The Carnival Trilogy by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

and feels in this moment. Freedom therefore is grounded in perceptions of originality that see through absolute fate.”
    I was seized by a responsibility that may have intuitively existed in everything I had already written but which suddenly acquired a new, subtly terrifying, dimension.
    Take, for example, young Masters’ cousin Thomas, the twelve-year-old boy who had vanished in a clump on the foreshore pursuing an animal fragment of original cosmic crab. Was he twelve years old or twelve hundred years old? Whose child was he? In consulting my notes of conversations with Masters in the 1960s and 1970s I find no reference to Thomas’s parent-masks.
    Masters nudged me suddenly in the labyrinth of past/present/future through which we moved into accepting his cousin as my spirit-flesh, my fiction-blood. I hesitated even as I accepted. I felt an inner turbulence. Was I giving Thomas the Doubter a new, unsuspected, disturbing Carnival adolescence in a twentieth-century plantation Inferno or Purgatory? Such responsibility in fiction comes as a shock, a blow. For ifDoubt (rather than Faith) and its astronomic, biologic, economic antecedents were to be sanctioned and protected by its spirit-parent, and to become my progeny, then the law of fiction I represented needed to visualize diverse proportions of the body of tormented love it had vicariously married to become Thomas’s Carnival parent. One’s obsession with the tormented body of love – who was parent, who not, who would inherit the earth, who not, whose populations were exploding, whose not, who possessed the future, who did not – needed to secure guides (concrete in instinctual imagination ) if one were to visualize foetal significance, emergence, adolescence, in alien – or apparently alien – generations one accepted and adopted.
    One needed guides in those who – driven by regimes of fear or uncertainty – had regressed backwards in space or had “re-entered the body of the mother” they idolized or worshipped .
    I grant that Masters was a principal guide in this context of regression that counterpoints progression and it was he who bestowed upon me the privileged mask of fiction-parent; but in becoming my concrete guide into an area or areas I had but vicariously married he opened the body of time to young Thomas as well and to uncertainties I needed to fathom as acutely more relevant to me, and my age, than Faith. All this in spite of my earlier revelation of the hand of cousinly Thomas that exacerbated the wound it sought to prove. In such exacerbation lay a blindness, or cloud over the world’s eyes I had not realized or experienced before. And in this new exacerbated guidance, or journey into blind collision between worlds seeking to prove each other, young Thomas was virtually indispensable …
    It took me months of close conversation with Masters in London to piece together Thomas’s reaction to the flight of the boy-king in his charge from the false shaman. Thomas reappeared from the clump in which he had pursued a fragment of constellation crab. The child-mask El Dorado was nowhere in sight. Thomas shouted, he looked everywhere,then flew into New Forest. The town became a cloud that darkened his eyes as though the bandage upon gold, upon currency, assumed gigantic proportions. He needed proof of the king’s whereabouts. He needed to seize him, scold him for playing tricks. He needed to weigh him in the balance. His uncertainty ran so deep, his fear that his charge may have been molested (he had read the New Forest Argosy ),it was as if he himself had never been born and the gigantic bandage diminished into a shell. Masters had feared the Abortion of an age written into universal flesh-and-blood in glimpsing the glass woman. He, on the other hand, glimpsed the concave egg like a mask or blind over his eyes in alignment with “plucked brand” or gold. The uncertain penetration of those veils, egg and gold and fire, was his gestation in the womb