Companions of the Day and Night
Wilson Harris








"'He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light of the sun and create an obsession with royal sculptures, echoing stone?… It was time to take stock of others as hollow bodies and shelters into which one fell…'"

In "Companions of the Day and Night" (first published in 1975) Wilson Harris revives figures from his earlier "Black Marsden" — chiefly Clive Goodrich, the 'editor' of this text, who constructs a narrative from the papers of a figure known as Idiot Nameless: a wanderer between present and past, taking an Easter sojourn in Mexico that lasts both for days and for centuries. The results have the strangely hypnotic power characteristic of Wilson Harris's fiction.






Wilson Harris




Companions of the Day and Night


For Margaret

and to the memory of B. S. Johnson






COMPANIONS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT

(Idiot Nameless Collection edited by Clive Goodrich)







The above extract from a Folk Song from Puerto Rico was found amongst the Fool’s papers. It was accompanied by the following.

NOTE: In certain parts of Mexico people begin celebrating nine days before Easter and Christmas. As day turns to night the people gather in the square. Then they go from house to house in a long procession. The ceremony is called the Posada. They carry lighted candles.




EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION


It was I should think just under a year after Black Marsden left that I received a number of paintings and sculptures from him which were entitled the “Idiot Nameless Collection”. These were accompanied by voluminous papers and diaries.

I found as I began to study and work on a translation of these into a novel that they were a chronicle of inner and outer treasures — as though the paintings and sculptures to which the writings related were doorways through which Idiot Nameless moved.

They spoke of a hidden nunnery and of some of the nuns who fled to Europe and North America after the revolution in Mexico early in this century. They spoke of the Fool’s arrival in Mexico, of the preparations to go there in which he had been steeped over a great many years condensed into an autumn, winter, spring before the “Easter of man”.

I found that the preparations and researches invoked a distinction between deeds as passive reflections in nature and history and vision as unsuspected, glimpsed proportions through objects of nature and history. This was the fundamental climate of the Idiot Nameless records which I have attempted to be faithful to in the task entrusted to me of translating his writings into a novel.

It has also been essential to obey his preoccupation with the theme of gravity. There was a physical or congenital reason for this preoccupation that discloses itself in the body of his writings. But there was something else that one sees in the landscapes and cultures into which he descends. In what degree are ‘black holes of gravity’ susceptible to interpretation as an area of anxiety in twentieth century man when they come into rapport with pre-Columbian investitures of fear built into sacrifices to a sun that might fall into the ground and never rise again?

Gradually as I worked on my translation the impact the Fool made on me was incredible and enormous.

Perhaps it was the edge of breakdown on which he appeared to hover, remaining however sane, miraculously sane and imbued it seemed to me with an extraordinary spirit of compassion.

My great problem was to edit and re-write a mass of material that spread, as I opened package after package of writings, across my study like a carpet of autumn leaves and bare winter branches pointing to the pyramid of the sun.

A word about the title I have chosen for the novel—Companions of the Day and Night. I adopted this because the diaries possessed a ceaseless interwoven motif drawn from a pre-Columbian calendar — a nine-day cycle (companions of the night) and a thirteen-day cycle (companions of the day). Days Eight and Nine were called Dateless Days (another pre-Columbian calendrical motif) in order to absorb, as it were, into the nine-day cycle the flight of the remaining four days in the thirteen-day cycle.

It is my hope that I may have been able to convey some portion of the magic of reality that swept over me as I descended into the Idiot Nameless Collection.

I confess that I thought I had heard the last of Black Marsden when we parted company in Edinburgh (as related in a previous book).

I had certainly not anticipated receiving from him such a body of materials or of being entrusted with the task of translating them into a novel.

Indeed I wondered at first — was it another aspect of his sardonic humour? Soon, however, I could feel nothing but the mystery of companionship in those pages and of a frightening wisdom they embodied of which a glimpse or two fallen into my own translation would be wealth.

Therefore my first inclination, which was to burn the writings, canvases and sculptures, was soon swallowed up in an emotion of attachment to every scrap of paper, line of paint or nail of wood in a man’s hand that seemed to me in magical contact with the gods.

CLIVE GOODRICH




THE FIRE-EATER CANVASES ANDSCULPTURES (comedies of psyche and the fall of man)


Idiot Nameless arrived in Mexico City just under a fortnight before Easter. A dream he had long entertained and when it happened it seemed both concrete and infinite like a shadow pitted against the sun in shapes of gravity prior to the shape of birth itself.

This desolation of infinite shadow allied to authenticity seemed to be inescapably himself as he stood on the airport waiting to collect a bag. He was astonished at his emotion of descent into a past that seemed his own future.

The bus he caught threaded its way into the city through a square of rotting Spanish houses. The scene changed. A sudden gaiety in the attire of persons on pavements or sidewalks intervened like his own surprised shadow, multiplied, yet rarefied in atmospheric degrees as though to confirm afresh a poignant capacity for self-judgement that enveloped him.




A DOOR INTO THE FORGE OF CREATION


(First Person Narrative in Diary)

I booked into the Gravity Hotel (I had been told it came by this name because of its proximity to the Palace of Fine Arts known to be sinking gradually into an underground lake) and made my way back into the road. I was within a stone’s throw of the Alameda Park (once a market-place in the times of Montezuma) but misread my map and took the opposite direction along the Avenida Juarez.

Night was descending. I came to the junction of Juarez and Reforma, crossed a square and continued on the sidewalk until I was abreast of a dismantled building against which someone stood, someone called to me, with a torch in his hand.

I stopped dead; suddenly I was ill; felt myself slipping, descending into a backwater streaked by its individual setting sun and offset from the wide torrent of the now unreal boulevard streaming with cars I left above or behind.

The hand of time moved. The torch of place moved. The dying sun moved into a mouth that ate fire. I moved to the edge of fire … began to recover … pulled back. I was beginning to recover over aeons of time it seemed from the falling sickness I suffered. (They came in sudden unpredictable spells — these attacks — and were followed by a blending of features which I can only describe as half-reflected deed or object in which I became involved, half-glimpsed unsuspected dimension through the very deed or object….)

I found myself now standing a breath or two away from the head of the fire-eater. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, ghostly features and a hollow page of a face. He drew the sun out of his wide-brimmed hat as if it were a letter of fire. The page of his face stepped back into itself as it wolfed fire, re-wrote itself, revised itself as it disgorged fire. Each written page was a new self-portrait he drew that I assembled in my own heart as companions of the day and night.

I had stepped, according to the jumbled faces I now read, into a nine-day cycle painted on the ground, painted on the pavement of the city. I had been baptised into circular Fool, Clown by a maker of suns…. Baptised, immersed into the descent of a spark as the fire-eater cast his bread on the waters of tradition.

Take painting of self-portrait descent into the First Day by the fire-eater which I began to read in the dying light of the sun. It was stacked into other canvases and sculptures against the broken wall by which we stood. It may have fallen straight out of his wide-brimmed night, brazier of night, to break into sparks that assembled themselves into Montezuma sailing on a canal sunken now under Avenida Reforma. Bread of fire upon the waters of tradition. Sunken waters a long time ago. A long night of history ago before the canals of Tenochtitlan were sealed by the streets, the pavements of the city, the very pavement on which we now stood.

The fire-eater’s sunset seeped through twentieth-century cement and fell upon an ancient stream upon which the Emperor sailed. It was another self-portrait, vast head into which the stream ran. The sun flared, vanished into that forge or head. Then re-appeared like newly aroused fire, newly aroused flood to sprinkle my Fool’s crown.

Thus it was we shared a mutual body of sacrifice arching back across centuries of Christ and Montezuma, conquistadores and emperors, in the name of the dying sun.

Thus it was we awoke with a deep conviction of sailing in space towards the port of love, the port of dawn within the vitals of eclipsed majesty.




THE SECOND DAY (The Door of the Virgin)


The Idiot put his hand on her eyes. They felt sharp. Fine prick of her lashes. Made of bone. Easter sculpture for sale. “Yes,” said the fire-eater with an air of gloom. “Painted, sculpted with precision. Look at those lines. A marvel. Flesh-within-flesh, ghost-within-ghost.” He continued advertising his wares in a singsong voice like a priest chanting. “She’s worth her weight in gold.”

A landscape of times nestled beneath the Idiot’s fingers that smarted now as if they had been burnt by a spark far back in the torch of the day, a pinprick of blood, a pinprick of paint, a pinprick of bone.

“Unfinished,” said the fire-eater apologetically. “Sorry about that.”

Indeed the bones of the virgin were unfinished, the paint not yet dry and the Idiot felt smeared, unclean. As if he had descended by the skin of his teeth into an ageless material hollow, the marks of which he carried on his hands as she (the virgin) bore it in her eyes.

Preparations for Easter were now in full swing. Models were on parade of Christ and his disciples. Temporary and makeshift perhaps. It did not matter. The cathedrals were already stacked to the brim with golden, silver treasures.

The sensation he had had of descending into stream or forge was a disease that seemed part and parcel of the constitution of nature itself (baptism by the elements, coercion of spaces) as far back as he could remember. The impression would grow from within that some strange place he encountered was in fact strangely familiar (as if he had been there before, had been dipped into it before) or — even more alarming — that some familiar place he had come to was wholly strange, he had never been addressed by it before.

He would arrive at the end of a road that branched in two directions — science and art (the science of a map, on one hand, the architecture or styles of subjective arrangement on the other) and would find himself afflicted by a sensation that both branches of the road and the very place on which he stood were unknown to him; one branch led into a hole in the ground, into untapped resources of energy or untapped resources of extinguished time, the other into a cloak or body sacrificed to the sun, into the end of time itself or the genesis all over again of light …

Then with an effort of concentration he would roll up the scene again around him into a stable element he recalled now like the back of his hand. But stable as it was he could not banish the accumulative taste of what had been occurring across a lifetime now of passion of the senses — if passion it was — taste or feeling or passionate immersion in a line of paint, wood, earth, stone as the threshold of vulnerable, glorious flesh-and-blood — in her eyes (the fire-eater’s virgin), on his tongue (the fire-eater’s tongue), in his fingertips (Idiot fingertips).

He walked into them and they into him as into blind rooms of mysterious community in which science and art were two sides of nameless potentialities reflected/glimpsed that made the shape of each body, each room already subtly different to what one thought it was.

An Easter procession was approaching. “If you join them,” said the fire-eater smiling at the Fool, “they will take you to a church in which the carving of Christ hanging over the altar is mine, my handiwork.” He spoke with pride then shrugged. “As for her,” he pointed to the virgin, “they (the church) commissioned her of me but they rejected her in the end. Poor fools,” he spoke with a touch of rage. “Perhaps you would care … She’s worth her weight in gold. And another thing you will find her …”

“Find her …?”

“My model, sir. The woman who posed for this. She’s my artist’s model. The best in these parts. She’s there now. In the procession. Look …”

But before he could look the procession had moved hotly upon him and the Idiot was swept into a stream, an eye floated here, a face rose up there, a coat, a cap, swept into a flood of features that drew him to the Door of the Absent Virgin as the church was called.

Once inside he saw the Christ of which the fire-eater had spoken blazing in the air that was so hot now, so close, he felt faint. He recalled, as he began to melt into the ground, as he knelt on the ground, the pride with which the fire-eater had spoken. It was, beyond a shadow of doubt, a majestic self-portrait. Yet it spoke of a vulnerable god, of his rage, his desire for a rejected goddess, an absent goddess.

