The Tree of the Sun

by Wilson Harris

  “Coup d’état of a queen, the voluntary surrender of powers by a king, by myself, is easier to accomplish with a hand that waves a milk bottle in the cradle of space”, Francis murmured and laughed at himself, at the absurdity of himself, “than by my resurrection’s striking body. I shall give Julia the child she needs. I swear it.”

  The bowler hat shone, as it too receded along the pavement, to bestow on him a sense of being clothed or re-made, of being painted by da Silva across distances on either side of a cradle or a grave, the furs the lady wore began to melt into human skins, the bottles of milk vaguely twinkled like stars half-smothered in a blanket of cloud. They vanished into a queue of passengers who had been standing for some time now at a bus stop, further along the pavement, close to a hole in the ground in which workmen were descending.

  Not absurdity really he thought as he arose with their fractured soil on him. An unexpected shaft hit him all at once, like another blow from da Silva’s brush, as he came half-way along the half-moon park of Royal Crescent on the Holland Park Avenue side.

  Across the road from him rose the façade of the unfinished hotel situated on a site that had previously held, in Francis’s other lifetime, a garage, ancient offices or residences. Its rectangular face looked brown in the misty winter morning like dressed earth. A spirit of everyday craftsmanship, low-keyed sophistication, ascended there out of a trench of previous buildings and Francis wondered again about the shaft in his limbs, about his manifesto or revolutions and lives. And it seemed, all at once, in being painted anew into existence, into resurrection, one comes alive to a humour of cosmos that distances one from oneself … in drawing one back to oneself … one’s need for oneself, one’s blindness to oneself. So that the very geography of divided circumstance, on this bank or that of the reflected cosmos, creates a stranger population in a self that seeks to return to itself as a new creation.

  He stopped and examined the premises closely and it came home to him that he had been hit by the apparently unschooled hand in the four naked trees that ran along the pavement before the face of the new hotel. (Perhaps it was another assault by a painter’s brush, a number of which da Silva kept by his palette.) They seemed equally neither to stir nor to sing and yet they ran with a song of the earth, song of a melancholy homecoming to a universal city he loved on both banks of father time.

  He moved on again with the inner sense of that shaft or song until he came to the junction of Holland Park Avenue and Holland Road. The sky pressed down upon a recently constructed roundabout that swept into a new highway towards Marylebone.

  The atmosphere was inclined to thicken but intimate traceries of light ran nevertheless through the clouds like curtained branches upon curtained branches of space reflected in the Thames, beneath a Chelsea horizon, in which the faces of the three passersby, to whom he had read his book, seemed all at once quite vividly there within him, within a suspension of incredulity, courtesy, abuse, laughter.

  A fruit shop and a bank he recalled in his previous lifetime, over twenty-five years ago, on this side of Holland Road, had sailed away or vanished.

  So had the pub, the barbershop and the ironmonger’s on the other side.

  And yet he could see them as if they were there forever pooled in his own consciousness.

  Francis dodged between a line of cars as he crossed Holland Road towards the place on which the ironmonger’s store had stood.

  The area of thick buildings he used to know there had vanished and the land ran clear to an old railway line at the back. And yet he could see….

  The ironmonger used to stand in the door of his shop quite close to where Francis’s foot now stood. On a hot summer day he was often coatless and the buckles on his braces shone. He would stand there with his eyes fixed on the stream of people making their way to the pub or to the barbershop or coming from Kensington or going to Kensington. There was an embarrassing fixity in his gaze as if he were bored with the business of the day or as if he needed to test a theory of his own about the tree of existence.

  Francis recalled seeing him dressed one memorable and sad day (the day that Julia died twenty-five years ago) in a very black hat above the trunk of his limbs with the air upon him of a solemn wedding and a honeymoon. He seemed as formidable as a human safe in which to lodge the wild oats of god, the wild griefs of god.

