Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

The prayer had barely crossed my lips when the perils and dangers we faced dawned upon me within the gloom and the Bell of the forested Waterfall. We were making an ancient journey, we were making a modern journey. We were still rooted in the deprivations of the Word though we sensed a breach that clothed these in paradoxical senses. Had not Penelope implied on the second bank of the river of space that her mission was woven into the tapestry of the ‘adventure of love unfulfilled’? Now on the fourth bank (as we bore the Shadows of the drowned in our arms) that mission was as much a penetration of local sentiment as of non-local and universal grave and cradle in the interwoven aspects of incarnated text. It was idle claiming within the divisions and sub-divisions of the Word that haunted us, within the spaces that lay between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’, between ‘fate’ and ‘freedom’, between ‘endurance’ and ‘passion’, that the language of identity was not fraught with questions we still had to answer, questions of electric mood, ecstasy, electric depression. Melodic Conscience was on our side within each frail candle that shone in the Bush as the breath of music but it was not to be taken for granted. It possessed hidden darknesses, hidden teeth. I felt them biting now into the soil of my mind. Soil of mind! Earth-music. Painful soil, mind, earth-music. Our way was barred I swore by the teeth of music dressed in a sudden, unpredictable downfall of weather and mood. I felt myself an enemy of nature and Mankind as the rainy high mouth of the Forest descended and closed in. Was it morning, was it noon, was it premature Night? Absurd ultimatum. Slightly shivering ultimatum of the enemy within a wave of heat that subsided but left us drenched, bitten to the skin, and cold. Absurd teeth within a Dream that is the simultaneous exposure of untranslatable fear and bias in ourselves. In such exposure, such unearthly music of devouring impulse, melodic Conscience bit deep, bit so deep, it jested with us, it painted us into enemies of the very nature and Mankind we wanted to serve. Bitten artist, bitten engineer, bitten saint, bitten sinner, civilization’s bitten missionary and teacher, civilization’s bitten savage.

We had been walking for several hours. It seemed an age in the mouth of space. The trail ahead of us was blocked again. Fire was needed to clear a path. I tried to disabuse myself of devouring impulse within and without but the tangled branches raised their arms imploringly into a Shape, a woman’s Shape (I could see the fern of her hair and her lustrous black eyes like pools reflected upwards from the ground) crowned by an Orchid. It was not Queen Rose this time. It was bitten-by-fire Queen Orchid. Our guide had set a match to the heaped branches across the trail.

‘The Dido Orchid,’ cried Ross. He seemed in this instant of fire-music immune to the flame in my Dream as if his spontaneous, aroused curiosity or excitement was so strong it baffled the mouth of space in which we stood. He leaned over the Orchid, smiled, I saw the glitter of his teeth this time, touched by flame, kissed by flame. The volumes on South America he had brought from England shaped themselves into brilliant ashes, brilliant intercourse of incandescence and human curiosity that has sustained many a fiery adventurer in the desert, at the Poles, in the depths of the rain-forest, military high-flying adventurers as well before they unleash their bomb. Each volume, each page, was clothed by running music, the cautionary fire-music that breaches the heart of Dream. I could still read the ghostly names of ghostly authors in the subtle furnace, some had lodged themselves in a crackling chorus of high-flying nineteenth-century super-power map-makers, botanists, biologists, evolutionists, soldier-civil servants, anthropologists, chroniclers, etc., etc.: Schomburgk, Horsman, In Thurm, Beebe, Boddam-Whettam, Humboldt, Roth, Waterton … A page fluttered, turned in the fire-music and I read, as page intertwined itself with page, the hand of another nameless writer –

The Dido Orchid was christened by a German botanist. It takes its name from Queen Dido of Carthage and Libya. Note the flaming, wondrous, flaxen, yet blackened, ferny leaves and petals. Queen Dido built her own funeral pyre in Libya as though she had been bombed by fate when Aeneas abandoned her.

I peered into the fire as the nameless hand dissolved in the brilliant ashes of classical investitures upon the flora of the fourth bank of the river of space in which lies the ancient, unconscious, epic seed of modern botany and modern warfare.

The nameless hand revived itself in the ashes of Dream and Ross and I read –

Jupiter forbade Aeneas to wed Dido and settle in Africa. All well and good to dally with her, to sleep with her, but it was implied that ‘miscegenation’ would come of such a union. And yet Virgil painted the African queen with white skin and flaxen hair. Such was the formula of epic evolution. Was it a formula that inevitably sustained the transmission of errors in the oral material that great epic poets use?

The blaze settled. White teeth, red fire’s black voice! Nameless muse or chorus of the imagination that runs in one’s blood. Ross’s eyes had darkened. I saw him for a flashing moment in the bombed garden in which Simon had come upon him and Penelope long ago. His love of her had been translated into a curiosity that tied him to a foreign landscape and the phantom South American orchid of ancient Libya and Carthage. I sensed the music of the unconscious in him, unconscious seed underlying the vocabulary of the imperial travellers who were our predecessors.

Indeed I could be sure of nothing. How conscious was I of the imperial legacies that tended to frame the environment of my mind? I may have read in the nameless hand in the fire a paraphrase of Schomburgk’s German prose which I had seized intuitively and made into my own. On the other hand — other nameless hand — I may have tapped the rhythm of Im Thurm’s sensuous English dialogue with the rivers of Guyana and found it native to fire, my fire, my blood. What was clear was the necessity to penetrate, replay, reinterpret, and not succumb to, formulae of static evolution: to respond to the true, multiple voices — familiar, unfamiliar, native, alien — that run in one’s mixed inheritance, mixed blood. The fire-music, the earth-music, had illumined the mouth of space that we (and our imperial predecessors) had entered long before a voyage to the moon had been contemplated.

Those true voices in the live fossil blood of music could turn nevertheless and tear one’s convictions into shreds, into a beggar’s rags, with jesting translations, with jesting paraphrase, of flawed history, flawed anthropology, flawed biology, enshrined by cultural habit into pure white, pure black, frames. Deprivation’s frames.

‘She bars our path,’ the voice in my blood cried. The blaze was high. The black African queen with white skin and flaxen hair split into two pictures. One was a constellation of Botanic lore transferred into the soil of the Americas. The other was a crucial moment in the womb of the human imagination when the queen gives up the ghost of black or white purity and biased fossil, biased formula, on her funeral pyre in the heart of future generations.

Ross was aroused. He shared my vision but distrusted it. He was staring at the Macusi guide who tended the blaze that had been lit in the blocked trail of fallen branches and trees. He stroked the enigmatic Orchid flesh of the queen. The stoic demeanour of the savage who led us reminded him of the pupils in his classroom and drew a veil as it were between him and the fire with its frail implications of passion’s peace on the delicate singed bloom in his hand.

‘Peace is an illusion,’ he murmured, ‘without massive deterrence. It is unfair, no doubt, to equate the young Macusis in my classroom, their slightly sombre and entrenched expression, with the dread efficiency and uniformity of the Nazis or the Japanese in World War Two. And yet it is the Shadow in the mirror, the Shadowy conflagration of a queen or a king or an imperial dynasty that fills me with misgiving. I see not peace there in primitive fires and implicit holocausts but xenophobia. I hear no music except the delirium of power. Alas, people fear people everywhere, Anselm. I wish it were otherwise.