Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘I had forgotten but I remember as you speak,’ I said. ‘I always wondered

‘She bought it and hid it away the day your father died.’

‘But why?’

I was startled to hear my voice played back, playing back in the Dream. A child’s ageing voice. Or was it an ageing cradled echo of the stranger, the everlasting stranger one is despite every homecoming?

I scanned the sculpture of black Agamemnon. It appeared to recline in space as in a Waterfall, Waterfall river or bath of space, with Canaima’s knife in its ribs. It wore the Alicia cap. It was a member of Canaima’s team. No sign of a thorn this time. Just the knife! It was a private and startling piece, naked yet reticent.

‘Why did she hide it away?’

‘She touched the knife and felt that her hand, Rose’s hand, was in yours, in Canaima’s. It was the reverse of what had happened before when your hand had been an involuntary extension of Rose’s. So you see it belonged in the self-reversible parallels, the ravelled/unravelled tapestry of a multi-faceted king in dual suitors and triple queens that we have been playing. Every unconscious suitor who repudiates our expectation of the safe return of the carnival king, who kills in the name of the law, the law of love (did not Harold purchase hate instead of love?) is involved in a pattern of unconscious sacrifice in a violent and a terrorist age. Not unconscious suit or suitor this time who raises his hand in involuntary but protective love for abused mother nature but unconscious sacrifice that becomes an instinctive, redemptive base in a conflict-ridden age, a base upon which the family of the Alician state resurrects the slain king (saddled with charges of the abuse of the world) — a slain king who is akin to a slain God — resurrects him through daemons and furies of poetic justice, poetic dynasty, poetic law.’

As he spoke I felt a glimmering understanding … a glimmering apprehension of the trial to come and its bearing on ‘daemons and furies’. Had not Canaima warned me in his complex dance on the first bank of the river of space that I would need to grasp and reinterpret the nature of the ‘furies’?

Proteus’s inner broadcast had subsided a little but it suddenly increased in volume — ‘Your Aunt Alicia was the most faithful of wives, the most loyal of women. And then she realized you had changed everything. She had paid the price demanded of Rose to have you. She had aided and abetted Rose in the punishment inflicted on your father. She had sworn to keep your identity a secret. The bond with the twin-Roses had become a contract — an agreement — to secure revenge in the end. And when the Syrian magus appeared on her doorstep she was impelled to face the full implications of your ascendancy over her (the legacy of responsibility you would be summoned to unravel sooner or later) and Rose’s judgement upon her dead husband.

‘Her private contract, her private bond, became a thread into the mystery of the law. How guilty was she? Should she have broken her word? What is the law of love? What is the law of revenge? Where lies the medium of sacrifice within love and revenge? How do dynasties rise and fall, fall and rise, with the murder, the assassination of kings?’

There was a sudden hiatus within the airwaves, hiatus or subtle abyss, as the ancient/modern broadcast within my living Dream ceased. I was drawn into the complicated homecoming of human surrogates of divinity through the gateway of a piece of sculpture that had appeared on my aunt’s doorstep when I was a child. I felt the shadowy weight of self-reversible merchants and magi around the globe. It was as if the collective unit of piratical bodies (ancient Ithacan and post-war modern) in equation with the king of thieves — that I had sensed on the second bank of the river of space — had now become paradoxical merchants and magi. My aunt had paid them, those paradoxical and self-reversible magi, in tea, myrrh, gold, sugar, as if to give their trade an Imaginary sacred seal to redeem, she hoped, the revenge implications built into her contract with Rose.

In this context of self-reversible sculpture it was not the magi who brought gifts but the Alician family of state who gave of its possessions to glimpse an involvement with a core of Being, a core of metamorphosis, in which Penelope’s unfinished garment of Presence and tradition overshadowing the globe — snatched from her by the king of thieves — had materialized into a shape, a form, a sculpted body that had arrived, it seemed, from the margins of the world.

Not from great centres or establishments but from an obscure and marginal village in Palestine that possessed a thread of blood with ancient, long-forgotten family histories in Greece and upon Calvary.

It was as if I had been deluged by a Waterfall of Dream in Agamemnon’s bath. I swam in the corridor of space into the charisma of the political family of Man, the complicated family of Man everywhere, divided in its allegiances out of necessity, fate, freedom. I struggled to find my footing and knew — as if I had been stabbed all over again by Canaima’s hand within myself — why Alicia had apparently run from herself, why — despite her courage — she had pushed the black Agamemnon into a dusty grave or bin.

Even now in the revived murmuring echoing voices that had resumed their inner chorus within me on the airwaves, living chorus, long dead chorus, historical personages, mythical personages, speaking from the archives of chameleon space (staid spatial accents, sharp accents, lyrical accents, gentle tones, ringing spatial tones, grave accents, etc., etc.) I felt fear and uncertainty in facing black Agamemnon again as the long Day of the twentieth century drew to a close.

Blackness was but a mask. Strip it away and one was left with features of blood on one’s doorstep.

Did I not hear features of sacrifice on the airwaves in the voice of a great American president? One hears with the eyes of Dream, sees with the ears of Dream. I could not be sure. Sacrificial voices are faceless until the burden is shared through one and other, man and woman. ‘Politics is choosing between the inherited blunders of Adam and Eve.’ President Kennedy spoke again — I assumed it was he in Proteus’s genesis radio play — Adam and Eve at the Berlin Wall, homecoming Adam, Dallas. I dreamt I heard a sudden scramble of voices in the Fall, inherited blunders, the Waterfall, live rock-voices, a funeral procession, followed by deathly stillness. The drought of history! Assassination. Home after Troy’s Berlin, Troy’s Cuba, Troy’s latent Vietnam, criss-crossing radio tragedies past, present and future. ‘Humanity weds every great fallen commander or ruler,’ said Proteus, ‘within a tapestry of voices, the news, displaced quotations, memorable utterances.’

I touched the knife in Agamemnon’s body. I touched the thorn of the queen Rose my mother in Alicia’s hand. A president’s inherited wounds? A king’s inherited wounds? ‘Will the legacy of an American president, the legacy of uncrowned Martin Luther King (“I have a Dream”) turn by degrees in the sacrificial medium of an age into the root of futuristic American theatre, uncrowned Irish kings, uncrowned black kings? Or — to put it differently — will the blood of sacrifice, of martyrdom, witness for a universal and protective sovereignty within tragic republics around the globe that yearn in the dynastic pigment of the unconscious for the regeneration of saving kingship, saving queenship?’

I was unable to reply except by raising another question. ‘Does there lie in the assassination of the Mahatma Gandhi a charisma of loss that fertilizes the seed of new sorrowing dynasties in Asia, a Nehru, sorrowing dynasty, a Bhutto, sorrowing dynasty, the rise of future, peasant ruling families from the soil of the “untouchables” whose champion Gandhi was?’