Wilson Harris - Companions of the Day and Night

The above extract from a Folk Song from Puerto Rico was found amongst the Fool’s papers. It was accompanied by the following.

NOTE: In certain parts of Mexico people begin celebrating nine days before Easter and Christmas. As day turns to night the people gather in the square. Then they go from house to house in a long procession. The ceremony is called the Posada. They carry lighted candles.

It was I should think just under a year after Black Marsden left that I received a number of paintings and sculptures from him which were entitled the “Idiot Nameless Collection”. These were accompanied by voluminous papers and diaries.

I found as I began to study and work on a translation of these into a novel that they were a chronicle of inner and outer treasures — as though the paintings and sculptures to which the writings related were doorways through which Idiot Nameless moved.

They spoke of a hidden nunnery and of some of the nuns who fled to Europe and North America after the revolution in Mexico early in this century. They spoke of the Fool’s arrival in Mexico, of the preparations to go there in which he had been steeped over a great many years condensed into an autumn, winter, spring before the “Easter of man”.

I found that the preparations and researches invoked a distinction between deeds as passive reflections in nature and history and vision as unsuspected, glimpsed proportions through objects of nature and history. This was the fundamental climate of the Idiot Nameless records which I have attempted to be faithful to in the task entrusted to me of translating his writings into a novel.

It has also been essential to obey his preoccupation with the theme of gravity. There was a physical or congenital reason for this preoccupation that discloses itself in the body of his writings. But there was something else that one sees in the landscapes and cultures into which he descends. In what degree are ‘black holes of gravity’ susceptible to interpretation as an area of anxiety in twentieth century man when they come into rapport with pre-Columbian investitures of fear built into sacrifices to a sun that might fall into the ground and never rise again?

Gradually as I worked on my translation the impact the Fool made on me was incredible and enormous.

Perhaps it was the edge of breakdown on which he appeared to hover, remaining however sane, miraculously sane and imbued it seemed to me with an extraordinary spirit of compassion.

My great problem was to edit and re-write a mass of material that spread, as I opened package after package of writings, across my study like a carpet of autumn leaves and bare winter branches pointing to the pyramid of the sun.

A word about the title I have chosen for the novel— Companions of the Day and Night. I adopted this because the diaries possessed a ceaseless interwoven motif drawn from a pre-Columbian calendar — a nine-day cycle (companions of the night) and a thirteen-day cycle (companions of the day). Days Eight and Nine were called Dateless Days (another pre-Columbian calendrical motif) in order to absorb, as it were, into the nine-day cycle the flight of the remaining four days in the thirteen-day cycle.

It is my hope that I may have been able to convey some portion of the magic of reality that swept over me as I descended into the Idiot Nameless Collection.

I confess that I thought I had heard the last of Black Marsden when we parted company in Edinburgh (as related in a previous book).

I had certainly not anticipated receiving from him such a body of materials or of being entrusted with the task of translating them into a novel.

Indeed I wondered at first — was it another aspect of his sardonic humour? Soon, however, I could feel nothing but the mystery of companionship in those pages and of a frightening wisdom they embodied of which a glimpse or two fallen into my own translation would be wealth.

Therefore my first inclination, which was to burn the writings, canvases and sculptures, was soon swallowed up in an emotion of attachment to every scrap of paper, line of paint or nail of wood in a man’s hand that seemed to me in magical contact with the gods.

CLIVE GOODRICH

Idiot Nameless arrived in Mexico City just under a fortnight before Easter. A dream he had long entertained and when it happened it seemed both concrete and infinite like a shadow pitted against the sun in shapes of gravity prior to the shape of birth itself.

This desolation of infinite shadow allied to authenticity seemed to be inescapably himself as he stood on the airport waiting to collect a bag. He was astonished at his emotion of descent into a past that seemed his own future.

The bus he caught threaded its way into the city through a square of rotting Spanish houses. The scene changed. A sudden gaiety in the attire of persons on pavements or sidewalks intervened like his own surprised shadow, multiplied, yet rarefied in atmospheric degrees as though to confirm afresh a poignant capacity for self-judgement that enveloped him.

( First Person Narrative in Diary )

I booked into the Gravity Hotel (I had been told it came by this name because of its proximity to the Palace of Fine Arts known to be sinking gradually into an underground lake) and made my way back into the road. I was within a stone’s throw of the Alameda Park (once a market-place in the times of Montezuma) but misread my map and took the opposite direction along the Avenida Juarez.

Night was descending. I came to the junction of Juarez and Reforma, crossed a square and continued on the sidewalk until I was abreast of a dismantled building against which someone stood, someone called to me, with a torch in his hand.

I stopped dead; suddenly I was ill; felt myself slipping, descending into a backwater streaked by its individual setting sun and offset from the wide torrent of the now unreal boulevard streaming with cars I left above or behind.

The hand of time moved. The torch of place moved. The dying sun moved into a mouth that ate fire. I moved to the edge of fire … began to recover … pulled back. I was beginning to recover over aeons of time it seemed from the falling sickness I suffered. (They came in sudden unpredictable spells — these attacks — and were followed by a blending of features which I can only describe as half-reflected deed or object in which I became involved, half-glimpsed unsuspected dimension through the very deed or object….)

I found myself now standing a breath or two away from the head of the fire-eater. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, ghostly features and a hollow page of a face. He drew the sun out of his wide-brimmed hat as if it were a letter of fire. The page of his face stepped back into itself as it wolfed fire, re-wrote itself, revised itself as it disgorged fire. Each written page was a new self-portrait he drew that I assembled in my own heart as companions of the day and night.

I had stepped, according to the jumbled faces I now read, into a nine-day cycle painted on the ground, painted on the pavement of the city. I had been baptised into circular Fool, Clown by a maker of suns…. Baptised, immersed into the descent of a spark as the fire-eater cast his bread on the waters of tradition.