The Tree of the Sun

by Wilson Harris

  6

  The market scenes faded back into dawn’s canvases when da Silva began his WOMB PAINTINGS and his intuitive explorations of the ironies of fate, the miracles of compassion, wrought by nameless forces to secure the origins of life; the maps, legends and conventions of fire and flood in the tree of the sun; the subtlety and enormity of the challenges to life involving levels of conscious and subconscious illumination of animal deity, of populations and complications in evolutionary disguise, evolutionary dread, of cosmos….

  Faded back into the currency of dreams a minute to the hour when Jen, his wife, conceived….

  “Lands, cities, are ships with sails of darkness (sails of light) as the clouds or the stars unfurl into conventions and maps. Tenanted floods. Tenanted fires. Confusing landmasses of myth to house unborn (yet psychologically born and demanding) tenants and populations.”

  Da Silva was dreaming still that the postman drew into harbour and knocked in the body of his wife’s house to deliver a map of unborn, yet born, populations. A pregnant response—as she hung upon the thread of inhabited, uninhabited, worlds—wreathed itself into a mutual cry, eternal mother and child.

  Perhaps that coming eternity of a child was offspring of Mercator’s stick, across four painted centuries of the making of modern maps, as the balance of wealth shifted by degrees from the gold of the Indies to the rise of a northern Atlantic civilisation. And with that shift the very conventions and legends of maps began to reflect the rising importance of northern landmasses in mythical extensions to islands and continents. Greenland grew larger than South America in Mercator’s pregnant globe and great movements and fascinated migrations began, the peopling of North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the waves of emigration from the West Indies and Asia to rich Europe and richer America in the twentieth century.

  “Creation’s myths turn solid underfoot,” said the auctioneer of freedom and fate to flooding presences on foetal landmasses. “Creation’s myths make oceans deeper, vaster, than sight and sound until space itself is born.”

  Over millennia of evolutions the auctioneer of fleets of species in the womb of the coming of man had hunted foetal landmasses or sails, on which to pin immaculate fortunes of the globe, half-fin, half-feather, partialities, implicit wholeness, half-lion, half-angel.

  Over Millennia of evolutions the auctioneer of fleets of species in the womb of the coming of man had burdened foetal landmasses or sails, on which to pin his exploitative designs of the globe, extinguished fin, extinguished feather, self-destructions, half-lion, half-devil.

  There were evenings when the womb of the coming of man’s earth or the coming of god’s sky was made of a rose texture that sealed one’s sight with beauty, midwife breath, midwife rose, midwife seal, in the glass of windows or houses that ran with lakes of the setting sun. A cradle of scarlet, a lake of fire, a cradle of spring blossom, lies everywhere, upon blankets and sails, in the confusion of sight, until intensities smooth as a wave or a cloud melt into the subtlest green, blue, mauve, brilliant white, blind newborn, unborn, enclosing the day or the coming of night.

  The coming of night was a link with the stillest heartbeat of summer.

  The coming of night was a steep cliff into fascinated kingdoms in the stillest heartbeat of winter or spring.

  The coming of night lay in one’s ancient unborn, born, limbs, black, brown or white. One stick of a limb awoke unpredictably to fly to another which slept in the instinctual tasks it performed until broad daylight became resurrected midnight.

  Thus born, unborn, day melted or froze, born, unborn, architectures, letters or books, concertos or sculptures, melted or froze in the middle of the night as the sun shone.

  Each intimate womb painting, or experience of naked enterprise in a body of elements, possessed intertwining forces that had crossed from one bank of cosmos to another to confront each other in a sudden breath or seizure of flesh. And in that confrontation or unpredictable incarnation, stood a variety of conflicting informants, conflicting auctioneers of the humours of creation, within sudden touch, or smell, or glimmering signal of perception of giant bodies and pygmy bodies secreted in a line or word or stroke of paint.

  There was a mystery to the globe, da Silva felt, as he dreamt he genuinely saw the divine comedy, the arts of flesh-and-blood woven upon a stick that tapped and tapped until it swam or supported the head of a giant in certain projections of newborn space, Mercator’s children, that enclosed him now, mythical extensions to landmasses, certain conversations with lines or maps, certain territorial fears of extinction or unhappiness in capital flesh-and-blood, markets of the globe, rooms of the globe, Olympian beds, chairs in which the foetus of the gods sat and grew larger than life in a flash or diminished—in another flash—into terrifying atoms.

  He dreamt of his own painted intercourse in the middle of the mapped night, the midnight morning Jen and he slept together and the postman came with a new sun, a new earth; he tapped the brilliant news. The coming child was as real as the imagined intensity of enduring fiction that overturns the calendar at a minute to twelve.

  Blind tapping night that flooded her still with a seal of rose as he transferred his eyes of the coming of eternity’s child into her body; descent into his own conception, into the memory of his parents’ shoal of banks of fish upon which he stood, the memory of being skinned or hooked alive as he came out of that sea or land into a seal’s midwife body.

