The Tree of the Sun

by Wilson Harris

  *

  It had been a hot and stifling day on the island of Zemi when her father was buried at three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun rested on a lower peak in the mountains of the west.

  Her almost childlike love and esteem for him had grown over the years.

  She had invested a wealth of emotion in him in the leaden age of twentieth-century industry when fathers were obsolete and gods were dead. Her mother died when she was two years old. And—though she retained no conscious memory of her—she dreamt of her as someone who had been carved into a chair, a rocking deity in which she sat and conversed with the other rock-epitaph deity, her father, in whose great shock or nest of hair it sometimes seemed a bird’s gentle wings flapped.

  Every summer, from the age of five until her father’s death, she spent the long summer holidays with a great-aunt in England, a stiff-limbed kind-hearted lady-in-waiting who walked with a slight limp upon a stick. She was seventy when Julia first met her but so active in mind she ran a Samaritan office in Southampton Row near Holborn to help people who were in desperate emotional straits and had come to the edge of suicide.

  That great-aunt arrived in Zemi (she was now eighty-four years old) a fortnight after her father was buried to take Julia back to England.

  She wore black and Julia instantly recalled the mourners who came to her father’s funeral. They too were dressed in black under the drum beat of the sun. They were—quite a large section of them—inhabitants of Zemi, isolated civil servant faces, some seafaring painted faces, businessman painted faces, varieties of nondescript faces. And—here and there—the remote buried-sky-faces from the top of the mountains.

  There was a nondescript reporter from the Zemi Chronicle who stood at the gate and noted each arrival in his book. Nondescript and yet on a second, a third, a fourth, glance, he may have been a disguised Da Silva da Silva in advance of his time.

  A funeral was an extraordinary occasion in Zemi and its effects were heightened now in Julia’s sculpture of mind that bridged, it seemed, centuries as well as days and years. She felt alone. It seemed an impossibility that her father was dead. How could he be dead? She thought of her great-aunt in London and of the stick upon which she leaned with apparent exhaustion at the end of a long day after interviews and telephone conversations. She thought of her rocking-chair mother upon whom she (Julia) leaned now herself in a state of numbness akin to sleep. They all grew into insensible props now built into the greater insensibility of death which was an uncanny prop itself, or furniture of tradition, upon which future generations would come to lean.

  They were (great-aunt’s stick, rocking-chair mother) an implicit form of the curious carriage and miscarriage of a lost granddaughter or grandson fate had designed for her in which dwelt an apparition of freedom and truth nevertheless that flashed upon her, all of a sudden, in the body of her aloneness.

  That flash modified the bulk of insensibility and gave her an inner, however frail, steadfastness, an inner detachment, with which—or through which—to witness to the mighty coffin of an age borne in the capital limbs and in the furnitures and in the labour and apparatus of variegated mourners.

  First of all the sense of blackness in the coffin of god, in the apparatus that signified “capital father”. The serge suits the bearers wore were black. The white dresses the women wore in the wake of the coffin highlighted a passion that was black. The glare of the sun at two-thirty in the afternoon painted faces black, deepset faces, filled them with a rich density of tone, all colours, all pigmentations, all illuminations, all creatures, so rich in frail contrast that they seemed to live with the flash of wings that flew through her father’s hair in the midst of a solid wreath of paint that seemed black.

  Then there was the sense of wood, a great carving of flesh-and-blood in the bodies of the bearers and the processional mourners. The glare of the sun on those bodies was like a fire that highlighted the earlier sensation she had had of insensible props of grief built into the greater insensibility of death. Except that, in this moment that subsisted upon a flash, those props seemed actually slighter than before as if their function had altered into a thread in the evolution of insensibility in some of the mourners’ faces which were unfamiliar to her. It was the custom at great funerals for people one scarcely knew, or did not know at all, to attend on the slenderest thread of excuse, a fleeting acquaintance with the deceased, or with a member of the deceased’s family.

