He moved on again with the inner sense of that shaft or song until he came to the junction of Holland Park Avenue and Holland Road. The sky pressed down upon a recently constructed roundabout that swept into a new highway towards Marylebone.
The atmosphere was inclined to thicken but intimate traceries of light ran nevertheless through the clouds like curtained branches upon curtained branches of space reflected in the Thames, beneath a Chelsea horizon, in which the faces of the three passersby, to whom he had read his book, seemed all at once quite vividly there within him, within a suspension of incredulity, courtesy, abuse, laughter.
A fruit shop and a bank he recalled in his previous lifetime, over twenty-five years ago, on this side of Holland Road, had sailed away or vanished.
So had the pub, the barbershop and the ironmonger’s on the other side.
And yet he could see them as if they were there forever pooled in his own consciousness.
Francis dodged between a line of cars as he crossed Holland Road towards the place on which the ironmonger’s store had stood.
The area of thick buildings he used to know there had vanished and the land ran clear to an old railway line at the back. And yet he could see….
The ironmonger used to stand in the door of his shop quite close to where Francis’s foot now stood. On a hot summer day he was often coatless and the buckles on his braces shone. He would stand there with his eyes fixed on the stream of people making their way to the pub or to the barbershop or coming from Kensington or going to Kensington. There was an embarrassing fixity in his gaze as if he were bored with the business of the day or as if he needed to test a theory of his own about the tree of existence.
Francis recalled seeing him dressed one memorable and sad day (the day that Julia died twenty-five years ago) in a very black hat above the trunk of his limbs with the air upon him of a solemn wedding and a honeymoon. He seemed as formidable as a human safe in which to lodge the wild oats of god, the wild griefs of god.
He thought of the bowler-hatted young man (who looked in his early or mid-twenties) to whom he had read a page of his book less than twenty-five minutes ago, a page he had concealed in the ironmonger’s body twenty-five years today — or was it twenty-five years tomorrow — griefs and joys are timeless — as it registered upon him (within or across a divide of time built into a flash of sorrow); he was caught then as now upon a projected page, resurrected in da Silva’s canvases, like a stranger father of self-made sons, never-to-be-made sons, suspended in himself.
“Can god father himself”, Francis wrote, “in iron masques of tradition, constellated milk bottles, nondescript bowler hats, furred mistresses, unseen populations, unborn heirs?”
There was an odd, a disconcerting seed of resemblance between father time and self-made son, between incredulity of branch in the young man and fixity of gaze in the older, though in point of fact the bowler-hatted youth was thin and tall, the ironmonger’s eyes bulky and large.
There was an odd, a disconcerting seed of rebellious upward movement, in Francis, towards the ironmonger’s foot in a wedding whereas he (Francis) stood in a grave. And, as a consequence, he was drawn to conceal a page of consciousness there, to invest in ironmonger sculpture as a backward resurrection of father time. As though the past is itself the resurrection of feuds of consciousness in the present and the future, in the stress of immediate circumstance, since the present and the future inevitably begin to conceive and to die….
“Am I my own father?” said Francis. “That’s nonsense.”
“Is it nonsense? Is it?” said the ironmonger. “There’s a central, apparently invincible, nothingness to all material existence out of which time runs backwards and forwards….” He paused and continued—“And it is this that imbues us with a capacity to cast off a conviction that imprisons us or to acquire a conviction that determines us.”
“I have come through nothingness,” Francis thought, wishing to assert his own naked manuscript, from which da Silva painted, even as it flashed on him that the bowler-hatted youth was father time’s self-made son conceived twenty-five years ago on that bitter honeymoon day when he (Francis) had seen him (the ironmonger) dressed to death in his shop.
The ironmonger began to air his views across the years. The centrality of nothingness lay in the shadow of the womb. The strength of nothingness lay in the shadow of the grave from which one steps back with a sense of having gone forward to an unborn yet old-born existence clad in all durable ages and rags.
“And therefore,” said the ironmonger, “we return to life out of invincible nothingness possessed of a model of strength.” His eyes were fixed on Francis with a profound and tormenting question.
Model of strength, Francis thought, and scepticism clouded his mind now about his own striking resurrection body. To go through extinction, as if it were a growing seed, towards a solid truth should signify, he suddenly saw, a capacity to cast off an obsession with models of strength (or weakness for that matter).
“And therefore”, said the ironmonger, “to return to life with such obsessions, however admirable in some respects, born of immersion in invincible nothingness, is to return to the labyrinth of history from a death we dream we have had but not yet completely known in its ultimate passage to truth. A something rubs off on us, chains us, obsesses us still, and brings us back to life a step closer to truth perhaps but far from it nevertheless. And that is all you can claim….” His eyes were fixed on Francis, in da Silva’s painting, as though they stared through a new-found mask or vizor in the great conquistadorial ball Francis and Julia had attended and which he recalled so vividly now, in the presence of the ironmonger, on a day of a wedding and a funeral twenty-five years ago.
“But I tell you”, said Francis, “that what I sought to do in my book was to relate myself through you — through others who may come to read it — to the prick of a pin upon which populations move against the inscrutable canvas of the stars. Perhaps a minute, in this context, bridges centuries, on either side of which we stand, as an index of how buried we are in time.”
The ironmonger was still. He was drawn by the humour and the pathos of the cosmos, tall or thin bowler-hatted son, black milk bottle son, larger-than-life fixity of father time’s body in a suit of armour. It half-opened, it half-closed upon him into a measure of escape or freedom from grotesque attachment, a measure of the transparent, therefore half-bearable, domination of the past in the present and future, a measure of groping conception and truth, as native to oneself and foreign to oneself, with which one returns to the body of this life.
3. Wedding Day/Resurrection Day
Julia had arisen from bed, bathed and dressed. She wore a long skirt that swept around her ankles. Da Silva tried to fathom her appearances through the tree of the sun but they eluded him again as if her mask in the partial lives and deaths of history remained as elusive and perfect as ever. A curious combination perhaps of extinction and vacancy and the refinements of aroused presence. He continued to paint her like a figure in a wall, a fire that was other than fire with whom father time, sun-king, snow-king, ironmonger-king, communes in his search for a resurrected self in the womb of the elements.
There is a fire to spring, a fire to winter, a fire to autumn, a fire to summer, as though the sun’s pregnant shapes, reflected in windows and skies, relate to various illuminated banks of the image-less (yet image-haunted) pool of the cosmos upon which we seek ourselves in every renascence of the arts.