The Tree of the Sun

by Wilson Harris

  “Out of a kind of cowardice perhaps,” she insisted gently.

  “It was nothing of the kind.”

  “It was Francis. And now he brings us face to face, he edits our secret conversations.”

  “You mean he brings you face to face with him. The arrogant bastard. Who does he think he is?”

  “Francis. Not arrogance. We’re quarrelling again. His hand is there yes. In his interpretation of our lives. But can’t you see it works to diminish a pattern of domination?”

  “What are you driving at Julia?”

  “He makes us speak to each other so unpredictably, so unexpectedly, that we become the voices we feared or concealed in ourselves most of all in our past lives. He too becomes …”

  “We become strangers to each other Julia. That’s his doing.”

  “You mean we become more aware of the strangers in each other that we fear Francis. Unity is the mystery of otherness. I and Thou. I actually wrote that in a letter to you which you never read.”

  “Whose fault was that?”

  “Mine of course. I was afraid. As Eleanor’s afraid of your son in the parts she plays. She conceals herself from Harlequin as I concealed myself from you. It’s an immemorial drama. A mirror, a television box, a bed, a stream, a cradle, the tomb one invents. Many a great actress is born out of the stealth with which she conceals herself in others and from others. Who is your son Francis? Is he the descendant of all your terrors and hopes mixed together? Is he a creature of mixed blood? (I mean ‘blood’ in a painter’s or writer’s limbo sense, the sense of tradition that bleeds until it glows like a sun in one’s side.) To what and whom in you is he closest? Does he exist at all? Do you exist at all? You conceived him in another man’s wedding bed the day I lay in my coffin. Was it guilt for your own actions, your past affairs with women, or was it a form of blind jealousy that I might take it into my head in the grave—yes the grave—to have a lover who would come between us until we had no alternative but to face the resurrection of the self in a variety of strangers who play us as we play them?”

  “Stop,” Francis cried. “Stop.” He felt chained within a theatre of unique contrasts, wedding day/resurrection day renascence of the arts; chained within a necessity to sift the evolution of the family of man from tabula rasa seed to tabula rasa conception; to sift tenderness/non-tenderness, conquest/savagery, being/non-being, all buried in inimitable constellations of otherness. “I must speak with him, this lover of yours. I cannot believe …”

  “But you do believe, you do believe in god….” Julia sounded naïve.

  Francis was terribly angry; angry at a precipitate logic of confrontation between Julia and himself he had concealed, or appropriated within his book of life, until this instant when they found themselves actually quarrelling—as if it were a dream and the conversations they held were theirs and yet not theirs—about the authority of love, the authority of god, the annunciation, the incarnation. Actually quarrelling (in the logic of dreams) in spite of—or because of—an unresolved ancient carnival feud of the parentage of the cosmos planted in their common flesh-and-blood.

  “How can you think of yourself, your need for a child in the very grave and god in the same breath? It’s a heresy,” he wanted to shout but remained silent altogether aware of the authority he had himself arrogated to himself in this very matter. “He’s a devil, this artist-lover of yours,” he thought. “A devil,” he repeated softly, so softly, Julia scarcely heard; and then his voice softened and he continued unexpectedly, unpredictably, as if it were a confession—“We have a long, long way to go Julia if we are … you and I … to be, to live, to bridge our extremities. The collateral of conception deepens tragically in the world around us until children are bought and sold, as if they’d never been born, and security’s a model of intransigence. We need to plumb our intransigence in the depths and the heights. I put it into my book to you a long time ago Julia. (What is time? What is the incarnation?) Then hid it from you for your own good, your own good Julia, your own good. I swear. But now the tyranny of love I upheld for our mutual self-interest draws us back to lapsed seasons and lapsed senses, into gaps and holes through which to ascend, to descend into a daemon or creator, a daemon of conscience I fear.”

  His anger flared up again as if he wished now to repudiate the confession he had made. But he put his foot nevertheless tentatively on to a rung in the ladder of fate da Silva drew from his book.

