In a long life I have read the books and been taught the deeds and studied the scholarship and seen the art of the famous in many great countries of the world. The work of some of our own in this small corner where I have lived and which is blessed and which I love is as exceedingly good as the best I have seen or known about anywhere. Such men are on a par with any. Here are two my life has been enriched to know.
• Denis Williams’s masterpiece was probably the work Prehistoric Guiana, published in 2003. In that magisterial book we have the work of Denis Williams, archaeologist and anthropologist of worldwide stature. But Denis, astonishingly, was much more than that. He was certainly one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met in my life. In my day to day experience, only Martin Carter matched him as a creative presence in the nation. When those two men died within a year of each other in 1997/98 you could almost feel the world of art and sensibility in Guyana grow narrower in imagination, meaner in spirit, shallower in intellect, smaller in stature, weaker in all that inspires humanity to do its best.
When Denis returned to Guyana from Africa in 1968, I met and got to know him. He went into the interior to farm and write and paint. I used to send books and magazines to him in his forest domain and he never failed to thank me in letters which I treasured for their wonderful range of interest, depth of reflection and lucid literary expression. From that time when I first got to know him well he seemed to me, in the variety of his passions and enthusiasms, a sort of West Indian Leonardo Da Vinci. He seemed filled with that fervent eagerness to understand all the world’s mysteries which the scientist Louis Pasteur called “the inner god, which leads to everything.” There is a passage about Da Vinci, that greatest of all Renaissance men, which could have described Denis as I remember in him the tumult of his enthusiasms:
“It seemed that nothing was impossible for him, that he could attempt anything – and understand anything. He composed treatise after treatise; with supreme self-confidence he sought to penetrate the secrets of art, water, air, mankind, the world. He was interested in geology, in fossils, in ancient architectures and in the formation of mountains. He investigated the origins of milk, colic, tears, drunkenness, madness and dreams. He talked of writing what the soul is. He dreamed of flying like an eagle or a kite and began to draw plans of flying machines. Alongside a drawing of a bird in a cage he wrote: “my thoughts turn to hope.””
Denis was continuously bursting with creative energy. In an article by Malcolm Gladwell, I have read that creative fecundity of this kind is what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Johann Sebastian Bach, for instance, and his long-forgotten musical peers is that they had a handful of ideas to their names whereas Bach in his lifetime created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones band tells how they had to discard hundreds and hundreds of ideas and lyrics before they were left with the classic album Exile on Main Street. Partly, at least, a genius is a genius because he comes out with a staggering number of insights, theories, random interesting perceptions, unexpected connections between different points of view, all pouring out in a stream very likely to yield a final array of original concepts and finished creations.
Denis’s creativity was expressed in an extraordinary variety of ways. Some men write novels, some are celebrated painters, some compile works of deep scholarship, some edit important magazines, some make brilliant careers of lecturing and teaching, some are devoted keepers of a nation’s heritage. And in each case what these men do so well is enough to make them famous and fill their lives with value. But Denis Williams did all these things with passion and intelligence mixed to a high pitch of achievement. And, beyond the myriad public achievements, it is well known – and I can certify – that his private conversation was a full and stimulating education all by itself. There is an African saying that when an old man full of wisdom dies a whole library is burned down. When Denis died not only a library burned but whole galleries of art and the imagination went up in flames.
• Then there is the master spirit who lived in our midst. Philip Moore was a patriarchal 90. His life-work is a glory of his land. I believe he was one of the world’s great artists. His paintings and sculptures should grace famous galleries and perhaps one day they will. For the time being let us feel fortunate that his mysterious, darkly shimmering, meticulously crafted, Afric-centred, shaman-inspired masterworks are available for viewing in Guyana. A day will come when they will be universally revered.
Once I visited Philip where he lived when he was in Georgetown. The place was filled with his work hung and propped on walls and occupying tables and chairs. He showed me around. I was in a daze. There were many wondrous works in progress. Then in his small bedroom he showed me an extraordinary thing. It was a coverlet of some sort, the material perhaps oil-skin or the stretched and stitched hides of animals. Philip had painted over every inch of both its surfaces in the most brilliant colours in interlocking patterns of suns and moons and stars and crosses and crescents and hearts and priests or prophets in white robes. In the dark it dazzled me. A universcape, he called it.
Philip said when he felt a weakness in himself, when he felt exhausted by the world, he would lie down and wrap this coverlet around him and rest alone and gradually he would revive, slowly his soul would clear, slowly his vision would come back to him, his dream-clothed spirit would strengthen and at last he would be ready to do his work again.
“Wrapped in my cloak of dreams”. Naturally I have remembered such a beautiful and wondrous thing ever since. And it has seemed to me that all these exceptional human beings whom we call geniuses, and one of which Philip Moore most certainly is, one way or another, actually or figuratively, clothe themselves with dreams when it is needed to bring forth their miracles of achievement.
Columnist’s note
In my column of February 7th on encounters with extraordinary people, my fleeting reminiscences of Nobel Prize winning geneticist James Watson omitted to mention that later in life he had become an international pariah for unscientific and racist views on genes and race.
I should have checked before recording my early memory of meeting Watson at Cambridge and would then have been able to give a truer picture. The awful nonsense which Watson has expressed on race should of course be dismissed.
As Dr Francis Collins, celebrated geneticist and Director of the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, has said in rejecting Watson’s scientifically untrue and “profoundly unfortunate” statements, “It is disappointing that someone who made such groundbreaking contributions perpetuates such unsupported and hurtful beliefs.”
