Art and Lies

  I like to read George Bernard Shaw, not, as he hoped, as an improvement on Shakespeare, but as a visionary who truly believed that Socialism could progress man’s basest instinct; greed. Is there a gene we could tag and rub out for that? If there is, the money won’t be there for the research, much more profitable to ease out red-heads or homosexuals. What’s the difference? In the fifteenth century it was well known that red hair was a sign of a consort of the Devil. If our ancestors had possessed our technology, this woman opposite me would certainly be brunette. There would be no red-heads, and we would justify that loss by saying ‘Ah yes, but thanks to us there are no witches either.’ Genetic engineering would have taken the credit for ordinary social change. Witches and devils no longer threaten you and me. We don’t mind living next door to the harmless lady with her herb garden and decoction still, her black cat and red hair. Once we would have tied her to the stake and burned her, but these days, it’s just the faggots that offend.

  We strict Catholics won’t flinch from a little medical intervention. We have made that mistake before. In 1936, when the Catholic hierarchy was colluding with the Nazis, Hitler was not in favour of Concentration Camps. He advocated compulsory sterilisation for the ‘hereditarily diseased’. His advisor, Cardinal Faulhaber, disagreed: ‘From the Church’s point of view, Herr Chancellor, the State is not forbidden to isolate these vermin from the community, out of self-defence, and within the framework of the moral law. But instead of physical mutilation, other defensive measures must be tried, and there is such a measure; interning the people with hereditary diseases.’ (Literary remains of Cardinal Faulhaber.)

  Strict Catholics. Orthodox Jews. The other day I heard an ex-Chief Rabbi arguing in support of genetic cleansing for homosexuals. It would be kinder, he said, than imprisonment.

  The problem with imprisoning homosexuals is that it is impossible to imprison them all. Homosexuality is harder to identify than Jewishness. Much better to intervene while the incipient queer is still in the womb. His mother is to blame. She’s the carrier. Homophobia and misogyny bedded down under the white sheets of bad science. That’s progress isn’t it?

  I haven’t said anything about lesbians. I don’t know anything about them. I suppose that they, like other women, will be surprised to find their new listing from the American Psychiatric Association. It is ‘Mentally Ill’, but only when they are pre-menstrual, of course. You don’t mind the harmless lady with her herb garden and decoction still, her red hair and her black cat, who lives quietly with her friend, do you? Do you mind her when I say that she is a mentally ill lesbian? And if I said I could cure her, wouldn’t you think me a good man?

  *

  Don’t be narrow minded Handel, with your gloomy science and medical obsessions. People live longer, our children aren’t slaving down the mines, we do recognise our global responsibilities, even if our governments choose to ignore them. Women are not equal, but they are less unequal than they used to be. We don’t call black men niggers. We are an advanced civilisation. A democracy. Isn’t that something?

  Yes, it is something, it’s The Golden Age of Greece, the Athens of Pericles. The Greeks enjoyed longevity. Their own people were not slaves, although their empire depended on the slave labour of others, in much the same way as the West exploits the Third World. Women enjoyed considerable freedoms, though not the same freedoms as men. The Greeks, beyond the concerns of their empire, were not xenophobic. They were an advanced civilisation. A democracy, ahead of ours, in that it was not representative, but direct. To them, we owe, poetry, philosophy, logic, mathematics, model government and sculpture. I admit that they did not invent the microwave.

  Perhaps it is a good thing that Greek is no longer taught in most schools. A study of Greek language and Greek thought would make the most ardent computer modernist as disillusioned as I am. Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually?

  I dare not ask if you are happy?

  Are you happy?

  Many years ago I fell in love. It was the only time that I have fallen in love although it was not the only time that I have been in love.

  I was home for the holidays and I brought with me another student, a young woman, my friend. I always have prided myself on my capacity to be friendly with women. As a celibate I do not expose myself to the usual complications. Or do I mean temptations?

  She was a confident young woman. My mother did not like her. She was rational, I was intense. She was dignified, I was still farouche. Still the choir boy singing the songs of the dead with living ardour.

  It was a December of steam-like fogs. Daily we opened the back door and set out from the clear warmth of the kitchen into a freezing sauna. Through the steam we heard voices calling out and the rattle of trucks on the road. We saw nothing, and the lower fog being thicker, it was our heads that made a marker for one another. We joked about waking up in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell; the frozen lake of Cocytus, where traitors are plunged up to the neck in ice. For her, it was a playful game, for me it came too close to truth. Whom did I betray that Christmas? She? Me? Both of us. Cocytus. The river of mourning.

  We had gone out to gather mistletoe. Pagan berries for a Christian feast, difficult blessing, hanging as it must, on the topmost branches of old oak. I stood her on my shoulders so that she could climb up to the first branch. After that, she swung herself up easily enough, and cut down the medusa clumps of knotted green, white eyed. I am queasy about mistletoe, it is such an unnatural green, shining like a wrecker’s lantern in the steady green of the oak. She dropped it down into my waiting net, how foolish I felt, chest high in mist, lacking both wit and laughter, so serious under the oak, while she joked and shouted in the ice air. Two others came past, arm in arm, pleasure warming their faces. They offered me a swap of wild mushrooms for a hand of mistletoe. I looked up at her, perilous and poised. ‘Give it to them Handel’ she yelled, and threw a huge bunch at my head. I did as I was told, happy in the moment, in that simple way that is so very difficult. Nothing to think about, nothing to analyse, the friendliness of strangers, rare and rarer.

