The Carnival Trilogy (48 page)

By retracing my steps it became possible to lift the
bandage
of the Word a little and to see, or bear, what would have been unbearable before, namely, the stillness, the echoing stillness of the Word within varieties of the hollow or fossil parent one was. I was able to accept Ross’s difficulties, to learn from him, to chart in a mutual hollow unique
correspondences
through and beyond his ethic of withdrawal from the ‘savage’; I was drawn back within these varieties of unique correspondence to a moral transcending utilitarian ethic and into a visualization of the unexplored worlds or territory I had glimpsed between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’ but in a different light now, the light of the bruises that encompass the death of a child, the birth of a child, the resurrection of a child: all stillnesses (death and resurrection) threaded into the movement of birth downwards, inwards, outwards, upwards to leave a transfigurative wound that revives a conception of the mystery of the Word, the Word made flesh.

The ‘drowned children’ that Ross, Penelope and I carried were woven into the tapestry of the Word. Such was the Dream territory of the fourth bank of the river of space overlooking the serpent-ladder. Ross bore his child within a net that made him conscious of a ‘savage formula of glory’ he had grown to distrust. Penelope bore hers within resources of inner metaphor, inner tapestry, inner thread that ran – it seemed to me in the Dream – into
her
childhood and her early relationship to Simon. I bore mine within the chemistry of a wound I would have been unable to define as
transfigurative
except in counterpoint to missionary Ross’s
ambivalent
ethic. Shadow-organ counterpoint. Shadow-organ investiture of the deprived Word, the bruised Word, the well-nigh hollow, thin Word of my age, I now carried in my mind and body and hand in the intricate shape of a Macusi child I had drawn up from the river of space into
breath-body
. It was clear that we had lifted the Shadow of the three drowned children from the river. Negative resurrection? Negative funeral procession? ‘Time to take them back,’
Penelope said, ‘to the hill and valley country from which they came to attend our El Dorado Mission School. Time to learn from them about ourselves.’ Ross looked dubious as though he already knew all he needed to know but he was curious about rare botanical specimens of the river of space
overlooking
the serpent-ladder. He had armed himself when he left England with several volumes by nineteenth-century
European
travellers in South America. Those volumes floated now on the crest of a Dream-wave around him. Were they possessed of unruly spirits? Of Shadows I felt. The Shadows Ross’s predecessors had borne in their heads and arms when they left Europe, Shadows of classical lore with which to christen orchids and flowers. ‘The Dido orchid,’ I murmured, ‘may, it is said, be found in these parts.’ Ross’s eyes lit up with the purest excitement and curiosity though the allusion to Dido left him uneasy. I was unable to pursue the matter for it was time to leave.

It was a blue morning, blue yet red with bruises of dawn-cloud. We set out from the Mission House around seven. The year was 1950. It was the week of the drowning fatality (as an El Dorado newspaper had put it). The Macusi lightning axeman (subdued now and shrunken) whom I had met on the first bank was our guide. We made our way uphill, up the blue, red, dawn-cloud world to the grave where Canaima’s dancer lay. It was as if we were venturing upon another planet to mourn our dead. I recalled the bird-text on the lips of the dancer when I had come upon him long ago on the riverbank. Here on the fourth bank of the river of space that bird-text had been uplifted from the first bank (uplifted grave as well) into our gateway into the planetary Forest. We stopped at the uplifted grave as our guide moved up ahead to clear a mass of fallen branches from the mouth of the trail.

Ross had put an arm around Penelope. They stood beside the dancer’s epitaph in the very depression that the king of thieves had occupied when he poured shining rain into the
ground. I saw the shadow of leaves touch their faces with the light bruise of a candle that seemed to sing in the wind. Shadow organ investiture of the technology of a candle or a bulb when one sets foot in unexplored realms. How else may one come abreast of what lies beyond one’s vocabulary of apprehension? Penelope grieved. The body of the child she carried began to slip from her arms. It was after all an alien burden that did not fit easily into the texts of her education in the world from which she had come. Was it an illusion to cherish the body of a drowned alien? Why not let it slip into oblivion? Why not let it resume its path upon the
serpent-ladder
into deep anfractuous caves and deeper still into the river of the dead? As Ross placed his arm around her her question was answered by the bird-text in the ground. She looked up into drought-planets, forest-planets,
riverain-planets
and into the fossil bodies of the living in
their
anfractuous, multi-layered, circuitous corridors of space. She heard the faint sound of aircraft far above and was able to see – from the clearing where we were – a white ribbon of frozen smoke in the wake of an aeroplane.

