The Carnival Trilogy (49 page)

We had been walking for several hours. It seemed an age in the mouth of space. The trail ahead of us was blocked again. Fire was needed to clear a path. I tried to disabuse myself of devouring impulse within and without but the tangled branches raised their arms imploringly into a Shape, a woman’s Shape (I could see the fern of her hair and her lustrous black eyes like pools reflected upwards from the ground) crowned by an Orchid. It was not Queen Rose this time. It was bitten-by-fire Queen Orchid. Our guide had set a match to the heaped branches across the trail.

‘The Dido Orchid,’ cried Ross. He seemed in this instant of fire-music immune to the flame in my Dream as if his spontaneous, aroused curiosity or excitement was so strong it baffled the mouth of space in which we stood. He leaned over the Orchid, smiled, I saw the glitter of his teeth this time, touched by flame, kissed by flame. The volumes on South America he had brought from England shaped
themselves
into brilliant ashes, brilliant intercourse of
incandescence
and human curiosity that has sustained many a fiery adventurer in the desert, at the Poles, in the depths of the rain-forest, military high-flying adventurers as well
before they unleash their bomb. Each volume, each page, was clothed by running music, the cautionary fire-music that breaches the heart of Dream. I could still read the ghostly names of ghostly authors in the subtle furnace, some had lodged themselves in a crackling chorus of high-flying nineteenth-century super-power map-makers, botanists, biologists, evolutionists, soldier-civil servants,
anthropologists
, chroniclers, etc., etc.: Schomburgk, Horsman, In Thurm, Beebe, Boddam-Whettam, Humboldt, Roth,
Waterton
… A page fluttered, turned in the fire-music and I read, as page intertwined itself with page, the hand of another nameless writer –

I peered into the fire as the nameless hand dissolved in the brilliant ashes of classical investitures upon the flora of the fourth bank of the river of space in which lies the ancient, unconscious, epic seed of modern botany and modern warfare.

The nameless hand revived itself in the ashes of Dream and Ross and I read –

The blaze settled. White teeth, red fire’s black voice!
Nameless
muse or chorus of the imagination that runs in one’s blood. Ross’s eyes had darkened. I saw him for a flashing
moment in the bombed garden in which Simon had come upon him and Penelope long ago. His love of her had been translated into a curiosity that tied him to a foreign
landscape
and the phantom South American orchid of ancient Libya and Carthage. I sensed the music of the unconscious in him, unconscious seed underlying the vocabulary of the imperial travellers who were our predecessors.

Indeed I could be sure of nothing. How conscious was I of the imperial legacies that tended to frame the environment of my mind? I may have read in the nameless hand in the fire a paraphrase of Schomburgk’s German prose which I had seized intuitively and made into my own. On the other hand – other nameless hand – I may have tapped the rhythm of Im Thurm’s sensuous English dialogue with the rivers of Guyana and found it native to fire, my fire, my blood. What was clear was the necessity to penetrate, replay, reinterpret, and not succumb to, formulae of static evolution: to respond to the true, multiple voices – familiar, unfamiliar, native, alien – that run in one’s mixed inheritance, mixed blood. The fire-music, the earth-music, had illumined the mouth of space that we (and our imperial predecessors) had entered long before a voyage to the moon had been contemplated.

Those true voices in the live fossil blood of music could turn nevertheless and tear one’s convictions into shreds, into a beggar’s rags, with jesting translations, with jesting paraphrase, of flawed history, flawed anthropology, flawed biology, enshrined by cultural habit into pure white, pure black, frames. Deprivation’s frames.

‘She bars our path,’ the voice in my blood cried. The blaze was high. The black African queen with white skin and flaxen hair split into two pictures. One was a constellation of Botanic lore transferred into the soil of the Americas. The other was a crucial moment in the womb of the human imagination when the queen gives up the ghost of black or white purity and biased fossil, biased formula, on her funeral pyre in the heart of future generations.

