Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Even as they beat him they embraced him. They were wed to him, they were wed to an obsession imprinted on the door of the unconscious. The golden man, the golden thief. It did not matter whether gold was black or white.

I remembered now. I saw it now as I retraced my steps upon fossil leaf, fossil gold, fossil diamond, and glimpsed in high heaven, through the body of the forest, the flashing light of a Horse that I was to encounter much later and on another bank in the river of space in my pilgrimage. At the present moment, however, the horse’s mane stood on the thief’s head as an apparition of his fall across the centuries into my age.

*

The king of thieves had pierced my cloak of invisibility (as I had pierced his eyes of blindness), and as a consequence I became a curious honorary telepathist or spy of the heart and the mind, as I continued my journey. The telepathist on the first bank of the river of space is a spy, who dreams of building an Imaginary City of God by accumulating necessary intelligences in every sphere, through all alternatives and parallels. I felt I stood now within a medium of exchange with ‘live absences’, with those who had vanished or died but were returning now into the Sleep of object, as much as the Sleep of subject, the Sleep of ruler, as much as the Sleep of ruled. As though the substance with which I now sculpted them into life was shared thought, a mutual exchange of secrets, a mixture of philosophy and reverie.

I did not have far to go before I came upon the English missionaries, Ross and Penelope George. I had been thinking of them when I met Pizarro. I was sure they had been thinking of me too across the abyss that lay between us. I drew them up, as it were, from within the darkness of my own mind and the darkness of theirs within half-grave, half-cradle of mutual instinct and memory.

I saw them descending a hill towards me. Just behind them came a soldier, a high-ranking officer I perceived from the many decorations that he wore on his chest. The medals and decorations were vibrating almost imperceptibly to the faint rhythm of military music running through Penelope’s mind. She was humming a marching song silently to herself and I picked up an intelligence of the strains and echoes in myself as telepathic spy. A song that left her pensive, uneasy, burdened by something or someone she could not easily shake off. Her reverie ceased when she saw me. (I was now visible to all as my previous cloak had been pierced by the king of thieves.) She stopped humming or beating the strains of the tune silently within herself as she saw me and the soldier who stood so close to her — his hand on her arm, squeezing her arm — stepped away from her into the Bush. I lost sight of him.

But his appearance and abrupt disappearance made me uneasy. It did not yet occur to me that he was a ghost I had sculpted into existence by spying into the materiality of Penelope’s silent song, Penelope’s uneasy military body of thought that possessed her in that instant. My first idea was that he had come to visit Ross and herself (whom I gathered he had known in England) to tell them he was a candidate for the Governorship of the Colony. Perhaps some such odd fantasy — fantasy to do with the dead who haunted their thoughts powerfully — had been relayed to me by them. Or perhaps I had picked up some early ambition, some early hope for a seat in the administrative hierarchy of empire, entertained by the officer himself before his death, of which they knew and which lingered in their subconscious or unconscious.

The tasks of a spy who dreams to build the City of God are complex, sometimes they border upon meaningful self-deception. The notion that he was a candidate for Governorship — indeed much more, a Ulysses returned into his private kingdom, private possession — gripped me. I wondered whether he would know something of my brief in the Potaro as Government Surveyor and Architect. Perhaps he had visited my head office in Georgetown which was set in Queen Alicia’s theatre of history in which I had grown up as a child with Proteus and Harold.

Perhaps he had been informed that I had been sent to reconnoitre the area as a likely settlement for refugees, to assess the hydro-electric potential of the Potaro River above the Macusi Waterfall … I felt the curious tremor of a subject who faces the object of power, the dress, the decorations for military prowess, the uniform, the high masquerade to which one owes allegiance.

I felt the strains of such object-power, heroic personality, lingering in the loom and tapestry of Penelope’s mind. I felt the thread of her song stitching kings and queens upon the Bush around us and into my carnival temperament.

Aunt Alicia was a carnival queen (her imprint was clear to me now on the painted Bush) and Penelope responded to this lightning telepathy by assuming the burden of becoming a queen herself — the queen of the El Dorado Mission House of the Potaro in which she and Ross taught and worked. Burden indeed! The El Dorado Mission narrowly escaped being in the red. It needed funds and though it succeeded — with the help of international charities — in defraying expenses it was driven at times to exceed its slim budget. The War had left us all poor.

I seemed to learn all this as Penelope’s and Ross’s stream of inner sometimes disjointed reflection circulated within a medium of legend that I associated with Alicia. Aunt Alicia knew all about slim budgets. But her humour, her ironic charity, was such that she converted Poverty into a moral comedy. ‘Ask the poor,’ she would say, ‘how they see the world! They will tell you it’s a village

‘A village?’

‘A global village, Anselm. Remember the Beatitudes — “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”’

I never fully understood what my formidable aunt was driving at when she associated her carnival queenship at home when I was a child with the ‘poor in spirit’, but now it became curiously obvious to me that masks of Poverty in her theatre (slim budgets etc. that she shared not only with hard-driven neighbours and members of her own family but with august missions, high enterprises of art or religion or education) embodied the visionary importance of the complex unity of Mankind through dual or triple queenships in order to illumine the necessity to cross frontiers, to break polarizations. ‘When one is poor in spirit,’ she used to say, ‘one is rich in giving a helping hand to others whoever they may be, wherever they may have come from. We’re not just puppets on a string, Anselm. Someone we ourselves put on a pedestal may pull a string or two — I know that — and catapult us into an arena where we fight one another even though we scarcely know whom it is exactly we are fighting. It’s easy to fall into line like helpless idiots, Anselm. Until helplessness becomes the cement of the state … Yes, helplessness is a form of subconscious cement, helplessness is a block that we build in which the state imprisons us. The poor in spirit know they have to reach out. And that’s carnival. Reaching out. Reaching through legacies of helplessness into dual and triple kingships and queenships across frontiers. Kingship or queenship becomes a shared privilege, a shared burden.’

There flashed in my mind, as I remembered the staccato rhythm of her sermon to me — when she wrestled with varieties of distress — a distinction between ‘prizes and punishments’ (in the king of thieves) and ‘shared privilege, shared burden’ in a theatre of Spirit.

I was astonished at the curious wealth of association running through my mind: a spy into world Poverty’s metamorphoses invokes a store of secrets (open secrets) that come thick and fast from everywhere and nowhere.

Penelope was smiling. She shared the material substance of my thoughts even as I penetrated hers. She knew I was an absurd spy for the ‘kingdom of heaven’ (‘absurdity is sometimes a bleak, a terrifying measure of creative hope, creative truth’), and it amused her, even as it helped to lift from her the shadow of unhappiness and anxiety that I had witnessed in her when the soldier had held her hand with his insubstantial but bruising fist, with a kind of brutal force, a kind of jealous rage.