Wilson Harris

The Tree of the Sun

For Margaret,

Joyce Adler and W. J. Howard

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree

Are of equal duration.

T. S. ELIOT

I must hear from thee every day i’ the hour.

For in a minute there are many days.

Romeo and Juliet: ACT III, SCENE V

During a long series of feuds and battles with the Caribs the Arawaks used to climb into the sky by means of a foodbearing tree. One day their enemies set fire to the tree. It blazed across the oceans and as it fell there was an explosion like thunder. The Indians who remained in the sky turned into stars and formed the constellation of the Pleiades.

GUIANESE ARAWAK AND MACUSI CREATION MYTH

1

Da Silva painted lines of snow far above Tenochtitlan, ancient Mexico, in the seemingly breathless air of extinct volcanoes through which the conquistadores came….

He painted their descent into a green field that bordered a balcony on which the sun-king Montezuma stood. He painted the sun-king retiring into his palace; painted the blow he received from the hand of the conquistadores, from the hand of his own people as well. A blow that was but a glancing blow, that left him untouched, or, on closer scrutiny of the canvas by each eye within or without it, so subtly bruised as to appear scarcely wounded at all. So that his death from the blow he received was a mystery to those who were in attendance upon him. It was as if he wished to go, to slip away from them when they least bargained for it and as he died he secreted his last thoughts about brute assassin threaded into paradoxical arrow of liberation or tenderness within the wall of extinct volcanoes far overhead or within the gorgeous apparition of the sun painted indoors close to the bed on which he lay. His was a death-mask of the elements’ interchangeable ruses of tyranny and love, seasonal birth and seasonal resurrection, each day’s carpet of earth, each day’s tree of the sun, each day’s journey backwards or forwards in time, each day’s everlasting feud…. Yet pattern of relief.

Da Silva glanced away from the Montezuma mural that he had scarcely begun, despite his intense speculations about each line he had begun to sketch or paint, towards a blue winter sky over the city of London in which he lived in the year 197– with his wife Jen. She was Peruvian-born; he had lived in England since the age of five but his birth place was Brazil and his antecedents were Arawak, European and African.

A mild sun shone that seemed closer to spring than winter and was reflected in a window in a block of flats across the way, across a tennis court that ran beneath his studio, as if the two suns — one in the sky, the other capable of multi-reflected frames on earth — existed now from a single toss or shaft of light other than immediate manifestation or immediate reflection. An electron arrow of painted consciousness the sun was with a capacity for double penetrations, double hurdles, multiple penetrations, multiple hurdles, through the walls of space.

There was a horsechestnut tree close to the window of his studio and each naked branch seemed drawn there now by an inimitable hand, da Silva thought, that led one back into the fires of autumn or forwards into embryonic tapestries of spring.

At its extremities the wood seemed splintered into a delicate lacework or spreading bridle and rein of resources in the hand of rider on horse sculptured into the tree. The fossil blood (reds, yellows, browns) that painted each dying or dead leaf in beautiful October into early November had rained from the centaur spirit of the tree into the late carpet or miraculous battlefield of autumn as if all places around the globe witnessed to and mirrored an event, half-tragic encounter of heterogeneous cultures, half-fateful spectre of the nature of history.

Da Silva turned from the view outside his studio to his own gigantic painting, a huge leaf of a canvas that covered one wall of the room, and sought now to trace with a nail or a finger an almost imperceptible line of blood that ran along Montezuma’s pagan temple, a faint bruise from the glancing blow he had received from the hand of enemy or friend.

The autumn and winter and cruel spring of the modern world seemed to cluster there in that line, shadow of indeterminacy, stone or arrow, splintered lacework, remembered dying and living cavalry seasons in the head of sunking and snow-king.

In the bottom right hand corner of the mural da Silva could see the outlines of his own Brazilian signature already planted there, Da Silva da Silva (Christian name with a capital D, surname with a common d). It swam, yet stood, in the base of the canvas, as if it were part of a sacrificial seed in soil and water written into silver and gold to make a mercurial distinction in itself beyond itself, to mirror and repudiate subtly, unselfconsciously perhaps, a tautology of identity in painter as well as painted subject….

Jen came into the studio now with a morning tray and cups of coffee; sat in a chair at the edge of the painting, close to the window, seemed all at once an extension of paint herself with a capacity to mediate between sun-king and snow-king, between conception of the sky outside the studio and conception of volcanoes inside upon a canvas in the studio.

He saw her all at once in that light of mediation reflecting anew his astonishment and tumultuous joy at news she had given the evening before. The news hung there now as her eyes met his in the pendulum of a clock in lines of paint swinging back, swinging forwards, a field of grass, brushstroke or waving sea, from which a blade rose up nevertheless unfalteringly as the seeded blow of time. Retina of the womb.

“It’s marvellous”, he paused, sipping his coffee, “and terrifying,” he added quickly. “I’m not cut out to be a father, Jen.” He laughed. The black liquid glinted, a star. “Or am I? I can hardly believe it.”

She smiled against the field of grass that blew in his canvas. “Me too,” she said. “It’s eight years we’ve been together. A long time it’s been. And yet perhaps it’s happened at the right moment.” She changed the subject abruptly. “I don’t remember this.” She was staring at the Montezuma conception of a painting that extended from her side across the wall. “What’s it called?”

“The tree of the sun. I started to paint it two months ago. The very morning you and I …” he paused—“the very morning that it happened. Two months pregnant this painting is.”

He put the cup down, took up a brush and pointed it at her. A blade of grass stirred. Mediation of light. Branching irrational thread of antecedent and existent times. Outer flesh. Inner cavity, flesh. God-made, goddess-made, climax. Creation. And da Silva in turn was impregnated by a tree of pleasure, potentiality, voices in leafy canvas or wood.

“The very morning,” he repeated, “two months ago, when our child was conceived. I knew it then. It was then I began this.” He tapped the canvas, stopped and thought in himself—“I had a rooted feeling then. An ear in the heart of the ground. An eye in the middle of wood. A hand uplifted…. It was early. I got up, came into the studio with the warmth of your body still upon me. The studio was cold, a cave. Perhaps I dreamt it all, who knows? The tender assassin who creates the paradox of the globe. I began to paint the blow of creation before I could properly see it on my own brow as upon that of others, to paint an ice-age tree of love before I could properly feel it in my own crucifixions of lust as in the naked appetite of others, a foodbearing tree nevertheless, the execution of a seed of light, the miracle of branches of dawn, the complex blood of dawn that resembles a break — a pattern of relief — in a body of darkness.”

He stopped again with a sense of alarm and thought in himself—“I felt as if I choked, was drowning, faces wanting to be born were clutching at every constellation of light, knife faces, axe faces, that struck at me; upon that tree in the midst of which something or someone implicit in them all who was both terrible and pointed — yet incredibly sweet — swam towards me. A royal pleasure, a common grief, across oceans, across continents. And then it all seemed to fade, the joy, the sorrow. Until”, he was speaking aloud now, “last night when you told me you were pregnant. It rose up all over again, the arrow of the Sun, the arrow across the sea, the sorrow and the joy. I remembered the painting I had begun, had abandoned and I unrolled it and here it is.”

Jen listened, fascinated by her implicit mediation between feuding elements but remaining matter-of-fact and cool like a brushstroke of lucid water that ran within the painted features of earth as a trunk or bridge between continents fell yet formed. Perhaps she was affected by a thaw of graven images in her husband’s canvases, by a conception of art and sacrifice in the spark of kings. She wished to garner that tidal spark in wombed city, wombed studio, wombed world, wombed sky, that related her and her husband’s peoples to other peoples one night-filled morning when they lay in bed and drew together lip to lip, limb to limb, arrow to arrow.

It was difficult to tell at times, she knew, the difference between original conception and original violence, original ice, original fire, original catastrophe, original creation. Yet she recalled, without contradiction, the warmth of her body by which he (da Silva) had been drawn, it seemed, into an earnest of the sun flung in a variety of pregnant shapes around the globe.

“Let me see what I can see,” she said staring into the penumbra of the womb as into a joint project or habitation they shared as man and woman upon a floating beam or nail within the earth and the sky.

*

Dark and distant ancestral cave in tree of felled morning, it seemed to da Silva now, across the days and weeks, across the ages, when he rose from bed with a sudden spur to paint antecedents and unborn worlds. He came into the studio with a band of stragglers, an ancient queue, who seemed to shiver beside him as they carved a footpath along each beam or floorboard born of splintered, darkened tree. Perhaps he and they were not yet fully astir.

Clock in the womb of the house chimed four. An arm, a painted spear of a body seemed to arise with misgivings onto sill of bedroom or studio through the window-curtain that stood ajar upon a streetlamp shining through the trees from Holland Park Avenue.

The sound of an aeroplane passed and da Silva dreamt he parachuted from the stars into a crowd of workmen seeking employment who pressed into the newly-built, unfinished Kensington Hilton Hotel around the corner.

The crowd moved into semi-play, semi-painted construction, and da Silva could scarcely believe he had arrived on the ground to embark on a new palatial project that welcomed moneyed tourists from every corner of the earth.

The ceiling of night stood just above the roadway with streetlamps like huge bright nails beneath the faint constellations upon the curved balloon of the sky that had released him as it would release other arrivals as they came flying into the city.

Jen’s warm body in the darkened room began to absorb the crowd. The balloon of the sky faintly lightened into the multi-cellular cave of dawn as though it had descended with him into a newborn canvas.

A warm brush of feeling painted him alive. An inner lamp framed him now to conceive libraries and subways and ancient parliaments left ajar by the goddess of night.

Overground unemployed characters were astir in Chelsea libraries awaiting a readership of dawn.

Underground politicians caught trains that still ran or rocked.

He reached up, after rocking ages, it seemed, four o’clock constellation train, five o’clock constellation train, six o’clock queue to switch on a light in his studio, pick up a brush.

“There’s an innermost self-confessed blow …” Perhaps someone spoke at his elbow, surreptitiously sliced each scheduled bone of subsistence.

“There’s an innermost art of resurrection as the sun-god balloons into each age, death-mask, life-mask, an innermost art of descent from the asylum of heaven.”

And he began to paint now in the sharp light of the studio, furred with shadows, cave of dawn, antecedent, unborn, voices in each hand.

Black antecedent voices in each hand, like a glimmering stone, unemployed builders, in the furred shadow of the womb.

Ice-age animal voices, Spain, Portugal, early morning radio he had just switched on as he began to paint, early morning bulletins of kings and revolutions in the shadow of the foodbearing tree.

Arawak antecedent voices, pre-Columbian chorus, half-visible page of a book he had flung open as he began to paint in the foodbearing tree. And these ran in concert with an Inca princess from whom Jen was descended on a branch of illustrated histories of subsistence upon maize, cover design for a magazine he kept beside his painter’s palette.

The princess’s warm breasts, warm palate, sun tree, were shaking with laughter, a miracle of wood, a miracle of flesh, as the canvas began to take fire slightly, to enlarge itself, grow pregnant almost visibly, and he was startled at the bonfire of conceit he sought at first to paint as the seed in her body, dying food, living food, woven from times immemorial into histories and cultures.

He clung to a spark of wisdom.

There was a tendency sometimes when the sun arose in some quarters of the globe for a tree of fire to appear beyond translation into paint; a cradle of splendour which settled on one’s canvas within varieties of misconception of the nature of justice.

