Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘I felt myself,’ I said to him, ‘so close to the hooves I could have been lying in the throng on the pavement of Troy amidst those who were trampled as they ate and drank. What a craft that Horse was. In it was the diseased genius of a civilization. And yet how close it came to sheer divinity. Pregnant wood. Divine wood. It was the gift of the law. But a law that had eclipsed its true proportions of peace. The furies in the saddle were in disarray. And yet as I lay under the hooves I perceived them. I perceived human excess interwoven with lightning storm, lightning fear and passion, lightning excess. A terrifying blend! How difficult to unravel.’

The judge appeared to be growing smaller in his Chair. Curious foetal object? Curious child?

‘The first fury or mistress of the saddle,’ said the judge, ‘is Rose.’

‘The second,’ said the Shadow-organ of the living and the dead, ‘is fire, fire’s naked grace.’

‘Fire,’ said the judge, ‘is an emanation of the storm of creation that lingers in Memory at the moment of birth. It vanishes and we tend to forget we saw it but it reappears on the pavement in the feast that is abandoned by the trampled masses.’

‘The third rider is a craftsman of diseased genius‚’ I said quietly. ‘That is obvious. He built the Horse. He harnessed the Rose sisters (their lust for revenge) to naked fire, naked grace.’

As I spoke I could hear the singing voices of the Rose sisters afire in my mind. Sober mind. Incandescent mind.

‘Such craftsmanship is so magnificent, so marvellous, it mimics the incarnation of the law but falls short and becomes an engine of conquest.

‘It is ridden sometimes by missionaries, by priests who bless guns. One could enumerate the fascinations of such engines in every fable or legend in every land. Wheels in the Biblical sky, Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines, medieval submarines, etc., etc..’

The Rose-music was subsiding.

‘Rose knows this. I can hear the echo of her involuntary complaint as she rides every man-made legend. Her existence is at stake. Her hopes within my gestating unconscious lie in the craft of the animal body, its unique frailty, its beauty (not beauty in fashionable abortion), beauty as life, as the inimitably crafted seed of life.

‘Thus — more so than anyone else — it is Rose in my gestating unconscious (rather than my foetal unconscious in her as a judge) who must question ailing genius. On one hand Rose possesses the thorn.’

‘Tell me more of the thorn,’ said the judge.

I was silent for a moment listening to the distant music of agricultural and industrial revolutions in the blood of the thorn.

‘The thorn is an inoculation at the feast that brings Home to us the severity of the illness of genius. To be pierced in one’s cradle by the thorn is to imbibe a trace of the harvests our antecedents have sown and reaped in the past in all ignorance, ignorance of continuing consequences, ignorance of the furies they conscripted, the mutual traumas of enslaver and enslaved, broken forests in the flesh of the world, polluted rivers, etc., etc….’

‘Does this mean,’ said the judge, ‘that genius must reckon with the womb of the unconscious, with hope that a spark in the body of the living dreamer will erupt, a spark that will be fleshed by furies in balance …?’

‘Such a spark or Home is the Spirit of the kingdom of truth we have scarcely begun to build ….’

I felt I was being swept along by Shadow-organ music built of filaments of rain, flashes of sun in illuminations of soil, dark and red soil, the catspaw of the stars in the soil, rippling and pinpointed gold within the ground on which I stood. The ground had spoken through me and I felt I was on the edge of tilting into an incredible chorus but the judge drew me back. He reminded me of the thorn. ‘What else does Rose have?’ he asked.

I was glad to pull back from the chasm. The light or shining music, the sun’s bright, sweet claw, the stars’ music, cleared from my eyes. ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘she sponsors the knife with which Canaima is endowed. It was there in the cabin in which she and Proteus conversed. The very knife Alicia saw in the ribs of black Agamemnon.’ I was unable to continue. A choking sensation! I emerged from this recalling the chasm from which I had pulled back. I saw the chasm again. I recalled the sun’s bright, sweet claw interwoven now with dread. I recalled the stars’ music interwoven now with torment. Were these the unpredictable features of my gestating unconscious coming to birth at last ?It was as if Alicia and Rose were my children, sprung from me into swiftest being, swiftest beauty or craft of the body which Rose desired. I ran with one in my Dream even as I ran from the other. I ran with swift Alicia in her fear, I ran from swift Rose into necessary meditation to encompass what was at stake in the craft of the seed — the innermost gift of the seed — of inimitable life. And therein in that moment of well-nigh inexpressible passion and compassion swift as lightning upon the darkest sky — when the gestation of deepest, darkest, innermost form, innermost seed (one has been carrying in the womb of the psyche for ages and generations) turns into newborn life — I saw the furies (I saw their saving rather than destroying light) with which one wrestles in every man-made enterprise, or institution of the heart, or cradle, or school of art.

Harold and the Rose sisters were as much my children now as they had been my terrible parents and relations, Proteus my child as much as he had been my wild patron and uncle … A balance of furies within the craft of the body, the gestating male/female body of spirit one nurtures, the body one slays, the body one sculpts into great man-made Characters of epic myth, epic war, epic disease, great Agamemnon, great Ulysses. Greatness becomes an organ of tenderness in the reversal of diseased antecedents and relationships, the child as the parent of civilization, the parent as child, old age as a mirror of newborn parallels and alternatives, interchangeable fates and freedoms, responsibilities in flight and escape. The great judge became a shape I held now in my arms, a shape of the law I nursed in my arms within a balance of furies, a shape that edges Memory’s man-made legends, man-made martyrdoms into the new inner craft of Rose and into the prospect of a newborn state.

My ascent from the third bank of the river of space to the fourth in the theatre of Dream happened within an innermost, deepest blend of resources born of the unconscious, a blend that strengthened my hands, took me by surprise even as it uplifted me: a strengthening of limbs. I meditated in my flight from Rose on the ravelling/unravelling of the tapestry or coat that I associated with Penelope and Ross George in the Imaginary Cathedral and Refectory within the ruins of the burnt Potaro Mission House. Then I came abreast of uplifted Jacob’s ladder in its primitive lightning arc, one curved wing of the law upon the earth, the other breaking into the ceiling of the sky. Lastly I was advised again of the antiphony of the law and the Shadow-tongues of the living and the dead.

It was thus that I gained a sudden, almost precipitate appreciation of the sentence that had been passed upon me in the trial on the third bank of the river of space. Nurse the shadow of the law one carries in one’s arms into a life that speaks through and beyond death. Nurse the shadow of the work of one’s hands.

I listened to the faint tremor of the tides of space like a rounded syllable on the fourth bank of the river. So faint it may have been the vibration of a leaf that fell from my brow onto my hands.