Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

Weeks, months had passed — from late winter into summer — over which time he had taken Black Marsden, Jennifer and Knife into his house, FEED MY SHEEP, he thought wryly: the most potent assembly of god’s sheep he could recall — lives that seemed more real than any body of fictions or matching ruses to his inner book, inner diary. No wonder tempers flared every now and then.

Now this morning, for example, had Jennifer deliberately ignored him? On the other hand he was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt in his mind — she had been preoccupied as they passed each other. Another thing, having been reduced to the state of a ghost by her, he was comprehensively aware of her — her figure, clothing, gait etc. Some purgatorial necessity perhaps.

It amused him in this context to draw a kind of cartoon of himself run over by the car on the Dean Bridge so that the idea of his ghostliness and invisibility could become comical and relieve him of embarrassment. Thus his comprehensive awareness of her became concretely intuitive and curiously supernatural. She seemed to glow this morning with father sun rather than mother earth whom he had seen plastered on her not so long ago in his sitting-room.

Now, when they came upon each other, she was walking hand in hand with a man he did not know. He had so confidently expected her to stop and introduce her companion that he was smiling even before she came abreast of him. Then as he passed he realized she may have been wholly absorbed by something the man was saying. It had been a shock when she cut him dead but the comical absurdity of being a ghost cushioned the shock into the humour of invisibility. And furthermore he was provided with a chance to look more closely at her companion who became an additional agent in the comprehensive portrait he had begun to paint of her.

This man wasn’t the pale young rider with whom he had seen her in the Royal Mile not very long ago. This was a somewhat older man, down-to-earth looking and wearing solid spectacles, a much more robust man all in all; the air, in fact, of a manual worker, an out-of-doors man. Robust as he was, however, he shared an unmistakable feature with the other man (the pale young rider).

It was a depressed feature. Robust as he was he lacked authority. Physical as he was, he seemed devitalized economically, beaten into shape by a kind of perennial regional hammer, the hammer of depression. Solid as he was he appeared depleted of both a will-to-power and a will-to-revolution.

He seemed as unsuitable for Jennifer as the pale young rider had been. Perhaps they were brothers in this feature or respect — one a curious eunuch of spirit (depleted of spiritual authority), the other a curious eunuch of politics (depleted of revolutionary authority).

This kinship between them made Goodrich conscious with renewed strangeness and sharpness of Marsden’s phenomenon of personality. In some subconscious degree beyond her apparent apprehension Jennifer was so subject to him — to his ironies and powers — that her men turned into substitutes of her unfulfilled longing for him….

As this resentment against Marsden grew and this tide of feeling — this passion for Jennifer swept through him — he was on the point of calling after her but it was too late: they had already turned a corner in the road. And he was left with a desolation, the hollow cue or strangeness of living lives, living other lives as well as one’s own. The desire mounted in him to strike Marsden; to set Jennifer free. It was an irrational dream, parasitic as well as violent, but it took his breath away as upon a rare self-deceiving plateau, tabula rasa assassin or murderer.

He began to walk across a stretch of grass towards a large cedar overlooking a stream or pond. There was a bench upon which he sat, and reflected upon the nature of invisibility. He opened his book and scanned the pages.

Was invisibility a bonfire whose sparks seared the memory until one party or face or eye of the world lay in shadow, did not see the other party and yet in unselfconscious disarray provided a comprehensive beckoning portrait link by subconscious link?

Was one half of the world’s invisibility an immanent sun of friendship within the globe — like Harp and Goodrich who when they met for the first time got on like a house on fire?

Was invisibility a ghost town, a ghost culture, a ghost landscape, an unmasking of schizophrenic premises?

Was invisibility the slate of birth or the slate of death, the mask of love or the mask of hate?

Moveable squares on a chessboard, thought Goodrich, aroused all at once by the spectre of infinity — by his own cartoon of ghostliness — to look far and deep into the spaces he had attempted to bridge in his journeys around the globe. First he needed to revisualize (and revise) his journey across Namless….

*

“What do you hope to find?” asked Knife, who drove him on a rickety road in a rickety taxi through blistering mountains towards the Town of Namless. This Knife was brown and more talkative than the others but he belonged to the same family as black Jamaican Knife and Marsden’s white purgatorial Knife.

“What are you looking for?” Brown Knife repeated.

“I was born here in Namless,” said Goodrich waving his hand at the ribbon of road which seemed to undulate here and there like a stylized path through a sea of land blown into long crests and troughs by subterranean storms. “I remained here until I was one year old when my father, an American engineer, died. My mother re-married in Scotland and we returned — she and my stepfather and I — when I was five years old. Square Five. Age Five.”

“Square Five? Age Five?” Knife was puzzled.

“Oh my stepfather disappeared in Brazil when I was five,” said Goodrich in laconic explanation. “My mother and I remained for a year or two at Namless trying to learn all we could. But it was impossible to get all the facts. There were all sorts of rumours. A rumour, for example, that he had deliberately dropped out.” He stopped and Knife gave a sharp nod. “We had to leave in the end,” Goodrich continued. “It was an unhappy time. Perhaps that is why I have come back. To try and sort out something, something oppressive.” He paused. “I was six or seven years old when we left. It’s a long time, a long time ago. And Namless looks like another country.”

“You have returned to another country,” Knife agreed. “And yet I would say it’s a country which has been ripening for you over all these years. There’s a country (perhaps just a village or a dot on the map) which is ripening for each or every man if he could find it. As a particular war or a particular revolution ripens into one man’s scene. He becomes So-And-So the Great. Nothing here at Namless goes around in a circle. Everything is turning inside/out.”

“Marsden the Great,” Goodrich muttered, so softly he wondered whether Knife had heard.

The blistering range of mountains was beginning to fall far behind and the ground which swept away now from the road looked cooler all of a sudden and greener. “As you can see,” said Knife, pointing to abandoned farm lands, “every house hereabouts appears deserted.”

Goodrich stared into the distance towards ripening signposts marked TROPICAL, others MEDITERRANEAN. A new and distant range of mountains, loftier than anything he recalled seeing before, began to appear and to glisten with snow. Incredible, thought Goodrich. Snow far up. Here below we are in the tropics.

They were passing more houses, as deserted-looking as ever, broken and smashed.

“There was an uprising,” Knife explained. “Crushed at a blow.”

“But … but … where are they … the people?”

Knife did not say except to wave his hand and exclaim: “There was a strike in Namless Town. That came a year or so afterwards.”