It spoke of an all-consuming spring, fascinated fires of youth, the intense spring of man when the arm of a goddess, her leg, her face, enmeshes him. And the chain of fire within him/within her confirms all that is intimate, all that is unbearable, within his reach, beyond his reach. His presence. Her absence. Worth her weight in gold. He felt crushed. The Fool felt crushed. Crushed by that blaze, that fury in the sky. Except for a spark. Spark of blood. Spark of paint. Pigmentation of man. Was it taste or tastelessness to be born of a woman, baked in an oven? The fire-eater’s rage was the Idiot’s spark, the fire-eater’s rage the mystery of love, the fire-eater’s all-consuming humanity the mystery of hate.

The afternoon began to grow dark, to grow susceptible to his spark as if the blaze of Christ above, high in the church, had become a torch in the Idiot’s hand at the bottom of the world to illumine again the vessel of an emperor. And that illumination, that reflection were a door through which to descend still further beneath imperial shadow into rejected abysses, rejected goddesses, sacrificed priestess under the floor of the church. Long, long ago when her flesh was the bread of spring.

Hollow brimming flesh. The Idiot looked up (or was it down?) at the fire-eater’s beard which was suddenly black, kissed by a balloon that rose above the altar into the church.

He turned his head to the procession to see who was responsible. A child. His balloon. He was paying it out like a kite from a ball of twine in his hand and his face was wrinkled with pleasure, the enormity of pleasure a child sees in the incongruity of making contact with the gods.

There she was. Almost on the heels of the child — huntress and hunted — yes — unmistakably — there she was. The woman of whom the artist had spoken when he said “Look”. He perceived her now. She saw him now.

Perhaps it was a state of mind, quiescence, flotation after a hectic age of light. He could see now why the fire-eater needed her as the reflection of his need.

He could see now why he needed her. It was as if they were flowing together across a pool, a black-bearded pool towards an inimitable spark of tenderness. And it was with gratitude he rose to his feet, called to her, held her. Wandered the streets together. It was past midnight when they came up to his room in Gravity Hotel; two figures/survivors from a long vanished age it seemed. He switched on the light. She was still there, solid as gold. High cheekbones, dark skin, dark hair, pencilled in space that broke her solidity and gave him hope. Hope of subsistence, hope for a future. Penetration of goddess. Penetration of paradise.

*

I was alone when I awoke. Not lonely. Alone. She had been here. I would find her again. I would fall into privacy and security through interchangeable doors of absence and presence, rejection and acceptance. It was a beginning … the beginning of the radiant city.

I recalled the church the afternoon before; kneeling before the rail beneath the majestic portrait of Christ.

There was a hollow brimming lake under my knees.

I saw a balloon rise into the air. A child’s universe.

Then she came. I rose from my knees and we left together.

The light I had switched on when we got back to my hotel was burning still. Proof she had been here if proof were needed. Spark of tenderness, splinter, bone, flesh, illumined spectre of time. Womb of space.

How beautiful she had been. Pitiful too. Yet glittering, pitiless, robed in flesh. It had been raining when we got in. Naked eyes, glistening (as she undressed) arms, hips. The nipples on her breasts were black and the hair against her thighs shivered to a razor’s edge of light on the bed in the room. Perhaps despite everything, everything I felt now, it remained a cruel ecstasy, a cruel morning, a cruel sun as the aftertaste of rage I had not yet dispelled in the name of god. In the name of solid fire (solid door), in the name of solid earth (solid door), in the name of solid water, solid air (solid door), in the name of solid whore susceptible to all rejected visions, rejected mankind. I felt as if there was sand in my eyes. Fallen a great distance into the door of the sea. Or into a desert. A high wind, a fleeting glimpse…. Alone. I would find her again.




THE THIRD DAY (High Wind)


He felt, as he dressed that morning, the first intimations of having been thrust into a high dangerous wind that unsettled the state of the world. He needed to see her again. He needed to hold her again. How close did one come to the madonna as rejected commission of an age through ex-priestesses of forgotten cults, not only buried cults, drowned cults, but post-revolutionary, post-Christian hidden cults?

The conversation they had had (as between naked body and naked mind) still lingered in his head. Artist’s model. Fastidious as a nun. It seemed to someone like him (in search of a cure for his disease) a bizarre repudiation of paranoia through the displacement of opposite projections. In short (the Idiot scrupulously shaved) the new fall of man.

It was, she had said, the time of the year when the trees that lined the avenue to San Francisco Convent were streaming and bent high in the air, half-blown to kingdom come. If he wanted to meet her again he must go there and reconnoitre the neighbourhood. She lived within a stone’s throw of that avenue on the road from Mexico City to Cholula.

He hired a car and drove along the Insurgentes North past a modern railway station and social security hospital towards the Shrine of Guadeloupe. A sprinkle of rain fell out of a faint sky misty with pollution. The yellow Basilica loomed, fell behind.

He drove now through the edges of parkland — a rolling countryside of brown, grey hills with clumps of dark green wood. The sprinkle of rain ceased. A lorry was speeding in the distance upon a lane or track off the main road. Trailing dust.

He drew up at the roadside. Consulted his map. Had taken the long way round, needed to go right, join the Avenida Consulado.

There was an old road that ascended into the Sierra Madre and fell to Cholula.

Once again he was sailing through a dust-ridden landscape plotted with occasional fields, mounds, painted with deep shadow. The land was rising into higher altitudes. The thin mist was lifting now and there swirled far away that high wind unsettling the globe. Bones. Earth. Epitaph the Idiot wore in his head. Snow-epitaph far above upon the tops of ancient volcanoes, perhaps long extinct, the Sleeping Lady and Popocatapetl. It was time to lay aside for a while his hair of waving wood, dust-swirled reminiscences of terrestrial lakes, and to replace it with pine. Snow-cloud and pine. Sharp scent, sharp heights of pine. Time to bow to the Sleeping Lady and Popocatapetl the Warrior.

A truncated pyramid of landscape man Popocatapetl was. Deprived of a skull. Yet as the high wind swirled in the Idiot’s head an interchangeable epitaph was blown there towards him of shadow and light that turned outer absence into inner presence, rose backwards upwards into a fabric of glaciated sun or gigantic crystal hollow in space, volcanic skull, Aztec, Mixtec. Warrior. Priest. Displacement of opposites.

He drew up now upon a bridge and looked across a ravine into distances that concealed a memorial to Cortez erected within the pass he had taken four and a half centuries ago within the Sleeping Lady and her Warrior/Priest.

From there the conquistadores possessed their first view of Tenochtitlan shining in its lake. From there they began to descend into interchangeable vocations, Christ and Conqueror.

Twentieth-century Fool bore all this in the hand with which he stabbed the place now like a backward door into time. Winced to an invisible wire in his blood. Invisible wire or prick of bone in the fire-eater’s commission of virgin landscape.

Wire. Bone. Something coiling and glancing through him into Sleeping Spaces, Possessed Spaces, Dispossessed Spaces …

Sensation of a code, indefinable, implacable that conditioned the hand, the eye, the senses, one’s responses to a pebble, a fence, a mountainside that seemed there, given timelessly, forever now what they always were. Until one glimpsed one had been coded into it, into place and time like an involuntary puppet of subjective destiny — into the ground one trod that other men had shaped and trodden long long ago; into the road on which the Idiot drove that other men had driven like shepherds under flocks of cloud; into the bridge across the ravine set at a certain angle of sacrificed spaces time wore on its back.

It was this instinct, this passion for reversible objectivity/subjectivity at the heart of the world (man-made? god-made? nature-made?) that wired each bulb into epitaphs of place to flash a message through Idiot Skull.

*

The descent along the old road to Cholula — through a wide landscape pitted by shadow — drew one down into the battledress of approaching Easter.

Propped against a wall was a blood-bespattered Christ on its way to the Convent of San Francisco. The outlines of a chasm, a ditch, stood at its feet into which it seemed about to fall as if it had been riddled for that purpose by an invisible firing squad.

Its descent to the Convent lay, therefore, through a climax of dust that dozed in the sun. Path downwards as well as forwards into pointillist brides of space susceptible to Christ. The Convent of San Francisco was now a church. It may have once been an actual convent but with the revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century nunneries and monasteries had been banned by the state.

Some had therefore converted themselves into churches and chapels.

Others (such as the hidden Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla) had resisted the ban, concealed themselves for a number of years until they could no longer do so when they had become museums or vanished into oblivion.

And there were curious ironies, unconscious parallels and pits in that subjective/objective landscape of opposite tendencies. There were post-revolution convents that seemed to sink when their end came into excavations that had recently commenced, after centuries of eclipse, into preConquest Toltec shrines concealed in mounds and hills.

The strange humour of Christ lay in this, in susceptible spaces, susceptible executions, susceptible carvings, susceptible resurrections and descent into apparent oblivion, apparent nakedness woven into the intuitive chasm of his world.

Everything there could be taken for granted. Nothing there could be taken for granted. And it was this combination of levels, levels of open disguise that gave him the magic of universality — gave him a body susceptible to intelligences and bullets as it was to fatalistic love and unsuspected corridors, underseas, undersides, of creation.

Was unfrocked space his? Was unfrocked nun his? Had he consented to a new kind of nakedness or a new kind of proportion?

Idiot Nameless asked himself these questions as if he were descending into his own past life, past lives (it seemed), preparations, adventures, excesses, crimes of love. It was a peculiar self-accusation but it ran true to a susceptibility to adventure as a mirror of callousness, a mirror of fathoms created and explored in which began the concealment of brides of passion to whom he was to return later through other lives as if these could restore his own rejected premises. Or was it murdered premises, the art of murder and love, from which an overspill of emotion engendered seas, oceans, air, rivers, lands as the burial place and cradle of endless apparitions of guilt, glory, compassion?

Idiot Nameless followed at a snail’s pace in his car the procession of bullet-ridden Christ to San Francisco Convent.

He was stunned by a sensation of mutual disguise, mutual nakedness enveloping him in the faces of the people in that procession. Hewn blood. Solid and dark as though a self-created tree or wall drew each to the other inch by inch into bed, ditch, unfrocked space.

Did earth fall into air, air into sky, sky into a hollow to make seas, lands, mountains over which one marched, moved like self-executed premises in one’s head, self-executed marriages?

For a while it seemed as he crawled inch by inch along the road that god dozed in his wheels and in the shuffling feet of innumerable peasants, until all at once they had reached the avenue that led to the Convent and one was aware of the trees, tall trees whose topmost branches were bent and streaming in the wind.

It always blew, he had been told by the fire-eater’s model, for a week or so at this time of the year.

This was the place then.

He would need to scout for her in the immediate neighbourhood.

What a marvellous old façade seemed all at once to float under the trees as he drew close to the church — squares or tiles, square inches of summer and autumn and winter and spring multiplied and rare.

The whiteness of the sun blazed at the tops of the trees. The stream of the wind blazed in the tops of the trees.

A woman came out of the church. There was dust on her lips. A square inch of thin dust.

He almost swore it was she and a dry sensation crossed his lips before they could melt into hers. But he was mistaken. She was not the woman he was looking for. Their gaze locked, broke and the stem of expectation he had shared for a sun-locked moment with her broke into areas of human drought. Inimitable drought. Inimitable lips … Inimitable dust of a trodden moment, a trodden flower.




THE FOURTH DAY (Unfrocked Spaces)


The Fool made a perfunctory estimate of holes in his chest as they bore Christ through the façade of the seasons — nine bullets in all.

The first two were already spent as interchangeable balloons (pyramid of earth? pyramid of moon?).

