The Tree of the Sun (8 page)

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.