The Carnival Trilogy (4 page)

Young Masters was fascinated. Such skill he had never witnessed before. The stranger waved his hand and appeared to disembowel space, yet to stitch it around the child in a wonderful garment with a button for an eye. The young boy recalled the eye of the fish on the fisherman’s gallows he had seen that afternoon in the game he played of wheeling light years.

He was tempted now by a most dangerous extension of that game, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye of creation and his, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye mysteriously fired and sculpted, mysteriously dismembered into revisionary pupil and socket until it became a revolution of mind, a window of soul –
and
his.

He ran, without knowing why, from such a temptation to accept
his
as the absolute original. It was a temptation he could not rationalize. It was as if the stranger were offering him the gifts, the talents, of a cosmic Pygmalion, a cosmic sculptor and seducer of space, offering him the precision of a godlike puppet to place his finger on the button of collective, explosive rape (to submit himself, in advance of that event, to a private version of collective, explosive rape) so close to, yet so remote from, the garment of love that is threaded into that transfigurative wound by the luminous hand of the sun and the moon and the stars.

Had he stayed, had he been raped by that intimate stranger, the facts of this biography of spirit would have accumulated into a miscarriage of soul (whatever ambitions Everyman Masters may have realized, whatever powers he may have come to possess in imbibing the solicitation of the false shaman) for he would have appeared narcissistically whole in his own eyes and would have forfeited the mystery of partial guilt and therefore the mystery of ultimate surrender to otherness, ultimate innocence. As it was the danger remained – though few were aware of it as Masters climbed the ladder
of success into traditional plantation overseer; the danger remained like a constant threat over a king’s or a god’s estate, and the consequences were never wholly to be forgotten. Memory, true and false, had arrived in the gateway of creation.

Young Masters gained the sea-wall and continued running into New Forest. He arrived at the gate to his house, ran along the flagged pathway through sunflowers and sweetpea up the stairs through the front door. Then stopped. The house seemed unnaturally silent except for his own breath which came with the trapped force of a live creature from his heart and blood. The shadow of the false shaman still lay over him though he had run fast and left him behind on the foreshore. It lay over him and imbued his escape with uncanny
excitement
, akin to a fever, a drive, an energy, the shadow of Memory false and true. Did something reside in him now of the psychology of rape, the psychology of conquest? Was this the seed of Ambition to rule, to master a universe that had despoiled one, to march at the head of great armies into monsters one projected everywhere? (It was a question Masters was to frame long afterwards when we sat in Holland Park and discussed the psychology of power and the nature of Ambition at the heart of diseased politics around the globe.) Had he run forwards from the false shaman that New Forest day into the lust of light years, or backwards into the eye of a star cautionary and wise that forms in the spaces of the womb where fiction gestates? The fiction of Carnival began indeed to gestate from that moment.

His trapped sobbing breath had ceased and he moved gingerly (as he had crawled gingerly like a king crab on the foreshore) toward his parents’ room. The door was very slightly ajar. He was about to rap or push when he glimpsed something through the slit of space. It was his mother’s tears that he saw, tears that masked her and suddenly made her into the mother of a god in the play of Carnival. She was sitting at a mirror and her tears were reflected in the glass. He was so riveted by them, by seeing them fall, by the charisma
of grief they spelt to a profoundly disturbed, profoundly impressionable, child that he seemed to see through her side and back into the glass or mirror that ran down her front. Her tears seemed as a consequence to be woven from glass. They were fluid and divine cherries all white and edged with marbled fire. They were small yet unnaturally large as they fell upon her breasts that were open and bare in the shadowed glass front of flesh, and Masters was smitten by the sensation that she
knew
all that had happened to him that afternoon and was weeping for him, weeping for the lust, the Ambition, in Memory false and true.

Of course she could not have known, the young Carnival god knew. She was weeping for something else of which he was never to learn exactly. Indeed, even if she had turned around then and told him what it was, he would have forgotten and remembered only the tears that were shed for him now, as in the past, and the present, and the future.

She did not turn. He did not disclose he was there. He felt nevertheless that she knew; he felt as she touched her glass breasts in the mirror that she knew he was inside her, halfway between a wall of glass and a cavity of flesh, that she knew he was looking through her into a kind of fire that mingled with her tears.

