The Carnival Trilogy (40 page)

‘A collective parallel to one of the thieves beside Christ –
our
king of thieves in my Imaginary Theatre – who turned his face away from paradise.

‘Fate crucified that collective, your suitors, when Ulysses returned, when Ulysses was drawn into the loom that you wove. But fate, in the shape of your all-conquering design, never entirely vanquished them. For they were to descend from the pagan rafters of their woven cross and set alight new wars, new slave raids, new piracies in the long day, or is it the long night, of the centuries.

‘The distinction between being vanquished and returning again stronger than ever to man the bastions of trade and industry is one we know only too well as the twentieth century draws to a close across the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean.

‘As a consequence – in drawing you out of the margins of nothingness into visualized being – I needed to bridge the centuries-long Night, the Night of ancient Greece into North African desert Night where Simon, your first and jealous husband, fought in Montgomery’s army, the Night of Spain into the Night of South America where the reincarnated thief ransacked the gold of the Incas. As for Ross – good angel he is, yes, but his curious missionary guilt resides in the fact that he (like all of us, like me and my relatives) may have one foot in one camp – the epic camp – and the other in another camp – the camp of reformed thieves; half-thief of love, of your love, half-epic Ulyssean beggar in the gates of Home is his fate, my fate too, the fate of my relatives who scraped to make ends meet. It is this shared burden, in the light of the abyss, which requires us to unclothe self-reversible
perspectives
within a civilization we take for granted, self-reversible pride into responsibility as we ponder our predicament.

‘I needed a dark comedy of blind warriors and suitors, half-epic guilt, half-theft of love.
You
are an emancipated queen, an emancipated centre, around whom and which your husbands, your lovers, and the thief – the thief who stole the coat you made – revolve on the second bank of the river of space. Who comes first, who comes last? In this late cycle of cosmic Capital are there not rich, desirable slave women (enslaved to systems of money) with a dozen suitors, divorced husbands and lovers, rich, desirable slave men (enslaved to the Stock Market) with two dozen mistresses, all fighting, arguing, over fortunes that have been made or spent by this or that besieged spouse they loved, loathed, envied?

‘It is true
you
Penelope – as inimitable twentieth-century
spouse of missionary endeavour whose vocation lay in a foreign and a starved continent – know in your heart of hearts that a genuine choice is necessary. A true sacrament, a true marriage, is necessary. That is the purpose of the loom, the coat of tradition.

‘But how can you discover the chosen one unless you weave unsuspected variations upon the pain and ecstasy of freedom? How can you know what true sacrament is unless you find the key that the king of thieves let slip from a pocket in the coat that he snatched from you as you stood under the pagan rafters of every cross?’

I was startled by the sudden question that came upon my lips like an inspiration. ‘Did you really put that key there, Penelope, in the loom of tradition without knowing you had done so – the coat of tradition that never quite seems to fit the globe? And as a consequence we travel, we all travel, in search of … of what?’

Penelope hesitated. As if the words I had spoken had been on her lips as well. We were so close I felt I could seize her breath. She was searching into the depths of hollow yet brimming religious impulse by which she was led to travel into foreign lands, the lands of the living, the lands of the dying.

We were searching together for the key to the adventure of love unfulfilled, a key inscribed into the foundations of blind empires, still blind in this Day to the past and to the present but susceptible nevertheless as never before to a new crumb or piercing light in the mutual body of Wisdom that one broke into bread.

Wisdom
is
strong
meat.
It
rocks
the
imagination
to
the 
founda
tions
of
memory.
The
imaginary
Cathedral
around
you
fades,
Anselm.
The
window
of
time
grows
black.
The
bone
and
the
fire
subside
into
a
rose,
a
rose
tree,
a
garden.
At
the
heart
of
the
black/red
rose
you
dream
you
see
the
ancient
Macusis
feasting
and
dancing.
They
too
fade.
But
you
will
see
them
again.
The
rose
remains,
the
roses
of
childhood
in
Aunt
Alicia’s
garden-city 
theatre.
Listen
to
what
Uncle
Proteus
is
now
saying
– ‘Watch the river of space, watch this dream space, dream-rib,
metamorphoses
, watch the live processional sculptures from the Waterfall. They bring the key …’

Yes,
the
key.
I remembered the key in the loom of tradition of which I or Penelope had spoken but it was nowhere in sight in the kingdom of the Rose. And yet … I was still to retrace my steps into the body of the Rose.

