The Carnival Trilogy (46 page)

‘You are on trial,’ said the noble judge matter-of-factly, ‘because Rose set you free even as you let Canaima escape. Is the gift of life but a pattern of escape from death, a pattern of escapism? How guilty are you, how guilty is Rose, how guilty is Canaima in leading an escapist dance?’

I was bowled over by the question – its configuration took me completely by surprise – but managed to reply – ‘Rose was my mother, Canaima my brother.’ I spoke softly, automatically. No one heard me except the judge. I was glad no one did, I was ashamed to advance such a plea or revelation of bias. Indeed – even if I had known how related I was to Canaima and Rose – I had never really welcomed it, I had suppressed the knowledge in childhood, suppressed it over the long years until it flared into the obituary notice or film of Proteus’s death, flared into scorched sanctuary and blackened courtroom.

Perhaps I had advanced the plea not simply out of the biased flare of instinct but in the light of the carnival crown, carnival heirloom or kingship conferred upon me. But Canaima and I were twins … Were we not both equally entitled to the crown? What did such entitlement and
equality
imply? Was carnival a legacy of escapism, licence and abandonment, suppressed criminality, or was it a profound universal theme and a reinterpretation of the great masks of legend and history, the progressions, digressions, reversals of great myth?

Were the two – suppressed criminality and
reinterpretations
of the great body of a civilization – linked together yet subtly divided within the cellular organs of carnival, the cellular chemistry of carnival, carnival guilt, carnival
innocence
?

The judge stared at me out of his dusty, deceptively matter-of-fact, sleeping (however apparently wide-awake) eyes. He seemed to know my mind. ‘Why should carnival cells assist us in these deliberations? Your uncle was a street-performer, an actor, a good-for-nothing, a sailor, a spendthrift, a gold miner, a man of no fortune. He died penniless in his early fifties. There’s derangement of cells for you!’

I was outraged by the jest. ‘My uncle was an immortal,’ I protested. I felt the pressure of eyes in the courtroom upon me. I felt I was on trial for the poor, the heartbreak of the poor who seek the seed of value, of religious value, in their excesses. I felt the absurdity of the occasion but I had to reply in the spirit of wine, with a tongue of wine (whatever that was). I had to do justice to Proteus.

‘Of such stuff are immortals made,’ I cried. ‘He drank, I know; he spent, I know; but he cared for the inner
robustness
of art, he faced great odds, he spoke philosophy as if it were mother’s milk. The very excess of his life sustained a moral tale. There were days when he went without food and drank nothing but wine and rum and water. It made him feel strong, it gave him a handle with which to
grip
the sensation of being poor but risen above greed. His larder then was the wilderness and that’s a moral tale …’ There was a murmur in the courtroom. I waited until it subsided and continued in the spirit of rum and wine, the spirit of excess. ‘As for my poor devil of a father, he was a brilliant womaniser until his eyes were blinded by Rose. He misconceived money and dreamt his
purchase
on life was strong. Stronger that
Proteus
’s. In him too lies a sobering morality and the veiled cornerstone of the sacred grotto that I now glimpse in
everyman’s, everywoman’s, body in this burnt courtroom, I glimpse the chemistry of passion that may save or destroy at the heart of the law.’

I saw the Shadow of Sleep veiling the judge’s eyes. Was Sleep a theatre of excess for saint, for sinner? Either vocation involved far-reaching tone and passion. Proteus would have understood the judge. Harold would have understood the judge. ‘You may be right,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps there the transition is, the new (or is it old?) morality of which you speak. It lies in variety, subtlety, and unfixated wholeness.’ He was staring at me in the gloom of the grotto or grotesque courthouse. I knew he was mocking me. Mocking my appearance of a drunkard’s simplicity. He had cut me to the bone of outcast spirit. He saw my discomfiture and was sad. I felt as the wine coursed through my veins that he loved me as if he were my father in heaven, that he would err on my side in protecting me. And yet his curious biting mockery of himself and of me remained.

