Black Marsden Page 8

  “Robot!” Goodrich was half-astonished, half-prepared for this.

  “But of course,” said Knife. “It’s a miraculous refinement of the dinosaur of ages (the collaborative nexus of sex and love, striking man and risen-up god)—the roof of heaven in our mouth.”

  Goodrich did not reply but looked up again at Marsden’s ascension robot outlined against the sky. It’s funny, he thought, I think of her now, my poor mother. She used to wear that odd oppressive perfume, a slightly burnt odour at the foot of the cross on Sundays in church.

  Knife was silent. And soon they drove off (or pitched, it seemed, on their ribbon of road) into an oppressive landscape, a rickety sensation of perfumed, burnt spaces within a cathedral of rocks.

  *

  Before nightfall they drew up at what seemed a wrecked farmhouse. “We shall spend the night here,” said Knife. “The road is primitive so I doubt whether we’ve done more than a couple of hundred miles.”

  Goodrich was glad to get out, stretch his legs again. The setting sun blazed upon the rim of a mountain in a ripe canvas painted TROPICAL: a magnificent ripeness of colour or rain of perspectives or climax of a waterfall in a majestic furnace. Yet from another angle that canvas seemed to shed on the stage of earth MEDITERRANEAN distinctions of individuality which invoked in each mound or thing its own separate sun or soul, redness was the delicate soul of red, greenness the delicate soul of green, purple was royal purple, blue was the essence of blue, diamond was cutting diamond, pearl was buried in pearl. Within these two extremes of tropical ripeness and mediterranean individuality, sky and earth seemed to revolve into a globe upon which the sun sank forever for those souls now departing this life into the wilderness of the Pacific they had always longed for (as their nameless scene, their nameless place of greatness), rose forever for others who set sail never to return from the wilderness of the Atlantic they had always dreamed of (as their nameless scene, their nameless place of greatness), buried its god forever in solipsistic nights of the Amazon, skimmed like Freya’s hair forever in solipsistic days of the Arctic.

  The wrecked farmhouse stood like a charmed shell in itself, mediterranean and individual, though bathed in a curious glow as if it had been uprooted and would swim, at any moment, towards the tropical canvas of heaven and towards some waiting soul to be ferried from one extreme to the other. There were pools of light like individual blinds in the cracked glass of window-panes. As Goodrich drew closer he observed the mutilated façade resembling now an Indian blanket woven into all weathers and colours, the map of an alchemical robot. Then suddenly he was confronted by another dimension of accumulating effects—the ravages of uprising and repression, a gaping eyeless room from which—his nostrils began to quiver involuntarily—a dying, still-burning (it almost seemed) odour came.

  “I think perhaps,” said Knife, “it’s best to bed down out-of-doors. We have blankets in the house. There’s a woman on the premises.”

  “A woman,” said Goodrich astonished.

  “She comes and goes,” said Knife.

  “But how—on what?”

  “Ass-back. Horse-back. Mule-back.” Knife shrugged.

  It occurred to Goodrich that on his long journey that day—an immensity it seemed to him now—he had seen a few wings circling far overhead but not a foot on the ground.

  “There are animals around,” said Knife as if he read his thoughts. “That’s how a hidden population travels. We’re lucky to come on wheels.”

  The great curtains of tropical night were descending upon the Director-General’s mediterranean stage. In the western sky it was steel, a steely avalanche raged. In the eastern sky it was dark, a mysterious avalanche descended and a kind of perfume came from the stars. Goodrich’s nose wrinkled involuntarily (as it had when he sensed the burnt room in the farmhouse) and he wondered if, by any chance, the woman of whom Knife had spoken had returned and stood somewhere in the darkness. He discerned her already with sensuous eyes on the tip of his nose. Then Knife came out of the farmhouse with an armful of wood. This he arranged on the ground, applied a match, fanned the flame. “That’s better,” he said at last. “By the way there’s no sign of the woman. But if she’s around she will come out sooner or later. Now for some food.” He set up a rude tripod, hung a pot over the fire into which he poured water, rice, peas, vegetables. Then he opened a can of beef, emptied it into a pan. Goodrich followed the preparations as if they were a ritual harvest, a harvest of food and fire within man and nature, the smell of food and the smell of flesh, cosmic essences, cosmic drama. Conquest of the stars in the roof of one’s mouth. An army marches on its stomach to recruit posterity, and birth is a trauma of subsistence.

