Art & Lies (17 page)

I do not ask for comforts. I do not pretend. I do not ask for comforts but do not tell me lies. Why should I live with the new brutalism of the universe if it is not true? Why should I accept that there is either what is material or nothing? If it were true, I would be satisfied with gathering within my bounds as animals are. Animals have no conception of anything outside of their own worlds. They do not dream of strangeness. Give an animal enough to eat and his right habitat and he leads his life contentedly, long or short. He has no sense of death. He does not look up at the stars.

Once I showed my cat the moon. My cat the moon in a pool of barely moving water. My cat put its paw in at the ripple, and finding nothing, walked away. Later he caught a mouse and brought it to me as I continued in thought by the pool. The mouse and the moon. No question for the cat which is greater. For himself the cat is right. But for me?

I cannot accept that the yearning I feel is for goods and money. I may desire those things but I do not yearn for them. Get them, and they do not satisfy the open space unfilled. Is it a space I want to fill? It is not so much something missing as something not found. Perhaps something not remembered. Plato understood it as the longing for the time, before birth, when the soul was freed from vulgar needs and bodily restraints. For Plato, the duty of the human being was the duty to remember. To remember all that we are in the face of the little that we seem to be. Development of the soul for the soul.

It isn’t easy, since there are so many false gods, each saying, ‘Look at Me.’ Gods of money, gods of fame, gods of envy, gods of despair. All the brazen gods of the material world that wrap themselves in orphrey and claim to shine like gold. It would be logical to assume that if this world is all in all, then to possess it, all in all, will be enough. The wealthiest man will be the most contented man. True? The most famous woman will be the happiest woman. True? The more I have the better I will be. True?

Console me like a Medici Pope with every material devising. Let me gorge off gold plate. Load my body with sweat-mined jewels. Let me live in palaces of such splendour that Heaven blushes. If the material life is all then let it be all. Miss nothing out. Bring me everything there is to stuff the void. I will be Midas set in a palillogy of gold. Progress. Progress … might the past have known better? Cupidious monks, rat-fed nuns, the awful power of the Church in a stench of incense that never quite disguised the smell. The leper-clappers and the disfigurations of the human form unfed. All this and yet the spirit. The wild excesses of the spirit that taunted the body’s restraint. No doubt of the difference between actual life and the real solid world of images.

And now? No gold. No spirit either. A modern wretchedness new to history. Better to be a beggar on the Ganges than broken on the gilded wheel of the West.

Whisper to my soul. We have come a long way. So we have. Is distance travelled more important than the state, on arrival, of the travellers? I have come so far so fast that I haven’t had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be. And I am not going to be given the choice. As soon as I learn enough to ask questions, all aboard, off we go again. Society on its World Cruise. And isn’t it astonishing how everywhere we go is beginning to look like everywhere we have been? The shock of the new? Forget it.

Forget it. This is the time to remember. Time can travel backwards. Time can stand still. No need to be pushed down the road to progress. For progress read ‘technology’. The same old material world, this time in a space suit made of DNA. How To Fight Time The Techno Way. Heart transplant. New mistress. New car. Bigger Better Bomb. Tag and kill the ageing gene. Face lift for now. Nintendo for the kids. Virtual Reality for the grown-ups. Eat more irradiated food. Feeling ill? Radiotherapy, chemotherapy, bowel out, breasts off, we have a robot to take care of you. Losing your hair? Life-like wig followed by a day out at our follicle farm. Fear of death? Get in the freezer. We’ll thaw you out when we can. Fear of death? New! Computer controlled coffin. Self-cleaning.

The kingdom of heaven is within you.

It was a long time ago. The fish blue and green in the mauve sea. The sea in clean colours on the hull. The dark ships that split the colourful sea. The dark sea, impassive, over a sinking sail.

The early morning is cool. The sun, still yellow out of colour, not orange in heat. The ball of the sun is pigmented gold; yellow orange and red through the deepening day. Buy from me gold refined by fire and garments washed in sand. She was white with the sun at her head. Her footprints left no trace.

