Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Had not Ulysses’s gift of the law to his cousin Aeneas taken the extreme form of a monstrous and pregnant Horse in advance of its time, in advance of the Incarnation of species that civilization was unable to sustain or bear except in the conflagration of war between gods (masquerading as men) and men seeking the art of the divine as a token of grace beyond their comprehension?

‘The animal Home of the law, throne of the law, sustains emblematic compassion, emblematic lust and the emblematic wound that mirrors all hunted creatures. It sustains heartbreak and the chemistry of the animalesque and the divine. Speak the truths of that heart-breaking, heart-changing chemistry, that unresolved chemistry, Anselm, and you approach the mystery of the Incarnation. God will hear your prayers.’

I was filled with awe at such unpredictable association and colour to the law. And yet the very frailty of the judge, his lightness, his capacity for metamorphosis, the paradoxes he revealed within transparencies of the unconscious that cloaked him — that made him into my object as well as my subject — his attachment to someone as marginal or extreme as me, gave me courage to cling to the edges of fused yet broken civilizations. Perhaps he was a creature of labyrinthine jest but all at once he was near and dear to me. In him I saw a sponge of the absurdities yet truths of the Incarnation of the law. He dripped the wine of curiosity into my mouth as I stared at him, the risks that arose from a measure of addiction to the highest form of ecstasy and hope, communion with what could prove a misconception, a misinterpretation, in identifying deity with an animal frame.

But as I drank I saw as well the necessity to endure the wine and the jest, to endure the risks, to disabuse myself of the sensation that I or anyone possessed the sacred in a solid bubble. I saw the necessity to persist in a dialogue with every spark of divine administration of justice in all masquerades however apparently unprepossessing …

‘Your Chair,’ I cried, ‘possesses an ancient savage lineage that drips lightning. Your Chair is symbolic of the incarnation of a drunken storm, the incarnation of lightning. You and the chair together become celebratory flesh on bone in animate wood as the lightning wires lip to heart. The spiritualization of bottled wood, the spiritualization of bottled wing and feather in one’s carnival thirst for the angel of the divine. Lightning strikes the wings of the Macusi Bird and your Chair floats in the Sky. ‘Look!’ I cried, ‘it is there among my charts and diagrams of god-rock, there on the table of the feast, the savage feast before you. Lightning strikes and illumines a winged stairway from sky to earth as the Chair and the table tilt into an abstract diagram and a Bird. See how the wings become a lightning arc or miracle-chalk upon a blackboard. Outspread drunken wings tilt between sky and earth, fold, stretch out again into the spiritualization of wood that is carven into the arms and wings of your Chair.’

Sobriety is always a shock, the sobriety of an individual visionary who faces the passion of faith, the sobriety of the state which turns at last to face itself, the sobriety of a world that has suffered many crises, the sobriety of a saint, or an artist, or a sinner, who suddenly sees in a wounded Bird that falls from the sky, in the lightning of a storm, in paint or ink or chalk or wood that has been sculpted, cut, chiselled, visualized in its grain, grained tree (all these and more), an infinite equation with the Incarnation of the law.

Sobriety, true sobriety, is an awareness of the edges of the chasm in the mind of order, the mind of the incarnate law (how priceless is such visionary understanding of mind and order). Order means risk. Order is a glimpse of the risks to all creatures inherent in creation. Creation is a storehouse of terrifying energies that imply risk. And the law incarnates itself within a chasm of risk as it broods in the storm upon every frail messenger of being that climbs or falls.

The courtroom was still, so still I almost forgot where I was, what I was saying.

‘Every theatre of judgement and trial is a theatre of Dream in its exposure of the language of order that pierces our mind to instil us with orchestrated varieties of the partial translation of sleeping hunger and waking thirst. As the Bird falls it incorporates that chasm of pierced consciousness into itself and revolves into a constellation that is neither pure hunger nor pure thirst.’

I clung as before to the edges of the chasm until hunger and thirst released the apparition of daemons glistening on the wings of the law, one on each wing. They were nameless and I could only identify them from memories of the environment of my childhood. My uncle’s abstention from food (his kind of order) on his alcoholic rounds and drinking bouts had invoked the morality of the creative fast within me as I grew up. Creative fast was one daemon of order upon one of the wings of the law. My father’s obsession with women — with the taste and colour and beauty of women — had reduced him to a shell (a shell of grief, a shell of innermost contrition) within which one hears the murmur of a Voice from an ocean of storm: passion’s peace at the heart of the storm. Passion’s peace was the other daemon of order on the other wing of the law.

And those daemons now turned into an intricate capacity for order and balance within the terror of lightning creation and storm, lightning art, as they stood or rested on the wings of a falling Bird in the judge’s Chair.

‘How strange,’ I replied, ‘that the daemons on the wings of the law, the daemons of order, are as familiar to me as the moral legacies I have drawn from my kith and kin.’

There was a murmur in the courtroom. The Voice of an organ murmured — ‘The daemon of the creative fast rides on one antiphonal wing of the law, the daemon of passion’s peace rides on the other, to sustain a balance when the storm rages and the sky appears to mirror the extinction of all creatures.’

*

There was a long interval of silence as hunger and thirst rearranged their element in the theatre of Memory and Imagination. I felt the trial was over but all at once the judge stirred and awoke. He rustled the papers before him into a gentle, sighing wind. His gaze had lightened from dusty corridors into the reflection of a feast. His self-mocking eyes were upon me. I was sobriety. Sobriety was on trial. I had often seen Proteus solemn as a judge. I had often seen him raise a tissue of dialectical ecstasy and argument with a straight face, a face of glass, a face to sip glass and glass’s reflection of the flea that bites the drunken dog.

‘I accept the miracle,’ the judge said at last, ‘I accept the miracle of insight into your early background and environment. Let us be clear. The balance you imply is threaded into natural events, into nature as a vessel of creation that may overwhelm us. The fiery liquid is not of our brew. All well and good. But surely, Anselm, you need to touch upon another kind of balance within man-made perils, man-made disasters as distinct from any kind of natural catastrophe …’

I stared into the vessel of the sky through the veiled fabric of the courtroom. ‘The daemons that provide a balance within the risks of creation help us to perceive another kind of balance within man-made engines, a man-made cosmos (so to speak). There I tend to see furies rather than daemons as agents of balance. But those furies alas are in a state of disarray, diseased genius

I stopped. The judge was waiting like a policeman at a feast that is scattered on a pavement in the cold blue light of the dawn. Ulysses sat there in rags and chewed a sandwich. I saw Rose’s majestic Horse in the Shadows of the courtroom. It loomed on the veiled terraces of the sanctuary. The sounding hooves ran into my mind. I felt close to being trampled but arose and faced the judge.