And the third brought him to the brink of descending into an unfamiliar bed or chart.

He secured a room in a lodging house, fell into bed, sun-drenched sleep, dreamed he was a man floating on a log. Then he became the log.

A log may drift back into the past, preparations for a journey, shores of the past, self-executed marriages.

Ages past condensed into an autumn bride. Autumn crime. Crime of love.

It was autumn, the Idiot dreamt, an autumn spent hollowing a canvas of space, hollowing oceans on which to sail, hollowing sky within which to fly to Mexico; hollowing evolutions of murder and sacrifice through which to carve a queen of beauty and sorrow in the edges of copper, gold and scarlet leaves carpeting the globe.

Edge of autumn sacrifices, autumn globe within which to sculpt tranquillity, carve immortality. Edge of autumn bride through which to turn again to penetrated tranquillity, penetrated immortality as the blood of expiring calendar rising up into the depths of a sea upon which to sail, turbulence of sea. Creation of horizons, frontiers through enraged premises that become a code of conflict and splendour written into reflections of security.

A log may reflect a leaf, caress a leaf, paint a leaf in the illegality of conquest like a god who begins to sail through ordinary flesh-and-blood towards the execution of hollow spaces to encompass seas. Towards the execution of commodities of love afar off on distant carpeted shores. Intangible layer upon layer of love of commodity under his hand. Scent, animality, wondrous texture, whore of a leaf, whore of a butterfly.

*

Late afternoon of a god the Idiot dreamt. Sacrificed angel pinned to the sky. Reflected wings buried in the sky. Glimpsed pride and guilt as commodities of love.

“The art of murder”, the Idiot said to the angel in his bed, “is the art of love of heaven too through winged premises. Have I not buried you in the sky as I secreted you in the sea? A tree may fly with a leaf and flash its skin, secrete its animal, secrete its darknesses. All these prospects and more add up to executions and menaces buried in wings of time, wings of space …”

He laughed now to dispel a mist, scarlet leaf, copper, gold. He felt the breath of her wings as they fluttered on his lips like a dust cloud, arched themselves into a mellow camouflage, mellow sky at the edge of the sea.

“One dies or kills with the dying year in order to pursue what one prizes, an inimitable equation between life and death …”

The dream faded and the Idiot awoke in a sharp tree of morning light that ran from him across the Mexican sky. Unfrocked angel. It was a beginning … the beginning of the kingdom of light … the beginning of glimpsed proportions, unsuspected proportions … the beginning of a kind of “aloneness”. ALONE

“How should one put it?” the Idiot thought (as he shaved). “Fourth Day in a novel-gospel? Gospel of the Fool?”

Fourth Day of glimpsed proportions perhaps within accumulated levels of sacrifice over unconfessed ages, unconfessing ages. The new fall of man. The aloneness of man.

“I like that,” the Idiot reflected. “Suits me.” He was invaded all at once by an immense sadness, the sister of compassion.

He finished his shaving, ate breakfast and set out to meet the guide Hosé he had secured for the day’s expedition.

Amazing how the sun in this sky sometimes seemed to stand straight up, to suspend one straight up until one felt quite safe, quite well.

And if one fell it was into a pillow of earth newly painted and translated out of the depths of a sky one had oneself hollowed or dug.

Why had he come to this part of the world to live, perhaps to die.? It was a sudden question out of the blue, that hit him like gunfire without rhyme or reason at a stroke, stroke of pen, stroke of a brush as the fire-eater would say.

Somewhere in the composition of his days lay the enigmatic reply. To find an equation between revolution and religion, to face a firing squad.

Stark equation, perhaps, and it left him with a sense of anti-climax, of desolation of premises.

The fire-eater’s model lived in this area. Think of that. Everyone knew. He knew as he absorbed an emotional gunflash that seemed to come out of nowhere into the pit of his stomach.

What no one knew as yet — what he had not whispered to himself as yet in the pages he had written — was that he had planned, in any case, to come here. Long before he met her. He had planned it in London and New York. He was looking for the foundations of a vanished nunnery in these parts that may have been blown sky-high or lake-deep.

There was another hidden convent close at hand in Puebla (the hidden Convent of Santa Monica it was called) which was well known to travellers and their guides alike and this had been converted into a museum. Whereas the vanished order he sought might never have existed for all the world knew and it was this, those lost vocations, with implications beyond a dead past, a dead future in the museum of the mind, which drew him to the spot, this very spot perhaps, within the globe.

Yes, he could see reason in all this. Legitimate reasons, hopes, ambitions. Except that now he felt illegitimate, desolated. Something had happened to him, something to do with the woman he had picked up or by whom he had been picked up the day after he arrived in Mexico City; something that made him question his own motives now in coming to a site he intended to visit all along but which in a flash shrank into nothing it seemed as he dreamt brutally, vividly of possessing the woman again. It was a repudiation of himself on one level and confirmation at the same time of compulsions that ran deeper than plans like an inexplicable tide embodied in action.

And having confessed it, having implied it openly now he felt himself falling anew into the site (chosen site?), into re-arranged naked premises, re-arranged naked features, rearranged exposures of the susceptibility of the future to the past …

There was a rumour he had heard, or she had whispered to him, that she was related to a nun …

Buried in that thought it came almost as a shock to feel a sleeve brushing against him. Hosé the guide had appeared. The Idiot turned and saw he was smiling. A cold smile he felt. Like someone in a frame of mind perhaps at this moment which made him distant, which drew him to stand with one foot in the grave, the other in the past. Was it the style of his dress? Or the length of his hair, the trim of his beard?

The Fool saw now he had not taken him in quite like this before when they met and discussed the present expedition. It was his dress perhaps, the sense of involuntary fashion, involuntary time-lag, a cruel past, a cruel present.

Late twentieth-century man dressed in early twentieth-century obsessions.

Early twentieth-century obsessions dressed in late nineteenth-century paint.

Late nineteenth-century paint dressed in early nineteenth century hate.

Early nineteenth-century hate dressed in late eighteenth-century skin.

Skin-within-glove-within-skin …

Was it the length of his beard or the rings he wore on his hands?

A man of seventy stockily built (peasant? aristocrat?). Either way both feet in the past.

Guide-within-paint-within-obsession …

“How alone would one be,” the Idiot murmured, “if one saw one’s obsessions, glimpsed one’s susceptibilities (age to age, future to past)? How alone.?”

“How alone.?” the guide echoed.

The Idiot saw his lips move to a painted lesson, as if he were repeating a parrot’s tongue. As if he were immersed in the living fate of all guides into the past — to which one succumbs — to settle for the past as if it were the moral paint and skin of the present, as if the past reflected in the present had no bearing on the present except to adorn the present with facts, figures, appearances, commodities of love like a solid unbroken mirror through which one glimpses nothing but reflects everything.

“Oh my god, Hosé,” said the Fool. “I feel suddenly naked and yet it is possible to be naked and not to be alone. To be dressed naked which is a monstrous self-deception.”

“Are you quite well sir?”

“I felt…. Oh nothing. It will pass. I am glad you have come.”

“It’s a bit of a tramp sir. That wood. Over there. I know these parts like the back of my hand. I am sorry to see you fell. Your knees are all muddy. There was rain last night. Are you sure you still want to go.?”

“Quite sure. Yes I slipped. It’s nothing really. I did mention yesterday, Hosé, that I am curious about an artist’s model who lives in this area. Perhaps you may know of her.”

“Are you a reporter sir?”

“In a manner of speaking yes. I suppose I am.”

“I am glad. You see we have wondered for some months if anyone would come. She deserves to be remembered. A great lady.”

“Great lady? Remembered?” The Idiot was confused.

“Why,” said the guide. “I thought you knew. She died last autumn.”

“That is impossible. I slept — that is, I was with her a couple of nights ago.”

The guide stopped for an instant. His eyes flicked over the Idiot’s face with an edge of rage, edge of resentment for the first time. “I am referring to Sister Beatrice,” he said stiffly, “who died last autumn. You must be referring to her granddaughter.” The resentment remained though on the surface it had faded. “I am sorry, sir. We are at cross-purposes I see. I thought you knew of Sister Beatrice when you spoke of the vanished convent. She was a young woman — hardly more than twenty-five I would say — when the hidden convent was exposed. That would be fifty years ago perhaps. The other nuns fled. Some to Europe. Some to the States.”

“I have met one or two”, said the Idiot, “before I came here.”

“She remained. And began …” he spoke in a smooth voice now, “to involve herself in the rituals of the day.” He paused. “An artist’s model if you like to refer to her as that. It was she who dressed herself up as Christ — yes, Christ, imagine that — in his bullet-ridden vest for the very first time. A dangerous thing for a woman to do. She was seized, exposed in the procession. And raped.”

The word “raped” rang through the wood and possessed for the Idiot the force of terror — naked force, catastrophic aloneness — but on the lips of the guide it seemed nothing but a bridge he embodied unthinkingly across a stream over which the Christ Nun moved for him as if she were reflected naked, dressed in the callous of the day, her skin. Mirrored callous. Mirrored dress. Commerce of soul.

Once again the Fool was displaced by senses of standing abreast of his age (and therefore about fifty years ahead of his time), stripped of callouses, utterly alone, horribly aware how vulnerable it was to be truly exposed …

“As for the granddaughter,” the guide spoke with rising tongue, “I hope you’ll forgive me if I say it. She is accursed. Nothing but a whore. Artist’s model indeed. Nothing like her grandmother. She’s a whore I tell you. There’s neither glory nor money in it for her. Who would pose as ex-priestess, ex-virgin, god knows what, for nothing—except the child of a child bornfrom rape?”

The Fool stopped. He had suffered an assault. How to begin … how to begin he cried inwardly — how to begin to repudiate the devil? “I take it,” he said as if he were speaking from a great distance with another man’s cracked lips, “I take it Hosé you were a young man when it happened.”

“Happened? What happened?”

“To the young nun. Dressed as Christ. Raped. Exposed.”

The guide looked suddenly virulent, inquisitorial. “Yes,” he cried. “She should never have done it. A mere strip of a woman playing such a part. A violent part. A man’s part. She should never have done it. Why even today …” he stopped. Bewildered. Aware he had said what he had never intended to say.

“I wonder”, said the Idiot under his breath, “of whom do you now speak, of grandmother or of granddaughter?”

“What did you say?” cried the guide. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“A great lady sir. It was she who instituted the play and procession you saw when you arrived. And the rumours you hear …” he stopped.

“What rumours?”

“That after that, after she was raped, it was she who seduced a Fool each year to play the part (went into the city and brought him back) — the stories are entirely false and without foundation. It’s the granddaughter who has put those rumours about. She’s mad.”

“A Fool? Each year? What I saw yesterday was a log of a tree, all carved …”

“For a time”, said the guide softly, “it used to be a man, a man with real feelings. But it made things ugly. She had nothing to do with that. She had learnt her lesson. And it was just as indecent having a man as a woman to play the part. She had nothing to do with that. We honour her today as the patroness of Christ and the firing squad. That’s all. It’s a monument, sir, her monument.”

All at once the Idiot found it difficult to know whether he felt pity, contempt or admiration for Hosé. In some quite astonishing and extraordinary way he was proving an admirable guide and the origins of the play (the procession) which the Fool had witnessed, into which he had been drawn, were displaying themselves now through him, through the very prejudices he embodied.

