The Carnival Trilogy (37 page)

On the other hand those beliefs could genuinely change when one began to perceive the subtle abyss that existed between them, between the vanity of ‘freedom’ and the vanity of the ‘prisonhouse’. How potent was that abyss? That was the Inspector’s prime inquiry of me. Could that abyss alter the features of both time and eternity?

‘Freedom’ by itself could prove a baseless ‘eternity’ that consumes all as the elements become polluted and the fabric of moral order capitulates to an atrophy of being, the ‘prisonhouse’ by itself could prove the cement of baseless ‘time’ through which one flits helplessly into limbo.

How strange if the abyss then that lies between ‘freedom’ and the ‘prisonhouse’ could so extend the range of our
perceptions
that eternity yielded itself to us not as a consuming and
polluted furnace in opposition to passing time but as the parent of vital, original time – re-cast time – within a range of architectures, rooms, doors, walls, cycles, beams
that
draw
themselves
up
from the very abyss that we begin to contemplate into pregnant consciousness?
Draw
themselves
up
into visionary splendours, visionary fragments of a dreaming Creator, a true Creator, whose unknowable limits are our creaturely infinity?

‘Is it possible that the abyss between freedom and the prisonhouse is a source of renewal? Do we need to
contemplate
the nature of every abyss between patterns and forms that we take for granted?’

I shook my head. I knew he was fencing with me. I knew he believed in nothing. He wanted to pick my brains. He wanted to cannibalize every organ of spirit … He stared at me with his quizzical, cynical smile. A sophisticated
tormentor
. Man-made, grave-made brain which could utter genuine truths at times but falsify them into instruments of exploitation because they were void of a spiritual ancestry. A sovereign nihilist capable of putting ‘intelligent’ questions in order to extract what substance he could from his victims. In a way, a fascinating and remarkable way, he resembled Canaima. One was a detective and manipulator of souls, the other was the captain of his team of victims.

Perhaps he felt the burden of my distrust for he mopped his bony skull and shot a sudden question at me – ‘There’s reason to believe this wretched thing’ – he pointed to the god-rock – ‘may help us to unlock the code of Canaima’s hiding place.’ He was staring at me now accusingly (his earlier slightly ingratiating manner had vanished) as if he knew I knew something. I decided to fence with him, to lean into the abyss that stood between us.

‘Take this.’ He pointed to a diagram at the foot of the rock. ‘What do you as a spy, God’s engineer’ – his dry lips flared with his contempt for all religions (yet his desire to exploit all religions) – ‘make of it?’

He knelt beside me as I took a sharp pencil and eased its point into each line of the diagram he had indicated to remove an accumulation of faint mould.

‘I have taken the liberty,’ I said with a dryness that matched Robot’s flare of contempt, ‘taken the liberty of putting A and B and C at the three lines on the diagram at the base of god-rock. The Macusi worship the architecture of the tides. They seek a bird’s-eye view of the geology of the tides in the City of God.’

The Inspector stared at me blankly.

‘A is flood level, C drought level, B is an outline of stone or rock in the Waterfall, peak and valley, through which a precipice of water thunders when the river’s full.’

The Inspector listened intently. I felt he had cast a sudden net around me, blank gaze, intent Robotic instinct and listening ear, coldness, calculation that pushed me on the defensive.

‘B is also,’ I continued, ‘a procession of draped bodies in the Waterfall: rock sculptures that harness the river. The
Macusis see them as the work of the God of all weathers; they also see them as clothing inner bodies that wait to come alive, a living procession, when the tribe is approaching extinction. So though the rock procession may become their epitaph, the epitaph of the tribe within the Waterfall,
something
else will step forth into the world, a magical art born of “live absences”, a magical procession of living interior bodies sculpted at the heart of the Waterfall.’

‘You spoke earlier of a bird’s-eye view, Mr Anselm. Can you explain?’ He was tightening the net upon me. I
hesitated
. I dreaded his deadly curiosity, blank stare, intent listening ear, abstract precision.

‘The soul dreams,’ I said at last and struggled in his net, ‘to dance up from the Waterfall. It dreams it may come to stand tiptoe upon the wing of a bird, that it may wear the feathers and the glory of all winged creatures, and gaze through the eyes of the masked being of space …’

‘What does it see?’

‘It sees the geology of the tides.’

‘Is that all?’ said Robot. He smiled with indifference. He was baiting me, pushing me along.

‘It sees the distant Atlantic coast far below us,’ I sought to explain, ‘where the ocean tides rise and fall. It sees the ease with which the coastal rivers (they look like veins and arteries in the body of distance, earth and space) would run unchecked into the salt sea were it not for every day’s reversal in the pulsation of the tides, the reversed pulse or animate door or fluid wall of the tides that rise where they fell before and ride back up the rivers, push back and conserve the precious fluid of the sky, the drinking fluid, the irrigation fluid.

‘Outflow into the salt sea occurs with every falling tide. Then comes the reversal, the conservation of the river’s resources, with the rising tide that builds itself into a fluid door uplifted on the reversed tracery or re-tracery of the dancing falling/rising body of arterial rivers.

‘I say a
fluid
door, a
fluid
wall, to bring home to us – where we now stand (you, Inspector, and I) far inland and above the ocean – the miraculous parallels, the miraculous architecture of the Waterfall. Look closely at the diagram! The sculptured procession of peak and trough, of carven rock, in the
Waterfall
has been uplifted here by a geological upward
displacement
of the ocean tides. The ocean tides are a fluid door, the processional rock is an active tide however stationary it seems. You may remember my telling you that this
processional
rock will become the epitaph of the tribe even as it releases a new magical art. But to return to the action of geological tides within the Waterfall! When the Macusi River (it’s also known as the Potaro River) falls as you see in the diagram from flood to drought, from A to C, it conserves itself because of the sculpture of rock within the Waterfall to release, yet implicitly reverse or hold the flow from above the Waterfall to the plain of the river beneath.’