Ross was aroused. He shared my vision but distrusted it. He was staring at the Macusi guide who tended the blaze that had been lit in the blocked trail of fallen branches and trees. He stroked the enigmatic Orchid flesh of the queen. The stoic demeanour of the savage who led us reminded him of the pupils in his classroom and drew a veil as it were between him and the fire with its frail implications of passion’s peace on the delicate singed bloom in his hand.

‘Peace is an illusion,’ he murmured, ‘without massive deterrence. It is unfair, no doubt, to equate the young Macusis in my classroom, their slightly sombre and entrenched expression, with the dread efficiency and
uniformity
of the Nazis or the Japanese in World War Two. And yet it is the Shadow in the mirror, the Shadowy conflagration of a queen or a king or an imperial dynasty that fills me with misgiving. I see not peace there in primitive fires and implicit holocausts but xenophobia. I hear no music except the delirium of power. Alas, people fear people everywhere, Anselm. I wish it were otherwise.

‘Natives fear immigrants, immigrants natives. It has taken nearly a century and a half for the French and the Germans to relinquish a pattern of feud that may have had its roots in the Napoleonic wars. I have seen my friends and relations engulfed in two great wars on European soil in this century. I have French and German antecedents – though I am English – and (let me say in jest) I sometimes see myself as my own worst and best enemy with whom – thank God – a treaty is now possible but at a price, Anselm…’

‘What price?’

‘A price that involves an awareness of savage idealism. I wish it were possible to enter a laboratory (not a monastery, mind you) and devote the rest of my life to training a telescope or a microscope on forests and constellations, flowers and stars. A blissful existence! Instead my job is to educate a tribe, a generation, I cannot fix, do not – in heaven’s name – wish to fix. For then I would have betrayed
everything I hold dear.’ He was laughing at himself and yet I felt he was asking a question of me. Not of me! Of the substance of Dream that divided and united us.

‘Eruption is a measure of a healing process in nature,’ I cried. I felt tears in my eyes. His logic seemed unanswerable. ‘The globe cleanses itself when it quakes and spews forth lava. There would be no flowers to spy on without the quake, the lava.’ I could not stop the tears welling up and pouring from me in the Dream. ‘The gods are an eruption within and from humanity‚’ I said haltingly, ‘that may set in train …’ I hesitated, ‘set in train a process of healing once we turn, face events,
and
make
distinctions.’

He stared at me against the mirror of fire-music (‘delirium of power’, he had called it) as if I were a child. I had brought him no release from misgiving. And yet I could not be sure but I sensed that a tension of true counterpoint lay between us in the abyss of our age: a deeper self-confessional edge to our lips in self-portraitures and the sculpture of others. His mind about the nature of history, the nature of nature, was apparently made up. Mine was too. And yet I felt the very divisions between us were a catalyst (if ‘catalyst’ were the word) of far-flung change and of the translation of ourselves on to another level of being that would assist us to see ourselves differently in different shades and lines and fragments of existence.

‘Rid yourself of myth, Anselm‚’ he said softly. ‘It’s a dangerous addiction, this business of eruptive yet healing nature. A manifesto of anarchy. Reform of our institutions is necessary of course. Everywhere. But we need discipline and control. I have seen eruptive human nature, revolutionary activity, and it’s a fruitless bargain. No one wins.’

‘You’re turning your back on what I am saying, Ross‚’ I cried.

‘What are you saying, Anselm?’ His manner was cold despite the leaping tongues of fire.

‘I am saying that eruptive being has now reared its head in
all of us (conservatives have become radicals, radicals
pseudo-conservatives
) – whether we admit it or not – in all sorts of ways. Not the old revolutionary compulsions. Reared its head because of technological uncertainties, the clash of cultures, the susceptibility of masses to charismatic leadership …’ I blurted out almost crudely, crude Word, yet desire for truth – ‘The gods are not God‚’ I cried. ‘That much we know, Ross.’

‘Do we?’ he spoke like a complete stranger in the Dream.