  It was as if—on the arm of Julia—he had arrived at a crucial parting of the ways. He stood on an ancient pier over unknown serpentine waters magnified into the trunk of a tree that had fallen across worlds. Beside these waters a jealous mechanic of day, in the hand of a child, rocked or swung a ship of sun, a jealous mechanic of night, in the Bayswater hand of a child, rocked or swung a ship of stars. It was a game that extended through immemorial approximations to the genesis of day and night in the games that children played, that adults played.

  His hand reached up too to Julia’s in the game of death and life Jen and da Silva played in the rocking canvas of the womb.

  She had retreated out of curious reserve, inhibition perhaps or shyness. Like a child in a woman after a disagreement or a quarrel. She sat up in her coffin or swing as if it were a boat or a chair from which to address the jealous mechanics of the sun and the stars built into her husband’s book. Were they both daemon and creator, or was one god, the other devil? Her ladies-in-waiting swung into many achieved distances on branches of air and water that reached into every apartment of existence.

  He wanted to seize her, to embrace her like a living coronation or sculpture, but he knew a trial run of the “limbo swings of the body” had commenced, precipitate seas, precipitate lands and elements, and that he needed to descend into these if he were both to follow and return to her, to embrace her and to be with her in truth and in deed, to embark with her in the fullness of expedition as with a mature queen of sorrows and joys shared by all lives and unlived lives suspended between heaven and earth.

  5

  Resurrection Day/Limbo

  The origins of the family of man lay upon swings of time as Francis descended the ladder of fate.

  Eleanor descended with him until she came to rest upon a stool before a mirror in her sumptuous apartment.

  She sat in her bedroom in a rich corner of the universe in Ladbroke Grove. It was a free afternoon following a week of rehearsals in Kensington Gardens.

  Harlequin was away on business in Liverpool and she was awaiting the arrival of Leonard.

  Designs and models of guns were pinned into every wall of the house and her bedroom, with its wallpaper of an aggressive milky way, was no exception.

  Her hair fell and half-veiled the stars or nipples that rested like red-brown pebbles in precipitate breasts of clay and gold.

  A cavalry charge of cloud stood almost at slow motion in the mirror before her which was angled to catch the sky outside.

  Da Silva felt a trace of gratification mixed with remorse in beginning to disclose to Francis an intimate translation of elements from his own book.

  Sometimes it loosened the tongue—created a state of shock in an author—to see his secret thoughts and writings in public or painted flesh-and-blood (like a savage tribe exposed to itself), in the cinema, or the box, or the bed, or in a grave of water, in a coffin of sky; a shock to come abreast of oneself as cannibaliser of other lives and deaths around the globe, raider of others’ private lives, famous explorer, the base curiosity, the eternity of lust … and yet (in spite of it all) the potentiality for compassion….

  “I know”, said da Silva almost apologetically, “what a shock it is to see your own incorrigible dreams and shadows re-appear before you, the seed of a dance between heaven and earth, flight to other places, conflict, pursuit. Take Eleanor. Take Harlequin. Take Leonard. From what high branch in the stars, in the tree of the sun, have you plucked them in compensation for your own losses?”

  “I met Eleanor”, Francis sudd
enly confessed with a loosened tongue in his skull, “a month or so after my wife Julia had had a miscarriage, her first miscarriage. Met her, and the man with whom she lived, at an exhibition of guns. He possessed a shop in Holland Road but their home was in Ladbroke Grove. In the end she agreed to marry him. He was twice her age, you see, twice my age and Julia’s. That was years afterwards and, as you know, by a twist of fate they got married on the day of Julia’s funeral.

  “Eleanor was a comfort to me, I suppose, when I first began to sleep with her, it was her coarseness. Something earthy and yet pathetic. She needed a strong man, a strong husband, and that Harlequin was not in spite of his collection of guns. They both vaguely knew of my wife Julia whom I kept religiously apart from them. She and they never met. Indeed I am sure they did not know that Julia was buried within the hour and minute they were married. That shows how successful I was in disclosing virtually nothing to them of Julia’s concrete suffering existence.