Why – I wondered – had the members of my family become immortals? ‘Perhaps,’ I said slowly, groping to find a true equation between the feast of love (wine and women) and immortality, ‘it was because every feast begins to grow too rich or too sour and one begins to absorb the immortal spirit of the
creative
fast
and
passion’s
peace.’

I felt I had struck a chord of wisdom but the judge shot me down with a dusty glance. ‘Fasting is no defence nor is passion’s peace in the business of murder.’

Business
of
murder.
Business again! Was murder business? He was eyeing me cryptically within the savage gloom. ‘You will have to do much better than that in Church, Anselm.’

I was amazed. ‘Why Church? What do you mean by Church?’

He ignored the question and I found myself shouting at him with a sphinx-like ardour that matched his. ‘Do queens spurn kings and judges and the fasting male to throw a new religious light on humanity’s fascination with crime?’

The judge smiled. A smile that shook the terraces of the court.

‘Fascination indeed,’ he said, ‘the fascination of religious judges like me in the bizarre sentences, bizarre freedoms, we sometimes mete out to sex offenders as if we see them with sudden irrationality against a backcloth of spiritual appetite, spiritual marrow, spiritual bone. You and Proteus and Harold should know what I mean.’

At last the blackened room within our mutual
unconscious
, my unconscious, the judge’s unconscious, loomed bright. I saw the strange humour of the occasion quite distinctly now. I had been aware of the judge’s self-mocking eyes before but now he seemed wired to the skeleton of a sexual bottle in my mind though he was
not
Inspector Robot. Each jesting bone in his bottled face quivered as if it were waiting to be drawn from a Bird’s wing and placed between the lips of the Queen of Roses. A bone is a lightning conductor of sexual freedom, sexual wine, and of the parole of furies in dusty graves, furies arriving suddenly on a judge’s lips and speaking irrationalities through him that occasion laughter. Thus a monster of the deeps may hope to be set free when the Dead speak in high court museum. I felt there was a chance for the drunkard in me. A chance for Proteus. A chance for Harold. I felt I needed no apology to speak on behalf of the immortals in my family.

The judge sat in a box-like Chair with great extended wings on which to rest his arms. And I remembered the lightning Bird of the Macusis, the dancing Bird I had shot down with Canaima’s knife on the first bank of the river of space. How curious are the emblems that mark the fallen species, the unconscious species, the complex slaughter of a beast or a bird or a dancing angel in the animal enthronement of the law, the majesty of the law, the
occasional
lapse or parole of a monster!

Does the judge
see
an emblematic beast and is filled with uncanny compassion, or uncanny lust, when he grants parole
to a monster? Does he see a fiery angel within the mutual unconscious of hunted species, mutual Sleep, the judge’s sleep (on one hand), and the unconscious of a tilted bone in a wing of space (on the other), bone-bottle in my Dream of wine, bone-sex in his courtroom of love within the famished lips of a Rose?

Yes, I remembered how Rose had listened to drunken Proteus, had accepted his plea for my life, as if he were a judge who desired that I should be set free. I remembered the monstrous Horse on which Rose would have taken me. I saw its majesty in a new and native light now: I saw the prospect of an incarnation of species I was unable to grasp or bear – though it was native to me – and from which Proteus dislodged me in the nick of time to live, to contemplate the mystery of the law in every lived life, however extreme.

Had not Ulysses’s gift of the law to his cousin Aeneas taken the extreme form of a monstrous and pregnant Horse in advance of its time, in advance of the Incarnation of species that civilization was unable to sustain or bear except in the conflagration of war between gods (masquerading as men) and men seeking the art of the divine as a token of grace beyond their comprehension?

‘The animal Home of the law, throne of the law, sustains emblematic compassion, emblematic lust and the
emblematic
wound that mirrors all hunted creatures. It sustains heartbreak and the chemistry of the animalesque and the divine. Speak the truths of that heart-breaking,
heart-changing
chemistry, that unresolved chemistry, Anselm, and you approach the mystery of the Incarnation. God will hear your prayers.’

