Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

Then it was between curtain and curtain of night he saw the woman emerge from the farmhouse. She came straight over to him but he found himself unable to move, curled tight into the ripe scene he had become. She began to undress methodically and as she stood in profile against the fire, her head in shadow, he dreamt he could see with the severed eyes of his nose the pointed eyes of her breasts. Then she turned to face him.

An animal-smelling face nuzzled into him but it was not the woman. It was not a dog. It was not a sheep. It was the constellation of the bull, Goodrich exclaimed, the tall bull of night on its knees beside him with the longest horns he had ever seen reaching into the stars. They picked him off the ground and held him steady. He wanted to lie back, curl up again. He was about to slump when the bull pushed him forward, caught him between its horns, braced him with its forehead, pushed him on again. Now he was pushed on the forehead of the bull straight upon her: upright coitus — upstanding coitus — into which she had been drawn upon the head of the bull between the upright and upstanding pillars of night.

Pillars of night which he (Goodrich) had uprooted (so it seemed to him now). In one sense (it was true) they had uplifted him, pushed him off the ground into her thighs, between her thighs; in another sense it was his Samsonian avalanche, his uprooting of everything into a collaborative revolution of establishment.

A toppling world and yet he clung to the pinnacle of fear, the pinnacle of hate, the pinnacle of love, sleepwalking bull of night, the gigantic robot of sex which now bestrode space like the genius of the avalanche.

The question returned — had he been uprooted by her, decapitated by her into the head of the bull, or had he devoured her, his severed eyes in her body, his uprooted lips to her lips, his uprooted tongue to her tongue, his uprooted spire…?

Had he pushed her or had been pushed by her…? This was the question raised by the Director-General of Cosmic Sex as though in constructing his gigantic robot of night he was intent on fathoming the dinosaur of an age — the Strike of man against himself as a narcissistic function of economic ritual….

“Oh god,” said Goodrich as he awoke shuddering with newborn terror. “Oh god.” His blankets were awry and he felt the acute mystery of born, unborn existences.

*

When the sun was high Knife and Goodrich set off again in the rickety taxi along the ribbon of road. “I believe,” said Knife, “the woman I told you of may have gone on to one of the stations ahead of us along the road.”

“Who is she?”

“I thought you knew,” said Knife in his dead pan voice which made it difficult to tell whether he was serious or laughing up his sleeve.

“How should I know?” Goodrich was annoyed. He recalled the ague of his dream.

“Blankets,” said Knife soothingly. “So many of us sleep in the open. Comfort comes from blankets. Also from food, needless to say. She cheers our blood along the road. There is a population in these parts — a depressed population — whose survival seems to matter to her.”

“Where are they — the people she cares for?”

“Always on their guard. Each and everyone who comes from outside is suspect and they do not easily approach strangers or new arrivals. The Director-General has his agents, you see, amongst them, amongst us all. It’s (to put it mildly) a testing time. For example, despite all the talk of revolutionary theatre which one hears of these days there are totalitarian rumblings as well. There are some who venture to say that the new offer the Authorities made — the economic hand-out they were prepared to give is a sign of the times.”

“Sign of the times? What do you mean?”

“Sign of a totalitarian economic theatre. That is what I mean. Wealth may come to Namless in the wake of the Director-General but that wealth may well reflect a totalitarian brotherhood or economy of man.”

“I fear I am no economist. I do not understand.”

“Neither am I. I merely repeat the dark rumours, the dark rumours of time. The Dark Rumour is our newspaper in Namless and it says that with each economic hand-out within the proverbial nation-state the effects are to consolidate the proverbial middle class and to attract to it new and successful elements from the proverbial working class.”

“I belong to that proverbial middle class myself. Is it such a bad thing after all?”

“Thus a kind of human economic bastion is created within the state,” Knife went on as if he had not heard Goodrich, “against every so-called revolutionary underground. In the same token I read in Dark Rumour of an economic hand-out by South Africa to Malawi.”

“How does Dark Rumour editorialize this?” Goodrich was half-exasperated, half-fascinated.

“As the first step in the African continent towards a totalitarian brotherhood of man where black and white masters may well begin to sit at the same high table and feast on the same side of the fence. It’s an old story, of course, in the American hemisphere except that there it’s become patently absurd when every human economic bastion proves but another face to the American dinosaur of the twentieth century.”

“And is this the reason for the entry of the Director-General?”

“Ah,” said Knife in his dead pan voice which laughed in the dinosaur’s sleeve, “Namless has become (quite unwittingly, quite unselfconsciously) the repudiation of self-conscious ideologies. Perhaps therefore it is a laboratory of startling contrasts which intrigue the Authorities immensely. There is an emergent philosophy of revolution bound up with a re-sensing, re-sensitizing of dead monsters — the spatial potential, the architectural caveats and potentials at the heart of such apparent monsters — if one is to begin afresh from the hidden grassroots of a new age and not succumb to the inevitable temptations, the inevitable monolithic imperatives.”

“Are you quoting from Dark Rumour ?”

“I always quote from Dark Rumour. I have no opinions of my own. I cannot afford such a private luxury.” He cast a contemptuous eye at Goodrich’s diaries. “There is a guerrilla theatre now in subconscious league with the very formidable intelligences that once sought to wipe it out. Thus it is in a position to immortalize itself at last within foundations sprung from the decay of the very barbarous death-dealing capital it once feared.”

Knife’s bus rattled and Goodrich was aware of a change of scenery.

It was the same world as yesterday but a curious subtle fleshing (if that was the right word) appeared upon the rocks. Perhaps, thought Goodrich, it was something to do with the light. Whatever it was — light or film of new vegetation — it had subtly awakened the landscape, the bones of the landscape, as a sleeping but treacherous giant stirs refreshed by age-old cataclysmic dreams. (Once there had been an earthquake, once a volcanic eruption across Namless. Once — once only in living memory — there had been a shift of ice down the mountains burying an entire village.)

On every hand Goodrich could see those bizarre clusters he had noted yesterday, cathedrals of rock upon which he had seen his phantom, the Director-General’s rare robot lying upon the pavement of heaven while everybody flashed past at great speed and looked the other way. Now the change of tone affected these too — both cathedral clusters as well as pavement spires or dinosaurs in the midst of the pace of infinity — a slowing down rather than speeding up of the light….

They (the rock clusters) all subtly moved as if one detected the most curious refugee church of mankind in action, walking bones, uprooted bones all fleshed by an avalanche where the very nature of things ceased to be a self-conscious theme and became the subconscious theatre or liberation of men from fanatical pursuits. Thus there was a submission to movement, yes, in cultural phenomena of Namless Theatre — but so intuitive, so unspectacular — it became an opus contra avalanche.