We stood beneath the lines and circles of flight of
hundreds
of criss-crossing planes on their way to the uplifted graves of Rio or Buenos Aires or Ecuador or Caracas or Port-of-Spain or Kingston. A veritable hive of transparent or uplifted corridors and caves, uplifted by bird-men and women into space. Not to speak of satellites and perpetual debris afloat above us, immersed in an ocean of space around us, in perpetual suspension between us and the stars. Uplifted graves? Uplifted cradles? And all at once Penelope resumed the burden in her arms, she pulled it against her breasts in an ocean of space in which she swam in my Dream into a future from which she could not escape. All were involved, all were responsible, all were being tested to the core …

It seemed to me then that she would have preferred
not
to be touched, not to be held by Ross. She accepted his arm
because had she pulled away he would not have understood the singular tide, the complex labyrinth of emotion and passion in which the drowned child lay against her now, heavy as stone yet frail as an unimaginable feather from the wings of God’s angel as if to witness to untranslatable Innocence within the wastes of Time. I could not be sure that this was how she felt. And yet I knew. I knew how coiled one is into the ladder of lightning peace that runs midway between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’: so coiled that one may
unwittingly
embrace another and bring hurt to him or her – a hurt or an injury of which one is unconscious.

One may embrace another when one’s arm or body is not desired at that particular moment. One should step back but one continues (sometimes apparently mindlessly) to step forward. Such is the dance of primitive nature that is intent on its goal. One’s touch is born of the riddle of possession (the desire to possess), the riddle of compassion (the desire to support or console). One may seek not to possess but to console and still bring the shock of pain or grief… The Dream intrudes. It makes one aware of what is happening and yet it does not disclose why sorrow or grief is a thread in the dancing fabric of innocence …

The other submits (as Penelope does now to Ross in the Dream) because she is aware that the need to withstand the terrors of primitive nature runs deep: it runs in the voices of the blood in one’s veins into a whisper of untouchable beauty.

‘Touch what is untouchable. Dance to a music of genesis one scarcely remembers …’

Perhaps in secretly withstanding Ross, yet accepting the consolation of his arm, Penelope was shaken by the voice of the drowned child she had taught to sing her English songs, shaken by another music, the music of genesis that triggered a response in the eel, the dance with the eel, the lightning dance, black lightning peace. Black lightning peace? Black lightning conception?

Peace became, conception became – against that sounding backcloth of the music of genesis within the whispering tide – a measure of our mutual acceptance of fate (when fate voices its legend, the legend of the dance of genesis), our mutual acceptance of freedom (when freedom voices its legend, the legend of ultimate insight, ultimate consolation), melodic Conscience.

I reached out too to touch and support Penelope as she seemed on the verge of toppling into a faint. The Dream had not disclosed to me or to her or to Ross or to our savage guide why sorrow and grief were a thread in the fabric and the dance of innocence but it offered a clue now to the grain of the hollow Word. Hollowness needs to clothe itself again with heaven’s dance and then it may plumb the flesh of genesis that we carry everywhere in the body of the unconscious. Melodic Conscience is the subtle flesh of the Word that clothes a child one bears on earth … Such is the prayer of the Word, the intimate, ultimate dance of the Word, the renewed Word, the ecstatic Word.

I was driven by a glimmering understanding of the voices heard in mutual blood yet could not fully articulate: voices of fate and freedom one hears as if they were a breach in a vocabulary of fear and apprehension, the breach that clothes one’s deprivations with fire-music, water-music,
earth-music
…

We were at last in a position to face our expedition on the fourth bank of the river of space. It was as if – whatever divisions stood between us – a new dialogue had commenced as the twentieth century drew to a close and we retraced our steps.

Our guide was signalling to us. The mouth of the trail had been cleared and we climbed and entered the Bush. The fantastic, planetary greenheart trees rose into marvellous
silvery
columns on every hand. Clothed in water-music. The trail was narrow. We walked in single file. The cracked silvery veil of greenheart possessed the texture of slow-motion rain
falling within the huge Bell of a still Waterfall in which whispering leaves of fluid sound ran up into veil within veil of Shadow-organ gloom towards the highest reaches of the Forest and the slits of the Sky far above. Subtle fire-music.

