Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

It was as if we shared a range of childhood secrets, within a language of poetry and epic that was ours. She saw plainly imprinted on the Bush — as in a lightning portrait of mind that I painted there within the gallery of the first bank of the river of space — how Alicia had governed me in childhood even as the ‘soldier’ had been her implicit hero or standard-bearer as far back as she could remember in the games they played in childhood. (She had known him as a child. Their families had been neighbours.)

My state of self-confessional subjection to Alicia helped to lift her state of body and mind into a bond of emotion, in which she was able to resist the jealous soldier by associating herself with Poverty’s masks in a world foreign to her own childhood in Kent, where she grew up, yet pertinent to her deepest fantasies. It was an important treaty, it was the beginning of an important alliance, an important comedy, a maturity, a Wisdom, that would extend its implications within the reach of the four banks of the river of space.

And yet I was suddenly cast down. Such extension into genuine Wisdom seemed now suddenly precarious, suddenly remote in a world in which we needed to acknowledge how little we knew ourselves, and how our lack of self-knowledge was threaded into our ignorance of others, our tendency to rely on so-called first impressions and upon superficial estimates of complicated capacity in others. At least — as an honorary spy upon the first bank of the river of space who had begun to retrace his steps into the heartland of the twentieth century — I was apprised of this. I knew I moved into the extremities, the hidden spaces in others, within the extremities, the hidden spaces in myself, upon a quantum materiality interwoven with the gross materiality and bankrupt realisms of my age. No wonder one tended at times to lose heart, to recoil from the task, to distrust oneself.

Does one not fear to open oneself to energies, to risks, that may change one’s being radically, a radical change of heart? Does one not distrust a radical change of heart as the cornerstone of every Imaginary City of God? Distrust is contagious. It overshadows the medium of inner discourse, the medium of the soul.

I had distrusted Ross, he had distrusted me, when we first met in 1948. I accepted our mutual dislike one of the other as the realism of ruling object (he was the friend of Governors and high-ranking Civil Servants) and ruled subject (I was susceptible to nursing grievances against the injustices of colonial order). He seemed to me a reserved, cold-hearted missionary and friend of the establishment. But now as I retraced my steps upon the ground of quantum materiality the shell of mutual distrust began to break.

It broke within the door of the unconscious upon which was inscribed elaborate traceries of far-flung telepathic myth, far-flung intelligences within a theatre of ancient/modern soul.

Penelope had been amused at the fantasies I entertained as a child about my aunt Alicia. So now too I found myself clapping, one hand clapping in the mirror of the soul. Ross had moved upon the stage within that mirror, that theatre. His reserve, his coldness, cracked to reveal another existence that was part and parcel of myself though I would never have suspected it when we first met. He was no base suitor at Penelope’s court. He was no ordinary missionary in the kingdom of El Dorado. His reserve was real. How real? There are many approaches to the real. And now I found myself weighing his real intraversions in mine.

Guilt and fantasy are real. Guilt is rooted in the extraordinary life of fantasy, shared but suppressed fantasy. What better defences against an ignorant world than the appearances of distance from others, the appearances of reserve?

I had known the ice of guilt as a child even under the blaze of the tropical sun. I had seen marvels of suppressed guilt in Proteus’s broken-backed laughter as he played the clown or the king and squeezed himself into another shape. I had seen buoyant guilt in Harold’s lusts. Harold was the womaniser of our family. Ross was no womaniser but he felt himself imprisoned within a pattern of angst and lust one tends to associate with the theft of love from another, another who cultivates jealousy and takes himself for granted as the sovereign master of a woman’s heart.

He fell in love with Penelope during the War when her jealous soldier-husband was still alive. He burdened himself with the thought that this had demoralized Simon ( at last I drew the name Simon from the crevices of his mind, the name of the shadowy officer and Governor who had placed himself between them as they descended the hill )when he returned from El Alamein and found them in bed together: that this had led to his death in Normandy in 1944. Simon may have thrown his life away!

It was untrue, it was folly, it was a distortion. Ross had been scrupulous to a degree, wholly conscientious. Penelope needed him. He had stood by her, tried to heal the wounds her husband had inflicted. The marriage had ended (though a legal tie remained) long before he and Penelope met and made love in a room above a bombed garden in which a single rose bloomed. There was no need for guilt. He was no base suitor. Yet guilt and uncertainty remained like a formidable door into a complex and far-flung dimension that I — as a spy who retraces his steps within the long Day of the twentieth century — began to weigh, to assess, to evaluate in new lights, in the light of parallel and alternative existences, guilt in parallel with formidable myth, myth in parallel with duty and devotion, ancient Ithaca in parallel with ruined El Dorado, ruined kings, queens, suitors.

Ross’s intense reserve sustained him in all his tasks, heightened his sense of duty. Such reserve became a hidden door, a door of the Dream I shared with him (I felt myself an imaginary suitor in Penelope’s court, I was struck by her beauty): a door into the kingdom of the heart, a kingdom Ross distrusted and equated with primitive fantasy, primitive humanity. All the more necessary it was for him to work hard, to prize the vocation of a missionary in an alien South America. He was no base suitor in Penelope’s court, no base thief of love here in El Dorado nor there in Europe from which they had come. Indeed the structure of formidable proprietorship of the ancient kingdom of the heart began to suffer a curious reversal. The Shadow of Simon, the Governor, haunted them (I had not realized it before) as it haunted me now though his status as a hero was no longer absolute. It was as if the nature and authority, the ironies of love, choice and fate, were in suspension. And the outcome now lay in re-visionary theatre.

The queen of El Dorado accepted the necessity to weave a tapestry of counterpoint, guilt and innocence, poverty and wealth, that made it impossible for her to conform to a convenient climax with a potent ghost or with a dutiful, conscientious suitor or with an imaginary suitor. The fulfilment of longed-for ecstasy had suffered a measure of eclipse within arts of freedom: freedom of association, yes, freedom to live with whom one wished to live, yes, freedom to declare one’s need of another, yes, but freedom for what, what values, what truths in oneself and others?

Here lay the nature of a discourse in which my fantasies were joined to Penelope’s, to Ross’s, to those of the king of thieves in whom gold was the obsessional guilt of love …

It was astonishing how in glimpsing the complicated features of Ross through a shell of reserve I became a stranger to myself even as he drew paradoxically closer to me in quantum territory. In knowing him better my self-portrait became stranger and truer. I glimpsed my own strangeness. Who was I? Was it a question I would ever be able to answer?