Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I stopped and reconsidered the enigma of parallels, ‘pain’ in parallel with ‘release from pain’, ‘lack of food’ in parallel with ‘bounty’. The mystery of the abyss lay between such parallels. And it was as if one saw horizontals and verticals in a numinous light. ‘Parallels’ signified ‘depths’. One saw a vertical column or bar or shaft descending from each parallel on either side of the abyss. Take ‘pain’, giant pain in the world, giant ghost of pain, giant parallel. The vertical column that descended from ‘pain’ possessed a series of imprints one above the other. Each descending imprint subtly, almost imperceptibly, altered the imprint of ‘pain’ above. Thus giant ‘pain’, giant ‘parallel’ that seemed eternal on its side of the abyss, underwent a series of accumulating, almost imperceptible, transformations in depth.

Likewise ‘release from pain’ possessed its vertical shaft or column which in its layered or descending series of imprints possessed a curious echoic or vibrating spectre of gravity akin to the genesis of the conscience of the abyss. The column vibrated as if to a distant seismic eruption. Then it was still. So still I was able to read — Conscience is a blend of hunger and ecstasy and pain; and therefore there is no release from abysmal torment except …

‘Except what?’ I asked. ‘What reconciliation of opposites lies in the abyss?’

There came a moment in the stillness of conscience when the two columns descending from parallels ‘pain’ and ‘release from pain’ appeared to ‘sound’, to ‘utter’, to reflect a music of joint-resource so incredible one may only describe it as the inimitable ground of Being …

Not simply a reconciliation of opposites. Such a formula was too uncreative or mechanical. Not just a mechanics of psyche. But a gathering up of all that had been experienced in every condition of existence, an accumulation of apparently imperceptible change into true change, in which nothing was lost and everything possessed an inimitable difference akin to joy … I knew then albeit still with dread what I had sensed earlier in relinquishing one or other false eternity locked in an assumption of absolute parallels.

Giant ‘pain’ was real but it was not an absolute condition of time or timelessness. ‘Release from pain’ was an illusion until it became a joint-witness in yielding itself to a whole concert or design composed of paradoxical levels of altered imprint in depth, paradoxical architectural incarnation of the beauty of creative conscience.

Inimitable architecture of the City of God one touches but never seizes is a resource I dreamt, through which one gathers vicariously (one becomes a vicar of truth) all parallels and columns of experience in what is yet other than every net or entrapment of the senses, what is graspable sensation yet ungraspable solid music …

In the same token if one were to settle for the last missionaries on earth as a broken-backed Atlas (the desolation of love, the adventure of love unfulfilled) on one hand, a museum church or statistic of endeavour on the other, then one would have forfeited entirely the quantum mystery of parallel desolations through which the architect in the City of God animates a gulf, an abyss, yet a crossing between adventure unfulfilled and the visualization of love as the supreme creative power that holds the long, traveller’s day and the long, traveller’s night together within every envelope of soul or frailty of flesh and blood …

In this way — by seizing upon the mystery of quantum, parallel lives, parallel formations — I found it possible to pull the last missionaries back into my canvases of imagination, sculptures, shapes with which I animated allegorical presences in the original Greek sense of speaking otherwise, presenting others in diverse shapes of myself, other selves within as much as without oneself. Penelope and Ross re-emerged from the margins of nothingness into which they had almost vanished. The depletions of spiritual memory, the curious fast of memory that I endured, strengthened in a paradoxical way the open, broken yet flowering seed of visualized presences within me, before me. As though the hollow materialistic age or day within which I lived revealed itself as possessing — in its uttermost cavities of renascent, cross-cultural myth, uttermost reaches of emptiness — unsuspected room for original sensation, unsuspected and piercing ironies of spirit that nailed one into the congregation of all one’s characters and even into the shoes of the king of thieves. One is obsessed by every being one visualizes whether apparently evil or apparently good. One bears the wounds of the past into the future and the present. One is oneself and other than oneself … It was thus that I limped, as though nailed upon an Imaginary walking tree in stained-glass window that I painted, into the presence of the last missionaries on earth in the post-Christendom Cathedral and refectory that I was building.

I heard Penelope speak plainly but her voice seemed changed by the acoustic of spiritual being, the acoustic of hollow, echoing being, and this gave daemonic absurdity yet revelation to her utterance.

‘Three of us are here instead of two, Anselm. My two husbands and me! That is the beauty of breaking bread so late in this twentieth-century Day. Shadows acquire substance as the twentieth century draws to a close. Substance acquires new shadow. Ross is my second husband. Simon, my first, died in 1944 in the Normandy campaign. He was my epic lover, my epic soldier.’ Her lips crinkled a little with a trace of self-mockery and she whispered almost under her breath — ‘I shall tell you later about some of the terrible things he did to me despite the many decorations he wore on his chest. But that’s for another moment, another painted moment. Not now. Poor Simon!’ She paused for a fraction of an instant then spoke up loudly again — ‘Ross is my good angel. We got married in 1946. That very year we left England to work in South America. First in Brazil. Then we came to the Potaro in 1948, two of us ostensibly, but we hid Simon in ourselves.

‘A wise precaution, for had we declared that all three of us were solidly there (Simon’s shadow was quite solid, believe me!) on the banks of the river of space, why — think of it — everyone would have said we had come to South America, the three of us, not to be missionaries but to live in sin. One woman and her two husbands! Imagine the pain and the scandal of love.’ Penelope was laughing and Ross and I and Simon (with the king of thieves inserted between us upon a slab of gold that floated in space) could not help laughing too. Laughter echoes sometimes on the lips of solid grief and frail men and women within the feast day music of the gods whether ancient Greek or ancient pre-Columbian allegory.

We were now within the refectory and had taken our places at a great dining table.

‘Look,’ Penelope said, ‘I have been slaving at a coat for many a month, many a year, in this day or century. A coat that is woven of the fabric of sunset, the stillness, the transience of flame. A coat that is as much a tapestry of the world, as of fire and water, to fit the shoulder of a hill, or the body of rock in a Waterfall. A coat that sometimes looks like a beggar’s divine rags! A coat that is woven of every long rift in the cloudy blue of space that precedes the suspended fall of night. The coat of Wisdom when impermanence is well-nigh graspable beauty. This has been my task since Ross died in 1981 and I in 1982. You painted me into the Day of my age, the cathedral of stained-glass window sunset, as if the needle with which I work and sew were a match. The match of sunset. And because of the impermanence of darkness and light the match of sunrise as well. The coat never fits Ross or Simon perfectly. I must tell you all this, Anselm. For it is the way you appear to see us. The coat never quite fits. Always a sleeve of element or a fluid stitch that’s out of joint.’ She moved as she spoke and I saw the faint but indelible colour of bruises on the soft, bright flesh of her arm as she lifted it away from the side of her body. The gesture appeared to tighten a close-fitting garment upon her breasts.