It is the mark of the new that we never know what it will be until it arrives. Of one thing only we can be sure, that it is unpredictable and is never the outcome of existing “trends.” The wind that bloweth where it listeth is unconstrained, blows round corners. Current ideologies determined by mechanistic and “evolutionary” premises are likely to see the future as the product of the past, whereas perhaps that past is the product of the future in a living—and therefore purposeful—universe. Teleology, rejected by Darwinian evolutionism, returns. In Wilson Harris's world it is premises which are in question, the unknowable determinants. Thus the figure of Virgil and the meaning of his epic are changed by Dante, and Dante in turn resituated by what he becomes for Wilson Harris. The past is living and continually changing because of the future which changes it. Or perhaps there is only one time, one place, one total being in which every human life, every creature and every particle, has its eternal presence within a whole participated by all. Throw away our preconceptions and all becomes very simple—but it is precisely our preconceptions of which we are least aware.

If Harris's work and his world are difficult to come to terms with (as I have gradually discovered), it is not because they are more complex but because they are simpler, closer to the reality of actual experience, than the way of seeing that our highly complex Western civilization has imposed on us, as if it were an unquestionable norm. In reality that “norm” is fragmented and incoherent. We live, for example, as if our waking and our sleeping selves were different persons; our past and our present were separate worlds, as if our dead are no longer with us when they no longer share our present. More and more we have come to live in the immediately sensibly perceptible space circumscribed by our bodily senses at a given moment. Wilson Harris, by contrast, sees clearly that there are really no such boundaries and frontiers to the universe we inhabit. The final imaginative realization to which he leads us is an unbounded unity, of which every part has access to the whole, and that living whole includes every part. He gives us access to ourselves in a way that does not destroy but restores an original simplicity, the simplicity of our original Edenic state, which we have lost and to which we are forever seeking to return—and which in reality we have never left, otherwise than by thinking ourselves into the unnoticed complexity of the modern world.

We find ourselves in a simpler, but also a very much larger world than the restricted universe of Western materialism. Wilson Harris restores us to the world of soul, as it rightly belongs to us; however we may have struggled to accommodate ourselves to the lifeless universe of a materialist ideology for which not consciousness, but “matter” is the ground of what we have chosen to call reality. In that lifeless world we ourselves are mortal, and meanings and values have all but vanished into an ultimate nihil. In Harris's world our “carnival masks” are worn by the ever-living; they are at once our human guises, which we present to the world, and the “windows” through which the ever-living may look into world's carnival—as Lear imagined “God's spies.” The masks change, come and go, sometimes we do not know if the guiser is the same or another, whether the mask is the same or another, for the law of this old-new world Harris opens for us is metamorphosis, continuous and subtle and liberating. Indeed, liberation is the final meaning, the shedding and assuming of selves in an open universe. It is, as it seems, a Christian universe, whose work and end is redemptive—indeed, Harris uses the word resurrection in his title Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. The Cross and the Two Thieves—the two Brothers enacting the parts of Good and Evil—move through the great Epic of Redemption—Christo is the name of another epic masquer.

The impression of characters who come and go, disappear only to reappear elsewhere, is at first reading bewildering but we come to accept the truth of this interweaving of unbroken continuities flowing like water mingling in the one river. No one and nothing can be pinned down—Wilson Harris's intent is at the opposite extreme from the depiction of clear-cut and unique identity of “characters” in a nineteenth-century novel, created by their authors, participants in a world where individuation seemed more significant (and in a certain tradition of the novel this is still so) than epic universality. Harris writes of a quantum world—by quantum so applied to persons I take him to mean the property of a particle which is at the same time a wave, simultaneously located and unlocated. We are all increasingly aware of such a world, as measurable matter converges with immeasurable mind, aware of the space-time universe itself continually traversed by waves and particles, coming and going on their invisible trajectories to which we are continually but for the most part unconsciously exposed—if indeed these quanta are not ourselves. This is a most modern paradigm and also most ancient, the world soul traversed by angelic and elemental spirits, its aspect at once novel and deeply familiar. To read his novels is to experience a new strangeness that yet comes to us like a memory of something already and forever known. “Originality,” in the sense of something never previously thought of and quite different from the already known, is incomprehensibly nowadays deemed an academic virtue and encouraged even among students of philosophy. Yet what is can only be itself, and its recognition leads not into outer space but is always a homecoming—“so it is true after all”—a building, not a dismantling, of what we term reality.

This recognition and assent belong not to reason but to the Imagination, which is a totality, is, according to William Blake, “the human existence itself,” perhaps the Self of Vedant with its triple aspect, being-consciousness-bliss (sat-ohitananda). Reason, so far as I know, has no means of making a value judgment of a work of imagination. But this unscholarly account of a personal response to the world of a new great writer's vision would be incomplete without making reference to the power of Imagination, which for Harris himself is central. The first is too simple for the professional critics of today, though well known to the writers of the Jewish Bible: the response of the body, when the hairs of the head rise up in response to the presence of the Spirit. My gray hairs stir red in response to a quality in the writings of Wilson Harris that I would venture to call beauty—a word which has lost all meaning, one might be tempted to believe, for modern secular criticism and for a great deal of the work criticized also. Beauty has come to be deemed a falsification of reality, whose presently accepted image is closer to that powerful nihilist painter Francis Bacon's rotting yet protesting corpses than to Dante's “perfect human body.” Yet for Plato, as for all traditional thought, beauty is the very aspect of the real, announces its presence in a numinous manner (the body's response of the hair stirring at the roots), the sense of deep recognition of what we are and what our universe, that we know also as the Good and the True. Of which indeed we have no knowledge other than this instantaneous assent of the Imagination.

Wilson Harris has written poems of great beauty—for poetry is normally the use of language in the service of this imaginative vision—but as it seems the poet has chosen to speak in the guise of the novelist, or, as it might be truer to say, of the epic, “The Infinite Rehearsal,” as Harris himself calls that mystery we enact. What distinguishes the epic narrative above all from the narrative of the novel is that the latter is concerned with events in the life of the empirical daily self, without regard to that level signified in earlier epics by the participation in human affairs of the gods. Or should I rather say the participation of human life in the mysteries of higher worlds? Are the gods returning, of late, to participate in our lives? One thinks of certain novels from Latin America or Africa. It is this dimension which is, to my mind, the proper theme of poetry, and the narrative works of all great epics, not to mention the world's fairy tales. The Mahabharata, Homer, Virgil, Dante, the Arthurian Cycle. Proust described himself as a poet, and so, curiously enough, did Balzac. Under no circumstances could the word be applied to Dickens or to George Eliot. Poetry is the language of the soul—sometimes we may be inclined to believe it is a dead language, so far as our own Western civilization is concerned. But then one reads some new work—I think of my own first reading of David Jones's In Parenthesis or at an even earlier time the novels of Thomas Hardy—and the vision unexpectedly returns. In the novels of Wilson Harris a new and fresh beauty announces the sacred presence. Amazingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, river and waterfall, tropical forests, tropical flowers, human participation in something cosmic, in a great mystery, the Great Battle, in resurrection and metamorphosis. And we know ourselves back on familiar-unfamiliar ground, the lost country, back where we belong. Yet all is simple, the people who wear the carnival masks are almost anonymous, and for all the marvelous exotic scenery of The Guyana Trilogy and elsewhere, the author deals with simple central human issues of the one human story in which we are all involved. No other writer known to me at this time writes from the imaginative depth and truth communicated by Wilson Harris.