Why should he not seek to protect the reputation of ideal monument or “great lady”? Why should he not express his aversion for what seemed to him the violence to which she had given birth as distinct from the heroism she had cultivated? Why should he not seek to preserve a distinction between grandmother and granddaughter as between the preservation of an art (money and glory) and the life-blood of an art (scorn of money and glory)?

Were these not legitimate question to frame of illegitimate sanctity that came to an unconscious head in the prejudices of Hosé?

If Hosé had seemed to him a moment or two ago the very devil himself in respectable dress now it was the Fool who saw for himself the necessity to descend into hell in naked dress if one were to preserve heaven — to descend into hell as terrifying compassion and a capacity to entertain all guides, to be tolerant of all roles, without which the very origins of detachment, the very dress of perfection (like a beautiful body on the cover of a book) would lack the edges of resentment, the edges of callous fury or callous lust that made it priceless as the irony of a pearl in a marketplace of sorrows, of abused flesh-and-blood. Such was the drama of pitiless/pitiful humanity.

They were descending now into a hollow in the ground within which an old wall, an old building, crouched in the earth.

“There it is,” said the guide. “I have tried to scrape some fragments together. To scrape bits and pieces together in which to house a portrait of Sister Beatrice. She was the one who remained when the others fled. It’s not really finished, the portrait, done under stress, I fear, half-a-century ago. But it is possible to make something out of it I think — the seed of a place to which people may be drawn in years to come. And if you give your assistance sir — if you write something — I am sure …”




THE FIFTH DAY (Rape of the Winter Bride)


Perhaps every man knows he is being dreamt into existence by others, conceived by others; a sense in which he likewise dreams others into existence as husband/father to places and times, as Fool to every ghost-child he entertains or hunts for with pitiful, pitiless ambition. A sense in which every revolution of the hunt, every religion of the sexes, is related to a potentiality for child-bearing, ghost-bearing, capsules of ambition — the unborn child/ghost of hope for some, the never-to-be-born child/ghost of aborted future for others. Related therefore to a ceremony of expectations and of silent mourning concealed perhaps from oneself but active in every career night and day as fate.

And, in some degree, in the circuit of his travels as nameless child or clown to himself (as to others) the conception of ghostly born/unborn selves everyman possesses may fade into a deeper hollow of longing or animal ground or brighten into a blindness of reality and animal sun.

That hollow of longing may signify the strength of particular memories of the chase so strong they blot out everything else. That sun may signify the bullet of a particular morning of the chase so deep it appears central to the mystery of the animal of god one is.

Monument of a subconscious conception of wholeness — vulnerable parts, alarming roles played by respectable idols — with which the Fool lived as if it were his daily bread of fire that left him hollow and susceptible to nameless others.

He returned to his lodgings after his day in the wood; masked he felt, possessed of roles that led into the dead past and into the unconscious future …

He fell into bed and dreamt again he was a man on a log. He became that sculptured log. A log must learn to bleed, to fly, to be an animal. Hare of god. Autumn hare. Winter hare. Spring hare.

He looked back, it seemed, through the unfrocked spaces of that hare of dreams to a winter of preparations for flight…. Knocked at the sky, hare of a sky, animal board.

Rapped and shivered. Cold. Cobbled street. Was it an old part of an old town in Europe of which he dreamt? A monk’s body, a monk’s retreat, a monk’s self-portrait?

The door opened and a porter appeared who led him into a blazing studio, blazing fire, took his coat and gloves …

Alone. It was an hour or two past noon. The winter sky was glinting on the windowpane with the ice and the fire he felt in his blood, in his bones. Whiteness, sharpness, thickness as if one could slice into a beautiful half-misted world as into something invisibly hooded, invisibly black.

His glance turned now inwards, towards the dumb furniture in the room, heavy, dark. Head nodding. The room was warm, beautiful fire. A solid mourning language lay everywhere. He stirred, got up. Moved over to an easel which was turned away from him. A startling canvas. The Winter Hare (it was called). An enormous painted hare adorned with … he could not be absolutely sure … the paint was blurred … were they a man’s testicles?

A ghost of a hand ran between its legs with a thorn. Thorn of love? Thorn of hate? Thorn of accumulated longing?

The Fool retreated, resumed his chair and let his head fall deep into a huge desk, an enormous coffin. It was a curious room. There were Bibles, prayerbooks and a number of Mexican ornaments, calendars and effects that seemed to lift the room into space like a mid-Atlantic cabin suspended between Europe and Central America.

Far below on the skin of the ocean was inscribed the hand with the thorn … burning eyes … The Fool’s eyes were closed … He was asleep … Buried in the structure of a thorn that pricked his eyeballs …

“Sorry to have kept you waiting,” came a deep voice like a wave upon the floor.

The Idiot stirred, pulled his head up. He was asleep. Buried in the structure of a thorn that encompassed his head. For weeks now he had been burning the proverbial midnight candle, researching, writing up his papers, anticipating the pyramid of the sun, the vanished foundations of the moon, anticipating lakes and skies, haloes and furnaces.

It was all he could do to struggle to his feet.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t get up. I am sorry I am late. But it has been an effort to get here and I do want …” Her voice was trailing away and the Idiot was filled by a confused stab, a look of importunity, a plea to him not to abandon her so quickly, that ran close to the light of jeopardy in the painted hare.

He knew his sensations were irrational, that they sprang from the borderline of sleep (or of death) as though he were dead (or she was dead) though they were self-evidently alive.

Sister Joanna was a woman in her middle eighties. It was a long time, an age or two perhaps, since her flight from Mexico and her abandonment of an active vocation in the Catholic Church though in fact she had been active, in a different way, as an ex-nun who drove herself into good deeds, numerous charities and social works. Her reputation as a good woman, a woman of good deeds, was known to all.

“It was kind of you”, he said, “to agree to see me. I wrote … I cannot remember when it was …”

“Just under a fortnight,” she said. “And I replied immediately making this appointment. I was sure then I could help you. And I felt today somehow, in spite of much that has happened to me since then, I could not let you down. I am an old woman and I have learnt now that a single minute, a day could turn into a signal compression of all our years, a signal plea. It’s the Mexican ritualist coming out. I am half Mexican.”

Her voice was much stronger now, half self-mocking, half deadly serious, and the oppressive sensation the Idiot had had at first of a formidable gulf between them, between her habit and his time, began to lapse into the irony of communication. She had become his echoing target, a voice that stood within him and confronted him with its inner face to his inner face, its outer death to his inner life (his inner journey).

“I am planning some research,” he said, “as I explained in my letter, into post-Christian ages, post-Christian foundations …” The words seemed heavy on his lips. Sculptured lips.

“Ah,” she said. “I can tell you about my own order. You will find in the end that what matters is a capacity to revise all your plans — however painful that may be — day to day — to respond without bitterness to self-contradictory tongues that speak with the voices of saints, devils and angels all rolled into one. I wish I had remained in Mexico. She did.”

The Idiot’s curiosity was aflame. “Why did she?”

“It’s a long, long story, young man. Her youth for one thing. We were ten, fifteen years older than she. And women are by training conservative. She saw darkly the need for an equation …”

“Between revolution and religion.”

“You have put the words into my lips, young man. Into my dead lips. For I am dead, my Fool, you are alive.”

“Do you think she succeeded?” the Idiot cried as if possessed by the dream, the language of a dream-play. Or as if he were deaf to her humour. How could she be dead and still speak to him except there was a mythical logic to deafness, to blindness, inserted into the spectre of order?

“She tried …” the voice was fading into a myth.

“Tried? Tried what?”

The voice returned with a struggle—“She saw what was pressing upon us. Beyond words. She tried to face a future everyone feared or shrank from. And I believe her trial counts in the end more than any success I have had.” Sister Joanna’s voice was shaking a little. There were tears in her eyes and the Idiot noted the texture of her skin, rather chapped, even coarse, and yet imbued with a kind of strength, a fabric that resisted to the end as if it were trembling on the edge of its grave.

“I know”, she continued with a surge of power, “that Beatrice may appear to have achieved little. The old walls she prized — we all prized — crumbled before her eyes. And in some quarters her legacy is viewed as dubious, even scandalous. I am told she instituted a new procession, a dream-play, and in the beginning there were elements in it which were deplorable and savage. I have heard all this. And other things have been kept from my ears. You see I correspond with one Hosé. He should prove an excellent guide. I know — I am sure of it — the seed she has sown is terribly, terribly important …”

“I do not follow,” said the blind Fool. “You are the one who, in practical terms, has achieved good works. You have done good. Not a breath of scandal attaches to you. Whereas she … What has she achieved? I am astonished …”

Sister Joanna gave a slightly abrupt, slightly coarse laugh like the latch of a window which the wind blows loose so that it rattles in the throat of space as it speaks.

The Idiot stirred, half waking.

“Remember,” she said. “Mark my words. You will revise your plans when you arrive. As I have come to revise in a flash, at the last moment, my estimate of every good performance I have given. All in the light of her scandal …” She was laughing still. Then she seemed to fade a little, grow still save for her voice which rose again out of the dumb furniture of place as though intent on its disconsolate, painful confession. “If I have done a useful body of work I am glad of it but I have no wish to erect a monument. It would be wrong to do so when this house (it has been my asylum) is the monument, the base for my good works in a country that is still by and large homogeneous and Christian rather than heterogeneous and post-Christian. The house by the way is run by a very strange man, a Father Marsden. And he and I worship good deeds though he knows as well as I that in Europe — with its long tradition of Christian charity — good works seem easier to perform than in other parts of the world we have known. More natural in performance, shall I say, and less imbued with contempt, of which we may be wholly unconscious, for the poor.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean there is a well-defined, a finished doctrine in Europe — though one is aware of new questions now being asked — that clears the decks for a vision of compassion in action. A metaphysic has been ironed out, fought over for centuries, and finally established lucid and firm for all to obey.

“This, in my experience, is not the case in Mexico (or in the lands south of Mexico) where a cleavage exists within the ethics of sacrifice entertained by divided civilisations, different cultures rooted in pre-Columbian, post-Columbian worlds, pre-revolutionary, post-revolutionary states. And within that cleavage action is largely meaningless until one strips away from it a body of encrusted habit that trades on the exploitation of culture by culture. Indeed action has become a bureaucratic succession of callouses between man and man. A technique, a technicality, nothing more. Except, of course, that there is pity, the obscurity of pity, which moves one man to reach out to another as though for a moment or two they lose themselves and become naked souls.”

“And don’t you feel”, said the Fool dimly conscious of his and her frustrations now, “that this is true of Europe and America too?”

“Not in the same way,” she said. Then paused. “I do not know. I have already tried to explain. Did you not hear me? What I do feel now”, her voice was struggling to maintain its paradox, its force like a displaced sibylline feud of pride and prejudice, “is that her trial of values, her scandal, her supreme trial of values, her supreme scandal, is the exposure of a dead world dressed in all the garments of history and even now — at this late stage — it has led me to conceive, miraculously conceive …”

“Conceive what?”

“Has driven me—forced me to conceive …”

“Force? Do you know what you are saying? Force is rape.”

“Forced me to conceive.”

“Conceive what? Conceive what Sister Joanna?”

“To conceive, as if for the first time, the very earth in which I lie, into which I run …”

The voice was running now, flying, running into the structure of a thorn that blazed in the Fool’s eyes as if lightning midnight candle flashed.

As if her eyes/his eyes had kissed and then parted into a door, into a sky that stood between them now.

The Idiot half-stirred, half-woke to the fact, the dream-fact, that he stood in the street, cobbled street, that he had lifted the knocker and struck the door once, carved into a thorn. He lifted it again, rapped, knocked.