  He dreamt he arose from bed on his painter’s/postman’s stick. Jen was asleep as he painted the floor and tapped on his darkglassed canvas. There were three sentinel figures in the room on their highbacked darkglassed chairs, Rima (the birdwoman), Eleanor (the lioness woman) and Queen Julia. Each slept in her chair holding eternity’s child in her arms. He made his involuntary choice to take a human garment of flesh from them and gathered it around him, like a miracle of grace, to make his way down the stairs, into the street, in his darkglassed canvas of rose and seal.

  He dreamt of himself as a skeleton—propped up on a rose and a seal—in a state of exile from the city of god. And yet he was clothed in the flesh of grace. Was there an inimitable comedy and unity between evolutionary science and mythical art built into foetal landmasses, an inimitable suspension of spectral populations, in the midst of conventions and usages, that drew one back, as well as forwards, to immerse oneself in the limits and voyages of fabled existences?

  The moon slept under Mercator’s sea.

  Atlantis grazed on Mars and Venus larger than cows and horses of legend.

  “Take Atlantis,” the auctioneer of species murmured to shepherds and shepherdesses in a field by the canals of Mars. “One hundred thousand billion pounds. Think of it ladies and gentlemen. Think of Mercator’s cattle on Venus, on Mars. On it all parallels of latitude are equal to the equator. Did someone say two hundred thousand billion pounds? An eastward stretching commences until mythical bison begin to bulge as large as Chicago or Los Angeles. A compensatory north-south stretching begins until a spectral core of unlived lives or elusive lives becomes a manifestation of an inhabited, uninhabited, universe.”

  “There is a catch”, said da Silva suddenly, “in the sale of Atlantis.” He seemed to be addressing a crowded universe on the foetal landmasses, seamasses, of his native globe. “We need to confess to the double exile of coming mankind, partial exile from the womb, partial exile from the city of god, wherever one lives. We need to confess to psychological truths at the heart of coming population explosions, coming population implosions. Pure landscape of fact is itself a myth, an invaluable myth, a necessary myth, but a myth all the same. All landscape of fact is susceptible to complex enlargements or diminutions of violent hatreds and loves in the climate of a particular age, in the spatial or non-spatial creative or non-creative obsessions peculiarly interwoven, peculiarly intertwined, in each bed of circumstance….”

  “Did someone say three hundred thousand billion pounds?”

  “Where is Francis?”
da Silva cried suddenly. “He and I were psychologically intertwined….”

  “Have you not struck a bargain with Francis and Julia?” said the foetus of the gods. “Is it not a fact that you and he are descended from the stars into a ladder of complex approximations to deity’s flesh-and-blood upon skeletons of art, complex approximations to resurrection day upon a shrinking planet?”

  Da Silva turned and wondered at the licence of the auctioneer of dreams. He made his way now back along the bed of the street into the room where he had left the three women on their highbacked chairs. They had vanished. Three skeletons sat there now instead with three skeleton babies that rocked on the laps of continents. A minute’s darkglassed chair, the eye of the needle, into which had been threaded the double classical exile of mankind from the kingdom of god and from the womb of animal.

  “Here lies one whose name is writ in water. A poet’s epitaph. Here lies one whose name is writ in fire. A painter’s canvas. Incarnation of ultimate immunities from flood and fire, drought and desert. Thank god! Jen’s pregnant. The world will live one day and the mystery of life will baffle statistics of disaster. In the meantime I, da Silva, wave my stick and Julia arises from her skeleton chair in a renascence of arts, fully fleshed, fully painted, on this side of the grave, in Kensington Gardens, beside the Serpentine….”

  7

  Julia’s deepseated love affair with posterity’s editor and painter Da Silva da Silva led her back to her childhood and young womanhood in the West Indies as into an extension of mythical presences, a mythical family whose figures reached across oceans to each other until the very art of creating a community (the very art of creation itself) seemed a heterogeneous enterprise.

  “Do the origins of creation lie in an inimitable poem or word, an inimitable poet or maker of words?

  “Do the origins of creation lie in an inimitable brushstroke of light, an inimitable painter or maker of suns?

  “Do the origins of creation lie in an inimitable sculpture of space, an inimitable sculptor or maker of shapes?

  “Do the origins of creation lie in an inimitable symphony or sound, an inimitable composer or music-maker?

  “Or are they all uniquely correspondent, coincident, figures of and in creation, capable of enlargement, but substantially implicit in an equation of one and other until deity is both true and profound as paradoxical other or community-in-creator?”

  Julia recalled the garden parties and dances at government house in Zemi to which her father had taken her, the cricket matches, the limbo contests.

  At the age of eighteen she had attended her first carnival ball dressed in a hooped elaborate skirt that could have matched the panorama of fashion that paraded the Broad Walk in the eighteenth century.

  It was in the early to middle eighteenth century that the Broad Walk, the Round Pond and the Serpentine were fashioned into distinctive features of Kensington Gardens in parallel expedition to distant estates in the British Empire on the other side of the globe.

  For it was in the middle eighteenth century that Julia’s great-great-great grandfather sailed from England and established the rudiments of a sugarcane plantation that became enormously wealthy a hundred years later. He took a black woman as his mistress and she became Julia’s great-great-great grandmother.

