Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘You are on trial,’ said the noble judge matter-of-factly, ‘because Rose set you free even as you let Canaima escape. Is the gift of life but a pattern of escape from death, a pattern of escapism? How guilty are you, how guilty is Rose, how guilty is Canaima in leading an escapist dance?’

I was bowled over by the question — its configuration took me completely by surprise — but managed to reply — ‘Rose was my mother, Canaima my brother.’ I spoke softly, automatically. No one heard me except the judge. I was glad no one did, I was ashamed to advance such a plea or revelation of bias. Indeed — even if I had known how related I was to Canaima and Rose — I had never really welcomed it, I had suppressed the knowledge in childhood, suppressed it over the long years until it flared into the obituary notice or film of Proteus’s death, flared into scorched sanctuary and blackened courtroom.

Perhaps I had advanced the plea not simply out of the biased flare of instinct but in the light of the carnival crown, carnival heirloom or kingship conferred upon me. But Canaima and I were twins … Were we not both equally entitled to the crown? What did such entitlement and equality imply? Was carnival a legacy of escapism, licence and abandonment, suppressed criminality, or was it a profound universal theme and a reinterpretation of the great masks of legend and history, the progressions, digressions, reversals of great myth?

Were the two — suppressed criminality and reinterpretations of the great body of a civilization — linked together yet subtly divided within the cellular organs of carnival, the cellular chemistry of carnival, carnival guilt, carnival innocence?

The judge stared at me out of his dusty, deceptively matter-of-fact, sleeping (however apparently wide-awake) eyes. He seemed to know my mind. ‘Why should carnival cells assist us in these deliberations? Your uncle was a street-performer, an actor, a good-for-nothing, a sailor, a spendthrift, a gold miner, a man of no fortune. He died penniless in his early fifties. There’s derangement of cells for you!’

I was outraged by the jest. ‘My uncle was an immortal,’ I protested. I felt the pressure of eyes in the courtroom upon me. I felt I was on trial for the poor, the heartbreak of the poor who seek the seed of value, of religious value, in their excesses. I felt the absurdity of the occasion but I had to reply in the spirit of wine, with a tongue of wine (whatever that was). I had to do justice to Proteus.

‘Of such stuff are immortals made,’ I cried. ‘He drank, I know; he spent, I know; but he cared for the inner robustness of art, he faced great odds, he spoke philosophy as if it were mother’s milk. The very excess of his life sustained a moral tale. There were days when he went without food and drank nothing but wine and rum and water. It made him feel strong, it gave him a handle with which to grip the sensation of being poor but risen above greed. His larder then was the wilderness and that’s a moral tale …’ There was a murmur in the courtroom. I waited until it subsided and continued in the spirit of rum and wine, the spirit of excess. ‘As for my poor devil of a father, he was a brilliant womaniser until his eyes were blinded by Rose. He misconceived money and dreamt his purchase on life was strong. Stronger that Proteus’s. In him too lies a sobering morality and the veiled cornerstone of the sacred grotto that I now glimpse in everyman’s, everywoman’s, body in this burnt courtroom, I glimpse the chemistry of passion that may save or destroy at the heart of the law.’

I saw the Shadow of Sleep veiling the judge’s eyes. Was Sleep a theatre of excess for saint, for sinner? Either vocation involved far-reaching tone and passion. Proteus would have understood the judge. Harold would have understood the judge. ‘You may be right,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps there the transition is, the new (or is it old?) morality of which you speak. It lies in variety, subtlety, and unfixated wholeness.’ He was staring at me in the gloom of the grotto or grotesque courthouse. I knew he was mocking me. Mocking my appearance of a drunkard’s simplicity. He had cut me to the bone of outcast spirit. He saw my discomfiture and was sad. I felt as the wine coursed through my veins that he loved me as if he were my father in heaven, that he would err on my side in protecting me. And yet his curious biting mockery of himself and of me remained.

Why — I wondered — had the members of my family become immortals? ‘Perhaps,’ I said slowly, groping to find a true equation between the feast of love (wine and women) and immortality, ‘it was because every feast begins to grow too rich or too sour and one begins to absorb the immortal spirit of the creative fast and passion’s peace.’

I felt I had struck a chord of wisdom but the judge shot me down with a dusty glance. ‘Fasting is no defence nor is passion’s peace in the business of murder.’

Business of murder. Business again! Was murder business? He was eyeing me cryptically within the savage gloom. ‘You will have to do much better than that in Church, Anselm.’

I was amazed. ‘Why Church? What do you mean by Church?’

He ignored the question and I found myself shouting at him with a sphinx-like ardour that matched his. ‘Do queens spurn kings and judges and the fasting male to throw a new religious light on humanity’s fascination with crime?’

The judge smiled. A smile that shook the terraces of the court.

‘Fascination indeed,’ he said, ‘the fascination of religious judges like me in the bizarre sentences, bizarre freedoms, we sometimes mete out to sex offenders as if we see them with sudden irrationality against a backcloth of spiritual appetite, spiritual marrow, spiritual bone. You and Proteus and Harold should know what I mean.’

At last the blackened room within our mutual unconscious, my unconscious, the judge’s unconscious, loomed bright. I saw the strange humour of the occasion quite distinctly now. I had been aware of the judge’s self-mocking eyes before but now he seemed wired to the skeleton of a sexual bottle in my mind though he was not Inspector Robot. Each jesting bone in his bottled face quivered as if it were waiting to be drawn from a Bird’s wing and placed between the lips of the Queen of Roses. A bone is a lightning conductor of sexual freedom, sexual wine, and of the parole of furies in dusty graves, furies arriving suddenly on a judge’s lips and speaking irrationalities through him that occasion laughter. Thus a monster of the deeps may hope to be set free when the Dead speak in high court museum. I felt there was a chance for the drunkard in me. A chance for Proteus. A chance for Harold. I felt I needed no apology to speak on behalf of the immortals in my family.

The judge sat in a box-like Chair with great extended wings on which to rest his arms. And I remembered the lightning Bird of the Macusis, the dancing Bird I had shot down with Canaima’s knife on the first bank of the river of space. How curious are the emblems that mark the fallen species, the unconscious species, the complex slaughter of a beast or a bird or a dancing angel in the animal enthronement of the law, the majesty of the law, the occasional lapse or parole of a monster!

Does the judge see an emblematic beast and is filled with uncanny compassion, or uncanny lust, when he grants parole to a monster? Does he see a fiery angel within the mutual unconscious of hunted species, mutual Sleep, the judge’s sleep (on one hand), and the unconscious of a tilted bone in a wing of space (on the other), bone-bottle in my Dream of wine, bone-sex in his courtroom of love within the famished lips of a Rose?

Yes, I remembered how Rose had listened to drunken Proteus, had accepted his plea for my life, as if he were a judge who desired that I should be set free. I remembered the monstrous Horse on which Rose would have taken me. I saw its majesty in a new and native light now: I saw the prospect of an incarnation of species I was unable to grasp or bear — though it was native to me — and from which Proteus dislodged me in the nick of time to live, to contemplate the mystery of the law in every lived life, however extreme.