On this island where the visions are, the mind scoured clean by the epurate sun, she gathers roses and throws them at the moon. White to white, colour shed, blanched petals from the aurum day. The day is fading and she too. What is left? Not time in grains under her feet. The world rolls up like a scroll. In the beginning was the Word. And at the end.

Read me. Read me now. Follow the lines that thread you through the cave. Backwards, forwards, the meaningless of time to all that is not time bound. All art belongs to the same period. Catch it by accent and not by chronology. Ask, ‘where does the emphasis fall?’ not the antiquarianism of where and when. Art is not archaeology. How will I know it? By its rapture. How will I know it? By its fidelity to itself. How will I know it? By its form. Not chaos here, the ugly wings are beaten back.

And love? The brazier where I burn. Extravagant, profuse, excessive, beyond bounds. Out of our risk comes our safety, not the small sad life that will cling to anything because it has nothing. You are not a raft. I am not a sailor. You are not weak. I am more than a strong arm. I want to love you well, not to lose you in children and objects. I want to love you well, but to love you well I shall have to be in love with more than love. I shall have to find in myself the emotional extravagance that fits me to stay in one place.

Falling in love: Art or science? Gravity’s insistence and the heart dropping from a ready tree. Gene pool or opera? You choose. Once the Church married us, now, it’s the little men in white coats.

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries. Who told me you had stars in your eyes? Let me see your heavenly body. Star-proof I am not. From a hundred billion others, you hurled yourself down in gassy form; no definite boundaries, no fixed volume. You could have filled any space but the space you filled was me. I saw you drop from the roof of the stars, and in the moment of your falling, you began to be defined.

I picked up the flickering body, frozen in crystalline form, kissed the plane of your face and the solid geometry of each limb. Five points you; legs, arms and face, a pentagon of hope, and me a talisman at your hand.

Revoke me; You do. Call me back and back through the wastes of time, here, there, nowhere, carrying white roses never red. Not a dead poet but a living love, and if the words I bring are dusty, I will renew them in your mouth.

Look up where you began. The high place in the thin air. Your speeding mass through the unweighed leaves. Your tumbling body and no net below. Let me wipe your bruises with a fanon. You are a holy thing; telesma. Hold my hand, your heart still beating, not the steady steady loss, but your pulse against my palm. Hold my hand, and read in it this day, and all the rest unpledged.

*

On the frozen night, star-mazed, lost in the vanishing light, I took the note from your hand and left you a piece of paper of my own. I wrote ‘VICTORY’ and signed my name ‘Nelson.’ Then I fled the approaching fleet of doctors and police, family probes and midnight gawpers.

‘Who is she?’ I heard them say, as I took off through the blue streets.

It was a long time ago. She had a daughter called Cleis. She was the most famous poet of antiquity. Her work filled nine volumes. Little else about her is known.

Modern scholars have mocked her because she compared the moon to a rose. Since the Renaissance, roses have been red, what is that to her?

She carried white roses never red. Bud, bloom, blown. Blown roses at her feet, damp and tender, fallen roses and the rising moon. Touch me: You do. Your hands are white and your lips are pale. Pale the flowers that cover you on your evening bier. Slip away now, while the moon is full, fullness of your lips against the thinning day.

Love me: You do. Your true heart a golden chest. You wear my breast plate, no need for spear and shield. The light that makes an aim of you is clear. Shot down by light you have erupted into flame.

Quickly through the blue streets, and on a corner, three men, their faces muffled round a pan of red coals. The snow had begun to fall in white sheets. White sheets to wrap us in on this bitter night. Can’t tell my future in the coals. It is the past I see, up to the hilt of this night, my name written down the blade. The live coals sing. The young man has a banjo that he tunes to his gut; open your mouth, the live coals sing.

*

Rhythm of words passed from life to life. Mouth to mouth of language uncoded by time. Words are not his, speak them. Love is not his, speak me. Love recorded against Time. Love stamped through time on the brand of the word. Sappho 600
BC.
The City 2000 After Death.