The illustrated histories magazine in the shadow of womb-painting carried a picture of Atahualpa, the Inca sun-king, arm in arm (or branch in branch) with Jen’s ancestral princess. Da Silva was tempted to oust Montezuma from his canvas and paint Atahualpa in instead as sovereign exile or god of corn. But he reflected upon Atahualpa’s fate. Atahualpa had been burnt to cinders in the tree of dawn by command of Francisco Pizarro.

There shone absolute justice some would say, da Silva thought, when a sun-god is thrust by another’s command into the sun’s all-embracing parental canvas of fire.

The necessity to live through black fire — to transform a legend of feud or tyranny, in patterns of royal hubris, as in the insensibility of conquest or command — to raise to the level of paint a bearable authority or star — involves a mystery to the judgement and experience of terrifying relationships rather than a familiar destitution to the human frame.

And that was why da Silva turned his back on forms of absolute justice and resumed the paradox of a cultivated field within the winter mask of heaven that was less protesting, less newsworthy of fire, though scorched into the slenderest stigmata of the womb and into an unwritten equality or capacity for hunger in the body of races and sexes.

Scorched into the paradox of vanished conquistadorial Europe and vanished pre-Columbian America still surviving nevertheless in smooth death-masks, smooth birth-masks, with their infinite grained capacity for elemental need within iron trees and ivory trees of the cosmos.

The winter light in the sky of the womb secretes hidden seasons, hidden carpets, new scars of autumn and spring.

Absolute justice is death’s republic. To step back, before it is too late, through a crack or a crevice in the sky and to begin, all over again, to enfold a resurrection-motif of individual tenderness — born of reflections of victor and victim — individual art of saving powers within each holocaust of ancestral rigours of affection, fire to fire, ice to ice, is a conception of the frail kingdom of life.

2

During the autumn two Indian carpets were laid in bedroom and studio. There was a tree design da Silva would walk upon until he came to the branches from which to paint a Mexican sky under his English roof or — as he revolved upon a branch, flew upon a carpet — an English sky under an alien roof; an inner flight through an outer branched ceiling into a stranger element.

A face stood on each branch as though seen, for the first time, within or through a curtain of stars that stood ajar in the ground of the world under the sky of the house.

Each face on its branch seemed at first wholly identical one with the other. Later however distinctions appeared. One seemed a subtle map, pleasure or pain, on brow, another on lips, a third along both cheeks like the wounds of a needle, a fourth was possessed of a hairline mirror stitched across one eye.

Da Silva saw himself as another face in the carpet on which he stood, another face in the mural he painted, as if he had been parachuted there into that tree by nature’s self, conjuring parachute of self, map of extremities, divisions, alliances between appearance and appearance, past and future.

It made him subtly aware of a network of influences, rivalries, hopes of supremacy, implicit tyrannies and subjections they all shared as the notion arose that each was identical in the other, each hung on the branching thread of the other’s dominant consciousness. A notion that set up a clamour of protest, like the illness of the living dead as they begin to change and acquire the strangest resurrected longing for a principle of justice one can endure, the therapeutic relief, rather than oppression, of otherness. Da Silva was rooted in that clamour or meaningful protest.

The carpet of the tree of the sun symbolised their joint root or tenancy or ownership (his and Jen’s) of the house in which they lived and in which others had lived since the turn of the century and long before.

He recalled many a subtle crack that rolled or secreted itself in wall or room at which he and antecedent tenants, over the generations, may have stared seeingly, unseeingly, within the life of the house of which he and Jen possessed, if that were the truth, but a spark. As though their existence hung from almost indecipherable influences he had partly discerned in the branch on which he stood under the sky he painted, varieties of canvas or painting in body-work or house. Varieties of profound malaise that conditioned them, even as it re-shaped them, to conceive a therapy of originality within the shell of time, its carpets or walls or beams that cohered nevertheless into patterns of relief or doors through the tree of the sun….

He slipped like a figure of paint himself, painter in sky, almost without realising it, through the door of the tree of the sun into the life of previous, long vanished, now suddenly recalled, tenants of the house.

Their names appeared to be Francis and Julia Cortez. (Long after he was to discover Francis had changed his name by deed poll and this had a bearing on the ramifications of a book he had written and on some of the curious deceptions imparted, wittingly or unwittingly, by Julia into a body of letters she had written.)

Francis was half-Spanish, half-black. There were fading photographs of himself and obscure antecedents pinned into his unfinished book. His body from neck to waist was white. His face was tanned or brown like a face to be worn or discarded under different skies and atmospheres.

Julia’s ancestry was difficult to determine despite photographs, one notably of her father. Her features were elusive though half-English, half-West Indian creole. She was very beautiful in spite of a long (apparently economic) fever/convalescence of history from which she suffered.

Da Silva had found (rummaging around one day during the conversion work of a bedroom into a studio) Julia’s letters and Francis’s book and from these Jen and he began to piece together a portrait of long vanished lovers. The letters and book were voluminous — they had slipped quite deep into the wall as into a couple of elongated safes — and Jen and da Silva were astonished, as they began to read, by developments they could not have foreseen, astonished by the way it gripped them (as if they too were related characters in a curious drama of creation); astonished at the blind man’s game the lovers played like two books that stood on the shelf of a library, in continuous communication with each other, though neither had been actually opened or read by the other.

He felt guilt and perturbation as he spied upon this curiously involved relationship — until the impression grew that there was an element of resurrected fate in it. He was himself being taken over by them page by page as he began to sketch or paint them; as he became immersed, sometimes apparently fleetingly, in expectations of painting them….

And in the midst of this paradox of visions — implicit and explicit creations — within a universe they traversed, the sensation arose of individual realness reflecting sometimes bearable, sometimes unbearable, degrees of otherness, mystery of otherness, outlasting time.

It was a face in the Indian carpet that brought Francis back into mind this morning, the lines like the palm of a hand along both cheeks, a map of pleasure and pain.

Less of a map and more of a nondescript blow, needle-straight lines within and upon each other that ran on either side of the face from the eyes down to the jaw. The rest of Francis’s face remained smooth as a dark marble. And that smoothness of taut skin highlighted a sense of containment, passion held in rein, remorseless care, restraint, flight. Were they the divided features of warrior and priest Francis wore under da Silva’s feet and in the sky overhead?

It was more difficult to enter Julia’s kingdom of the ruses of the imagination though sometimes at the stroke of a match some midnight mornings, against a canvas of dreams, da Silva saw her curiously walled and stark yet implicitly crowned and beautiful, one foot in a wedding, one foot in a funeral.

He lay then against or upon it, upon that beauty or ghostliness of form, held her like a painter of constellations who resurrects the mystery of undying symptoms of therapeutic masquerade, until she almost cut invisibly into his flesh and the child Jen conceived was the apparition of a child she (Julia) dreamed to conceive all her life in the letters she wrote….

They were laughing and joking together, Francis and Julia, as he came upon them through the tree of the sun this painted morning. They were talking about a grand costume ball they had attended, given by the Spanish embassy, when they were just married at which because of the conquistadorial associations of their name — Mr and Mrs Francis Cortez — he had dressed himself up as Francisco and she as a slim and elegant Atahualpa, a feminine Atahualpa, eyes flashing through her mask.

It caused a faint stir in the embassy’s ballroom, a whisper of distaste, even laughter. “Pure fact is a myth,” Julia wrote in one of her letters, “an invaluable myth, a useful myth, but a myth nevertheless since fact is susceptible to inevitable enlargement or atrophy in the climate of a particular day or age. Breath is sometimes the most subtle wreath of truth to tell of vanished faces in substantial masquerades. It links irrational laughter to intimate sorrow, taste to distaste….”

Wisps of smoke arose around Julia’s head as she smoked her only cigarette of the day. (Da Silva was painting breath into his mural.) The scent climbed into foodbearing tree, half-elusive, half-binding, suddenly acrid and disturbing, burning fruit or wood. Was it a new pollution he had begun to cook? FIRE. Now it seemed he had stumbled upon creation’s blaze in the walled face of Julia like the seed of Atahualpa plant in a madonna panel transported from an old Peruvian/Francisco Pizarro building or Spanish church or cannibal Carib library into this old London house.

There had been a fire in the house long before he (da Silva) and Jen came into its occupancy. Julia herself was dead, childless and dead, when the fire happened. Francis too had vanished; new tenants were in occupation…. The fire happened ten years after their death; that was fifteen years before Jen and he bought the place and scraped a token of ash from an inner wall to unearth the letters and the book that had apparently escaped by the skin of their teeth; in truth the fire had obviously been put out quickly and a couple of minor scars had been plastered over by the occupying tenants. Nevertheless a spark had run across the divide between the living and the dead, a spark that touched Julia and Francis in their graves within the flesh of a page. Da Silva counted it a marvel that the book and letters had survived.

Perhaps that was why Francis’s resurrected breath-body leaned forward in room or canvas now and kissed Julia. Her lips opened to him, her teeth caught the spirit of his tongue as he held her close. She was the burning wall of the house he held in his arms long before the fire actually happened, as if it were still happening now, and their expedition through it into da Silva’s paintings was a miracle of transubstantial community.

Julia was convalescing when Francis held her to him, hardly fit to fly into or out of the mouth of space. Her thoughts were on the child she wanted to have on earth or in heaven. Youth (or was it divinity’s middle-age?) was still on her side. Francis knew that though she seemed well now she cried at nights and he soothed her hands when they began to burn. She was hardly conscious of this (or hardly recalled it when morning came) and this was a blessing in disguise, Francis reckoned, for on the following day, in broad daylight, he pretended he knew nothing of it at all, nothing of the food of pain, as if he courted a kingdom of oblivion, or release from torment for all animals, at the heart of the elements, with the cunning resources of apparently vanished, blanketed strokes, strokes of the subtlest, deeply penetrative, intercourse that befitted her condition.

*

The intensity of care that enveloped him when he held Julia — held all her pregnant dreams to him — became an obsession with him.

Perhaps he had been rough or even cruel, without intending it, and that was why she recalled nothing. This was an issue that tormented him.

It was a long convalescence. Sex between them had become the exception, not the rule, over the past year and a half, and when it happened a rose bloomed in a winter garden. She grew better each day and seemed to enjoy, without knowing she enjoyed it, his constructive mastery and self-control tinged by daemonic properties when she reached out and claimed him into herself; they drew into a tree of passion through which a psychical forest or creation grew and reached up, in its turn, into other forests or unknown creations.

Their bodies became a cradle of the future running hand in hand or mouth to mouth with a vision of nothingness so strong and secure it seemed other than nothingness and to abandon all straitjacketed proportions, to lie beyond discourse or memory; to happen, as it were, of its own volition in the wombed voices of space or time.

A cradled angel descended in the middle of the night. Or was it the sky of anima and animus, an ideological carpet laid out for a king and a queen, a queue of forces that drew her thighs apart into a branched living goddess in which faces were schooled like leaves when everything stood upon root and trunk?

Francis moved this morning, as da Silva inspected him through a branch of the sun, crushed his cigarette all at once into a tray like a venomous thread or fig tree of paradoxical war and peace between ancient enemies, victor and victim, man and woman, Christ and blasted nature. It was the dream of the perfect tyranny of love he sometimes entertained — as a misconception of the tree of passion — tree of great wonders into lightning paths of the body’s expectations.

“You’ve stopped smiling, dearest Francis, and grown serious,” Julia said all at once to Francis. She drew her fingers now along the needle-straight lines of his face.