There was furniture in the room and that too stood within the glass and the cavity of flesh. There was a lampshade that sprang out of the cavity into the glass. There were china ornaments that framed themselves in the glass to greet the flesh. There was a bed in the room that seemed to slide from the glass into the flesh. Slices of all these shone in the fire, shone in the mirror, shone in each minuscule balloon or
teardrop
sculpted from his mother’s sockets and eyes. One slice seemed to rub against another until as they shone they silently sounded a note of music.

“Here is the evolution of Sorrow,” the foetal Carnival child thought without articulate thought, the kind of thought that lies at the heart of a coiled dancer against a door, peering through his mask, a coiled dream in the womb of space when
the eye of a star peers through the crevices of Memory, Memory that is female now rather than male, Memory that brings the danger of cosmic fire, of burning exposure in the body of the mother of god, sudden exposure to the substance and the shadow of spiritual Sex.

Was she weeping at the thought of losing him, of plucking him from her like a brand on fire? Was this inconsistent with what he had felt before, that she was weeping for him and for the encounter he had had with the false shaman that afternoon?

Did the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman” subsist in one of the profoundest secrets of Carnival,
the
mask
of
the
cuckold
?

I remember discussing this question with Everyman Masters in London in the 1960s and 1970s when he addressed the philosophic myth of a colonial age that draped its mantle everywhere around the globe on superpowers, as on empires past and present, to set in train parallel existences, executions, resurrections of a plantation king or emperor or president or god.

Masters explained the seeds of trauma that had led him, within the ground of bizarre irony, to erect the obscure colonial status of sugar or rice estate overseer into Carnival prince of the world. He explained that the shock of encounter as a child with the “intimate stranger” on the foreshore of New Forest had so curiously broken him, yet imbued him with the spectre of terrible Ambition, that he had run back
metaphorically
into the womb; and in spying upon his mother had been so overwhelmed that a closely guarded family secret sprang into his mind. Closely guarded yet not so closely guarded for he recalled the whispers of servants in his parents’ home. His father was
not
his father. And it had seemed that she (the glass woman in whom he lay coiled all over again) had contemplated an Abortion when she carried, or was pregnant with, him. I asked him, as he seemed reluctant to continue, what had saved the day. His father, he said, his legal father, had stood by the glass woman, protected her, and
insisted upon her keeping the child as if it were his. (It was important to remember, he said, that his legal father was coloured, the glass woman, his mother, was coloured, his biological father, whom he had never met, was white. And all expectations were that the newborn baby would be white.)

Where then, I pressed him, lay the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman”? It lay, he said, in forces of humiliation that resembled each other but differed in ultimate wisdom from each other. To spy upon her or
through
her, as if he had returned into her body as foetal Carnival child, and to see the fire that threatened to consume him with her tears, was to endure the psychology of rape within her body long before the false shaman appeared and threatened to seize him on the foreshore. How extraordinary, yet
inevitable
, it was that the “mask of the cuckold” that his legal father wore came into luminous perspective when he ran back into his mother’s womb. In that mask of Carnival humiliation, Carnival cuckold, was raised the enigmatic spirit of Sex
through
and beyond nature’s intercourse, a spirit that could sustain both mother and child within a cruel and desperate world so easily exploited by the false shaman.

Instead of the “plucked brand” or the Abortion his mother, the glass woman, had begun to plan, the foetus would mature and the child would be born with a capacity for judgement and self-judgement beyond his years, a capacity that was strangely fractured, strangely unfulfilled, a capacity to employ such partial fracture as an integral element in unravelling/overcoming the lure of diseased Ambition or conquest.

