Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Ross had put an arm around Penelope. They stood beside the dancer’s epitaph in the very depression that the king of thieves had occupied when he poured shining rain into the ground. I saw the shadow of leaves touch their faces with the light bruise of a candle that seemed to sing in the wind. Shadow organ investiture of the technology of a candle or a bulb when one sets foot in unexplored realms. How else may one come abreast of what lies beyond one’s vocabulary of apprehension? Penelope grieved. The body of the child she carried began to slip from her arms. It was after all an alien burden that did not fit easily into the texts of her education in the world from which she had come. Was it an illusion to cherish the body of a drowned alien? Why not let it slip into oblivion? Why not let it resume its path upon the serpent-ladder into deep anfractuous caves and deeper still into the river of the dead? As Ross placed his arm around her her question was answered by the bird-text in the ground. She looked up into drought-planets, forest-planets, riverain-planets and into the fossil bodies of the living in their anfractuous, multi-layered, circuitous corridors of space. She heard the faint sound of aircraft far above and was able to see — from the clearing where we were — a white ribbon of frozen smoke in the wake of an aeroplane.

We stood beneath the lines and circles of flight of hundreds of criss-crossing planes on their way to the uplifted graves of Rio or Buenos Aires or Ecuador or Caracas or Port-of-Spain or Kingston. A veritable hive of transparent or uplifted corridors and caves, uplifted by bird-men and women into space. Not to speak of satellites and perpetual debris afloat above us, immersed in an ocean of space around us, in perpetual suspension between us and the stars. Uplifted graves? Uplifted cradles? And all at once Penelope resumed the burden in her arms, she pulled it against her breasts in an ocean of space in which she swam in my Dream into a future from which she could not escape. All were involved, all were responsible, all were being tested to the core …

It seemed to me then that she would have preferred not to be touched, not to be held by Ross. She accepted his arm because had she pulled away he would not have understood the singular tide, the complex labyrinth of emotion and passion in which the drowned child lay against her now, heavy as stone yet frail as an unimaginable feather from the wings of God’s angel as if to witness to untranslatable Innocence within the wastes of Time. I could not be sure that this was how she felt. And yet I knew. I knew how coiled one is into the ladder of lightning peace that runs midway between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’: so coiled that one may unwittingly embrace another and bring hurt to him or her — a hurt or an injury of which one is unconscious.

One may embrace another when one’s arm or body is not desired at that particular moment. One should step back but one continues (sometimes apparently mindlessly) to step forward. Such is the dance of primitive nature that is intent on its goal. One’s touch is born of the riddle of possession (the desire to possess), the riddle of compassion (the desire to support or console). One may seek not to possess but to console and still bring the shock of pain or grief… The Dream intrudes. It makes one aware of what is happening and yet it does not disclose why sorrow or grief is a thread in the dancing fabric of innocence …

The other submits (as Penelope does now to Ross in the Dream) because she is aware that the need to withstand the terrors of primitive nature runs deep: it runs in the voices of the blood in one’s veins into a whisper of untouchable beauty.

‘Touch what is untouchable. Dance to a music of genesis one scarcely remembers …’

Perhaps in secretly withstanding Ross, yet accepting the consolation of his arm, Penelope was shaken by the voice of the drowned child she had taught to sing her English songs, shaken by another music, the music of genesis that triggered a response in the eel, the dance with the eel, the lightning dance, black lightning peace. Black lightning peace? Black lightning conception?

Peace became, conception became — against that sounding backcloth of the music of genesis within the whispering tide — a measure of our mutual acceptance of fate (when fate voices its legend, the legend of the dance of genesis), our mutual acceptance of freedom (when freedom voices its legend, the legend of ultimate insight, ultimate consolation), melodic Conscience.

I reached out too to touch and support Penelope as she seemed on the verge of toppling into a faint. The Dream had not disclosed to me or to her or to Ross or to our savage guide why sorrow and grief were a thread in the fabric and the dance of innocence but it offered a clue now to the grain of the hollow Word. Hollowness needs to clothe itself again with heaven’s dance and then it may plumb the flesh of genesis that we carry everywhere in the body of the unconscious. Melodic Conscience is the subtle flesh of the Word that clothes a child one bears on earth … Such is the prayer of the Word, the intimate, ultimate dance of the Word, the renewed Word, the ecstatic Word.

I was driven by a glimmering understanding of the voices heard in mutual blood yet could not fully articulate: voices of fate and freedom one hears as if they were a breach in a vocabulary of fear and apprehension, the breach that clothes one’s deprivations with fire-music, water-music, earth-music …

We were at last in a position to face our expedition on the fourth bank of the river of space. It was as if — whatever divisions stood between us — a new dialogue had commenced as the twentieth century drew to a close and we retraced our steps.

Our guide was signalling to us. The mouth of the trail had been cleared and we climbed and entered the Bush. The fantastic, planetary greenheart trees rose into marvellous silvery columns on every hand. Clothed in water-music. The trail was narrow. We walked in single file. The cracked silvery veil of greenheart possessed the texture of slow-motion rain falling within the huge Bell of a still Waterfall in which whispering leaves of fluid sound ran up into veil within veil of Shadow-organ gloom towards the highest reaches of the Forest and the slits of the Sky far above. Subtle fire-music.

I had never before seen the shining bark of greenheart columns in this slow-motion raining light (nor the Sky clothed in frail ribbons of fire-music within the lofty gloom of a Bell) in all my remembered Dream of Forests I had travelled in my youth. How young was I, how old was I? We had entered it seemed — the Macusi guide first, Penelope second, Ross third, I last — an innermost chamber of the magical Waterfall beneath god-rock. It encompassed the globe, the ancient world, the modern world. As if the Waterfall had been uplifted from the river and transferred within us in the music of space, around us in Shadow-organ imperceptible (not wholly imperceptible for we were aware of it) dance of genesis.

I recalled the funeral procession when the inner bodies in the rocks in the Waterfall had left their shell to guard the waters even as they arose within the king of thieves and others who bore Canaima’s bird-text victim to his grave. It seemed now that the dancer’s text was a further conversion or alchemy of inner sculpture into living Memory. Penelope, Ross, the Macusi guide and I had been sculpted or painted not from rock but from the silvery text of rain within the fluid, still Bell of the Waterfall to bear the absent bodies of the drowned children to their homes within the tapestry of the Word.

I began to pray — ‘May the daemons and the furies and the archangels help us,’ I prayed, ‘to make unique and far-reaching global distinctions in fabrics of sorrow and innocence, the fabric of names by which we name ourselves, saint-names, king-making names, queen-making names, etc., etc. We have a long way to go backwards into all these names, the names we have given flowers, trees, stars, the names with which we have tagged genesis (though the music of genesis still breaks through); we have a long Dream to take back into our callouses, into the complacent formulae by which we live (whether of stock heroism or stocks-and-shares salvation), a long Dream to take forwards into our addiction to mass prosperity, the ethics of mass prosperity, before we turn and confront our two selves (our many-rooted, many-branched two selves), past and future selves in the present, and confess to an unique and sacred Poverty that makes us susceptible to the regenerated eye, the regenerated ear within the very grain of things and possessions, places native and foreign that we take for granted in our history books.’