Black Marsden Page 2

  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.

  I felt cheated by those blind counterfeit eyes of hers (half-falling, half-uplifted from her body) but fascinated and astonished as well that such a shell or woman—so fragile and lovely she seemed now—possessed such sculptured breasts into which were set such huge coins or currency of beauty. Currency of rage. Rage indeed. If those coins were to strike the floor they would ring with fury at the manifest way their owner had been entangled in a spell or net cast by Black Marsden’s ritual camera.

  All of a sudden, at the very edge of fascination, Knife slashed the camera, and Marsden stood stark naked. I was engulfed by a feeling of impropriety. But, incredibly, impropriety was erased in the avuncular way he appraised Gorgon like a doctor a patient. Naked doctor. Naked breasts of patient. Then he touched her nipples and my original suspicions returned.

  “It’s all right,” he said calmly. “Nothing sexual, believe me. Pennies on dead men’s eyes as far as I am concerned. We live in a penny-wise, pound-foolish age.” He still touched her as he spoke. “We make a fuss about moral pence when millions of mortal lives are cheap.”

  “This is outrageous,” I cried stung and ashamed. “There you stand … stark naked … blatantly … naked.”

  “Naked propriety,” said Black Marsden. “I am inventing a new style for both pulpit and theatre. She is our divided enchantress. Moral pence in church or bedroom. And a million dirt-cheap in the theatre of the world. We have created an ambiguity. And out of that ambiguity is born the Knife of humanity. Each man kills the thing he loves.”

  4

  Goodrich woke with the dream fresh in his mind. So fresh it seemed to saturate the world outside with a curious precipitation of melancholy. A dispersing melancholy lay on the trees across the garden in the distance. A darker but more intimate pride and spirit suffused the wood of the trees into which the young leaves seemed to retire like fossils of autumn rather than cradled summer.

  He sat at a small table near the window, sipped a cup of tea and ate a biscuit from the tray Mrs. Glenwearie had put there. Curious, he thought (as he looked out across the garden into the misty sky) how the passing seasons were saturated by one’s dreams and turn into half-fossil, half-cradle—endless deceiving, revealing subjective/objective fabric or open-ended bias. He wrote in his diary: “Open-ended ironical flesh of nature or fabric of things into axe; open-ended iro
nical fabric of things or flesh of nature into scythe; open-ended ironical tunnel of mist into a shield for an assassin.”

  As the mist upon the trees began to disperse into letters of space which seemed to match or mock his reflections, he suddenly felt a cleavage of mood—a cleavage within the desolating fabric of dreams.

  “The memory of Knife was oppressive when I awoke: I remember how he slashed Marsden’s cloth or camera. Now I feel a sense of relief.”

  He poured himself another cup of tea, stared into it unseeingly. “Naked bias,” he wrote pulling his dressing-gown more closely around his limbs. “What is freedom without the blackest self-mockery—without intense creativity and care—without seasonal dress and undress and the unravelling of self-portraits and self-deceptions?”

  He stared at the naked pages of infinity—so his diary seemed to him sometimes like a hidden blackboard in yesteryear’s snow, paradoxical tabula rasa. Each morning he endeavoured to make some sort of entry. Sometimes it was a record of the previous day’s activities or a reflection on the past night’s dreams which he wrote with a stubborn left hand or impish right. As he sorted out the loose pages now they seemed to him not quite in the order in which he had put them a day or two ago. Perhaps it was his imagination. Or on the other hand—had someone slipped into his room and read his private diaries? He began now to make a new and perverse entry.

  Diary entry the morning after I dreamt of Jennifer Gorgon and Black Marsden’s slashed coat.

  COMEDY OF FREEDOM.