  When they had eaten Knife offered Goodrich another cup of Namless beverage. “Come on,” he said when Goodrich refused. “I know it makes you feel a little sick at first but you need it in this part of the world. Trust me. I am a seasoned campaigner.” Goodrich capitulated and swallowed a mouthful. Soon he had another and another. He kept a sharp eye now (scarecrow sharp with the Namless beverage) upon the shapes of night beyond the fire. Still there was no sign of the woman. Knife had spread the blankets on the ground. It was inclined to be somewhat misty but on the whole quite warm beside the fire, under a blanket.

  Knife was off the moment he put his head down but Goodrich was so tired his senses were keyed up upon the borders of sleep in associative parallels and faculties. There was a gentle sighing wind and the sound of a shaking door or a window from the wrecked building. Also a hooting noise, an owl or some other creature. And an occasional twitter and sparking like a fire of crickets in a clump of grass.

  He counted god’s sheep, felt no sickness this time from the Namless beverage but tension, almost an ague, the sense of his own limitations, the sense of ripening into the Director-General’s comedy of relations.

  Then it was between curtain and curtain of night he saw the woman emerge from the farmhouse. She came straight over to him but he found himself unable to move, curled tight into the ripe scene he had become. She began to undress methodically and as she stood in profile against the fire, her head in shadow, he dreamt he could see with the severed eyes of his nose the pointed eyes of her breasts. Then she turned to face him.

  An animal-smelling face nuzzled into him but it was not the woman. It was not a dog. It was not a sheep. It was the constellation of the bull, Goodrich exclaimed, the tall bull of night on its knees beside him with the longest horns he had ever seen reaching into the stars. They picked him off the ground and held him steady. He wanted to lie back, curl up again. He was about to slump when the bull pushed him forward, caught him between its horns, braced him with its forehead, pushed him on again. Now he was pushed on the forehead of the bull straight upon her: upright coitus—upstanding coitus—into which she had been drawn upon the head of the bull between the upright and upstanding pillars of night.

  Pillars of night which he (Goodrich) had uprooted (so it seemed to him now). In one sense (it was true) they had uplifted him, pushed him off the ground into her thighs, between her thighs; in another sense it was his Samsonian avalanche, his uprooting of everything into a collaborative revolution of establishment.

  A toppling world and yet he clung to the pinnacle of fear, the pinnacle of hate, the pinnacle of love, sleepwalking bull of night, the gigantic robot of sex which now bestrode space like the genius of the avalanche.

  The question returned—had he been uprooted by her, decapitated by her into the head of the bull, or had he devoured her, his severed eyes in her body, his uprooted lips to her lips, his uprooted tongue to her tongue, his uprooted spire…?

  Had he pushed her or had been pushed by her…? This was the question raised by the Director-General of Cosmic Sex as though in constructing his gigantic robot of night he was intent on fathoming the dinosaur of an age—the Strike of man against himself as a narcissistic function of economic ritual….

  “Oh god,” said Goodrich as he awoke shuddering with newborn terror. �
�Oh god.” His blankets were awry and he felt the acute mystery of born, unborn existences.

  *

  When the sun was high Knife and Goodrich set off again in the rickety taxi along the ribbon of road. “I believe,” said Knife, “the woman I told you of may have gone on to one of the stations ahead of us along the road.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I thought you knew,” said Knife in his dead pan voice which made it difficult to tell whether he was serious or laughing up his sleeve.

  “How should I know?” Goodrich was annoyed. He recalled the ague of his dream.