“I love you,” she continued to write. “That is why I mail each letter to you in a hidden safe in the house. You may never see what I am writing. But one day a stranger I feel within my bones will find them and put his arms around me — as if I’m alive — and see and feel how much I knew, how much I valued your affection. All the world may come to know that I knew what you felt … what daemons you wrestled with … your own hell….”

*

The miracle of Francis’s and Julia’s resurrection upon the tree of the sun, at this moment of time, when da Silva learnt that his wife Jen was pregnant, hung upon a flash of consciousness.

Studio and house were addressed by a flash at the tips of one’s fingers and this was the flight of conception one nursed into being, as an artist or craftsman now, to match the blow of shape in a woman’s body.

Da Silva read in Francis’s book how Francis recalled the blow of Julia’s illness like a locked door between them.

“What room is there in the midst of illness for sensuous crafts, sensuous command, sensuous futures? And yet I must stand firm, care for you, attend to you through every fabric and circumstance, the tremor of a line, that makes me see the ordinary world we inhabit, built by me, built by you, as a new thing. And this brings home to me, against my own judgement, an imperishable bond I suppress but cannot entirely evade between creature and creature, creation and created, however apparently defeated, apparently overturned, one or the other may be. And, as a consequence,” he was smiling with an air of authority, “I shall address the world this very morning, invite all persons to read my book. As if nothing at all has happened except that it’s resurrection day.”

Julia was smiling ironically in the game they played as she replied to him in her theatre of a bed this morning. Francis had left for Shepherd’s Bush Green to buy a week’s fruit and vegetables as if nothing at all in the world had happened.

She half-reclined on a heap of pillows embroidered with spring flowers.

“Dear Francis,” she wrote, “How does one cultivate the dawn’s flowering when our time to leave each other, our time to return to each other, comes? Is everything the same or has everything changed beyond our wildest dreams as we slept? Is this the new thing of which you speak? Imagine the streetlamps on a crisp winter morning just before the sun rises.” She was staring into space. “Have they become a flowering garden or a callous artifice?”

She paused to sip from a glass of water. It sparkled like a bulb in its own right, the flicker of a letterhead, ghostly flowering or callous lips in touch with another’s glass lips in the tree of the sun.

“One nurses each electric signal as if a trial run commences of the resurrection of the body, petal, leaf, stem, one tastes as one drinks from a cup as bitter as hell or lightning body beyond a shadow of doubt like the lazy fig tree smitten by Christ before he came to the cross himself and the nails were driven into his hands.”

Perhaps she was herself on the edge of tears as if she wrestled with a confusing yet blessing shadow.

“Sometimes, in the wake of a rainy morning, as the streetlamps fade in the carpet of the earth, the sky descends and bandages each nail or wound until it glows through the very bandage of spirited circumstance like fruit or flower. The first signal of a pregnant rose brings a taste of wildness, visionary wildness, to each purchase of life.”

She stopped again and da Silva pondered taste of wildness (or was it wilderness?).

“I am smitten by the stars as I lie here, their seed on my lips.” She sipped the water again and his painter’s brush smoothed her lips.

“Is it wrong,” she demanded, “to conjure up a lightning body of reflections re-made by forces, a lightning desert or a lightning garden? Is it a violent universe we inhabit (or impose upon ourselves) as conquest by deity? Is it a savage formula entangled in the origins of human culture, I meanconquest, to which we unwittingly subscribe in all our elaborate projects of soul conscripted by structure? Doubtless it is — who would deny it—” she stopped again, then continued softly as if a chorus of voices dwelt in her throat, “a violent universe in many of its uniform faces but there’s another inexplicable face within the carpet that’s utterly different, that’s not violent. Close to it, yes, because of the expedition, or apparently ruthless pace, of features of compassion so woven within a stricken moment that it seems to strike, even as it rescues; fierce rescue of line into incredible eyes drawn by holy and daemonic masters schooled for timeless ages by the hand of god.”

She sipped again from a transparent pool on da Silva’s palette.

“In the meantime I am content to be glanced at by those eyes in my stricken moments.” She conjured up Francis’s resurrected face in the shadow of a walking canvas on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green. “Sometimes I know dear Francis that you envy those eyes and dream of the perfect tyranny of love one needs to imitate, it seems, in the chaos of human freedom, human laziness.”

She paused for a moment and then continued in another voice—“I see it differently for my part within myself. I see the eyes of god, the ruthless hand that paints one’s breath to save it, as a measure of the incompatibility of my understanding. And that leads me to prize freedom above all else in time; to restrain from investing in absolutes. I have been ill I know for some time, wretched fever, wretched delirium. Incompatibility is an ugly word. It breeds intolerance. Less ugly however if one accepts the many faces of a conjurer’s universe. To accept incompatible visions, to accept what is like and unlike oneself, to accept the tricks of nature as a versatile warning that truth exists but stands on unfathomable foundations, and still to believe in the unity of the self, is to run fleetingly (but sometimes securely) in a presence of glory….”

She fell back on her pillows exhausted. Glanced up at the clock on the mantelshelf. Francis would be home in an hour or so. The clock’s design was a fossil spider separate and distinct on the wall of the room yet integral to the reflection of her hands as they paused timelessly on each minute of the hour before advancing again and again through each apparent respite or lull within the seamless constellation they wove blown across spaces into each niche or grave or womb or cranny of existence.

She roused herself, folded the pages she had written, arose from bed, crossed over to her postbox. It occurred to her then to wonder whether Francis possessed his own postbox, perhaps near at hand, somewhere in the sky of the house and whether she moved in it, like a character in space, for other eyes in a coming time to read or see in many moods and lights. Perhaps at the end of the day an apparition of truth would ascend, very frail, yet incapable of being extinguished.

*

Francis turned from Holland Park Gardens into Holland Park Avenue and began to walk towards Royal Crescent on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green.

He was filled with a sense of absurd contentment, absurd peace, that was nevertheless profound and real though susceptible to uneasiness like the memory of a pool when a stone smites each reflected brow or cloud-creature that hovers over it. The absurdity arose from the notion of a trial run for “the resurrection of the body” this winter morning in London. What a long way one has to go to begin all over again through a tissue of masquerades and self-deceptions….

What would passersby say if he came up to them and explained—“I have a page from my book (I have been working at it as far back as I can remember) addressed to you that I wrote this morning when the sun rose and Julia slept. Let me read it to you.

*

Dear Passerby,

Here I am. I died twenty-five years ago. But here I am. I shall die twenty-five years from now perhaps and here I am, large as eternal life, on this side of the grave. It’s such a fraction of time, a pinprick of time, in the age of the universe — twenty-five years — that wherever one stands and lives (on this bank or the other of the grave) one is resurrected.Wherever time flies — on this bank or the other of the trench of the sky — the centuries are pinpricks of implicit otherness or implicit wholeness or incalculable extension in and beyond each prison of existence. That is freedom, that is the royalty of freedom, all men are kings, women queens. I shall crown Julia.”

Francis had buttonholed a couple, a tall young man in a black bowler hat and a lady in furs, and was reading his manifesto of revolution to them. It was a misty day, quite mild, as if it were already spring. They stared hard at him, murmured something, words of incredulity mixed with courtesy. Perhaps they could not believe their eyes or ears. He turned from them to another passerby dressed in a loud check coat who carried two bottles of milk — one in each hand — that he raised almost threateningly, abusively, as Francis began to read. Francis stopped and the black milkman proceeded along the pavement.

“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 fleet? “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.

Queen Julia possessed three ladies-in-waiting.

One was da Silva’s Jen who came towards her, it seemed, in the humour of cosmos, from a bank of posterity.

Then there was Eleanor Rigby, implicitly clad in furs, who had already appeared, it seemed (Francis seemed uncertain of the resemblance as he cast an eye upon her charms within da Silva’s paintings), that very morning with the painted bowler-hatted young man and with the black milkman in Holland Park Avenue. Perhaps she had been taken by surprise when Julia pricked a stone and summer flew out of a winter grave enveloped in animal skins and furs in the humour of the cosmos.

Lastly there was Rima, in her bird sanctuary, goddess of nature and of fire, in Hudson’s Green Mansions, transported abstractly by Epstein into Hyde Park.

Jen (who was herself of royal Inca blood like a bird of sun) possessed the spirit of the sanctuary in her body as well as she approached the Round Pond from Bayswater Road in the comedy of da Silva’s coronation of the womb. Two months and a day pregnant she was and da Silva had insinuated both the mimesis of catastrophe and the recovery of the foetus of the gods in the elongated feather he planted in her body from within his own loins (as if he dreamt of his own native animal resurrection — animal approximation to the divinity of the rescued self — in a body of art to which he was married).

Dreamt of the shadowplay of a majestic principle of light, that billowed effortlessly, in a rich complication of judgement day honeymoon between universal gods and goddesses one painted as approximations to resurrected selves, across centuries, across islands and continents, on this bank of heaven or that bank of earth.

He had, out of religious necessity, religious privacy, put Jen — his own wife — into the canvas for without the down-to-earth, day-to-day, night-to-night, games they played, he had no gateway himself into the serenity of the queen he painted (or into the recovery of father time’s solemn funerals, and wakes of honeymoons, in which one is involved, within the human abyss, each minute of the day and night).

In the same token without the grotesquerie of animal instinct, that clothed Eleanor Rigby in furs, without the indolence of a winter grave, which had been smitten in a flash, until it bled a new creation or summer sun, he possessed no foothold in the unpredictability of the seasons, the savage lightnings of Christ, the tiger.

Lady-in-waiting Eleanor had been joined by her husband, the bowler-hatted young man, Harlequin Rigby. In the distance, under the trees, stood Leonard, the black milkman, as if to accentuate an intensity of approximations built into resurrection day carnival.

A close look again confirmed, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Eleanor was none other than the lady-in-furs and Harlequin none other than self-made ironmonger’s son whom Francis had buttonholed that very morning on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green, when he dived into an accumulative masque of tradition with a page from his book to be lodged there, out of instantaneous rebellion, out of instantaneous grief, twenty-five years ago when Julia died and the ironmonger’s wedding began.

Eleanor’s behaviour now seemed both rich and marvellously eccentric as Francis’s pen dug into the page of masques of tradition on the other side of the grave (in the land of the living), on this side of the cradle (in the land of the unborn), until both positions became co-existent with day-to-day lives on the prick of a pin where populations danced in immensities of time since the earth began. Each letter or line was furred and thick. It may have been father time’s grief, it may have been father time’s lust, that set in train a pattern of subconscious and unconscious pages on that memorable day of loss and pain he endured. Until he was driven to write into existence — as fruit of his own body — a self-made/self-created son and self-made/self-created wife for that son.

Where his lost peerless Julia was all delicacy and foam in the sea of time, this half-accursed Eleanor was all thickness and coarseness of soil on the reluctant beach of harlequin natures. As though he needed the thunder and lightning of a sexual revolution to shake Eleanor out of Julia’s resurrected sea until her breasts grew large as clay yet rich as waves of gold.

Clay and gold are premature spirits of awakening perhaps, da Silva thought, as he turned another page in Francis’s book, premature pre-existent beginnings to property and wealth, premature post-existent beginnings to creation, that summon up therefore a harsh spur or reminder of potentialities mixed into fields of indifference to life, callousness mixed into hope, war into peace, reluctant or unfulfilled lives into apparently lived or living or born lives.

And thus he was drawn to Eleanor and Harlequin and distant Leonard as to his own children, his own half-created past and half-uncreated future, peculiarly tragic, peculiarly hopeful, in its capacity to relate to strangers, to the gaiety and the madness in others who are utterly strange to oneself yet utterly true to oneself as to a dialogue between creator and created….