I was filled with awe at such unpredictable association and colour to the law. And yet the very frailty of the judge, his lightness, his capacity for metamorphosis, the paradoxes he revealed within transparencies of the unconscious that cloaked him – that made him into my object as well as my subject – his attachment to someone as marginal or extreme
as me, gave me courage to cling to the edges of fused yet broken civilizations. Perhaps he was a creature of
labyrinthine
jest but all at once he was near and dear to me. In him I saw a sponge of the absurdities yet truths of the Incarnation of the law. He dripped the wine of curiosity into my mouth as I stared at him, the risks that arose from a measure of addiction to the highest form of ecstasy and hope,
communion
with what could prove a misconception, a
misinterpretation
, in identifying deity with an animal frame.

But as I drank I saw as well the necessity to endure the wine and the jest, to endure the risks, to disabuse myself of the sensation that I or anyone possessed the sacred in a solid bubble. I saw the necessity to persist in a dialogue with every spark of divine administration of justice in all
masquerades
however apparently unprepossessing …

‘Your Chair,’ I cried, ‘possesses an ancient savage lineage that drips lightning. Your Chair is symbolic of the
incarnation
of a drunken storm, the incarnation of lightning. You and the chair together become celebratory flesh on bone in animate wood as the lightning wires lip to heart. The spiritualization of bottled wood, the spiritualization of
bottled
wing and feather in one’s carnival thirst for the angel of the divine.
Lightning
strikes
the
wings
of
the
Macusi
Bird
and
your
Chair
floats
in
the
Sky.
‘Look!’ I cried, ‘it is there among my charts and diagrams of god-rock, there on the table of the feast, the savage feast before you.
Lightning
strikes
and
illumines
a
winged
stairway
from
sky
to
earth
as
the
Chair
and
the
table
tilt
into
an
abstract
diagram
and
a
Bird.
See
how
the
wings
become
a
lightning
arc
or
miracle-chalk
upon
a
blackboard.
Outspread
drunken
wings
tilt
between
sky
and
earth,
fold,
stretch
out
again
into
the
spiritualization
of
wood
that
is
carven
into
the
arms
and
wings
of
your
Chair.’

Sobriety is always a shock, the sobriety of an individual visionary who faces the passion of faith, the sobriety of the state which turns at last to face itself, the sobriety of a world that has suffered many crises, the sobriety of a saint, or an
artist, or a sinner, who suddenly sees in a wounded Bird that falls from the sky, in the lightning of a storm, in paint or ink or chalk or wood that has been sculpted, cut, chiselled, visualized in its grain, grained tree (all these and more), an infinite equation with the Incarnation of the law.

Sobriety, true sobriety, is an awareness of the edges of the chasm in the mind of order, the mind of the incarnate law (how priceless is such visionary understanding of mind and order). Order means risk. Order is a glimpse of the risks to all creatures inherent in creation. Creation is a storehouse of terrifying energies that imply risk. And the law incarnates itself within a chasm of risk as it broods in the storm upon every frail messenger of being that climbs or falls.

The courtroom was still, so still I almost forgot where I was, what I was saying.

‘Every theatre of judgement and trial is a theatre of Dream in its exposure of the language of order that pierces our mind to instil us with orchestrated varieties of the partial translation of sleeping hunger and waking thirst. As the Bird falls it incorporates that chasm of pierced
consciousness
into itself and revolves into a constellation that is neither pure hunger nor pure thirst.’

I clung as before to the edges of the chasm until hunger and thirst released the apparition of daemons glistening on the wings of the law, one on each wing. They were nameless and I could only identify them from memories of the environment of my childhood. My uncle’s abstention from food (his kind of order) on his alcoholic rounds and drinking bouts had invoked the morality of the creative fast within me as I grew up.
Creative
fast
was one daemon of order upon one of the wings of the law. My father’s obsession with women – with the taste and colour and beauty of women – had reduced him to a shell (a shell of grief, a shell of innermost contrition) within which one hears the murmur of a Voice from an ocean of storm:
passion’s peace at the heart of the storm.
Passion’s
peace
was the other daemon of order on the other wing of the law.