The Carnival Trilogy (2 page)

I do not have to remind you that tyrannies have been nourished by the ageing Church which turned a blind eye to injustice, by ageing democracies which have been the
s
uppliers
of machinery of war or have stimulated in the
commercial
field gross, materialistic ambitions.

I cannot easily explain it but the curious fractured storylines within
The
Infinite
Rehearsal
drew me intuitively to sense that the numinous body of the womb in the female priest implied unsuspected fabric that breaks and alters the rigidity of Faustian hubris. The substance of the nail, the substance of instrumentalities linking cultures, turns
institutions
around to examine and re-examine themselves in creative and re-creative lights. Robin Redbreast Glass yields to the priest Emma:

The numinous instrumentality of the nail becomes the seed of invisible texts in which ageing, expendable masks become the secretion of strangers who are intimate to ourselves and who will sustain continuity into the future.

One needs to be cautious for the issues we are exploring do not turn on dogma or intellectual formula. Yet one may have, I think, a certain true confidence in the intuitive life of the Imagination, its spectrality and miraculous
concreteness
beyond implacable identity of formula.

It is the nail, the paradox of associative instrumentalities, which brings me now to the last volume in this trilogy, namely
The
Four
Banks
of
the
River
of
Space.

Let me commence by presenting a cross-cultural parallel between an aspect of Homer’s
Odyssey
and South American/Guyanese legend relating to the figure of Canaima.
Telemachus
is approached in Ithaca by a friend who tells him that his father Ulysses is alive and will return home to redeem the kingdom and to destroy Penelope’s suitors who are wasting the substance of the state. The next day when Telemachus runs into his friend and reminds him of their
conversation the friend is astonished. He has no
recollection
of it. He was somewhere else, Homer covers the discrepancy by saying that a god or a goddess had appeared in the shape of Telemachus’s friend. A similar yet enigmatic confusion of identity occurs in South America and it relates to the revenge apparition or fury or god called Canaima. Ulysses does return as prophesied and is not immediately recognized. He comes in the rags of a beggar.

An aspect of Ulysses’ fury when he returns which I find horrific is his slaying of many or some of Penelope’s serving women who had slept with some of the suitors in the palace in Ithaca. One accepts the necessity of slaying the suitors but the hanging of the serving women filled me with dread as a child when I read Homer. Upon reflection across the years I find it endorses another parallel with Canaima. The aspect of terrifying revenge! True, Ulysses was a great hero, a returning hero, but the redemption of his kingdom is tainted by the horror of revenge.

I recall coming upon a group of Macusi Indians in the Potaro river in British Guiana in the mid-1940s. They told me Canaima was active amongst them and in pursuit of some obscure wrong he had judged their people had done – some crime they had committed in the past – and as a consequence he was spiriting away their young men and maidens. It is hard to describe their state of misery in the face of Canaima who is indeed a formidable legend
associated
with the enactment of revenge upon wrongdoers. The pathology of revenge in him becomes a form of evil.

It is important to note in charting the parallel with
Homeric
epic that Canaima may appear in an encampment – intent on sowing fire like a terrorist or causing some bitter distress – and be recognized as a neighbour, as one’s cousin, or someone’s brother or father. Yet the following day when the recognized person is cornered he makes a good case for being somewhere else, hunting, fishing. An uncanny
confusion
overwhelms the tribe. Not only are they confused about the crime they or their antecedents have committed
and which brought Canaima into their midst but they are confronted by an abyss within which lurks the identity of terror.
If
only
they
could
seize
the
instrument
Canaima
uses
!

The instrument becomes both spectral and concrete. And this explains in some degree the ascendancy of the camera amongst deprived peoples. If they are to deal with such spectrality, such concreteness, a shift has to occur in the premises of their
reading
of reality in the sky, in the land, in the river, everywhere. That shift seems almost impossible in a mass-media world and yet a moment may have arrived when the apparatus, the instrumentalities we take for granted, are susceptible to cross-cultural and re-visionary momentum. Take the camera. Disadvantaged peoples become pawns of the camera. Their ills are made visible to millions of viewers and then they fade from the news. The camera becomes a weapon with which we shoot an animal or a savage and bring him home as a trophy in the television box. There are passages in
The
Four
Banks
of
the
River
of
Space
which extend the complications I have raised but I wish to restrict my emphasis to the matter of weaponry and instrument.

A camera is a weapon in some instances. In other
instances
it is an extension of the caring eye. It could also be a private excursion into the future through recorded relics of memory. Each relic implies a fossil dimensionality that enriches the present and the future. The camera is also an eye of spirit as when one encounters people – as I did in a market place in Mexico City – who are alarmed that their souls may be imprinted or captured on the glass eye staring at them.