Eleanor and Harlequin had stopped and were sitting on a bench in the park as if to reconnoitre their approaches to Queen Julia.

Harlequin began to change his winter morning gear and to put on flannels and an open-necked shirt. He executed this with such ritual propriety that no one spotted the slightest impropriety on his part.

On the other hand all eyes in the park were rooted in Eleanor’s thick golden flesh as if to imbue her with self-made projections and characteristics. Perhaps she was a fortunate film star come back from the dead to play a nude scene, as she stripped out of her furs in broad daylight into a voluptuous body and a light grassgreen summer dress.

Harlequin was naturally an indolent man with a curious suppressed twinkle in his eye, blue, black, sometimes red, like an inner (minuscule and elusive) mask of blue, black, red blood he wore within flesh and bone.

His affairs with his wife were normal, even inhibited, in tone. “Sex is a complex theatre”, Francis wrote, “in which father inhabits son, rebukes son, fights with son over the possession of a resurrected property of lust….”

All eyes were rooted in the half-open field of paint that Eleanor wore. Was it the beginnings of a gateway into the fantasy of a queen, into a genuine mystery of serenity, as father time fought with the sons of time, played rhapsodically with the daughters of time …?

“My father was fascinated by handguns,” said Harlequin suddenly, “duelling pistols, revolvers, rifles, the lot. He had quite a collection which included the replica of a fifteenth-century European handcannon of a type probably used at a later date in the conquest of Peru and Mexico. It was certainly used in Europe as we know from recent excavations. My father told me he acquired it from a gentleman who lived in Holland Park Gardens with his black queen and wife a long time ago — one Francis Cortez Esq. My father told me she died the day he was married, the year I was born. Born.” He was smiling inwardly at himself. “It’s all a fiction Eleanor, I’m sure, a recurring dream in which something happens, grips one, tends to release one…. My life’s a page in another man’s gun or book.”

Eleanor wasn’t listening. She had heard it all before except the matter of Julia’s pigmentation. This interested her, this aroused her.

“Black? Was Julia black?”

“Black with the flame of the sun when it shines in snow. A painter would give his eye-tooth … Black. White. My father said she was a creole beauty from the island of Zemi in the West Indies. A long time ago. He — I mean Francis — apparently vanished within a month or two of her death. My old man was intrigued by the whole affair. All sorts of stories circulated. She was quite wealthy you see. My old man was able to secure quite a collection of guns from the Cortez estate. It all seems an age ago like the Spanish Civil War and all that in which my father enlisted. So you see he was in his forties or fifties — and that’s a body of years I would think — when he met my mother. An old man in fact. If he’d been killed as a young man in Spain where would I be now? Indeed sometimes I wonder …” He half-smiled at Eleanor who had caught sight, in that instant, of Leonard under the trees. “A body of years and yet it’s as fleeting as a bullet. My old man used to say a hundred years are as fleeting as an arrow that flies from hand to heart.”

“I always think of cannon as huge beasts,” said Eleanor expressing an implicit preference for the hand in the cradle, coup d’état by Leonard’s milk bottles. Yet she shuddered a little in the canvas da Silva was painting as though a cat’s rippling tread of populations moved upon her flesh in Leonard’s dancing tread as he seemed to advance towards her from under the trees. The breeze strengthened and the painting fell upon a mimic battlefield. (It was a fantasy of love and hate Harlequin entertained when they were out in the open together.)

She lay there, lovely and prostrate, half-slain, her legs raised to the bullet of history until da Silva lifted her into an upright position against the foot of his easel. An advancing army, on milk-bottle horseback, applauded and Harlequin’s inner eye, in painted canvas, took aim at Leonard. He (Harlequin) elected to coffin himself in space, as she (Eleanor) reclined at his feet, and to be at liberty to patrol the air above her like a brilliant centaur in his own right in the sky; a brilliant conversion of wizards and witches into broomstick technologies and metamorphoses of resurrection in science.

Nothing was demanded of him except a satellite of appearances and disappearances, the trick of terrestrial and super-terrestrial battlefields, an opera of love and war through clay and gold and bottle-necked glass and rockets to the stars.

His apparent detachment — his air of non-existence in the upper air as Eleanor reclined on the ground (and Leonard bestrode a bottle), the air he cultivated that he had never been born, had been extinguished by a phantom bullet from a gun in the middle of a modern or ancient war his father fought — ignited a sensual flare, a sensual target of undreamt-of promiscuities, bodies and limbs scattered far and wide on a painting of green.

Perhaps an element of summer telepathy was at stake which inscribed his thoughts into a sculpture of non-existences, a sublimation of existences, grounded in meaningful obscurities of motive or action, gunplay in the ancient Wild West, film of violence, escapism through violence.

Shared thoughts of the box in his head, the bed in his sky, centred on his father’s handcannon as uncertain cradle or trigger of annunciation to smite the world with the lightning madness of the human species, the lightning gaiety of the human species, obsessional codes of the lost king (the lost queen) of space that Francis mourned in backward resurrections of Harlequin’s body before he was born and had been conceived to die….

“I always think of cannon as huge beasts,” Eleanor insisted.

“Huge beasts? Are they?” Harlequin caught himself. “Not at all. Three-handed but not huge. We’re back in the fifteenth century, remember? The issue then was not size but the additional component one required in order to take aim, to fire. Each target one slew, each body one killed, survived in a ghostly mechanic at one’s side. That was my father’s vision of the future in the past.”

“I always think of cannon …” Eleanor insisted.

“Handcannon,” Harlequin cried. “Handcannon my love. Quite small really. The bore is less than an inch, the barrel just over a foot. Devil to fire. And so an additional hand, called a serpentine, an ‘S’-shaped piece, was built against the stock. There stood one’s ghostly mechanic, my dear lady-in-waiting Eleanor. It was he or it who held the lighted match — as if it were the first or last star or sun in the hand of creation — and moved it by degrees to ignite the powder one had primed into the barrel of one’s gun. And so one’s hands were free to devote themselves to aligning the gun, to taking aim, some sort of rudimentary aim. One aimed at the enemy with both hands. In the meantime a fraction of a second’s evolutionary delay in the serpentine hand of the mechanic at one’s side, in igniting the ammunition of a star, could make all the difference between life and death. The third hand at one’s side became the enemy — a fraction of a second’s delay made him (or it) into the enemy. And the third hand on the enemy’s gun became yourself, your friend. A fraction of a second’s delay there might save your life, by allowing you to fire first. That was my father’s theory of targets of genesis through which to assemble a maker of worlds within the premature or precipitate materials in the very beginnings of creation. It was nothing to do with the size of the blanket of death or life (or the size of the gun, the size of the thunder) but rather with the mystery of survival, the mystery of conception in a third hand or ghostly recruit at one’s side. All evolution is the subtlest marriage of opposites within a scene of conflict….”

The paint on his lips cracked and much that he said seemed to vanish into the ground as the sensuous bullet Leonard fired hit him on the lips with which he kissed Eleanor with sudden zest, with limbo zest.

“Perhaps they both aimed and missed each other,” cried Eleanor scrambling up and tidying her dress as she saw Queen Julia turn and begin to descend towards the Serpentine.

*

Da Silva’s Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park had been painted with open stretches and with clumps of trees — oak, horsechestnut, ash, elm, cedar, beech, lime, willow.

Silver-grey roads of marvellous summer light tinctured by autumn and spring ghostly mechanics in the barks of trees wound their way from Bayswater Road to Kensington Road and Knightsbridge, from Hyde Park Gate around the Serpentine canal to Broad Walk.

Distances in each painting foreshortened themselves or deepened themselves into underground links or streams or rivers.

He brushed in a number of children’s swings within a hundred yards of Bayswater Road.

An intimacy of line and tone, the flashing wings of a gull over the Round Pond, shone through a slanting element like the thinnest lines of rain that rocked a miniature ocean upon which to embark around the globe from the sunrise of the early sixteenth century into resurrections of dawn in the late twentieth century.

It had been a long apparently stable cloud of night over the sun’s delayed apparition and a swan or night-headed duck settled on da Silva’s ocean as though an egg of cosmos were hatching within the hands of the foetus of the gods as it floated backwards and forwards in time….

These were in part Julia’s thoughts as she descended with Francis from the black/brown/white child clutching a riddled toy ship in which a letter to posterity had been posted. A letter from the grave of the Round Pond to the grave of the Serpentine. A letter from nondescript child to Shelley’s dead wife, Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself one cold winter night in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Posterity lies in the past as much as in the future.

Eleanor was playing the part of Harriet in the glare of television suns. It was an important film that would be transmitted by satellite to America. There was a green summer dress on her breasts like paint and yet it may have been an illusion for as Julia shaded her eyes the floating body of the actress in the water seemed curdled into winter foam and furs.

Julia stepped back herself from her lady-in-waiting who had flown from a Wild West studio in Italy (as if it were a bench in the park) to the Serpentine; turned away and stepped back herself into deeper recesses of the night-headed duck that sat on Leonard’s head, stepped through shell upon shell of pigmented camera to sail in another time from limbo port to limbo port of romantic oblivion.

The noises of twentieth-century London were momentarily stilled as the cameras clicked to paint each ghost. A fleet of children’s twentieth-century toy ships and dive bombers sailed on the Serpentine, flew in the air, not far from the film makers, under a gay summer sky. They seemed, all at once, a futuristic negative or painting, slightly unreal, slightly mad, like Picasso’s fashionable Guernica in the backward sky of nineteenth-century horse shining overhead.

She could still discern the magnificent rider embodying Physical Energy in the near distance of the park. Some said it had arrived in Kensington Gardens from as far afield as Cape Town — that it had broken loose from a Cecil Rhodes memorial and been caught by the hand of a sculptor called Watts.

Julia was peculiarly aware of all these co-existent features, implicit Guernica in Southern Africa’s cavalry, the smooth barrel of Watt’s horse in the cannonball bed of Picasso, and she gripped Francis’s arm with a profound sense of mourning in this timeless day of judgement/resurrection feuds, Promethean dawn and Serpentine fiery ghost.

“The present is an unreal letter one writes and conceals … out of a kind of cowardice perhaps.” She gripped Francis’s arm again as if she clung to a line that had been written for her or written by her a long time ago. “And then the letter returns before one loses one’s chance to see how close we are to the truth. Each lady-in-waiting’s alive the moment one sees, has the courage to see an entire body of approximate destinies in the womb of death and life.”

“Jen’s pregnant and alive, thank God,” said da Silva.

“What’s that? Whose voice was that? Was it you, Francis? Or did it come from the crowd over there? No. Not you. Nor anyone over there. His, the one who reads and edits my letters, your book, puts lines into my mouth, kisses my mouth with his brush. The future’s unreal until it becomes so real it actually speaks, in a play, in a poem perhaps, in a painting, in a novel. Each day in our lives was a resurrection Francis. And therefore we live backwards into the future until, who knows, the present may become so real we may live forwards into the past. We may live on either side of the grave. I wonder — did he say all of that or did I? I heard him cry ‘Jen’s pregnant and alive’ and I felt suddenly alone and yet on the edge of a sea that could take me to him; to you Francis when you plunge into some other world and leave me on this side of things.”

Francis held her and steadied her within the canvas da Silva painted. All of a sudden he was filled with irrational jealousy. “Who does he think he is?” he cried, “this other, this editor, this painter? In the first place it’s quite ridiculous really, I never read your letters nor you my book. We wrote and concealed …”

“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 suddenly 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 implacable 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.

