The Tree of the Sun Read online

  The Tree of the Sun

  WILSON HARRIS

  For Margaret,

  Joyce Adler and W. J. Howard

  The Tree of the Sun

  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

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  1

  2

  3: Wedding Day/Resurrection Day

  4

  5: Resurrection Day/Limbo

  6

  7

  8: Embarkation/Wedding Day

  Copyright

  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 c
ame 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….