Black Marsden Read Free Page B

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’s slashed 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