Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Inspector Robot placed his finger of bone on the starred portions in the diagram beneath the drought level of the Macusi River.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘The starred portions under C are all the down-flow through the Waterfall that the action of geological tide releases in time of drought. The river conserves itself within a miraculous architecture and balance of parallel forces. The starred portions or selective down-flow become the nightsky of drought in every fable or constellation of the survival of the river.’

‘Ah!’ said the Inspector. His skeleton face was alert. ‘How truly picturesque! Picturesque behaviour! That’s all that poetry is. The nightsky of the drought river! I like that. Bird’s-eye view?’ He came close to me and suddenly I felt the net tighten upon my limbs. ‘Not bird’s-eye view, Mr Anselm. I dispute that. Gaoler’s view! That’s better. Gaoler’s view I tell you. And so perhaps we may yet restrict the movements of Canaima and seize him when the door of the law bangs shut.’

I sought to pull away but it was impossible in this instant. I felt the twist of Canaima’s knife in my mind. How strange are the responsibilities of knowledge, the imparting of knowledge. Does one impart knowledge by imposing it (and thereby falsifying it) upon others? Or did I, through the knowledge I imparted to a juggler of artificial intelligence, give him a chain or a net to bind me?

I suddenly felt angry yet infused with a bitter wisdom. Knowledge illumined the enigma of the self. Was the imparting of knowledge a falsification of its own apparently real but innermost premises? Was the imparting of knowledge a confession of frail humanity upon which an order of machines, the rule of machines, could be built? Knowledge as painful truth subsisted upon contraries, contrary spirit, contrary artifice. I knew I could only be free of Robot by embracing contraries within an unfathomable unity of being, unfathomable self-mockery yet access to unfathomable grace through all patterns, all shapes one may inhabit at various times.

‘Gaoled waters you say, Inspector? Gaoler’s view?’ I could not help the rising passion in my voice. Robot turned and stared intently. ‘Look, see!’ I pulled Canaima’s knife from my side. ‘Look, see.’ It was all I could say. Robot recoiled a little. Perhaps he felt threatened. Then I threw the knife far up into space. It glittered. It flashed. It was a conveyor, a satellite of knowledge. Inspector Robot was startled. And yet perhaps he had been waiting … It glittered. It flashed. Then all at once it shot like lightning into the body of a flying creature. The Inspector and I heard (as with a single yet cloven ear) the flying creature’s long, sweet, poignant, bitter lament as if a note had been struck in the darkest recesses of melodic Conscience. The lightning knife had found its mark. The winged, dancing, flying bird appeared to pause in the twinkling of an eye within us, within inner space, glimmering stillness yet lightning apprehension of the geology of the tides through which to build the architecture of the City of God or to topple El Dorado into further ruin.

The angelic dancer fell with open, outstretched wings. It fell downwards (or was it backwards into the upturned vessel of the sky in which the sun shone like a pooled star within a drought of cloud?). Glimmering star/sun or floating eyelid of the abyss. Did it fall into the Waterfall? I listened for the splintering note of the knife upon a head of rock but heard nothing. We were unsure. Inspector Robot was unsure. I was unsure.

‘Did the dancer and the knife fall and rise upon an ozone door, a toppled, ruined, tidal door in the greenhouse drought-spectre of earth and sky? Every epitaph for a dying savage tribe’s angel of beauty witnesses to an abyss we need to visualize, distances and architectures we have befouled, an abyss between a knife in the sky and a knife on the earth. A double-edged knife! It pierces us with the necessity for a visionary change of heart, for a new sculpture of being.’

It was time to ascend god-rock. We made our way up the serpent stairway and stopped when we possessed a good view of the spectral river and the Waterfall of dreams beneath us. Inspector Robot unslung his telescopic glasses from his shoulders and passed them to me. There was a sly and a terrible look in the bone-sockets of his eyes as if the glasses he passed to me were equally embedded in them. I looked through. Everything was black. It was the grave (but a grave such as I had never dreamt existed) into which I looked. A re-constructed grave, a re-constructed cosmos from which a master-brain, a man-made brain had arisen. I was gripped by uncanny temptation. ‘Wear the eyes of the master-brain, the man-made brain of a skeleton-god. Become a nihilist. Your strength will be prodigious. Arm yourself. No one will dare to touch you, to attack you. You may become, if you wish, a forerunner of revolutionary order and sterile morality, a great man, the masses at your feet.’

A well-nigh irresistible temptation and yet since all knowledge is suspect then knowledge of power over the masses is the most suspect of all temptations, all vanities, the most dangerous to entertain.

One comes close to being crushed by a skeleton-lord of revolutionary technology but clings nevertheless to a thread of liberation through one’s scepticism of absolute power exercised in the name of religion or science or politics or whatever.

So though at first everything was black, black temptation, black power within technology, I was able to approach Robot with understanding if not love. His telescopic glasses became a medium of shared intelligences, artificial and intuitive. I was able to salvage the unfathomable quantum address of every resurrection of the Imagination that runs in parallel with the seductive artifice of the grave as a laboratory of monsters. I was able to reassemble what I knew, or thought I knew, namely, the convertibility of technologies into quantum mechanics, knife into quantum knife, axe into quantum axe, camera into quantum camera, and now telescopic glasses into quantum vision.

‘They’re gathering,’ I cried suddenly. ‘Look! The Waterfall.’

‘Gathering?’ said Robot.

‘The processional rocks in the Waterfall are coming alive. You do see, don’t you?’

The Inspector gave his ingratiating and permissive smile. As much as to say, ‘Have it your own way for the time being.’ He did not actually reply. But I sensed that his perception of the activity of the rocks beneath us conformed to a statistical revelation of geological behaviour. In the laboratory of the grave he was at liberty to exploit all religions and to simulate the life of the earth within the void of his socketed eyes. The ascension of the rocks was possessed of no genius or innermost leap, innermost duration. It was a spectacle that confirmed the avid curiosity and power of the skeleton-brain to give picturesque momentum to a state of ultimate arrest.

It was different with me. I was no giant and little match for Robot. But as I looked through his glasses I became genuinely involved — as if the innermost genius of the planet were at state — in uplifted veil upon veil of darkness until I possessed a glimmering apprehension of the magic of creative nature, the life of sculpture, the genesis of art, the being of music.

The living sculptures were arising from the Waterfall and making their way along the bank of the river. They left the cloak or shell they had worn in place in the Waterfall: cloak or tidal clock through which to conserve another spirit, another existence within the rocks, the spirit of time that remained to invoke protective cover for the river and the Waterfall.

I concentrated upon the particular existential sculptures that had arisen or been plucked from the rocks to make their way along the riverbank to the body of Canaima’s victim, the murdered dancer. They lifted him up and placed him in a box. He was light as a feather. The procession was led by the king of thieves.