  He thought of the bowler-hatted young man (who looked in his early or mid-twenties) to whom he had read a page of his book less than twenty-five minutes ago, a page he had concealed in the ironmonger’s body twenty-five years today—or was it twenty-five years tomorrow—griefs and joys are timeless—as it registered upon him (within or across a divide of time built into a flash of sorrow); he was caught then as now upon a projected page, resurrected in da Silva’s canvases, like a stranger father of self-made sons, never-to-be-made sons, suspended in himself.

  “Can god father himself”, Francis wrote, “in iron masques of tradition, constellated milk bottles, nondescript bowler hats, furred mistresses, unseen populations, unborn heirs?”

  There was an odd, a disconcerting seed of resemblance between father time and self-made son, between incredulity of branch in the young man and fixity of gaze in the older, though in point of fact the bowler-hatted youth was thin and tall, the ironmonger’s eyes bulky and large.

  There was an odd, a disconcerting seed of rebellious upward movement, in Francis, towards the ironmonger’s foot in a wedding whereas he (Francis) stood in a grave. And, as a consequence, he was drawn to conceal a page of consciousness there, to invest in ironmonger sculpture as a backward resurrection of father time. As though the past is itself the resurrection of feuds of consciousness in the present and the future, in the stress of immediate circumstance, since the present and the future inevitably begin to conceive and to die….

  “Am I my own father?” said Francis. “That’s nonsense.”

  “Is it nonsense? Is it?” said the ironmonger. “There’s a central, apparently invincible, nothingness to all material existence out of which time runs backwards and forwards….” He paused and continued—“And it is this that imbues us with a capacity to cast off a conviction that imprisons us or to acquire a conviction that determines us.”

  “I have come through nothingness,” Francis thought, wishing to assert his own naked manuscript, from which da Silva painted, even as it flashed on him that the bowler-hatted youth was father time’s self-made son conceived twenty-five years ago on that bitter honeymoon day when he (Francis) had seen him (the ironmonger) dressed to death in his shop.

  The ironmonger began to air his views across the years. The centrality of nothingness lay in the shadow of the womb. The strength of nothingness lay in the shadow of the grave from which one steps back with a sense of having gone forward to an unborn yet old-born existence clad in all durable ages and rags.

  “And therefore,” said the ironmonger, “we return to life out of invincible nothingness possessed of a model of strength.” His eyes were fixed on Francis with a profound and tormenting question.

  Model of strength, Francis thought, and scepticism clouded his mind now about his own striking resurrection body. To go through extinction, as if it were a growing seed, towards a solid truth should signify, he suddenly saw, a capacity to cast off an obsession with models of strength (or weakness for that matter).

  “And therefore”, said the ironmonger, “to return to life with such obsessions, however admirable in some respects, born of immersion in invincible nothingness, is to return to the labyrinth of history from a death we dream we have had but not yet completely known in its ultimate passage to truth. A something rubs off on us, chains us, obsesses us still, and brings us back to life a step closer to truth perhaps but far from it nevertheless. And that is all you can claim….” His eyes were fixed on Francis, in da Silva’s painting, as though they stared through a new-found mask or vizor in the great conquistadorial ball Francis and Julia had attended and which he recalled so vividly now, in the presence of
the ironmonger, on a day of a wedding and a funeral twenty-five years ago.

  “But I tell you”, said Francis, “that what I sought to do in my book was to relate myself through you—through others who may come to read it—to the prick of a pin upon which populations move against the inscrutable canvas of the stars. Perhaps a minute, in this context, bridges centuries, on either side of which we stand, as an index of how buried we are in time.”

  The ironmonger was still. He was drawn by the humour and the pathos of the cosmos, tall or thin bowler-hatted son, black milk bottle son, larger-than-life fixity of father time’s body in a suit of armour. It half-opened, it half-closed upon him into a measure of escape or freedom from grotesque attachment, a measure of the transparent, therefore half-bearable, domination of the past in the present and future, a measure of groping conception and truth, as native to oneself and foreign to oneself, with which one returns to the body of this life.

