Wilson Harris: Black Marsden: A Tabula Rasa Comedy

Acknowledgements are due to authors and publishers as follows: Oliver and Boyd Ltd for quotations from The Scottish Tradition in Literature by Kurt Wittig; The Clarendon Press for quotations from John Knox by Jasper Ridley; The Bodley Head Ltd for quotations from Haunting Edinburgh by Flora Grierson; Penguin Books Ltd for quotations from The Legend of John Hornby by George Whalley; Faber and Faber Ltd for quotations from Writings from the ‘Philokalia’on Prayer of the Heart translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer; Cassell and Co Ltd for adaption of a quotation from Highland Days by John Gordon.

I came upon him in a corner of the ruined Dunfermline Abbey of Fife like a curious frozen bundle that may have been blown across seas and landscapes to lodge here at my feet. On the journeys I had made through Fife last year I had been aware of the harlequin cloak of the seasons spread far and wide into strange intimacies and dissolving spaces. For example I had looked down upon the sea from another ruined abbey at Culross; I recalled evenings bridled by early lights along the Firth of Forth; all this seemed at times sunken into a transparent film or subaqueous world. The ancient palaces and corridors I visited were an extraordinary and naive cradle of kings woven nevertheless into complex, sometimes implacable legend. This combination of naive and complex features was true of kings whether in pre-Columbian America or pre-Renaissance Scotland or Europe. The idea obsessed me and I found myself at liberty to trace its contours around the globe since winning a fortune from the Football Pools.

A half-frozen spectre of a man it was who appeared now at my feet in a corner of the winter Dunfermline Abbey. His beard was savage and black and icy and consistent with a wildness of nature that literally pierced me as our eyes met. It was an uncanny twist or stab from within myself as if I knew him though I had not seen him before.

I had hardly dwelt properly upon this when the knives in his eyes turned into quills. Something to do with the glinting threads of light that laced the Abbey in the winter afternoon. It was self-surrender, I thought, rather than self-conquest which had been inscribed there upon a living mask. I had read of magicians who slept in ice or snow. It was this aspect of strange immunity to the elements and strange immersion in the elements — half-pathetic and sorrowful, half-ecstatic and joyful — that became now a kind of vivid black humour, deepset and unique as a late dazzle of sun.

I leant forward and addressed him. Smoke rose from my lips. He shuddered a little. “Are you all right?” I said. I felt awkward and unfree. He sensed my embarrassment as well as fascination and grimaced with pain to intimate to me that my inner frame corresponded with his shuddering stiffness as though one disability sparked the other.

“All right,” he replied. “All right.”

We were curiously united within a human mist or ground of shared predicament. He looked doubled-up and spectral; no longer did he glint with knives and quills but his bent back had turned into a harp and I had been metamorphosed into a kind of rib or spring stretched by the deepest pull of fascination towards a condition of marvel.

*

This was the beginning of my curious and ambivalent friendship with Doctor Black Marsden — Clown or Conjurer or Hypnotist Extraordinary. As if that winter afternoon the strangest invisible Gorgon or Muse, ancient as the face of the globe, had turned her head towards us and fascinated us beyond words. I was in process of projecting from within myself upon him — as he simultaneously projected his mysterious frame of associations upon me — an assortment of instruments ranging from a knife to a harp.

It was an uncanny idea (I felt myself stricken to the bone by the disease which I had already characterized to myself as ‘condition of marvel’—my conscription by the fortunes of history into a patron of the arts): uncanny to dream that a Gorgon or Muse, ancient as the face of the globe, had long fascinated us — without our being aware of it — and bound us into conserving and fleshing within ourselves the ritual skeletons of civilizations (walking knives or bent harps).

The Gorgon or Muse, Doctor Marsden said, was the open-ended mystery of beauty — flesh into stone or vice versa.

The Walking Knife, Doctor Marsden said, was both straight and twisted as love or death.

The Walking Harp, Doctor Marsden said, was an essential ruined cage within ourselves/cradle of music/vibrating touchstone….