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Authors: Wilson Harris
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the kiln and da Silva drew Francis up from their bench in the park which had seemed, in the subtle shock of translated elements, a dimension of native as well as half-forgotten immigrant body.
Leonard was a tall black Englishman and da Silva and Francis trod on his heels (in his heels) as he made his way from the kiln along the grey-black carpeted road. He was dressed in a loud check coat to echo subconsciously perhaps a ribald, yet religious, commentary on Harlequin antagonisms unveiled in Francis, painted in da Silva. Recreation of the trade winds of psyche blown into common-or-garden squares or fabrics or colours. Twentieth-century comedy of divinity.
They passed a priest cycling to work and were approaching a doctor’s surgery, at the corner, flanked by an old fragmented wall in this curiously historic neighbourhood. Then, on their left, came an open area with a low building which housed a new swimming pool.
Leonard stopped for a moment on an open concrete pitch that bordered the pool to shout a word of encouragement to a limbo dancer from the West Indies who swept under a pole held horizontally by two white youths.
First the dancer merely lowered his head and shouldersas he passed under the bar but gradually as the pole was taken inch by inch, foot by foot, closer to the ground, he began to bend his trunk and limbs backwards; his legs and feet acquired astonishing agility and protean spirit.
In the background, perhaps a mile away, above pool and pitch, four or five high-rise buildings ascended into the sky like elongated dancers themselves in tune with a bottle-necked kiln of populations. The limbo dancer beside the pool re-fashioned himself into a series of distortions as he kissed the deck of symbolic slave ship, symbolic free ship, with the back of his head between pole and ground.
“Middle passage ritual,” said da Silva to Francis as he made a series of rapid sketches, a series of dancing shapes in pursuit of a universal architectonic or self.
Francis was astonished—“Middle passage …?” he asked. And then he remembered his book. His eyes were opening in his skull. “On every urban ship the gods are there in each new building programme like implicit dancers, horizons as well, under which history moves by global degrees. Cramped economic degrees, dwarfed economic degrees, embedded nevertheless in the womb of space as in a canvas of deeds that lag behind a universal conception of the body of truth. In a limbo dancer or building or monument one glimpses chains and broken chains, divided spaces, wounded angles in resurrections, movement and distortion towards the inimitable (never-to-be-wholly-achieved) re-assembly of limbs into high rise Osiris, god-beetle, anancy spider, mast of new Christian ship, unfinished land, unfinished pier in the sea and the sky on the precipitate ladder of fate.”
Leonard picked up his heels in Francis’s book; they moved on, turned a corner into an unfinished housing estate, and made their way through it towards Clarendon Road, Lansdowne Road and St John’s Gardens.
The atmosphere began to change abruptly into a tide or bar of spacious houses possessed of an air of leisure and well-being.
They ascended St John’s Gardens and came upon StJohn’s Church on the summit of the hill from which spectators , in the middle of the nineteenth century, had had a grandstand view of the Hippodrome racecourse.
The choir was practising inside and the sound of blurred organ and voices came like orchestrated applause from a past day. Limbo horses swung to that spectral applause through Clarendon Road, across Ladbroke Grove and into Portobello Road’s sea of a market that dipped into all periods and accents, book bargains, antique voices, trade voices and rough cheer.
Each hoof deposited its climax of curious, half-glittering cargo or prizes. A cloud-horse drifted back towards Ladbroke Grove, stood over St John’s steeple and stepped into Eleanor’s bedroom and mirror….
The door
Leonard was a tall black Englishman and da Silva and Francis trod on his heels (in his heels) as he made his way from the kiln along the grey-black carpeted road. He was dressed in a loud check coat to echo subconsciously perhaps a ribald, yet religious, commentary on Harlequin antagonisms unveiled in Francis, painted in da Silva. Recreation of the trade winds of psyche blown into common-or-garden squares or fabrics or colours. Twentieth-century comedy of divinity.
They passed a priest cycling to work and were approaching a doctor’s surgery, at the corner, flanked by an old fragmented wall in this curiously historic neighbourhood. Then, on their left, came an open area with a low building which housed a new swimming pool.
Leonard stopped for a moment on an open concrete pitch that bordered the pool to shout a word of encouragement to a limbo dancer from the West Indies who swept under a pole held horizontally by two white youths.
First the dancer merely lowered his head and shouldersas he passed under the bar but gradually as the pole was taken inch by inch, foot by foot, closer to the ground, he began to bend his trunk and limbs backwards; his legs and feet acquired astonishing agility and protean spirit.
In the background, perhaps a mile away, above pool and pitch, four or five high-rise buildings ascended into the sky like elongated dancers themselves in tune with a bottle-necked kiln of populations. The limbo dancer beside the pool re-fashioned himself into a series of distortions as he kissed the deck of symbolic slave ship, symbolic free ship, with the back of his head between pole and ground.
“Middle passage ritual,” said da Silva to Francis as he made a series of rapid sketches, a series of dancing shapes in pursuit of a universal architectonic or self.
Francis was astonished—“Middle passage …?” he asked. And then he remembered his book. His eyes were opening in his skull. “On every urban ship the gods are there in each new building programme like implicit dancers, horizons as well, under which history moves by global degrees. Cramped economic degrees, dwarfed economic degrees, embedded nevertheless in the womb of space as in a canvas of deeds that lag behind a universal conception of the body of truth. In a limbo dancer or building or monument one glimpses chains and broken chains, divided spaces, wounded angles in resurrections, movement and distortion towards the inimitable (never-to-be-wholly-achieved) re-assembly of limbs into high rise Osiris, god-beetle, anancy spider, mast of new Christian ship, unfinished land, unfinished pier in the sea and the sky on the precipitate ladder of fate.”
Leonard picked up his heels in Francis’s book; they moved on, turned a corner into an unfinished housing estate, and made their way through it towards Clarendon Road, Lansdowne Road and St John’s Gardens.
The atmosphere began to change abruptly into a tide or bar of spacious houses possessed of an air of leisure and well-being.
They ascended St John’s Gardens and came upon StJohn’s Church on the summit of the hill from which spectators , in the middle of the nineteenth century, had had a grandstand view of the Hippodrome racecourse.
The choir was practising inside and the sound of blurred organ and voices came like orchestrated applause from a past day. Limbo horses swung to that spectral applause through Clarendon Road, across Ladbroke Grove and into Portobello Road’s sea of a market that dipped into all periods and accents, book bargains, antique voices, trade voices and rough cheer.
Each hoof deposited its climax of curious, half-glittering cargo or prizes. A cloud-horse drifted back towards Ladbroke Grove, stood over St John’s steeple and stepped into Eleanor’s bedroom and mirror….
The door
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