Wilson Harris - Companions of the Day and Night

“Force? Do you know what you are saying? Force is rape.”

“Forced me to conceive.”

“Conceive what? Conceive what Sister Joanna?”

“To conceive, as if for the first time, the very earth in which I lie, into which I run …”

The voice was running now, flying, running into the structure of a thorn that blazed in the Fool’s eyes as if lightning midnight candle flashed.

As if her eyes/his eyes had kissed and then parted into a door, into a sky that stood between them now.

The Idiot half-stirred, half-woke to the fact, the dream-fact, that he stood in the street, cobbled street, that he had lifted the knocker and struck the door once, carved into a thorn. He lifted it again, rapped, knocked.

“Good afternoon sir,” said the porter.

“Good day,” said the Fool. “I have an appointment with Sister Joanna. My name is Nameless.”

The porter regarded him closely. “Sir,” he said. “She died.” It was the hard almost off-hand way in which he said “died” that grounded the dream-wire, dream-fact, into an electric circuit that drew to earth the mid-Atlantic cabin in which Sister Joanna had stood.

A dumb flash enveloped the scene like the distant gunfire of a heart. Failed heart, stopped heart.

“It was quite sudden sir. A couple of days ago. Father Marsden was out. I was in the studio with her. I had brought her a letter. She opened it, began to peruse its contents and collapsed — as if she had been shot. Turned to me and said something about a shock, a friend, the death of a dear old friend. All there she said in the letter. Then she cried something that sounded like Merde. Or it could have been Mardie . ‘Merde, Mardie, I want to confess. Who will hear my confession?’ Imagine that. Confess! What had she to confess? A saintly old lady like that. The best, the most good. And yet I fear there was something she needed to say for she haunts the place now …”

The distant gunfire was fading as the troops of death receded, across earth and sea and sky.

“Her last good deed was to take in the child …”

“Child? What child?”

“Do you not know of it sir? A child — a few days old at most I would think — was placed at our door. Wrinkled, wrinkled newspaper; wrapped in newspaper…. And that reminds me sir. I have this for you. A slip of paper. Father Marsden said you might care to visit the last remaining sisters, Maria and Rose. They live in New York City. And on your way to Mexico …”

ON YOUR WAY TO … ON YOUR WAY TO … The door slammed fast. A door slammed somewhere in the house. Ground-level, ground fast … The Idiot was stirring, awaking. Wrinkled paper, wrinkled dream-wire, dream-fact. Descent into the all-encompassing structure of a thorn that invaded his eyes. Halo. Breast. Two breasts. Two eyes. Canvases of taste. Milky darknesses.

One mother a child has but she seems many, multi-form, multi-dimensional, many cultures, many skins.

And at first it seems a calamity to have been severed from the womb. Until one dreams one is pierced by an arrow of taste, tastes, ecstatic riddle, ecstatic morsel.

To taste is to see. To taste is to descend into black spaces, multi-form spaces, eyes of gravity in the fire-eater’s model. Firing squad of sensations. Two holes. Two eyes. Numberless number. Numberless dying. Numberless living…. It was the beginning of the child of humanity — the beginning of the obscurity of pity, the obscurity of antecedents, the new fall or Fool born outside of his time. Forced into conception … A conception of unsuspected dimensions written into the passive birth or death of objects reflected into history….

Teotihuacán’s doors into the creation of the gods lay a giant fire-eater’s hand from Cholula, Puebla and San Francisco Convent in a desert of painted landscape. The Idiot felt he had been tumbled into his Seventh Day when he came in sight of Teotihuacán’s pyramid of the sun, pyramid of the moon, sea, land, shell, serpent, all exposed to him upon their beach of sublimated seas and spaces.

Which way lay the door into the gods? Which way lay the door into the riddle of early cloven settlement, lapsed settlement, extinguished settlement? Did it lie backwards through the Way of the Dead, forwards into the Way of the Unborn or by way of deaf, dumb, blind traces of fire, tongues of ash, staccato voices of moon, erratic abysses of time, serpentcraft around Jupiter, Venus?

Painters, sculptors in the school of the fire-eater had drawn the pyramids and their associated temples like commodities upon a chessboard of time across nameless cities beached here and it was this sensation that wakened the Idiot to nurse his own shadow into indistinct senses of economic nakedness.

Anything first of all, in the rat-race of economies of fate, to appear naked while richly clad, to camouflage lust and disaster even as the paint on one’s lips cracked into charismatic sex, charismatic vessel, charismatic metamorphoses of ex-god, ex-goddess, ex-priest, ex-priestess, ex-Christ, ex-nun. There was a time to marry landscapes and a time for divorce from landscapes. A time to visualise concealed force, concealed reason, concealed unreason and how these concealments drew one to the threshold of change even as they frustrated the pregnant scandal of an age into an assumption of static property or constitutional dress.

A time to be innocent carving, a time to be pathological carving of blind, deaf, dumb commodities of god. To be an orator, an emperor, a dictator, a president, a captain of ships, a member of oracles. To be the child of wretched ambition, the child of desired greatness, the child of paradise, hell.

“Are you unwell sir? Are you.?” He stopped, his eyes hardly discerning the face of his interrogator half reflected, half blurred across a trance of seas in the blind shout of vendors like a marketplace of shells that rose to one’s ears. Confessions of the sea, of hollow faintness, indistinctness of memory. Articles thrust at him — at his eyes, nose, throat — unfathomable confessions, vanished wave. Tricks of memory. Agents of the fire-eater’s sea, conspiracy of emotion.

“Conspiracy of a shell,” he breathed. “I am … I am … nothing.”

“Are you unwell?” The question was asked again with studied care, implicit hostility (idiotic poverty versus idiotic wealth), indistinct sales-talk.

“Let me help you sir.”

They (the vendors) had concluded that he was their ancient victim (half blind, half deaf) for they swarmed upon him with a new vehemence. He was abreast of the pyramid of the sun, the shell of the sun. They swarmed. He was deluged by misery and chaos, tides of nameless feud. Yet hardly able to see, hardly able to hear. Who was Subject, who Object? He made a great effort, rolled himself up into a map, into a kind of dead rockfastness, dead steadfastness and the Sea of Feud imperceptibly it seemed began to alter, to change into his painted attire. Painted Subject. Bargain Object. Bargain Soul.

The old sublimated sea of riddled cities he had traversed on the Way of the Dead was still there but it had acquired an extra density of transparent shell, conflicting sculpture, under the pyramid of the sun. And the chaos of youths, chaos of vendors, swarming there was distilled from a ghost of inspiration that related it to itself as to a shared insensible body upon which the sun fell to etch figures upon a brow of shadow, draw others insensibly upon shoulders of shadow, still others again clutching thighs (wrestlers), others fists (boxers), others feet (runners).

The Fool staggered in the surf of old/new worlds painted by the fire-eater.

“Sir,”—for the third time—“are you unwell? Let me help.”