  “A fleeting acquaintance with god”, Julia wrote afterwards in one of her letters, “is enough to claim an intimate rapport with the mighty insensible coffin of an age that engages what is fleeting and insubstantial as if to endorse the secret, the most sensitive, origins of life in the apparent death of life.”

  Thus the sense of wood possessed its grain of incalculable irony or humour, incalculable spark of compassion, and the very gatecrashers who came to her father’s funeral, out of stranger curiosity, rather than familiar sympathy, seemed to modify a block of insensibility, in the depths of familar helplessness (rocking chair, walking stick or crutch) one sensed in one’s best friends or relations, by equating the tree of evolutionary death with a fleeting conception of sorrow that became profoundly meaningful in ultimate relief or perspective in the seed of unfamiliar life.

  In addition to limbs of blackness and wood arose a bulk of construction embodying a variety of features. There was the painted, almost planed, quality of her father’s brow above the burly frame that lay in state. There was the huge nose; the life-like almost speaking lips; the grey moustache and the veined leaflike character of the closed eyelids. His death had been so sudden that it had caught a breathless instinct of life on the tree of the sun that splashed within the room.

  There was the red waving rose in the button-hole of his coat. For some reason he had had an attachment to the red of roses, had worn them (or it) in his office and in his drawing room as if the colour of a fruit or a vegetable or a flower were capable of being skinned alive, of being born alive, in spite of apparent incapacitation. The red rose seemed to highlight an illogicality of drifting construction embodying a variety of features whose lifelikeness was the frailest straw, the most remarkable assumption of all, in the heavy architecture of the Zemi afternoon.

  As the coffin was closed and raised on the shoulders of the bearers, like a felled tree, the other features of evolutionary construction arose like a modified abstract centaur. Elongated box or horse with human legs began to move within a space of attendant bodies so that the entire implications of the waving procession were metamorphoses of cavalry. The huge procession formed and re-formed to charge but was held by the reins in the beak of a bird that fluttered in the dark air between the sun on its mountain and the earth in its saddle of space.

  Thus another modification of insensibility occurred in the imprint of expedition or flight, the imprint of immaterial reins, built into a huge tree—apparently irrelevant to that huge tree—yet expressive of the secret origins of life pitted against great odds before time or evolution itself began. Indeed that imprint of expedition or flight was here now in the multiplication of great odds into formidable patterns of helplessness, that drew one into an endless procession of overlapping cones and spheres, bodies and saddles, numbers, branched faces and veined eyes, valleys and mountains, that seemed to swarm around one on the way to the black cradle or to the blind grave….

  Perhaps the instinct to charge into sculptured solutions to the resurrection of man in the malaise of time came up against a conviction of other solid armies or orders within which lay buried, apparently forever, an imprint of frail imaginative stables of truth. And it was in this curiously lost battle, synonymous nevertheless with varieties of the overcoming of insensibility, that the procession wound its way to the hollow in which God lay under the tree of the sky and the sun. As it drew there, deposited its coffin, confronted its seed of unfathomable father/mother divinity, it began to turn by degrees and to scatter as the ceremony drew to a close, as if the procession
al charge in which it had been involved had been turned by another invisible hoofbeat, that echoed out of the earth into the loftiest columns of never-ceasing forested bier, never-ceasing forested cradle, extrapolated into the creations of space.

  It was the vanity of all construction in the arts of space that seemed to strike at Julia on her return from her father’s graveside; and this bottomless perception pinpointed again—like an indescribable or minuscule horse and rider sounding the drumbeat of the sun—the nature of sorrow she had entertained earlier in the day. Pinpointed it within a majesty of proportions that made almost dazzling the fleetingness of the heart, the expedition of feeling into undreamt-of other worlds.

  It seemed incredible that the majesty of the evolution of the universe possessed its grain or motivation, at certain cathedral levels, in nothing more substantial than a stranger fleeting stable of feeling, an inexplicable expedition, or just meeting with a Creator in whom and upon whom one appeared to be little more than a curious gatecrasher of space, within funeral processions of the gods, that adorned windows and ceilings.

