Companions of the Day and Night

by Harris, Wilson

  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 nos
trils. “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 lik
e 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 …