“Middle passage ritual,” said da Silva to Francis as he made a series of rapid sketches, a series of dancing shapes in pursuit of a universal architectonic or self.

Francis was astonished—“Middle passage …?” he asked. And then he remembered his book. His eyes were opening in his skull. “On every urban ship the gods are there in each new building programme like implicit dancers, horizons as well, under which history moves by global degrees. Cramped economic degrees, dwarfed economic degrees, embedded nevertheless in the womb of space as in a canvas of deeds that lag behind a universal conception of the body of truth. In a limbo dancer or building or monument one glimpses chains and broken chains, divided spaces, wounded angles in resurrections, movement and distortion towards the inimitable (never-to-be-wholly-achieved) re-assembly of limbs into high rise Osiris, god-beetle, anancy spider, mast of new Christian ship, unfinished land, unfinished pier in the sea and the sky on the precipitate ladder of fate.”

Leonard picked up his heels in Francis’s book; they moved on, turned a corner into an unfinished housing estate, and made their way through it towards Clarendon Road, Lansdowne Road and St John’s Gardens.

The atmosphere began to change abruptly into a tide or bar of spacious houses possessed of an air of leisure and well-being.

They ascended St John’s Gardens and came upon St John’s Church on the summit of the hill from which spectators, in the middle of the nineteenth century, had had a grandstand view of the Hippodrome racecourse.

The choir was practising inside and the sound of blurred organ and voices came like orchestrated applause from a past day. Limbo horses swung to that spectral applause through Clarendon Road, across Ladbroke Grove and into Portobello Road’s sea of a market that dipped into all periods and accents, book bargains, antique voices, trade voices and rough cheer.

Each hoof deposited its climax of curious, half-glittering cargo or prizes. A cloud-horse drifted back towards Ladbroke Grove, stood over St John’s steeple and stepped into Eleanor’s bedroom and mirror….

The door to the apartment was slightly ajar. Leonard entered, stood on the thick carpet that led into the flat. He shut the door softly behind him. He knew Harlequin was away. But he was almost persuaded that a shot might ring out and he would fall by the side of the swimming pool he had passed or be trampled under a horse’s hoof.

One area seemed drawn into the other, giant racecourse into guarded hallway, one fortress of chance or death into another, until a sprinkle of fate seemed as swift as a bullet. Until sprinkle and bullet, phallus and perfumed temple in which Eleanor sat, were an intimate paradox and brushstroke between one fortress and another.

Francis stopped dead in Leonard’s fictional tracks in the hall of the apartment as da Silva unveiled another translation of the elements in his book. He was shocked anew to see the intimate thoughts of his body and mind painted into broad daylight, thoughts of Eleanor, of her absent “husband”, of the “fictional” Eleanor and the “real” Eleanor in bed, in his arms.

It was the strangest climax or notion by which he (a secretive writer) was possessed to import black Leonard into his book.

There, away on business in Liverpool, yet looming like the shadow of war over the flat — in da Silva’s translation of Francis’s book — stood the older jealous man with whom Eleanor lived and whose house this was.

There stood also, with a finger on the trigger, the young revengeful Harlequin, of Leonard’s age, obsessed by thoughts of nondescript parentage in the miscarried foetus of the gods. Until he believed himself the older man’s son conceived, all the same, by Francis (or Leonard in bed with Eleanor at the heart of the book of fictional yet terrifyingly real inner life).

And as Leonard waited for the young daemon of his own age to fire, on behalf of father time, he felt himself projected forwards into future wars and conflicts in which the “old” Harlequin had “unaged”, had shed half his years, in order to become Francis’s and Julia’s unborn son given fictional projection into cruel, half-incestuous, half-foreign, life. So that as the bullet sped, its material consequences seemed less overwhelming, almost as if it were tipped by ineffectuality to vanish into an apparition or creative paradox. Could Julia’s miscarriage of flesh-and-blood be converted into profound sensibility of apparitions of community (in resurrections of the unborn) one lives ahead of one’s time in order to be whole and to survive? Could a queen’s unborn son prove the trigger of fictional life, parable or strangest blessing or miscarriage of bullets by ageing/youthful jealous tides of populations? And it was as if a subtlety of shocking comprehension, that drove the creative imagination to run far deeper than moral convention or grave or cradle or appearance, led Francis into bed with another man’s wife in pursuit of a supreme fiction or book or treaty of sensibility between the born and the unborn; led him into a voyage of affections, that appeared promiscuous, but was other than promiscuity within a design of unfathomable premises of imaginative unity as compensation for losses endured; led him into a conception of the miracle of survival, immunity from fire, immunity from water, immunity from bullets, as limbo complications in the dancing strangers in his book….

As the threat of a gun — that mirrored the half-curse, the half-blessing, of unlived lives or dormant ages, lived lives or translated feuding ages — began to dissolve, Leonard moved forwards again along the hall until he came to Harlequin’s study or “holy of holies”.

He poked his head in, fascinated all over again by a tiny model of a machine gun and by larger-than-life “percussion transitional revolvers”, on a wall of the room, like emblems of menace that could blow one to smithereens. They had been rifled with six chambers and there was a “sighting hole” in the bar hammer; a unique short-lived weapon that stood between the “percussion pepperbox” and the “true” or “atomic” revolver.

The other half of another wall was lined with books in red leather binding, from the age of Homer to the age of Dante on to Dr Johnson, side by side with a startling display of weapons that ranged from models of variants of the sixteenth-century German wheellock through mid-seventeenth-century north Italian wheellock and late seventeenth-century Scottish all steel flintlock. (The Scottish models were particularly impressive with scroll or “ramshorn” butts.)

There were guns with Spanish miquelet locks that were crude and angular with their huge-jawed cocks and right-angled steel and pan covers. There was the prepossessing English dog lock of the middle seventeenth century in which the cock and tumbler or axle were forged in one piece.

There was an admirable French lock designed by one Marin le Bourgeois, a gunmaker, painter, sculptor, musician.

“The dance of the guns,” Leonard sighed, almost flippantly, but the sense of his miraculous survival in history, the sense of having escaped jealous retribution, folly, his own and that of others, from the madness of hate or feud or war — across middle passage ages, middle passage generations, centuries — had not entirely faded as he retreated from Harlequin’s “holy of holies” and made his way to Eleanor’s bedroom.

“A growing shock”, da Silva echoed the subtlest dispersal of gunfire, upon the ladder of fate on which he was painting scenes from Francis’s book as if each step or bar were a box in which times danced, “to see your characters unveiled before you within scenes that unravel a series of lusts and connections in you, their creator. In me as well upon the swings of conscience. Your daemon of conscience. Conscience indeed. What is the conscience of art in a promiscuous age, a vicarious age?” He was serious as he asked, yet laughing like an artist-clown, to veil his late twentieth-century naked discomfiture. Francis was laughing too from within the swings of the grave to the cradle to unveil his early-to-middle twentieth-century skeleton discomfiture—“What is community Da Silva? Ours is a promiscuous age, a vicarious age, indeed.” He confronted da Silva as one who spoke unspoken thoughts and hidden dreams from the canvas or silver screen of the dead to the very hand that painted it or him with flying strokes or phantom bullets.

“What is my greedy connection to Eleanor, yours to Julia and Jen? Are we not all greedy for immortality as we swing from the past into the present, the present into the future? I need Eleanor to return to Julia as vicarious queen. You need Julia to come to Jen as living lady-in-waiting with whom you play your games of divorce from death and re-marriage to life. We are immersed — as you make so plain in each brushstroke of hidden darkness or light — in the strangest intercourse of survival, those of us who suffer statistics of disaster, in each minute, and need to resense a bond of survival through ages.

“There is, I know, an ineffectuality, no one can fathom, to material oppression that may illumine an individual’s life in a sudden moment, beyond expectation or control, and bring about a sense in him or her — his small life or hers — of unexpected kinship to the very kings or queens, to the greatest souls in time. That is the mystery of poverty. How does a mere straw, tossed on the rubbish heap of human waste, accumulate an intensity or new passion in creation, a brilliancy of surviving bodies within the most unpromising field of circumstance? Perhaps no one can say what everyone burns to say — I am the link between the apparently failed ones and the apparently great ones.”

It was this link between ineffectually or miscarriage and complex human greatness that drew Francis to mask himself in Leonard, in bed, in Eleanor’s arms; to suspend himself over her — upon her perfumed body — within her perfumed body that annihilated his senses until he became oblivious of whom or what he was. And this very obliviousness led to a character of supreme fiction, in limbo sex, as an animal’s or bird’s orientation, in limbo flight, appears mathematics of genius, though it is nothing more than supreme instinct.

“Is there an equation between supreme fiction and supreme instinct and both are marvels beyond logical categories of comprehension?

“Is there an equation between fallible lust and infallible divinity? Have the most virtuous gods, who came to maturity in the pressure of aeons, ascended from their terrestrial encampment, desert or jungle, to sow wild oats or stars, at the end or the beginning of worlds, as if to establish a canon of unfinished (half-defeated) humanity that resembles the mathematics of unfinished (half-defeated) deity?”

Eleanor knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Francis was aware of her as half-dormant, or unfinished creation, who had been lodged in the milky way by ironmonger statistics and consumer affections. Her infinite coarseness and thickness of soil drew him to rape her in the middle of the stars to which he had fled. And she dreamt in turn it lay with him perhaps to assuage — if not cure — the injustices and incompatibilities in her half-created state or kingdom. By assuagement she visualised an extension of herself surviving within the most cruel elements, surviving with him, or through him, into accumulative shadows of approximation to the resurrection of the self like creatures of matching instinct and supreme fiction who pass through fire.

“Abed-negro,” said Leonard (in whom Francis had masked himself). He sat up in bed with a flippant command or prayer on his lips and admired the black spirit of his painted body, decked out like a savage, in the flame of the mirror in Harlequin’s bedroom. “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. The great ones, the kings of fire. I have often marvelled at my admission to such a citizenship, to such a state of survival. I am wholly undeserving….” He still seemed flippant but, in fact, an incredible tenderness lay between him and the young woman at his side who feared for her own flesh and sanity in ironmonger statistics and consumer affections.

*

The ladder of fate drifted out of the room (as Francis unmasked himself) into the street beneath St John’s spire.

The sun stood overhead upon a subtle pillow of cloud suffused with whiteness. Across the blanket of the road, in a square of garden, the filtered light seemed curiously solid with each precipitation of paint. Dancers were poised on the steep ladder of the senses and non-senses, twig, branch, centaur tree, bound to a moment’s bridle of enchantment. Bound to a silver climax, the clock of space that troops into each minute in masked houses, bodies and appearances.

Perhaps each brick or beam that dances in the sun ages into a young lamp, pregnant with fossil resources and glories, with which to light one’s way into the coming of electricity before it had been dreamt into nights of existence.

It was this coming of miraculous translations of a motivated creator of terrifying universes into kings and queens in fire (in drought and ice) that gripped Francis, as he glanced back to Eleanor’s window and sensed a climacteric vision, relating to intuitive bodies of the imagination based on concrete, apparently common-or-garden, affairs and events. The coming of expeditions of rescue within cavalry seasons and elements, within precipitate fires and floods, upon racecourses of history buried in time, translations of intensities of odds pitted against the foodbearing/ love-making spirit as it auctioned its wares of dread and beauty, its memorials of incredible survival, unceasing marvel and fear….

