The Carnival Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

of mudheads, if I may so describe my forebears, appeared in post-Columbian times, they were the renaissance of Carnival to compensate the inexplicable demise of El Dorado, the golden man and idol of kings. He ate from golden dishes and bathed in golden waters. So many cultures in ancient America vanished without rhyme or reason, leaving their treasures like heaps of straw on the floor of palaces and temples. Were they slain by Doubt or by Famine?
    “I was born in 1917 and was scarcely nine when I began to reconnoitre the foreshore, and to seek the button in the eye of the fish.”
    His voice ceased but the foreshore that I knew (I had run there too as a child some twenty years or so after his time, his childhood) rose vividly into my mind. The button in the eyeof the fish Masters had pressed projected me up. It was a kind of atomic wheel, atomic fiction rather than deed, in the light years of innocent creatures one rode, sometimes up, sometimes down. He had put his finger on the wounded eye of a hanging creature and uplifted me, whereas before I had stood low and raised him without being conscious of the wound – bird’s broken wing, or leviathan pupil – I had touched, on beach or foreshore, to imbue him with the myth of ascent.
    I saw him far below me now like a ghost in space whose light years reached me nevertheless across fictional time. He picked his way on the mud of the foreshore. He was nine years old. He crawled gingerly. Crabs scuttled as he moved, their white legs of Carnival and their shadowed backs shining with the gloom and the pallor of El Doradan nebulae. It was as if I perceived him in another age, an age that was close to the execution of the golden man by Doubt or Famine. And yet he remained a child of the 1920s. A wild and glorious cherry tree suddenly sprouted. I saw it distinctly and yet it existed within a capacity to fade or vanish. How had that wild glory of a tree centuries ago, in the age of El Dorado, subsided into a relic of the 1920s! Unidentifiable relic it would have been were I not aware of it as it originally was.
    So too Masters seemed a relic, child and relic, young and ancient, child of the 1920s, child of our century, yet an ancient king, the king of a vanished realm. His subjects were crabs on a South American foreshore, nebula-crabs. I paused as I wrote to reflect upon the constellation of the hunted in the hunter Masters had previously invoked in my book, the eye of the fish in the hanged fisherman upon a wasteland tree. Each ancient relic or stump on which the eye of the fisherman was drawn, each shell of a crab sculpted there, each skin of an animal or cell planted there, addressed me now as susceptible to the glory of Carnival tree, or gallows of god, that could ravish the knowledgeable heart.
    I had scarcely dwelt on the thought of such glory when I doubted my inspiration. It seemed suddenly desolating to dream of parallels of glory within gallows stump and relic,within crab and fossil. All I could now discern within my “knowledgeable heart” was the anguish of a child who crawled on a beach beneath me. He had cut himself on a bone, I suddenly saw. He staunched the blood with a rag; it was a new beginning overshadowed by uncertainty, the uncertainty I felt over the origins of kingship. I (though still aloft on the wheel of fiction) reached down and sought Doubting Thomas’s hand then to help young Masters, young mudhead, yet to thwart him in my disbelief. Thomas of New Forest Carnival made a rough gesture, perhaps it was involuntary, and tore the rag. Thomas, in this incarnation cultivated by Carnival tradition, was an older cousin, twelve years old at least, who had accompanied the nine-year-old boy-king in the game they played of light-year wheel and gallows susceptible to glory and to hope …
    Before pursuing the game the two boys played, I must stop for a moment to reflect. I was jolted, shocked by what I had felt and seen, by most painful inner revelation in the