Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I stared at him with a sense of awe and peculiar apprehension, peculiar understanding I could not now express. I had expected him to worm his way into the Rose garden and slay his enemies. But instead the imperial design of the homecoming lord and master had been converted into a colonial fable that spun its web in reverse order in the branches of the lofty rose tree over my head. The queen lay hidden in its branches.

This much I was able to read in the web of a volume — ‘ The lordor master disguised as a beggar diesin colonial and post - colonial fable. The virtuous Rose betrays him because she wishes to goad him into reflecting upon innermost nature, pregnant nature, innermost potential, innermost peril, innermost craft. Such is the divine comedy of the master’s homecoming, a comedy that pierces convention to break a complacent mirror of conquest, the conquest of love by the master (when love cannot be conquered or else it ceases to be a gift truly given, truly taken), the conquest of the suitors of the beloved by the master: suitors who may take the most unpredictable form in pregnant natures, natures one has abused or exploited sometimes in perversity, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in blind lust. ’

Ulysses stared up at me with a plea, a curious plea, in which he confessed that true heroism and a true Homecoming was a burden too great to be borne by any single warrior or lover or actor or individual in the theatre of twentieth-century history. Alicia and Proteus were aware of this in the early twentieth century within their live fossil museum. So was I in the Imaginary Theatre I was building and in the incorporation of Alicia’s and Proteus’s early plays into my pilgrimage within the long Day of the twentieth century. The truth was that the enormity of lordship that Ulysses implied needed to be borne and shared by several (all partial) performances by different actors within different contexts of fate or freedom. The residue or fall-out from such performances implied a quantum reality that slipped forever into the future though it sustained immense pertinence for a Being of true hope within the recurring present moment. Proteus’s Ulysses needed support from Haroldian Ulysses as from Simon’s Ulysses whatever the inadequacies of each, each one’s sins, each one’s shortcomings. In each lay a door into unexplored realms, unexplored suit of God conducted by intimates as well as strangers whose conscious or unconscious role it was to challenge all assumptions of proprietorship of soul, proprietorship of flesh and blood. Such was the moral design of epic/allegoric theatre.

Simon’s implicit governorship of an Imaginary Colony in order to haunt Penelope and Ross, Harold’s proprietorship of Imaginary estates and slave-women within the Rose garden, were part and parcel of the enigmatic texture of fate, freedom, authority, industry, tyranny, that constituted the psyche of twentieth-century civilization.

Proteus’s early twentieth-century Ulysses needed still others, as I would discover, to share the burden of the thorn of the Rose in the gates of Home. I was involved in this and I recalled his prophecy that Harold would tell me something important that I needed to know when we met in the theatre of Jacob’s ladder.

Now — in the curious, abrupt and realistic absurdity of Dream — I realized that a small bag I had been carrying, when I stumbled upon the masked lord and king, had opened and spilt its contents on the ground between us. A shirt, a pair of socks, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, a draughtsboard and two dozen pawns, lay scattered so close to the beggar that they seemed an extension of his rags.

He stretched out his hand: it seemed possessed of a mysterious nail that grows on a tree side by side with Rose’s thorn and Canaima’s knife. Our eyes met. And I felt a moment of shattering peace. As if I saw through him into a future when one would indeed relinquish one’s ridiculous possessions, a future Home, a future Garden. But now they seemed so precious to me that I tried to push him away, to seize my own goods, to seize his rags as well. All of a sudden he held me and drew me close to him. My head lay against his heart. I heard the faint chiming of the bells in the distance in place of his heart. Curiously hollow yet brimming pulse of music. Had he died, was he still alive? Had I unwittingly helped to kill him? Had I been involved in the killing of the lord and master who returns to a broken, half-ruined fable of a Colony? What was the time and where and what was the Colony? Alicia in her absurdity would have said global colony , global prosperity, global poverty, global secretion within carnival history. Each hour or day one gave (early twentieth-century Day, late twentieth-century Day) crisscrossed into a pattern of Dream, Dream-Play within history, the depletions of history, the hungers of history, the desperations of history, the great and small wars from which the multi-faceted hero returns again and again and again … And the object of his return? He returns, it is said, to serve God, to make God his absolute beloved in every mission of peace, God the Mother of all men and women … Alicia was famous for such absurdities, absurdity plays, morality plays. Absurdity equals morality …

My innermost speculations were hushed. I was dazzled. He was the same and yet not the same beggar or king. The burden had been lifted. Or was it a reversal of the live, fossil premises of myth? Lifted, reversed! One was unable properly to say. Hints, guesses! Surely humanity was literate enough to read the webbed volume in the rose tree? Here was the key to mythical wealth (I had retrieved my ridiculous possessions and seized the beggar’s rags as I lay against him). Here was the key in the distant bells to the music of mixed royal ancestry, mixed royal parentage, abused kith and kin, glorified kith and kin, legitimacy, illegitimacy, jealousies, hatreds, loves. All these were woven into the lifted burden of the dying hero and into the rags I had stolen which left him naked on the stage with the thorn of the Rose in his brow.

Naked and crumpled as he appeared to be now, Proteus had given the part an inimitable and unique seed. As though in descending from the peak of lord and king and master he had acquired the ability of a mountaineer of God. Sheer paradox! Descent into the realm of the ‘poor in spirit’ was implicit spiritual muscle or extraordinary craft and power to cling to and make his way down the steepest face of the world’s abyss.

I entered the Rose garden and made my way to the palace of the Rose. Aunt Alicia sat at a long table. As a child I had sometimes dined — when money was short — upon a crumb of bread: now in old age I dreamt of her presiding over the long table like an empress and a queen. The table groaned with sumptuous dishes, roast duck, crisp turkey, lamb, pork, fish, boiled and baked meats, shrimp, eggs, cooked-up rice, creamed, sweet potatoes, and other preparations and varieties of food. Aunt Alicia invariably cried in the Dream through the curtain of the years as it lifted into a theatre — ‘Eat, Anselm. It’s here for you. All for you.’ I felt she was tempting me in a peculiar way. ‘Not now,’ I told her, ‘not now. Sorry.’

‘But why, Anselm?’

I tried to read her expression before I replied –

‘The face of the beggar! I can’t erase it from my mind! Such a strange face, a strange colour.’ I stared at the dishes on the table.

‘It’s his Macusi blood,’ Aunt Alicia cried. ‘He’s mixed. Like all of us. Like you. And as for his blighted, strange-coloured face — well, Proteus is a master at make-up, racial make-up, animal make-up.’

‘It’s real,’ I protested. ‘Human make-up. I see his face beside me. At the bottom of the abyss.’ I stared around the hall of dreams.