Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

With the fall of a certain ruling head or pattern of existence one naturally sickened in oneself even when (or precisely because) one entertained a desire within oneself for the essences of change. (That ruling fallen head was quintessential to oneself.) As dead pan Knife, for example, had sickened when he saw the quintessential barbarism, the most common savage denominator of change — abstract hand in broken head on the pavement of Namless or upon one’s doorstep: broken by the regime or broken by those who stood against the regime. And in order to cover that sickening sensation of horror, that common denominator of shared barbarism (as if he had committed the crime himself) he drew over himself an assumption of authority, brilliant tour de force, guerrilla theatre of Namless.

It was as if (Goodrich sketched into his diary) one looked upon a hollow guerrilla stage or extrapolation of intelligences brilliantly constructed to evoke the hypothetical fall of an age and to invite a deeper scrutiny or orchestration of hypothetical resources beyond that fall so that the function of wasted lives (decimated hopes) was transformed into an irreversible warning or motif of capacity to undermine the hubris of every abstract order or monument, abstract monument or revered cradle, abstract monument or superior grave.

He (as private Goodrich in the theatre of the guerrillas, private host in the theatre of mankind) sipped the brilliant-tasting but penetrative holy nausea of Namless sunset sky and earth, Namless beverage. The curiously real or curiously imagined half-burnt, half-sweet perfume associated with childhood, came to him across the strangest chessboard of evening lights he had ever seen. The sky was made of marvellous scarecrow cloth like glass and of sensuous fiery intelligences. Above the Basin of Namless and in the vague direction of the grave they had dug that day, the air seemed part and parcel of an animated spectre or family tree and for some deeply planted irrational reason Goodrich wept. He recalled his mother’s bewilderment when news of the disappearance of Rigby had come. He recalled how day succeeded day as they waited for news. An irrational body possessed him to take her in his arms. It was the trauma of being alive when the head of the family had vanished; and the notion was born that there existed a scout of love from whose effects of grief no one could escape except across a sea of tears….

Knife had now returned from his foraging expedition in the body of the half-wrecked inn and had set up his tripod and pot and lit the evening fire. “No sign of our woman,” he said to Goodrich. “Perhaps she’s in the hills….” He was staring quizzically at the Goodrich diary (the numerous pages and the drawings clasped together) on the steps of the inn….

*

Night was crystal clear, wild and beautiful with stars. They settled down not far from the fire in their blankets. “We are fortunate,” said Knife, “not to be plagued by mosquitoes in this part of Namless. In the rainy season I tell you it’s hell. Can you smell the orchid of Namless? Comes from the hills over there. Lasts for a week or so. And blooms every other year.”

As he spoke a distant piping music rose from across the Basin of Namless. Goodrich felt his hair stand on end at the extraordinary plaintive lament associated with a nameless piper who had played it in order to warn his master of a threatened ambush knowing that with each note his life was growing forfeit. He was prisoner in enemy hands. The piper’s master Coll Ciotach (left-handed Coll) hearing the music in time turned back and saved his life. The Gaelic words associated with the tune were:

Cholla mo run, seachain an Dùn.

Cholla mo ghaol, seachain an Caol;

Tha mise an laimh, tha mise an laimh.

Translated into English this runs:

Coll my dear, avoid the Fort.

Coll my beloved, avoid the Narrows;

I am in their hands, I am in their hands .

Knife pricked up his ears as the strange fire music threaded its way into the stars. Then suddenly there was silence, an abrupt eclipse or silence. The piper had been seized by the enemy, his fingers were severed and he was killed on the spot.

“They won’t trouble us tonight,” Knife said laconically. But Goodrich wondered whether he was dreaming. “What in god’s name do you mean …?”

Knife grinned. “Oh I see. The pipes. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? In this part of the world. It’s an agreed signal from the guerrillas in Namless that we are safe tonight and may take the road tomorrow through the narrow pass in the mountains.”

Goodrich was incredulous. “You are quite wrong. It’s a warning — the Piper ’ s Warning —it means beware of ambush.”

“It’s of ancient derivation, yes,” said Knife softly. “There has been a long piece on it recently in Dark Rumour. Apparently initiated by Scottish refugees who came to Namless in the eighteenth century to escape Butcher Cumberland. Note, however, Mr. Goodrich,” said Knife almost ingratiatingly, “that the Piper’s Warning has been converted into its opposite role by the present folk in the hills.”

“Opposite role?”

“Yes — the stranger, the new arrival like yourself is being counselled through me your guide and interpreter to pass rather than pull back. When the piper is seized the music stops and the metaphor of a forfeit is implied but in an open-ended sense. The tunnel is clear. The way is open. There is no danger. You have been granted assurances….”

But Goodrich was not convinced. There was something about Knife he distrusted at this moment. He lay back on the ground and the thought obsessed him like a dream that the music he had heard had come from the stifled lips of Marsden’s dead agent…. In his dream Knife’s role as guide was now finished.

I stop writing suddenly and clip the pages together — nearly twenty to thirty pages of notes and sketches I have made since Jennifer disappeared several hours ago around a bend in the Botanical Gardens. My notes are corrections and revisions of an early “diary of Namless” in order to build a new eye of the Scarecrow or stage or theatre of essences occupied by a phenomenon of personality reaching back into the slate of childhood. Upon that slate Clive Goodrich is a given existence and other buried traumatic existences as well wrestling one with the other to express a caveat or unknown factor, an intuitive fire music within the hubris of assured character, assured rites of passage into death or namless town.

My name is Clive Goodrich. Yet a name is but a cloak and sometimes a strange denuded nameless “I” steps forth. A denuded “I” who is absorbed by the mild spirit of an afternoon like this, or the mild ripple of a breath of wind upon the stretch of water near at hand overshadowed by trees. Or the shadow which now grows upon the sun, a mild self-effacing shadow as I rise to my feet and make my way to the gate leading to Inverleith Row.

My shadow joins others in the queue waiting for a bus to take us into or through Goldenacre. I am aware of a thin stooping woman dressed in a light coat and of a burly man, both in their sixties I imagine. I may have taken little notice of them but for the quaint rich lilt of their voices. The burly man says: “How is Willie Macdougall these days, Maisie?”

“Did ye no hear?” The woman sounds surprised. “Willie’s away.”

“Away?”

“Aye. He passed over at three o’clock in the morning in November last year.”

“Well, well, imagine that. I never heard.”

“Ah well, it was all for the best. He was near eighty and failing.”

“Poor Willie.”

“Not so poor. He left a guid sum and a car and a shop.”