They descended Ladbroke Grove, turned into Westbourne Park Road where the first intimations resided of the thronged river of a painted market and place of auctions. Some of the houses were already dressed like stalls with gaily-painted doors and the sudden sparkle of flowers on a miniature deck of a balcony overhead.

Then suddenly they were in the flood of the market itself that seethed by degrees along the reduced pathway of the road between a variety of stalls.

ORANGES, BANANAS, APPLES, PEARS, FISH, GREENS, EGGS.

ANTIQUE COMPASSES AND CLOCKS.

EXOTIC CANDLES, JEWELLERY, MAPS, MERMAIDS AND MERMEN.

BRACELETS, EARRINGS, RIDING BOOTS, JEANS.

BOOKS, PRINTS, SHELLS, CANNONBALLS, CRADLES.

The pathway of the street was crowded with a carnival of spectators who slipped in and out of currencies of deaths and lives, of masks and appearances, in and out of the foodbearing tree of the sun.

A mock auction was in progress at the stall of DAVID AND BATHSHEBA.

“One hundred thousand.”

“Two hundred thousand.”

Francis nodded. “Three hundred thousand.”

“Four hundred thousand.”

“Five hundred thousand.”

“Six hundred thousand.”

“Seven hundred thousand.” Francis nodded.

“Eight hundred thousand.”

“Nine hundred thousand.” Francis nodded as if he slept on the ladder of fate.

“One million. One million. One million. There. It’s yours sir. Your body of dreams.”

Francis drew up, into the translated page of his book in which the auction had been painted.

“A bargain, sir,” cried the auctioneer. “It’s Michelangelo’s David. Take this subtle wave”, he pointed to the anatomy of magical sculpture, “that climbs from a knotted turbulence, from the genital organs, the genital whirlpool held like a rose, such inimitable control.

“Note the half-visible, half-invisible, ripples that ascend the body, break at the chest, create a dispersal of momentum, ascend again and deepen into a vortex at the human neck before it rises into the glance of a god’s head and into a turbulence of hair that matches the implicit rose or whirlpool from which it commenced. Rose of the sea. Rose of midnight.

“Note also”, he continued in the logic of translated page and dream, “how the right arm is held parallel to the right side of the body. The hand folds in at last against the thigh and leaves a long inland sea of space between arm and side that matches the triangle that runs down from the genital whirlpool.

“Note also how the left arm folds over from the elbow to the shoulder and is held out from the body so that another spatial tide rises there and floods out again to match an inlet formed by the head and the neck above the left hand as it approaches the left shoulder.

“On the face of it it’s a naked body enclosing seas and enclosed by a sea. But, in actual fact, no naked creature is like this. He stands in a flood that is higher than a flood and lives.”

The auction of fate slipped further along the narrow sea of the market. Da Silva was the auctioneer of translated elements, translated bodies, translated ghosts and humours of fire, air, earth, water, humours of cosmos, tenants of cosmos.

In the slow processions of mankind that moved between the stalls or on the pavements, in the numerous eyes that stopped to scan a variety of things, the numerous hands that held or offered a variety of things, every feature seemed represented, Indian men, women in sweeping robes, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, West Indians, Londoners and other English folk, French, Italians, Spanish. Bearded faces. Beardless faces. Black and white Americans with cameras slung over shoulders.

There was the DOG SHOP in Blenheim Crescent and there was a stall called THE LION AND LIONESS GAME at which another mock auction of the effects of creation was about to commence.

Da Silva stepped a rung or two up on the ladder to indicate the merits of a Titian he had drawn from a page of Francis’s book.

“Folks,” he said, “what is the humour of fate or freedom if it disguises from itself the animal generations that stand within our terrors and ambivalences? We need to see them if we are to see how we ourselves are furnaces and floods in which so many threatened species may burn, in which so many lost species may begin to revive, to come back (who knows) through storms and hurricanes into a harbour of passionate serenity. And as we begin to see them we may begin to acquire the wisdom of savage parenthesis, savage and tender humility. Take this,” he was pointing to Sacred and Profane Love. “Where shall the bidding start?”

Francis nodded.

“One hundred thousand.”

“Two hundred thousand.” Francis nodded.

“Three hundred thousand. Ladies and gentlemen of dream populations draw closer. What do you see? Two women and a child within a charmed landscape and harbour of serenity. Two golden lionesses and a lion cub. Did someone say four hundred thousand for the conservation of all threatened species? What do we mean by conservation? We mean an active dialogue to assess limits of strength between the apparently strong and the apparently weak. Yes. Draw closer. Take the naked golden lioness woman with the coiled rope of a towel or a sheet across her legs. Note the scarlet robe on one arm like a draped bear that mourns and clings to her. The other woman is fully clad in voluminous white that flutters into ridges and valleys like a map that falls from the mane of her hair into a stable of horses. Note the shape of the face, the brow, the eyes, the nose, the lips, the exquisite sensation of the lioness within the stillest motion of fire. Note the red-blooded fire that swathes one arm like the implicit relish of the meat of a bird. Note the beautiful lion cub that plays in the head and flesh of the child beside her of whom she seems perfectly oblivious. Did I hear someone say five hundred thousand?” Francis nodded. “Six hundred thousand then. Did someone say seven hundred thousand as a modest beginning for the conservation of all threatened species clothed by our human terrors and ambivalences?”

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.

*

The first very long letter she wrote (like a chapter in a book) had been written within a year of their marriage.

She had had her first miscarriage; she had had a fever, a substratum of malaria, which was to dog her steps, confine her to bed from time to time, in the years ahead.

One summer day they quarrelled. He turned from her abruptly. It was a mild quarrel into which they had slipped; and yet there was that sudden blaze in his eyes she never forgot which left her with the inconclusive flavour of ramifications and architectures of conflict between man and man, man and woman, woman and woman, as if they had been shot, out of the blue, conscripted by a jealous bullet, the miscarriage of a word into feuding poetical elements, earth-poem, sky-poem, water-poem.

As if nevertheless in plumbing that subtle miscarriage of deity’s word, a child of the imagination was still being painted or sculpted or symphonically conceived to confront a merciful hiatus or ineffectuality shared by all implacable creator elements, in subtly unfinished dialectical materials, in subtly miscarried dialectical materials, in parallel universes, that left a miraculous light or shade, sound or space, in which to envisage a far-reaching community of redress.

Each principle of redress, however, pinpointed the essential precariousness of the myths of the family of man, areas that needed extensive support, tolerance, resources of self-critical affection across divides of hate.

See how Francis became a stranger to her all at once — as if they had stepped back across centuries into unfamiliar bastions prior to states of mutual self-discovery — as he abruptly and coldly turned away from her, unconscious of the effects of his retreat into a “will-to-tenderness”, struck off in the direction of Hyde Park Gate and in an instant she dreamt that all the bridges of generations had collapsed across oceans and she would never see him again.

He would return, she knew, and yet she sat in a chair in the park as if it were the end of the world (as if the world she still knew had never really begun). She became a rock woman on a rock ladder of a chair with a rock child to swing in her arms like eternity’s slingshot or cannon fodder.

The echoes of their quarrel seemed now to reach into Bayswater Road with its rush and its traffic. They would be home for dinner she knew. They would drive and chat as if nothing had happened. The taste of reconciliation was already on her palate; the taste of melting seed or bone, renascence of inconclusive flesh, through which to initiate a secret conversation with da Silva about re-creative fissures in a dialectical body of rock.

She knew all this, in advance of his return, and yet she was convinced that Francis was divided from her and she from him. He would be back in half-an-hour to board their car or ship. Half-an-hour. Each minute was a hundred years and many oceans lay between them (as if they had never been crossed), painted oceans, ocean-poems, confused causes, confused divinities, confused humanities. And with such a prospect of apparent division, as well as precarious adventure backwards and forwards to conserve what had actually been gained or achieved, she saw all the more deeply into the wounds of community-in-unfinished-creation.

How easy for them to ride into headstrong oblivion after all that had happened between them, to destroy with the glance of an arrow or a word so much that was beautiful and priceless they had actually achieved within a nucleus of far-reaching and shocking illegitimacy and legitimacy of antecedents.

So that as she dreamt they were driving in their car in half-an-hour’s time, the intervening minutes of separation and silence, as if everything had happened, as if nothing had happened, drew her to live the parallel but estranged expeditions of lovers, unravelled motivations that lay in the arts of the future at the heart of present silences and beyond miscarried words or ultimatums.

Theirs was the parallel wound or expedition of bruised affection in time within a renascence of the arts; executions that resembled a rock sentence of ultimate silence, division or death: resembled death in confirming a miracle of achieved life within unlived lives across incredible cosmic distances, a miracle of wounded wholeness implicitly whole in the very beginnings before all parallel stricken beginnings.

Each wounded whole comes to reflect elements of air and water and incredible distances that confused it in new beginnings after old beginnings.

And that confusion burns itself into the collective stone memory and non-memory of the born and the unborn as if to affirm that no escape exists from water’s clan or the clans of air, earth, fire, space, and the elements above space, since the kingdom of the womb from which one comes lies within them all. And the degrees of re-entry into that lost kingdom, through states of lived, unlived, lives, lie in the very cruel elements themselves as insensible substitutes for gateways of awe and blinding wonder.

Re-entry into peace is hemmed around by furies as if to witness to a nameless peace, unlike the names of peace, yet available to the mystery of the self in its inimitable movement into stillness or stillness into unseen movement.

Re-entry into love is hemmed around by apparitions of hate, as if to witness to a terrifying inner repose within the assault of the world, a luminosity, immunity, available to the mystery of the self as unseen shelter from fire within rock fire.

Re-entry into perfection is hemmed around by qualities of distress as if to witness to an otherness beyond captivity yet available to patterns or limits of endurance in the mystery of the self.

No wonder she found herself immersed in minutes that were hundreds of years, in which she felt herself both enlarged and diminished as she waited for Francis to return.

No wonder she smoothed her rock skirt and flesh into enterprises of invented car and re-invented ship on which to sail backwards to revived garden parties of her youth, savage symbols, carnival dances, that were in themselves a form of waiting, a form of anticipation, a form of hoping for a secret lover of infinity buried in ancestral bone and blood, a secret white, a secret black, a secret Carib, a secret Arawak.

At the age of eighteen, the year of her first carnival, she made her first step into the rock of the sky, into Arawak Zemi-land. She followed a procession that wound its way up into the central mountains.

They arrived in the ceremonial playing fields of the zemi-clouds above the Caribbean Sea. Those fields were rectangular and still circular, they were bounded by vertical stones in which the zemi-players crouched.

It was a glimpse by sculptured eyes through the sculptured mountain of the heart that Julia never forgot.

Perhaps it was her first intimation of the distances that were to trouble her, the distances between herself and a lover of infinity, distances of enchantment. Her blood sang, her feet danced, in expectation.

Far below the sea crawled in its wrinkled illusion of a mask battered by the sun but still expectant of the coming of the sky, the divinity of the sky. Far above, yet close at hand, through a crevice in the illusion of the sky, the zemi-players were poised in their three-cornered bodies, three-cornered blood, three-cornered feet.

Each feature enlarged itself into a phallic trinity or ball that bounced from the pitch of Maya-land to the pitch of Zemi-land, from lap-land to crown-land, from ladies-in-waiting to gentlemen-in-waiting.

She was suddenly naked lap-land and crown-land herself save for a fig-leaf of cloud into which had been pinned frogs and birds and bats and fish. Pinned into a mirror of intercourse between the sea and the sky.

