Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

For one moment — the instant I heard Ross inwardly utter the name ‘Simon’ — it almost seemed that he touched the knife in my side, the knife in the body of my mind. Indeed I felt a stab, a twist of pain. He was but one step away from unveiling the portrait I had painted in myself of my early morning encounter with Canaima. I was alarmed. I knew I must divert the action of his thought.

‘My parents, grandparents, great-aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., etc. — Alicia, Proteus, Harold, the Rose sisters, etc., etc. — stored their most secret dreams in the English language, Ross. Their prayers were uttered in the English language. English was their mental tongue — it became their landscape of psyche — whatever the colour of their skin.’ My inner voice — the action of telepathy — struck his ears. I saw he was drawn. He lifted his unconscious hand away from the knife and the veil that lay over my portrait of Canaima. His attention had been diverted from the bird-victim (the masked dancer) Canaima had plucked from the dance and killed. He would learn of it when they returned to the Mission House. In the meantime I felt I needed to learn a great deal more in order to give a full account of the forces that had inspired me not to raise an outcry when I came upon Canaima and the Macusi he had killed. The compulsions that had driven me, the thread of the dance linking all creatures, all spheres, all places — the antiphonal discourse — were so mysterious, so unpredictable, that I needed more time to let them act upon me in my pilgrimage. I needed to retrace my steps more deeply into the past before I could sculpt the dance, paint it in greater range and depth. I needed time even as they needed time to impart to me their particular crisis and its far-flung bearing on the nature of freedom, the innermost authority of the values of love without which freedom would be but nihilism, but a dead-end in a wilderness of licence and permissive abuse.

‘Yes,’ I continued rapidly, ‘my relatives and antecedents composed poems, sermons, etc. in English. Proteus sometimes fancied himself as a minister of religion. Like you, Ross. And as for Alicia, Great-Aunt Alicia! What a scream she was. I am quoting one of her retinue of servants amongst her admiring neighbours from whom she cast many a play. English was her mansion, English was a stage, a ladder, a curtain to be lifted on a variety of objects. It was a landscape populated by dancing figures involved in complicated gestures, imageries and steps. Not easy to describe. I remember when I first saw an L. S. Lowry ballet or painting within a backcloth of depression I thought of Aunt Alicia. But that’s an insufficient and inadequate comparison for her daring and penetrative vision of inner space theatre.’

Ross was smiling now. The comparison fascinated him and I knew I had turned his mind away from the metaphoric knife in my side and from Canaima.

‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘every object she unveils she addresses in English. Subject she may be but she becomes the soul of the object. There’s a wonderful vase, a tall vase inscribed with histories of the world — I hope to come upon it in due course on the second bank of the river of space — in which she resides now playing that she rules the world from within the very objects that ruled her. It’s her moral comedy, her version of moral irony. I dream of her as if she were a living empress who truly knows the tribulations of every subject, who is both within and without every object-masquerade, every mask, every furniture of being that passes before her; who hears the buried voices within the English language, the voices of her mixed antecedents, her mixed ancestry, bringing a new quality of incantation into the language of object and subject.’ I stopped. Despite everything one declares I sensed the divide between sophisticated ‘object’ and carnival ‘subject’. It was present in us all, in Penelope and Ross as much as in me. But Penelope and Ross were so seized by their commanding native tongue they would have accepted the divide as fate’s sealed discourse were it not for the rising subjectivity of Poverty’s queens such as Alicia and honorary spies such as myself. It was the new stresses on ‘native ruling tongue’ that drew us together within a shared telepathy of ruler and ruled, a shared intuition of linked foreign and native sovereigns within the dangerous plaster of ruling object: drew us together in such a way that the plaster became susceptible to unravelling by a carnival spy or ‘kingdom of heaven subject’ within the Sleep of history.

The living dreamer knows in some indefinable way he could rely on them to help him or me respond to Canaima even as they could rely on him or me — in Poverty’s ancestral epic masks — to help them respond to Simon’s shadowy manifestation of malaise, the malaise of a civilization in the wounded, jealous archetype of authority as it returned again and again into the kingdom of the heart to ravage the senses. Penelope possessed her sovereign, cruel master and her guilty, innocent suitors within her own mind’s ruling body and in perceiving this the theme itself, the theme of sovereignty itself, the theme of the suitor, required reversal in cross-cultural frames of theatre. I had, however faintly, begun to recall the theatre of my childhood: Aunt Alicia as a player in a body of dual or triple queenships, King Harold in league with Uncle Proteus. Yes I remembered the beggar Ulysses played by both Proteus and Harold in the gates of Home, native and foreign Home, intact yet scarred. The strangest paradox of theatre lay before me as I retraced my steps apparently backwards, apparently forwards … ‘We may only heal the wounded archetype when we live the divide at the heart of language and place its enormity on many shoulders, when several players — whether Simon, Harold, Proteus — take a share in performances and portrayals of inner ungraspable majesty, inner immensity of craft, inner power.’

I knew I still had a long way to go to encounter Proteus, Harold and the others. Penelope and Ross vanished along the trail on their way to the Mission House. Vanished but I heard their voices calling out to me to join them for dinner that evening. I declined. The invitation remained suspended in the air. It floated towards me across the years. I had almost forgotten. It returned now with immense poignancy. It was to take close on forty years for me to fulfil that summons. I did not break bread with them in the Mission House until 1988 when I retraced my steps into an imaginary refectory in the ruins of the old Mission. The old house had been burnt to the ground in 1966 by Canaima.

*

The way was clear now for me to continue my journey along the first bank of the river of space. I heard the organ of the Macusi Waterfall through the trees and came at last to god-rock, a huge sculpture with a winding stairway like a coiled serpent or eel up into space. It towered above the Waterfall.

Inspector Robot was waiting for me there in the shadow of the rock as within the shadow of time that lengthens mysteriously within us when an age is passing its zenith.

A skeleton-man to be feared in one’s dreams, a remarkable clown, a remarkable detective, a technician of artificial intelligence. He tapped me on the shoulder with a bony finger and conferred on me the extended title ‘honorary doctor, spy and Christian gnostic’. His bony finger reminded me of Canaima’s hand and the knife in my side. The links between violence (bony finger/knife), healing (doctorate of the soul), intelligence (spy), and knowledge as sacrament were disturbing and enigmatic. Were they rooted in some area of insoluble conflict that we needed to visualize in all its proportions if we were to create a changed heart within ourselves, a radical change of heart within a grossly materialistic civilization?