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….”
7
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.