Art & Lies (16 page)

‘Do I know you?’ Sir Jack’s interrogative.

‘I came to see your daughter.’

‘She’s gone.’

That was the following day, as early as I decently could, not early enough to catch her. There was a clue and I followed it. Followed it to the station and to the morning train. Followed the trail of colour that made a purple ribbon out of the snow. She was unravelling herself. She was loosening all the grey years into one bright line.

Piece by piece the fragments are returned; the body, the work, the love, the life. What can be known about me? What I say? What I do? What I have written? And which is true? That is, which is truer? Memory. My licensed inventions. Not all of the fragments return.

I’m no Freudian. What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pherein = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won’t let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

    The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that rises above itself. The word that is itself and more. The associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore or cenobite. The word unlied.

Shall I use my alphabet to disentangle the days? Not to label them A, B, C, nor to make my letters a more arcane deceit. Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of political life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

And now? Yes, and now, still challenging the fragments that I am.

Look up. A hundred billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Unconcerned with me, that confidence of stars, light offerings, two thousand years old. If they are anything to me they are jewels for my shroud. I cannot know them. I cannot even know myself. Pascal’s terror is mine: ‘Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.’ What can balance the inequity of that huge space, which never ends, and my bounded life? Perhaps this: The beatland of my body is not my kingdom’s scope, I have within, spaces as vast, if I could claim them. Proof? What proof have I of this – Not God, who, if true, is a priori and cannot be a proof, but art, that never concerns itself with the actualities of life, neither depicts it as we think it is, nor expresses it as we hope it is, and yet becomes it. Not representations, but inventions that bear in themselves the central forces of the world, and not only the world. Art ranches the stars.

How can I come close to the meaning of my days? I will lasso them to me with the whirling word. The word carried quietly at my side, the word spun out, vigorous, precise, the word that traps time before time traps me.

Ride beside me, so much that time allows, so much of beauty and of love. The desert that we cross flourishes. Time to take in the view. Am I a viewfinder merely? Eyes that smile and pass on. What to make of what I find? What’s in it for me? The splendour and the brevity, the effort to touch and see, the effort to understand.

Salvation, if it comes at all, will be conscious. Ignorance is not the road to wisdom. Sincerity of emotion will not be enough. The word will find me out; I speak therefore I am. To match the silent eloquence of the created world I have had to learn to speak. Language, that describes it, becomes me. Careful then, what I become, by my words you will know me. The word passed down through time time returned through the word.

It isn’t natural, language, nothing of nature in it, why pretend it so? No such thing as natural light. The light I read by is artificial. The page illuminates itself.

My lumber room is piled with books, not unread, unwritten. Experience untranslated into meaning. Days that have decayed untransformed. What shall I write? Not my memoirs. Bring out the dead, Bring out the dead. What light I had gutters and goes out. It is not simply that I shall lie, but that I shall not be able to tell the truth. I shall not manage to remember, objects before me, I shall have to invent a dim history for every one. What could be more pernicious than an honest lie?

I know that the straightest way to come at my emotions is by the unlikeliest route. Not sincerity of emotion but sincerity of form will take me there. You see, I have to beware of shallowness, a cliché of response, not mine but everyone else’s, is this how I really feel? How shall I know that these lines are my own, and not a borrowed text? How shall I know? By giving them a structure which formalises them, takes them out of the bath of self-regard. Of me but not me, my own made distant, separated out from me by patterns and shapes, forced to a distance by the language that will return it. Once I have found the right words I will never lose the emotion again.

It will not be enough to say I love you. I know you have heard it before.

I love you. Those words were not worn out two thousand six hundred years ago. Are they worn out now? Perhaps, but not by repetition, but by strain. There are other ways of saying what I mean … Other words fit for the weight. Other words that pin me to an honesty I might not like. So much can be hidden in ‘I love you’. I can hide in that sentimental cloud.

I will not hide. Here …

Her face is thoughtful, set in the shadow of her hair, set back, the hair before it, a veil. There is something voluptuous in the eyelids and the lips. The skin is cast of pearl. She is a matter of the sea. The sea deep about her, not only in her eyes that are green, but in the moving contours of her face.

Her head is strong but not coarse. Fine filaments of bone, white-set, have built the clean cage of her skull. Trace the line. The line that belies its firmness with the delicacy of a shell sea-washed. She is smooth. The heavy head is smooth.

Turn up her face to the light. What can I read in the clairvoyance of her mouth? The parted space where her spirit breathes. It is my future that she carries on her lips. Tell it to me … Her mouth on mine.

Her cheekbones are high. Twin towers of unrest. Restless when she smiles, armed when she does not. In her face the motion of her days.

Her throat cuts me.

Curiosity and desire of beauty in equal measure. These are the flares that light her face. She is a light to see by, though not of trees and wood, wood with a gift for burning, the light that consumes her is her own.

On her face, the play of light is theatrical. Rapt effect, concentration, the arch of her eyebrows, the pageant of her hair. Here in subtle staging are the nuances of nature and the refinements of art. What a piece of work she is, at once original and well known. Applaud her? I will, and something more, offer her a beauty fit for her own. A gift of burning: The word.

Which comes first? The muser or the Muse?

For Sappho (Lesbian
c.
600
BC
Occupation: Poet), herself, always, muser and muse. The writer and the word. Strange then, that what is left of her beauty should be interred under the commonplace of facts. And not facts. The search for truth is tainted with willing falsehoods. The biographer, hand on heart, violates the past. The biographer, grave robber and body snatcher, trading in sensational dust, while the living spirit slips away. The biographer, inventory of pots and pans, dates and places, auction house and charnel house in one room.

