Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

Now all of a sudden, as if with a wave of a wand, Goodrich was struck by a fantastic assembly of features — to which he already possessed a prelude on the rickety road or ribbon of sea across which Knife drove — features which may have been plucked from the loneliest reaches of the Highlands of Scotland like transplanted snow from the Cairn Gorms to the Cordillera Real in the Bolivian-Peruvian Andes which reach to Lake Titicaca on one hand, but on the other descend phenomenally to the Amazon basin. Such a spectre in which blister turns cool, ice beckons to fire, snow to rainforest was a family tree of contrasting elements.

As far as eye could see it may have been carved or erected as a vast nameless cradle by a refugee chorus of mankind dispersed from Pole to Pole, who celebrated within this mosaic overlapping features of their original heartlands: When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

Or it may have been borrowed from diverse peoples and inhabitants (stretching back into Pre-Columbian mists of time) who had been shepherded out of sight in order to create a theatre of infinity.

“The Strike at Namless Town,” said Brown Knife, “started with the usual demands — wages, housing and so on. It had been coming for a long time. Many were poorly paid, badly housed; others had experienced discrimination and injustice. Many had not forgotten the way the Authorities had stamped on the uprising the year before. Others were disgusted with a centuries-old pattern of uprising followed by repression, the old rat-race of history as day follows night. And so once the Strike had taken root in the Town it dragged on and on. Then out of the blue it seemed the Authorities agreed to everything. Higher wages, better housing, everything. An economic hand-out. Imagine that!”

“I see,” said Goodrich. And he stared into Knife’s dead pan face.

“But it was too late,” said Knife. “A week, a month earlier (who knows?) and it may have worked. Perhaps (who knows?) the Authorities may have been in league….”

“What do you mean? In league with whom?”

Knife did not reply but stared across the mimic cradle of exiled men and gods. “You know,” he confessed at last, “it’s a peculiar thing but strikes have been growing more and more into a game of chess in this part of the world. Everybody claims he is being pushed. Nobody ever does the pushing but everybody is being pushed….”

Goodrich suddenly observed on the dashboard of the taxi that they were down to the last gallon of petrol. “What do we do when we run dry?”

Knife grinned. “We set sail. There’s a thundering wind here sometimes that would push this little craft of mine to kingdom come.” He gave Goodrich a half-derisory, half-friendly slap on the shoulder. “You’ll get to Namless Town one day, Mr. Goodrich, never fear. This visit or the next. We must wait and see. There are two petrol stations by the way — one at the ferry on the river where I met you when you arrived, and the other in Namless Town which is our ultimate destination. A lot of country lies between the two — between ferry and Namless Town — and so I always travel with a spare drum of petrol in the back of my cab. You may not believe it, Mr. Goodrich, but this old ramshackle bus gives me forty miles to the gallon.” He had forgotten the enigma of the Namless Strike in recounting or tabulating a body of facts but Goodrich brought it up again.

“Namless,” Knife explained, “is the name of the whole territory as well as the Town. A town and a territory which slowly began to levitate — an archaeological phenomenon.” Knife looked more dead pan than ever as he said this: he may have been rehearsing a scene in which an extraordinary toll of events becomes common-or-garden knowledge. “When the Strike started it was apparently about higher wages etc. etc. When the higher wages were granted (which was in itself a phenomenon, it had never happened before in my lifetime) it was already too late. Namless had sleepwalked itself into another Strike: a Strike against the whole deadly rat-race of things. A kind of risen-up and drop-out at the same time religion.”

Goodrich was hypnotized all at once by Knife’s droning voice in which the sky was the limit. Now it was that a needle of rock in a bizarre rock cluster came into view upon which he discerned a shape…. Was it man or beast in the eye of the needle? … Something climbing … dangling…. Stuck? … Helpless? … Was he dreaming of archaeological or psychic riddles? He wanted to tell Knife but felt embarrassed, inhibited. Knife was looking the other way. A mirage, Goodrich thought, for when he looked away himself and back again, no one appeared to be there. His eyes were dazzled; the taxi descended an incline and the bizarre needle against the sky was temporarily hidden.

“Have a drink,” said Knife offering him a flask from which Goodrich poured himself a cup of reddish liquid. “Go on,” said Knife. “It’s good. It’s Namless beverage.”

Goodrich was thirsty, put the cup to his head and drank. Then he felt a little sick.

“Then it was,” said Knife, “an even stranger thing happened. Instead of troops the Authorities sent to Namless a Director-General of Cosmic Theatre. Imagine that. For centuries they had persecuted every form of strike as an immoral species of drop-out, risen-up thing. But now they were in league….”

Goodrich was stupefied, mopped his eyes. Half an hour ago they had driven through a curious kind of wide chasm. An icy wind had struck his clothing. It was cold then. “It’s hot now,” he said. “Suddenly it’s become hot.” The taste of the Namless beverage lingered in his mouth like a new opium of the masses.

“Do you realize,” said Knife, “that it’s 45 degrees F. in the shadow of some of those rocks over there? Walk a couple of hundred yards or so away, however, into the sun and the thermometer picks up and reads 72 degrees F. It’s about 75 to 80 on this strip of road where we happen to be driving now. Not too hot really.”

“Not too hot,” Goodrich mimicked, mopping his brow. “Your Authorities do have a sense of humour, I must say. What sort of genius is this Director-General who now addresses Namless?”

“Geni-ass of place,” said Knife repeating his dead pan lesson. “Hee-haw. Hee-haw. The sky’s the limit. His voice echoes in the stars. The Strikers in Namless had not dreamt of such a thing as the collaborative echoing repudiation of a whole system of values, the collaborative half-mocking repudiation of a whole way of tasting the world, a collaborative sickening to death of the world in high places and low until it crept up on them unawares. In the way sometimes a whole community suddenly finds it has been pushed — pushed into irrevocable decisions — pushed into extremes — pushed into something it never visualized in the beginning. It’s the whole mysterious aroma of self-judgement, combinations of corruption and establishment, effects of tyranny and revolution, an incalculable league of elements, over-ripening of parts…. Namless was convinced when the Strike started that it knew what its material demands were — real wages etc. Then all of a sudden something ripened in its head — the very palate, the very roof of existence changed. The bray of god became not only the voice of the people but the music of the spheres. Apuleius the Great.”

“There he is,” said Goodrich half-dazzled, half-confused. “I thought I was dreaming but there he is.” There was a long pause as he stared at the pinnacle or needle of rock he had seen before and which now came back into view as Knife’s taxi swung or rattled on its ribbon of road.

“I need to fill up,” said Knife as if he had not heard or had misunderstood Goodrich. “Time for petrol.” He drew up and got out of the car. Goodrich stepped out too, stretched his legs, tried to look elsewhere, think of something other than the climber he had seen. After a while Knife said: “The tank’s full. And I’ve checked on the radiator. We’re ready to go….”