Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

What was strangest about the role of Doubting Thomas in the Carnival of New Forest was his proximity to giants, broken giants, uneasy giants, partially slain giants. He grieved over them (even when he thwarted them), served them through masks of sobriety and rage by sifting the currency of the estate of the world in order to prove the depth of the wounds inflicted on humanity. But that was not all. Thomas sought to prove … Prove what?

Prove the seed or bone of royal genesis; prove a game that started in childhood — mostly forgotten — hope ; prove that royalty or glory (however contested) is other than mere fallacy or privilege, and the torn rag with which Everyman wrestles may actually still bind up the wounds of time …

Thus Thomas’s Carnival new world/old world masks were fraught with ambiguity, the ambiguity of the saint and the revolutionary manqué. I was unsure of Thomas, unsure of labels, but I loved him and felt his predicament inwardly and keenly. I knew I was ignorant of the inner problematic of sainthood as of the religious torment in touching a wound that may fertilize a Carnival bond with frustration, anguish, jealousy, violence, in subject cultures. He seemed to me as indispensable a guide through the Inferno of history as Masters himself was.

Even though buried in reflection, in past tenses and present tenses, I had not lost sight of the game on the beach. Thomas had relinquished the rag and was seeking to persuade the boy-king to abandon the game. But he insisted on going on. It had been a trifling cut, he said, pointing to the sharp bone on the beach.

I saw now that the bone was shaped like a knife from El Doradan Carnival.

“A seed sometimes cuts into the masked lip of a bird, the lip within the beak, as a bone cuts into the spirit of a child, the spirit within the flesh. But the axe, where is the shaman’s axe that slices and shapes the monument in the seed, the galaxy in the bone?”

He crawled on with the precocity of age and childhood, nine years old, nine centuries old, and came at last with Thomas in his shadow, in my shadow as well, falling from the sky with its wheel of lights, to the wild cherry tree that had been reduced to blackened limbs and stumps though I had seen it, or thought I had seen it, in all its original glory. This was the primal gateway into the underworld and overworld of the cosmos. The light that bathed it infused it, all at once, with the sensation that it grew downwards, that its roots were up here in space, its branches down there in the earth.

I looked around for the axe that had cut the tree, as the bone had cut the spirit of childhood into light-year bandaged ghost, and thought I discerned it far out upon the retreating tide when a glimmer of sun upon a wave transfigured the ocean into lilting, sighing, singing sharpness. That was the shaman’s axe! It was he (El Doradan shaman or space-priest) who had axed the tree a long time ago and sculpted from it El Dorado himself, El Dorado’s retinue, his court, his wives, his children, his huntsmen, his fishermen, his peers, his civil servants.

All had come alive under the subtle liquid blow of the axe, and I recalled Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea breathing all of a sudden under the chisel. So too had the wood, sliced from the cherry tree, turned to gold then to flesh-and-blood.

Were axe and chisel and bone the same liquid tool across parallel light years? I seemed to see it all save that the shadow of uncertain voice or lilt of the cosmos, in all carven broken things, persisted. Masters and his disciple had crawled on the beach, even as the axe sharpened the rhythm of the tide, and the chisel and the bone shone, but I wondered whether they were living sculpted being, whether — despite the fact that the cut or the slice of original shaman may have engendered freedom — a pattern of falsehood masked the truth to promote an automatic procession riveted in reflexes of fascination with violence, reflexes of false brutal axe, brutal greed, the greed of power, the greed of possession.

They stopped. Thomas crawled away into a sea-wood in pursuit of a colourful crab. Masters remained alone. I felt a shiver run through my veins as through his wound still bound with a rag. To crawl or to stop in mindless attachment to the instrument of power that fashions one’s nerves is to appear to live in freedom, yet not to live in freedom’s consciousness of the sorrow of pain in genesis, the slice, the cut, the blow that dis-members , yet may occasion one to re-member.

I felt divisions of sorrow within that blow, divisions of true shaman or creator and false shaman or manipulator of defeated cultures. I felt divisions of sorrow within a universal genius of love that seems at times in pawn to a universal seducer of humanity.

Yes, I had projected parallel fictions of “doubt” into space in shadow characterization (as though “space” were an entity to be sculpted like “wood” or “marble”), I had felt profoundest sorrow hit me, or reshape me, and I knew that the fiction of Memory (of re-membering, or reconstitution) lay in complex truths and falsehoods that could ape each other’s divisions within the unfinished stroke of genesis and creation.

The tree or stump of a gateway into the underworld and the overworld was a crucial rehearsal and alignment of truth and falsehood, and I felt myself now related to it as though through it; through its aerial roots and earthen branches I discerned a stranger, an intimate stranger, approaching young Masters. I have personified parallel existences of “doubt” in this spiritual biography. How should I personify Memory in an intimate stranger, Memory the male rather than the female persona at the heart of Carnival?

Ask young Masters why he suddenly ran from the man who approached him and invited him to go for a walk; he was tempted but he ran.

I say “ask” — ask the bandaged light-year ghost, ask him whether his fright may have been occasioned by rumours of a rapist on the prowl along the foreshore. I have checked a newspaper of the 1920s (the New Forest Argosy ) and found several columns on a rapist that a child could have read. And indeed it would be easy to advance such an explanation for Masters’ fear of the stranger who addressed him. Equally easy it would be to say that he had been warned by his parents and teachers. But the inner facts are different. I questioned him closely. He ran for “reasons” that were “irrational”; his flight was more eloquent than rumour or news, it spoke the language of the unconscious. He had received no caution — conventional caution — against strangers. He had read nothing in the New Forest Argosy.

Fear had become a republic or plantation or colony against which he recoiled and beat his fists, not with his naked small hands that would have been broken in the rapist’s grasp but with his running feet that clawed and sprinted on the earth. Was it a battle then in which he was joined against fear when he ran from fear? Such is the language of the unconscious. It speaks on many levels of dream, half-puppet language, half-spiritual language, half-true language, half-false utterance, the labyrinth of innocence and guilt.

The man who approached him was curiously appealing, oddly familiar, and yet sinister. He seemed to exist and yet not to be altogether real, a presentiment, a fate, something to be metaphysically penetrated, avoided, seen through. He was a menace, a danger; he would appear, again and again betwixt heaven and hell, Masters felt. Perhaps this was not the first time (and there had been previous visits) but whether first or not it would constitute the first critical encounter with Memory he would remember. An instinct for imagination perhaps saved the boy-king. It was a game of soul, a game a child plays with the shadow of Memory false and true, the shadow of Ambition, false and true. For Memory’s male persona aped the shaman of old. With a wave of his arm against the shadowy axe of the sea, far out in the sun, the intimate stranger called to the boy as to someone he knew, someone he saw with a backward glance from the future, or the past, into the present.