The Carnival Trilogy (38 page)

‘They’re gathering,’ I cried suddenly. ‘Look! The
Waterfall
.’

‘Gathering?’ said Robot.

‘The processional rocks in the Waterfall are coming alive. You do see, don’t you?’

The Inspector gave his ingratiating and permissive smile. As much as to say, ‘Have it your own way for the time being.’ He did not actually reply. But I sensed that his perception of the activity of the rocks beneath us conformed to a statistical revelation of geological behaviour. In the laboratory of the grave he was at liberty to exploit all religions and to simulate the life of the earth within the void of his socketed eyes. The ascension of the rocks was possessed of no genius or
innermost
leap, innermost duration. It was a spectacle that
confirmed
the avid curiosity and power of the skeleton-brain to give picturesque momentum to a state of ultimate arrest.

It was different with me. I was no giant and little match for
Robot. But as I looked through his glasses I became genuinely involved – as if the innermost genius of the planet were at state – in uplifted veil upon veil of darkness until I possessed a glimmering apprehension of the magic of
creative
nature, the life of sculpture, the genesis of art, the being of music.

The living sculptures were arising from the Waterfall and making their way along the bank of the river. They left the cloak or shell they had worn in place in the Waterfall: cloak or tidal clock through which to conserve another spirit, another existence within the rocks, the spirit of time that remained to invoke protective cover for the river and the Waterfall.

I concentrated upon the particular existential sculptures that had arisen or been plucked from the rocks to make their way along the riverbank to the body of Canaima’s victim, the murdered dancer. They lifted him up and placed him in a box. He was light as a feather. The procession was led by the king of thieves.

I had sculpted the king of thieves that morning from the stump of a felled tree. But now it was as if within the cloak of processional rock in the Waterfall he had eaten of the pooled stars in the Macusi river of drought. Sculpted wood then became unclothed rock, rock visionary flesh and blood in the creation of ‘live absence’ into ‘presence’ upon the first bank of the river of space.

He led the procession up the hill past the El Dorado Mission House. He stood at the head of the grave on the hillside. The corpse of the dancer was laid to rest. I saw Robot’s eyes fixed there. Each detail confirmed his concept of arrested being. None would escape their fate. And that fate was the power of the grave, the power of the prisonhouse, the toleration of a measure of fantasy in chained millions and millions who stood in a long but inevitable queue around the globe awaiting their turn to bury their dead or to be buried by those they hate, fear or even love, to kill or to be killed in a battle, on the street, in the air, on land or water. It was the
abyss within those who bury and those who are buried, those who kill and are killed, that divided the Inspector and me: the subtle abyss of an incalculable, inner reformation.

The king of thieves had brought with him a cup of the diagrammatic pooled stars in or under the drought-body of the Macusi/Potaro River. He poured it now over the dancer. It was shining rain. The survival of humanity. The survival of the river of space. It was as if in so doing he released for an instant the heavy burden of gold he had stolen across the centuries, the heavy obsession that tormented him and his fellow miners whom he led. He became the last tormented thief in the world in that miraculous instant. He was
eternally
alive in that instant. Vital time, newborn time. A curious reformation of the instant heart within the subtle abyss that lies within those who bury and those who are buried.

In 1933 I was ‘green and carefree’, I still thought quality and merit, however hardly achieved, the only yardstick. I had yet to hear of Bartók dying, impoverished and forlorn in some foreign field; of Berg whose life might have been spared if he could have afforded a specialist; of Webern, with works known to a handful …; of Schoenberg’s death, aged
seventy-seven
, worth £100.

from
A
Goldfish
Bowl
,
Elisabeth Lutyens (Cassell, 1972)

The voices of Macusi children returned to me across the years as I retraced my steps past the grave on the hillside and into the El Dorado Mission House. There were twelve children in the choir Penelope assembled in 1948, seven to eight years old, three of whom were drowned in the Potaro/Macusi tapestry of waters in 1950.

I hear them now. I see them in a loom that Penelope weaves. I hear their faint voices in the deep interior. It is as if the voice of the dancer sings through the soil of his grave. Sings within the voices of the three drowned children I have sculpted into a flute.

Music possesses such solidity one may hold it in one’s mind, sculpt it into a mysterious flute, a flute that is akin to a spiral or a curious ladder that runs into space.