Inspector Robot placed his finger of bone on the starred portions in the diagram beneath the drought level of the Macusi River.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘The starred portions under C are all the down-flow through the Waterfall that the action of geological tide releases in time of drought. The river
conserves
itself within a miraculous architecture and balance of parallel forces. The starred portions or selective down-flow become the nightsky of drought in every fable or
constellation
of the survival of the river.’

‘Ah!’ said the Inspector. His skeleton face was alert. ‘How truly picturesque! Picturesque behaviour! That’s all that poetry is. The nightsky of the drought river! I like that. Bird’s-eye view?’ He came close to me and suddenly I felt the net tighten upon my limbs. ‘Not bird’s-eye view, Mr Anselm. I dispute that. Gaoler’s view! That’s better. Gaoler’s view I tell you. And so perhaps we may yet restrict the movements of Canaima and seize him when the door of the law bangs shut.’

I sought to pull away but it was impossible in this instant. I felt the twist of Canaima’s knife in my mind. How strange are the responsibilities of knowledge, the imparting of
knowledge
. Does one impart knowledge by imposing it (and
thereby
falsifying it) upon others? Or did I, through the knowledge I imparted to a juggler of artificial intelligence, give him a chain or a net to bind me?

I suddenly felt angry yet infused with a bitter wisdom. Knowledge illumined the enigma of the self. Was the
imparting
of knowledge a falsification of its own apparently real but innermost premises? Was the imparting of knowledge a
confession
of frail humanity upon which an order of machines, the rule of machines, could be built? Knowledge as painful truth subsisted upon contraries, contrary spirit, contrary
artifice
. I knew I could only be free of Robot by embracing contraries within an unfathomable unity of being,
unfathomable
self-mockery yet access to unfathomable grace through all patterns, all shapes one may inhabit at various times.

‘Gaoled waters you say, Inspector? Gaoler’s view?’ I could not help the rising passion in my voice. Robot turned and stared intently. ‘Look, see!’
I
pulled
Canaima’s
knife
from
my
side.
‘Look, see.’ It was all I could say. Robot recoiled a little. Perhaps he felt threatened.
Then
I
threw
the
knife
far
up
into
space.
It glittered. It flashed. It was a conveyor, a satellite of knowledge. Inspector Robot was startled. And yet perhaps he had been waiting … It glittered. It flashed. Then all at once it shot like lightning into the body of a flying creature. The Inspector and I heard (as with a single yet cloven ear) the flying creature’s long, sweet, poignant, bitter lament as if a note had been struck in the darkest recesses of melodic Conscience. The lightning knife had found its mark. The winged, dancing, flying bird appeared to pause in the
twinkling
of an eye within us, within inner space, glimmering stillness yet lightning apprehension of the geology of the tides through which to build the architecture of the City of God or to topple El Dorado into further ruin.

The angelic dancer fell with open, outstretched wings. It fell downwards (or was it backwards into the upturned vessel of the sky in which the sun shone like a pooled star within a drought of cloud?). Glimmering star/sun or floating eyelid of the abyss. Did it fall into the Waterfall? I listened for the splintering note of the knife upon a head of rock but heard nothing. We were unsure. Inspector Robot was unsure. I was unsure.

‘Did the dancer and the knife fall and rise upon an ozone door, a toppled, ruined, tidal door
in
the
greenhouse
drought-
spectre
of earth and sky? Every epitaph for a dying savage tribe’s angel of beauty witnesses to an abyss we need to visualize, distances and architectures we have befouled, an abyss between a knife in the sky and a knife on the earth. A double-edged knife! It pierces us with the necessity for a visionary change of heart, for a new sculpture of being.’

It was time to ascend god-rock. We made our way up the serpent stairway and stopped when we possessed a good view of the spectral river and the Waterfall of dreams beneath us. Inspector Robot unslung his telescopic glasses from his shoulders and passed them to me. There was a sly and a terrible look in the bone-sockets of his eyes as if the glasses he passed to me were equally embedded in them. I looked through. Everything was black. It was the grave (but a grave such as I had never dreamt existed) into which I looked. A re-constructed grave, a re-constructed cosmos from which a master-brain, a man-made brain had arisen. I was gripped by uncanny temptation. ‘Wear the eyes of the master-brain, the man-made brain of a skeleton-god. Become a nihilist. Your strength will be prodigious. Arm yourself. No one will dare to touch you, to attack you. You may become, if you wish, a forerunner of revolutionary order and sterile morality, a great man, the masses at your feet.’

A well-nigh irresistible temptation and yet since all knowledge is suspect then knowledge of power over the
masses is the most suspect of all temptations, all vanities, the most dangerous to entertain.

One comes close to being crushed by a skeleton-lord of revolutionary technology but clings nevertheless to a thread of liberation through one’s scepticism of absolute power exercised in the name of religion or science or politics or whatever.

So though at first everything was black, black temptation, black power within technology, I was able to approach Robot with understanding if not love. His telescopic glasses became a medium of shared intelligences, artificial and intuitive. I was able to salvage the unfathomable quantum address of every resurrection of the Imagination that runs in parallel with the seductive artifice of the grave as a laboratory of monsters. I was able to reassemble what I knew, or thought I knew, namely, the convertibility of technologies into quantum mechanics, knife into quantum knife, axe into quantum axe, camera into quantum camera, and now
telescopic
glasses into quantum vision.