Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

“Would a child,” I said so softly it was doubtful whether she heard, “turn you into a real woman?”

Jennifer may have been intrigued by the question for she appeared to fade a little — to lose something of a virtuous crescendo of blood in resisting Marsden’s clutches — his brainchild, his spirit-child in her. It was ironic that she appeared to fade when she should have blossomed in her own right. He (Marsden) was a phenomenal lover, I began dimly to sense, few men could dislodge even when they seemed most prosaically and realistically ascendant.

Goodrich made his way from the Market Cross towards St. Giles, then past the old Parliament where a statue of Charles II trampled the grave of John Knox. Then along the Royal Mile past the house of Knox, past the site of the ancient Flodden Wall inscribed into the roadway. Many years had gone by since he first came this way — long years that stretched back to around 1950—long years before he won his fortune and settled in Edinburgh. Now it was interesting to look back to that first occasion when passing along this ancient roadway a grim spirit seemed to address him from the jumbled houses overhead and from each narrow wynd or close. And flags of suspicion fluttered it seemed to him then in the washing suspended from windows high overhead.

The Royal Mile looked now quite different: almost mild, almost relaxed, almost genial. There were shops with wares and items from many parts of the world. An Indian woman passed him in a saree. Then a group of laughing young women, maxi-skirted, mini-skirted. And yet though exotic layers of Spring and Summer were here, and the threatening garb of Winter had been rubbed out, there remained a strange brooding mixture of presentness and pastness embracing all historical seasons inserted into the place.

He came to the end of the Mile and Holyrood Palace. There was a bath house near the gate associated with Mary, Queen of Scots. Arthur’s Seat — the site of a long extinct volcano he believed — dominated the scene in the background.

The impact the palace made on him was one of private and public spaces so rooted in history he was filled with a sensation of intense apparitions — naked apparitions in search of density and cover. How could one defend privacy at the heart of a crowded court or world or city except within enigmatic patterns of identity — scandal, intrigue — tabula rasa theatre? As though the very ground of besieged personality asserted itself under certain pressures in forms of intrigue and counter-intrigue. It was this assertion perhaps of secret resistances, secret alliances that compensated over-burdens and grew into the heart’s blood of desperate romance.

He recalled now as he stood in the courtyard how on his way to the palace he had idled into a bookshop, opened a book by Flora Grierson on Edinburgh and read:

“Here was a city swarming with life like a bee-hive, wherein class distinctions must emphasize themselves boldly, or completely disappear; where criminals could lie undetected, even outside the sanctuary provided by the Abbey, and men like Deacon Brodie carry on for years their double lives of respectability and crime without fear of discovery. Here every type of person lived cheek by jowl, using the same dark staircase for every kind of illicit purpose, coming and going by the same front door. Private houses had grown so rare that Mackenzie, looking back on his earlier years from the greater seclusion of the nineteenth century, felt justified in giving them a paragraph to themselves.”

He flipped the pages and came to:

“Twisted and tangled was medieval Edinburgh: modern Edinburgh should be straight and tidy. The old town had adapted itself to its site: the new town conquered or ignored its site, forcing it to accept the laws of town-planning. And just as the old city derives much of its charm from its peculiar fitness to the landscape out of which it seems to have sprung, so the new gains in beauty from its sheer contradiction to the place on which it is imposed. But for that resolute disregard of all natural advantages and disadvantages, we would not have today those straight steep streets that rise from the valley of Princes Street, as it were, sheer into the sky, then fall again headlong into Leith and the Firth of Forth. The new town of Edinburgh is an exquisite paradox that satisfies because of its rational unreason.”

As he turned all this over in his mind the palace before him — framed in lines of steel by workmen repairing the façade — seemed to symbolize that bee-hive of the old and new: it was the reality and unreality of both commoner and king — a blackboard of premises upon which the goal of long-lost privacy and darkest freedoms of action and initiative were robed by contrary generations until with each fall-out of pattern and design an ancient spectre drew one closer to the enigma of modern times….

Goodrich was already busily sketching and writing his impressions upon the invisible book he hoarded within covers of body and mind. Everything became grist for his mill. “I am a miser of infinity,” he said to himself at last and then listened for the voices of accusing or commiserating phantoms at his elbow — left elbow and right elbow, bar sinister and bar profound.

*

As I made my way back along the Royal Mile I stopped for a moment at the site of the old Tolbooth and the following lines ran through my head:

O waly waly up the bank,

And waly waly down the brae,

And waly waly yon burn-side

Where I and my Love wont to gae.

Now Arthur’s Seat sall be my bed;

The sheets sall ne’er be pressed by me:

Saint Anton’s well sall be my drink

Since my true love has forsaken me.

Marti’mas wind, when wilt thou blaw

And shake the green leaves aff the tree?

O gentle Death, when wilt thou come?

For of my life I am wearie.

A famished sleeve or cowl brushed against mine. I suddenly glanced up (no one was there) and across the street in the way one’s eyes are drawn sometimes to a stranger’s in a kind of blaze or bond or intuitive relationship. But, in fact, there were no eyes I could observe upon mine. Rather Jennifer Gorgon and a young man, hands twined together, were approaching on the opposite pavement — so intent on each other in conversation I was invisible to them.

I felt a stab of jealousy before I could properly suppress it and was astonished by the appearance of the young man which seemed wholly inconsistent with the kind of male companion I would have drawn for her. Her present companion was very pale as if he lived indoors all the time. He wore dark glasses. His hair hung in a kind of half-glossy, half-lifeless fashion upon his neck. Beside Jennifer’s dramatic symmetry, decorous but wide hips, breasts with their inimitable coins to match the severed eyes of John the Baptist — the pale unsunned but sun-guarded dark-glassed young man seemed wholly inadequate and inappropriate.

What a waste, I thought. I wanted to call out to her but stifled my cry and retired into Old Tolbooth Wynd. When I calculated they had gone some distance I resumed my way along the pavement. The phantasmal voice in my sleeve kept murmuring — What a waste. What a waste. What a waste.

It was the word waste which seemed a sigh and then a snarl in cowl or sleeve to invoke a vision of Marsden standing within Jennifer Gorgon. “Set me as a seal upon thine heart … love is strong as death … jealousy is cruel as the grave….” It all flashed up and died away again but it lasted long enough for me to ponder upon Jennifer’s pale young man also standing within that terrifying complex of love. Had he been projected from Black or Fierce Marsden? Had Marsden’s phenomenon of personality — phenomenon of unconsciousness and implacable love — so engulfed Jennifer that when she was away from him (even for a day or an hour) she sickened without knowing it and her glowing maternity-desiring body was intent upon or obsessed by dismembered or anaemic presences like foetuses of soul? Perhaps Black Marsden had implanted in her his cradle or gaol or bed within which or upon which she was ridden by his eunuchs, his longing for fulfilled heirs of spirit which held her captive therefore as current frames or substitutes of his unfulfilled dream (or hers).