Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

He seemed to know it all in the throng of human/divine apes that viewed him as if he were rehearsing with us the tributes we paid him, the evolution of self-mockery. We were his spectatorial Shadows. He was elusive yet concrete and in seeing him through ourselves he immersed us in epic — absurd epic yet epic of conscience — and put us on trial. The screen or stage on which I saw him gave extremity to the curvature or line upon which he had come into our midst, an extremity of self-knowledge we could bear in our abuse of him. Such is the shared burden of divine comedy in responsive clowns. The clowns we abuse, in taking our abuse, shoulder our evolutionary deprivations, make light of our box-office stupidities, our best-seller orgies, regard us with supreme however self-deprecating character, supreme metamorphic insight into our self-love, self-hate, and eccentric malice.

Yes, I was grateful to my uncle Proteus as I had never been before for an enlightenment on the nature of clowns, sacred clowns, profane clowns, I would not have been able to bear until now in the wake of the Voice of Presence, the Voice I had heard that came from no painting or sculpture on earth. I knew my wild uncle confessed to his partiality in the shadow of such Presence, and in so doing revealed his flaw and the flaw in every solid trickster, solid (in contradistinction to elusively concrete) absolute, every flaw that is mediated through genuine theatre and narrative extremities in intoxicated flesh or intoxicated wood or stone or marble or pigment to warn us of the abysses, gaps, divisions of and in space, that lie between us and the invisible measures of the sacred.

I knew that he knew that the intoxicated obituary of him that we wrote (dancing scripts, dancing camera) as he ascended the hill in oceanic river of space reflected a growing tension that lay between him (as human/animal abused advocate of the invisible sacred) and us (as the ones who would nurture his advocacy even as we abused it) until the tension or marriage between the caricature of the divine and the dialectic of partial being precipitated inevitably daemonic furies within a society whose courtship of the Dead (as if the Dead were to be manipulated into the deprivations of the structured living) became a serial indictment of itself; became also an irony within the arts of the Imaginary City of God I dreamt I was building. ‘Such arts work through indirections, indirections that appear at first to promote the triumph of nihilism and realism only to bring home the taste of crumbling age and nakedness in our mouths. Does one’s age need to consume a body of Shadow to unclothe itself into the visionary life of a Child, ancient truly marvellous Child it once was?’

When news came of my uncle’s death I ran and curled myself into a body of newborn Shadow at the foot of Jacob’s ladder in the great warehouse. I lay in a cardboard box there and sailed on the pavement of a great city towards a bush house on the tilted side of the oceanic Potaro which Proteus was ascending through inbuilt tidal rock and wave.

He came to the bush house and entered the waving door. It was a makeshift cabin, as in the body of a wrecked ship deposited by geologic fable on a hillside. It stood half-way up the giant wave of the hill: half-way up from the Potaro to the ceiling of the sky reflected in stained-glass river cathedral Dream as if the river itself ran through the blue fire of heaven. He broke a loaf of bread and poured himself a glass of star-studded liquid.

The cabin was sparsely furnished. I lay in my cardboard palace upon the Hill of the Sea. There was another child in the cabin. He was several years younger than I but seemed my twin. Rose’s sister’s child. My half-brother and cousin. He lay on the solid surf of a cloud with a glittering knife in his hand. The years melted away between us as if we were twin-born — I in my cardboard palace, he quite still yet afloat on the crest of a still wave. Proteus glanced at us, touched the other child then my head with a gentle finger.

I saw the shadow of his finger in my infant dream-book writing through me in my old age. One was conscious of a curious combination of faculties in oneself: the sheer ordinariness of things — whether bread or cardboard palace — fused into miraculous fire and sea and cloud. Was this blend, this fusion, the character of infant-perception, infant-vision, one thought one had lost or forfeited for ever? I was immersed then and there through infant-vision in the truth of a resurrection that reverses and extends the rhythm of time, the music of time.

The frames of time slipped into curious musical twinship, extension, reversibility. It was as if as Proteus ascended he was drowning in the black, orchestrated depths of the river of space. As he drowned his past life began to unwind its loom within me. The reel of events — the drunken boat or tapestry of time — stopped at 1912 (the year I was born), within the martial drum-beat of post-World War 1920, when my half-brother Canaima was born. I knew the parallel, fused year (1912 in 1920) as an ordinary event, even as I saw the drunken boat afloat on the oceanic Potaro, buried in the sea, yet uplifted into the sky, even as I saw millions of soldiers on the skyline of War fused into a giant Child, a killing Child, a twin-Child that bears the burden of killing in each of us, each of us destined through our ancestral Dead to reinterpret anew the miracle of life, a crumb of substance, a glass of unpolluted water.

A woman with Asian-flu pigmentation, a twin-Rose, had entered the cabin. ‘It’s too much, Proteus,’ she said. ‘You ask too much of me. You travel as you drown, I ride as I die. I can take care of him’ — she was pointing at me — ‘I can fly with him on my saddle. You ask me to give him up … Millions have died. Does one frail child matter?’

‘Millions are dying, will die, in the long Day of the twentieth century, from twin-glorious-revolution-and-massacre, twin-prosperity-and-hunger, in Africa, South America, China, but a child — the conception of a child — still matters. A child clothed in its animal skin, the animal skin of endangered species … Hush! he’ll swim. Let him come with me.’

‘Swim and be damned my flat backside country,’ said the woman. ‘Better for him to ride hard, to fly hard with me.’

She stopped. They faced each other. I was able to see her now through a crevice in my cardboard palace. I accepted their uncanny, strange conversation as native fabric, as native blend of ordinary reality and ecstatic reality, disease and the evolution of fury. They spoke a strange yet everyday tongue, the loosened tongue of flesh and blood that stitches itself into bizarre peasant or aristocratic costume. Had not Marie Antoinette amidst a diseased Europe played at being a shepherdess or a virgin milkmaid? So too dying Rose — dying of post-war Asian flu that had drifted across the Atlantic into Alicia’s colonial garden — had dressed herself in riding boots and the spurs of heaven or hell. Her arms were bone-bare, her breasts bare, and the colour of apples of sunrise. Her hair was full and rich, a great mass of curls upon her head. Her lips were queen-roses and her eyes glistened into the imaginary precipitation of ancient rainfall upon a parched landscape. A desert appeared, a desert of famine, then clouds arose upon her skin far out in thin vistas of space. A thorn of sweetest, bitterest fire ran through her fever-lips and from eye to eye. I could see it through the flesh and high bone of her nostrils that pointed at me across the navel of the world to which I was tied.

Her nakedness in her bed of illness was a kind of fire, she had ridden upon a Horse of fire to bring me (or was it Canaima?) into the world. It was my life she sought to bear away with her in a joint illness (I too was ill when she gave birth to my twin).