The Carnival Trilogy (33 page)

Quantum reality consists of simultaneous possibilities, a ‘polyhistoric’ kind of being … incompatible with our … one-track minds. If these alternative (and parallel) universes are really real and we are barred from experiencing them only by a biological accident, perhaps we can extend our senses with a sort of ‘quantum microscope’ …

from
Quantum
Reality:
Beyond
the
New
Physics
by
NICK HERBERT
(Hutchinson, 1985)

The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other …, the flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediate links of perfect naturalness and propriety – all this magical imponderable dreaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery.

from
Association
of
Ideas
by
WILLIAM JAMES
(first published 1880)

I was amazed, to say the least, when I saw him in the theatre of Dream. Had he emerged from an abyss? I was dreaming of peaceful Admiral’s Park, one summer evening, late June 1988, Essex, England. And there he was. I knew him at once in the complicated mirror of a dream after forty years. Lucius Canaima. He came through a door of space into memory and imagination. It was impossible to run. Nailed to the ground. Human tree? He knew me, I him. My heart beat and loosened the nail in one’s foot. The nail that fear had hammered there fell out. The world was a stage for every walking tree and I advanced upon it. Unsure of my lines, my part in the play of a civilization.

For play it was. Play of truth.

I should have memorized my lines in anticipation of this moment, lines written by ‘daemons’ and ‘furies’, lines
written
within me that seemed familiar yet were profoundly alien in my own ears, lines that seemed unlike words in their material substance, pressure, intensity, lines written by spirits of wood and water, animal, bird, cloud sailing in space.

‘It’s you, Canaima. I know you within the long Day of the twentieth century, a long Day composed of years that are like elongated minutes. We last met on the bank of the Potaro River, South America. 1948. A stage then. A stage now.’

Stage? Why stage? Why theatre? Theatre of freedom’s responsibilities? I wanted to fling such questions at him. ‘You play a murderer, Canaima, and the part you play terrifies me.’ I stopped and thought I heard him reply but I was unsure. Now it’s high time the sky spoke, the rain spoke, the acid rain, the broken leaf. High time they grew within us,
they changed us, they made us see how endangered, how polluted our globe is.

Canaima stared at me from within the ageless shadow of sky and wind that I etched into theatre, into grassy curtain, backdrop of trees, tides, oceans. ‘Forty years,’ I said
ritualistically
, callously, as if ‘forty’ were a mere symbol. I sought to evade him as a statistic or a mere symbol, to cancel him out within myself, to reduce him to nothingness. Why should the living dead return to plague one’s peaceful dreams? What is peace? What is prosperity? He was no ordinary criminal. His victims reflected the moral dilemmas of an age. As if they were carefully chosen to bring home to us our involvement in threatened species, a threatened globe, within the
apparently
common-or-garden materials we employed or used as architect, sculptor or engineer.

‘I am an architect still, an engineer still.’ I was ashamed to have boasted. ‘And you, Lucius,’ I cried, ‘what are you now?’

‘You saved me,’ Canaima said softly at last. So softly it could have been the breath of an instrument, a strange, disturbing and confessional music interwoven with echoic gravity and fury.

‘Saved you?’ I protested. ‘Saved you?’ I drew his features on the canvas of space. When one dreams one dreams alone. When one writes a book one is alone. The characters one re-creates may have died, or may have vanished into some other country, so one invokes them as ‘live absences’, absences susceptible to being painted into life, sculpted into life, absences that may arise in carvings out of the ground, from dust, from the wood of a tree, the rain of a cloud: paintings and sculptures that are so mysteriously potent in one’s book of dreams that they seem to paint one (as one paints them), to sculpt one (as one sculpts them), and in this mutual and phenomenal hollowness of self one and they become fossil stepping-stones into the mystery of inner space. Perhaps one needs a creative penetration of inner space in a space age if one is to save one’s world rather than,
in some future time, abandon it – within technologies of flight – as a wreck.

‘Saved you?’ I protested again.

