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.