  LEFT HAND: Tunnel/garment. Doodles of ink. When my doodling tunnel is blackest I move towards a pinprick of light at the far end which grows brighter until the pinprick becomes a skylight. At the heart of the tunnel, however, everything remains black. I cannot see an inch along the road. I cannot see the feet which bear me as I move or draw my body. I am part and parcel of invisible limbs within my tunnel; I feel myself conscripted into an anti-clockwise or biblical sun at the end of the road; yearn to reach or draw my end. In my end is my beginning. I yearn to make the light captive, stop the sun in its tracks. Anti-clockwise noon. White is beautiful outside the tunnel. Fascination of the Gorgon.

  RIGHT HAND: You mean Black is beautiful inside the tunnel. Fascination of the Gorgon. When love is switched on inside the tunnel—when love is brightest and fiercest inside the tunnel you see, or think you see, all of its tailored parts—rivet, bolt, seamless metal inside the tunnel. But now you can no longer see the light at the end of the road. Keep right on to the end of the road.

  LEFT HAND: Doodles of love and freedom inside the tunnel or outside the tunnel have fascinated and seduced mankind since the dawn of time. Keep right on to the end of the road. When freedom glares we need the deepest unravelling vision of imagination not to be stricken or deceived. When freedom glares we need a comic apocalypse: chalk-and-ink into pillars of salt, flesh-and-blood into pillars of establishment.

  RIGHT HAND: When freedom glares we need to unravel the darkest phantoms of humanity who master us and nudge us along the road towards a spectral caveat or warning of the infinite resources of community to inflict damnation upon itself or appease damnation within itself.

  LEFT HAND: FEED MY SHEEP. My drugged sheep, my damned sheep, my drop-out sheep. My Jesus-tripping sheep.

  Knife arrived later that morning. Goodrich had not really believed he existed as flesh-and-blood until the actual moment he set eyes upon him and the polished sitting-room in Edinburgh, clean as a die, shone with the intensity of a mirror or a glass of living water speckled with stars. Knife’s face was reflected there within a swarm of buzzing flies under a glaring sun. “Why,” said Goodrich, half-hypnotized by constellations of memory, “we have met before. Three years ago wasn’t it? In Kingston, Jamaica.”

  Black Marsden gave a drunken chuckle as if to confirm a base pollution on one hand, a magical potency on the other in the elements. He sat in a large red upholstered armchair, his black beard wild. Wild and trim as the fierce liquid at his elbow which looked amber in one light transparent in another.

  The mist outside had vanished. A low fire burned under a ridge of coal at the far end of the sitting-room and a pale shaft crossed swords with it. Black Marsden snapped his fingers as if to aid and abet the Goodrich/Knife duel of memory. In his plush armchair he looked every inch the Director of Tabula Rasa Global Theatre. Goodrich half-laughed, half-protested, but sank nevertheless into a hypnotic scene (hang-dog or hanged man tunnel) as he wrestled inwardly with Knife afresh….

  He made doodles of butter punctuated by diamonds and flies. The suffocating heat of Kingston sliced him in half. He recalled the day he arrived there on his first round-the-world trip. He recalled being besieged by beggars. A crowd of faces (grown-up faces, children’s faces) pressed upon him. With the left hand of a dreamer in broad daylight he was intent on drawing them upon the pages of infinity in his book. The covers of that book were his own paradoxical frame of mind and body related to seasons and places. Soon it became too oppressive for him to complete the sketches he had begun. They dangled at his fingertips nevertheless—decapitated, armless sketches—blackboard or blackbeard buried in today’s sun or yesteryear’s snow.

  He dived into a restaurant and ordered a cold beer. The crowd outside had been overcome and buried for the time being but its sketched reality—its hang-dog or hanged man face—rose up before him within Knife who had followed him into the restaurant and stood by the door like conscience itself ready to steal, ready to kill: features pitted like a beehive into which miraculously the army of flies on the street had crawled and vanished. Knife hesitated at the door, then having made up his mind went straight to Goodrich’s table and laid a folded piece of paper upon it in order to levy a charge for the beggars he had consumed with a stroke of the pen, so to speak: Beehive Knife, Goodrich thought reflecting on his unfinished sketches.

