The Carnival Trilogy (50 page)

*

The fire-talk lucid conversation with its abrupt, wholly natural transitions, traceries, linked memories through polar opposites, faded into sudden darkness upon my lips.
Nothing
remained except a vague self-portraiture. The procession continued on its way. We camped further along the trail in a valley that was the gateway into the remote and small settlement from which the drowned child I carried had come. I laid the child (whose intricate face and body baffled my sight) on the ground. Sleep was a chasm, a fault in the landscape of Dream, and one wondered whether in falling more steeply or deeply into it everything would vanish forever in the future.

Despite our misgivings the sun rose with new morning in the fractionalized long Night, long Day, of fossil insight into the past. We clung to each feature of landscape as if it were a piece of live, bright coal that lit one’s mind anew. Whereas we had commenced our processional journey with the sensation of being sculpted shells of water, sculpted bodies composed of a fluid reality, now it was as if we had entered another dimension of the still Waterfall of space, a dimension of the future.

Here the great lofty precipitation of silvery bark upon the trees had given way to an open grassy savannah. Streams ran down from the hills. It was light itself that rained upon us: an inner texture of light as though the bark of the Forest had unclothed itself into naked brightness within the
multidimensional
fabric of the Waterfall.

I was excited by the light paint (restorative fossil paint, meticulous live fossil flesh) I placed anew on our lips in the resurrectionary canvas of space. Modern resurrected savage reflecting ancient primitive humanity within ourselves.

How far had we arrived in the future? We three, carriers of the dead?

‘Every Waterfall‚’ I said to Ross, ‘one enters in Dream or comes upon within a great continent such as this – a continent inhabited by lost or forgotten cultures one needs to see anew from the future, within an Imaginary future – is a veiled messenger of the womb of the sea, of the origins of life and technologies of death rooted in strangest innocence. I trust we shall learn and see. It stands and descends – that Waterfall – upon an escarpment; it appears at first sight to embody an absolute ridge between the past and the present, between the sea and the land … But look!’

Our camp lay within mountainous terrain, the valley itself– in its lofty right – however contained by the vessel of the land – possessed the escalating contours of a hill one million years above the sea: a fractionalized aeon’s perch in space above the tides of the ocean that still crawled in every rock garden.

‘Take the weight of a pebble in your hand. Strip away the mountains within the interior anatomy of space. Imagine ourselves as animate, beautiful, dancing skeletons perched here nevertheless in the ground of a valley that is no valley at all but a hill far up in Time above the rock garden of the sea that fertilizes itself as it splits into reversible lava or
life-giving
water.’

As I spoke I fished in my pocket for Inspector Robot’s glasses that I had used in ascending god-rock – glasses that fused a parallel between ‘artificial time’ and ‘quantum, simultaneous, microscopic eyes in all fabrics of existence whether flower or grass or tree’.

‘Now replace the mountains. Look through Robot’s glasses at the streams in the distance descending from the
mountains
we have fleshed into life again – skeleton, vanished mountains we have clothed into action again above the valley/hill on which we stand. Those streams become
messengers
of the ocean’s volcanic peace, the ocean’s tumult yet inherent quietude, raised above extinct devouring premises as valley is raised above running valley and cloud rains upon still cloud.

‘The mountains become a precipitate ridge, slow-motion Waterfall in space, half-solid appearance. A mountain is a slow-motion Waterfall within the simultaneous eyes of past/ future space. It is not an absolute ridge or monumental fortress between our past memories of the warring sea and our present occupation of the conquered land.

‘It is a fault that may imprison us in territorial conflict unless our eyes are opened to far future Imaginary
expeditions
when humanity takes its Shadowy rivers of the dead into the stars as new rain upon desert planets.’

Perhaps we were stealing a march into the future upon Inspector Robot in making such use of his glasses. I
remembered
he had tried to steal a march upon me when he sought to ape the features of the great judge at the trial on the third bank of the river of space.

We did not have long to wait. Gleaming, dazzling
messengers
were sighted on their way from the settlement we were seeking. The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses …

I STOPPED.
All
at
once
the
lines
–
‘Perhaps we were stealing a march, etc., etc.’ –
that
had
been
dictated
to
me
within
the
theatre
of
the
future
–
as
it
drew
me
to
recall
the
past
–
seemed
too
inflexible
(
inflexible
fossil-humour?
)
,
lines
steeped,
I
felt,
in
an
aroma
that
filled
me
with
unease.
‘Why
unease?’
said
the
dictating
Voice,
‘why
did
you
stop?
I
am
no
future
dictator
you
have
come
upon,
I
am
not
dictating
what
you
may
continue
to
record
on
the
fourth
bank.
Such
apparent
dictation
and
its
aroma
stem
from
–
let
me
put
it
this
way
–
transparencies
of
the
unconscious.
And
these
have
an
inimitable
style
of
their
own
that
seems
dictation
from
an
alien
source.
They
can
be
very 
dis
turbing
.
Conscience
is
the
spark
you
are
seeking
to
trace
within
every
dazzling
transparency
and
within
unique
atmospheres
and
fossil-strata
above
you
and
beneath
you.
Fire
was
the 
atmos
pheric
humour
in
which
you
read
the
nameless
hand
and
its
writings
before
you
came
through
the
trail
to
where
you
now
are.

