he implying that the music, the dance, that he claimed to accept through me (when I stopped for the first time in his experience and listened to the inner voice of the slain dancer) lay in a sphere of the unconscious/subconscious I had sought to eclipse over the years in order to reside within the shallows of consciousness? A sphere of the unconscious I could no longer deny?