The Tree of the Sun

by Wilson Harris

  “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.
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br />   “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?”