‘Now
it’s
not
that
strict
fire
which
you
experience
in
this
reach
of
future
time.
It’s
another
element,
an
element
that
has
evolved
from
imprints
of
fire,
an
element
that
is
not
fire
in
any
ordinary
sense
yet
it
smoulders
into
a
consciousness
that
does
not
burn
but
may
for
that
very
reason
be
unbearable,
well-nigh
unbearable,
at
times.

‘It
is
the
spark
of
the
living
Word
that
you
seek,
the
sacred
Word.
And
that’s
akin
to
a
compulsion
even
as
it
indicates
liberation.
It’s
upsetting.
It’s
a
style
that
drives
you
on
but
leaves
you
unsettled,
even
unhappy.
The
touch
of
long-dead,
buried
masters
who
travelled
into
the
future
long,
long
ago
and
who
are
intent
on
helping
you
in
the
quest
for
truth,
yes,
truth
I
say
–
truth
that
is
interwoven
with
a
sacred
kind
of
self-deception
(
odd
business
I
know
)
but
without
which
–
without
that
peculiar
interweave
–
conscience
would
not
exist.
You
will
see
and
it
will
shake
you,
Anselm.
’

I
would
see
in
due
course.
That
was
his
promise. I
wanted
to
close
my
ears
to
the
voice
or
voices
of
the
transparent
uncon
scious
.
But
it
was
impossible
to
do
so.
What
was
the
last
image
I
received
when I
saw
‘the
gleaming,
dazzling
messengers’
approaching?

The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses. It was the glistening drums they carried, and other adornments on their bodies, that made them shine. I recalled Proteus’s half-jesting remark to Rose in the hillside cabin on the third bank of the river of space: ‘infant lighthouse of science’. I was not sure I had
remembered
exactly but it helped us to feel partially at home with the savages of the past one perceived in a burning,
non-burning
light from a tower or tent in the future.

We looked through Robot’s glasses within transparencies of the unconscious at the ancient masquerade of a newborn tribe. They wore a long subtly woven belt – or shining umbilicus-eel – that issued from the region of their navel and coiled itself around their bodies to reach their shoulder and neck.

It was as if they bore the brunt of a fault within the inner/outer body of brightest innocence one could scarcely visualize except as a jest of nature. The bright umbilicus or eel brought home the drowned children (the Shadowy obscure bodies of the drowned children) we had brought to them for ritual burial. And the ease with which the eel had coiled itself around them suggested an intimacy with the elements (with the fluid electricity of the elements, animal electricity, animal ‘lighthouse’) that revived in me an
attachment
to the mother of light and darkness (the twin-Rose) who had spared my life.

Were they pitiless phantoms in the fossil-strata of the unconscious or harbingers of hope?

‘Eel’ or ‘umbilicus’ equalled ‘electricity’.

That was the nature of their innocent jest, innocent
transgression
into consuming technology, consuming spires of
electricity that would pierce the heavens and rival the stars. The gift of life was a gift of terrifying responsibility.

‘Eel’ or ‘infant lighthouse’ equalled a ‘fault’ in the
generation
of innocence within the depths of nature and as a consequence one was prone to worship nature and yet to recoil from it.

Before we knew what had happened they had surrounded us. They flattened our tower or tent in a flash and we were pulled without further ado into the long grasses as into a river of passions. The green swell of the grassy tide hemmed us in yet swept us along. The white waving crest of the sun sang with non-burning heat. It was a river as well as a lake or sea into which the band or tribe took us. The Shadow of my ‘drowned child’ had been snatched from my arms but Ross and Penelope still held theirs. I dreamt of long ancient spars and the rigging of sailing ships sprouting from the bodies of men. I dreamt of the wrecked cabin on a waving hillside in which my uncle Proteus had pleaded with my twin-mother Rose for my life.

It was a Dream of such power the cabin became
preternaturally
real. It became the grain of expeditions in space seen from a newborn standpoint of truth and self-deception. Truth in that it was a vivid articulation from within the unconscious of the perils I faced when my mother was taken ill and I was infected by the very Asian flu epidemic in Alicia’s household: an illness that occurred in the very year or month that my mother’s twin sister gave birth to my half-brother Lucius Canaima. The two happenings were so blended – my mother’s and my illness (on one hand) and the pregnancy of the other Rose and the birth of her child (on the other) – that I was deceived by patterns of memory into dreaming my recovery from illness occurred in a cabin on a waving hillside the day I was born and that my half-brother (five years younger than I) was my ageless twin born on the same day. His age tended to vary in the recurring Dream, five years, six years younger, five years, six years
older
than I.
Sometimes born in my skin, I in his. He was ageless. He was elusive. Our mother was the twin-Rose …