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Authors: Wilson Harris
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cubit to Francis’s hidden achievements. In Leonard he was suddenly impulsively aware of a dark kiln, a dark horse of a cradle (in which armies secreted themselves in the name of purgatory and creativity) or inner furious skeleton to flesh-and-blood woven from the Industrial Revolution .
That very moment—a mile or so away from where Eleanor sat—Leonard was boiling, in a sudden burst of sun around the dancing globe, to make his way to her from the bottle kiln facing Avondale Park.
“Come on, let’s go,” said da Silva. He had turned a page in Francis’s book and was beginning to unveil and construe some of its limbo elements. “There’s a sudden, perfectly normal, plunge—accentuated by shock—one takes from the ladder of fate into limbo. A state of abstraction, a state of immersion, in page or text, that takes one into another’s bones.
“Like the sudden, perfectly normal, plunge—coincidental to shock—one takes in absentmindedly turning a key in a door until one forgets one’s skeleton hand and finds one’s been locked into an antagonist’s flesh.
“A sudden, perfectly normal, sensation of sinking by degrees into a table or a wall as into the slow enveloping folds of a lake, the whiteness of the surface perhaps, the glint of rose colour from a shaded lamp or the smoothness of a wall, that blots out, for an instant, all other immediateanchorages—lowered threshold of awareness, extensive horizon —heightened threshold of awareness, intensive depths, unfathomable memories.”
They had arrived at the translated threshold or word of Leonard’s skeleton bottle kiln face to face with Avondale Park.
LEONARD’ S CRADLE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY IMMIGRANT ANTECEDENTS
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
THIS KILN
is a reminder of the nineteenth century when potteries and brickfields were established here amid some of the poorest housing conditions in London; it is one of the few examples of a bottle kiln left in London. The name of the mews behind is the only surviving evidence of the hippodrome race course which stretched around Notting Hill in the mid-nineteenth century.
“Ah yes,” said Francis as though his tongue were further loosened in his skull. “I remember this. I remember how I drew it into my book like an esoteric flower of economic horizons when Europe was expanding around the globe. I feel the constriction still of the rose of the sun in my head, the volcanic industries, the larger-than-life sensation.” He stopped. And da Silva drew him across the road into Avondale Park. They sat on a bench as within Leonard’s recalled ancestral immigrant body, immigrant room, in which the brickwork of the kiln (against which Leonard had deposited a twentieth-century milk bottle) loomed like a refined milestone or epitaph to an extinct volcano within the sky of time and place. The heat and burden of a past century had vanished and yet something pathetic, yet penetrative and illuminating, curiously naked and sad, seemed to relate the mystery of constellations to a re-dress of appearances in the comedy of the cosmos.
It was one’s perception of an economic scar that ran through new blocks and houses springing up on everyhand, through the stratifications of materials, the spare use of glass, the tight balconies on which a line of washing, here and there, hung like flags.
It was one’s perception of the apparent dissolution of economic miscarriage or scar on every bed of place and time in the filtered light of embracing seasons, a new pathos, a new detachment, a new hope, an old scepticism that conserved implicitly the humour and toughness of implacable generations….
The unveiled pages of Francis’s book in da Silva’s canvases of Avondale Park and its neighbourhood seemed to move from the oceanic light of mild half-winter, half-spring , descending from the sky, into half-boiling curtains of summer in a new body of building complexes….
Leonard had retrieved his milk bottle from under
That very moment—a mile or so away from where Eleanor sat—Leonard was boiling, in a sudden burst of sun around the dancing globe, to make his way to her from the bottle kiln facing Avondale Park.
“Come on, let’s go,” said da Silva. He had turned a page in Francis’s book and was beginning to unveil and construe some of its limbo elements. “There’s a sudden, perfectly normal, plunge—accentuated by shock—one takes from the ladder of fate into limbo. A state of abstraction, a state of immersion, in page or text, that takes one into another’s bones.
“Like the sudden, perfectly normal, plunge—coincidental to shock—one takes in absentmindedly turning a key in a door until one forgets one’s skeleton hand and finds one’s been locked into an antagonist’s flesh.
“A sudden, perfectly normal, sensation of sinking by degrees into a table or a wall as into the slow enveloping folds of a lake, the whiteness of the surface perhaps, the glint of rose colour from a shaded lamp or the smoothness of a wall, that blots out, for an instant, all other immediateanchorages—lowered threshold of awareness, extensive horizon —heightened threshold of awareness, intensive depths, unfathomable memories.”
They had arrived at the translated threshold or word of Leonard’s skeleton bottle kiln face to face with Avondale Park.
LEONARD’ S CRADLE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY IMMIGRANT ANTECEDENTS
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
THIS KILN
is a reminder of the nineteenth century when potteries and brickfields were established here amid some of the poorest housing conditions in London; it is one of the few examples of a bottle kiln left in London. The name of the mews behind is the only surviving evidence of the hippodrome race course which stretched around Notting Hill in the mid-nineteenth century.
“Ah yes,” said Francis as though his tongue were further loosened in his skull. “I remember this. I remember how I drew it into my book like an esoteric flower of economic horizons when Europe was expanding around the globe. I feel the constriction still of the rose of the sun in my head, the volcanic industries, the larger-than-life sensation.” He stopped. And da Silva drew him across the road into Avondale Park. They sat on a bench as within Leonard’s recalled ancestral immigrant body, immigrant room, in which the brickwork of the kiln (against which Leonard had deposited a twentieth-century milk bottle) loomed like a refined milestone or epitaph to an extinct volcano within the sky of time and place. The heat and burden of a past century had vanished and yet something pathetic, yet penetrative and illuminating, curiously naked and sad, seemed to relate the mystery of constellations to a re-dress of appearances in the comedy of the cosmos.
It was one’s perception of an economic scar that ran through new blocks and houses springing up on everyhand, through the stratifications of materials, the spare use of glass, the tight balconies on which a line of washing, here and there, hung like flags.
It was one’s perception of the apparent dissolution of economic miscarriage or scar on every bed of place and time in the filtered light of embracing seasons, a new pathos, a new detachment, a new hope, an old scepticism that conserved implicitly the humour and toughness of implacable generations….
The unveiled pages of Francis’s book in da Silva’s canvases of Avondale Park and its neighbourhood seemed to move from the oceanic light of mild half-winter, half-spring , descending from the sky, into half-boiling curtains of summer in a new body of building complexes….
Leonard had retrieved his milk bottle from under
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