If all this is true of the camera how much more varied are the weapons and instruments of past civilizations. The bow of Ulysses in Homer’s epic is
not
the same bow for us. How it lived for him, how it felt to him, the faint tremor and music of the string, the sound of the wind that whispered in the branches of trees from which the bow came are not the same for us. But tremor, sound, wind, incomparable composition
at the heart of words may awaken us to the mystery of trees, the precious life of trees. The abyss that has opened between ourselves and Homer – the greatest of epic poets – nourishes a fantastic and mysterious continuity that breaks a pattern of sameness, same bow, same arrow, even as it enriches the numinous raw material from which we fashion a bow, or a vessel, or a ship.

To destroy our rainforests now is to place our civilization upon another hill of Calvary. The three crosses fashioned from trees become the eloquent masts of a sinking ship from which Robin Redbreast Glass would be taxed, as never before, to arise. A bow, or a ship, or a camera, or a sword, or a knife, or an axe are not singular or same objects. They are instinct with pluralities. On one level that instinct cements violence. On another level we fashion, and are fashioned by, the enigma of constructive truth. The two levels or forces resemble each other but they are not the same.

The resemblance cannot be dismissed however. It achieves an overlap that resists absolute model or formula. There is no absolute model for constructive truth. There is no absolute imprint upon violence. Justice can be tainted by revenge. The resemblance assists us to make
differentiations
that are sometimes shockingly new in abysmal
circumstance
between our proneness to violence (as a solution to the world’s ills) and a blow we may strike that liberates our prepossessions, unshackles our bondage to fate. The latter blow is inimitably creative, inimitably
constructive
, in apprising us of the burdens of an imperilled globe that may only be borne in intimate and far-reaching alignment to strangers who are pertinent to us as we are pertinent to them. This issue of knowing ourselves,
recognizing
ourselves differently, implies a creative/re-creative penetration or blow directed at models of tradition whose partiality engenders an accumulation of crisis.

That such accumulation is visible everywhere makes clear, I would think, the rituals of sameness, of repetitive
slaughter ingrained in violence within the symbols of world politics. One returns to the issue of instrumentality, the life of the extended body, in visualizing the stranger in
ourselves
. The mould of revenge gives way to profoundest self-confessional imagination. We may not recognize
ourselves
in the evil-doer but our dismemberment at his hands need not be a prescription for ultimate self-destruction. To jettison such a prescription is to perceive within the threat of a dismembered world an instrumentality that has chiselled us, shaped us, across aeons of space. We cannot seize such instrumentality but we can release in it, from it, proportions that begin to overturn the aboriginal tautologies that
condition
our responses to evil. Evil seems to be evil for ever and ever until it voids self-confessional creativity. In
The
Four
Banks
Canaima, the evil-doer, returns to Anselm, the good man, after forty years. Alarming as it appears Canaima has changed. He has been dislodged
within
the instrumentality of a cosmos he abused. An
abused
cosmos which has shaped one, sculpted one, across aeons and evolutions, is a paradox no one can solve. Can one abuse a creator that has sculpted one, written the word of being into dust and marble and flesh? The extremities of evil are woven into such a paradox which Canaima begins to illumine when he returns to Anselm in a Dream.

Canaima the fury becomes a redemptive daemon. Has not Anselm, the good man, the architect, the saint – in the nameless proportions of artifice and instrumentality, religion and law which have their roots in well-nigh
forgotten
pagan realms – conspired inadvertently with powers that bred catastrophe? Canaima’s return therefore is
self-reversal
in such illumined conspiracy. His return is an illumination of restrictive vision into shared evil, shared faculty of redemption through the arts and sciences that have been abused in the prosecution of fundamental causes.

Anselm sets out on his Odyssey into the past with
Canaima’s
dislodged knife in his side. It is as if he gathers up
into his arms – in a wholly new, abysmal, terrifyingly creative light – the corpse of the bird-dancer Canaima had slain forty years previously on the bank of the Potaro river in South America. The corpse is but a mask to be worn by endangered species whose life is now wholly precious, sacred.

The
Body’s
Waking
Instrument.
The arousal of the body to itself as sculpture by a creator one abuses. The body wakes to itself as inimitable art, inimitable multi-faceted, living fossil extending into all organs, objects, spaces, stars, and the ripple of light. Wakes also to self-confessional blindness, blindness to self-destruction and the
destruction
of others.

The body wakes to the instrumentality of breath – ‘
sharpest
extension of breath in sculpted body-senses’:

I appreciate the difficulty in a phrase embodying ‘
slow-motion
lightning’. It was the closest I could come to a visualization of the energies of the cosmos as sleeping/waking life, as station and expedition, as the
transfiguration
of technologies into a therapeutic edge within the malaise of gross materialism that threatens to destroy our planet.