I had never before seen the shining bark of greenheart columns in this slow-motion raining light (nor the Sky clothed in frail ribbons of fire-music within the lofty gloom of a Bell) in all my remembered Dream of Forests I had travelled in my youth. How young was I, how old was I? We had entered it seemed – the Macusi guide first, Penelope second, Ross third, I last – an innermost chamber of the magical Waterfall beneath god-rock. It encompassed the globe, the ancient world, the modern world. As if the Waterfall had been uplifted from the river and transferred within us in the music of space, around us in Shadow-organ imperceptible (not wholly imperceptible for we were aware of it) dance of genesis.

I recalled the funeral procession when the inner bodies in the rocks in the Waterfall had left their shell to guard the waters even as they arose within the king of thieves and others who bore Canaima’s bird-text victim to his grave. It seemed now that the dancer’s text was a further conversion or alchemy of inner sculpture into living Memory. Penelope, Ross, the Macusi guide and I had been sculpted or painted not from rock but from the silvery text of rain within the fluid, still Bell of the Waterfall to bear the absent bodies of the drowned children to their homes within the tapestry of the Word.

I began to pray – ‘May the daemons and the furies and the archangels help us,’ I prayed, ‘to make unique and
far-reaching
global distinctions in fabrics of sorrow and
innocence
, the fabric of names by which we name ourselves, saint-names, king-making names, queen-making names, etc., etc. We have a long way to go backwards into all these names, the names we have given flowers, trees, stars, the names with which we have tagged genesis (though the
music of genesis still breaks through); we have a long Dream to take back into our callouses, into the complacent formulae by which we live (whether of stock heroism or
stocks-and-shares
salvation), a long Dream to take forwards into our addiction to mass prosperity, the ethics of mass prosperity, before we turn and confront our two selves (our
many-rooted
, many-branched two selves), past and future selves in the present, and confess to an unique and sacred Poverty that makes us susceptible to the regenerated eye, the regenerated ear within the very grain of things and possessions, places native and foreign that we take for granted in our history books.’

The prayer had barely crossed my lips when the perils and dangers we faced dawned upon me within the gloom and the Bell of the forested Waterfall. We were making an ancient journey, we were making a modern journey. We were still rooted in the deprivations of the Word though we sensed a breach that clothed these in paradoxical senses. Had not Penelope implied on the second bank of the river of space that her mission was woven into the tapestry of the ‘
adventure
of love unfulfilled’? Now on the fourth bank (as we bore the Shadows of the drowned in our arms) that mission was as much a penetration of local sentiment as of non-local and universal grave and cradle in the interwoven aspects of incarnated text. It was idle claiming within the divisions and sub-divisions of the Word that haunted us, within the spaces that lay between ‘daemon’ and ‘fury’, between ‘fate’ and ‘freedom’, between ‘endurance’ and ‘passion’, that the
language
of identity was not fraught with questions we still had to answer, questions of electric mood, ecstasy, electric depression. Melodic Conscience was on our side within each frail candle that shone in the Bush as the breath of music but it was not to be taken for granted. It possessed hidden darknesses, hidden teeth. I felt them biting now into the soil of my mind. Soil of mind! Earth-music. Painful soil, mind, earth-music. Our way was barred I swore by the teeth of
music dressed in a sudden, unpredictable downfall of weather and mood. I felt myself an enemy of nature and Mankind as the rainy high mouth of the Forest descended and closed in. Was it morning, was it noon, was it premature Night? Absurd ultimatum. Slightly shivering ultimatum of the enemy within a wave of heat that subsided but left us drenched, bitten to the skin, and cold. Absurd teeth within a Dream that is the simultaneous exposure of untranslatable fear and bias in ourselves. In such exposure, such unearthly music of devouring impulse, melodic Conscience bit deep, bit so deep, it jested with us, it painted us into enemies of the very nature and Mankind we wanted to serve. Bitten artist, bitten engineer, bitten saint, bitten sinner, civilization’s bitten missionary and teacher,
civilization
’s bitten savage.