And all at once she began to tremble in her leaf of a cloud as the zemi-players advanced from that other kingdom, on the other side of the mountain, towards her.

Screamed. Fell to the ground. High and dry. Between earth and sky.

Did she or was it they who screamed….?

The game had vanished. She was fully clad again, raped yet wholly painted, raped yet clothed in parallel wounded expectations of species and cultures. Torn fig-leaf, torn cloud. And all that remained — as the solicitous mountain party gathered around her — was the memory of her first glimpse of a lover of infinity, of lightning penetration and bliss, of frog angels and bird angels and fish angels, her first substitute carnival gateway into the annunciation of the globe as an absorption of sorrows on a pin or a star or a splinter in the eye of the needle within which unseen populations danced.

8. Embarkation/Wedding Day

Julia’s father died a year after her ascent of Zemi-land on which she left a subtle emotional imprint, an emotional intuition, a weather-madonna, da Silva thought, to match across the years a sculptured madonna as she now sat in her chair in the park.

Perhaps that ascent had been her first adolescent carnival sensation of a hand dissolving the elements, constructing the elements, a hand that could blow fierce and strong backwards from future or past into a created or re-created emotional presence within one and without one.

She was nineteen years old when her father died on the island of Zemi, twenty-nine when she lost her first pregnancy.

In that interval of ten years the outlines of varieties of emotional density or blown paintings of disturbed psyche, charged with the curious humours or immensities of pathos in father time’s agencies of original embarkation across incredible distances of cosmos, seemed to inscribe themselves in her in father time’s lost foetal child within letters of cloud: cloud-letters she had nevertheless meticulously written in which appeared apparently involuntary scribbles of what Julia herself called in a marginal note “father-deity at the door of the womb”. Some were much more than scribbles, da Silva saw when he came to study her letters, they resembled the most sensitive miniature sculptures and were of such delicacy they may have been impressed with a needle into shavings of wood or shell or stone refined into manuscript or paper.

Perhaps they had been peeled from a body of unspoken necessity, perhaps they were a compensation for losses endured, perhaps they were part and parcel of the evolutionary mystery of art in which she was to reside herself, in another age, like an inimitable carving herself in a chair against the papers of grass and water that stirred or evaporated in the park.

Her father’s sudden death had been a blow, her sudden abortion a shock, and something in her, which was originally bruised or torn before it actually appeared-to-be-bruised-or-torn, ran to embark into another beginning of the self. Ran to da Silva; her body of letters fell into him.

As such he dreamt, in the minute she came, that three skeleton mothers pencilled him into her receptive flesh and he knew her as if he received himself within her feminine flesh.

As such she dreamt, in the minute he came, that three skeleton fathers pencilled her as his penetrative phallus and she knew him as if she became a masculine pay or rope of selves.

One masculine pay of self was a conical brow of music, elongated epitaph (her father’s face), the other fused Francis, Harlequin and Leonard, the third was da Silva (whose pencilled receptivity confirmed a feminine bank of universe).

And so a grossly dogmatic character of economic rape, in father time’s manuscript species, repudiated itself into a variety of contrasting features, in dialogue one with the other, as if to affirm that the quest for the gods and the being of the gods were breached fatherhood, motherhood, illegitimate/legitimate husbandhood, wifehood, expectations and novel confrontations, in which one appeared to move towards a central garment of penetrated stillness (as one fell) or to be still within a central unravelling movement or never-ceasing womb (as one ascended).

Thus the quest for the gods was a turning in into others within infinite particularities of universal lived, unlived, lives, infinite suffered or eclipsed pencil, infinite enjoyed or abrasive brushstroke, infinite ink, infinite unspoken word or wounded whole in all its sexual instincts, in all its mathematical, abstract, equations.

Her conversation with her father across the years from her chair in the park was as much with conical, fused, creator-males as it was with the mysterious bodies of bird-woman Rima, lioness-woman Eleanor in them, in da Silva’s rocking chair canvases.

“I do not see”, da Silva thought rebelliously, as he painted Jen’s pregnant body in his studio, “why I am driven to make all this sacred fuss (involving my own unknown mother) about a foetus, an unborn creature. Pencils. Bones. Rocks. Sheets of music. Brushes. Paints. Canvases. Legends. Maps. It’s quite an expensive undertaking to bring a spiritual brat into the world. It’s rot. Life is dirt cheap, has always been. Who cares? Sure enough I care for you Jen. For you and your physical offspring-to-be. You’re my immediate family. But why should I bother beyond that?”

“Fuss? Is spirit fuss? I protest….” Julia cried and stopped. She dug into him fiercely, into his flesh that was now her flesh in the degree that he received her into his canvases as a woman receives a man. Their climax made him suddenly confused — even angrier still — at the dividing line between spirit and creation. His tools sang nevertheless, painter’s brush and sculptor’s hammer, singing flesh of a bird, the spirit of a bird. There was the rhythmic stab of a sculptured song, there was a sound of soundless crying, as the songbird lit in her body and inserted its beak into her flesh, into his flesh, into a piercing thrilling musical wire.

Her father had been a divided man, a wired man, Julia recalled as she sat in the park with a sense of being re-made in the depths of a climacteric quarrel of states of spirit and matter. The songbird thrilled within her as if it had suddenly crossed the dividing line; and in crossing had left her vaguely amused at da Silva’s anger and father time’s predilection for incurable romance. She could hear the singing quarrelsome beak tapping coded conversations into the woven ear within her, telling her that in token of da Silva’s receptivity — in token of his flesh becoming her flesh — he, father time, possessed a heart of gold and would make a generous buyer of their mutual child’s, woman’s, bird’s, man’s, body in the park were it (that body) put up for auction.

It was typical of him, Julia recalled, to launch into a ribald or cryptic jest on the metamorphoses of flesh. (Did skeleton metamorphose flesh or flesh skeleton in order to initiate an elaborate spirituality or spectre of materialism?)

It was the sort of question he jestingly asked on occasion but never quarrelled about. His was no quarrel of painter or poet. And his jests or questions were signs, nothing more, of an instinctive appreciation of the necessity of the arts, the comedy of the arts. His divided nature’s generous complicity with a heart of gold to serve both politics and art with singular devotion or innocence, may well have earned him — had he lived — a knighthood or a peerage in the Businessman’s Commonwealth.

Indeed it was that generosity that captivated Julia from her earliest years until her tycoon father grew larger-than-life into the kindest of fathers and a patron of libraries, hospitals, universities, colleges, schools, playing fields, all over the world.

“Perhaps”, da Silva prodded her, with a trace of jealousy in chisel and hammer, as he capitalised afresh on her quarrel with Francis which occupied a large place in her letters, “your father would have done even better in the cradle of the sixteenth century and may have acquired a kingly reputation for saintliness as a renaissance trader, lover, priest. Is it the genetic carriage or miscarriage of saint or sinatra that croons and warbles in my tooled radio beak as I sculpt you abstractedly, expectantly …?”

She was suddenly furious, almost resistant, rebellious, under the vicarious hammer and the brush, and then she yielded to him, curiously glad he had raised his half-mocking, half-jealous, question. Her father would have been amused, would have laughed almost appreciatively at such just, unjust, deserts. Yes, she was not ashamed of her father nor of the deep well of emotion that stood between them. He would have adored a grandchild of whatever pigmentation, half-sinner, half-saint, half-capitalist, half-socialist. It would have made no difference to him. No wonder in the midst of eulogies there had been an unflattering question or two raised in some of the obituary columns of newspapers. She was prompted to ask as she scanned a batch of clippings—“It is said”, she looked at him, “that you paid low wages father and the housing on some of your estates was bad.”

“I paid higher wages”, said her father, “than were standard practice in any colony in which I invested all I had in the tools of a new humanity, in a golden age. I love the people.”

The concreteness, almost mythical tone of his reply, made her conscious of the hierarchies he served at the peak of which stood a robust puritanism allied to a golden romance. “I love the people.”

The higher a god ascends the more curious becomes, in some instances, his love of the people whom he draws up with him into heaven until the lines are eclipsed between their poverty and his wealth. (His mistresses may even become angelic orders of woman.) And the maternity of the globe begins to value every complex bird-song, in its theories of language, as if to raise dialectal accents to hymns of praise. It was to her father’s eternal credit that an earthiness of communication obsessed him, within his genius for making money, and he saw all creatures as frail and grounded, claws and wires, through which to sound the brambly niches of heaven in earth, the niches of esoteric emaciation in the voices and bodies of young and old goddesses destined for ultimate refinement or elevation.

As flesh began to age he still clung to it. Here lay his incorrigible innocence, his generosity of heart, despite his divided nature. Flesh in a heart of gold. Flesh mirrored in gold. And even, at the very end, when he collapsed, in a black woman’s bed, flesh was mirrored in bone, flesh was metamorphosed bone.

That was the first condition of the new heaven of mankind he took with him to his grave. Egg of humanity. An egg rich enough, in all its circumstances and prizes of heaven and limits of hell, to become an issue of earthy wholeness, of representative numbers of the living and the dead in each global society one takes to bed with oneself at any minute of the blind day or darkest night, at any minute when one is born without memory of the state of birth, or dies without memory of the state of death it seems, within the capital resources of an heroic extension of oneself into all unconscious races and climates of original emotion.

*

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 processional 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.

Once again she was drawn to scrutinise the overlapping lineaments in the bird-gate, in the lion-gate, male and female evolutionary bodies. A resemblance existed between her father’s sudden death and Francis’s plunge into the ladder of limbo — as between the hanged man in the carriage or miscarriage of fate and Christ’s freedom on the cross — and these two self-reversible poles, or emblems of “father-deity’s strength and weakness at the door of the womb”, drew her forwards to sense the partial self (or selves) in all creations constructed in the teeth of great odds, within unpromising, perhaps inhospitable, perhaps barren, reaches of time.

*

It was within the construction of the rain’s multiple stick, upon which great-aunt Sky leaned, that the young and ambitious reporter left the island of Zemi with Julia a month or so after the great funeral.

There had been business matters to attend to in connection with her father’s estate but at last there they were on their way to the ship. Francis sat in the carriage with Julia and her great-aunt who seemed enraptured by the sudden coolness of the weather. They drove for the last time through the formal, sculptured, gate, with its lions and birds and hanging figures.

(Da Silva had painted himself into Francis’s skin as if it were he who sat in the carriage.)

“An astonishing gate,” he said to Jen, turning to his wife in his studio, pointing deep into his canvases as if they moved within and without these paintings themselves. “Like the entrance to a great theatre. My studio’s a stage. Our world’s a stage.” He kissed her and turned all at once on their world-stage as if the renascence of arts they pursued had run into drama and he was an actor, Jen was an actress; they took their translated (edited, transformed) lines from conjunctions of Francis’s book and Julia’s letters.

“An astonishing gate”, he continued, addressing the mask of Julia as it turned towards him, “in which I have added mutations of character, Rigby and Cortez; I shall change my name to Cortez, you see I’m a little mad, but then it’s becoming fashionable to change one’s name nowadays. As for Leonard and Harlequin, ah well they’re limbo dancers, limbo selves. They hang upon a rope of distances knotted into the rain. Mercator’s children. Family tree, satellite tree, Sky, Rain, Earth. Pricks in the milky way and the stars. Backside of the moon.

