Was she weeping at the thought of losing him, of plucking him from her like a brand on fire? Was this inconsistent with what he had felt before, that she was weeping for him and for the encounter he had had with the false shaman that afternoon?
Did the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman” subsist in one of the profoundest secrets of Carnival, the mask of the cuckold?
I remember discussing this question with Everyman Masters in London in the 1960s and 1970s when he addressed the philosophic myth of a colonial age that draped its mantle everywhere around the globe on superpowers, as on empires past and present, to set in train parallel existences, executions, resurrections of a plantation king or emperor or president or god.
Masters explained the seeds of trauma that had led him, within the ground of bizarre irony, to erect the obscure colonial status of sugar or rice estate overseer into Carnival prince of the world. He explained that the shock of encounter as a child with the “intimate stranger” on the foreshore of New Forest had so curiously broken him, yet imbued him with the spectre of terrible Ambition, that he had run back metaphorically into the womb; and in spying upon his mother had been so overwhelmed that a closely guarded family secret sprang into his mind. Closely guarded yet not so closely guarded for he recalled the whispers of servants in his parents’ home. His father was not his father. And it had seemed that she (the glass woman in whom he lay coiled all over again) had contemplated an Abortion when she carried, or was pregnant with, him. I asked him, as he seemed reluctant to continue, what had saved the day. His father, he said, his legal father, had stood by the glass woman, protected her, and insisted upon her keeping the child as if it were his. (It was important to remember, he said, that his legal father was coloured, the glass woman, his mother, was coloured, his biological father, whom he had never met, was white. And all expectations were that the newborn baby would be white.)
Where then, I pressed him, lay the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman”? It lay, he said, in forces of humiliation that resembled each other but differed in ultimate wisdom from each other. To spy upon her or through her, as if he had returned into her body as foetal Carnival child, and to see the fire that threatened to consume him with her tears, was to endure the psychology of rape within her body long before the false shaman appeared and threatened to seize him on the foreshore. How extraordinary, yet inevitable, it was that the “mask of the cuckold” that his legal father wore came into luminous perspective when he ran back into his mother’s womb. In that mask of Carnival humiliation, Carnival cuckold, was raised the enigmatic spirit of Sex through and beyond nature’s intercourse, a spirit that could sustain both mother and child within a cruel and desperate world so easily exploited by the false shaman.
Instead of the “plucked brand” or the Abortion his mother, the glass woman, had begun to plan, the foetus would mature and the child would be born with a capacity for judgement and self-judgement beyond his years, a capacity that was strangely fractured, strangely unfulfilled, a capacity to employ such partial fracture as an integral element in unravelling/overcoming the lure of diseased Ambition or conquest.
In other words the humiliation of the plucked brand he had seen as himself, the potential Abortion written into foetal self, ran in parallel with the psychology of rape he had endured at the age of nine on the foreshore, but the mask of the cuckold upon his legal father (and the humiliation that also implied for his family) was radically different in its internal essence from plucked brand or false shaman. It originated a vision through the Abortion of an age, through the fallacious proprieties of an age, it originated a capacity to set material pride aside in favour of the spirit of care, the innermost spirit of Sex, the spirit of brooding creativity that takes over where nature leaves off … I was, to say the least, intrigued at the origins of such conversion of humiliation into the genius of love that differed from the natural impact of humiliation upon the material body. I was at a loss to understand it all, though I had glimpsed again the transfigurative wound of which Masters spoke on so many occasions. He desisted from saying anything more at this stage though I knew now that his guidance into realms that seemed to exist before birth and after death bestowed upon me in this life (this lived life) a privilege that would deepen and expand the biography of spirit on which I was engaged. It would deepen it, expand it, in peculiar and mutual engagement between author and character at the heart of Carnival.
FOUR
Soon I was to perceive in the complex loves and sorrows of Masters’ life that I was as much a character (or character-mask) in Carnival as he was. Indeed in a real and unreal sense he and other character-masks were the joint authors of Carnival and I was their creation. They drew me to surrender myself to them.
My hand was suffused as I wrote by their parallel hands, my eyes as I looked around by their parallel eyes … And suddenly, paradoxically, it seemed to me that Masters’ coiled posture in the glass woman, his mother, turned upon me and conferred upon me a blessing or privilege, the fictional law that husbands the mother of a Carnival god when it (that law) — that character of law — dons the mask of the cuckold within Carnival.
“That mask,” Masters said, “possesses its origins in the family humiliations I have disclosed that evolve nevertheless into spirit-parent, into fiction-maker, that I confer now upon you.” He cried to me from the womb as much as from the grave that such a peculiar translation of the wounds of humanity was indeed the law of fiction and to wear it made me not only his creation but his father-spirit, to wear it made me not only their creation but the parent-spark of the other characters in Carnival.
Such is the paradox, the comedy, of half-divine, half-Carnival, character-masks in the medium of time. For Carnival time is partial, the past and the present and the future are parts of an unfathomable Carnival whole beyond total capture. Thus the past, as much as the future, bears upon the present, they are the children of the present but they also parent the present. The hidden past affects the present even as it emerges through present discoveries as a new, unsuspected force. If the present parents the future how can it also be the child of the future?
“The contradiction is resolved,” Masters said, “when one sees that the parts of time within which we live, die, are born, imply that there is no absolute parent or model of time that we can seize.
“To see into the future — as into the hidden past — is a revelation of the partial ground on which we stand and the partial ground to which we move backwards or forwards.
“To see into the past as into the future is not to possess absolute knowledge of the past or the future but to be moved nevertheless by the mystery of originality that gives birth to the future as the future and the past give birth to ourselves.
“That originality, that mystery, may perceive a real, however elusive or incomplete, outline of coming events — or hidden past events — even as it confesses to deeper and farther hidden pasts and coming futures that are already transforming the basis of what one sees and feels in this moment. Freedom therefore is grounded in perceptions of originality that see through absolute fate.”