In other words the humiliation of the plucked brand he had seen as himself, the potential Abortion written into foetal self, ran in parallel with the psychology of rape he had endured at the age of nine on the foreshore, but the mask of the cuckold upon his legal father (and the humiliation that also implied for his family) was radically different in its internal essence from plucked brand or false shaman. It originated a vision through the Abortion of an age, through the fallacious proprieties of an age, it originated a capacity to
set material pride aside in favour of the spirit of care, the innermost spirit of Sex, the spirit of brooding creativity that takes over where nature leaves off … I was, to say the least, intrigued at the origins of such conversion of humiliation into the genius of love that differed from the natural impact of humiliation upon the material body. I was at a loss to understand it all, though I had glimpsed again the
transfigurative
wound of which Masters spoke on so many occasions. He desisted from saying anything more at this stage though I knew now that his guidance into realms that seemed to exist before birth and after death bestowed upon me in this life (this lived life) a privilege that would deepen and expand the biography of spirit on which I was engaged. It would deepen it, expand it, in peculiar and mutual engagement between author and character at the heart of
Carnival.

Soon I was to perceive in the complex loves and sorrows of Masters’ life that I was as much a character (or
character-mask
) in Carnival as he was. Indeed in a real and unreal sense he and other character-masks were the joint authors of
Carnival
and I was their creation. They drew me to surrender myself to them.

My hand was suffused as I wrote by their parallel hands, my eyes as I looked around by their parallel eyes … And suddenly, paradoxically, it seemed to me that Masters’ coiled posture in the glass woman, his mother, turned upon me and conferred upon me a blessing or privilege, the fictional law that husbands the mother of a Carnival god when it (that law) – that character of law – dons the mask of the cuckold within Carnival.

“That mask,” Masters said, “possesses its origins in the family humiliations I have disclosed that evolve nevertheless into spirit-parent, into fiction-maker, that I confer now upon you.” He cried to me from the womb as much as from the grave that such a peculiar translation of the wounds of
humanity
was indeed the law of fiction and to wear it made me not only his creation but his father-spirit, to wear it made me not only their creation but the parent-spark of the other characters in Carnival.

Such is the paradox, the comedy, of half-divine, half-
Carnival
, character-masks in the medium of time. For Carnival time is partial, the past and the present and the future are
parts
of an unfathomable Carnival whole beyond total capture. Thus the past, as much as the future, bears upon the present, they are the children of the present but they also parent the present. The hidden past affects the present even as it emerges through present discoveries as a new, unsuspected force. If
the present parents the future how can it also be the child of the future?

“The contradiction is resolved,” Masters said, “when one sees that the
parts
of time within which we live, die, are born, imply that there is no absolute parent or model of time that we can seize.

“To see into the future – as into the hidden past – is a revelation of the partial ground on which we stand and the partial ground to which we move backwards or forwards.

“To see into the past as into the future is not to possess absolute knowledge of the past or the future but to be moved nevertheless by the mystery of originality that gives birth to the future as the future and the past give birth to ourselves.

“That originality, that mystery, may perceive a real,
however
elusive or incomplete, outline of coming events – or hidden past events – even as it confesses to deeper and farther hidden pasts and coming futures that are already transforming the basis of what one sees and feels in this moment. Freedom therefore is grounded in perceptions of originality that see
through
absolute fate.”

I was seized by a responsibility that may have intuitively existed in everything I had already written but which
suddenly
acquired a new, subtly terrifying, dimension.

Take, for example, young Masters’ cousin Thomas, the twelve-year-old boy who had vanished in a clump on the foreshore pursuing an animal fragment of original cosmic crab. Was he twelve years old or twelve hundred years old? Whose child was he? In consulting my notes of conversations with Masters in the 1960s and 1970s I find no reference to Thomas’s parent-masks.

Masters nudged me suddenly in the labyrinth of past/present/future through which we moved into accepting his cousin as my spirit-flesh, my fiction-blood. I hesitated even as I accepted. I felt an inner turbulence. Was I giving Thomas the Doubter a new, unsuspected, disturbing Carnival
adolescence
in a twentieth-century plantation Inferno or Purgatory? Such responsibility in fiction comes as a shock, a blow. For if
Doubt (rather than Faith) and its astronomic, biologic,
economic
antecedents were to be sanctioned and protected by its spirit-parent, and to become my progeny, then the law of fiction I represented needed to visualize diverse proportions of the body of tormented love it had vicariously married to become Thomas’s Carnival parent. One’s obsession with the tormented body of love – who was parent, who not, who would inherit the earth, who not, whose populations were exploding, whose not, who possessed the future, who did not – needed to secure guides (concrete in instinctual
imagination
) if one were to visualize foetal significance, emergence, adolescence, in alien – or apparently alien – generations one accepted and adopted.