Picasso

S
HE LOOKED AT HER
: Gunflint eyes, electric hair, voice that had a dash of pebbles in it. When she spoke, Picasso heard the sea crunching at the shore.

How long had they been on the train? Days? Hours? Months? Weeks? Years? Always? Never? The train had died. No guard, no announcements, no longer the fitful charge of the engine. In the dead train the sun heated them. The sun magnified through the thick glass. The spare restless man had fainted. Vainly Picasso pumped the automatic doors. They could not leave the train, for safety’s sake, no doubt. In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.

Her mother had been tremendously safety conscious. She had said, ‘Sit close to your brother. He will take care of you.’

‘I love you,’ her brother had said, when he was thirteen and she nine. ‘I love you.’

She had no other friends. Her mother knew that the outside world is a wicked place. She had no other friends. She and her brother played at sailors in the safety of their own home. He was the torpedo. She was the target.

‘What are you two doing in there?’ Mother’s voice at the door.

‘Torpedoes and Targets,’ answered my brother, with his hand over my mouth and his cock between my legs.

I love you. The magic bullet that kills the victim and frees the murderer in a single shot.

I love you. The universe hangs by its thread.

‘I love you.’ I never wanted to hear those words again. I never wanted to hear those worn-out words, that when they are not blunt, are sharpened on a lying-stone. When do they pierce the skin? When they are true or when they are false?

I love you. The murder weapon of family life.

Is that my mother, stalking me round the kitchen? Patiently waiting for me to drop my guard. All day she has punished me with her rosary of lies, one after the other, murmured prayers for my destruction, enough lies and I will not know who I am. Picasso will not exist but the Lie can wear her clothes. She knows how tired I am. There has been an offering of silence. She is silently chopping the meat. I am silently cutting the vegetables.

She pounces.

‘I love you.’ Straight at my heart with her little knife. She looks eagerly for the blood. I must pretend to feel nothing even though I am doubled over with pain.

‘Heartless,’ she tells me ‘that’s what you are. Heartless.’

I have told her that I am leaving home. Yes, and I am taking my heart with me. She knows I have hidden it somewhere. She knows that there is still a piece of me unkilled by the loving hands of my family. They have not yet made me in their likeness. I am still my own. Time is short. They will ransack me. They will find my heart hidden in my chest. They have devoured lungs, liver and tongue. They wonder why I do not speak. They wonder why I am afraid.

I am afraid but not mortally. I have some courage left and it will be enough. When my brother lay over me like a winding sheet and me his corpse, it was a patch of red I remembered on a Leonardo robe. While my brother embalmed me with his fluid I clung to life through a patch of red. When I had to look at his empty eyes over me, it was the red that speeded my own blood from clotting. It was the red that pushed life through veins I had thought to slit. Warm red with light in it. Gold decorated red that gave me a robe of dignity to put over my own torn dress.

Later, in the silent untimed years at the hospital of St Sebastian the Martyr, it was the strange vital yellows of Van Gogh that bore out a sane place in the babble of that overbright world. Overbright: the lights left on in accusing strips of neon. The nurses with their harsh friendly voices, cheerful, cheerful, nice nice. Be a good girl eat your party food. MY party food. Blue cake, green icing, pink candles to blow out. That’s nice, blow me out, every spark of me, on my birthday.

I am twenty-one.

I hid in my room with a book. ‘Withdrawn.’ said my report. ‘Uncommunicative.’ said my report. ‘Not fully socialised.’ said my report. ‘No progress.’ said my report.

I was making progress. I was studying Van Gogh. Sunflower yellow. Cornfield yellow, sky yellow, yellow in the woman’s fading hair that she pushes away from her face. Yellow in the wicker of the chair, yellow in the layers of the land. Yellow in the clay ridges of the fields ploughed. Yellow in his clothes going home.

I went home. This time I was properly dressed.

I have been thinking back and back to that night on the parapet and the resolution of wings. I should have been killed. It was intended that I should have been killed. There is more to the story but it has taken me a long time to remember it. I have not wanted to remember it. When I told them in the hospital they said I was inventing. My mother is certain I am inventing. It is easier that way. Memory can be murder.