‘Yes,’ I said to Penelope, ‘a living language is a precious ladder, it’s the antiphon of the flute in which the dead and the living discourse in the heights and the depths. Listen to the voices of the drowned children. They live again within solid music and within the elusive story they tell. They brush past my ears as if the dancer in the grave on the hillside hears the rhythm of the pooled stars that the king of thieves tilted upon him. That
tilt
is important. You shall see. That tilt tells of a ladder.’

I knelt on the ground and meditated upon a grain of dust as light as a feather.

‘The flute sings of an ancient riverbed one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage
of the drowned into the river of the dead. The flute tells that the river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks. We shall see!

‘So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill.
Then
the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children.

‘Listen to the voice of the flute. It sings and tells its tale in the English language yet solid (however whispering) music gives the Word that echoes in one’s frame as one kneels uncanny twists, uncanny spirals, that relate to ancestral tongues, Macusi, Carib, Arawak, Wapishana pre-Columbian tongues that have been eclipsed.

‘From such eclipse emerges the rich spoil and upheaval of the Word, upheaval into banks of the river of space. As though the flute is a paradox, it arrives at the solidity of music by processes of excavation within a living language.

‘One cannot tame the voices of the flute, voices of such uncanny lightness yet miracle of being that they are able to
tilt
the two rivers, the visible and the invisible rivers, into diagrammatic discourse; and in so doing to create the four banks of the river of space into a ladder upon which the curved music of the flute ascends. Those banks are dislodged upwards into rungs in the ladder and into stepping stones into original space.

‘The tilted banks convert the river of space into a sieve that spills its contents. That sieve is the antiphon of the Waterfall, it constitutes a discourse between the rocks in the Waterfall and the clouds in the sky. The spilt water evaporates into cloud, evaporates into the promise of new rain, into
cloudkinship
to latencies of precipitation in and of the Waterfall through rock. And the voice of the spiralling flute mirrors within solid music the ascension of the spirits of the living and the dead through rock and cloud into space.’

It was in this way through abnormal care and attention, by donning the mask and the ears of the dancer, that Penelope, Ross and I were able to follow the spiral of the flute upwards from the first bank to the second bank of the river of space.

Equally through his masked and bandaged eyes in the hill where he lay (half-artifice, half-Christian mound of gnosis) we gained a perception of the crumbling yet renascent spirit – evaporative, precipitative – of the tapestry of the Macusi/Potaro overground/underground rivers dislodged now into a visionary and wide ladder within and beyond our dreams.

Proof of the reality of the curvature of the music that rose upon the ladder of space from rung to rung lay in my work as an engineer in the 1940s and 1950s when I gauged the Potaro/Macusi River for hydro-electric power potential.
Electricity
culled from the dark waters by harnessing and
building
upon the architecture of the Macusi Waterfall was a vital ingredient in contemplating a new settlement for refugees in the wake of the Second World War. Nothing was to come of it but though I remained unconscious of a metamorphosis at the time my life had changed in its innermost fabric when I met Canaima and his team of
victims and spiritual refugees.
The truth was (I had long suppressed the knowledge in myself) I had known Canaima long before we ‘first’ met on the bank of the Potaro River in 1945. As I retrace my steps now in this book of dreams I hear the music and the footsteps of generations upon the ladder of science and spirit as if for the first time, the first truly attentive ear I place to the ground and to the body of the turning globe.

After ten years I possessed the rudiments of a
stage-discharge
curve sloping upwards from left to right as shown below and this was identical with (one sees now) the diagrammatic voice of the flute (see page 45) rising from the first to the second rung and from the third to the fourth in the ladder of space. In crossing the subtle abyss from the second to the third the voice of the flute maintained the same curve in reversed direction.

Music and numbers were (one sees it now) a revelation of a fluid skeleton, a ribbed body, to be associated with the flesh
of the elements, the smooth flesh of water, the spark and the animal magnetism within the anatomy and the blood of ancient streams upon which many cultures had survived and above which they buried their dead in mounds and hills. Our antecedents from all races and peoples glimpsed that skeleton as they wrestled with floods and droughts, plenty and scarcity, from times immemorial, antecedents we also glimpse in the nightsky of the ancient river through the seed of moral legend, moral theatre that they sowed, primitive constellation and metamorphoses of the voice of the flute … Primitive antecedent. Intimate
refugee
.