  “Blankets,” said Knife soothingly. “So many of us sleep in the open. Comfort comes from blankets. Also from food, needless to say. She cheers our blood along the road. There is a population in these parts—a depressed population—whose survival seems to matter to her.”

  “Where are they—the people she cares for?”

  “Always on their guard. Each and everyone who comes from outside is suspect and they do not easily approach strangers or new arrivals. The Director-General has his agents, you see, amongst them, amongst us all. It’s (to put it mildly) a testing time. For example, despite all the talk of revolutionary theatre which one hears of these days there are totalitarian rumblings as well. There are some who venture to say that the new offer the Authorities made—the economic hand-out they were prepared to give is a sign of the times.”

  “Sign of the times? What do you mean?”

  “Sign of a totalitarian economic theatre. That is what I mean. Wealth may come to Namless in the wake of the Director-General but that wealth may well reflect a totalitarian brotherhood or economy of man.”

  “I fear I am no economist. I do not understand.”

  “Neither am I. I merely repeat the dark rumours, the dark rumours of time. The Dark Rumour is our newspaper in Namless and it says that with each economic hand-out within the proverbial nation-state the effects are to consolidate the proverbial middle class and to attract to it new and successful elements from the proverbial working class.”

  “I belong to that proverbial middle class myself. Is it such a bad thing after all?”

  “Thus a kind of human economic bastion is created within the state,” Knife went on as if he had not heard Goodrich, “against every so-called revolutionary underground. In the same token I read in Dark Rumour of an economic hand-out by South Africa to Malawi.”

  “How does Dark Rumour editorialize this?” Goodrich was half-exasperated, half-fascinated.

  “As the first step in the African continent towards a totalitarian brotherhood of man where black and white masters may well begin to sit at the same high table and feast on the same side of the fence. It’s an old story, of course, in the American hemisphere except that there it’s become patently absurd when every human economic bastion proves but another face to the American dinosaur of the twentieth century.”

  “And is this the reason for the entry of the Director-General?”

  “Ah,” said Knife in his dead pan voice which laughed in the dinosaur’s sleeve, “Namless has become (quite unwittingly, quite unselfconsciously) the repudiation of self-conscious ideologies. Perhaps therefore it is a laboratory of startling contrasts which intrigue the Authorities immensely. There is an emergent philosophy of revolution bound up with a re-sensing, re-sensitizing of dead monsters—the spatial potential, the architectural caveats and potentials at the heart of such apparent monsters—if one is to begin afresh from the hidden grassroots of a new age and not succumb to the inevitable temptations, the inevitable monolithic imperatives.”

  “Are you quoting from Dark Rumour?”

  “I always quote from Dark Rumour. I have no opinions of my own. I cannot afford such a private luxury.” He cast a contemptuous eye at Goodrich’s diaries. “There is a guerrilla theatre now in subconscious league with the very formidable intelligences that once sought to wipe it out. Thus it is in a position to immortalize itself at last within foundations sprung from the decay of the very barbarous death-dealing capital it once feared.”

  Knife’s bus rattled and Goodrich was aware of a change of scenery.

  It was the same world as yesterday but a curious subtle fleshing (if that was the right word) appeared upon the rocks. Perhaps, thought Goodrich, it was something to do with the light. Whatever it was—light or film of new vegetation—it had subtly awakened the landscape, the bones of the landscape, as a sleeping but treacherous giant stirs refreshed by age-old cataclysmic dreams. (Once there had been an earthquake, once a volcanic eruption across Namless. Once—once only in living memory—there had been a shift of ice down the mountains burying an entire village.)

  On every hand Goodrich could see those bizarre clusters he had noted yesterday, cathedrals of rock upon which he had seen his phantom, the Director-General’s rare robot lying upon the pavement of heaven while everybody flashed past at great speed and looked the other way. Now the change of tone affected these too—both cathedral clusters as well as pavement spires or dinosaurs in the midst of the pace of infinity—a slowing down rather than speeding up of the light….