“Good afternoon sir,” said the porter.

“Good day,” said the Fool. “I have an appointment with Sister Joanna. My name is Nameless.”

The porter regarded him closely. “Sir,” he said. “She died.” It was the hard almost off-hand way in which he said “died” that grounded the dream-wire, dream-fact, into an electric circuit that drew to earth the mid-Atlantic cabin in which Sister Joanna had stood.

A dumb flash enveloped the scene like the distant gunfire of a heart. Failed heart, stopped heart.

“It was quite sudden sir. A couple of days ago. Father Marsden was out. I was in the studio with her. I had brought her a letter. She opened it, began to peruse its contents and collapsed — as if she had been shot. Turned to me and said something about a shock, a friend, the death of a dear old friend. All there she said in the letter. Then she cried something that sounded like Merde. Or it could have been Mardie. ‘Merde, Mardie, I want to confess. Who will hear my confession?’ Imagine that. Confess! What had she to confess? A saintly old lady like that. The best, the most good. And yet I fear there was something she needed to say for she haunts the place now …”

The distant gunfire was fading as the troops of death receded, across earth and sea and sky.

“Her last good deed was to take in the child …”

“Child? What child?”

“Do you not know of it sir? A child — a few days old at most I would think — was placed at our door. Wrinkled, wrinkled newspaper; wrapped in newspaper…. And that reminds me sir. I have this for you. A slip of paper. Father Marsden said you might care to visit the last remaining sisters, Maria and Rose. They live in New York City. And on your way to Mexico …”

ON YOUR WAY TO … ON YOUR WAY TO … The door slammed fast. A door slammed somewhere in the house. Ground-level, ground fast … The Idiot was stirring, awaking. Wrinkled paper, wrinkled dream-wire, dream-fact. Descent into the all-encompassing structure of a thorn that invaded his eyes. Halo. Breast. Two breasts. Two eyes. Canvases of taste. Milky darknesses.

One mother a child has but she seems many, multi-form, multi-dimensional, many cultures, many skins.

And at first it seems a calamity to have been severed from the womb. Until one dreams one is pierced by an arrow of taste, tastes, ecstatic riddle, ecstatic morsel.

To taste is to see. To taste is to descend into black spaces, multi-form spaces, eyes of gravity in the fire-eater’s model. Firing squad of sensations. Two holes. Two eyes. Numberless number. Numberless dying. Numberless living…. It was the beginning of the child of humanity — the beginning of the obscurity of pity, the obscurity of antecedents, the new fall or Fool born outside of his time. Forced into conception … A conception of unsuspected dimensions written into the passive birth or death of objects reflected into history….




THE SIXTH DAY AND SEVENTH DAYS (Door into the Creation of the Gods)


Teotihuacán’s doors into the creation of the gods lay a giant fire-eater’s hand from Cholula, Puebla and San Francisco Convent in a desert of painted landscape. The Idiot felt he had been tumbled into his Seventh Day when he came in sight of Teotihuacán’s pyramid of the sun, pyramid of the moon, sea, land, shell, serpent, all exposed to him upon their beach of sublimated seas and spaces.

Which way lay the door into the gods? Which way lay the door into the riddle of early cloven settlement, lapsed settlement, extinguished settlement? Did it lie backwards through the Way of the Dead, forwards into the Way of the Unborn or by way of deaf, dumb, blind traces of fire, tongues of ash, staccato voices of moon, erratic abysses of time, serpentcraft around Jupiter, Venus?

Painters, sculptors in the school of the fire-eater had drawn the pyramids and their associated temples like commodities upon a chessboard of time across nameless cities beached here and it was this sensation that wakened the Idiot to nurse his own shadow into indistinct senses of economic nakedness.

Anything first of all, in the rat-race of economies of fate, to appear naked while richly clad, to camouflage lust and disaster even as the paint on one’s lips cracked into charismatic sex, charismatic vessel, charismatic metamorphoses of ex-god, ex-goddess, ex-priest, ex-priestess, ex-Christ, ex-nun. There was a time to marry landscapes and a time for divorce from landscapes. A time to visualise concealed force, concealed reason, concealed unreason and how these concealments drew one to the threshold of change even as they frustrated the pregnant scandal of an age into an assumption of static property or constitutional dress.

A time to be innocent carving, a time to be pathological carving of blind, deaf, dumb commodities of god. To be an orator, an emperor, a dictator, a president, a captain of ships, a member of oracles. To be the child of wretched ambition, the child of desired greatness, the child of paradise, hell.

“Are you unwell sir? Are you.?” He stopped, his eyes hardly discerning the face of his interrogator half reflected, half blurred across a trance of seas in the blind shout of vendors like a marketplace of shells that rose to one’s ears. Confessions of the sea, of hollow faintness, indistinctness of memory. Articles thrust at him — at his eyes, nose, throat — unfathomable confessions, vanished wave. Tricks of memory. Agents of the fire-eater’s sea, conspiracy of emotion.

“Conspiracy of a shell,” he breathed. “I am … I am … nothing.”

“Are you unwell?” The question was asked again with studied care, implicit hostility (idiotic poverty versus idiotic wealth), indistinct sales-talk.

“Let me help you sir.”

They (the vendors) had concluded that he was their ancient victim (half blind, half deaf) for they swarmed upon him with a new vehemence. He was abreast of the pyramid of the sun, the shell of the sun. They swarmed. He was deluged by misery and chaos, tides of nameless feud. Yet hardly able to see, hardly able to hear. Who was Subject, who Object? He made a great effort, rolled himself up into a map, into a kind of dead rockfastness, dead steadfastness and the Sea of Feud imperceptibly it seemed began to alter, to change into his painted attire. Painted Subject. Bargain Object. Bargain Soul.

The old sublimated sea of riddled cities he had traversed on the Way of the Dead was still there but it had acquired an extra density of transparent shell, conflicting sculpture, under the pyramid of the sun. And the chaos of youths, chaos of vendors, swarming there was distilled from a ghost of inspiration that related it to itself as to a shared insensible body upon which the sun fell to etch figures upon a brow of shadow, draw others insensibly upon shoulders of shadow, still others again clutching thighs (wrestlers), others fists (boxers), others feet (runners).

The Fool staggered in the surf of old/new worlds painted by the fire-eater.

“Sir,”—for the third time—“are you unwell? Let me help.”

“I am much better now.”

“Agoraphobia?” asked the youth. “I know of people who suffer from exposure to open places. To sea and land. A constriction, a helplessness, assails them.”

“I suffer from …” he was about to say “gravity” but stifled the complaint. Fall into surf of deafness, fall into surf of blindness. Was there an insuperable element between man and man, an unbridgeable chasm between culture and culture? Erection without door? Chasm without erection? “May I see.?” He took an article from the young man’s hand in his desire to touch and be touched, to feel, to know. Had seen it before but now saw it again as if he had not seen it before and as though a new religious feeling (and response on his part) arose from it. He touched the exquisite self-deceiving brazier, ran his finger around the wide-brimmed self-evasive hat, wide-brimmed distillation of fire that addressed him now of all things like a sun of mist, an expan sive halo. “You have thinned it out”, he could not help crying in his astonishment, “into an expansion of the thorn of the gods. Brazier. Halo. Technology.”

“Easter,” said the youth. He looked insolent and yet sad. “A halo always appears upon the fire-eater’s head at this time of the year. It’s the trademark of Easter and”, he added, “of Christmas too.”

The Idiot held it up. Easter Christ. Easter technology. Christmas Christ. Christmas technology. He could not help laughing a little at himself. The young salesman smiled too, irrepressible humour, lips thin as bone, human shell, indistinct echo/halo of blood.

“This wrinkle,” the Idiot said as if he addressed both sun and surf, “why this? Why a wrinkle? Christ has no wrinkles.”

“You will find many wrinkles on the old, old fire-god Huehueteotl,” the young man said stubbornly. “The old, old fire-god is older than the oldest priest or nun who may ever have lived in history.”

“Hueheuteotl. Christ. I do not see the connection. A halo in the context of Huehueteotl’s brazier perhaps. A wrinkle never.” The Idiot was on the defensive, defensive fall into brow of clown, wave of misgiving, controversial brow, self-divided prison. Earth.

“This halo is a wave,” cried the youth as though he were shouting a newspaper headline of disaster at air or sea, or advertising a new play, a new heady paradise, a new film, a new expression. “Can’t you hear me?”

“I hear nothing. I am going deaf. I am falling.”

“Fire and wave together. Wrinkled youth. Wrinkled soul. Way of the Newborn. Can’t you see me?”

“I see nothing,” said the Idiot. “I am going blind. I am falling. Nothing except economies of nakedness. The rat-race of love.”

“Nakedness,” the young man was outraged. “How can he be naked when he wears these?” He was pointing to flattened bullets the Idiot had overlooked that dangled from Christ’s head like earspools painted deep, painted red, opaque manufacture of blood beneath grey-haired thinning haloes. Technology of fire. Technology of water. Animism of blind, deaf Capital. Earth.

It was a deafening commodity for an unconfessed tycoon, innocent falling tycoon, to buy or sell on the Way of the Cross and an indistinct uproar, an indistinct clamour, assailed him now. A wildness had been secreted in his deafness, in the jingle of his coins, which matched the indistinct murmur of millions crying “Merde, Mardie” as he bought his pre-Columbian/post-Columbian cloven god. A wildness had been secreted in the clash of haloes (fire-eater/fire-saviour) shouting “Merde, Mardie”, indistinct shouts, jingle of coins, he coiled around his head in the mint of suns as he bought his sacrified cloven Christ. Deaf. Blind. He had banked … he had purchased … how many million shouts, gold shouts, bronze shouts?

“Am I unwell — well — well?” Just an echo of a voice in the sun, in the wind, in the elements. Deep. High. Indescribable cleavage. The suffering creation of the gods.

*

Idiot Nameless retired against the pyramid of the sun. The echo of a voice “I” had come out of the ground as out of bone and blood he banked in a wave of gods. Banked floods (surf or sea of emotion), banked shores (wave of obsessions). Which was inner strand, which outer chasm or precipice?

He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light of the sun and create an obsession with royal sculptures, echoing stone?

As though what remained in the wake of ex-heart, disengaged heart — in the wake of ultimate sacrifice — were a cloak to be worn by the high priest of the sun as he intoned his lament “Merde, Mardie” and sought shelter against the night, the rain of night.

It was time to take stock of others as hollow bodies and shelters into which one fell. Hollow newspaper into which one fell, newsworthy sacrifice, wrinkled skin, FIRING SQUAD OF RAIN. Headline. Heartline. STOCKMARKET SHELTER, CITY RAINS. Deadline, CANVAS REQUIRED, SACRIFICE REQUIRED.

For centuries it seemed to him now he had been ascending, descending, sliding, falling into rain inch by inch, into shelters of paint, shelters of stone. Sacrificed paint. Sacrificed stone. Lament for the dying sun. This was the altar of his malaise, Idiot shelter, Idiot fascination, fall into the sculptures of the greatest men (upon whom? from whom? times rained).

Fall into the skin of emperors, admirals, conquistadores, kings at the corner of a street, Great Ladies, Beatrice, Joanna, centre of a square, Way of the Dead, as though these were his sacrificed bodies and he (Fool, Clown) were high priest of the elements after all. High priest of stone rain. Rain Emperor. HIGH PRIEST OF STONE RAIN

The Idiot fell from the precipice of the sun into imperial mist, atmosphere, cloak of emperor, rain that drenched him upon his pedestal in a nameless city. He was alone up there, beached, abandoned, in the middle of his great fall, great square. Carved, illustrious rain. Disengaged heart, hollow cloak, absent sun within which the Fool secreted himself now.

