Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Until within the puzzlement of all one’s senses and one’s lapsed, self-paralysed will, the serpent-ladder draws one into bandaged yet visionary eyes to touch the Shadow-organ of space and hear the Shadow-voices of bruised paternity in oneself insisting that much remains to be done in the making of Home … and one suddenly swims up to the light…

I came back with a crucial, piercing sensation that one of Penelope’s drowned children was mine, the other was Ross’s, and the third was intricately at the heart of all her bruises a projection from within herself. Time would disclose the features of the Shadow-children that Penelope, Ross and I now held in our arms.

Yes, I was stunned. Not stunned by despair but by hope, by excitement. For it seemed an utterly prosaic discovery, prosaic hiatus, prosaic stillness at the heart of music in which we listened for a heartbeat and recalled the child arising on the serpent-ladder into a fossil creation, a living fossil of Innocence. Its apparent monstrosities, the dread it occasioned, arose from bruised maternity/paternity we carried in ourselves, the conviction that we were living fossil parents ourselves and the children we parented (their fluidity, their dust) were as old as Time … Such is the prose of the heartbeat of Time.

I had never thought of prose in this light until I stood now on the fourth bank of the river of space and perceived that within my fossilization of parent-self lay a Word I could not utter, a subtle bruised Word or window through bandaged eyes into space. My bruised Word or child seemed all the more tenderly beautiful in its haunted innocence because of a streak or a flaw in each live painting of metaphor, each live sculpture of metaphor one makes to define a borderline between ‘fossil parent’ and ‘terror of beauty at the heart of the serpent-Spirit’.

Ross’s bruised Word or child seemed all the more dark and overshadowed in its primitive innocence because of his genuine misgivings that accumulated into a borderline between ‘fossil parent or missionary’ and ‘terror of a whole unpredictable humanity that one shrinks from almost unwittingly as if one dreads contamination by the very Spirit one serves’.

Ross never lied about this I sensed as I retraced my steps into the mid-twentieth century. I saw all over again his instinctive distrust of — and withdrawal from — the savage Macusis (‘savage’ as he could not help feeling they were) who attended his classes in school and church. He never pretended he did not feel as he did, he never lied, but he suffered within the language he spoke. His early public school, university unthinking acceptance of epic formula, of the great epic ‘savages’ of ancient myth, the great warriors, crusaders, boatmen, underwent a change. He began to distrust them within the suffering Word and primitive child he now bore in his arms with acute misgiving and ambivalence. The Word changed. Its inherited glory dimmed. He tended to concentrate on its thinness, its wasted features. He spoke of the purity of the language in order to mask from himself apparent deficiencies he feared, the inability of the Word to probe the ultimate issues, he was driven to harness the Word to purely utilitarian purposes, he began to surrender himself to the visual and to retreat from arts of visualization or the seeing mind that lies through and beyond the consuming eye.

Ross’s savage child therefore was a far deeper and a more intricate judgement of language than one would have easily imagined. That judgement (embodied in the first place in conscience-stricken missionaries whom the world forgot) was to become apparent everywhere as the century progressed, in the political simplistic newspapers, in the profit-making documentaries, in the chronicles of radicals who — lacking depth in themselves — clung to every dispute of nihilist conscience, dispute of nihilist religion, dispute of nihilist politics, as a means to flatten the world into implicit class warfare or implicit racial conflict. All this was woven into Ross’s ‘savage child’ — into immigration or emigration ethics that were to come — within Potaro’s El Dorado, the El Dorado of the Seine or the Rhine or the Thames or the Mississippi where white-masked teachers face black-masked children … Such is the prose and the flat poetry of the polarized heart. Ross felt all this, grieved over its implications, long before it became apparent in the meretricious philosophy of the mass media.

By retracing my steps it became possible to lift the bandage of the Word a little and to see, or bear, what would have been unbearable before, namely, the stillness, the echoing stillness of the Word within varieties of the hollow or fossil parent one was. I was able to accept Ross’s difficulties, to learn from him, to chart in a mutual hollow unique correspondences through and beyond his ethic of withdrawal from the ‘savage’; I was drawn back within these varieties of unique correspondence to a moral transcending utilitarian ethic and into a visualization of the unexplored worlds or territory I had glimpsed between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’ but in a different light now, the light of the bruises that encompass the death of a child, the birth of a child, the resurrection of a child: all stillnesses (death and resurrection) threaded into the movement of birth downwards, inwards, outwards, upwards to leave a transfigurative wound that revives a conception of the mystery of the Word, the Word made flesh.

The ‘drowned children’ that Ross, Penelope and I carried were woven into the tapestry of the Word. Such was the Dream territory of the fourth bank of the river of space overlooking the serpent-ladder. Ross bore his child within a net that made him conscious of a ‘savage formula of glory’ he had grown to distrust. Penelope bore hers within resources of inner metaphor, inner tapestry, inner thread that ran — it seemed to me in the Dream — into her childhood and her early relationship to Simon. I bore mine within the chemistry of a wound I would have been unable to define as transfigurative except in counterpoint to missionary Ross’s ambivalent ethic. Shadow-organ counterpoint. Shadow-organ investiture of the deprived Word, the bruised Word, the well-nigh hollow, thin Word of my age, I now carried in my mind and body and hand in the intricate shape of a Macusi child I had drawn up from the river of space into breath-body. It was clear that we had lifted the Shadow of the three drowned children from the river. Negative resurrection? Negative funeral procession? ‘Time to take them back,’ Penelope said, ‘to the hill and valley country from which they came to attend our El Dorado Mission School. Time to learn from them about ourselves.’ Ross looked dubious as though he already knew all he needed to know but he was curious about rare botanical specimens of the river of space overlooking the serpent-ladder. He had armed himself when he left England with several volumes by nineteenth-century European travellers in South America. Those volumes floated now on the crest of a Dream-wave around him. Were they possessed of unruly spirits? Of Shadows I felt. The Shadows Ross’s predecessors had borne in their heads and arms when they left Europe, Shadows of classical lore with which to christen orchids and flowers. ‘The Dido orchid,’ I murmured, ‘may, it is said, be found in these parts.’ Ross’s eyes lit up with the purest excitement and curiosity though the allusion to Dido left him uneasy. I was unable to pursue the matter for it was time to leave.

It was a blue morning, blue yet red with bruises of dawn-cloud. We set out from the Mission House around seven. The year was 1950. It was the week of the drowning fatality (as an El Dorado newspaper had put it). The Macusi lightning axeman (subdued now and shrunken) whom I had met on the first bank was our guide. We made our way uphill, up the blue, red, dawn-cloud world to the grave where Canaima’s dancer lay. It was as if we were venturing upon another planet to mourn our dead. I recalled the bird-text on the lips of the dancer when I had come upon him long ago on the riverbank. Here on the fourth bank of the river of space that bird-text had been uplifted from the first bank (uplifted grave as well) into our gateway into the planetary Forest. We stopped at the uplifted grave as our guide moved up ahead to clear a mass of fallen branches from the mouth of the trail.