One needed guides in those who – driven by regimes of fear or uncertainty – had regressed backwards in space or had “re-entered the body of the mother” they idolized or
worshipped
.

I grant that Masters was a principal guide in this context of regression that counterpoints progression and it was he who bestowed upon me the privileged mask of fiction-parent; but in becoming my concrete guide into an area or areas I had but vicariously married he opened the body of time to young Thomas as well and to uncertainties I needed to fathom as acutely more relevant to me, and my age, than Faith. All this in spite of my earlier revelation of the hand of cousinly Thomas that exacerbated the wound it sought to prove. In such exacerbation lay a blindness, or cloud over the world’s eyes I had not realized or experienced before. And in this new exacerbated guidance, or journey into blind collision between worlds seeking to prove each other, young Thomas was virtually indispensable …

It took me months of close conversation with Masters in London to piece together Thomas’s reaction to the flight of the boy-king in his charge from the false shaman. Thomas reappeared from the clump in which he had pursued a fragment of constellation crab. The child-mask El Dorado was nowhere in sight. Thomas shouted, he looked everywhere,
then flew into New Forest. The town became a cloud that darkened his eyes as though the bandage upon gold, upon currency, assumed gigantic proportions. He needed proof of the king’s whereabouts. He needed to seize him, scold him for playing tricks. He needed to weigh him in the balance. His uncertainty ran so deep, his fear that his charge may have been molested (he had read the New Forest
Argosy
),
it was as if he himself had never been born and the gigantic bandage diminished into a shell. Masters had feared the Abortion of an age written into universal flesh-and-blood in glimpsing the glass woman. He, on the other hand, glimpsed the
concave
egg like a mask or blind over his eyes in alignment with “plucked brand” or gold. The uncertain penetration of those veils, egg and gold and fire, was his gestation in the womb of space and it drew him into regions I could not dream to enter on my own as fiction-parent of generations steeped in the collision of worlds.

Thomas flew or ran along East Street, came to a corner, failed to see a market woman approaching him from North Road. They collided. She was massive, he was small. Disaster followed less from her than through him. She was carrying a basket on her head. She staggered, tried to clutch it, but it fell with a lush explosion.

The shell over Thomas’s eyes split for an instant into the splendid yolk and contour of the sun. He was dumbfounded, even paralysed, by the white and orange glare of a miniature pool that reflected the cosmos. He saw everything within a lightning mask but a blind fell over him again. A gross of eggs that the black woman had been taking to New Forest Market lay now smashed and oozing on the ground.

Two elements or forces in nature had conspired to prove or disprove each other. One element was the economic loss that the market woman had suffered. The broken eggs on the road deprived her of a round sum that would have paid her rent for a month at least in the tenement, plantation range in which she lived.

It was a minor catastrophe. It was a major catastrophe. It
may have seemed minor in cold shillings and pence but it possessed the heat of emotional configuration in the New Forest economy.

The other element was the sensation of exaggerated disaster Thomas had had in colliding with her, and this seemed to confirm the major content of economic emotion or depression in the 1920s. He could not shake off the feeling that he had exposed, rather than inflicted, an injury. How to probe it, analyse it (text books of Purgatory in the wake of the collision would ask, how to set up schools, universities, political sciences of the Inferno to assess economic emotion in a South American colony)! And blind as he became again after the shell grew once more over his eyes he could still perceive her sagging mouth and the sweat on her brow like tears.

“Oh god,” the market woman cried, “who is going to pay for this?
Gold
ain’t enough.” The humour of her remark that “gold” wasn’t enough registered faintly on Thomas.

“I shall pay. I shall find the money,” he promised.

“You believe gold is cheap, Boy?” The market woman was laughing but behind her laughter lay not only sweat but the mirror in which El Dorado had seen fire threatening to consume him.

