Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Horses are naked creatures of primordial sex whose unselfconscious majesty clothes them with the mystery of privacy, a privacy one glimpses and fears. Except for the shelter it sometimes brings. The nakedness of the Horse — that seeks to erase in oneself all traces of the thighs of darkness through which one comes into the light of birth — is still miraculously, in the body of the unconscious, one’s cloth and shelter of grace.

‘You do overshadow him with the terror of a love he cannot yet bear. Let me have him,’ said Proteus. ‘I shall see to his upbringing with Alicia’s help. Believe me! we shall find him parents, we shall bring him up as our own. And Harold will never know who he is until your sister tells him. If you take him now you will inflict upon him a passion from which he shrinks’ — he was pointing at me, I had retreated into my box of naked flesh and away from the terrible Horse-woman, the dying Rose of the sky and the sea, my mother in Canaima’s twin-mother …

‘But he’s mine,’ said the woman with the thorn in her eyes and on her lips. She would have taken me with her if Proteus had not pleaded for my life. Even now in old age it seemed so real it was touch and go. Perhaps I had known it all as a child and had suppressed the knowledge in myself, suppression of unwelcome news, synaesthesia of the body of Dream, dying limb? newborn limb? Or perhaps I had learnt it all in later years, in censored letters, censored diaries that Alicia kept. Such staggered (or staggering) knowledge exists on a borderline between knowing and not knowing one’s mother, between riding and swimming through a multiple sensation of mothering spaces, between walking and running backwards into a mothering past that becomes the living uncertain present in the sisters with whom one’s father slept. Alicia had taken her into the house, the Rose who was apparently my mother. She nursed her. She nursed me. She nursed us under the shadow of a great Horse. I too had been infected by the fever, by the deadly Asian flu. It was the year the other Rose, my dying mother’s sister, gave birth to Canaima. And when my mother died — despite Alicia’s care — the other Rose appeared over my bed as the Horse reared, swam, flew. The fever in my limbs began to subside, running limbs, swimming limbs, bird-limbs. The gift of survival! The gift of a twin-mother!

‘I am a king of oceans and skies,’ said Proteus to Rose. ‘I swam, flew the Atlantic through Middle Passage Africa, India, Greece, Rome, multiple Christian/pagan motherhood of carnival. I reached the margins of the world, I came to El Dorado, all in Jest. What a golden Jest colonialism and post-colonialism are. What untold riches! He knows as he dreams in his cradle. What a gift for a newborn child. Let us give him the riches of the Imagination for we have nothing. We are poor. Give him a chance, Rose. Let him live to create his Imaginary City of God.’

But Rose was still unconvinced. ‘I shall chain him,’ she said. ‘I shall tie him to the other child, Harold’s other child, the child with the knife in his hand.’

Once again as I listened I was aware of the orchestrated fabric of the unconscious, the language of the eloquent — however absurd, however comedic — unconscious: ordinary accents arisen from the abyss into Dream-life, fragmentation’s organ and tone, the self-mockery of wholeness and Jest within a cradle of Memory, prodigious infant-perception.

Infant-perception floats within age and youth to fuse remembered illnesses, my illness and recovery in 1920, my mother’s and Harold’s death in the same year, Proteus’s in 1922, Alicia’s in 1929, etc., etc., the dying and the living in the twentieth century into whom one arrives when one is twin-born. I possessed the thorn, Canaima the knife.

The thorn and the knife were fused yet subtly broken, subtly transformed illnesses within ourselves and others in theatre of Memory; such breach, such transformation, became a window of hope in Imaginary City of God where the thorn and the knife float into self-judgement, self-comprehension, when greed and lust and idolatry and revenge appear absolute or triumphant in a violent age.

It was a glimpse into the sanctuary, the sanctuary of Presence that dwells so deep it sometimes appears to inflict a wound, a wound that instils the mystery of the law in flesh and spirit.

‘It’s never too late to catch a glimpse of the sanctuary,’ I said. ‘To be born is to begin to learn the complex wound one suffers in all innocence. One touches fire in all innocence, one touches the splinter of the knife or the sharp bone of the thorn in all innocence. One touches the parentage of the wound in the fabric of the sanctuary.’

I had spoken in all prodigious innocence, innocent yet prodigious wisdom that wells from unconscious birth, of being born despite uncertainty as to the motherhood of values one inherits within a divided civilization.

‘He’s a talking infant,’ cried Rose suddenly. I felt her rage, her jealousy. I felt an incredible atmosphere, the terrifying Shadow of the parentage of the Imagination, and it was all I could do to retain my breath. Rose could have squeezed me into a ball, she could have placed me on her breast, and galloped into space.

‘A talking infant is the lighthouse of music, the lighthouse of the unconscious, the lighthouse of the Dead,’ said Proteus.

They laughed and the spell of danger was broken. And thus in Jest, as it were, as if to marginalize a burden of perception, to give it the status of a feather, a drum of lightness in the cradle, I was allowed the chance for which Proteus had pleaded, a chance to live and to ‘speak’ within an Imaginary temple, an Imaginary courtroom.

*

One had entered, to my astonishment, a blackened hall as though a fire had touched the walls of the courtroom, but I was convinced still of everlasting Presence. I perceived the enigma of the sanctuary in its veiled proportions within water or fire or soil or air. The sanctuary or courtroom may have apparently receded but was to be glimpsed through ordinary places, within ruins, within desolations where exists a self-accusing logic: self-accusing chemical warfare, man-made viruses, etc., etc., that touch the lives (threaten to consume the lives) of all species. One glimpses a kingdom, an animal haven, a human haven, that is close to us in the elements of nature, the chemistry of Being, yet barred from us by the perversity (criminal perversity?) that runs hand in hand with the marvels of science.

At the far end of the blackened hall sat the noble judge. Was he a scientist? Was he a saint? I could not tell. Inspector Robot was seated amidst the congregation in the fire-stained room. I recognized him from the shining bone above his socketed eyes. He was a master of artificial intelligences with whom one could play ball, the spinning ball of the globe. I felt the profoundest gratitude in not having to answer to him within living Dream as my judge though his bone-Shadow reminded me of the intricacies of the trial of body and soul one faced.

The year of the spinning globe was ostensibly 1988. The cradle of infant-perception (my cardboard palace) had lodged itself within a bounce of the ball to lie still upon the dark ground of the sanctuary. It confirmed the Jesting play and footfall of age, the age of Dreams, the agelessness of Dreams. Had I not stood within the box, within the palace, had I not lain within it as a child in a fusion of years or chemistry of intoxicated being? Chemistry, yes! the chemistry of the sanctuary one glimpses through perversity and risk, through every hazard of creation. ‘Why me?’ I cried to the noble judge, ‘why have I survived? It’s close on seventy years since my life was spared. Indeed it seems longer. As if the broken fever bears on the very moment, the very crest or wave in the moment I was born. It was then — in that crested moment — that Rose set me free. Danger, survival, was but the reflex of a deeper miracle, a deeper wave. Life’s the miracle. Creation’s the tide that runs through us into every excess.’