Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Young Masters was fascinated. Such skill he had never witnessed before. The stranger waved his hand and appeared to disembowel space, yet to stitch it around the child in a wonderful garment with a button for an eye. The young boy recalled the eye of the fish on the fisherman’s gallows he had seen that afternoon in the game he played of wheeling light years.

He was tempted now by a most dangerous extension of that game, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye of creation and his, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye mysteriously fired and sculpted, mysteriously dismembered into revisionary pupil and socket until it became a revolution of mind, a window of soul — and his.

He ran, without knowing why, from such a temptation to accept his as the absolute original. It was a temptation he could not rationalize. It was as if the stranger were offering him the gifts, the talents, of a cosmic Pygmalion, a cosmic sculptor and seducer of space, offering him the precision of a godlike puppet to place his finger on the button of collective, explosive rape (to submit himself, in advance of that event, to a private version of collective, explosive rape) so close to, yet so remote from, the garment of love that is threaded into that transfigurative wound by the luminous hand of the sun and the moon and the stars.

Had he stayed, had he been raped by that intimate stranger, the facts of this biography of spirit would have accumulated into a miscarriage of soul (whatever ambitions Everyman Masters may have realized, whatever powers he may have come to possess in imbibing the solicitation of the false shaman) for he would have appeared narcissistically whole in his own eyes and would have forfeited the mystery of partial guilt and therefore the mystery of ultimate surrender to otherness, ultimate innocence. As it was the danger remained — though few were aware of it as Masters climbed the ladder of success into traditional plantation overseer; the danger remained like a constant threat over a king’s or a god’s estate, and the consequences were never wholly to be forgotten. Memory, true and false, had arrived in the gateway of creation.

Young Masters gained the sea-wall and continued running into New Forest. He arrived at the gate to his house, ran along the flagged pathway through sunflowers and sweetpea up the stairs through the front door. Then stopped. The house seemed unnaturally silent except for his own breath which came with the trapped force of a live creature from his heart and blood. The shadow of the false shaman still lay over him though he had run fast and left him behind on the foreshore. It lay over him and imbued his escape with uncanny excitement, akin to a fever, a drive, an energy, the shadow of Memory false and true. Did something reside in him now of the psychology of rape, the psychology of conquest? Was this the seed of Ambition to rule, to master a universe that had despoiled one, to march at the head of great armies into monsters one projected everywhere? (It was a question Masters was to frame long afterwards when we sat in Holland Park and discussed the psychology of power and the nature of Ambition at the heart of diseased politics around the globe.) Had he run forwards from the false shaman that New Forest day into the lust of light years, or backwards into the eye of a star cautionary and wise that forms in the spaces of the womb where fiction gestates? The fiction of Carnival began indeed to gestate from that moment.

His trapped sobbing breath had ceased and he moved gingerly (as he had crawled gingerly like a king crab on the foreshore) toward his parents’ room. The door was very slightly ajar. He was about to rap or push when he glimpsed something through the slit of space. It was his mother’s tears that he saw, tears that masked her and suddenly made her into the mother of a god in the play of Carnival. She was sitting at a mirror and her tears were reflected in the glass. He was so riveted by them, by seeing them fall, by the charisma of grief they spelt to a profoundly disturbed, profoundly impressionable, child that he seemed to see through her side and back into the glass or mirror that ran down her front. Her tears seemed as a consequence to be woven from glass. They were fluid and divine cherries all white and edged with marbled fire. They were small yet unnaturally large as they fell upon her breasts that were open and bare in the shadowed glass front of flesh, and Masters was smitten by the sensation that she knew all that had happened to him that afternoon and was weeping for him, weeping for the lust, the Ambition, in Memory false and true.

Of course she could not have known, the young Carnival god knew. She was weeping for something else of which he was never to learn exactly. Indeed, even if she had turned around then and told him what it was, he would have forgotten and remembered only the tears that were shed for him now, as in the past, and the present, and the future.

She did not turn. He did not disclose he was there. He felt nevertheless that she knew; he felt as she touched her glass breasts in the mirror that she knew he was inside her, halfway between a wall of glass and a cavity of flesh, that she knew he was looking through her into a kind of fire that mingled with her tears.

There was furniture in the room and that too stood within the glass and the cavity of flesh. There was a lampshade that sprang out of the cavity into the glass. There were china ornaments that framed themselves in the glass to greet the flesh. There was a bed in the room that seemed to slide from the glass into the flesh. Slices of all these shone in the fire, shone in the mirror, shone in each minuscule balloon or teardrop sculpted from his mother’s sockets and eyes. One slice seemed to rub against another until as they shone they silently sounded a note of music.

“Here is the evolution of Sorrow,” the foetal Carnival child thought without articulate thought, the kind of thought that lies at the heart of a coiled dancer against a door, peering through his mask, a coiled dream in the womb of space when the eye of a star peers through the crevices of Memory, Memory that is female now rather than male, Memory that brings the danger of cosmic fire, of burning exposure in the body of the mother of god, sudden exposure to the substance and the shadow of spiritual Sex.

Was she weeping at the thought of losing him, of plucking him from her like a brand on fire? Was this inconsistent with what he had felt before, that she was weeping for him and for the encounter he had had with the false shaman that afternoon?

Did the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman” subsist in one of the profoundest secrets of Carnival, the mask of the cuckold ?

I remember discussing this question with Everyman Masters in London in the 1960s and 1970s when he addressed the philosophic myth of a colonial age that draped its mantle everywhere around the globe on superpowers, as on empires past and present, to set in train parallel existences, executions, resurrections of a plantation king or emperor or president or god.

Masters explained the seeds of trauma that had led him, within the ground of bizarre irony, to erect the obscure colonial status of sugar or rice estate overseer into Carnival prince of the world. He explained that the shock of encounter as a child with the “intimate stranger” on the foreshore of New Forest had so curiously broken him, yet imbued him with the spectre of terrible Ambition, that he had run back metaphorically into the womb; and in spying upon his mother had been so overwhelmed that a closely guarded family secret sprang into his mind. Closely guarded yet not so closely guarded for he recalled the whispers of servants in his parents’ home. His father was not his father. And it had seemed that she (the glass woman in whom he lay coiled all over again) had contemplated an Abortion when she carried, or was pregnant with, him. I asked him, as he seemed reluctant to continue, what had saved the day. His father, he said, his legal father, had stood by the glass woman, protected her, and insisted upon her keeping the child as if it were his. (It was important to remember, he said, that his legal father was coloured, the glass woman, his mother, was coloured, his biological father, whom he had never met, was white. And all expectations were that the newborn baby would be white.)