The market woman seemed closer to black marble than to El Dorado’s memory of a cavity of flesh behind him, glass in front of him, as he lay coiled in his mother. Nevertheless Thomas had seen the fire in black marble as he had seen the pool of the sun before through a shell. Despite his promise to pay he was terrified and desired to run, as Masters had run, but the marble woman held him firmly with a hand that seemed both rough and smooth as if it echoed the mystery of the human egg at which the economic spirits of creation in capital cosmos had laboured in the sun and the moon and the stars from the beginning of time.

It was noon in New Forest, the orange yolk on the ground shone, and the labour of capital cosmos, fathered by fiction, impressed itself anew upon Thomas. He knew he could not
run. The injury, the hand-to-mouth existence he had exposed loomed larger now than ever in the marble woman. But they had come to some sort of understanding, for she had
relinquished
her grip on his shoulder.

Thomas had, in the interval, abandoned all responsibility for his royal charge. Indeed he felt that the boy-king had implicated him in another devilish game. And he felt irrational anger, a blaze of irrational fury, but pulled himself up in time, rebuked himself in time. Yet something lingered, something vague, as though in the realm of irrational anger at someone for whom we are held responsible – or were held responsible – we may track down jealousy in its obscure beginnings that increase and multiply to divide those who possess the stigma of the Abortion of an age and those who fear their smooth masks are an inadequate defensive cosmetic.

I discussed this complicated theatre with Masters in London and he expressed the view that the parallel existences or incarnations of Uncertainty owe the character of jealousy that possesses them to a collision of worlds implicit in “primordial colonial egg” that Carnival dramatizes as the birth of a diversity of fictions and masks.

Thus “jealousy” is another humiliation that fiction may employ to fathom the human/animal soul, the glass soul, the marble soul, the iron soul, the steel soul, the weight or weightlessness of deprivations of love that masquerade as prudence.

“The relevance of all this to the fictionalization of a
constellation
that speaks for the twentieth century is clear,” Masters said to me. “It is as a tormented colonial age that the twentieth century will be remembered and your book should point, I am sure, within its multiple perspectives to an overlapping context of spirit and nature that reveals without dogma the essence of love and love’s imperial malaise, love’s imperial tribulations within the plantation, institution, metropolis, factory, everywhere.”

His voice faded and I continued to piece together Thomas’s “adventures” in 1926.

Thomas and the black marble woman made their way along East Street. She was taking him across the Town to the tenement, plantation range in which she lived, so that he would know where to come when he had accumulated twelve shillings (a prodigious sum in 1926) to pay for the basket of eggs he had been instrumental in capsizing when he ran into her.

The dream-clock in the sky let the sun fall a notch or two deeper than I had previously calculated. Was it noon or afternoon? The mask of the sun shone with brilliance and fury. They turned into Brickdam, an impressive,
black-pitched
bandage of a road that ran through the middle of the Town. It was distinguished by some of the finest residences in New Forest. East Street had had its fine wooden houses as well, all on stilts in the low-lying township protected by a wall from the sea, but Brickdam with its three-storeyed residences masked the nature of the subsistence (and less than
subsistence
) economy that controlled a plantation cosmos. Not only overseers resided along the bricked and tarred road (that tended to grow faintly moist in places, to stick to one’s feet) but civil servants of various pigmentation; the dust of gestating ages stuck to their faces in tune with Carnival cosmetic of the unborn.

Incongruously perhaps (or was it congruously?) two mansions, one a famous College for New Forest youth, the other a great Alms House, rubbed sides or fences in the elegant, wooden parade along Brickdam.

A game of cricket was in progress as Thomas and the market woman passed the College. As they moved to a faint, moist pressure on the soles of their feet, the striking batsman was hidden from sight less within the shell of the sun over their eyes than within the bamboo and sugar-cane masks at the edge of the field. But soon the ball had risen from the bat, it almost seemed to whistle in the body of space before arching and descending into Thomas’s hands.

Thomas could scarcely countenance his luck. He wanted to pocket the catch, to take it away and examine its markings for
the magic of blood in every game one involuntarily plays, the masked dead with the living, masked bamboo with
sugar-cane
, the unborn fodder with the born. Was it the redness of the ball that gripped him now or the unexpected
metamorphosis
of the yolk of an egg? A howl rose from the field. It reached him through every veil, tar and shell and sun, and he tossed the ball back into Carnival spaces.