Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

“It isn’t ridiculous at all, Mr. Goodrich dear. My late husband was a sufferer. He would glare at me and threaten to sneeze his head off if I dusted a carpet under his nose. You need to take greater care of yourself, sir. Sometimes I think you take too much on yourself, I do indeed. The oddsbodies you bring into the house at times. It fair unsettles you.”

“Abnormal luck calls for abnormal insurance, Mrs. Glenwearie. It’s better to pay than perish.”

“I confess I don’t understand a word of that, Mr. Goodrich. But, och, it’s not for me to say. I suppose you know your own business best.”

I lay in bed that night and turned over in my mind my conversation with Mrs. Glenwearie. She said she had seen Doctor Marsden take his flash-bulb camera into the sitting-room. I had no recollection of this. Mrs. Glenwearie had seen it. She said categorically she had seen it. Actually set eyes on it. I repeated the words like dogma. Dogmatic circumstantial evidence. A secret doubt began to sprout in my mind.

With a snap of the fingers, so to speak, judges had sent innocent men to the gallows on dogmatic circumstantial evidence. A strange light now shone down the longest tunnel on earth in my mind as I put the pieces together and recalled how Marsden had snapped his fingers at me and the curious hypnotic sensation which enveloped me then like a blow falling on the back of my neck.

One sees and still does not see, feels and still does not feel. I should have questioned Mrs. Glenwearie more closely. Did she know or recall the exact time she had seen Marsden with his camera? She had intimated in our conversation that it was around the time she set out for the butcher’s. Now as a rule this happened in the mornings. But I had known her on occasions to go in the afternoons.

Half-waking, half-sleeping questions robed in abstract concreteness or concrete abstractness (it was difficult to tell which) began to plague my mind. Who or what was this camera? Was it Marsden himself she had seen straddling the corridor? Had he made himself invisible within mental items of furniture she took for granted? (A newspaper column I had read some time back floated into consciousness; a “white” woman made herself invisible by playing “black” in an American economic theatre: real life rather than fiction. And then the right-handed real world to which she belonged (or with which she still secretly identified) saw her as a left-handed unreal chair to sit upon — or left-handed door to knock upon — mental cross-lateral furniture. In crossing and re-crossing an economic racial or religious or political divide (right to left, left to right) one could draw down upon oneself the implacable biases of cross-lateral reification or malfunction. And the old adage— never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing —became either a revelation of sinister complacency or a distorted cue intimating a sleeping ambidextrous Queen (uniquely gifted, not double-dealing or slippery) in the casket or camera of community. How amazingly involuted and truly impressionistic, truly expressionistic are the sovereign phantoms on the borders of sleep.)

Perhaps therefore my question about Mrs. Glenwearie’s camera — I pursued the theme obsessively — was less absurd than it appeared at first sight. When one is involved in the most serious game of dual responsibility one has played since the dawn of mankind (a prisoner on trial for a nightmare body of wealth he has accumulated) one will summon as witnesses all territories of waking and dreaming life as part and parcel of the exercises of judgement.

Marsden was a superb ritual conjurer. The day I stumbled upon him in the ruined Dunfermline Abbey he had played on me one of his divine cross-lateral jokes (left-hand telepathy) by invoking knives and quills and a harp which seemed to crowd upon him like an angelic and satanic chorus combined. Later I had been told of Walking Knife and Harp as real persons I would soon meet — his right-hand associates.

I opened my eyes suddenly to a jarring noise in the room but looking around saw no one: a faint premonitory rumble seemed to run through my limbs or through the building and then I heard distinctly (or felt absurdly) the drone of a passing aircraft I dreamt belonged to me like a sky-yacht in space.

My house was in a particularly quiet section of Edinburgh and at nights I enjoyed the stillness immensely as if I were in the heart of a charmed countryside. Thus every whisper of wood accentuated the muffled tread of time as though silence were the art of wrestling with invisible presences.

The room was dark. The darkness was accentuated by the fact that I had not drawn the curtains across the window which gleamed now with the light of the moon. I could see in my mind’s eye a clear sky over the city strewn with faint stars around the disc of the moon and as I visualized this I dreamt afresh of late afternoon and early evening walks and the conjunction I felt then of open sky and sea. The open sky delighted me. As much for its dreaming openness as for contrasting weathers and moods in which it steeped me from time to time. It sustained a divine rule or play of elements — hour to hour, day to day — in which the Castle over Princes Street symbolized a human and therefore man-made mist or legendary establishment.

The open sea delighted me. I could hear the cry of the gulls as I descended towards the Firth of Forth….

A rectangle of light at the end of the room or road (was it sea or sky?) insinuated itself into my dreams. Doctor Marsden had come in dressed as a Camera with a collection plate he deposited on the bedroom floor. I was struck by his great dignity and decorum: persona or camera fitted him well. At the same time I could not resist being almost overwhelmed by a sensation of weird and indefatigable humour beneath the black cloth or flesh he wore.

“Call me Camera,” he said familiarly adjusting his wig of cloth. “Cloth of hair.”

His head in the half-dark, half-light of the room was smooth on all sides — eyeless cloth, mouthless cloth, earless cloth, noseless cloth.

“Call me Camera,” he said again jocularly pointing to a rectangle of moon or sea or sky he had now incorporated upon brow and eyes. “It cost a pretty penny this outfit.” He slid along the floor. “Embroidery of stars and haircloth. A pretty penny.” He came still nearer, his voice half-sinister, half-wheedling. “Penny for the Guy,” he said. “Penny for the Guy.”

I proceeded without further prompting to lay out a pound, a dollar note, a franc, a pre-Columbian bone and a shell. Marsden put these on his plate as if they were the relish of his soul. “What a collection,” he said. “The Church like the Poor like Art is always with us. Give well and you give wisely.”

I nodded. “Now,” he continued, “you will clap Knife and you will clap Jennifer Gorgon. A sweet name is Jennifer.” He clapped his hands as he spoke and quoted Robert Burns:

“Here some are thinkin’ on their sins,

An’ some upo’ their claes.”

He clapped his hands again beneath the cloth of his flesh — clapping a hidden church or choir or theatre he carried around in his lusty camera. I saw now as he clapped that Knife, sharp as bone or sin, had stepped forth from him. And that Jennifer too had stepped forth from him naked as a sea-shell.

In the darkened church or bedroom she seemed to absorb much of the radiance from Marsden’s rectangular window or brow and in her desire to absorb this more completely, had pulled her nightdress over her head but been unable to free herself entirely from it, so that her mouth and nose were extinguished in a featureless robe and bundle, and her breasts shone beneath, sagged a little, darkened a little into large bruised eyes and nipples.