  3

  Wedding Day/Resurrection Day

  Julia had arisen from bed, bathed and dressed. She wore a long skirt that swept around her ankles. Da Silva tried to fathom her appearances through the tree of the sun but they eluded him again as if her mask in the partial lives and deaths of history remained as elusive and perfect as ever. A curious combination perhaps of extinction and vacancy and the refinements of aroused presence. He continued to paint her like a figure in a wall, a fire that was other than fire with whom father time, sun-king, snow-king, ironmonger-king, communes in his search for a resurrected self in the womb of the elements.

  There is a fire to spring, a fire to winter, a fire to autumn, a fire to summer, as though the sun’s pregnant shapes, reflected in windows and skies, relate to various illuminated banks of the image-less (yet image-haunted) pool of the cosmos upon which we seek ourselves in every renascence of the arts.

  She opened the curtains and sat at a desk by the window to await the return of Francis from Shepherd’s Bush Green, Francis the family-man saint, Francis the lover and warrior, Francis the writer, Francis the mourner and sculptor of pleasures and griefs (behind whom, like hovering posterity, was da Silva the painter and editor of Julia’s letters and Francis’s book).

  She half-opened the window now and was struck by a breath of marvellously painted air, as subtle as an egg or shell of creation, at which a painter takes aim again and again in creating the parentage of earth.

  What a refinement of the stake of the sun one embraces, da Silva thought as he painted Julia, on a wedding day, on a resurrection day.

  What a task is the translation of the cinders of dawn into oceanic depths of musical flesh-and-blood, into seasons, into climates, into illuminated banks and islands.

  She was indeed an incredibly lovely woman, one apparitional foot in the early twentieth century, the other in the late twentieth century. And he was tempted to speak to her now himself (he was sure she knew he was here, brush in hand), to place himself between Francis, the family-man saint, and Francis, the lover and king, as aroused subject, aroused reporter of approximate existences within the eye of the needle’s gate in each delicate brushstroke he inscribed upon earth and heaven.

  But at that moment came the sound of a step in the hall. Francis was back. He came into the room, flung his hat and coat upon a rack where they half-clung, half-bulged, into ghostly armour like refined charcoal. Julia laughed, with that incredible touch of gaiety men and women irrationally possess, in the darkest or brightest times, at the dressed cinders of noon, black afternoon diamond hat, black morning illustrious coat.

  A body of mutated associations seemed to cluster and arise out of wedding day, resurrection day, carnival as Francis held her to him and kissed her on the lips as if he had lost her and found her again on the minute speck of a star that shivered in her eyes.

  “Dear Francis,” she wrote from that minuscule star as his hand slid down her back, on to her legs and thighs, into animate gold, dark refined gold as into a variety of exaggerated premises.

  She disentangled herself. In the light of the room the black diamond hat, the black morning coat, shone with answering humour.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded.

  “Into another universe,” he said flippantly yet apparently quite seriously.

  “Did you buy the fruit and the vegetables?” she asked, equally seriously.

  “Fruit? Vegetables?” His voice was suddenly blank, naïve. Perhaps he had forgotten, in that instant, the necessity for foodbearing tree in the shiver of a star from which she posted her letters to him around the universe. Their inner reflections joined and swam. She shook him suddenly, her breasts moved like the implicit wave of a ship, a melting ship from which horizons grew to translate each living word.

  “Let’s remember today,” she said suddenly, sombrely, from within that wave that descended to her waist and left her suddenly naked like a flurry of pages of surf da Silva unbound around a rescued body.

  Francis drew her into bed. The sound of a faint call in the distance, a telephone beak in the shell of the sea, a telegram, rather than a letter, drew them into each other’s arms. Perhaps they were attuned to living ink as the surf ascended once again, to charcoal voices of birds in foodbearing tree at the heart of fire, to midnight eyes in the middle of broad daylight.