I turned and looked into the fire as if I spoke from it, in it, as if I leapt from broken ladder of flame to broken ladder of flame in danger of falling into a pit. I held a charred volume in one hand and read from it in the Dream. ‘God does not imbue us with the power of delirium but with a capacity for infinite, creative distinctions at the heart of all relationships,
relationships
of sorrow or joy, bitterness or sweetness …’ The page was crumbling but I was still able to read –’ … invaluable distinctions we need to make when the gods overshadow our world. The gods are in phenomena that excite us to
mindlessness
, mindless self-abandon, mindless superstition, the gods erupt in charismatic lusts and leadership, charismatic radicalism to purge our ranks, expel our enemies, charismatic conservatism to bind, to entrap, charismatic self-interest, charismatic mutiny or strike. The gods are dangerous,
sometimes
notoriously fickle and amoral. But they open the way to distinctions we scarcely ever make until their shadow darkens our path. A terrifying lesson. If we bundle together God, gods, daemons, furies in a uniform and gross package then we misinterpret sacred balances and forfeit the instructive bite of music, the interior anatomy, the creative fast that is required of us…’

‘Bundle together,’ said Ross drily. ‘The language of fascism, Anselm, the language of uniformity, regimentation. Bundle together! The gods like that. Easier than making distinctions.’

The dream-volume slipped from my hands but its utterance was imprinted on my mind. I did not reply. I found myself staring hard at the blackened fossil flesh of the marvellous
Orchid in Ross’s hand. As though his hand lay in mine, mine in his, within the abyss of our age. I saw a library of interior counterpoint no one could destroy replete with the rhythmic tapestry of the City of God, leaf, petal, bone, shell. The resurrection of fossil eternities into living diversity! A library that lay in the future, within us, beyond us. I would have given my sight to open a visionary page, to read a visionary line, to enter the future: the future’s miraculous community of souls born of the divisions of the past.

I would have given my sight to see backwards into a desolate age from the future. Curious self-contradiction! I would have given my sight to see with eyes acquainted with every extremity, to see myself as a living, resurrected fossil steeped in diversity
not
eternity-for-the-sake-of-eternity, to see my own blindness now from an unravelled, penetrative standpoint within the distant future, to know myself in all my limitations and through such paradox to live within yet beyond the present frame or burning moment …

The wish or prayer had scarcely touched my lips when the blaze subsided. The trail was clear. A doorway into the future. I felt fear then. How easy to slip into the future’s complacency and dream one has escaped the past and the present. No, that was not my intention. My hope was to retrace my steps from the future into the present and the past and know oneself – know the everlasting stranger within oneself – as never before. I had seen Ross for an instant as a total stranger who then became profoundly meaningful within the tension of interior counterpoint. It was this thread I wished to pursue through and beyond all measure of complacency. Perhaps in breaking a formula of complacency – in becoming a stranger to oneself – one would gain the strength to bear the full complication of relationships one had begun to unveil in ascending from bank to bank in the four banks of the river of space.

Should I shrink from such insight into a tapestry of responsibilities, a community of souls (saints and sinners)
that – in tearing complacency to rags – could shake me to the core of being?

Had I not already come forwards/backwards a far way in my pilgrimage? Was it not wise to leave it there? Leave
them
there? Ross, Penelope, the drowned children?

I thought I heard Ross say, as the last embers of the blaze subsided, ‘Let’s stop, Anselm. Let’s go to the riverbank and bury our drowned children in the ruined Mission House that lies in the future, a future we know in the Dream as you retrace your steps from 1988 into 1950. We know Canaima will burn the House in 1966 though this is 1950. Why go forward still more into an uncertain, perhaps threatening, future that may take us back beyond what we already know?’

It seemed sensible advice. And yet…

‘We have come too far‚’ I said, ‘We have earned the right to go forward not into a Golden Age from which to retrace our steps, not into the return of a Golden Age (of which El Dorado in Guyana is a pertinent Shadow), but into
profoundest
self-recognition of ourselves in and through others: the interior anatomy, the true terrifying flesh of the Word, the true terrifying knowledge of the Heart that may set us free at last from fear.’