Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

“Whom or what do you fear?” asked Goodrich at last.

“I fear,” said Knife as in a dead pan dream, “that the weapons I carry in my hand may come to mean just this.” He stabbed the dead man’s head with his foot. “A blunt instrument between the eyes, a sudden blow, the sudden extinction of everything. It must have been very sudden for him. What was he doing or thinking I wonder when they seized him?” It was an odd reflective question Goodrich thought to come from Knife. “He was an intelligence agent. I know that much. Would you believe it? On the Director-General’s staff. Like myself. We have often, on certain missions in Namless Town, shared the same rooms. Also …”—his voice fell to a whisper—“he was a member of a secret orchestra or revolutionary avant-garde. Perhaps he double-crossed them.”

“I.Q. of the double-cross, left, right, left, right,” said Goodrich and felt instantly ashamed for stabbing, in his turn, the intelligence agent from an avant-garde orchestra.

“And you, Mr. Goodrich,” Knife became quite savage, “I take it you know what you have done?”

“Done?” Goodrich was bewildered.

“There’s a rule at sea which holds good for land. When you spot a dead man floating towards your ship you button your lip.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You button your lip or it’s up to you to haul him aboard, stitch him in canvas with a cannon ball at his feet and fire him back into the sea again.”

“What are you driving at?”

“There’s a bucket in the back of my car,” said Knife.

“Bucket?”

“I didn’t bring a fork or a spade. But the bucket’s there. Take that and dig a hole in the sand.” The devil of rumour between them had been blunted but something else — the devil of command — had appeared.

“To hell with you,” said Goodrich all of a sudden. And he felt relieved for bringing it out into the open — a gathering regiment of vessels (intelligences of judgement and fear — pipes, trumpets, bassoons), cracked skull or chest or bucket — the inevitable marches of the robot living into the abstract orchestra of the dead.

“We’ll take turns,” said Knife. “What did you think I meant? Play and play alike the digging of our cradle or our grave is the music of the future.” And he laughed and whistled to cover his surprise that Goodrich had resisted him: the drollest guerrilla theatre of Namless: such inspired drollery that Goodrich now was taken by surprise. And Knife applauded. “Mr. Goodrich, Mr. Goodrich,” he exclaimed, “it’s our second day on the road to Namless. You have done well. When I report your behaviour to the Director-General he will be impressed.”

“Impressed!” said Goodrich glancing at the murdered man.

“Impressed when I tell him, Mr. Goodrich, that you refused to panic. You resisted me —the drill sergeant in me — the commander in me. That’s great.”

“But … but …” said Goodrich.

“No buts, Mr Goodrich. You have passed high noon on the road to Namless with flying colours.”

“Flying colours,” was all Goodrich could mumble with a sense of chill; and he looked at Knife with reluctant admiration — Knife’s colours of despair and broken-headed realism, versatility of tone and action — the droll whistling mask he had flung over the hollow behind his face, over the blunt dead involved in doing his thing, acting his thing upon the world’s stage. It was a political masterpiece — political flag at the heart of savage malaise — a political recovery, nevertheless, tour de force of ebbing and flowing abstractions which dyed the theatre of mankind with the fiercest broken colours and vessels piping in the name of freedom and still unfreedom, freedom from static illusion….

*

They found a loose patch of sand in which they dug a trench and dumped the Director-General’s intelligence agent. Then they drove another mile or so and turned into the ground before a half-wrecked hostel or inn. There was a large wooden vat on the premises which the guerrillas had not gutted — more than half full of water from the last rainy season — and Knife and Goodrich took turns with the bucket to have a bath. Then Goodrich sat upon the steps of the inn and sipped the bitter clarity of Namless beverage.

The second day of his journey to Namless Town would soon be over. A day of such intense reality it seemed a musical dream of metamorphoses and resources woven through cracked stone, through sand, nature’s pipes and organs as well as man-made ruin, instruments of soul.

Goodrich was making notes in his private diary. He noted the enigma of the Director-General: that curious figure with two faces — one apparently on a pillar of establishment, the other roofed by a revolutionary firmament. For it seemed to Goodrich that the duality of the Director-General’s agents was, in some way, a trial or dispersal of ancient fanaticisms and a sacrificial or multiform head of personality. A token, so to speak, of the bizarre liberalism of the ancient Authorities of Namless as they reconsidered the economic and political future of the region (how perhaps to re-capture it or collaborate with it in an entirely different spirit rather than re-conquer it by force of arms). How to sense its proportions as a theatre of inner trial, inner judgement within which to discern the natures of visibility and invisibility as these compounded the biased slate of freedom: as these compounded therefore both a creation and a caveat.

The assassination of the Director-General’s intelligence agent raised a number of issues that went to the heart of tabula rasa comedy and drama. One could not but note, for example, the curious stress Knife had placed upon a mysterious orchestra of “intelligences”. Had that murdered agent, for example, a conscious mission to rationalize to the people in the Basin of Namless a certain structure of intelligence — to justify to them an ancient biased conception — to give scientific status, as it were, to a hierarchical abstract realm of intelligence? And a subconscious mission to fail in so doing and be brutally done to death?

On its conscious side the mission looked orderly and beautiful enough — in fact ironically consistent with the strategy of a concealed enemy enmeshed in their own revolutionary codes. On its subconscious side it had no alternative but to ripen towards disaster in endorsing biases of ugly superiority and inferiority; in reinforcing brutal memories of past injustices at the hands of the Authorities; in tipping therefore a scale into being which promised to give endless status, in the body politic of an age, to brutal rebellion (as abstract heads or histories in the past gave endless status to besieged opposition).

Thus in surrendering his agent or pawn the Director-General had concurred with the notion of a sinister ratio or abstract double-cross, abstract status of self-execution into infinity. He had, as it were, with eyes wide open played himself apparently into irreversible checkmate, into kicking the bucket, into a whistling desert or sand; and in so doing therefore precipitated a hollow nemesis, a totalitarian nemesis to which Knife responded by playing commander or leader before Goodrich in order, so to speak, to take over where the Director-General’s agent had apparently failed. But Goodrich (as the Director-General may have hoped or intended) had brought Knife to book by resisting him and raising afresh for deeper scrutiny the mystery of “intelligences” internalized and externalized.

There were three positions Goodrich reviewed now upon his private chessboard, sketched now into his private diary. Two were already self-evident, namely, hierarchical abstract intelligence and totalitarian crude nemesis. The third position could well be the most terrifying though holding out a genuine hope of distancing the fascinations of tyranny. For it brought into uncompromising creative play the very essence, the very paradox of endurance: whether one could endure a state of crisis beyond infection by despair.