So little of her remains. Her remains are scandalous. The teasing bones that shock and delight. Yet, it is certain, that were every line of hers still extant, biographers would not be concerned with her metre or her rhyme. There would be one burning question from out the burning book. Not Sophocles, but Savonarola, with his raging face …

What do Lesbians do in bed?

‘Tell them’ said Sophia, the Ninth Muse.

Tell them?

‘There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies.’

Roll up! Roll up! Art for all, tuppence a peep. No previous experience necessary. Every man his own connoisseur.

Popular culture, that’s art isn’t it? Subjective, romantic, democratic, approachable, good notices in the quality press. If they don’t like it there must be something wrong with it. Does it smell fishy? What’s it about anyway? Where shall I put it?

Fit it all in. Fit it all in, as they say in the back alleys for a Saturday night fiver. So little time. Fit it all in.

Clock culture. Stuff me until I burst and make an installation out of the purée. Art? Don’t be silly. The contemplative life? I have a lunch appointment. How long will it take?

Lunch? Forever. Be forever lunching. Chomping bovinely through the day, wondering why all flesh is grass.

Time that taunts you taunts me. Time, with his lop-sided grin, shaped to the sickle he carries. Time, that peeps through the window, and slips his blade under the door. Time, who is waiting when we arrive. Time, who has thoughtfully wound the clock.

The tall, hooded man who played the Jack with me, when I was a child. He who cut wild flowers with his sickle and made me a hedge chain I did not want to take off. I went with him, hand in hand, child-crowned with his curious flowers. It was easy to walk beside him while his steps were met to mine. I never saw his face, only his hands, and the long days juggled.

When was it that he became impatient? Insisted that we hurry, and hurry faster, though not through press of destination? I had nowhere to go. Why did the sun not lull him as it did once? The still days and the luminous water. The afternoons that lasted for years. Wasn’t that him, dark shadow on the bank, unroused and unrousable? He was deaf in those days and for every long and hated hour, produced another, a soft sewn ball thrown to me. Yet I was happy and forgot. When was it that he became impatient?

The little chain of wild flowers, sap stalks and sun heads, petrified. I was fast-bound to him. I am his bondsman. Yearly now, he claims his feudal tithe, and I wither visibly. Each year there is less, and less to claim, but he does claim it, no matter how thin the harvest.

I have seen his face close up, the strange lop-sided grin, that turns to me immobile, although every day we are moving faster. There are others, all of us, the chain gang on the charcoal hill, bound in the danse macabre.

Do I try to cheat him with wigs, dyes, concoctions, ghastly operations and lambskins for my mutton flesh? Here I am, prancing on my back legs in a borrowed skin. Must keep up with the times. Must keep up with Time. When was it he became impatient?

Too fast. Kick off my dancing shoes and crawl on all fours. Drag me, how he drags me, knows the creature that I am. Beg him? He is deaf still. In spite of that I cry out.

On we go, the blurring body and the cheated soul. Why did no-one tell me to provide for it? Everything I have has been the outward show. Everything I have belongs to Time. Art? Don’t be silly. The contemplative life? Where can I get one? What then for my soul as Time pulls me on. What then for my soul?

Whisper to my soul its separation. My soul in the stained-glass window that lays its red and greens on the stone floor. My soul, that would fly out from the high places, if I could climb it there. My soul, that watches in the night with me, when the chair I sit on is night, and the table I eat off is night, and the bed I sleep in is night after night. My soul, that raises a lantern to my face, when every other hope is gone.

I hope. And the hope that is in me is from the soul is for the soul. Not present, actual, superficial life, but the real solid world of images. I hope that the real solid world of images will prevail.

Whisper to my soul. It is so temporary, life, and the ideas that form it are spirit, not flesh, and the images that outlast it are spirit not flesh. The best of me is not my body. The best of me is not the frame of bones, skin decorated, that delights in the delicate landscape where the trees slant out of the hill. Olive trees, trunks rope twisted, thick cables of bark that feed the fragile leaves from the good earth. Olives, grapes, the land, the sun that parts the leaf canopy with fine needles of light. On my body the acupuncture of the sun …

It heals me, drives red floods of energy through the shut lock gates. The sun on my spine brings colours to my eyes, blue and blood vermilion. My ribs are the ribs of rock that underpin the caramel soil. All this I am but there is more. Why split the soul from the body and then the soul from itself?

Love me Sophia, this hand tracing of myself, an outline told in blood. Take my hand, what do you read there? The chronicle of a long life and all the forgotten loss. But what remains when the story has been told? What will bring you back to me when you know what happens next? Only the words, the curving beauty in flight, the lasso at once tough and airborne. The words for their own sake, revealing now, themselves. Words beyond information. Words done with plot. The illuminated manuscript that lights itself.

Read me. Read me now. Words in your mouth that will modify your gut. Words that will become you. Recite me until you know me off by heart. Lift up a flap of skin and the word sings. On the operating table the word sings. In the grave the words push up the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the living word.

Whisper to my soul. Do I have one? There is no other explanation for the yearning that I feel. To yearn: To feel longing for … to feel compassion for … also something of grief, something of loss locked in the changeful word.

What is that for which I yearn? What is it that I feel I have lost? Look up. Ten billion stars and this blue planet. Once the world was a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls and a material firmament. The stellatum, the roof of stars, shield of this small preeminent space. See it in the frescos of the Campo Santo at Pisa. The painted toy, held in the hands of the spirit, Logos, through whom God made all things and taught the void to speak.

I know that there are no such certainties for us who live in the darkness of innumerable suns. Look up. The black sky increases. What am I in this?