Free The Carnival Trilogy by Wilson Harris Page A

balance the globe upon his head. His great muscular proclivity, his capacity to lift a crate or a barrel of sugar, was a trick of innate deformity. Imagine then, gentle reader, how chastening and astonishing it was to perceive, in Flatfoot, the czar of New Forest, the shadow of Masters!
    Masters’ escape from the false shaman, his fleet foot, gave an astonishing twist to Flatfoot Johnny’s predicament in being caught and lamed on the foreshore.
    Masters and czar Johnny together – in shadowplay cosmicessence – were an irregular portrait of age-old and ageing collectives whose gross or refined ambitions to manhandle the cosmos turn from the prospect of conquest on the battlefield , or conquest in industry, to nursing the spectre of vicarious athletics in space, Carnival Olympic Rocket Games.
    Masters smiled as if I had caught him out, caught his immersion in brutal yet philosophic reverie. It gave him no pleasure to confess to his kinship to Johnny save that such confession reopened the wound of diseased Ambition in which age is cemented to cosmetic youth or grotesque muscle. The powers of the lame are added to the fleet of spirit, as a parable of the partial nature of all human achievement, and human institution, all bodies, all images. I sensed he was as embarrassed and chastened as I, and this made me listen to him all the more closely and sympathetically.
    “In confessing to partial images,” he said so softly I had to ask him to speak up, “we come abreast of both bias (the bias of ageing institution) and potential (the capacity within all of us to be born anew) in all regimes and civilizations. All images are partial but may masquerade for an age as absolute or sovereign. Take the Market-place to which you have returned like a ghost from the future. As absolute or sovereign image ,the Market beguiles us into overlooking the terrors associated with it over the centuries. We tend to see in it the ground of honest trade, honest money – in our time – honest competition between individuals who are innocent of all that has happened.
    “As partial image ,however, the Market suddenly assaults us. It is brightest when it is darkest fellowship of greed. It is a net in which peoples and species have been decimated. We grow fat with our greedy antecedents, thin with our decimated antecedents. They inflate us to spawn them and their miseries and their grandeurs all over again.
    “I tell you, my friend, much subtlety and true honesty are needed in the ‘reading’ of partial images. For the partial image – in confessing to the ground of bias in sovereign institution – appears to terrorize us, or to confuse us, thoughit has begun, in some degree, to free us from the absolutes that clothe our memory and to reveal a potential that has always been there for mutual rebirth within conflicting, dying, hollow generations.
    “The partial image is biased, yes, but it is also in conflict with inherent bias – it is a part of something incalculably whole and stark and true. Such wholeness cannot be confined or structured absolutely; its complex nakedness and community of spirit eludes us within every mask or costume or dress …”
    “What then is wholeness?” I cried.
    “Wholeness is the unique mediation of fiction of spirit between partial images. Wholeness is, shall I say, a real fiction in arousing, penetrating, transforming the parent-in- the-child , the object in the newborn or unborn subject. Wholeness opens the prospect of climates of passion and emotion that reflect each other, not to overwhelm each other but to ‘redeem’ (if that is not in itself too biased a word) the fragmentation of cultures, and to do so without glosses of deception that underestimate the depth, the terror, the obscurity, of the enterprise.
    “The price of wholeness is a fiction that so relives the fragmentation of cultures that it cannot be duped by ideal rhetoric or faiths or falsehoods. It gives creative tension to doubts and