Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘Face the concrete,’ the Voice in the corridor said, a Voice that was attached to no absolute beginning, no absolute ending, within alternatives, parallel spaces, sculptures of myth and history. I could not resist the quantum humour of paradox. Without the invisible one would lose the seminal secret that resides in vision (the birth of vision as deathless life), would lose the medium or spark of divine comedy, abstract self-judgement, abstract fertility clothed by apparent nothingness.

It was a thought, an intuition, an inspiration that I could not yet fathom though the Voice of invisible Christ had spoken with such authority.

My mind was inhabited by questions of the architectures of birth and extinction, the locality and non-locality of ideas, questions of the origins of space (somethingness-in-nothingness) that I could not frame.

Yet an answer began to unfold on the third bank of the river of space through the memory of concrete Shadows that had visited me, or I them, on the first and second banks of the tilted rivers of the epic Guyanas, epic cosmos. I had been fortunate to gain through them a spark or grain of the seminal concrete of which Christ had spoken.

Suddenly it were as if radio-voiced, radio-armed Proteus slid into quantum television along the curvature of the arc of God in partial response to my unspoken questions or prayers. He (Proteus) turned into a spectator at his own funeral. He was there before me, he was here beside me, in the throng that viewed him. He had split himself into a versatile primordium or television amoeba, television irony, through which to contemplate a divided human/divine self, contemplate his and humanity’s funeral as a compartment nevertheless in a train of action and reflection within the sub-divided and mirroring mass-media eye of Protean age in myself and others. A drama unfolded, astonishing, unpredictable in its grain of living moment. Space (visual space, visualized space) became a stepping-stone into other dimensions.

Proteus was ascending a hill within a Waterfall, within a river, within a series of tides from which he arose as from a coffin and bottomless cradle into our self-made victim, our self-made actor, his self-made audience.

I reflected on the curvature along which he had come out of the depths as much as the heights: chiselled, as it were, into the ‘last comedian in space’ by an unfathomable and concrete Creator. I saw the tracery of peculiar self-knowledge in him, peculiar self-trial, peculiar sorrow, peculiar humiliation … For nothing was to be taken for granted in the ‘last sacred clown’ one associates with one’s intimate relatives, intimate family, intimate humanity. Neither the stereotypes of the box office nor the story-line of birth and death. To take such a story-line for granted was to surrender oneself to a conjurer’s unchanging universe. Whereas this unpredictable mythmaker was miracle and metamorphosis though so abused by us, so misunderstood, so exploited by advertisers, he had become the strangest ‘first’ rather than ‘last’ grotesque within which the seed of a resurrection lay buried in us, deep in us, in advance of its time. Invisible concrete (partially visible seed) was the art of the resurrection of humanity.

‘To stand on the brow of a quantum television hill in advance of one’s time requires one to gaze backwards in space into a mist in which one discerns through every veil an event that has already happened but which is so curiously suspended in the present moment it seems utterly native to the future.’

My Dream appeared to retreat a little into the Voice I had just heard and then to re-emerge with greater strength. Proteus died in 1922 but he seemed more alive now within the language of Memory. The old man (he seemed old to me in 1922 although he was less than fifty-five) had lived a full life — whatever that means — when I was a child.

‘What is a full life?’

‘A full life entails a body or bodies that lie so deep — and beyond a one-track frame of existence — that their true complexity and potency live and relate to the future.’

Proteus was more alive now than he ever was. More alive within an immediacy of Dream that drew part, indeed much, of its revolving content from barbarisms, killings, terrorisms everywhere. More alive and real now because the innermost suspended body of the past, through the veil of the present and the future, drew him invisibly/visibly into millions and millions whose hopes are threaded into a fabric of menace and dread, a fabric of absurdities and trivialities as well, through which they survive (their hopes gain bodily, wounded substance in survival) from day to day: bitter day, trivial day, happy day, unhappy day, overshadowed by the ephemeral solidity of the news, the black news, the television soul, the radio homecoming of the maimed around the globe.

All this edged itself into a Dream in which ‘space’ becomes Proteus’s ‘stepping-stone’ into a theatre of conception and birth I would soon encounter on the hillside he was ascending: becomes so because when I knew him it was so, he was a native of the abyss (whether I understood this or not). The germ of the abyss was there in his masks (adding new and unsuspected content to these), in the rags (divinity’s, humanity’s rags) that he wore, the inks, sketches, bottles, vessels of every shape and form, the warehouses, churches, schools, the business he conducted with the profane and with the sacred, the abuse he allowed others to heap upon him, in the intoxications of existences that he played — it was there in all these — in Poverty’s, El Dorado’s, primitive cinema, primitive radio, which I now perceived in Memory’s leap into quantum proportions.

When Alicia and I received a telegram of his death in the interior of the Guyanas, he climbed into my childhood as if this had become another stepping-stone into an audience within me which would write his obituary in film. We watched him avidly as the camera rolled within us on his last expedition for gold and diamonds, we watched him, he watched us, watchman of the golden abyss, watchman of the diamond abyss, weather charts, subtly rising oceans, subtly melting ice-caps. He was, some said, a notorious gambler and drunkard in the global village. Beardless as an infant yet crafty as a hermit. Adept at many games, God’s amoeban mountaineer of tragic/comic theatre, capable of uprooting many a family tree. He had tricked me when he gave me parents who were susceptible to many divisions and sub-divisions. He used chalks of glittering ice and snow-flesh in the tropics (as if to counsel one on the priceless family tree of the rainforests that were in danger), inks as black as midnight (as if to counsel one on the necessity to nurse the sun into a new lease of day). He painted me black at times, painted himself white at times.

After such trials (carnival ecologies, carnival inverted/subverted racism) I became a hollow man who had no alternative but to fast in spirit to become well: ‘Fasting is primordial insight into the hollow Day of the twentieth century as one retraces one’s steps.’

It was my turn now to mock him, to join hands with his tormentors, stitch a few famous last words on his lips, a four-letter word or two, an expletive or two, an inane gesture or two, by which posterity would remember him on television or radio as Comedian Uncle.

‘Damn you, blast the world,’ he said, as if to oblige me from within Poverty’s ghetto. There was faint applause. I lifted his hand in Carry-On Cardboard Cinema to everyone’s uproarious delight and let it fall on Rose’s backside as he ascended the hill. I placed him on quantum television hill in 1922. It was a triumph of science. ‘Poor devil! Poor scientist of the theatre, poor uncle Proteus, we’ve got him by his tail at last, he’s dead.’