Wilson Harris

The wanderings of the soul after death are prenatal
adventures
; a journey by water, in a ship which is itself a Goddess, to the gates of rebirth. In Vao the newly dead man is believed to arrive before the entrance to a cave on the sea-shore, where he encounters a terrible crab. In front of the cave mouth is a mazelike design called the Path. As the dead man approaches, the crab obliterates half of the design, and he has to restore it, or else be devoured. The Path is the same one that he has trodden many times in the ceremonial dances, and his
knowledge
of it proves him to be an initiate. After completing the design, he must thread its mazes to the threshold of the cave.

NORMAN O. BROWN
,
Love’s B
ody

Everyman Masters celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in the summer of 1982 with several glasses of red wine he consumed in a pub. He returned home intoxicated and, ascending the stairs to his flat in Holland Park, came upon her again, the woman who had moved in within the past week to occupy the apartment above his. He had caught a glimpse of her then but now it was as if he knew her for certain, and everything he had surmised in their previous encounter was true. In her lay the climax of Carnival, the terror of dying, the bliss of reciprocal penetration of masks. She was tall, slender, very white; her skin was transparent yet stood beneath or within coal black hair.

She gave him a faint, pointed smile of recognition. A needle seemed to stitch a spirit on to her lips. Red wine for thread. White skin for fabric. Blackest hair for a veil or net. All these – the glimmering shadow of a star in a glass of wine, the net of whiteness and blackness like the painted apparition of a ghostly storm – were substitutes for another presence as if they were all Carnival fabric, as if they were all animate costume saturated by the wine of memory, the strangest sacrament of jealousy and love that binds one to involuntary divinity, plagued humanity, with which one wrestles across the years.

Her subtle red lips were stitched by the needle of space into another woman’s jealous mouth. Yes, it was true. He saw it all. He remembered. The resemblance ran deeper than mere pigmentation or exaggerations of emotional tone, emotional colour. A black or brown divinity could wear a
white
mask and
red
lips and still reveal itself complexly, profoundly, as other than whiteness or redness. So now the white face of the woman in which Masters’ soul was mingled like wine was
but the stitched investiture of a hidden pigment, a hidden affair with another woman apparently vanished or past but vividly present again, vividly dark, vividly alive, to break the mould of fate, or finality of ancient colour, inscribed into encounters of personality.

He clung to the banister, then half-stumbled, half-danced, it seemed, into his apartment. She helped him through the door, half-embracing him. They gained the sitting room.

“Water, please.”

Jane Fisher repaired to the kitchen and returned with a glass. He took it from her. “There’s a bottle marked Elixir somewhere on the mantelpiece – would you … yes, that’s it – thanks.” He extracted a tablet that he placed on his tongue and swallowed with a sip. The darkness of his face seemed to burn, then to clear, then to grow mellow. “That’s better. I suffer from the genius of love.” It was an astonishing remark yet seemed weighted now with profoundest matter of fact, profoundest comedy. He stopped, but within a moment or two continued accusingly, yet welcomingly, as if they were characters in a play.

“You astonished me, young woman.”

The expression “young woman” – spoken with a slightly caressing note – softened the blow in his voice, softened the bizarre in his previous utterance.

“You’re the spitting image of someone I met long ago except that she was black, no brown.” He stopped again, took another sip, then continued with unexpected passion, as if he had forgotten himself and spoke to another being within her being. “You were, no, she was the colour of rice that seems white yet conceals brown pigment and black in the dazzle of the sun, an Indian woman, East Indian, one tended to say in New Forest. I am not sure if she was even that. They were a mixed lot, mixed races, the New Forest people.” The effort left him momentarily exhausted, slightly breathless.

“Where is New Forest?” Jane asked. She could think of nothing else to say. She felt herself inwardly gripped by something.

Masters did not reply immediately. But he recovered his voice once again. “South America. Facing the Atlantic. I came to Europe twenty-five years ago, in 1957. Never returned. I remember the year because of Sputnik, the first rocket
signalling
the Inferno.” He leaned back and rested in his chair. His face, like hers, was a mask, the words he had spoken also masked (she felt) a fantastic, oddly breathless, yet breathing force, a fantastic, troubled, indefinable bond between them. They were real yet unreal presences to each other as all human shocking intercourse is. One lives in and out of Carnival time since each element that masks us sustains time as its original medium of sacrifice within creation. Not only that. Original medium of theatre. One is the other’s veil of timely or untimely dust. For himself Masters saw through Jane to the other woman who had stabbed him twenty-five years ago in New Forest. Life was draining away from him now as then. Life was drawing him close again to the
originality
of death as a spectre lodged in the breast of humanity, humanity’s eclipsed longings, eclipsed ambitions, eclipsed hopes; that revive, flash forth again upon every border line between theatres of the dying and theatres of the living. Such originality was Masters’ goal, Masters’ quest.