  She was coming down, slight, lithe, red hair under her red cap, a winter acorn breathed in frost. She took the last eight feet di-salto, and landed firm and square, in a parachuter’s jump close bundled at my knees. She pulled me down beside her and took out a mistletoe sprig. She kissed me lightly and undid her heavy jacket, putting my chilled hands through on to her breasts.

  ‘Haptics,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The science of studying data obtained by touch.’

  Yes, I knew then, from the Greek, Haptein, ‘to fasten’. It was my heart I fastened while she unbuttoned me. My eager open heart, that I shut up from her and from myself, with stiff and frozen fingers.

  Her kiss threatened the frozen world. Her kiss was a lit brazier on the sealed lake. My body jumped, as fishes do that look for air, that look for food and find it. Under the quilt of fog she kissed me. Never go. Never stop. The kiss of life for this airless man.

  I had my hands on her breasts, but, and I know this is bizarre, I felt as though her breasts were holding me, safe, firm, sexed. I wanted to stay there, on the zero ground, my hands on her breasts.

  We didn’t make love. Slowly we walked home through the darkening day, her hand in mine, I carrying the mistletoe. My parents had gone to Mass. While I was fussing in the kitchen, she went upstairs, and a little while later, I heard her calling me.

  Handel … Handel … her voice far away.

  I went up, and found her in the spare room, on the dusty double bed. She was sitting up, straight backed, naked.

  Handel … her voice far away, her voice trying to penetrate the thick Seminarian walls, my untried fears. Those long days in Rome, hidden behind the red skir
ts of my Cardinal, hiding my beating heart in his skirts. Handel … her voice far away.

  I looked at her, her hair in a perpetual spray around the sculpting of her shoulders, her body, a living fountain of red and gold.

  I looked at her and turned away. Turned away from beauty. Turned away from love. Turned away and closed the door on the unused room. The next day she caught the train.

  When I operate my hands are cold. The woman’s breast is warm. It remains an eternal December, the winter when I fastened my heart.

  I try to make the cut as small as possible.

  Long-slanted light. Light in polished spears that pierces my side and releases blood and water. The hydremic body and the unforgiving light. Why should the light forgive me? I keep my past in a trunk with old school clothes and dusty photographs. Things in the dark, things hidden away, not for the shafts of sunlight that force the dust to dance. In the long spear of light the dust dances. Jerky puppet movements of the past, I shield my eyes, but the motes are in them. Remembering, the body of the past that was broken and lifeless, knitted together in a gruesome semblance of what was. I’m not there, it’s gone, I know it has gone but my mind betrays me and pushes me back down winding tunnels to the chamber of the dead where a terrible pantomime is being performed.

  Is that me, the foolish boy? Is that her, the lovely woman? I have not thought about this for more than thirty years. What right has the light to disturb my rest?

  If I burn within my iron tomb what is it to you? It is possible to be damned in your own lifetime. A string of successive damnations that bind what is still left of the soul and force its future into the same thick moulds as its past. Small treacheries, hurtful lies, moral cowardice, wilful sadness, neglect of beauty, scorn of love, each does its own violence to what was made inviolable; the soul. Not fashionable? No, and not to the Epicureans either whose philosopher died in 270 BC. The soul swings in and out of fashion, immortal or not, it can be damned. Isn’t this life hell enough?

  Hell enough for you Handel, who rejected a love you felt in favour of a duty you despised. And the worst of it? That it condemns you to a permanent adolescence. Lost love to weep over, a full bath of self-pity and self-hatred, the one real chance at life lost. It’s such a popular delusion and I’m not a romantic, not at all, I loathe the sentimental in me. In human nature. If I had taken her in my arms, with the ardour she deserved, what would have happened? Would we have been lovers for a while and parted? Would we have married? Would we have remained friends? I would not have gone into the priesthood, but since I am in it no longer for other reasons, that hardly matters. These speculations hardly matter, whatever the later choices, I would have faced both beauty and terror squarely. Beauty, at what she revealed, terror at what I could no longer conceal. I fastened myself tight against both and have stayed a battened hatch against both. I have kept my mild prejudices and weak pleasures, my doubtful faith and my shy jabs at passion. Religious ecstasy would be enough, if I had it, artistic rapture would satisfy me too, and I come at the edges of both. I can see into the fiery furnace, I know it is real, but I can only carry a few lukewarm coals.

  It is not the only time that I have preferred a fraudulent response to one that had been genuine. She rightly read the moment while I stumbled through a second-hand text. I loved her and I lied.