  He unfolded the paper, flattened it out and read the following: “Dear patron, I am the father of many children. I cannot find work. Unemployment is higher than it has ever been. I beg. I am ashamed to speak to you and ask for help. Please help me. I will stand here at the door and you can pass something to me as you go out. Don’t say a word, just give me whatever you can.”

  He took a dollar from his pocket, folded it into the man’s letter and slipped dollar and letter under a bowl on the table. He raised his glass to his lips. A faint shadow snaked towards him and before he could say “Jack Robinson” the dollar bill and circular letter levitated from the table and vanished with Knife into the street….

  *

  “You are mistaken,” said Knife. It was the first time he had spoken after what seemed a long pause in the Edinburgh sitting-room. “I have never been to Jamaica.”

  “You have never been to Jamaica …” Goodrich began in astonishment.

  “Never.” Knife sat back in his chair beside Marsden. It was a similar chair and belonged to a rich suite—divan and armchairs. Goodrich sat on the divan. Black Marsden chuckled and sipped his whisky with a disconcerting wry flicker of a smile on his lips. Goodrich wondered was Marsden drunk? And he was stricken by a certain thought but ashamed of it immediately—the feeling or thought that Marsden would never scruple to slip into his bedroom and read the contents of his private diaries. That morning the pages had seemed to be somewhat out of order as if someone had cleverly ransacked them but slipped up somewhere along the line….

  “Why of course … of course …,” he cried to Knife (trying to blot out or stifle his suspicions of Marsden), “the man I saw was black. And yet I could have sworn when I first set eyes on you…. I remember sketching him in my diary as Beehive Knife. His face was all pitted … a graveyard … a beehive. It seems an incongruous comparison. But there it is. That’s how he seemed to me. And I don’t really mean that you look like that. God forbid. You are quite elegant in fact. I must confess I cannot account for the resemblance between him and you….”

  “All elegance,” said Black Marsden drunkenly, “is a pit of fashion under big brother d
evil or big beggar god or big trader devil god. There are affluent actors or beggars in affluent societies to play poor beggars acting out poor societies. What an apotheosis of elegance is involved in such a transformation or translation of techniques. I am sure Knife appreciates with tongue in cheek of course (how else?) the new suit on his back which you have given to him, Goodrich. And the shoes too.”

  Knife’s white face remained expressionless. He was tastefully dressed in a lounge suit of greyish or brownish material and in sharp boots of Japanese circulation. “Yes,” said Knife seeing Goodrich’s eyes on his boots. “They came from America to Regent Street, London, but were made in Japan.”

  “Apparition of poverty,” said Black Marsden cryptically.

  “Poverty?” Goodrich was bewildered. “Aren’t they among the richest societies on earth?”

  “Quite so. But we need riches to make Knife play poor beggar elegantly and well. He must achieve a marvellous apotheosis. Bless the rich man for the crumbs from his table! Bless the poor man for the opportunity and role of a lifetime! I want Knife to play poor beggar as if he embodies the storehouse of the devil. Not only crumbs but exceptional blood and talent. Not only crumbs but fantastic masks and costumes. Fabrics from all over the world. We may need to open a few graves. And that costs money. A silken thread of blood here, a wasted bone or button there. A shoe-string of muscle worth a fortune elsewhere. Even a fly or two that may cost a diamond or two. Think of the glue in his eyes.”

  “Mardie, Mardie,” said Jennifer coming into the room suddenly. “You know you shouldn’t drink at this time of the day.” She came in with a large tray of sandwiches. “Mrs. Glenwearie is a dear.” She deposited the tray on a table; then with the facility of an expert at bridge flicked plates and napkins towards the men in the room. Each plate had dwarf insignia—a crucifixion, a knight, a king, a queen, jack of spades, diamonds, hearts etc. “There’s chicken and cheese and tomato and cucumber. And ham I think. Yes, delicious.” There was a knock at the door and Mrs. Glenwearie appeared with coffee which Jennifer took from her and deposited on an extra table in the room. Soon they were eating Mrs. Glenwearie’s sandwiches and drinking Mrs. Glenwearie’s coffee.