Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

‘Nurse the Shadow,’ said the leaf that grew from a tree on god-rock and from within the skeletal imprint of lightning winged stairway and Bird. ‘Build the Shadow-organ of Home. That is my sentence. Home is the turning world.’

It seemed at first sight, at first sound, a liberal, purely rhythmic sentence that defied logic until I grasped that the key to the future, to a changed heart, lay in complex rhythm, in complex incantation. It was no liberal sentence that had been passed upon me. Each whisper had been threaded into ‘daemons’ and ‘furies’, their subtlety and grain, their masquerade and spiral in the body of a plant, planted tapestry, ecology, the pitch of a voice in the body of wood, newborn wood, divine wood, the splinter of rock that sinks into a tide and cries its seismic lament in the shaken Waterfall that showers the globe. ‘There is a close proximity between natural catastrophe and man-made disaster — proximity as well as distinction — that one never grasps except in a thread that runs through ear and eye.’

The musicality or linkage between daemon (within natural catastrophe) and fury (within man-made legend, man-made Eden, man-made dynasty) was, I perceived, a component in the Shadow-organ of Home on the fourth bank of the river of space.

Take 1948 when I met Penelope and Ross George and Simon’s warrior-ghost in the Potaro. I saw now, all over again, the glitter of his military decorations within the rags of Ulysses’s beggarly coat upon the skeleton of a tree. He had returned home from leave, found Ross and Penelope together, innocently together in a bombed garden, but as a jealous Governor of flesh and blood seized her (as if she were a disobedient servant), flung her to the ground and advanced upon Ross with hands raised in a boxing gesture or like someone about to pull a giant bow. His Shadow was to dwell with them for the rest of their lives. He returned to his regiment and was killed on the beaches of Normandy.

Four years after his death they volunteered to work in South America and he sailed with them. He clung in jealous spasms at times — when he settled in the Potaro — to Pizarro, the king of thieves, who stalked El Dorado and whom he associated with Penelope’s suitors. He hated Ross. At times I dreamt he hated me as if I were another suitor: as if he saw through the flesh of the Rose (to whom I was linked in musical dialogue) into the possibility that Penelope might bear a child (his dream-child all unknown to him which Ross might claim as his own), a dream-child that might lie in wait for him with a thorn or a knife. Rose seemed to fuse two faces into Penelope’s features — two sisterly faces — and he could not tell which child was his by one sister, which was Ross’s by the other.

Penelope never conceived. She (like Harold’s Alicia) never bore a child. Her marriage to Ross remained childless. But she assembled a group of children into the choir of the Forest, the endangered Forest, the young voices of the Forest.

Had I understood I would have placed my ear (as I was able to do now in a Dream) against her body, beneath her breasts. I would have known that those children sang within her even as they sang without in the Forest. I would have known that therein lay the seed of an infinite symphony. Or opera. Or some other form of nameless music.

Had I listened with her ear to my body — no, my ear to her body — I may have perceived the thread of a leaf within her, within me, and recorded the endangered Forest or family tree of humanity in the rising mist of the river and in the veined Shell of the sounding Waterfall beneath god-rock, recorded the sentence of a universal Home that the judge had uttered in the courtroom long after — or was it long before — within a Memory of childhood’s involvement with a sea of roses and churchbells.

How often had I not stopped under the Mission House as the children sang: stopped to be haunted by sensations of the future and the past yet oblivious of the seed of music everywhere, in every dwelling house, every place, every village, every settlement. Oblivious of the enormous frailty of life.

Frailty, yes, frail dust, frail earth, frail soil that pours through one’s hands. Two years later three of Penelope’s Forest children were drowned in a boating accident. I recorded the fatality in my first book of pilgrimage upon the first bank of the river of space. I did not say there that the drowned were excellent swimmers. I forgot to mention that electric eels were seen grazing in the river the next morning and it became clear then what had happened.

Electric eels are innocent monsters one suppresses in every dream narrative of the depths and its fantastic creatures. They are an organ of apparently innocent craftsmanship in nature, neither daemon nor fury. They occupy an unexplored middle ground between these that puzzles our senses and our will. They approach in a swirling current without guile, fondle fluid arm and leg, and seek to dance with all who come close. But each stroke, each embrace, breeds shock and paralysis in those they touch. The swimmer in their embrace collapses and sinks like a stone. Stone as much as the spirit of rubber, rubbery limbs upon a serpent ladder in the dark waters through which they descend to the river of the dead.

Not Jacob’s ladder this time. Not the Macusi brightest wings this time between heaven and earth. Not these. But another manifestation of a ladder. The undulations of the innocent serpent within unexplored territory between daemon and fury, a dancing animal ladder in whose scale or measured rungs is secreted electricity, black lightning eel in reflected skies within the mirrored organ of fluid space.

They (Penelope’s drowned choir of three) sank into that organ. Sank into rhythmic stone, sank into eclipsed revived memories of an extensive organ of space through all substances and elements: the organ of Sebastian Bach (where one least expects to find it) in the Imaginary City of God that is imperilled yet drifting, arising within the voices of children in the waters of space. They sank into a medium of unexplored Being in which the very substance of the inner music of the stone transported the lighted candle I had received in the corridor of the third bank of the river of space into a numinous serpent-ladder. I would have lost them forever there within an innocent fabric I dreaded. Except for the lightning Shadow-music, Shadow-candle I visualized. Had I not seen its glimmer before in the shining rain that the king of thieves poured on the dancer in his grave? Had I not perceived it in all unconsciousness in the spiralling flute of evaporative/precipitative cycle?

Yes, I had attempted to draw and record it in the very ordinary tasks of my life (extended now into peculiar sublimity, peculiar dread, peculiar ecstasy), in the survey diagrams I drew and in the science I had pursued. Hardened though my heart may have been I had still been in touch on the first bank of the river of space with a genuine insight (through the ordinary tasks I performed), a true insight into rhythmic stone, shining rain. Except that the linkages between daemon and fury (and the unexplored territory that lay between) were a wholly new revelation upon the third and the fourth banks of the river of space. The inner stone unleashed the Shadow-organ of the deep river into new rain, into the distant voice of the churchbells I recalled in Alicia’s garden city theatre on the second bank of the river of space.

In all these — Forest children, ladder, stone, lightning, churchbells — I had missed the subtle linkages of a parent-Imagination in, through and beyond all creatures, all substances, all elements, a Parent beyond fixed comprehension until I began to retrace my steps. How easy to fall into despair as though one were drowning oneself in a lake of bruises one equated with God — how easy to feel stunned, to grow numb …