  Gatecrasher indeed. She stood at the window—as if painted into glass herself—and looked out along the cathedral road, the procession had taken, with the sense of being a stranger in her father’s house, her dead father’s house, the wealth of which she would inherit.

  At any moment perhaps the hoofbeat would sound and her retreat around the globe would commence, her great-aunt’s stick like the comedy of elderly cavalry, a kindly but insistent shoe or brush (in da Silva’s hand) upon the canvases of the world.

  The time was at hand when she would leave and never return to Zemi. Was it indeed a retreat, a rout at her father’s grave? Had she gatecrashed into her own house, in the very beginning, her own wealth, in the very beginning? Did the tears that fell gatecrash on her breasts to rain on the ground?

  It was time to remember the construction of the gate, the construction of the rain, the construction of the soil, through and upon which she moved with seeing and unseeing eyes as a stranger in the house of the gods, the house of father-deity, the house of mother-deity.

  Earlier in the afternoon, when the mourners began to gather, Julia had had a glimpse of a figure standing beside the nondescript Zemi Chronicle reporter at the gate of her father’s house. As though to support him, to give him an unfathomable dimension, myth that lurks in every man’s heart to which he subconsciously confesses.

  She was struck by the dark confessional beard of self within self that cloaked half his face and fell upon his chest to highlight a chalk-white quality of brow and skin; and in a flash she conjured up through him an ironic tabula rasa construction, a blackboard mirror in which a hidden combination of features appeared in counterpoint to the rose on her father’s bier.

  “Who is he—that man?” She turned to one of her father’s secretaries pointing.

  “He’s a Doctor Black Marsden, an archaeologist, he came to see your father a few days ago, the day before he died.”

  “What a strange look he has about him, almost like some devilish monk. And the other, the young man who almost appears to lean on him?”

  “Oh, he’s a reporter from one of the newspapers. His name is Francis Leonard Harlequin Rigby.”

  “What a curious pair—the monk and the clown.”

  Julia was distracted by the entry of a maid into the room and when she turned back to the window Black Marsden had vanished. Only Da Silva da Silva endured, in the nondescript apparitional skin of the young reporter he had painted into his canvases until it stuck to him closer than reality. Perhaps it was an inescapable fiction or costume of possession, in the translation of other lives and letters and books, in which he was involved, as if he became the “soul” of past and present times in everliving presence or renascence of the arts.

  Now, in the late afternoon after the funeral, standing alone at the very window and looking out to the gate that led to the cathedral road of Zemi, she recalled the vanished archaeologist as if his presence typified, in part, the condition of man standing between costumes of heaven and earth as gatecrasher (mirrorcrasher) into soils, souls, minerals, animals, and other nameless elements.

  This was her condition too, her emotional condition, and she felt it acutely as the scenes of the funeral flooded into her mind—the trench of the grave, the sky of the grave—like images devoid of reflection, as if she herself, in her trespass into the mirror of the elements, began to absorb the prime quality of archaeological sorrow created in the void of herself—within the glass of herself—in the death or absence of her father. It was as if she were already married to Francis (and to posterity in da Silva) as she mourned like a superb unconscious actress, unselfconscious queen of an actress, in the irrational/rational drama of death-in-life, birth-in-life.

  Thus an immateriality or non-reflected pressure became an aspect or gate of enduring emotion, in metamorphoses of created and re-created and uncreated populations, back into the past and into bodies of the future.

  Take the population of faces of the women who had been her father’s mistresses after her mother’s death. They had all come to the funeral (or so it seemed as she scanned the features in the crowd). Nondescript faces of women she recalled from the age of five or six. Masked gate of creation stained by varieties and pigmentations of soils. Masked stick of creation on which a young girl could lean dressed up for a ball. Elderly cavalry on which young men and old could ride dressed to death. They seemed quite old, old as her great-aunt, but there were young women there as well, the youngest was barely twenty in whose bed her father had died….

