Companions of the Day and Night

by Harris, Wilson

  Companions of the Day and Night

  WILSON HARRIS

  For Margaret

  and to the memory of B. S. Johnson

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Companions of the Day and Night

  Editor’s Introduction

  The Fire-Eater Canvases and Sculptures

  Idiot Nameless arrived in Mexico City

  The Second Day

  The Third Day

  The Fourth Day

  The Fifth Day

  The Sixth and Seventh Days

  Dateless Days

  Marsden’s Letter to Goodrich

  Copyright

  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 ci
ty. 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.