Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I was stunned by Canaima’s outrageous address, the address of a spiritual tormentor. I had set him free and yet he was my prisoner. He had killed, he had come close to killing me. I still felt his knife in my ribs. The dancer he had killed lay within the net of his (and my) mind and heart. The cap of Alicia — a family badge I associated with childhood — had been stuck on the dead man’s head. So he was part and parcel of a childhood — half-forgotten — theatre as well. The knife and the cap were an incomplete badge and signature I suddenly remembered.

Salvation is the mystery of unfathomable grace yet torment, the mystery of the net, of the thread, of the key to a door whose obsolescence or inestimable value I was soon to know within a body of living, sculpted, painted ghosts arising from the past into a Dream of presence.

*

I walked through the door of the dream-unconscious as an honorary ghost in the wake of Canaima’s metaphoric knife in my ribs. As such, as a living dreamer, I was able to don — in true ancient epic style within the late twentieth century — the cloak of invisibility that I needed in retracing my steps and embarking upon my pilgrimage upon the first bank of the river of space.

I turned in the morning light — wholly unseen by the people in the region who were now astir — and took an intricate path along the riverbank in the direction of the Macusi Waterfall and Rapids.

The river was angry as if it had been stirred by Canaima’s glance which shook the dead bird-man at his feet. Its sudden, passionate foam led me to paint the soil of the place with a degree of coarseness that I instantly regretted. I looked everywhere for monsters as I touched the knife in my ribs. What monsters? The masses of the river (miniature masses, I may add, since the population was small) were made up of ordinary folk, gold and diamond miners, everyday faces one would meet in the footpaths through the forest or on the water-top, Macusis whose children were attending the Mission Church and the School, Inspector Robot and his police force, Penelope and Ross George the English missionaries.

I came upon a Macusi woodman with an axe on his shoulder. He was — in the circumstances of my invisibility — unable to see me but I possessed the outrageous liberty of scanning his features and inspecting him from top to toe. There was a faint sweat in his eyes like a spider’s web or the distilled breath of the river upon glass. He was sturdy as rock. His employment was to fell several acres of rainforest timber. A mere drop these were on my canvas of space that invoked the mid-twentieth century into which I had come. But one wondered how it would spread in the future. The rainforests were the lungs of the globe. Trees needed to be felled, yes, but the breath of the rivers and the forests was a vital ingredient in space. It was an issue of living contrasts interwoven by the soul of the dance through every monstrous desert that lay hidden in the coarse soil of place — deserts that had not yet happened in South America but which we could inflict on ourselves if we were not watchful and capable of attending to the voices of the dead in our midst.

I — as Government Surveyor, Government Architect, Government Sculptor and Painter of the City of God, an Imaginary City within the fabulous ruins of El Dorado — had submitted a report on the preservation of the rainforests to my employers in Alicia’s museum of fossils in Georgetown.

I said to the woodman — ‘Your people were here before Columbus dreamt he had touched the shores of India. That is why you and your people are called Indians. History is a book of dreams. And it’s time we scanned the pages afresh and woke up to patterns of Sleep in which we stumble upon each other in the masks of many existences. When we fight one another — whom do we fight? When we love or hate one another — whom do we love or hate? Be careful, axeman! Remember the crosses on Calvary’s hill. They were felled trees, carven trees, felled by living, sleep-walking ghosts like you.’

He did not understand a word but stopped and listened, astonished at my voice. It was the trick of an honorary ghost who sighed in the trees. Was it phantom cinema, phantom radio, imported into savage and remote realms? There was a black bead or ritual charm on his lips that he could blow into a curious kind of balloon in which to trap visual spirits. I took advantage of him. I touched the bead and converted it into a television box over his head that was as transparent as his balloon. Its transparency matched the faint sweat or breath of glass arising from the river into his eyes.

Trick of breath in my sculpture of him it may have been but it was authentic comedy or retrace of unimaginable genesis I sought nevertheless to infuse into the arts of life as a moral counterpoint to civilization’s addiction to technology. I moved within the Painted Bush and threw the net of an unseen camera around him. Startled all at once in recalling the way Canaima had thrown his net around his victim on the ground! The correspondence was indeed startling. It gave an extra edge to the film I was suddenly involved in making with the epic media of the gods who had thrust me on to the first bank of the river of space. The Macusi woodman was in process of becoming a bright Shadow on a screen (in a box-balloon) to millions of invisible viewers within a net of the future (invisible to him as I now was) who would feast on him in their sitting-rooms, feast on him and on the nearextinction of his savage tribe, feast on him as on a rare bird, exotic fish, butterfly.

In the outrageous liberties I took with him I was their ambassador, the ambassador of invisible millions, invisible to the savage I shot with my camera.

I inscribed on my film the following caution — ‘Read the ironies of technology in the haunted spaces of civilization’s mind, a mind infused with metaphors of the hunt and the kill, the seizure of others within every museum or cinema.’

The door of associations through which I had come had now swung wide. It was so close I saw something I had not seen before. There were subtle etchings of three crosses. I was prompted to ask the Macusi axeman (though he did not understand a word) — ‘Who is the king of thieves? Look! there he is. He’s descending from his cross as if to retrace his steps backwards into previous centuries, forwards into later centuries, into our century. Odd of me to say “retrace”. Retrace one’s steps into the past. But can we retrace our steps in the coarse soil of the future? He is the thief who mocked Christ and turned his face away from paradise’s door. Such a thief lives in us all and in a door that haunts us in every century.’

I saw he was listening and I continued as I touched the knife in my ribs. ‘Perhaps my door is rooted in a subtle abyss between Christ’s cross and that of the king of thieves, the door in the cross, the cross in the door.’

‘He is behind you,’ I said suddenly to the axeman. ‘He stands between your raised axe and the tree you are about to fell. I am not sure but he reminds me … I think I know. I remember something from childhood when I played in Alicia’s garden theatre with my uncle Proteus who was adept at all sorts of masks and disguises. The sun would glint on his brow like a cord of bright sixpences. Clever devil! I remember once he stole my pocket money. It wasn’t much but it was a fortune to me. Fortunes are made when one astutely delves into the pockets of infants. It was a moral lesson that Proteus intended.

‘Look axeman! The thief turns in your Shadow within the futuristic television box I have infused into a bead that you wear. Some say he stole the atom from the thorn of a Rose on Christ’s brow. He turns, axeman! he turns in your box and faces millions. Look! how they cheer, how they applaud.’