Here is the passage at the outset of Palace to which I allude:
A horseman appeared on the road coming at a breakneck stride. A shot rang out suddenly, near and yet far as if the wind had been stretched and torn and had started coiling and running in an instant. The horseman stiffened with a devil’s smile, and the horse reared, grinning fiendishly and snapping at the reins. The horseman gave a bow to heaven like a hanging man to his executioner, and rolled from his saddle on to the ground.
The shot had pulled me up and stifled my own heart in heaven …
I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye …
Mariella had killed him …
(pages 19 to 21, Palace of the Peacock, 1988)
The nameless, dreaming twin brother “I” rides towards El Dorado and re-enacts in himself a theatre of revenge inflicted on the EldoraDonne fugitive of time his brother has become across the aroused or awakening centuries. For his brother, the conquistador, is now native — in an evolution of the unfinished genesis of the Imagination — to the soil of Old/New worlds. Donne’s ghost and that soil are becoming visible again within the gaps and holes and hiatuses of recorded histories.
Such visibility is made possible by the density or rhythmic veil of “wind … stretched and torn … coiling and running in an instant”. Not only that. The “invisible” wind is outlined into a luminous tension between implicit rope or noose and “stiffened” bullet.
It is not my intention to say much more in this brief Note. Except a word about muses of time and place. Even as Donne embodies a plurality of voyagers, a plurality of living deaths, so Mariella (whom he abuses) embodies a plurality of women. These are made visible as terror-making faculties and the regenerative womb of time when the skeletal fabric and artifice of history’s masquerade acquire luminous density in the music of living landscapes.
There is the ancient Arawak woman whom Donne and his crew seize and conscript into a guide.
Tiny embroideries resembling the handwork on the Arawak woman’s kerchief and the wrinkles on her brow turned to incredible and fast soundless breakers of foam …
The crew were filled with the brightest-seeming clarity of tragedy, as cloudless as imperfectly true as their self-surrender to the hardship of the folk they followed and pursued: the cloudy scale of incestuous cruelty and self-oppression tumbled from their eye … Their ears were unstopped at last …
(pages 62 to 64, Palace of the Peacock, 1988)
Finally with respect to Mariella’s embodiment of women and a womb of potentialities beyond every frame of abuse comes a revelation of the “bone-spirit” in the woman dressed in nothing but her hair.
Such artifice rooted in nature is peculiarly subtle in its orchestration of elements. There is a rhythmic linkage between ear and eye foreshadowed in the ancient Arawak woman and Donne’s crew. In pre-Columbian legend “ear” and “eye” and “head” could assume different personalities to be combined and recombined into a music of the senses. My intuitive interpretation of such recombinations is that a hidden capacity slumbers in nature and everywhere to address a labyrinth of healing in a conflict-ridden age. Within such a labyrinth, adversarial twins — not necessarily connected by blood or race — become psychically supportive one of the other in trials of the Imagination.
In those trials a “material nexus binding the spirit of the universe” gives way to a “threadbare garment” envisioned by ear and eye: as though ear sees, eye listens, within a medium of visionary music.
Such artifice — if artifice it is — brings a pregnant apparition into the silences of space that have neither a beginning nor an ending.
The woman was dressed in a long sweeping garment belonging to a far and distant age. She wore it so absentmindedly and naturally, however, that one could not help being a little puzzled by it. The truth was it was threadbare. One felt that a false move from her would bring it tumbling to the ground. When she walked, however, it still remained on her back as if it was made of the lightest shrug of her shoulders — all threads of light and fabric from the thinnest strongest source of all beginning and undying end.
(page 106, Palace of the Peacock, 1988)
WILSON HARRIS
January, 1997
BOOK ONE. HORSEMAN, PASS BY
Cast a cold eye
On Life, on death.
Horseman, pass by.
I
A horseman appeared on the road coming at a breakneck stride. A shot rang out suddenly, near and yet far as if the wind had been stretched and torn and had started coiling and running in an instant. The horseman stiffened with a devil’s smile, and the horse reared, grinning fiendishly and snapping at the reins. The horseman gave a bow to heaven like a hanging man to his executioner, and rolled from his saddle on to the ground.
The shot had pulled me up and stifled my own heart in heaven. I started walking suddenly and approached the man on the ground. His hair lay on his forehead. Someone was watching us from the trees and bushes that clustered the side of the road. Watching me as I bent down and looked at the man whose open eyes stared at the sky through his long hanging hair. The sun blinded and ruled my living sight but the dead man’s eye remained open and obstinate and clear.
*
I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye. I put my dreaming feet on the ground in a room that oppressed me as though I stood in an operating theatre, or a maternity ward, or I felt suddenly, the glaring cell of a prisoner who had been sentenced to die. I arose with a violent giddiness and leaned on a huge rocking-chair. I remembered the first time I had entered this bare curious room; the house stood high and alone in the flat brooding countryside. I had felt the wind rocking me with the oldest uncertainty and desire in the world, the desire to govern or be governed, rule or be ruled for ever.
Someone rapped on the door of my cell and room. I started on seeing the dream-horseman, tall and spare and hard-looking as ever. “Good morning,” he growled slapping a dead leg and limb. I greeted him as one greeting one’s gaoler and ruler. And we looked through the window of the room together as though through his dead seeing material eye, rather than through my living closed spiritual eye, upon the primitive road and the savannahs dotted with sentinel trees and slowly moving animals.
His name was Donne, and it had always possessed a cruel glory for me. His wild exploits had governed my imagination from childhood. In the end he had been expelled from school.
He left me a year later to join a team of ranchers near the Brazil frontier and border country. I learnt then to fend for myself and he soon turned into a ghost, a million dreaming miles away from the sea-coast where we had lived.
“The woman still sleeping,” Donne growled, rapping on the ground hard with his leg again to rouse me from my inner contemplation and slumber.
“What woman?” I dreamed, roused to a half-waking sense of pleasure mingled with foreboding.
“Damnation,” Donne said in a fury, surveying a dozen cages in the yard, all open. The chickens spied us and they came half-running, half-flying, pecking still at each other piteously and murderously.
“Mariella,” Donne shouted. Then in a still more insistent angry voice — “Mariella.”