  There was an air of unreality, irreality, reality to her memories, both personal and archetypal memories, Julia felt, as though the painter da Silva existed in her before she was born as daemon in the conscience of the arts; existed in her as a need in the depths of unborn, born, personality, a need or myth to legitimise illegitimate creator antecedents then as now in that distant (yet intimate) day of parallel, yet estranged, expeditions; a need that pushed her, from within an accumulation of living fossil global instincts born of parallel and estranged expeditions into writing her first letter to Francis in the twentieth century (long after her great-great-great grandparents had died), concealing it, leaving it, to be unearthed and read by the very daemon she instinctually entertained or prized or embraced in the very beginning, before beginnings, before she was born: whom she was to take to her bed after she died like someone arising from a grave to the lightning brushstroke of inimitable painter-lover.

  “What is one’s time? Had one lived before, in some past age, would one have belonged in a way one does not now belong? Or is it that one lives ahead of one’s time in correspondence with a time to which one truly belongs?” she wrote in her first letter to Francis.

  The house in Holland Park Gardens/Addison Road in which da Silva was to unearth that letter, and the other letters she wrote, had been partly enlarged, partly demolished, until one wondered: was it he who had discovered her timeless body, within opened postbox or panel, or she who had prepared herself for the touch of his hand, before it came into existence, as an extension of herself into the myths of enlarged/demolished existence?

  There were moments when, in that body of myth, she came to Kensington Gardens to renew parallel expeditions, to be surrounded by invisible courtiers of the past and the future; moments when the nagging depression from which she suffered in her living, unliving, grave, lifted all of a sudden: a lift that could occur in a flash for no logical reason it seemed. Her blood would suddenly sing. Her limbs would appear to rise, to dance, in the air. Every care and foreboding of miscarriage of a soul would vanish. Music would strike up in the leaves, within radiating walks from the Round Pond down to the Serpentine, at the edge of a great wheel of sound, that spun and did not spin into vistas of oceanic blue, stitched to copper beech trees, or into avenues of lime, or through Matthew Arnold’s “black-crown’d, red-boled pine-trees”, or in a bubbling green wave of pink and white blossom on horsechestnut.

  She possessed no key to this sudden enchantment. It came of its own. It went of its own. It filled her with sorrow, with expectancy that sooner or later it would come again, she would fly again. And this expectancy led her to conceive a reader and companion in exile, in the midst of sorrow, a reporter to whom she was inevitably attached before she was born, someone to whom she could confide the mystery of another world from which she had been parted (the mystery of joy when the parting veil was lifted and the kingdom of god and its overlapping mirror, the womb, visited her, of its own accord; extraordinary bliss flowed out of common-or-garden trees or lawns).

  Sometimes, in an abstract moment, she wrote of it in her letters as an island far away, a place of romantic beauty, studded with palms, a vista of blue sea, a conical mountain swathed in the subtlest web of green and purples and blues. It was a place that had no existence; yet it was real; it could change its hue or tone into a majestic waterfall or into a subterranean cavern in the middle of a forest. It was a substitute gateway into her own body, into mixed elements, mixed ancestries, and into the foetus of the gods she dreamt to conceive.

  There were other times when she saw Francis as both intimate and stranger lodged in the gateway of her bed. His tenderness for her concealed an anxiety about her health physical and mental. No wonder he never shared completely—she was never tired of confessing it in her letters—her desire to have a child. It was as if he saw through her masks of Europe into a darker potential, a heterogeneous potential, that aroused him to distrust appearances, to hate her susceptibility to gardens and walks and lakes as if they could sublimely harbour a foetal procession of demons.

  “Hate” was too strong a word for it. “Love” was stronger still (and “jealousy”? who could say?) for, in point of fact, he often accompanied her and was filled with a pleasure, all the greater for his jealous misgivings, when he saw her states of sudden relief and pleasure. Indeed this “double pleasure” within them was a mutual gateway into several countries of the heart and mind—several mistresses and masters of the heart and mind—by which or whom they were accepted and yet from which or whom they had been banished.

  Julia had once confided to him (and it had aroused his most frightful misgivings as if his authority were being challenged) her feeling of the
partial exile of unseen populations, famished souls, from both the city of god and the kingdom of the womb.

  “It is this feeling”, she said softly but urgently, “that accounts in part for my ups and downs Francis, my elations and depressions. If only I had a key … the city of god would then absorb an overflow of sorrows from the spectre of the womb.”

  “Good god Julia,” said Francis, “what heresy is this?” He had spoken harshly but when he saw the tears in her eyes he desisted and apologised. He hardened himself paradoxically into “will-to-tenderness”. But she had witnessed a blaze in his manner she would never forget and it led to her increasing cultivation of her daemon-artist, daemon-lover, with whom she spoke at times through him and through the barrier of years. Voices Francis sometimes heard until he was driven to distraction by them as if, on the other side of the conical mountain of Julia’s existence, he was aware of an unconscious fire that ran through the mutual book of their lives—unlived and lived lives—into canvases already painted by a painter of the future, sculptures already sculpted by a sculptor of the future. And though Julia was unaware of it it fired and confirmed his ambitions and the book on which he had been engaged even before they met on the West Indian island of Zemi.