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?”
6
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.