  “So you see there was a real Eleanor and there was a real Harlequin behind the scenes in my book. Julia never said it but I knew she blamed me for the miscarriage. Irrational yes, I know. Perhaps it was post-foetal (rather than post-natal) depression. Her need or desire for a child was quite enormous, quite frightening. And yet she was kind, beautiful, considerate. Beside her Eleanor was clay. I used to go occasionally to Eleanor’s amateur plays. She loved acting. In my book she turns into a full-blown professional actress who makes her bed in pastures green and under the glare of satellites which tumble her in and out of global rooms and beds.

  “And thus emerged quite naturally, or supernaturally, in my book, the goddess fiction of Eleanor, overshadowing millions, based on the ‘real’ Eleanor.

  “Perhaps it was more of a curse than a blessing to project her into the future as if she could never age, never grow up, in remaining all her life a sleeping (however apparently active) princess of clay and gold.

  “And I wed her to my son by Julia, the son that had miscarried, the son that became a real fiction. Julia’s child. My child. Everyman’s, everywoman’s, lost child.

  “I called him Harlequin after the ageing husband of the ‘real’ Eleanor. I fashioned him as slender and young, half the age of the ageing Harlequin, half the size of the burly thunderous ironmonger.

  “It was a recurring dream of unageing lightning youth in which Harlequin appears and re-appears and remains perpetually the same age as Julia when we lost our first child. No wonder he is a fallible legacy. Perhaps he knew (fiction though he was) how scarred he was as unageing god born of metaphysical womb. And it imbued him with a twinkle of humour at the height of his failed battles. He certainly saw he was no match for the sleeping (however apparently active) Eleanor.

  “Indeed his presence, in my book, was a medium through which to clothe a faculty of perpetual unconsciousness, Julia’s unborn child, my unborn child, everyman’s, everywoman’s, unborn child; to create thereby the strangest sublimity of feud; to create through a mythical hero a mythical sleeping princess as well over which millions fight, a modern Helen caught between Paris, Achilles and Hector; caught, as it were, to forestall catastrophe—to transform, digest, catastrophe—through profound avant-garde creativity that gathers up what is insubstantial and rejected in the cradles of Man.

  “So failed warrior that he is he is utterly real in the antagonists with whom he fought (still fights), the uncanny way he puts flesh-and-blood on the most unpromising skeletons, guns, bottles, houses, shattered monuments, fallen trees, broken fires, drought-ridden waters. They are all his antagonists drawn up into sublimity of feud from a pool of unconsciousness from immemorial miscarriages and myths.

  “And every apparent victory or defeat he suffers at their hands seems to make him into other progenies of suffering, disadvantaged, creation I never dreamt to reside in my hands. Take the case of Leonard. At first sight that is, I confess, quite an unpromising skeleton with which to wrestle, with whom to wage war and to suffer defeat.”

  Da Silva could no longer restrain his curiosity. “Was Leonard Greek or Trojan or Caribbean miscarriage? Or was he orphaned by Auction Block, Middle Passage, antecedents?”

  Francis was startled by the question, then amused. “I thought you knew everything,” he said, “all the orphans of the head and the heart.”

  Da Silva was properly chastened and rebuked. Where before he had felt gratification and remorse in disclosing to Francis an intimate translation of elements from Francis’s own book now he felt—on his side—the shock of mystery to bought-and-sold character that added an invisible cubit to Francis’s hidden achievements. In Leonard he was suddenly impulsively aware of a dark kiln, a dark horse of a cradle (in which armies secreted themselves in the name of purgatory and creativity) or inner furious skeleton to flesh-and-blood woven from the Industrial Revolution.

  That very moment—a mile or so away from where Eleanor sat—Leonard was boiling, in a sudden burst of sun around the dancing globe, to make his way to her from the bottle kiln facing Avondale Park.

  “Come on, let’s go,” said da Silva. He had turned a page in Francis’s book and was beginning to unveil and construe some of its limbo elements. “There’s a sudden, perfectly normal, plunge—accentuated by shock—one takes from the ladder of fate into limbo. A state of abstraction, a state of immersion, in page or text, that takes one into another’s bones.

