Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

But the axeman was blind to the past and the future. And yet I was not sure. There was a glint to the blade of his axe that half-blinded my sight as well. Perhaps he was on the brink of disclosing himself in another light. I did my best to keep my eyes fastened upon him. I followed the are that he drew with his blade: slow yet lightning poise of a blade in the darkness of my own mind. The axe stood high in space. He gave a sudden ringing cry. ‘TIMBER, HUMAN TIMBER.’ Then struck. It was a miraculous blow. With one stroke he felled the tree. I scarcely believed what I saw. It was as if his blindness was now — in a flashing instant — a mask that he wore even as my invisibility was a cloak. I was a different person in retracing my steps. He was a different person in striking a blow that was so unusual, so immaculate, it made me abnormally sensitive to the responsibilities that are implicit in every cross one bears, every door one builds. Human timber!

I touched the blade. I marvelled at its subtlety and complex force. I remembered the knife, Canaima’s knife, that had metaphorically killed me yet had pierced me to the core of the body’s waking instrument — as if the knife were an extension of the human hand — so pierced me that I became an heir of civilizations (carnival heir) and was imbued with living dream or inner space to pass through the door of the unconscious, to become sensitive to the abuse of others, to the perils that encompass the globe.

The high stump of the felled tree began to move in the soil of the earth. It drew itself up. It was human timber. It arose from the roots of the cross. My eyes cleared. I remembered. Someone I knew yet did not know. It was the king of thieves. He — unlike the other thief on Calvary’s hill — had rejected paradise. I had glimpsed him on the first bank of the river of space at the heart of the long Day of the twentieth century between the raised axe and the tree. I had glimpsed him in childhood theatre. I had glimpsed him in the protean body of my own family. Such parallels or alternative existences had come into sharpest focus now, quantum axe, quantum camera, quantum knife.

They were the sharpest extension of breath-in-sculpted-body-senses. But simultaneously they made me acutely aware of the king of thieves as burdened with prizes and punishments. The Macusi axeman — whose blade seemed now a lightning extension of my own hand in the sudden darkness that falls over one’s mind in the wake of a staggering event — had vanished. I was left to reflect upon a thief, upon the punishments inflicted upon him, a thief whom I knew or thought I knew. I should have recognized him in the mid-twentieth century when I worked in the Potaro River and he was a miner there but I was blind then, I was deaf then. He was a miner-pork-knocker (in the idiom of the region). Pork-knockers live by the skin of their teeth when the payload, the paydirt, declines. They beat a drum in the Bush for comfort, they scrape the last morsels from every drum or barrel of pork. It was a punishment with which many a great adventurer was familiar in the age of Homer or Virgil or Defoe. And on such scraps I perceived a possibility for — the meditative genesis of — a symphony and a film on the incarnations of the king of thieves.

His nickname in 1948 was ‘Black Pizarro’. It was a tribute to his obsession with gold and to his great namesake, the Spanish conquistador of the sixteenth century, who ransacked the treasuries of the Incas. He was the living mascot of his crew. They hated him yet he was indispensable to them. None was as gifted as he in concealing a stone in the crevices of his flesh or gold under his tongue. He told tales of rich widows and he boasted that he had rubbed shoulders in Georgetown or Rio or Paris or Greece with many a suitor in carnival palaces who waited on queens and wasted their substance. The ruins of El Dorado — whose location tended to shift from region to region, continent to continent, from the present into the remote past, even as it hovered over the future — encompassed he declared the proportions of formidable live fossil (cross-cultural) theatre: ancient Ithaca (with its suitors or millionaire-thieves and its queen Penelope) and modern doors, the door of the modern unconscious uplifted into consciousness, the door of lost paradises, stolen paradises. As a consequence, in sculpting him back from the high stump of a felled tree as multi-existential fabric, as an actor or creature of many incarnations, I placed a stolen diamond in his flesh and a stolen nugget of gold over his heart.

I chiselled him as a thief who sought to steal in every century on earth the heaven he had lost on Calvary’s hill. It was a magnificent obsession. It glimmered in the seed of many an epic, in pre-Christian ages, in many an Odyssey, many an implicit crucifixion upon the high mast of a wrecked ship on the high seas, or beneath the pagan rafters or pagan crosses of buried kingdoms. I chiselled his head into magnificence and plastered the bone and the flesh with ageing leaves (a man in his forties), grey leafy mane or the fleece of cloud or animal hair. This conjunction of fleece with cloud with animal hair with a horse’s mane and with the brilliant, sometimes riotous flow of sun and breeze that stream through a forest of leaves from time to time (before the leaves fall and become sodden or grey or yellow or black) was an indication that the king of thieves sought (however parlous his condition) to ride high in space.

In this extreme context he was both rider and ridden, golden man and slave. He was civilization’s universal puppet, a civilization that took Poverty for granted, Wealth for granted, took the millionaire for granted, took the net that confined them for granted. Until the net snaps in Canaima’s hand. And the diamonds and the gold spill out and breathe in their own right, breathe on high within the forested saddle of space, fall into the ground and rot with every leaf to become emblems of a riotous soul, riotous elements that ride in space, in cloud, in storm, in every landscape, every tide, riotous elements in our mistranslation of the energies of a majestic tempest.

As the net breaks the leaf rides in the sky, as the net breaks the gold flashes in the rain, as the net breaks one’s blindness melts. One sees through the thief’s mask, the thief’s eyes, and he sees through one’s cloak of invisibility. The honorary scarecrow thief on the first bank of the river of space meets the honorary ghost who comes through the door of dreams into a collaboration of elements, a collaboration of poverty and wealth within live fossil theatre.

He is possessed of an insight into levels of being that touch upon all extremities, all prizes, all punishments. The thief and the millionaire — in this commotion of forested and winged elements, streaming and falling rotting leaves in space, gold and silver — come to the verge of surrendering everything into the SLEEP OF HISTORY’S DREAM BOOK in which they encounter themselves as strangers, as intimates. But the gold is heavy (it cannot easily be given up), the rotting leaf is a source of profit, and they find they are addicted still to the charisma of punishment, the charisma of prizes.

Black Pizarro had served, I knew, a sentence of imprisonment in 1947 in Alicia’s gaol of live fossils of history. Six months’ hard labour in the garden theatre. My childhood museum home had become a famous theatre, a prison, a library, it possessed an immortal vase inhabited by queen Alicia’s spirit, it possessed an unfinished Jacob’s ladder. Alicia and my uncle Proteus would have loved it all were they alive in the 1940s, they would have approved the evolution of Poverty — of poor men’s and women’s religion — into carnival masks of wealth.

On his return to the Potaro goldfields in 1948 after he had served his sentence he was chosen leader by the miners. They beat him within a fortnight of his return for a piece of gold he inserted between his toes as they dug the yellow metal in a ravine or a creek close to the Macusi Waterfall.