  They (the rock clusters) all subtly moved as if one detected the most curious refugee church of mankind in action, walking bones, uprooted bones all fleshed by an avalanche where the very nature of things ceased to be a self-conscious theme and became the subconscious theatre or liberation of men from fanatical pursuits. Thus there was a submission to movement, yes, in cultural phenomena of Namless Theatre—but so intuitive, so unspectacular—it became an opus contra avalanche.

  This sensation of liberation accented by unspectacular tokens of place and time began to occupy Goodrich enormously. Looked at in a certain light he saw the walking bones of mankind disappear. Looked at in another light he saw the flesh upon the bones as a unique contrast or animation which created an abstract void or disappearing dancing bone.

  The ribbon of road wound now around an enormous basin in the land and the sensation Goodrich had was of overhanging features in the very action, the very process of collapse as bones or rocks hung upon the very rim of abstract void or flesh in intercourse with light or space; a delayed action, a delayed precipice. That was the first sensation he had.

  But as the taxi swerved further along the road to face the basin differently, another sensation occurred. Now the action had happened. The rocks were in helter-skelter embrace and pursuit of each other until their appearance was blurred in their mad love affair with light and space.

  There was a third vision or sensation as the road swung and they began to ascend. The air seemed saturated by a dream—a film—an almost transparent cloud of dust which came over the rim of the basin and drifted across Namless Theatre. Goodrich felt an irrational correspondence with the “milky way” when the spaces between the stars are filled with a nameless cloud of particles; but now one was looking not up—not vertically into the spaces of night—but horizontally into the spaces of day. The delayed action of the rocks before they plunged possessed its quintessence here: quintessential shock or deliberation of movement, seminal ruin, seminal catastrophe.

  The actual plunge, the helter-skelter mad embrace and wildest conviction of drama, of an action leaving no trace, possessed its quintessence here: quintessential cloud or seminal tree of relief….

  These dual seminal proportions drifted effortlessly now at eye level across Namless Theatre like the epitome of movement or flesh of movement, the quintessential contours of all stages and movements before and after actions and times. In it were the grains of the precipice, Goodrich mused; in it were the grains of relief, self-reversible architectures and collaborative phenomena. It seemed the enduring rising and falling blanket of lost worlds sleeping endlessly, broken endlessly, endlessly over and done with. It seemed also the dream of an unborn, waiting to be born age….

  The ribbon of road along which they travelled continued to ascend gently and after a mile or so, a new almost weighted stillness was added to the presence of the rocks in the basin b
elow; they (the rocks) stood now less upon the rim of the basin and more clearly within the contours of an ancient lake or sea waterless now as a desert. Goodrich was fascinated by this transparent sea within a terrestrial cloud on the bed of which the rocks clustered into cathedrals and palaces, circles of repetitive fate or natural doom. There was a great perhaps terrible charm to that buried rock-city or petrifaction of times from the height they had now reached….

  It came upon him suddenly—this sense of great danger—of a timeless assassin standing at his elbow. There, said the assassin, lie my charmed circles forever and ever….

  And yet as the dark figure addressed him secretly, mockingly, privately (at the heart of his secret book, upon a private page memorized inwardly for insertion into his diary), Goodrich was aware of a deeper enigma, a curious privilege to dream (and to be able to support and unravel the dream) of the assassin. Yesterday perhaps the charm, the terror, the fascination of it might have been insupportable. Today—since his immersion last night in the Samsonian mask of the bull, the curious light upon the horns of the bull—he could endure the danger of coming into the neighbourhood of death-dealing masks and gods.

  He could endure that danger since a quintessential warning kept echoing in his head like an opus contra naturam, an opus contra ritual, an ironic placement and displacement of the sheer natural burden of action—the sheer natural order of love, hate and revenge, parasitic feuds and dooms. It was this quintessential motif inherent to vanished landslides which drew that rock-city or rock-cluster together upon the bed of the sea. In drawing them together therefore something moved, the very stillness still moved endlessly though it appeared to stand contrary to movement itself in monumentalizing a precipitate theme into a stasis of reality.