  “I spent the morning writing letters,” she confessed inwardly. Their bodies clung together into the language of a living tool, cultivated living bed, carpentered living tables and chairs in the room around them like attendant yet invisible courtiers, flesh-and-blood wood, grassgrown parks and ponds, carven benches, milestones of penetrative flesh in the theatre of a bed that secreted the memories of lives lived or unlived a generation and more ago, a generation and more to come.

  It was a strategy of wedded apparitions in each postbox of memory within a quest for the resurrection of the self….

  They arose from bed, took the car and drove to Bayswater Road; parked and went for a stroll in Kensington Gardens.

  Da Silva aimed his brush at a cloud in the sky shaped like Mount Olympus on which a god and a goddess sat. A drop of paint as subtle as the star that shivered in Julia’s eyes, or intangible as the bruise that ran on Montezuma’s brow, within creative and re-creative approximations of resurrected self, descended and clothed Francis and Julia now. Twinkling eyes, fingertips, eyebrows. Fleeting seasons. One world and another.

  They were astonished at their newfound powers. Prick a newborn stone, smooth as the forehead of time, and fly across chasms of sensibility and insensibility.

  And a tendency arose in da Silva’s paintings—as if his misgiving was theirs—for winter to extend beyond each envelope they wore, or autumn to appear suddenly in a carpet of leaves, convicted or bruised in a flash for natural indolence, and for the trees to part into the sculpture of a horseman riding magnificently and motionlessly into a falling horizon that seemed to embrace the Serpentine.

  Thus there was summer around them impressed with the latent bruises of winter. There was the judgement of autumn upon them led by a bridle of fate. There was the smitten light they wore of refinements of water and fire. They paused in the shadow of the beautiful trees close to the Round Pond. A hubbub arose, an outcry, a rushing of legs and arms that seemed one with the harness of expedition they had witnessed.

  A crowd was gathering at the edge of the pond which stretched a hundred yards or two from bank to bank.

  Francis and Julia quickened their pace. At last they stood at the edge of the water and saw nothing but their own mountainous shadow there on cloud Olympus.

  And then the light flashed upon a log. It seemed a log until it disclosed the knuckles of a hand. A child’s hand around a child’s toy or ship. The body in the water was so submerged it may have been brown or black miscarried foetus of the gods within Olympus. Save for the white gloves or blossoming skin of its hands where these emerged like paint on the glittering dark surface of sky in water. Was this the harlequin pigmentation of oceans resurrected backwards into toy ship or fle
et? “Let me … let me …” cried Julia, secreting a letter there she intended for Francis across a generation and more “hold it. Let me rescue it.”

  But the crowd was oblivious of the cry she raised, of the spontaneous irrationality of posted letter and saved or hoarded communication. There came a long-drawn-out insistent siren that dimmed the telephone beak in the sea, the rush of an ambulance towards resurrected pond, the speeding away of wheels. Then a vacancy in da Silva’s body of the globe as populations melted or vanished.

  “When did it all happen?” said Julia in bewilderment. “My unborn … I was taken ill.”

  “Your unborn … Our unborn … Their unborn …” He seemed to be waving at an elusive target.

  Da Silva murmured soothingly to a shadow on the mountainous reflection of heaven. “Perhaps a spiritual fleet is implied that will take us.”

  “Take us where?” Julia cried.

  “To a coronation,” said da Silva.

  Francis listened too. He heard, as da Silva spoke, the faint sigh or rattle of milk bottles coming across the park as though to announce the arrival of ladies-in-waiting to Queen Julia.

  4

  The magnificent sculptured horse and horseman called Physical Energy continued to move motionlessly above the Serpentine.

  And across the water Epstein’s Rima flew close to the ground above implicit rivers and bodies of water from continent to continent, South America to Europe.

  Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park were characteristic English parkland, designed for a queen, in which apparently alien, apparently archaic, apparently natural, freedoms and fates reside, with a degree of serenity, at the heart of the universal city da Silva loved.