Sparks from the central fire – I was lucky to be near enough to feel the blaze these men ignited in the world.
Wilson Harris
Soon after I arrived in British Guiana in 1955 I met Wilson Harris. Arthur Seymour had introduced me to his writing by giving me a copy of Wilson’s strange and powerful poem “Eternity to Season.” Wilson was a professional surveyor and spent much of his time in the forest and savannahs whose great spirits invaded his imagination forever. When he was in town I used to meet him at Martin Carter’s home. Wilson had a smile which crinkled his face until his eyes nearly closed and a very distinctive, slow, quiet tone of voice. But when he was inspired by the ideas teeming in his mind his low voice would rise and rise as he read out loud passages he had written to express his thoughts and his speaking of the words would become a sort of chant and soon he would be raising his hand to strike Martin or me on the arm or knee as we sat near him quite hard and harder to punctuate and emphasise what was tumbling out of his mind. “You see!” he would say. “You see! You see!” I might not always see. But I felt. Some passages he read were incomprehensible to me. Some I remember being as beautiful and clear yet shadowy as forest rivers. At the time he may have been composing that extraordinary, visionary, wholly original work later published in England as Palace of the Peacock – so I like to think those passages he beat upon my knee may have been the first announcements of his genius!
After Wilson went to London I did not see much of him. But I sent him copies of my own books of poetry written over the years and he always replied with a kind and thoughtful handwritten note. And whenever I visited him in his London home he and his beloved wife Margaret were the very soul of courtesy and kindness. He would explain to me the latest of the strange paths his thinking had taken towards truth and eternity. I could seldom follow him very far down those mystic paths. (In one meeting he said that the findings of the quantum physicists were beginning to enter into his thinking). But I was always left at the end of our times together with the sense that my own imagination was being stressed and stretched to the very edge of joining him beyond the ordinary world we live in to find the age-old spirit and greater power that guides our immortal selves and shapes our universal destiny.
Aubrey Williams
I once went fishing in the Lama Conservancy with Aubrey Williams. I caught nothing but Aubrey caught a couple of good-sized lukanani. Their colours shone as they lay dying in the bottom of the boat but by the time we got back to the Lama guesthouse the beautiful life-colours of the lukanani had faded in death. Aubrey made me a comparison. The paintings he composed in his imagination gleamed with the colours of heaven but by the time he got them on to the canvas they had grown dull and he was woebegone. He tried mightily to preserve the originals that hid in his imagination but mostly he failed. Composition was a sort of death. This seemed astonishing to me. To me and others his great series of paintings blaze with the undying fire of genius.
I found Aubrey the most overwhelming physical presence I ever encountered. Aubrey’s joy and laughter and praise of all the earth was an elemental force which lifted everyone around him. He told me when he went into the deep forest he and the friends with him would seek out a forest giant and embrace it with their joined arms until they sensed its spirit enter them like light or a thunder in the heart. This was not a game. This was how he worshipped and prepared his mind for work. He summoned Gods to preside. Whenever I met Aubrey and talked with him and when he gave me his huge hug before leaving my home I felt afterwards that it was not good enough to live an ordinary life.
