I felt cheated by those blind counterfeit eyes of hers (half-falling, half-uplifted from her body) but fascinated and astonished as well that such a shell or woman — so fragile and lovely she seemed now — possessed such sculptured breasts into which were set such huge coins or currency of beauty. Currency of rage. Rage indeed. If those coins were to strike the floor they would ring with fury at the manifest way their owner had been entangled in a spell or net cast by Black Marsden’s ritual camera.
All of a sudden, at the very edge of fascination, Knife slashed the camera, and Marsden stood stark naked. I was engulfed by a feeling of impropriety. But, incredibly, impropriety was erased in the avuncular way he appraised Gorgon like a doctor a patient. Naked doctor. Naked breasts of patient. Then he touched her nipples and my original suspicions returned.
“It’s all right,” he said calmly. “Nothing sexual, believe me. Pennies on dead men’s eyes as far as I am concerned. We live in a penny-wise, pound-foolish age.” He still touched her as he spoke. “We make a fuss about moral pence when millions of mortal lives are cheap.”
“This is outrageous,” I cried stung and ashamed. “There you stand … stark naked … blatantly … naked.”
“Naked propriety,” said Black Marsden. “I am inventing a new style for both pulpit and theatre. She is our divided enchantress. Moral pence in church or bedroom. And a million dirt-cheap in the theatre of the world. We have created an ambiguity. And out of that ambiguity is born the Knife of humanity. Each man kills the thing he loves.”
4
Goodrich woke with the dream fresh in his mind. So fresh it seemed to saturate the world outside with a curious precipitation of melancholy. A dispersing melancholy lay on the trees across the garden in the distance. A darker but more intimate pride and spirit suffused the wood of the trees into which the young leaves seemed to retire like fossils of autumn rather than cradled summer.
He sat at a small table near the window, sipped a cup of tea and ate a biscuit from the tray Mrs. Glenwearie had put there. Curious, he thought (as he looked out across the garden into the misty sky) how the passing seasons were saturated by one’s dreams and turn into half-fossil, half-cradle — endless deceiving, revealing subjective/objective fabric or open-ended bias. He wrote in his diary: “Open-ended ironical flesh of nature or fabric of things into axe; open-ended ironical fabric of things or flesh of nature into scythe; open-ended ironical tunnel of mist into a shield for an assassin.”
As the mist upon the trees began to disperse into letters of space which seemed to match or mock his reflections, he suddenly felt a cleavage of mood — a cleavage within the desolating fabric of dreams.
“The memory of Knife was oppressive when I awoke: I remember how he slashed Marsden’s cloth or camera. Now I feel a sense of relief.”
He poured himself another cup of tea, stared into it unseeingly. “Naked bias,” he wrote pulling his dressing-gown more closely around his limbs. “What is freedom without the blackest self-mockery — without intense creativity and care — without seasonal dress and undress and the unravelling of self-portraits and self-deceptions?”
He stared at the naked pages of infinity — so his diary seemed to him sometimes like a hidden blackboard in yesteryear’s snow, paradoxical tabula rasa. Each morning he endeavoured to make some sort of entry. Sometimes it was a record of the previous day’s activities or a reflection on the past night’s dreams which he wrote with a stubborn left hand or impish right. As he sorted out the loose pages now they seemed to him not quite in the order in which he had put them a day or two ago. Perhaps it was his imagination. Or on the other hand — had someone slipped into his room and read his private diaries? He began now to make a new and perverse entry.
Diary entry the morning after I dreamt of Jennifer Gorgon and Black Marsden’sslashed coat.
COMEDY OF FREEDOM. LEFT HAND: Tunnel/garment. Doodles of ink. When my doodling tunnel is blackest I move towards a pinprick of light at the far end which grows brighter until the pinprick becomes a skylight. At the heart of the tunnel, however, everything remains black. I cannot see an inch along the road. I cannot see the feet which bear me as I move or draw my body. I am part and parcel of invisible limbs within my tunnel; I feel myself conscripted into an anti-clockwise or biblical sun at the end of the road; yearn to reach or draw my end. In my end is my beginning. I yearn to make the light captive, stop the sun in its tracks. Anti-clockwise noon. White is beautiful outside the tunnel. Fascination of the Gorgon. RIGHT HAND: You mean Black is beautiful inside the tunnel. Fascination of the Gorgon. When love is switched on inside the tunnel — when love is brightest and fiercest inside the tunnel you see, or think you see, all of its tailored parts — rivet, bolt, seamless metal inside the tunnel. But now you can no longer see the light at the end of the road. Keep right on to the end of the road. LEFT HAND: Doodles of love and freedom inside the tunnel or outside the tunnel have fascinated and seduced mankind since the dawn of time. Keep right on to the end of the road. When freedom glares we need the deepest unravelling vision of imagination not to be stricken or deceived. When freedom glares we need a comic apocalypse: chalk-and-ink into pillars of salt, flesh-and-blood into pillars of establishment. RIGHT HAND: When freedom glares we need to unravel the darkest phantoms of humanity who master us and nudge us along the road towards a spectral caveat or warning of the infinite resources of community to inflict damnation upon itself or appease damnation within itself. LEFT HAND: FEED MY SHEEP. My drugged sheep, my damned sheep, my drop-out sheep. My Jesus-tripping sheep.
Knife arrived later that morning. Goodrich had not really believed he existed as flesh-and-blood until the actual moment he set eyes upon him and the polished sitting-room in Edinburgh, clean as a die, shone with the intensity of a mirror or a glass of living water speckled with stars. Knife’s face was reflected there within a swarm of buzzing flies under a glaring sun. “Why,” said Goodrich, half-hypnotized by constellations of memory, “we have met before. Three years ago wasn’t it? In Kingston, Jamaica.”
Black Marsden gave a drunken chuckle as if to confirm a base pollution on one hand, a magical potency on the other in the elements. He sat in a large red upholstered armchair, his black beard wild. Wild and trim as the fierce liquid at his elbow which looked amber in one light transparent in another.
The mist outside had vanished. A low fire burned under a ridge of coal at the far end of the sitting-room and a pale shaft crossed swords with it. Black Marsden snapped his fingers as if to aid and abet the Goodrich/Knife duel of memory. In his plush armchair he looked every inch the Director of Tabula Rasa Global Theatre. Goodrich half-laughed, half-protested, but sank nevertheless into a hypnotic scene (hang-dog or hanged man tunnel) as he wrestled inwardly with Knife afresh….
He made doodles of butter punctuated by diamonds and flies. The suffocating heat of Kingston sliced him in half. He recalled the day he arrived there on his first round-the-world trip. He recalled being besieged by beggars. A crowd of faces (grown-up faces, children’s faces) pressed upon him. With the left hand of a dreamer in broad daylight he was intent on drawing them upon the pages of infinity in his book. The covers of that book were his own paradoxical frame of mind and body related to seasons and places. Soon it became too oppressive for him to complete the sketches he had begun. They dangled at his fingertips nevertheless — decapitated, armless sketches — blackboard or blackbeard buried in today’s sun or yesteryear’s snow.