Idiot spark in stone emperor upon his pedestal above the square of a city whose name he had forgotten. The traffic of a great metropolis rolled beneath him, moved in the rain, sometimes seemed to stop at the heart of night, sometimes to edge its way forward. Mexico City? Madrid? Paris? London? New York?. Where was it? The Stone Emperor Rain had forgotten, had forgotten his own name, his own voice, his own city. In his sacrificed spaces (mosaic of cities) the fallen Idiot spark blown across landscapes nestled now, spark buried in rain, spark buried in stone.

Would spark run by undreamt-of degrees into the emperor’s hand? Would spark lift the rain god’s imperial hand to inscribe with a finger another eyelid of sun, another eyelid of dawn within nameless cities the emperor had forgotten?

Emperor Rain — half mist, half stone on his high stage — had forgotten where he stood. The traffic edged its way around him, past him, sparked edge he reflected as it reflected him, sparked chasm he glimpsed as it glimpsed him in a mutual pool upon which the rain dashed its rivets of stars. The Fool’s eyes were flattened in the emperor’s night head. The pools on the ground looked flattened too within the starred rain as if to ponder a distinction between the nature of seeing (the nature of something glimpsed) and the nature of passivity (the nature of something reflected).

In the degree that a genuine transaction of vision (rather than reflection) informed the high priest (fallen high priest) the Fool had riveted it there as water rivets fire; as water wears naked fire and fire wears the hollow disengaged heart of rain into which it bites and burns to make day out of night. The idiot friction of naked fire, naked water, naked day, naked night, within each other’s self-contradictory hollow pool, hollow flame was the movement of an eye, the movement of being glimpsed by each other across ages, across reflected passive galaxies, across reflected passive technologies, across reflected passive cultures.

On the other hand in the degree that a purely passive reflection (devoid of authentic glimpsing, authentic transaction of vision) informed the emperor, Idiot Nameless had deserted him. Left him both beached and drowned, for ever isolate, for ever besieged by a motorised futility of sparks that bathed his forehead, motorised headlights, motorised infantry; for ever self-besieged, for ever reflected as disengaged heart in each hollow rocket or vessel aimed at the sun.

These were Emperor Stone Rain’s dimensions of torment Idiot Spark glimpsed. Would spark really see to flick a nail in the emperor’s hand, drip by drop of stone matching the paint of the sun upon sawn-off reflected mountains, shadow and light, marriage to cavernous landscapes, divorce from from cavernous landscapes with the coming of each night?

In the blind reflected square that emptied within the night, the ghost of a woman now moved. Her gown splashed. Splashed rivets of rain, lightning. Lightning on earth the emperor had forgotten, friction of elements Idiot Spark recalled now, the friction of glimpsed seed-within-ghost-within-womb-within-sun.

She was wet to the skin. Indeed — the Fool felt — she was, in this respect, as indifferent to the rain as the emperor’s night monument above was indifferent to the sky. And it was this indifference that led him, as fallen priest of light, to glimpse the possibility of a connection between their bodies though divided in apparent substance. Emperor Stone above. Ghost Woman beneath. Hollow shelter, imperial majesty, on his high pedestal of night. Ghost womb, splashed gown, in her blind square of sex.

BLIND SQUARE OF SEX. Blind connection of Stone Rain in Battered Dress or glimpsed repudiation of passive man-condition to passive woman-condition in hollows of culture within the passing night, passive fashion-plate wired to fashion-dish, love-bird to sales-bird.

The rain was lessening now and the mutual indifference to each other embodied in Emperor Rain and the woman in the square slipped like a skin from one to the other in the Fool’s sparked eye. So that in the degree that the emperor rain knew her as his naked monument within her naked flesh, so too the Fool knew her as spark within ghost.

The shape of her back loomed up before him, the movement of her hips, window dressing of absent dawn in the light of a passing car, emperor’s patrol.

Half of her was reflected here (monumentalized here); half darkened there (glimpsed there)…. Back a light, front a shadow. Blind conception of dawn. Window dressing of dawn, emperor’s mistress in a nameless city.

She moved across the square, came to a dress shop at which she stopped to anticipate an electric dawn, moved on and turned a dark corner. The Fool wondered whether she had deserted him. He in turn began to desert Emperor Rain’s passive reflection of out-thrust arm, out-thrust foot, passive reflection of coercive embrace that made her look unutterably forlorn but a moment or two ago within the night’s connection of stone rain, in battered dress, buried in the heart of nameless sleeping citizens, nameless whoring citizens, nameless dead cities.

In the same context he glimpsed himself too as incredibly forlorn, a spark in a drift of stars under the emperor’s foot. And as he followed her it was with a sense of the difficulty of finding her, of moving arms and legs that were heavy with the emperor’s indifferent tread, the emperor’s patrol of law indifferent to love, love indifferent to law.

Perhaps he was sustained by an irony, the irony of his fall, of his need to descend into implacable assumptions of fate’s ruling objects of indifference to arts of subjective freedom.

He came to the lighted dress shop at which she had stopped briefly and turned the corner she had taken. It was a narrow street leading vaguely uphill into an unfamiliar district.

The rain had ceased except for an occasional drizzle from an occasional tree. A cosy street in broad daylight he imagined, antiques, stationery and illustrated books. Filled now after midnight with wraiths, the wraith among wraiths of half-electric, half-envisoned flesh-and-blood he pursued. Was death impending upon nameless futures, nameless highways, square of emperor death into which nameless citizens fell as counterpoint to sexual dawn’s implicit room for others to be born in a new light?

She paused for an instant (he was sure it was she) at another window with illustrated books. Then slipped into the shadows again that lined the street with old old ghosts of light.

He too soon came abreast of the illustrations that had held her, a moth to a candle, and stopped, a spark for an eye.

A large book was open to display two illustrations. He read—“Above: The sacred city of Teotihuacán (the name in Aztec means ‘the gods were made here’). Below: Masks of wind serpents and rain serpents.”

He moved on after her along the narrow street, beneath a vaguely lighter sky that seemed now a segment of paint drawn from Teotihuacán’s Way of the Dead and laid now over a glimpsed mosaic of twentieth-century cities into a Way of Satellites.

He caught another reflection of her along the street. A door was opening. She was caught herself in beam and torch, animal staring into a bullet. The door closed. She was gone. He quickened his pace. Came to the vicinity of the door. Closed fast. For a moment he was uncertain. Had she gone in?

No. There she was. The rattle of a tin on the pavement. There she was. Reflected crackle, tin drum of pavement. Outlined afresh by orange streetlamp. Clockwork herald of dawn. Herald of garish beauty shed by the streetlamp like a light that dresses cell and prison and bed into sacrificed elements invoked by her, commodities of operational death and sex.

He hastened after her with a sense of mutual chasms now growing indifferent to each other in the struggling uncertain light — blind square of sex, blind square of death.

It was still quite dark and he almost missed her when she turned suddenly to the left. He followed as quickly as he could emerging this time into a wider avenue.

At first he thought he had lost her. Then hardly believing his good fortune he saw she had stopped at a coffee wagon. There was a rude awning attached to a vehicle beneath which a few stragglers, workmen perhaps on night-shift and dawn-shift, tramps, homeless scholars, heretic souls had gathered.

There was another wagon at the edge of the avenue also serving coffee. The arrangement was perfect. The Fool stopped and ordered a drink. She stood a dozen or so yards away and he was in a position to observe her without betraying his curiosity.

The couple of workmen beside him were grumbling about a strike or a lock-out, an ultimatum they said.

“Tired,” said one. “My day will never come.”

“Your day, mate,” said the other, “is bloody revolution and that will never come until the workers tighten their belts, bloody well fast …” The rest of the conversation was buried in obscenities. The Idiot was distracted from his own mission. Filled also with a sympathetic hunger.

“Revolution,” he cried. “What is revolution?” He had not intended to speak but the question issued of its own volition almost from his tongue. Perhaps it had been carved there, branded there. The workmen turned, stared at him. They were a little astonished, even nonplussed, at his intervention. But they knew the oddest characters with the oddest question on their lips slept rough and roamed the streets.

“I agree”, said the Fool seeking to placate them and justify himself, “that politics is the art of sacrifice.”

“Who makes the sacrifice mate?”

“Who indeed,” the Idiot parried. “Even in the most humane democratic systems there comes a moment of deadlock when the ruling voices of the day on every side of the fence, labour, capital, government, trades unions, you name it, declare themselves utterly determined to do something. And we know when they say that that each and all really mean somebody will get the chop, somebody’s ripe to be sacrificed on the altar of the day in the name of economic and political expediency. Somebody’s head is beginning to grow increasingly indifferent to another body’s heart in order to ensure that the right cause, as each reflects it, will triumph, the right victim prosecuted (or persecuted) in order to provide a large enough capacity or proverbial enough skin to promote what is known as the unity of mankind …”

“Bloody revolution,” said the workman turning a deaf ear to the Fool. “You come back to what I said. Bloody unity.”

The Fool laughed. Then grew sad. Sipped his coffee, shivering a little.

“I said bloody revolution. Do you accept that? Bloody unity. Do you accept that?”

“I accept that revolution is possible, barely possible, when we discern an element of conscience in the most implacable roles unity plays. The question is — how deep does that element lie, how frozen, how far in is it fallen?” The Fool spoke like a Fool to a post-midnight workman’s head.

“Fallen mate? Fucking where? Fallen into what and whom?” The workman spoke like a workman to a pre-dawn Fool’s midnight head.

“Into institutions,” said the Fool helplessly. “Into everything that models the shape of the world we live in, the kind of demands we make of each other and have been making for so long we can’t even remember when we started. Into the highest canvases, if you like, sculptures of the land. For if we are to move them, transform them in the slightest real way, we need to regress into them as sacrificed bodies into which a spark fell and still falls. Can’t you see?” The Fool spoke like a Fool to a post-midnight workman’s back turned now towards him. “Royal sacrificed body, presidential sacrificed body,” he said to that back as to a piece of leaden furniture. “We need to see from within the roles that are played by others in our name, and in the name of the nameless forgotten dead, the nameless forgotten living. Me. You. We need to regress into our most formidable and implacable rituals for they dress us up like mummified children at a fair …” The Idiot felt ashamed. Ashamed of the passion of his tongue or the passion of tongues as if they were two or more in his head. As though passion were born of elements carved high and low that one was ashamed to recall. Ashamed of self-contradiction, strangeness, hunger for beauty, hunger for faith … heaven … hell.

The fast of one’s tongue was an animal’s chain that pulled one to turn one’s back upon enemy or friend.

Not clockwork back nor clockwork cave alone. Not clockwork front nor clockwork womb alone. These yes. But other reflected chains as well. Such as toppling sensation, descent into self-mocking canvas, blind square of factory, blind square of revolution painted there on the workmen’s canvas, on a workman’s back as if it were Stone Emperor’s eloquent blood.

Descent by a spark. Factory cradle. Descent into a spark. Factory overall. “Which is a way of saying”, he translated the chains in his blood, “that I am implicated in a tension of bodily and bodiless pasts, tongues of darkness, tongues of light, unconfessed elements.” The Fool shivered.

