Anselm sets out on his Odyssey into the past with Canaima’s dislodged knife in his side. It is as if he gathers up into his arms — in a wholly new, abysmal, terrifyingly creative light — the corpse of the bird-dancer Canaima had slain forty years previously on the bank of the Potaro river in South America. The corpse is but a mask to be worn by endangered species whose life is now wholly precious, sacred.
Canaima’s knife … had metaphorically killed me … pierced me to the core of the body’s waking instrument.
The Body’s Waking Instrument. The arousal of the body to itself as sculpture by a creator one abuses. The body wakes to itself as inimitable art, inimitable multi-faceted, living fossil extending into all organs, objects, spaces, stars, and the ripple of light. Wakes also to self-confessional blindness, blindness to self-destruction and the destruction of others.
The body wakes to the instrumentality of breath — ‘sharpest extension of breath in sculpted body-senses’:
Perhaps I was the medium of the dance in touching the earth, in touching the light, in touching the sculpture of appearances as if every structure one shaped, or ordered, or visualized, was a sacred infusion of slow-motion lightning into substance, substance into life,
I appreciate the difficulty in a phrase embodying ‘slow-motion lightning’. It was the closest I could come to a visualization of the energies of the cosmos as sleeping/waking life, as station and expedition, as the transfiguration of technologies into a therapeutic edge within the malaise of gross materialism that threatens to destroy our planet.
Wilson Harris
CARNIVAL
FOR MARGARET, JEAN-PIERRE AND NATHANIEL
Here all misgiving must thy mind reject,
Here cowardice must die and be no more,
We are come to the place I told thee to expect,
* * *
His hand on mine, to uphold my falterings,
* * *
He led me on into the secret things.
The wanderings of the soul after death are prenatal adventures; a journey by water, in a ship which is itself a Goddess, to the gates of rebirth. In Vao the newly dead man is believed to arrive before the entrance to a cave on the sea-shore, where he encounters a terrible crab. In front of the cave mouth is a mazelike design called the Path. As the dead man approaches, the crab obliterates half of the design, and he has to restore it, or else be devoured. The Path is the same one that he has trodden many times in the ceremonial dances, and his knowledge of it proves him to be an initiate. After completing the design, he must thread its mazes to the threshold of the cave.
ONE
Everyman Masters celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in the summer of 1982 with several glasses of red wine he consumed in a pub. He returned home intoxicated and, ascending the stairs to his flat in Holland Park, came upon her again, the woman who had moved in within the past week to occupy the apartment above his. He had caught a glimpse of her then but now it was as if he knew her for certain, and everything he had surmised in their previous encounter was true. In her lay the climax of Carnival, the terror of dying, the bliss of reciprocal penetration of masks. She was tall, slender, very white; her skin was transparent yet stood beneath or within coal black hair.
She gave him a faint, pointed smile of recognition. A needle seemed to stitch a spirit on to her lips. Red wine for thread. White skin for fabric. Blackest hair for a veil or net. All these — the glimmering shadow of a star in a glass of wine, the net of whiteness and blackness like the painted apparition of a ghostly storm — were substitutes for another presence as if they were all Carnival fabric, as if they were all animate costume saturated by the wine of memory, the strangest sacrament of jealousy and love that binds one to involuntary divinity, plagued humanity, with which one wrestles across the years.
Her subtle red lips were stitched by the needle of space into another woman’s jealous mouth. Yes, it was true. He saw it all. He remembered. The resemblance ran deeper than mere pigmentation or exaggerations of emotional tone, emotional colour. A black or brown divinity could wear a white mask and red lips and still reveal itself complexly, profoundly, as other than whiteness or redness. So now the white face of the woman in which Masters’ soul was mingled like wine was but the stitched investiture of a hidden pigment, a hidden affair with another woman apparently vanished or past but vividly present again, vividly dark, vividly alive, to break the mould of fate, or finality of ancient colour, inscribed into encounters of personality.
He clung to the banister, then half-stumbled, half-danced, it seemed, into his apartment. She helped him through the door, half-embracing him. They gained the sitting room.
“Water, please.”
Jane Fisher repaired to the kitchen and returned with a glass. He took it from her. “There’s a bottle marked Elixir somewhere on the mantelpiece — would you … yes, that’s it — thanks.” He extracted a tablet that he placed on his tongue and swallowed with a sip. The darkness of his face seemed to burn, then to clear, then to grow mellow. “That’s better. I suffer from the genius of love.” It was an astonishing remark yet seemed weighted now with profoundest matter of fact, profoundest comedy. He stopped, but within a moment or two continued accusingly, yet welcomingly, as if they were characters in a play.
“You astonished me, young woman.”
The expression “young woman” — spoken with a slightly caressing note — softened the blow in his voice, softened the bizarre in his previous utterance.
“You’re the spitting image of someone I met long ago except that she was black, no brown.” He stopped again, took another sip, then continued with unexpected passion, as if he had forgotten himself and spoke to another being within her being. “You were, no, she was the colour of rice that seems white yet conceals brown pigment and black in the dazzle of the sun, an Indian woman, East Indian, one tended to say in New Forest. I am not sure if she was even that. They were a mixed lot, mixed races, the New Forest people.” The effort left him momentarily exhausted, slightly breathless.
“Where is New Forest?” Jane asked. She could think of nothing else to say. She felt herself inwardly gripped by something.
Masters did not reply immediately. But he recovered his voice once again. “South America. Facing the Atlantic. I came to Europe twenty-five years ago, in 1957. Never returned. I remember the year because of Sputnik, the first rocket signalling the Inferno.” He leaned back and rested in his chair. His face, like hers, was a mask, the words he had spoken also masked (she felt) a fantastic, oddly breathless, yet breathing force, a fantastic, troubled, indefinable bond between them. They were real yet unreal presences to each other as all human shocking intercourse is. One lives in and out of Carnival time since each element that masks us sustains time as its original medium of sacrifice within creation. Not only that. Original medium of theatre. One is the other’s veil of timely or untimely dust. For himself Masters saw through Jane to the other woman who had stabbed him twenty-five years ago in New Forest. Life was draining away from him now as then. Life was drawing him close again to the originality of death as a spectre lodged in the breast of humanity, humanity’s eclipsed longings, eclipsed ambitions, eclipsed hopes; that revive, flash forth again upon every border line between theatres of the dying and theatres of the living. Such originality was Masters’ goal, Masters’ quest.