‘In the land of the Rose,’ Proteus said, ‘you will find the key.’ He was laughing. Better Proteus’s laughter than his anger.

‘The key to carnival,’ Proteus said, ‘is rooted in imperial and colonial disguises. The key to carnival lies in a
displacement
of time-frames to break a one-track commitment to history. The key to the reformation of the heart breaks the door of blind consciousness into shared dimensions, the dimension of subconscious age and the dimension of
childhood
. They cross and re-cross each other within levels of Dream. The key to the unconscious future lies in shared burdens of intuitive Memory, shared volumes written by mutual science and art within the Spirit of age, dual and triple beggars and kingships and queenships. Listen for a commotion of bells in the abyss, in the clouds, in
cloud-rocks
, in the precipitation of biological and mythical
antecedents
, the precipitation of living masks in Aunt Alicia’s live fossil museum theatre.’

‘Here, take this. Sup,’ said the king of thieves. He held the vessel of the pooled stars to my lips. ‘Retrace your steps into childhood when you dreamt the skies were a living garden, Anselm. Here’s a programme of plays, a feast of the
Imagination
. Uncle Proteus plays the beggar Ulysses, remember? You,’ the thief was laughing, ‘are something of a
robber-baron
yourself, Anselm. You steal the beggar’s rags,
remember
? Then there’s Harold whom you loathe when he tells you … (You will find out in due course.) He shares the burden of Ulyssean carnival kingship with Proteus when he
plays the part at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Not quite the top! One of your Aunt Alicia’s conceits. Conceit or not it is rooted in the Wisdom of theatre. Strong meat. Then you will meet black Agamemnon and when he vanishes you will hear the
voice
of Presence. Then comes the Antiphon of the …
But
no.
I must leave you to make your own discoveries as the dimensions of childhood and old age cross and re-cross each other. It’s epic habit to summarize the progress of coming events and to recapitulate the flight of past events as if they were one and the same true, timeless yet changed, changing fabric … Prophetic conceit some would say. I would say the creative riddle of the abyss. Homer was versed in this. Homer the greatest of all epic imaginations. I knew him once long, long ago. I ate every blind crumb, every blind tear, that fell from his eyes. Poor thief I was even then long before Calvary’s hill.’ His voice faded into the global village garden theatre, Georgetown theatre (had it been named after Ross and Penelope
George
?), I was about to enter.

The programmes, the broken tapestry of forthcoming plays, sculptures, paintings slipped from my fingers and fluttered to the ground. The programmes were torn and as I sought to retrieve them in the Dream the eclipsed portions drifted into the subconscious from which a child emerged nine years old. I was that child clothed in the epic tears of memory. Tears were habitual to epic character … My parents had died in a road accident in 1914 when I was two. Aunt Alicia died in 1929, Harold in 1920, Proteus in … Now I was unsure for whom I truly wept in the past and in the present as the Imaginary Cathedral faded into Alicia’s Garden City Theatre.

The church bells were ringing in the distance. I felt dejected but buoyed up nevertheless by the distant Waterfall music.

Depression is a disease but I was strangely afloat within the music of the distant bells.

They were the faraway voice of eternity through and
beyond time, God was eternity. Eternity was buried in my longings, in my anxieties. That faraway voice melted into the liquid pulse of vanishing sound that resuscitates itself, faint, marvellous, descending, ascending.

Uncle Proteus had told me that the garden city theatre’s global village was on the brink of
hard
times
. ‘Charles Dickens,’ said the voice of God. ‘Recession’s coming,’ said the bells. ‘Ask in Wall Street in 1929.’ The chimes came in separate lines (
Ask
in one line or dream-year,
In
in the line or year below that,
Wall
in the third line, etc., etc., etc.), as if the voice of God possessed a comic slant, innermost humour I sought to nourish in an illiterate world, in becoming a best-selling poet’s utterance in the prosperous heavens.

