The Tree of the Sun

by Wilson Harris

  *

  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 bl
iss, 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.