  “Like the sudden, perfectly normal, plunge—coincidental to shock—one takes in absentmindedly turning a key in a door until one forgets one’s skeleton hand and finds one’s been locked into an antagonist’s flesh.

  “A sudden, perfectly normal, sensation of sinking by degrees into a table or a wall as into the slow enveloping folds of a lake, the whiteness of the surface perhaps, the glint of rose colour from a shaded lamp or the smoothness of a wall, that blots out, for an instant, all other immediate anchorages—lowered threshold of awareness, extensive horizon—heightened threshold of awareness, intensive depths, unfathomable memories.”

  They had arrived at the translated threshold or word of Leonard’s skeleton bottle kiln face to face with Avondale Park.

  LEONARD’S CRADLE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY IMMIGRANT ANTECEDENTS

  Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

  THIS KILN

  is a reminder of the nineteenth century when potteries and brickfields were established here amid some of the poorest housing conditions in London; it is one of the few examples of a bottle kiln left in London. The name of the mews behind is the only surviving evidence of the hippodrome race course which stretched around Notting Hill in the mid-nineteenth century.

  “Ah yes,” said Francis as though his tongue were further loosened in his skull. “I remember this. I remember how I drew it into my book like an esoteric flower of economic horizons when Europe was expanding around the globe. I feel the constriction still of the rose of the sun in my head, the volcanic industries, the larger-than-life sensation.” He stopped. And da Silva drew him across the road into Avondale Park. They sat on a bench as within Leonard’s recalled ancestral immigrant body, immigrant room, in which the brickwork of the kiln (against which Leonard had deposited a twentieth-century milk bottle) loomed like a refined milestone or epitaph to an extinct volcano within the sky of time and place. The heat and burden of a past century had vanished and yet something pathetic, yet penetrative and illuminating, curiously naked and sad, seemed to relate the mystery of constellations to a re-dress of appearances in the comedy of the cosmos.

  It was one’s perception of an economic scar that ran through new blocks and houses springing up on every hand, through the stratifications of materials, the spare use of glass, the tight balconies on which a line of washing, here and there, hung like flags.

  It was one’s perception of the apparent dissolution of economic miscarriage or scar on every bed of place and time in the filtered light of embracing seasons, a new pathos, a new detachment, a new hope, an old scepticism that conserved implicitly the humour and toughness of impl
acable generations….

  The unveiled pages of Francis’s book in da Silva’s canvases of Avondale Park and its neighbourhood seemed to move from the oceanic light of mild half-winter, half-spring, descending from the sky, into half-boiling curtains of summer in a new body of building complexes….

  Leonard had retrieved his milk bottle from under the kiln and da Silva drew Francis up from their bench in the park which had seemed, in the subtle shock of translated elements, a dimension of native as well as half-forgotten immigrant body.

  Leonard was a tall black Englishman and da Silva and Francis trod on his heels (in his heels) as he made his way from the kiln along the grey-black carpeted road. He was dressed in a loud check coat to echo subconsciously perhaps a ribald, yet religious, commentary on Harlequin antagonisms unveiled in Francis, painted in da Silva. Recreation of the trade winds of psyche blown into common-or-garden squares or fabrics or colours. Twentieth-century comedy of divinity.

  They passed a priest cycling to work and were approaching a doctor’s surgery, at the corner, flanked by an old fragmented wall in this curiously historic neighbourhood. Then, on their left, came an open area with a low building which housed a new swimming pool.

  Leonard stopped for a moment on an open concrete pitch that bordered the pool to shout a word of encouragement to a limbo dancer from the West Indies who swept under a pole held horizontally by two white youths.

  First the dancer merely lowered his head and shoulders as he passed under the bar but gradually as the pole was taken inch by inch, foot by foot, closer to the ground, he began to bend his trunk and limbs backwards; his legs and feet acquired astonishing agility and protean spirit.

  In the background, perhaps a mile away, above pool and pitch, four or five high-rise buildings ascended into the sky like elongated dancers themselves in tune with a bottle-necked kiln of populations. The limbo dancer beside the pool re-fashioned himself into a series of distortions as he kissed the deck of symbolic slave ship, symbolic free ship, with the back of his head between pole and ground.