Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

This sensation of liberation accented by unspectacular tokens of place and time began to occupy Goodrich enormously. Looked at in a certain light he saw the walking bones of mankind disappear. Looked at in another light he saw the flesh upon the bones as a unique contrast or animation which created an abstract void or disappearing dancing bone.

The ribbon of road wound now around an enormous basin in the land and the sensation Goodrich had was of overhanging features in the very action, the very process of collapse as bones or rocks hung upon the very rim of abstract void or flesh in intercourse with light or space; a delayed action, a delayed precipice. That was the first sensation he had.

But as the taxi swerved further along the road to face the basin differently, another sensation occurred. Now the action had happened. The rocks were in helter-skelter embrace and pursuit of each other until their appearance was blurred in their mad love affair with light and space.

There was a third vision or sensation as the road swung and they began to ascend. The air seemed saturated by a dream — a film — an almost transparent cloud of dust which came over the rim of the basin and drifted across Namless Theatre. Goodrich felt an irrational correspondence with the “milky way” when the spaces between the stars are filled with a nameless cloud of particles; but now one was looking not up — not vertically into the spaces of night — but horizontally into the spaces of day. The delayed action of the rocks before they plunged possessed its quintessence here: quintessential shock or deliberation of movement, seminal ruin, seminal catastrophe.

The actual plunge, the helter-skelter mad embrace and wildest conviction of drama, of an action leaving no trace, possessed its quintessence here: quintessential cloud or seminal tree of relief….

These dual seminal proportions drifted effortlessly now at eye level across Namless Theatre like the epitome of movement or flesh of movement, the quintessential contours of all stages and movements before and after actions and times. In it were the grains of the precipice, Goodrich mused; in it were the grains of relief, self-reversible architectures and collaborative phenomena. It seemed the enduring rising and falling blanket of lost worlds sleeping endlessly, broken endlessly, endlessly over and done with. It seemed also the dream of an unborn, waiting to be born age….

The ribbon of road along which they travelled continued to ascend gently and after a mile or so, a new almost weighted stillness was added to the presence of the rocks in the basin below; they (the rocks) stood now less upon the rim of the basin and more clearly within the contours of an ancient lake or sea waterless now as a desert. Goodrich was fascinated by this transparent sea within a terrestrial cloud on the bed of which the rocks clustered into cathedrals and palaces, circles of repetitive fate or natural doom. There was a great perhaps terrible charm to that buried rock-city or petrifaction of times from the height they had now reached….

It came upon him suddenly — this sense of great danger — of a timeless assassin standing at his elbow. There , said the assassin, lie my charmed circles forever and ever ….

And yet as the dark figure addressed him secretly, mockingly, privately (at the heart of his secret book, upon a private page memorized inwardly for insertion into his diary), Goodrich was aware of a deeper enigma, a curious privilege to dream (and to be able to support and unravel the dream) of the assassin. Yesterday perhaps the charm, the terror, the fascination of it might have been insupportable. Today — since his immersion last night in the Samsonian mask of the bull, the curious light upon the horns of the bull — he could endure the danger of coming into the neighbourhood of death-dealing masks and gods.

He could endure that danger since a quintessential warning kept echoing in his head like an opus contra naturam, an opus contra ritual, an ironic placement and displacement of the sheer natural burden of action — the sheer natural order of love, hate and revenge, parasitic feuds and dooms. It was this quintessential motif inherent to vanished landslides which drew that rock-city or rock-cluster together upon the bed of the sea. In drawing them together therefore something moved, the very stillness still moved endlessly though it appeared to stand contrary to movement itself in monumentalizing a precipitate theme into a stasis of reality.

It was this infinite movement within and beyond an almost overwhelming fascination with stasis — this subconscious parallel between his present frame on the road to Namless and that order of things at the bottom of the lake — which made the terrible charm of internalized or externalized assassin a bearable theme….

“My god,” said Goodrich almost without thinking now — jolted out of his thoughts—“I have seen him again…. Stop. Stop .”

Knife drew up at the side of the road.

“There’s someone or something,” said Goodrich, “lying there — who resembles yesterday’s creature — I saw him there — in the bushes.”

They made their way back for a yard or two. There it was. There he was — a sprawling figure ten feet or so from the edge of the road. His feet stuck out from a straggle of bushes which lay across his body: his head was obscured by the shadow of a rock. As they came closer Knife exclaimed with dead pan factuality:

“He’s been brutally disfigured.” He stopped. Goodrich was behind but all at once he, too, could see for himself the man’s beard black-looking and rotten-looking with dust and sand where the body had been pulled along the ground. The eyes in that dragged, bearded face still seemed to see, curiously sardonic and without illusion in death.

“I guess someone hit him before he could blink,” said Knife. But his words were hollow as a shell of water playing over a duck’s back and piping — as though quills whistled in the man’s beard — a warning tune. “Hit him,” said Knife (echoing bluntly the dead man’s complaint), “with a heavy stone or a piece of iron or something.”

Goodrich was unable to say a word. He felt a resistance in his throat as the dead man’s eyes resisted sight and Knife’s sharp documentary edge to events grew intuitively blunt. He was suffocated by something Marsdenish (the shadow of Marsden stretching into the past and into the future of Namless Theatre) — a sense of the familiarity and unfamiliarity of the murdered man: a sense of shared existences masked by the frame of death which dared even then to turn the ultimate riddle of life into a self-mocking duel between a phenomenon of personality and degrees of feeling and non-feeling temperament as the chill of being four or five hours dead settled upon the thing on the ground.

“I fear …” said Knife and stopped. And Goodrich was startled by the flicker upon those sharp features. Startled, too, by the cracking and lifting of the constraint which had lain between them since their Dark Rumour conversation earlier in the day. Indeed if it were not for the partial blunting of sheer rumour — and the growth of a peculiar insight into the hollow naturalism of an age which they instinctively shared — he would have been unable to bear or support the savage hollowness of Namless he had begun to glimpse behind Knife’s face. The dead pan public to which he belonged — the dead pan loss of all freedom of opinion or choice — the waiting game at the soul of every instrument, instrumental man, instrumental woman — seemed to flicker in that public hollow: public servant of a regime, hollow desire to overthrow that regime, public alliance with an establishment, hollow desire to act against that very establishment.