I stood in Camp Street with the flowering trees on either hand. I tore the poem into the scraps of dollar bills. Proteus appreciated that. There was a breath of quickening air in the bright morning light. No wonder the pace, the occasional disparity, the occasional break or self-mockery in the voice of the bells made one float into anticipating anything,
everything
, the anticipation of terror, the anticipation of peace.

The voice unrobed itself, drew a naked shadow within a blossom or leaf that fell and seemed to bruise my head with a trace of red ink. Proteus was adept at such preparations and markings. I had seen many of his sketches for Alicia’s plays, the naked shadows he appeared to create as if in these nature reversed itself into the true substance of a dream that left its mark upon us everywhere. To dream of being killed was to dream we had ourselves killed others, to dream of being attacked was to know simultaneously that we were ourselves attacking others. Such was the naked shadow, self-reversible shadow, in the substance of dream that Proteus employed as his moral design.

He had smeared the blood-red ink on his Ulyssean brow for the play and, as if it were an afterthought, leaned towards me so that a trace or bruise or shadow of my aggression fell on my head and hand. My aggression? His blood?

Now as the leaf fell – upon the identical trace or shadow I had received when he leaned towards me – the Rose-queen in the garden sent her shaft or thorn straight to
his
brow. The thorn drew blood, his blood. The leaf danced in the wake of the thorn and settled upon him, his blood.

I knew the scene by heart after several rehearsals but a new element had arisen which took me by surprise. The despatch of the thorn by the queen had never before coincided with the stroke of the leaf, the naked shadow of blossom. Had I been bruised by – or had I occasioned – the shadow of his wound as the thorn pierced the leaf before lodging itself in his flesh and bone? Had I secured her line of sight by balancing the leaf on my brow and upon my hand? If so it were a feat of unconscious Shadow, a feat of Dream.

Proteus’s Ulysses appreciated my dilemma. What is nakedness? When one dreams of nakedness does one dream of aggression, or of the nature of birth, the nature of dying, the nature of humility? He was dressed in rags, a beggar in rags, and this was also a new element in the naked play. He had discarded the robes of lord and master, king of the Rose garden of Home. The thorn in his brow grew sharp, the agonized tongue of the brain that stuck forth from his wound and spoke now on behalf of its lord and master – ‘The Rose that pierced me secretes your Shadow in her body, Anselm. I wish I could lift you in my arms and tell you the secrets of nature, a nature that recoils upon us, the conflicts we need to understand, our roots in nature, our ignorance of nature … tell you that true heroism is founded in accepting the poverty of our understanding
through
which we may at last perceive our mutual deprivations and begin a transformation of our (I should say
your
) inheritance … I wish I could tell you the secret of your birth within a society addicted to lust, to fleshly property, fleshly acquisition. Harold will tell you when you ascend Jacob’s ladder in another scene of the play.’

I stared at him with a sense of awe and peculiar
apprehension
, peculiar understanding I could not now express. I had
expected him to worm his way into the Rose garden and slay his enemies. But instead the imperial design of the
homecoming
lord and master had been converted into a colonial fable that spun its web in reverse order in the branches of the lofty rose tree over my head. The queen lay hidden in its branches.

This much I was able to read in the web of a volume – ‘
The
lord
or
master
disguised
as
a
beggar
dies
in
colonial
and
post
-
colonial
fable.
The
virtuous
Rose
betrays
him
because
she
wishes
to
goad
him
into
reflecting
upon
innermost
nature,
pregnant
nature,
innermost
potential,
innermost
peril,
innermost
craft.
Such
is
the
divine
comedy
of
the
master’s
homecoming,
a
comedy
that
pierces
convention
to
break
a
complacent
mirror
of
conquest,
the
conquest
of
love
by
the
master
(
when
love
cannot
be
conquered
or
else
it
ceases
to
be
a
gift
truly
given,
truly
taken
)
,
the
conquest
of
the
suitors
of
the
beloved
by
the
master:
suitors
who
may
take
the
most
unpredictable
form
in
pregnant
natures,
natures
one
has
abused
or
exploited
sometimes
in
perversity,
sometimes
in
ignorance,
sometimes
in
blind
lust.
’