“Take this,” said one of the workmen suddenly turning and throwing him an overcoat that smelt of grease and hell’s paint. The Idiot slipped into it, shivering still, as into another’s grave, Stone Emperor’s blood, bullet-ridden workman. The smell of vulgar death was in his nostrils. “No,” the overcoat said to him. “Not death, heroic strife. No, not death I say, a hero’s grave, yes death, brute death. Which is it?” The Idiot shivered to each sovereign bullet NO, YES. “Yes, No” hit him in the spine. “Revolution Square, Heretic Square” echoed along his spine.

“Whose coat … death do I wear?” It was an unanswerable question that left him drained, stubborn, shrouded by immortal indifference of ruling back, half violated comradeship of subject heart. Half aware of himself in another’s sceptical grave, sceptical of ready-made answers, ready-made resurrections, Atlas pit, bullet in his back. Cloaked on all sides by the fast of the sun, bullet-ridden workman, Unknown Warrior and Workman King — two silent tongues in his head forever “No, Yes”—one loud command in his heart FIRE … ultimate buried fate … ultimate buried freedom …

All this encompassed the Fool and riddled him until all of a sudden he came to himself and remembered what he was here for. The woman. He had followed her across the city from Emperor Square through emperor death into this entanglement in sovereign hero, brute death in the overcoat of a dead workman whose name had long been forgotten at the heart of an insurrection. He had been shot when things got “out of hand”. And the Idiot was imbued afresh by the terror of banal lips, banal dialogue with earth as he sank into unwritten, unspoken reserves, codes, bodies, window dressing, overalls, bullets, factories …

Now anything — he prayed wordlessly — to move again from the bottom of the world, inch by inch, foot by foot towards her, by the skin of his teeth, cup, saucer, globe, sun, self-reversible monuments, languages, self-reversible wagons, coffee wagon outlined in its particular chasm of dawn.

“Christ,” he said as he rose out of the ground and addressed a bearded tramp, “where is she? Tell me please. Where is she?” It seemed to him he had risen out of the ground after a lifetime of conflict but in fact — sovereign fact — he had crossed from one subsistence wagon to another, one continent to another … INTERCHANGEABLE DREAMS OF SUBSISTENCE IN MOSAIC OF CITIES IN PLAY CHRIST AND THE FIRING SQUAD

Each step around the globe for the Fool subsisted upon unwritten reserves planted in the death of obscure men and women who were antecedent to the gods. As though the gods were born of antecedent silences, lost buried tongues that set up unfathomable necessities of unexpressed feeling upon which the Idiot subsisted — which drew him through them into unsuspected spaces that cried for a language, the language of creation, the language of the deaf, dumb, blind fallen who lay at the bottom of the world.

“Born of … born of …” said the Idiot. The tramp with the beard of the fire-eater was standing over him.

“You fell mate. Are you ill?”

“Ill? I am as well as ever.” He lay on the ground with his head upon an overcoat the fire-eater had bundled into a pillow.

“You were blazing away there to yourself the good news — born of woman. We all are, aren’t we mate?”

The sky was growing much lighter now and the Idiot realised he had made a journey through space — seas, skies, places — which seemed to condense itself now into a few paces he had just taken (before he fell) from one subsistence wagon to another.

“Born of woman,” the Fool repeated. “There is no way of fathoming in its entirety all that that means. The immensity of the quarry one pursues. The antecedents of obscurity out of which one has come. Where is she?”

The fire-eater dissected the Fool with his majestic eyes that seemed to look through the globe, dissected pigment by pigment, thread by thread, vein by vein. Dissected wrinkled child, wrinkled age built into the apparition of halo and wave that lay now at his feet.

It was on the edge of his lips to say like a terrible god, a terrible painter—“I have seen no one. You have no woman, no wife, no mother. Born of none.” But instead he lifted a mop with which he had been brushing the pavement under his awning. He squeezed it like a brush of sky dripping dew, dripping tears. “Ah yes,” he said. “She was dripping wet. The pool on the ground. She squeezed her dress as I do this sky …”

“Does one”, said the Idiot, “cross water or cross fire at the moment of birth … at the moment of death.?”

The fire-eater was painting the shape of a woman on the pavement around him, lost mother, lost woman across death by water, death by fire, unfathomable premises…. A fasting wave is as good a pillow as any on which to lie …




DATELESS DAYS (Eight and Nine)


Idiot Nameless’s companion days and nights drew him back into an impersonal past, into a multi-form diagram of savage resources of tradition and into autumn, winter, spring doors of preparation for flight.

Either way he was destined to fall into apparently self-created seas and lands and skies as other cloaks of sacrificed existences.

And the process of that paradox — that fall — led him into a sense of being suspended in time, as in the dateless supernatural days of pre-Columbian Mexican calendar — pinned at the same time into his own numbers and diaries.

For it was as one suspended upon an incline of past and future that he settled into the final leg of his journey to Mexico and to Teotihuacán’s pyramid of the sun.

A log must learn to fly — to stand in mid-Atlantic between continents — between London, Paris, Madrid, Rome and New York to which Idiot Nameless flew in a crowded aeroplane in which he was lucky to make a step or two without bouncing into someone.

He had written to Sisters Rose and Maria whose address he had been given by Father Marsden’s porter.

A log must build, stand motionless in space, sound-conditioned log, cramped aeroplane, carved in the sky like a door into limbo or paradise.

He stood in a still and beautiful canvas of weather, cloud cities assembled on either hand. And when he looked down or through his door he caught a flash, a pinhead at most, that flared like a star in the vast wrinkled map of the sea.

Was it a dream of the evolution of conscience in a gigantic mirror filled with light at the base of the world, monk’s world, mother’s world, savage world, fire-eater’s world to create across cloaked distances the impression of a star, a terrestrial cradle, minuscule pyramid, towards which one fell by inaccessible motionless degrees?

Then again how beautiful, changelessly changing, were the radiant cities of the sky through his scarred door in their bands of colour, green transparencies, unfathomable oceans, blue beyond bluest marbles of smoke, indefinable presences of music to sound catastrophe … to sound suspensions of catastrophe …

He arrived in New York City saturated by the notion of a door through which to step into limbo or into paradise … to step into arcs of static refuse, static congestion …

The very ground on which he stood seemed to embody a visible node in invisible proportions of perpetual mission, perpetual fall into space, perpetual detritus.

Fallen city, ancient and modern, broken city, cities that wrestled in one’s consciousness with the enigma of capsules of relief from the sickness of man …

From a room in Manhattan he looked out across Greenwich Village towards Hudson River and felt, as he deposited overcoat and bag, that the drive from Kennedy Airport had passed for him like one already buried in the foundations of a sky city that had been lost for ever in passive reflections that raced, networks of cars and cloudy epitaphs, clouded crowded arms and legs within a dateless grave of suspended catastrophe …

He made his way back into the street as into encrusted epitaph, rain-cloud, congestion, through which he steered a path. Hailed a cloud-taxi …

Just before midnight, coming out of a theatre, he found himself after a while, ten minutes walk or so, in the vicinity of Rockefeller Cloud Center. He was, incredibly it seemed, alone. Alone on the ground, capped by an aloneness of sky. The crowd had thinned into a mere glow of souls, into a cigarette of consciousness, ghost and architect in that hollow lung or square, abandoned now by daily bundles of newspaper arms and legs, newspaper symphonies, that had fled or vanished into Long Island perhaps as midnight struck like a match in a clock. Hissing strokes. Funeral past and vulgar cradle.

Match. Lung. Clock. Bullet. Cigarette. Architect sky-god riddled by holes the Idiot thought as he looked up into his tunnel of night at an enigma of proportions.

For it was as if the very door he had dreamt that day into oceanic suspension in the sky in his aeroplane had opened again this instant into a tunnel arising from earth, starred nucleus of densities pinned to earth. Mother tunnel. Mother aloneness. Ancient door. Ancient pin. Mirror of dwarfed light across staggered distances with a flawed capacity to reflect up as well as down into a glimpsed abyss of ironies of self, congested, crude and yet in all of its facelessness, its tragic disfigurement, haunted by a mission of thwarted beauty at the base of the world.

If one opened that door, fell through it too rashly, too precipitately, too suddenly, congestion ruled on every hand and one was demolished, demoralised by silences as by crowds, by a conflict of internal emotions and external multitudes, seen/unseen as the malice of cities.

On the other hand if one came upon that door and perceived it as a vision of multi-layered, multi-form densities, one was apprised of an instinct towards astronomical privacy as the heart of god in dynamic suspension and circulation of spaces. Here. On earth … epitaph to lost radiances, lost fables, lost cities reflected in new bases and foundations … MRS. BLACK MARSDEN’S ROLE AND TWO PACES TOWARDS SISTERS MARIA AND ROSE

Sisters Maria and Rose lived close to Greenwich Village between Fifth Avenue and Sixth.

A tidy street the Idiot thought like a tidy beach on the edge of the creeping dilapidation of the Village. The houses were straitlaced perhaps but they possessed splendid vestiges of iron trellis-work that seemed in another light, as the street brightened and darkened, the branches of hardened trees invested with an air of waiting for something to happen. The coming of the sea if not the sky. Perhaps it was a reflection one saw in a window, a shadow and a light, a stranded tree. Long washed away, blown-away inmates …

The Fool read the slip of paper in his hand, checked the address at which he had arrived and knocked. Mrs. Black Marsden came to the door and led him into a glittering room, polished brasses, furniture.

He was astonished to learn that she was a Mrs. Marsden.

“Marsden? Any relation to Father Marsden?”

“My husband is Father Marsden’s brother.” She spoke as though she were testing him and testing herself, too, as if to confirm the half-playful, half-sinister unreality of reality.

“But I thought”, said the Idiot practising his own arts of the game, “that Father Marsden was an old, old man. Of course I didn’t see him the afternoon I was there. I spoke to a porter.”

The woman laughed. She seemed both natural and supernatural like a fine actress built into her part (capable of living her parts), self-possessed at the same time, curiously sceptical about dates and ages and about names too, names of peace, names of war, place-names, habits, conventions

“There is a forest of Marsden faces,” she explained, “buried everywhere, cousins and brothers I fear. Father Marsden and my husband Black Marsden are about the same age.”

“Black Marsden?” the Idiot looked astonished.

“There are several Black Marsdens,” she confessed with a trace of self-mockery. “It’s a complicated masquerade — complicated descent. It’s the source of many inspirations in the theatre, in poetry, in the novel. I am not sure why I am telling you all this.” She stopped but the Fool said nothing. Buried in his (or her) womb of thought. So that, as happens sometimes in the middle of a conversation, one is reborn to many hidden ties, hidden chains, mixed antecedents, rational/irrational dreams of freedom one glimpses in the faces of others as in oneself, contagious laughter, contagious absurdity, contagious youth, contagious age, contagious divinity. Contagious roles of man, contagious family of ghosts. Contagious theatre of absences and presences.

“I see,” he said a little awkwardly.

Mrs. Black Marsden laughed at him as at herself. The Fool laughed at her as at himself. Contagious laughter. Then they were sad for no clear reason at all, contagious sadness.

“As you may have gathered,” she confessed, “I am an actress. There you see a bundle of my costumes in a pile on that chair.” She pointed to a neat collection of garments and wigs in the room. “My husband is interested, you know, in family biographies. He thinks I should do something on Sister Rose — she is a great-aunt of mine. But I find I need to play the part of Rose before I may begin to write it down. We do have a small drama group which meets in this house. In fact we met this morning before you arrived. That is why I am so excited. I am not sure that I know why I am telling you all this but you seem so sympathetic …”

“Please tell me everything,” said the Fool. “How do you play the part of Rose.?”

