Harris The Tree of the Sun

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-29932-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

The Tree of the Sun, first published in 1978, begins where Wilson Harris's previous novel Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness ended, and thus forms a sequel. The London-dwelling Brazilian painter Da Silva is deeply moved by his wife's pregnancy after eight years of marriage. As he contemplates the child to be born he recalls a painting he began on the very morning he and his wife made love and conception occurred: a painting that contained a growing image. This becomes the evolving 'foetus' of imagination through which Da Silva begins to relate himself and his wife to the former (childless) tenants of their Kensington flat. 'I must admire the imagination and force of Wilson Harris' writing.' Kevin Cully, Tribune

Sir Wilson Harris was a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and lecturer. Born in 1921 in British Guiana, his father died when he was two and his stepfather disappeared into the rainforests in 1929. He began working as a government surveyor in 1942 and led expeditions into the Amazonian interior for almost 15 years. In 1959 he left for England to become a full-time writer. The following year, Faber published his debut novel, Palace of the Peacock, which became a landmark of Caribbean literature and the first of The Guyana Quartet. Over the course of his career, Faber published all 26 of Harris' novels, including The Carnival Trilogy, Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar, and The Ghost of Memory. Harris was awarded numerous academic fellowships and honorary doctorates as well as being a Guggenheim Fellow. He twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature as well as a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Harris was knighted in 2010, and died in 2018 at the age of 96.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Harris, Wilson

Leseproben

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...