Wilson Harris - The Waiting Room

A stone’s throw from the cottage in which she lived (was it twelve or twenty years ago … adamant centuries past or still to come … in an unexplored present, unbroken future) one came abruptly upon the edge of the land. He inserted his hearing aid and grew slowly aware of the sound of the depths, coming, it seemed, from an inestimable distance, a universe of muffled, muffling direction. The sea was the blueness of the sky, foaming white far under him around each black penis of rock constellated in the uncanny wilderness of space. He felt himself quiver like a bat’s wing upon sheer cliff — radar fantasy — and discovered a flowering plant lying crushed beneath him, blue petal, dark veins, stars, spatula of mesmerism, the minute grasp of hand and fingers, intimate overwhelming design.

Rape in broad daylight. Had she, in fact, inveigled him to dwell within her — within his assault upon her, crushed petal, living room, so that now, long after the obscure kinship of event, he still found himself suspended in her filament of reverie, spider’s root, blind web, ear of memory? The phenomenal page of the past upon which he was drawn to peer, grew into the very present chest of cliff upon which he had followed her along a compulsive path before prostrating himself upon the very brink, lip, heart in mouth, rage, hallucination, nerves of the sea. He turned and tried to shout but where he lay flat on the ground it was no longer possible to see the elusive echo, mound or house into which she (the one he stalked) had vanished as if into the ground — wave of land beneath him. Her sweat — not his — began to roll into his eyes: subtle prominence, configuration, landscape, globe or bead of moisture in himself whose translucency or transparency … recollection … was chained to a surf of elements.

The agonizing inconsistency was the way she dissolved into everything and nothing but existed still to remonstrate with him. Sound of fate (echo sounder rather than bellow), sightless outcry, fathom rather than ascendancy. One moment she would be there — actively here (and he knew, every time, it would all happen again and again in numerous guises, disguises) — large as life, instinct with blood, incarnation of desire — but in another void or shape she would retire into the broken texture of himself and he would come to know himself deprived of everything he possessed, and empty of the rigid datum or value within her at which he flung himself, introspective, retrospective line, grasp. Rape in broad daylight.

SILENCE PLEASE. How he longed to hold her within the dearest conviction of abandonment of the senses, as something utterly priceless and beyond the self-advertisements of beauty or the shop window of the universe. But even as he dreamed to succumb to the self-surrender of everything she drew him still to her as before along a vulgar track, cement of consciousness … pricked … reflected … out of the depths. Echo sounder. Defective hearing aid. One’s poor involuntary humanity — what ambivalent props, tap, cane, adventitious root one grew to clutch, stand in need of … until these became in turn a senseless soul, barrier.

*

He leaned on his elbow (as upon a crooked stick). The sky was turning misty as glass and the clouds flitted like milk dissolving upon a window-pane though still occupying their own grain of pallor, destiny, soul of light. She summoned him still, the flitting command of vanished youth, mushroom of sensibility. Now “he” shrank from her in the waiting room — as from brooding ornament, prison, hell — but then (long ago) he could have sworn he knew what it was she justly and truly and freely saw in him. He could have sworn she was the reciprocal one he would follow to the ends of the earth, pick out of every crowd, every street, every age. And that it was she — silhouetted against time — who expressed her choice of fulfilment in him, even though he lay on the very tip of inconsistency and isolation … buried in her and his lengthening cruel design, self-deceptive wraith of desire upon bottomless wraith…. WHEN DARKNESS FELL HE WOULD ARISE AND SMASH THE DEVIL OF A DOOR.

*

But before darkness fell with his explosive assault on her, they would retrace their steps farther back still in time towards another potential threshold of the kingdom (or territory) of love. Promissory unit. Razor’s edge — sculpture and renaissance of youth. Would it ever be possible to say when it was he had given her, or been given by her, the very first vivid confused stab upon which overlapping present and past — meaningful presence —suddenly became an acute convergence of reality, an obsession with distance which she now appeared to abolish?

Was it upon his descending wave, her trough, his unlikely perch, fugitive epitaph, cliff-top? Was it an antique face they equally shared, groomed, polished to perfection upon the timeless meteoric landscape of the dead — their common step towards ancient self-portrait and vessel … cargo and pathos of fashion, rage for — indeed quest of — immortal youth? She was the earliest trigger he recalled he possessed — emotional target, residual goal within an immemorial span, phenomenal pursuit…. She drew him now so close to her he could see once again the light on her face — the faintest shudder of her lips, a kind of crackling, even wooden, darkness issuing from her mouth which made the reflection of her skin — neck and cheek — glow like a shade which was neither the coal of breath nor the fire of spirit.

He wanted to touch her, caress her but she became all of a sudden (to his astonishment) a fury he had not expected to find, a trigger of fury he had himself sprung into existence and yet not truly bargained for. The soul of love. Had she actually spoken the words out aloud like a creature of curious motivation, robot of spirit? The soul of love. Such unearthly venom, self-abandon, self-hate. Such an expression — ancient and devouring — such an aim and assumption of being — was incredible, archaic: was it the daemon of all possession (and dispossession) at her side in the faceless throng of the universe whom he had overlooked and to whom she spoke? For how could he dare to believe it was he, rather than another, whom she dreamt to invest with the blast of memory? Was it the purest ricochet of fantasy? Had he misread the frame of her lips? Was he merely her ironical substitute — SILENCE PLEASE — shattering and loud like the ornamental cultivation of the deaf, hammer of deity, consciousness?

Susan made an involuntary gesture upon the page of her book to her slave and god as though to push him away from her at the very moment of explosive climax: it was she after all who feared him — not “he” her — feared infection by him (or impregnation by him) with an instrument of alarm, a train of consequences she had herself engendered. She warned him with all the force at her command to stay away from her, as if to confirm once again within him the trigger of fury he had not bargained for.

The time for an ultimate target of invocation within her was not yet ripe. The bark of upheaval — hollow stress of unity, trunk of ages — was adamant as stone. The thaw was still to come. The fruit was still hard and green, buried in the rind, antique muse of the field, punishment of the wheat, corn, rice. The scythe of the sun flashed — dumb flare, cannon, instrument — but the harvest remained an enigma.

A famine of spirits blazed in their very facile resemblances whether skin, leaf, petal, brow, eye, lake. And even as he beheld her — or thought he beheld her in a glimmering crowd of stars — he was doubly conscious of her withdrawal into his ignorance of her naked material, immaterial proportions. She had just crossed a dent and crack in sky or pavement, hesitated, caught, forced to struggle: bend forward abruptly, like a woman in the fields, intent on a furrow and plant — the terrestrial root and model of which she had herself half-driven, half-ground into him until it almost seemed to grip him like her hallucination and plea, elongated heel, spur, compulsive arch, half-branch, half-step, inverted privilege of community to which he clung. And which he now sought to depict as the phenomenal circuit of fear and love engendered by her in him. Technology of the soul. Hearing aid or pickaxe. Scythe or gun. Rust of the senses. Invention. Madonna of the fields. Thus did it dawn on him that he had suffered a partial eclipse, the eclipse of god, and that this was the humiliating design she imposed on him as a kind of salutary rebuff and accommodation of incapacity at the same time. It was as if in pushing him away she still continued to draw him up into her compromise with reality. She knew she was blind and must learn to conceive of him in a manner consistent with a true rehearsal of her own limited powers of freedom and explosive actuality.