‘Conspired with me then, Anselm,’ said Lucius Canaima. ‘Do you prefer “conspire with” rather than “save”? You were in league with me one way or the other. Your reputation in the Potaro River of South America was that of a good man – something of a bloody saint’ – he was mocking me – ‘whereas I was bad, a devil. Good men who contemplate the mystery of creativity have a way of conspiring with furies. I killed. Does that make me a fury? I warn you, Anselm, you will have to define the nature of a “fury” in your book of dreams. But there’s time for that.’ He stopped. And yet his voice seemed to persist in the ground. The same voice. Yet not quite the same. As if in Lucius I perceived, however faintly, parallel lives, alternative existences. He was a
common
criminal. He was an uncommon creature. Did such distinctions touch on the disturbing reality of what one sometimes half-jokingly called ‘salvation’? Was this Canaima the same and identical human being I had known? Had he in returning from the dead changed despite appearances?

‘You knew I had killed the Macusi in the bird-mask. You knew I had enticed him from the tribe, from their ritual dance, and killed him. A threatened tribe. Some say on the verge of extinction within the twentieth century. It was as if I had plucked their bird-dancer from the air. I brought him in my arms to the riverbank and put him at the water’s edge. I sprinkled him with water as if he had been drowned. A drowned bird-creature. And then I put a cap on his head – the Alicia-cap – as if he were a member of my team. Perhaps I should say our team, Anselm.

‘You came upon me on the riverbank leaning over him. All you had to do was raise your voice, make an outcry, and I would have been caught. But you remained silent. Had you raised your voice, raised your hand, I may have been caught, and then I would have lost my soul.’

‘No, no,’ I shouted. ‘I cannot believe …’

‘Believe what?’

‘I cannot believe that I let you go, that I accepted such an appalling responsibility. I should have seized you, I should have shouted, I should have handed you over to Inspector Robot.’

‘But you did nothing of the sort,’ said Lucius. ‘You kept your tongue well in your head. Instead of making an outcry you
listened
. It was not the first time I had committed a crime in South America …’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I was a fool to let you go …’

‘But,’ said Canaima, ‘it was the first time anyone truly stopped and listened.’

‘Listened?’

‘You have forgotten. You will remember. I have returned to help you remember. You began to listen that early morning when you came upon me and my bird-victim to utterances that may now send you back into the very secrets of your childhood. But first you need to come to terms with what happened that day.’

‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Let me go as I once let you go. I have no desire to write a book of dreams, no desire to retrace my steps.’

‘
I
had to retrace
my
steps that day,’ said Canaima. ‘I would never have done so, Anselm, had I not seen that you – no one else had listened before – were attentive to the bird-text on the lips of the dancer I had taken from the Macusi tribe. You became a medium in the dance. The carnival heir of the dance!’ He stopped. I was astonished. I had never dreamt of myself before as a ‘carnival heir’. Perhaps there in that ‘heir’ lay alternative or parallel existences in myself I had
suppressed
across the years. How strange is one to oneself? How many ‘quantum strangers’ does one bear in oneself?

‘I walked away, that is true, but each step I made was crucial, a crucial rehearsal in an ultimate relationship to test the nature of violence. Terrible but true.
And
so
here I
am.
’
What did he mean by,
‘And
so
here
I
am
’? Was he implying that the music, the dance, that he claimed to accept through me (when I stopped for the first time in his experience and
listened
to the inner voice of the slain dancer) lay in a sphere of the unconscious/subconscious I had sought to eclipse over the years in order to reside within the shallows of
consciousness
? A sphere of the unconscious I could no longer deny?

I bowed my head. I tried to close my ears. The nature of violence! It was abhorrent to be drawn into such a dialogue. But Canaima’s presence remained. His voice was penetrated I felt by the musical and antiphonal utterance of the
bird-creature
, his victim, half-coffined in soil and water; I found it almost unbearable. No wonder I had apparently forgotten what I had heard in 1948. It was less an utterance and more the rhythm of space: as if the striking and the stricken soul – the anima of conflict-in-suffering – were speaking in terms ecstatic (as much as to say ‘salvation is real if we retrace our steps into a visionary cradle of being’) yet so disturbing, so unusual, so strange, I wanted to forget absolutely a medium of discourse I dreamt I had entered and knew.

