Companions of the Day and Night
Wilson Harris
Language: English
Pages: 84
ISBN: 057129622X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'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.
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
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
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
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
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