The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds)
Page 13
He was witnessing—without realizing it—in that procession he saw in the hills, the regression of the dying folk into mysterious tune of love and death: mysterious attunement to a gulf or divide between sky and earth, between territorial, animal imperative and humankind or human space within all innocent/guilty, sad/happy places where Mack the Knife had moved or settled upon and around the globe….
Jackson recalled with sorrow how he himself had fallen from the ladder of space and into that fall was threaded his “lost” daughter of Man. Or was it that a descent of “daughter” was needed to match an imperfectly understood notion or “ascent” of son—daughter of man, son of man? The question loomed in Mary’s automatic book.
The question brought the hills into his room as he faced the two women and listened to Lucy Brown’s appeal to “talk” to her daughter. The silent hills were running down to the sea not up to the sky. The rivers ran down the island of his boyhood to a sea that possessed so little tidal range there was no reversal of flow back upland or inland. Until the silent hills grew again to match the faint ascent of the spidery rain into the great cloud ancestors of Anancy heaven.
“Ah,” said Jackson turning away from the Jamaican hills to the young woman of Notting Hill, “to fulfil your mother’s trust …” he was speaking to himself “… I must learn to be silent in the face of your obliviousness, I must learn to paint or sculpt what lies stranded between earth and heaven….” He stopped. He looked at her with longing and clouded eyes. Lucy was so young. The minute hand of the clock moved in him to embrace her as Stella had embraced Mary by the hospital gates; as Khublall had embraced his child-bride a long time ago in the riddle of death and love.
Nineteen Lucy was but she seemed younger. He wanted to touch her like a painter or a sculptor and in so doing to create through the mystery of temptation.
What was that temptation? Enchantment with the womb of nature, an enchantment that remained the greatest danger still in bedevilled populations around the globe.
It had led to the arousal of the furies. It had damned him across a generation, no, longer than that, it seemed, a century, two centuries, three. It had given him, only to pluck from him, his “daughter of man”.
And now as he looked at Lucy the temptation was in flower again but with a difference. In the greatest flowering danger lies the greatest prize of artistic wisdom. Lucy was smiling at him as if she knew, yet did not know what he was saying to her, a Mona Lisa smile.
Does every lost daughter of man change into unconscious child-bride within cultures that are stranded between animal divinity and human divinity?
The notion was staggering. It explained so much. It made him see with the eyes of ancient cultures conditioned by the bizarre purchase of love, inner fury that sets its seal of remorse or grief upon sanctioned rape.
Does every sculptor, painter, enchanted by the womb, imply humanity’s involuntary proneness to revert to feudal tradition however camouflaged by technology or promiscuity?
Why could he not reach out and seize Lucy by the nape of her exquisite neck, or by the lips with his lips upon her secretive, enigmatic, curiously hard mouth?
The cat-and-mouse metaphor made him laugh. How ridiculous. Hard lips indeed. The fact is she was practical. He was middle-aged. She had no use for him. And yet it was clear that her very hardness matched his coolness and sobriety, and that his invisibly enraged mind possessed therefore some counterpart in hers. And that was the key to her danger less from him than from some other ancient grievance dressed up in twentieth-century sentiment or authoritarian regime.
Her flat-earth practicality or rejection of cosmic hope could conceal the masked intentions of others in the grip themselves of compulsive illness or regressive force they little understood.
There was nothing he could say to her now. Silence was a measure of terrifying love that creates through every temptation to seize or to speak. There was a time to accept oneself as rooted in the hardness of an age that only non-possessing love beyond given presences, given voices, given conventions, could begin to dissolve.
Fear of the abyss was the beginning of silence he had sensed on Bale in the fire of the hills and trees that had seemed to clothe the woman Mary. Thus in her dissolution lay the conversion of his obsession with the womb, her symbolic dissolution, the acceptance of chastening and mutual responsibility for the body of humanity. He was her authentic messenger of a gleam with which to retrace his steps into faint consensus of radical hope. He was both true person—his crown of hair echoing Marsden’s beard or cloak, fertile spirit, echoing intelligence—and a character in a book that begins to know himself, to thread himself into mutual anguish, mutual authorship between creatress and created.
Mary’s automatic narrative drew to a close. It was as if she knew that to be whole was to endure not only Stella’s comings and goings but the traffic of many souls, endangered souls, in ceaseless angelic/daemonic paradox that cures, yet never cures wholly.
Staring into the spiritual mirror, Mary had no illusions about the difficulties and the tragedies that the making of new community of self presented. They were rooted in her own riddles of body and mind and the tormenting camouflage that Joseph Marsden had helped her to begin to unravel.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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© Wilson Harris, 1982
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ISBN 978–0–571–30209–3