He revived, touched his side where the dagger had lodged. He drew Jane to him. Does the originality of love, however elusive and curiously distorted, cohere, or gain substance, in every theatre of the dying? Carnival had not yet come to London in 1957 when Masters arrived. Twenty-five years ago? He could scarcely credit it. Truer to say twenty-five ages or paces had drawn him closer to the art of dying he sought as his supreme goal. Such art or such a goal involves a
penetration
of masks that stitch into being a universal and complex Carnival or capacity for shared wounds, shared ecstasies, between past and future through living actor and hidden force.

Masters touched her eyelids and her lips as if he drew her into a performance. He seemed all at once immensely privileged, she felt herself curiously addressed by fictional
reality. At first she wanted to pull away from him as if he were a dirty old man, poet or seer, but something
indescribable
held her, the obscure bond she had felt before, obscure stitched fabric through which he sought to trace the essentiality of other features within her, upon her, the essentiality of a kiss like a scar to which one succumbs again and again.

“Something puzzles your will, my dear,” he said, “some trace of longing you have entertained from childhood into adolescence, some trace of deepest ambition to shed accumulations of deprivation, to become a different creature, disciplined yet abandoned, the subject of lucid dreams in that you dream but still know you are dreaming, ageless child in self-surrender to species of fiction. I can see what is
happening
. I know within my own doomed flesh. A fever, a drought, possesses you. Is it not so?”

Jane sought to pull away but did not do so in the dream.

“Half-oasis, half-desert. I know. I have been there many times. I understand. Our, or my, birthday performance seems unusual, even perverse, but in point of fact it is a veil I seek to part within you, a veil you hug to yourself because you fear the world and its censure or ridicule.

“If you were a famous actress, yes, then you could be human and divinely mad or unveiled on the stage. You could murder … Society would allow you to play at being possessed by someone as drunken as me whose lines you would utter to enchanted audiences.

“So the world’s ridicule is hypocrisy or veneer, a device men and women don as chattering parrots and apes of the birth of creation that they too fear. Their fear is as great as yours.”

Jane could not make up her mind about the wound of fear. She toyed with the dagger in Masters’ flesh.

“Have you not noticed how politicians, journalists, economists, interviewers, interviewed, who appear on the box, suddenly become, as they confront the spectre of a wounded age” – he touched her hand as he spoke – “mimics
of involuntary vice or virtue, a mimicry instigated by the originality of infected being? Something claws at them and unwittingly they utter the Sermon on the Mount to the unemployed or their eyes twist into another mask and they become noble, they cry like Old Testament prophets for the return of the death sentence. You are puzzled. Humanity is uniquely infected by legends of judgement that conflate all professions, all sciences, all vocations, into theatre of the Word or the Wound. The Word is the Wound one relives again and again within many partial existences of Carnival.”

She could not be sure she had heard or understood everything Everyman Masters was saying to her. The bond of confessed partiality and biased personality between them gave her a sudden sensation of privilege – if not divine right – reserved for a minority establishment. The sudden privilege to become “great” and “famous” was both heaven and hell. Her shadow arose, her shadow descended. She was naturally deprived but infected now by Masters’ drunken sobriety. He was drunk but infected by her pigmentations of spirit as if spirit needed to haunt the wedding feast and the funeral with elusive feminine water from a dagger of wine in god’s side. She was naturally common-sensical but infected by his uncommon illness. He was wise but infected by her capacity to twist the daemon’s tail. She was naturally young but infected now by his scent for ageless reserves of fiction. His power to hold her close to him as the soul of the cosmos lay in an immediacy of spirit to invoke greatness in a life such as hers that seemed remote from conventions of fame within which the so-called great actors or statesmen of history mimic universal death or love as they pursue statistics of world hunger, world charity, nuclear wealth, nuclear poverty.

“Ah yes,” he said pointing to the dagger and the wound that she (as newborn famous actress playing another woman’s shadow in the Carnival of history) had inflicted on him twenty-five years or ages past, “there was no reason to stab me. You were joined by your husband when you dealt the blow though you told me, when you invited me to your
house, that he was away fishing at sea. I was innocent. You mistook me for someone else who had done you a great harm. I was game to be slaughtered. The wound I received was my first human/animal death, human game. Innocent as I was, there was guilt, another man’s guilt for which I paid. I was lucky to know this. Lucky I say, for others continue to die without possessing a clue about why they are hunted. Think of men and women from all walks of life who become victims, innocent victims. Their lives and deaths accumulate into statistics of motiveless or meaningless crime. How to identify those who are guilty, acquit those who are innocent! How to perceive the morality of Carnival within a universal plague of violence! That is our play. We shall descend, ascend, we shall travel around the globe. A first death and a second dying
now
as I embrace you, my dearest enemy, my dearest love. These are the facts on which the judgement of spirit rests.”