The vertical rib in the diagram was a record of river levels in the fossil or bone-pulse of our ancestors. The horizontal ancestral rib was marked to imply a multiplying volume of flow as the river rose and ran into the Waterfall. The initial volume becomes dual, triple, etc., in a library of carnival science. The small circular stars are plucked from that library to give the values of volumetric flow observed with quantum current meters as the river rose and fell, rose and fell again and again across the years. A sufficiency of close agreement or accord between the stars permitted me to trace a
stage-discharge
rib or curve in the river’s fluid skeleton. The eccentric stars that flew off above or below that rib provided an implicit nightsky or constellation in the river, a primitive violin in league with the diagrammatic voice of the flute, a dual bow, a heart, a head and a neck. It was but a glimpse into a library of illustrated dream within a theatre of science I had not realized then within the mid-twentieth century but perceived now.

That glimpse empowered my pilgrimage upwards in space yet backwards in time within the Carnival Day of the twentieth century. The glimpse became a key into
cross-cultural
capacity to bear the dual, triple (sometimes
self-reversible
) content of some of the greatest myths of survival in the body of humanity.

If there is such a mantle as ‘carnival heir of civilizations’ which one shares with others in a time of peril then one must kneel and pluck the carnival rib from the river’s side as darkness threatens to fall and encompass one’s mind and the world appears to slip away from one’s grasp. One plucks that rib as the foundation stone of an Imaginary Cathedral. The grave on the hillside is close to the burnt El Dorado Mission House that Penelope and Ross George occupied when they worked in the Potaro. It is fitting therefore to see the Cathedral encompassing both sites and arising now in my innermost library from dancing bone and fire to the music of the flute and the violin in the Waterfall. I arose from my knees with the magic rib. The music of recall, the music of solid soul, was so faint and strange and heartrending that it was a shock, the shock of terror and beauty, to see Penelope and Ross standing in the doorway of the Cathedral as if the long Day of the twentieth century were inscribed into the very day that the king of thieves had presided over the burial of the dead. It was as if their dinner invitation to me that day which I had been unable to accept remained nevertheless suspended in time within the Imaginary Theatre of a century that I was building. Such is the comedy of dreams. I dreamt I was meeting them for the first time on the second bank of the river of space whereas we had spoken not long before in the old, remembered Mission House.

Now, however, this was a Cathedral and I saw them as the last missionaries in South America but the first reluctant guardians of the fire and the bone, the fire and the bread, the food of the world, on which we were about to sup. It was as if we were involved in a contract to conserve the resources of the earth and the sky, a contract between missionary queen of threatened El Dorado and every unconscious suitor in the womb of space and time who may be seduced by power or prosperity to waste her substance.

Now it was as if they came forward to greet me as warmly as they would have done had I accepted their hospitality so long ago. Penelope was smiling the half-crooked enchanting smile I knew so well and Ross had his hand outstretched toward me. They had returned to England from South America in 1966 or thereabouts, had retired and died in the early 1980s. I had never travelled from Essex to Kent to visit them but we had kept in touch by letter.

The El Dorado Mission House in which they had lived for many crucial years had been abandoned after their
departure
. Canaima of the Macusi tribe had set it on fire soon after they left, when pictures appeared in the popular press of a child dying of starvation. No one had dared to touch the blackened shell of a Mission House until I perceived it in my Imaginary City of God as a museum loaf of bread within the fast of memory upon which transubstantial love floats up from the first bank to the second bank of the river of space. Transubstantial bread I could at last break with Penelope and Ross into parallel lives (parallel life and death as well) in the refectory of the Cathedral.

Despite the warmth of their greeting I hesitated, drew back, a little uncertain whether it would all vanish into nothingness, the entire scene, the Imaginary Theatre,
everything
that I visualized. I clung to the genesis of hope in cross-cultural community around the globe, the solemn
occasion
, one’s entry into the first post-colonial,
post-Christendom
Cathedral on earth, as if I were about to receive a blessing from the last missionaries from Europe into Central and South America. I clung to the Cathedral I was building within myself on the ruins of an English Mission House, ruins of real/unreal cities in the compositional fabric of the elements.