  What to say of the silent day when I turned away from her face and into the dark chasm of self-regard? I fled beauty now beauty flees me. How do I spend my days? Not by the living body but by the marble slab, black arts of scalpel and blade, dissection of what I love.

  Too bitter? perhaps, but I have found that human nature is bitter, twisted roots of wormwood and gall, the buried death-in-life, that still fears the grave. Having killed part of me, I fear it less than those who do their murdering with unconscious hands, the daily suicide that precedes all other crimes. Love of money. Fear of death. Twin engines of the human race. Foolish then to search for wings? Inhuman even? But I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallness that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

  ‘She’s dying Handel.’ My mother’s death, the fragile combative body had become a winter husk.

  We were arranged round her bed, father on her right, myself on her left, her sister at the foot, my brother fidgeting in a faded chair. The clock beat out the minutes metronomically. The nurse consulted her watch. The dead are not timely. My mother, who woke at 7, breakfasted at 9, corresponded until lunch, napped until 2.30, collected me at 3, deposited me at 4, gave orders to the household until 5, read, bathed, dressed for dinner, ate it and fell asleep by II pm, had outlasted her doctor’s estimate by three days. For three days her family had gathered thus, eating in shifts, resting on camp beds, not speaking but glancing one to another, with the secret guilty signal, ‘Will this time never end?’

  Her will had gone, only the animal was left, the animal holding on to life at any price. She, all of us, would choose to die with dignity, to accept the inevitable with restraint. We don’t imagine that the body we have tamed will turn savage. Her hands tearing the bed clothes, her face twisted in pain, tormented thrashing from side to side as her systems failed and her organs ignored the chain of command. She was full of fluid undrained and undrainable. We had taken out the tubes that gave her as much hurt as they relieved. We had brought her home, away from the stainless steel bedpans and castored trolleys rattling with drugs. Away from the Terminal Ward and its unfeeling banalities. Death being a favourite TV tear-jerker, the living now act out their soap opera roles. It’s true that death is a situation where we desperately need a script. Most of us are dumb with feelings no-one warned us we might have. Better to be dumb than to chloroform feeling with platitudes, make it safe with sentimentality. Shouting is not allowed on the Terminal Ward unless it happens on the television. Those about to lose their loved ones must sit sotto voce by the bed and watch an American actor hamming grief. If they’re lucky, there might be a comedy show, then everyone can pretend to laugh. Television is compulsory, all you can do is draw the curtains round your own bed, or pay for a private room.

  Of course we paid for a private room but the walls were too thin.

  Thin … the thin sheets on the thin mattress. The flimsy covering over my mother’s body, skin and bone. The thin walls that could not keep out someone else’s death; death seeping through the stud partition, tainting the water filled with cut flowers.

  Thin soup passed through a narrow tube into her throat, a thinner tube in her kidneys taking the fluid away. Paper cards saying ‘Get Well Soon’, imported soft fruit unpithed. She in a narrow bed alone.

  Why dilute her last days? Thin them out so that they resemble what is to follow. Why sterilise death, hoping to make it clean and acceptable when it is what it has always been, furious, messy, full of doubt and anguish, but not hopeless, not pointless, it is an event in life.

  I forced my father to bring her home. On the day he went to collect her in the ambulance I ran to the market and bought armfuls of lilies and roses and old-fashioned sweetpeas whose scent filled her bedroom and knotted into the heavy red counterpane over her best linen sheets. I knew she would ruin the sheets, my brother’s wife was angry, they were rather special, impossible to find nowadays. They had been part of her trousseau. My brother’s wife had expected to take them home.

  My mother died, exhausted, ruined, on the morning of the fourth day when only my father was present. I came in with a cup of coffee for him and he was stroking her head, saying ‘Kathleen, Kathleen.’ He looked up at me ‘Why does God do this?’

  I’m supposed to have the answers aren’t I? A priest, a doctor, you’d expect me to be able to say something careful and comforting. The priest does it every day, manages to trot out his homily on the Will of God, the doctor is less certain and will tell you something in baby language about her heart. There is no answer because there is no question. My father is saying ‘Weep for me, weep for us, fragile creatu
res of spirit and clay.’

  ‘And the king said to the Cushite, “Is it well with the young man Absalom?” And the Cushite answered “May the enemies of my ord the king and all who rise up to do thee hurt be as this young man.” And the king was deeply moved and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went he said “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God that I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”’ (2 Samuel, 18:32–3).

  I had washed the body; her skin delicate death-blue, the joints not swollen now, all repose, easy to read the steel-nibbed lines that covered her in gentle calligraphy. The book of my mother finished and closed.

  Grief were the curtains of the room, grief the rug on the floor. Grief paned the windows and burned in the solid candles placed head and foot. Grief in our mouths and gravel for food.

  We could not comfort one another. Each in his own shroud against the light. Each fearful of discovery. Grief sat on our shoulders and whispered. ‘If only I had …’ And then the punishment because we had not. Not put out our hand, not said the longed for words, not been there on that day, not cried when she cried, or laughed when she laughed. Separate from her in life we were desolate for her in death. There had been forty years to say the things that now seemed so imperative.