The Tree of the Sun (7 page)

“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?”

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
….”