“You see,” he said to Julia wryly, “you’ve led me a pretty dance you know. Across oceans. Into the birth of space. Back to where it all started. Our first meeting. So here I am. How do you put it in your letters? Ah yes I remember. Parallel expeditions and beginnings. So here I am. Seated beside you on our way to the harbour. There we embark with great-aunt Sky.

“You say it was unfeeling of me to break in on you the evening of the funeral but I thought you were leaving Zemi the next day and I couldn’t afford to miss you. And then of course I discovered we were actually booked to travel on the same vessel; I mentioned the book I had started to write about you, when I first heard of you, before we met, called the tree of the sun. A secret book. But when I looked at you then I knew you knew how much I envied your serenity and wealth. And I felt you also knew that envy may lead in god’s good time to the greatest admiration that beauty arouses. Indeed I am deeply in love with you Julia. Fate. Freedom. A chance for me when we marry, as we surely will, I feel it will surely happen, to do something in my book for a world that needs authority and imagination; needs innocence.”

“Innocence?” said Julia startled by his naïveté or unselfconsciousness or hubris. She inclined her head a little as if she were listening for a frail stable of truth within the horses’ hooves that seemed to run in the shadow of wombed canvas.

Perhaps the shadow of an intuition possessed her, the shadow of distress or distrust of “will-to-tenderness”; the shadow nevertheless of hope in the wholly creative achievement of authority and imagination, the achievement of beauty. “Innocence is a sea,” she began and stopped as if she were concealing, in a pocket in the carriage, her first love letter to Francis on which the shadows crossed. “It may bear us forward, it may swallow us up, in the cradle, in bed, in the things we grow to idolise.” She sounded a trifle uncomfortable as the carriage swayed and distorted her voice.

“I do not believe it swallows us up,” da Silva said softly.

“I died,” cried Julia, abruptly changing the subject, “according to the records, in my fortieth year.” She spoke like a translated actress who mimicks the records as reification of fact, bed of fact, cradle of fact. And then, in a flash, in another voice, like an actress again, improvising this time, “I have no memory of dying Francis except in an endless procession of turbulences. One disembarks. One embarks again upon another ship. One’s here. One’s not here. My body’s in this carriage. My heart’s back in the old house. Perhaps it will crawl and swim until it catches up. My mind and spirit — they’re with you already on the ship. And the child I so much want to have … Where is he or she I wonder? A procession of turbulences.”

The wheels of the carriage were running smooth as velvet on a new pitched road that ran beside the harbour of Zemi. The rain had ceased. “We’re almost there,” she cried to Francis. “Perhaps if you look out you will see the ship. You will see us leaning over the rail ahead of ourselves.”

Francis looked out but he seemed suddenly to grow blind, suddenly to grow a shade lost. Neither in his book, nor in her letters, had appeared a description of the ship upon which they were to sail and this left a gap on da Silva’s stage.

A gap he filled with sudden emotion. They were leaving lives on the island they would never live, local occupations and patterns through which they would never function again. And, in Julia’s case, each spectral occupation or unlived life made a breathless hush now that fell upon the land: a breathless construction of the soil by the sea, she would never see again, at the other extremity of the rain when the air grows still.

There was a mist in the sky and when she looked through the other window of the carriage the mountain range vanished. She turned again to the harbour and the island itself seemed about to sail into an extension of a vast continent in space. In that breathless extension each grain of sand or crumb of water was a mirror that had been ploughed, yet smoothed over at the same time at the end of the rain, into each spectral life in its miniature canvas and frame she would leave behind when they sailed.

Why leave? Why not live forever upon a static gate, static punishment without end, static reward without end, static exile?

Why not stay in a safe mirror, static reflection without end?

Why move at all, why begin to die, across the ages one has constructed from deathless lives? To fulfil perhaps a theatre of nature that appears to be finished yet remains unfinished. To unravel perhaps an assumption of the deathlessness of one’s native land with which one clothes one’s deepest fears of a wholeness that lies beyond each boundary, or epitaph, or cradle.

Why not stay forever in that breathless hush of constructed, unfinished, soil or sea at the extremity of the rain when the air remains cool and still?

But she had no final answer to all these questions, that swarmed about her all of a sudden like a crowd of eager combatants, participants, on their way to a carnival theatre, except that, having raised such an audience herself, she knew it would accompany her in each step she took from stage to stage, sculpture to poem, music to cinema.

Her great-aunt Sky was still descending from the carriage upon each stick of the rain that had rolled itself into a single root or support of sun. Francis assisted her. Great-aunt liked Francis Julia felt. And as he held her arm her sacklike, yet stiff, ancient, puritan, body, that was suffering a sea-change across the generations seemed all at once, in Julia’s eyes, a safe paradox or depository of children lost and found, a rich part to play on the stage of the world.

“I shall live to a great age like you great-aunt,” said Julia impulsively. “Francis and I shall have a son and a daughter.”

Her great-aunt could not resist a smile as she leaned on Francis. Her sons and daughters were not of her flesh. Or perhaps they were, after all, in every crossing she had made of oceans, every absorption of unfathomable sorrows curiously rooted, she began to see, in deathless or unlived lives that accompany one back and forth as if to endorse the fascinations of their partial exile from the state of the womb, from the city of god.

She had never married nor borne children. Yet she was married, she did have territorial and oceanic children for whom she cared with the strictest diet of compassion.

Her children were creation’s deathless offspring, telephone voices sometimes in a strait jacket of despair, telephone annunciations at the other end of the rain on a misty afternoon, or telephone flesh-and-blood rags of ailing immortality when the postman rings the bell or taps on the door in Southampton Row.

“I shall be like you, great-aunt,” cried Julia. “I shall glue myself to the telephone. And when my children ring from a static sea or a static mountain I shall tell them to come home, I shall tell them that home is always another journey….”

The words had been written by her in one of her last letters to Francis. They were spoken now by the actress Eleanor (who had been schooled by Jen in one of da Silva’s canvases). The part of great-aunt was played by Rima, the part of Francis by da Silva. They stood in the West End on a stage called The Pleiades of The Tree of the Sun. The time of the performance was the first decade of the twenty-first century.

*

It was a newly-built theatre and the sound of the traffic had been stilled. A sea of faces pressed up from the stalls or pressed down from the balcony. Great-aunt was descending from the carriage on Francis’s arm. Time had itself stopped into an approximation to the genius of time within a minute’s breath that spanned years. There appeared, as if from the deck of an unseen ship, a doctor and a nurse who bent down to Julia where she lay on a bed that seemed part and parcel of the pier that jutted out from the land over the sea like the hand of a clock.

Julia was dying from cancer in a large room that was to become, years afterwards, an artist’s studio. She was forty years old.

Julia was leaving Zemi. She was nineteen years old.

Julia was the part Eleanor was playing in The Pleiades. “She would have been”—someone was saying—“I would hazard a guess, were she alive, eighty-four years old today, and there she is, in Eleanor’s shoes, young as a rose.”

“Mr Cortez,” said the nurse to Francis, “your wife is delirious. She believes she’s back in that afternoon in the harbour of Zemi when you left. She believes the telephone is ringing and you’re on the other end of the line. She believes her great-aunt is young as a rose.”

“Rigby,” said Francis. “Not Rose. Rigby. My name’s actually Rigby.”

“What did you say Mr Cortez? You are exhausted yourself, poor man, you’ve been up for ages without sleep. A century’s rolled past. Please do sleep, I shall be here to wake you if I must.”

“Sleep,” Francis thought. “What a miracle of grace is sleep. I write best after a long sleep.” The doctor and the nurse from the ship were bending over Julia. “My name’s Harlequin,” the doctor said. “Your name’s Leonard Harlequin,” Julia said to the captain of the ship. “A young captain. One day I shall have a son like you, a captain or doctor of ships. His father will be proud of him. Are you there Francis? Did you hear that? Are you still on the line?”

She continued—“A ship, a hospital, a pier, a studio, a market, a garden, a house, a factory, are stages-within-stages in which one stands at the gate, at the letter-box, and waits for a communication that’s subtle as truth.”

“What is she saying doctor?” asked the nurse.

“She’s telling us of the evolution of serenity….”

“Is that all? What’s serenity?” cried a voice from the audience.

“Creation’s news,” Julia said. “The sea, the land.”

Great-aunt stood by the carriage. In the corner of her eye she could see, through the open door, the tip of an envelope, in a pocket of the interior, in which Julia had deposited her first letter to Francis.

It was addressed to Francis.

It was written to a variety of spectral audiences whose questions sprang from her own needs.

It reposed, in that pocket of the interior, like a part of herself which travelled towards another turbulence of selves until each page or line began to dance before her eyes.

“What fun,” she thought. “What fun, Francis. We shall enjoy ourselves on our trip.”

She closed her eyes.

“You must rest Mr Cortez,” said the nurse again. “Sleep.”

Francis strained his eyes into the misty harbour to catch a glimpse of the ship. An icy grief blinded his sight. Julia reached up and touched his face as if it were her father’s eyes in the old clown of a coffin in Zemi.

“You once told me”, she said, “that you were descended from the stars.” He could see she was amused.

Touched his eyes again with the gift of laughter until there broke from him a murmur that swelled across the stage, the murmur of waves. And for the first time he saw the sea as he had never seen it before laughing with him, through him, through its wrinkled orchestra of a mask in which he put his foot like a curious crab with an evolved baton, half-shuddering, half-awed, sea music, knee-deep in the mystery of a clown’s tears, father time’s tears.

The captain and the nurse had returned.

“Time to go,” said Julia, as if she were ready to release the hand of the clock built into the pier. “Do you hear it tapping on the drum of earth, wood, stone, shell, metal, silver, gold? It’s music. It’s incredible music.”

Francis found himself unable to move. His half-human, half-crab, body had retreated up the beach. He was transported, astonished, drawn upon a horizon that witnessed for the greatest success as the evolution of music began to pour along the stage. And then in the midst of his delight and torment, as he stood there broken into two, half of him hanging back, half of him intent on going forward with her, her living questions swarmed into the faces of the audience that pressed upon him from every angle of the globe. And that was his first cue to break his shell and to fly or press towards her as she moved on to the ship; the applause mounted to a crescendo as though to magnify a chorus of advances and retreats, advancing, retreating, heart and sight, free and unfree body and mind, free and unfree spirit and shell. And even as they set foot or wing on the deck a distance remained within that sea of eyes and faces, that sought to follow them, as if the sculpture of the ship he had failed to see before, as he strained his eyes into the misty harbour, had been caught in the wake of itself, in a ground of applause.

Some strange tracery or pattern resided there beside the pier, on the beach of the theatre, under his very eyes, under his nose. Lines of reality. Were they speaking bow and stern, voices of wheel and paddle and tiller, sun tree? Hand of the clock that eased itself into a command of the elements as if to outline responsive anatomy and feet that danced on water.

The fascination was so compelling that before they knew it they too had been caught afresh in the backward sweep of that human sea with its outlines of theatres, plays, orchestras, like beacons of yesterday’s and tomorrow’s passions.

Francis lay in Julia’s arms which were outstretched from the strangest living nothingness into the strangest living otherness.

And then the prow of the great ship began to move forward, the water surged and swelled and a chorus of voices, the chorus of incarnation or human orchestra, filled the air with presences.

“Away,” cried the voices, “away, away, away.” The ship moved on and outward into the sun.

Content

Wilson Harris
The Tree of the Sun

1

2

3. Wedding Day/Resurrection Day

4

5. Resurrection Day/Limbo

6

7

8. Embarkation/Wedding Day