Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I bowed my head. I tried to close my ears. The nature of violence! It was abhorrent to be drawn into such a dialogue. But Canaima’s presence remained. His voice was penetrated I felt by the musical and antiphonal utterance of the bird-creature, his victim, half-coffined in soil and water; I found it almost unbearable. No wonder I had apparently forgotten what I had heard in 1948. It was less an utterance and more the rhythm of space: as if the striking and the stricken soul — the anima of conflict-in-suffering — were speaking in terms ecstatic (as much as to say ‘salvation is real if we retrace our steps into a visionary cradle of being’) yet so disturbing, so unusual, so strange, I wanted to forget absolutely a medium of discourse I dreamt I had entered and knew.

I continued to bow my head but Canaima’s presence remained. He was dancing slowly, dancing intricately. He was dancing away from me into the past, into 1948, up the Potaro riverbank, even as he circled and returned afresh under my bowed head in 1988 within the frame of the present moment. He danced again away from me into the mid-twentieth century, vanished up the hill but returned as upon a curve in intricate space.

And it became essential now to recover a medium of inner/outer response that had triggered the dance long ago, dance as flight, dance as escape, dance as a visitation of terrifying responsibility for one’s deeds. Dance as lightning wings … Lightning was a sudden vision that I associated with the masked corpse on the ground long ago and I could not account for it now except in an unravelling of memory, in recalling the past, in recalling the way I had let Canaima escape into the mist-laden sun up the hill, the way I had seen the face of his victim within a shell of paint, shell-like lips that appeared to glisten and whiten and redden in the rising sun reflected in the water-top at my feet.

My silence had lodged itself in those lightning frail wings on a dancer’s lips: harnessed lightning discourse that we infuse into a suspension bridge, or into a rocking vessel on the high seas, or a distant aeroplane that flashes like a bright insect in the sky within a thin trail of snow-cloud, or a stairway into space, a ladder, the crossing of many a subtle abyss , vertical crossing, horizontal crossing, cyclical crossing.

Perhaps I was the medium of the dance in touching the earth, in touching the light, in touching the sculpture of appearances as if every structure one shaped, or ordered, or visualized, was a sacred infusion of slow-motion lightning into substance, substance into life.

Canaima had returned in that dangerous dance of the soul originating in spatial rhythms and music one rarely listens to. And when one does one tends to forget. Perhaps it is only possible to stop and to listen when one is drawn by a thread or a key to the door of the unconscious as it lifts into slow-motion lightning consciousness.

Had I saved him in order to find him again dancing on the threshold of that uplifted door that I now began so faintly to recall, to see in everything …?

I remembered the wings that had fluttered on the dancer’s lips. A thread ran from them now into the dark melodic door that I had glimpsed as my entry into the first bank of the river of space. It was a curious and a peculiar door of associations but such peculiarity of composition was inevitable in my situation. The truth was I had forgotten so much in myself, I had eclipsed so much in myself. I was beginning to remember now …

It is indeed essential to retrace one’s steps within the long Day of the twentieth century. It is essential to test one’s vocation as an architect. The door of dreams is my achievement, is it not?

‘Your achievement, Anselm? You seem frightfully eager to set out, to go through the door. No doubt you will clothe yourself in invisibility as the ancient epic heroes did in many a long odyssey.’ He was mocking me. ‘Have you forgotten, do you remember?’

‘I almost forgot how fearful I was when you returned. You were so perfectly visible! I asked you to leave me alone. Now I know that whatever form we take it may be an initiation into extending

‘Extending our senses, Anselm. We cannot solve the world’s terrifying problems otherwise.’

His mood suddenly changed as if he were a different person, a fury disguised, a god disguised in ‘visibility’. Perhaps only human heroes on this side of the grave, in the land of the living Dream, need the protection of ‘invisibility’. I was uncertain. Perhaps ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ were biased configurations susceptible to a sacred humour that offered to redeem one’s imperfect grasp of the miracle of time and space: biased configurations within human gods, godlike humans, that the weak artist or saint or architect may bear to express the unbearable divine: weak, yes, but inwardly strengthened through multiple sharers in every field of endeavour in the translation of epic fate into inimitable freedom within the unfinished genesis of cross-cultural moment.

I knew but I was fearful to accept what I knew. I wished to place a seal upon the innermost realms, the innermost cliff of Being that exists everywhere.

‘Anselm, Anselm,’ he cried. ‘Architect, engineer, painter, lover, sculptor, saint!’ He was mocking me again. ‘All these extensions help you to conceal yourself in your various properties. But remember they are suspended by a thread of music in the abyss. That thread is woven out of ages of prayer.’

‘Where did you learn all this rubbish?’ I demanded.

‘The sanity, the humour of the dead who return as themselves, their wicked or their innocent selves, inhabited nevertheless by the fragility of knowing themselves otherwise! You will understand in due course when you go through the door as a living dreamer. It’s time the living entered into a true discourse with the reformative disguises of the dead everywhere amongst them.’

‘Madness,’ I said. ‘Sanity,’ he replied. We were talking within the curious comedy, the curious cross-purpose of incantation and Dream. ‘Let me put it bluntly. We need strange cross-purpose, strange self-contradiction, to open the fabric or prisonhouse of existence. If crime is forever crime, if tautology rules in our dogmas and poetries and statecraft, if violence is the only armour against the violent, then the door is obsolete, the drum is obsolete, the organ engages in nothing but the business of doom. But you know that is not true. The thread of the dance may bring us together again and again, Anselm. But the dance is no absolute enclosure. It is freedom’s re-visionary step, however difficult, into unimaginable truth and beauty.’

I was fascinated by the unfashionable word ‘beauty’. What is beauty in an ugly world, I asked myself. Perhaps he had stumbled and I had gained the upper hand over him, over the fury or the god that inhabited him. Beauty was worthless! He gave a sudden bark and poked me in the ribs as if his finger were truth’s knife. I recoiled. My complacency appeared to bleed as if I had received a wound. Was I a creature — an unwitting creature no doubt — of the nihilist philosophy of a civilization? Did I deserve to die at the hands of Canaima?

‘Not to die. Not to die. You will recover. The thread never snaps. And yet sometimes it appears to snap. It snaps, I tell you. It never snaps. It snaps, I tell you. It never snaps. It snaps, I tell you. Doesit eversnap?’ His voice had grown terrible, and I suddenly recalled the way he had stared at his victim on the ground when I came upon them on the riverbank. As though he were shaking him with his glance, shaking him free, yet binding him in a secret net.

‘I want the world to understand,’ he spoke softly now as if his rage were written into the spectre of a river I recalled, ‘how precious he is. How invaluable you are, Anselm. I came close to taking your life. To killing you in the Dream and flinging you back into the mid-twentieth century upon him. I want you to know who I am not. I am not a mischief-maker. I am a manifestation of a conflict of values that I nurse within my victims. No ordinary criminal, Anselm. You should know within your childhood heart of hearts! We need to puncture one another’s dramatic misconceptions from the day we were born that feed the theatre of the world. You saved me, yes, when you remained silent. I released you when I could have easily, so easily, killed you when I appeared to mother (or was it to father?) my victim on the ground. We are twins …’