“There is a technicality to Rose — as to any person, any life — which I seek to gather about me. But also there is a ghost to Rose which may become visible within that technicality. One does not need always to die to become a ghost. An actress may be, when she plays a part, sheer even marvellous body technicality. But sometimes brilliant as her act is a paradox arises in that her performance (however successful) may have no bearing on the present moment in which she lives. And I feel myself that it is only when the ghost is partially visible through the dress of technicality that the past really connects with the present — with the naked present. I am not sure why I am telling you all this. If my husband were here …”

“Please go on. Tell me everything.”

“I am excited today as you see. And I have been talking a great deal since you arrived. I think it’s a discovery I feel I have made about Rose. She’s a dear old soul but she eats up our time, she makes excessive demands on us day after day. It used to be hard before but it’s a hundred times worse since Maria’s death.”

The Fool was astonished. “Her death? But I thought … I was told they were both …”

“Alas no. Maria was killed last autumn — a tragic accident. She was out shopping and was standing at a street corner in Manhattan when she was hit by gunfire from a passing car that was being chased by the police.

“It was a great shock, a terrible shock for Rose who has refused utterly to accept Maria’s death. She writes to her friends as if Maria’s still here. I have had to break the news to people. It’s as if she’s involved in a role that is life and death for her. And all her absurdities, her cannibalisms if you like (she subsists on everybody, devours anything at all she can put her hand on which relates however indirectly to Maria) reflect an intense bottled-up desire that is sheer ghost, sheer prince of a ghost she needs to project into eternity…. I don’t know why I am telling you all this.”

There was the rumble of a passing lorry like anonymous gunfire and Rose appeared at the door of the drawing-room, a portrait in a frame of exquisite hardened wood. Her thin features, painfully upright body, stood in contrast to the open-minded dress, sceptical and wry humour of Black Marsden’s wife. The Fool took two paces towards her … towards the heap of wigs and costumes Mrs. Black Marsden had assembled and which seemed now to be coming alive.

“I am sorry”, he began, “to trouble you at this time. I had not heard of Sister Maria’s death…. Mrs. Marsden”, he looked around but she had vanished, “has just explained …” He was pointing into space as if with a single step he had crossed from one stage to another. “If I had known I would not have come.”

“Not at all,” Rose said. “You are welcome. Maria would have told you so herself, will tell you so herself. She is here as you know. And if we — I—we can be of assitance to you it would make us very happy. We — I—have received a letter telling us of your plans. Please do take a seat.” She pointed to a chair by the window, repeating the invitation in a different tone, a different voice that disconcerted him. “Please do sit down.”

She sat on a sofa facing him. Very thin. Very upright. Almost shadowless he thought. Yet subtly enveloped in an atmosphere that glistened in furniture and brass as the curtains billowed suddenly around him like clouds in a draught as he fell from the pyramid of the sun. He shook his eyes out of a cloud. Pulled his chair back. Too close to the window. Too close to the curtains with their base of a billowing pyramid in his head. Was it royal bone (Maria) … was it royal blood (Rose) he saw there?

He could see the colour of Rose’s face animated and alive at the base of the pyramid. He could see Maria’s head elongated like bone, upright reflection, fastidious attachment to a structure embodying the past. Rose sat there facing him.

“Maria never forgave herself”, she said, “for running away. We came to Manhattan about fifty years ago. We were, she said, the aristocracy of the church. And the aristocracy never yields, never yields an inch. That is its glory. You would think, wouldn’t you, to hear her say that that she is a tyrant. But in fact she is all I possess, she is the dearest creature on earth and I love her. I love her.” There was the glimmer of a tear like a splinter of bone on the edge of her lips — transubstantiation of bone into rain.

“I am a tyrant,” the voice that spoke now was a different voice, inflexible and dry, Sister Maria’s voice on Sister Rose’s lips. “There was a time when princes earned their place in the realm … earned their privileges, bounties the hard way — sometimes with their lives.”

“Earned their place? What do you mean?”

“They fought to hold their assets and lived as princes did under the shadow of the axe — as a revolutionary lives today in the shadow of the bullet.” Maria spoke with pride, the perverse pride of a prince of the church. “I have earned my reward even if I seemed at first — half a century ago — to have deserted my post. In the end I was privileged to die….”

“Now, now Maria,” it was the confused, animated voice of Rose. “Now, now Maria,” shook Rose trembling a little, “you are extreme. To talk of dying as if it is the end of things. Princes of church and state do not die. They live forever. Born of … born of …” she stopped at a loss, caught herself, continued. “Born of … born of no one and nothing except god.”

The sun fell from the sky and melted into the heart of the Fool as though a sentence had been enacted upon him in which to be born was to be unmade in the legendary heart of Rose in compensation for Maria’s bone and death, to be born was to be broken in the dream-play of history in compensation for unfulfilled models of sovereign subsistence, to be born was to descend into a depth of frustrated appetite and need arching back across centuries — a rage for lost anchorages, lost securities that made him a vulnerable body of time with a reflected/glimpsed capacity to engross others within roles that were curiously unconscious of self-brutalised, self-cannibalised antecedents and peerages of the depths and the heights.




MARSDEN’S LETTER TO GOODRICH (Eight and Nine)


My Dear Goodrich,

During Easter weekend of the year 197– the body of a man was found at the base of the pyramid of the sun on the ancient urban complex of Teotihuacán. It is thought that he suffered an attack close to the edge and fell. I learnt of this because of a slip of paper on him which gave Sister Rose’s address. The authorities contacted me.

I was interested in the case because of the extraordinary impression Nameless (that is what he called himself) made on my wife when he visited her in New York a fortnight or so before his death.

I flew to Mexico City and my interest was further aroused by his papers and the unsigned canvases and sculptures which were in his hotel with a note directing that they should be forwarded to me in the event of anything happening to him.

I am aware of the formidable difficulties you face in translating these but I feel somehow you would want to do so.

When I was your guest in Scotland I was aware of your susceptibility to “objects” that symbolized, in various degrees, the “soul” or “glory” of cultures and civilizations past.

Therefore I felt your curiosity would be aroused in the Nameless collection and in the way his papers relate to “objects” and to an ambiguity in the achievement of civilizations and cultures extending from pre-Columbian times to our own day.

It is peculiar, I know, to sense how a culture may be trapped in its institutions or achievements and yet may return to those “objects” when it is sensed that these relate beyond/beneath themselves to unfathomable needs of deaf, dumb, blind ages of man that cry for a creation, cry for a tongue …

I do not wish to dwell on this in detail as it would be impertinent of me to attempt to summarize in a paragraph or two something that occupies such large tracts of the Nameless imagination.

I mention it because I wonder how large it may come to loom in your appreciation of Nameless theatre as “novel-ghost” that resides within “technical address”.

The point here as I see it (if I may add a further note) is the subtle and varied connection between past and present that lies in a language of things through historical investitures into the naked life of one’s time: the irony of coming abreast of one’s time.

The only eye-witness account I possess of Nameless is the one my wife gives of him when they met in New York City. I shall come to this in a moment or two but first of all I would like to comment on the scene (Two Paces to Rose and Maria) — the last thing he wrote before his death.

The temptation exists, I am sure, to see this as a prophecy of his coming death but such an interpretation is false.

Nameless was ill and the people he met, houses, places he visited which appear in his narratives become stages written into the very base of his experience — a base that resists being identified with any idea of a total structure of the past; that resistance opened out proportions of continuously “dying structure” into continuously “living present” upon which to resume ever further advances into a territory of ceaseless compassion as well as descent into projected/unfulfilled ghosts of time as these bear upon the naked terror of our time.

It is inevitable therefore that the advance of “dying structure” into “living present” (in a body of work created by any one man) would appear, in one or other of its facets, to coincide with his actual death and would lend itself therefore to be interpreted as prophecy.

This would be quite wrong. Nameless was not a prophet nor an animist. I hope I have made this clear. He was something of a poet, perhaps, something of an ironist in the deepest sense, perhaps. And it is against a background of “dying structure” into “living present”, implicit in his work, that one needs to see the objects in my wife’s house (the curtains, for example, with their painted design of the base of the pyramid of the sun that seems prophetic of his fall) that he draws upon in his last piece of writing to evoke the dream-play of Rose as projected ghost or prince built into an ageing woman’s womb of a past childhood or return to the implacable fantasies of her youth.

In fact this is a consistent thread to weave into the play Christ and the Firing Squad that occupies various strands within the Nameless imagination’s sacrificed bodies or cloaks worn by others as inner face to outer face.

Nameless arrived at the house (which he describes in his scene) on the outskirts of Greenwich Village not long after my wife had had a busy and exciting morning discussing plans with her drama group in New York.

She told me when she first saw him at the door how immensely frail he looked; and worn as if (a vivid impression flashed upon her) he had literally ascended from a hollow place that left its mark on him. So much so he seemed to her eloquent with the silences of an inner face; eloquent mosaic character composed of inner stains and dyes …

I find this a peculiarly sensitive and appropriate description in the light of what I afterwards learnt of the Nameless expeditions.

There was another aspect to this Nameless frailty that absorbed her. It was something elemental like the sun on earth — non-solid energy so to speak — as if he gave himself to others and others subsisted upon him (as he subsisted upon them).

All this combined to create a very deep vibration of sympathy between them and, coming on top of the morning’s excitement, led to an animated conversation (traces of which appear in the Rose scene written by Nameless).

My wife describes it all as a “confession” she made to him — a strange phrase to use for a sudden heightening and deepening of her responsibilities as an actress both to the past and the present in the roles she hoped to play.

I wonder, my dear Goodrich, is “confession” to a daemon that visits one the very foundation stone of all inspiration? What do you think?

So far it was a blissful and enjoyable encounter but something happened at the last minute which left my wife with a feeling of deep disturbance, of having laid bare certain secrets prematurely perhaps.

Again an odd phrase to use. (I myself despise secrets as you know.) And yet the implications are enormous. It is as if Nameless were inviting her to reflect on varieties of the self-exposure of the past, varieties of deep-seated preparation required for growth into a living present, a living encounter with a living present. To reflect therefore deeply with an eye of vision on the enormous tragedy of the late twentieth century, the enormous tragedy of a premature ripeness that we find everywhere, a premature nakedness that sells itself everywhere bound up with a kind of immature projection of stasis as art of prophecy.

All this came to a head when he was about to leave. For it was then that he delivered his bombshell.

“Would it be possible for me to stay, to be with you for a day, and for a night?”

His words had an instantaneous effect upon her. It conjured up the feeling in her that he was trying to pick her up in her own house, on her very doorstep, that this man who seemed to her — yes she actually said the word — that this man who seemed to her Christ (if anyone could be Christ in the late twentieth century) was making a naked proposal to her.

And yet, woman of the world as she is, all her instincts of respectability were up in arms. She was confused and said the first thing that came into her head: “My husband would not like it.”

He looked at her then. And his eyes were alone. Not lonely. Unfathomably alone. Wholly compassionate, wholly seeing.

“I am sorry.” That was all he said. He turned away and as he stepped into the road looked back for the last time.

Had she really rejected him? Did it mean that a tide of history would flow now not towards the Absent Door of the Virgin but towards the Absent Door of a Prince?

She felt a kind of rage at herself and she slammed the door fast in his face. The sound echoed through the house like the fall of a heavy mask to the floor, an uncommon mask generations would invest with rage and begin to seek, as threshold to inner faces, inner encounters.

Ah, my dear Goodrich … who knows.? Who knows.?