Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

We were searching together for the key to the adventure of love unfulfilled, a key inscribed into the foundations of blind empires, still blind in this Day to the past and to the present but susceptible nevertheless as never before to a new crumb or piercing light in the mutual body of Wisdom that one broke into bread.

Wisdom is strong meat. It rocks the imagination to the foundations of memory. The imaginary Cathedral around you fades, Anselm. The window of time grows black. The bone and the fire subside into a rose, a rose tree, a garden. At the heart of the black/red rose you dream you see the ancient Macusis feasting and dancing. They too fade. But you will see them again. The rose remains, the roses of childhood in Aunt Alicia’s garden-city theatre. Listen to what Uncle Proteus is now saying — ‘Watch the river of space, watch this dream space, dream-rib, metamorphoses, watch the live processional sculptures from the Waterfall. They bring the key …’

Yes, the key. I remembered the key in the loom of tradition of which I or Penelope had spoken but it was nowhere in sight in the kingdom of the Rose. And yet … I was still to retrace my steps into the body of the Rose.

‘In the land of the Rose,’ Proteus said, ‘you will find the key.’ He was laughing. Better Proteus’s laughter than his anger.

‘The key to carnival,’ Proteus said, ‘is rooted in imperial and colonial disguises. The key to carnival lies in a displacement of time-frames to break a one-track commitment to history. The key to the reformation of the heart breaks the door of blind consciousness into shared dimensions, the dimension of subconscious age and the dimension of childhood. They cross and re-cross each other within levels of Dream. The key to the unconscious future lies in shared burdens of intuitive Memory, shared volumes written by mutual science and art within the Spirit of age, dual and triple beggars and kingships and queenships. Listen for a commotion of bells in the abyss, in the clouds, in cloud-rocks, in the precipitation of biological and mythical antecedents, the precipitation of living masks in Aunt Alicia’s live fossil museum theatre.’

‘Here, take this. Sup,’ said the king of thieves. He held the vessel of the pooled stars to my lips. ‘Retrace your steps into childhood when you dreamt the skies were a living garden, Anselm. Here’s a programme of plays, a feast of the Imagination. Uncle Proteus plays the beggar Ulysses, remember? You,’ the thief was laughing, ‘are something of a robber-baron yourself, Anselm. You steal the beggar’s rags, remember? Then there’s Harold whom you loathe when he tells you … (You will find out in due course.) He shares the burden of Ulyssean carnival kingship with Proteus when he plays the part at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Not quite the top! One of your Aunt Alicia’s conceits. Conceit or not it is rooted in the Wisdom of theatre. Strong meat. Then you will meet black Agamemnon and when he vanishes you will hear the voice of Presence. Then comes the Antiphon of the … But no. I must leave you to make your own discoveries as the dimensions of childhood and old age cross and re-cross each other. It’s epic habit to summarize the progress of coming events and to recapitulate the flight of past events as if they were one and the same true, timeless yet changed, changing fabric … Prophetic conceit some would say. I would say the creative riddle of the abyss. Homer was versed in this. Homer the greatest of all epic imaginations. I knew him once long, long ago. I ate every blind crumb, every blind tear, that fell from his eyes. Poor thief I was even then long before Calvary’s hill.’ His voice faded into the global village garden theatre, Georgetown theatre (had it been named after Ross and Penelope George ?), I was about to enter.

The programmes, the broken tapestry of forthcoming plays, sculptures, paintings slipped from my fingers and fluttered to the ground. The programmes were torn and as I sought to retrieve them in the Dream the eclipsed portions drifted into the subconscious from which a child emerged nine years old. I was that child clothed in the epic tears of memory. Tears were habitual to epic character … My parents had died in a road accident in 1914 when I was two. Aunt Alicia died in 1929, Harold in 1920, Proteus in … Now I was unsure for whom I truly wept in the past and in the present as the Imaginary Cathedral faded into Alicia’s Garden City Theatre.

The church bells were ringing in the distance. I felt dejected but buoyed up nevertheless by the distant Waterfall music.

Depression is a disease but I was strangely afloat within the music of the distant bells.

They were the faraway voice of eternity through and beyond time, God was eternity. Eternity was buried in my longings, in my anxieties. That faraway voice melted into the liquid pulse of vanishing sound that resuscitates itself, faint, marvellous, descending, ascending.

Uncle Proteus had told me that the garden city theatre’s global village was on the brink of hard times . ‘Charles Dickens,’ said the voice of God. ‘Recession’s coming,’ said the bells. ‘Ask in Wall Street in 1929.’ The chimes came in separate lines ( Ask in one line or dream-year, In in the line or year below that, Wall in the third line, etc., etc., etc.), as if the voice of God possessed a comic slant, innermost humour I sought to nourish in an illiterate world, in becoming a best-selling poet’s utterance in the prosperous heavens.

I stood in Camp Street with the flowering trees on either hand. I tore the poem into the scraps of dollar bills. Proteus appreciated that. There was a breath of quickening air in the bright morning light. No wonder the pace, the occasional disparity, the occasional break or self-mockery in the voice of the bells made one float into anticipating anything, everything, the anticipation of terror, the anticipation of peace.

The voice unrobed itself, drew a naked shadow within a blossom or leaf that fell and seemed to bruise my head with a trace of red ink. Proteus was adept at such preparations and markings. I had seen many of his sketches for Alicia’s plays, the naked shadows he appeared to create as if in these nature reversed itself into the true substance of a dream that left its mark upon us everywhere. To dream of being killed was to dream we had ourselves killed others, to dream of being attacked was to know simultaneously that we were ourselves attacking others. Such was the naked shadow, self-reversible shadow, in the substance of dream that Proteus employed as his moral design.

He had smeared the blood-red ink on his Ulyssean brow for the play and, as if it were an afterthought, leaned towards me so that a trace or bruise or shadow of my aggression fell on my head and hand. My aggression? His blood?

Now as the leaf fell — upon the identical trace or shadow I had received when he leaned towards me — the Rose-queen in the garden sent her shaft or thorn straight to his brow. The thorn drew blood, his blood. The leaf danced in the wake of the thorn and settled upon him, his blood.

I knew the scene by heart after several rehearsals but a new element had arisen which took me by surprise. The despatch of the thorn by the queen had never before coincided with the stroke of the leaf, the naked shadow of blossom. Had I been bruised by — or had I occasioned — the shadow of his wound as the thorn pierced the leaf before lodging itself in his flesh and bone? Had I secured her line of sight by balancing the leaf on my brow and upon my hand? If so it were a feat of unconscious Shadow, a feat of Dream.

Proteus’s Ulysses appreciated my dilemma. What is nakedness? When one dreams of nakedness does one dream of aggression, or of the nature of birth, the nature of dying, the nature of humility? He was dressed in rags, a beggar in rags, and this was also a new element in the naked play. He had discarded the robes of lord and master, king of the Rose garden of Home. The thorn in his brow grew sharp, the agonized tongue of the brain that stuck forth from his wound and spoke now on behalf of its lord and master — ‘The Rose that pierced me secretes your Shadow in her body, Anselm. I wish I could lift you in my arms and tell you the secrets of nature, a nature that recoils upon us, the conflicts we need to understand, our roots in nature, our ignorance of nature … tell you that true heroism is founded in accepting the poverty of our understanding through which we may at last perceive our mutual deprivations and begin a transformation of our (I should say your ) inheritance … I wish I could tell you the secret of your birth within a society addicted to lust, to fleshly property, fleshly acquisition. Harold will tell you when you ascend Jacob’s ladder in another scene of the play.’