Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

She began to fade and I drifted now through a door in the great hall into the scene of one of Proteus’s failed industrial projects. Proteus was a sacred socialist (metamorphoses of socialism was the name of his business) and socialism was destined to harden, grow brittle, and fall. The scene into which I had come may have been an ancient warehouse or a cinematic project of paradoxes and resources linking heaven and earth. I remembered the axeman I had filmed into moral imperative, moral proportion, on the first bank of the river of space when we contemplated the prospect of ruin — or one’s capacity to avert the ruin — of great tropical forests. The axeman had felled a tree with a single, lightning blow; now from within the heart of that tree emerged an unfinished, a ruined, ladder. Jacob ’ s ladder theatre.

The hall was dark as a sacred Bible of epic prophecies and I lit a candle. Its flickering light (there was a faint draught in the huge warehouse) caught the shadow of the lightning stroke of the axe. And as I looked up at the dim, lightning, shadowy stairs of the felled yet arisen tree I was reminded of an escalator in a great city such as London or Paris, of gigantic excavations, of my apprehensions on arriving there, of venturing for the first time into the great underground, into a concrete riverbed beneath a fluid riverbed.

That apprehension of woven or cemented spaces within spaces at the heart of a global community gave substance to retraced steps within ancient and modern Dream, crossings, ascendings, descendings, substance to echoing footsteps upon Jacob’s ladder that resembled the hollow passages, the hollow shoes of childhood that one sometimes abandons as one runs barefoot through a whispering tide within whispering floorboards, whispering palaces of achievement.

Proteus’s ‘escalator’ had been long abandoned in the body of Alicia’s museum-whispers, museum-voices, fading pageants, vases, banquets. And now in barefoot candlelight I dreamt of a distinction between true bread and trodden bread at the edges of the ladder of space: trodden bread like candle-grease: trodden tears. Barefoot candlelight was an expensive commodity in the making of a film of palaces and cardboard boxes. ‘It burns a hole in space. It burns into a pit at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Barefoot candlelight lights the way to bed in a cardboard box on the pavement of a great city.’

Proteus envisaged an economic leap despite recession in the 1920s and 1930s when money would become so plentiful (one hundred dollars for a loaf of bread) that it would serve as a drunkard’s walkway in space. It would serve as one of the planks he would employ to cross the river or strengthen the ladder on his death. ‘A great film,’ he confided, ‘a funeral pageant.’

I perceived now that at the heart of Proteus’s humour lay the economic necessity to gauge the scaffolding of his business career.

‘Business‚’ he said, ‘is more than business, capital more than capital, labour more than labour. Visualize the innermost heart of a lightning tree, visualize the necessity to scale heights and depths one may otherwise overlook.’

Beyond a shadow of doubt my memories of Proteus’s ‘warehouse of civilization’ were the intricate substance that I threaded later into Inspector Robot’s glasses, into the axeman’s blade, into the camera that I used on the first bank of the river of space.

It was a forbidden area. Proteus’s religious socialism was dangerous. He had warned me to stay away. Dangerous ladder, he said. A drunkard’s pitfall. When the sacred business crashed he blamed no one but himself. He had invested in a joy-ride to the stars that involved expenditures and proportions that had sliced into the core of his genius. He had invested in a waxworks museum that threatened to come overwhelmingly alive, vulnerable, entombed, yet active spectacle within the subconscious and unconscious. His intention was to paint the ceiling with stars and galaxies and to build secret corridors in which great, historical, wounded personages would stand in an eerie light and point the way to the ladder … or to the plank afloat on the river …

He was suddenly taken ill after a bout of excessive drinking, whisky, rum, wine, champagne. The waxwork figures moved and became his epitaph. The last time I saw him it seemed as if he had been beheaded, his arms and his body from the neck down were so hidden under a sheet. I dreamt his head addressed me now from the top of a mountain. ‘Time to brave the ladder, Anselm‚’ he said. ‘The living dreamer may ascend and descend and return to life. Time to be born again within the Shadow of truths we have little understood about ourselves and others.’ He was one of the strangest sculptures I drew forth in the secret corridors that took me to the ladder.

The ladder shot up through the roof of the theatre into the sky. As I climbed I kept my eyes glued on the bright pit of the heavens above, all the brighter for the dark tunnel and walls on either side of me. I tried to touch these. Were they steel or waxwork or cardboard? Could one punch one’s way through them? The thought had scarcely settled in the Dream when I came to a corridor. Perhaps every mental probe into the substance of space begins with visualizations of the familiar, familiar absurdity, familiar structure or shape, living waxwork epitaph, slow-motion joy-ride to the stars in Alicia’s museum.

I had forgotten the candle that I still carried. Its eye of flame was now strong: as strong as the familiar sun in the sky into which the ladder shot far above me and the corridor into which I had come.

The corridor was at blessed room temperature, deceptively comfortable, deceptively relaxing, as I contemplated the business of the sacred above the warehouse of civilization from which I had come.

Haroldian Ulysses was waiting for me here like a ragged merchant-warrior and landowner. As if to emphasize the concept of ruined business career in the scaffolding of the Play, the concept of familiar being, he wore the very rags I had stolen from Proteus’s Ulysses in the gates of Home.

Alicia’s warning rang in my ears. ‘Take nothing for granted.’ I listened and thought I heard her voice again on the other side of the river upon her prized vessel or vase, a faint flute or piping voice this time within a chorus of drowned children — ‘Masks of wood or stone or wax or clay appear identical hardware/software at times within a strange universe to sustain us in our recovery of a dialogue with the past. It is the music, however faint, of inner spaces that tells of furies and daemons, intimate catastrophe’s, intimate ecstasy’s unpredictable substance and duration, high fever yet saving grace.’

Everything in the corridor was familiar yet everything was incalculably strange.

‘I died when you were eight‚’ Harold said suddenly. ‘I know you hated me, Anselm.’

He was trembling. He was biting his lips fiercely but no blood came. I was taken aback at the accusation. Had I hated him? Feared him, perhaps! I was unsure. ‘I shrank from you, Uncle Harold.’ It was the only way I could voice my distress. ‘I wanted to run whenever you struck Aunt Alicia.’

‘I struck her when you came. She was never the same after that. You were the beginning of my downfall.’

‘Me?’ I could not believe my ears even as I was driven to ponder the word ‘downfall’. It echoed in my mind as a focus of ‘destitution’ that resembled though it differed radically from Proteus’s Ulyssean ‘steep face of the abyss’. It was as if a contrasting link between ‘downfall’ and ‘steep face’ had appeared in the overwhelming Ulyssean body shared by two masters of the Dead, dead antecedents, dead but living figurations of Memory, one possessing the instinct of the mountaineer of God, the other (Harold) replete I felt with the anguish and terror of royal and possessed , bought and sold, flesh and blood.