I continued to bow my head but Canaima’s presence remained. He was dancing slowly, dancing intricately. He was dancing away from me into the past, into 1948, up the Potaro riverbank, even as he circled and returned afresh under my bowed head in 1988 within the frame of the present moment. He danced again away from me into the mid-twentieth century, vanished up the hill but returned as upon a curve in intricate space.

And it became essential now to recover a medium of inner/outer response that had triggered the dance long ago, dance as flight, dance as escape, dance as a visitation of terrifying responsibility for one’s deeds. Dance as lightning wings … Lightning was a sudden vision that I associated with the masked corpse on the ground long ago and I could not account for it now except in an unravelling of memory, in recalling the past, in recalling the way I had let Canaima
escape into the mist-laden sun up the hill, the way I had seen the face of his victim within a shell of paint, shell-like lips that appeared to glisten and whiten and redden in the rising sun reflected in the water-top at my feet.

My silence had lodged itself in those lightning frail wings on a dancer’s lips: harnessed lightning discourse that we infuse into a suspension bridge, or into a rocking vessel on the high seas, or a distant aeroplane that flashes like a bright insect in the sky within a thin trail of snow-cloud, or a stairway into space, a ladder,
the
crossing
of
many
a
subtle
abyss
, vertical crossing, horizontal crossing, cyclical crossing.

Perhaps I was the medium of the dance in touching the earth, in touching the light, in touching the sculpture of appearances as if every structure one shaped, or ordered, or visualized, was a sacred infusion of slow-motion lightning into substance, substance into life.

Canaima had returned in that dangerous dance of the soul originating in spatial rhythms and music one rarely listens to. And when one does one tends to forget. Perhaps it is only possible to stop and to listen when one is drawn by a thread or a key to the door of the unconscious as it lifts into slow-motion lightning consciousness.

Had I saved him in order to find him again dancing on the threshold of that uplifted door that I now began so faintly to recall, to see in everything …?

I remembered the wings that had fluttered on the dancer’s lips. A thread ran from them now into the dark melodic door that I had glimpsed as my entry into the first bank of the river of space. It was a curious and a peculiar door of associations but such peculiarity of composition was inevitable in my situation. The truth was I had forgotten so much in myself, I had eclipsed so much in myself. I was beginning to remember now …

It is indeed essential to retrace one’s steps within the long Day of the twentieth century. It is essential to test one’s
vocation as an architect. The door of dreams is my
achievement
, is it not?

‘Your achievement, Anselm? You seem frightfully eager to set out, to go through the door. No doubt you will clothe yourself in invisibility as the ancient epic heroes did in many a long odyssey.’ He was mocking me. ‘Have you forgotten, do you remember?’

‘I almost forgot how fearful I was when you returned. You were so perfectly visible! I asked you to leave me alone. Now I know that whatever form we take it may be an initiation into extending

‘Extending our senses, Anselm. We cannot solve the world’s terrifying problems otherwise.’

His mood suddenly changed as if he were a different person, a fury disguised, a god disguised in ‘visibility’. Perhaps only human heroes on this side of the grave, in the land of the living Dream, need the protection of ‘invisibility’. I was uncertain. Perhaps ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ were biased configurations susceptible to a sacred humour that offered to redeem one’s imperfect grasp of the miracle of time and space: biased configurations within human gods,
godlike
humans, that the weak artist or saint or architect may bear to express the unbearable divine: weak, yes, but inwardly strengthened through multiple sharers in every field of endeavour in the translation of epic fate into
inimitable
freedom within the unfinished genesis of cross-cultural moment.

I knew but I was fearful to accept what I knew. I wished to place a seal upon the innermost realms, the innermost cliff of Being that exists everywhere.

‘Anselm, Anselm,’ he cried. ‘Architect, engineer, painter, lover, sculptor, saint!’ He was mocking me again. ‘All these extensions help you to conceal yourself in your various properties. But remember they are suspended by a thread of music in the abyss. That thread is woven out of ages of prayer.’

‘Where did you learn all this rubbish?’ I demanded.

‘The sanity, the humour of the dead who return as
themselves
, their wicked or their innocent selves, inhabited nevertheless by the fragility of knowing themselves
otherwise
! You will understand in due course when you go through the door as a living dreamer. It’s time the living entered into a true discourse with the reformative disguises of the dead everywhere amongst them.’