  Long after, in one of her letters to Francis, she was to link them, these ancient women, these young women (grandmothers and granddaughters in god’s mistresses), with the nondescript young reporter at the gate, the disguised face of a future (or futures) that would caress her, indict her, console her, quarrel with her, censor her, care for her, in the depths of the cradle and the grave.

  Nondescript faces of father-deity’s mistresses who go down into the tomb with him as carved wood in flesh-and-blood. Nondescript faces of mother-deity’s masters who go down into the body of the womb with her. It consoled her, even as it astonished her, cautioned her, made her despair, made her hope, to see them in that ancient, equally tender, privileged light and darkness. Half-monster, half-angel.

  “What is foetal hope? What is foetal despair?” she wrote. There was no immediate answer.

  Long after, in another letter to Francis, she confessed to a recurring dream which seemed so real, that though she dreamt it after her first miscarriage, it was as if she had dreamt it long before on the very night after the funeral at Zemi. (Or lived it at the open window through which she looked out on her father’s gate at the young reporter standing there.)

  Her father’s mistresses stood in a group there at, or in, the gate and her linkage of them with a painter-lover-apparitional-canvas, in the tomb of the future, sprang from a curious editorial function exercised by extremities in all cruel or kind bodies in the book of time (judgement day time). So that they became the perennial postmistresses of god who received, translated, stored, distributed, messages of a terrifying resurrection.

  A cross-section of the message they stored was built into the gate; was a preservation of their ambivalent youth, their ambivalent adventures or metamorphoses of rider and ridden. And as Julia read this complex sentence in their half-parchment, half-wooden, faces—shrouded now in mourning—she seemed to acquire a capacity herself to slip through the gate of life and death into another kingdom of life that resembled unconsciousness in its radical divinity of attachment to unselfconscious motivations of abandon and joy in truly lived god-like innocent lives within one’s grasp, beyond one’s grasp, in its radical divinity of attachment to truly lived god-like lusts and hates within one’s grasp, beyond one’s grasp.

  And, in the same token, she was drawn towards the future, as unanswered question, husband, enemy, friend, whose hiatus in hierarchical absolutes (joy or
hate) lay in a tension of realities, within one’s grasp, mercifully beyond one’s grasp, hiatus in divinity’s cloak upon skeleton frameworks, hiatus in scaffoldings, hiatus in codes of absolute justice, absolute innocence, absolute lust, and in all the unbearable punishments, unbearable prizes or deserts, one associates with a radical divinity upon the human frame. In that hiatus was grace to make the unbearable bearable.

  It was as if she espied a rope that encircled a hanged man’s neck, in her father’s gate, a fluttering bonnet, an eye in a needle, a subtle hiatus in stitched hatred or violence or murder, a subtle pity, a subtle helplessness, in cradled, executed child of spirit, seed of mourning wood, confused madonna relating inexplicable evils to inexplicable goods.

  She had never been told the confusing origins of the noose in the gate of the womb, middle passage, capital punishment in Zemi.

  Perhaps sentence had been passed on the buried-sky-faces that had raped her a long, long, legendary time ago, it seemed.

  Did she hate Francis? Did she love Francis?

  Francis never knew how she came to know of his mistresses who were substitutes or approaches to serenity in herself, in his book of life; how she came to elevate them into figures within her grasp, beyond her grasp, as if to overcome the burden of love and hate, of conquest in himself, in her letters of life.

  She wrote a letter to lady prime minister Eleanor and confirmed her in lioness office. She wrote a letter to lady of justices Rima and confirmed her in ariel office. She confirmed herself as failed queen of species and Francis as failed king. She wrote a letter to daemon artist Da Silva da Silva in whom she trusted, in some other age, to transform apparent failure into an unfinished prize of unfinished community.