Art and Lies

  He had said ‘This fell on my head. Why?’

  ‘Codling moth,’ said the Doll.

  She was still fond of him. She was fond in her work, but in love? Never Never Never. Yet, she liked men, foolish, boyish, trumpeting men. What was it her friend Jack Cut the butcher had said? ‘A pig and a man, both must have loins.’

  A Swank dropped down beside her and offered her a trotter. It was not a trotter she wanted …

  Time passed. Let Time pass, she would not detain him, he had too much detained her. She was twice Ruggiero’s age. Time had passed and taken her with him in his train.

  Lost in the dial of the clock, she did not see the tall, square-shouldered woman, gay companion on her arm. They stood by the door, the woman, a little nervous, fluttering her eyes at the men. It was a sense that she was being watched, that made the Doll look up from her cups, she looked up. She knew the straight nose that made an Emperor of his face. She knew the clean lines of porphyry, his pale skin, purple at the temple veins. She knew the twist of his arm and his agitated fingers. She knew his upright back and the plumbline of his spine. She knew, though she had never known, the delicious pound weight of his whiter meat.

  There was jelly on her lips from the trotter.

  She stood up and walked over to the woman, who blushed, and bowed a little behind her fan.

  ‘Let her hide behind all the fans of the Orient,’ thought the Doll, whose own bright head had begun to rise in the East …

  She gave her arm to Ruggiero and accompanied her to a dark seat, where she pulled out from her lower pocket that bound volume, The Poetical Works of Sappho.

  The Wise Sappho? Am I wise to love the image and not the idol?

  Open the book. What does it say?

  The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, set in the bride’s chamber, the statue of Hermes or Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art she looked upon in her rapture or her pain. They knew that life gains from art not only spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly and they were perfectly right.

  The image not the idol. The image stamped upon the retina, repeated behind the eyelid, stored in the rhomencephalon, returned to the body in injections of emotion. The power of the image through the unforgetting brain.

  Did I see you, Sophia, on a ledge in the night? White winged in waves of beauty that closed over my head? Equinoctial waves that box at the moon. The sea in the harbour ring and the moon on the ropes of the boats.

  Did I see you again or do I suffer from retina pigmentosa? I saw your colours in prismatic white, a see-through angel in unfitting clothes.

  What did I see when I looked at you? An arrangement of molecules affected by light? A vision of my own? A vision of you? You as you really are, unaffected by darkness, stripped out of the net that captived you. Gladiators and spiders both use nets, but neither say for safety’s sake. Who lied to you and bound you? Who called their meshes your own good? Retiary malice of the unfree to the flying?

  It was a long time ago. I caught her as she fell in whirling wheels of pain. Caught the body weighed down by sorrow. She fell out of the past through an insubstantial present and into the future of her love. Her love, which like charity, does not begin at home.

  This is what happened: It was Christmas morning, three years ago, Christmas of deep snow stacked in high banks. I had been with friends but left them in warm revels to make myself an icy fugitive in the streets below. I was alone but for the thin dog that rootled for a bone. Alone but for the alley cat black on the glassy wall. Alone among the frost-cast stars.

  Was I alone? I looked up in time to see her drop from the still roof into the moving air. Naked, without sound, through the silent air. I ran to where she fell and found her, higher than my head, unconscious on a white altar still soft with late snow. She was bleeding from the mouth.

  I covered her with my coat and tried to get an answer from the dark house doors barred. How many years passed before a light filled up the passage and an angry voice threatened me with the police?

  There were police. Raucous squad cars that slewed round her body in an obscene circle, doors open, flashing lights, the staccato of the radio cutting through the family tears. The ambulance, white, sterile, certain. The grim men on Christmas duty, one at either end of the fragile stretcher. Blankets over her now. Her body, a faint bundle of red blankets, red to hide the blood and the corkscrew of her leg.

  I slipped away, but not before I held her hands, not before I kissed her. I said ‘I will come back.’ I said ‘Open your eyes, won’t you open your eyes?’ and all this I said and did in the terrible minutes while the family ran up and down the long hall calling the police.

  I thought that she would die. I put my cheek to her lips and felt no breath. I kissed her with the life of me, life to life, warmth enough to lift her hand from the cold gates slowly opening on to her last estate. I said ‘I will come back.’

  I did go back but she had gone. The house was dark and shuttered. I did go back, not once, but many times, to the blank walls and shielded doors. Nothing to guide me but a scrap of paper from out of her hand. ‘That which is only living can only die.’

  She had not died. Strange miracle that saved her. Miracle of the soft snow that broke her fall. Miracle of the cold snow that staunched the blood. The disinterested weather and my fervent hands. An accident of the season and a passer-by. Happy coincidences? Ordinary miracles? It doesn’t matter, what matters is her life. Her life, that was more to her than flesh and blood, more to her than a killing doll, could not evaporate in the night air. She had a spirit and it lived. I did not know what it was that drove her to the roof and flung her off it. I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows. The fissures and the hollows of the heart do not respond to rational measurement. When the instruments fail the doctor blames the patient. He says he can find nothing wrong.

  The doctor said he could find nothing wrong. She was healthy, she had work, she came from a good family. Her heart beat was normal. Was it? Well, perhaps a little too fast.

  Heart attack. Had her heart attacked her? Her heart, trained at obedience classes from an early age? Her heart, well muzzled in public, taught to trot in line. Her heart, that knew the Ten Commandments, and obeyed a hundred more. Her disciplined dogged heart that would come when it was called and that never strained its leash. Her heart, that secretly gnawed away its body’s bones. Her heart, that too long kept famished now consumed her. Her heart turned.

  I saw her heart turning over and over through the somersaulted air.

  I saw her heart ignore its bounds and leap.

  It was her heart I pounded with both hands, my knees across her, my mouth that shouted ‘Live! Live!’

  She opened her eyes. She did live. Consciousness returning to the accelerated body. Her body, that in the spinning seconds had resolved to finish its work. Her body, that had travelled through gravity, through light, its own mission of inner space. Its suit too flimsy for the years that pressed upon it in the seconds left. Common for people to see their past flash before them, the images stored in the unforgetting brain. Common for them to find that, as every material thing is slipping away, it is the image that prevails, the image that was victorious after all. Those pictures and impressions long since cut away from their source, but here still, as lively as ever, liveliness of spirit against the dying life.

  She saw her past compressed into a single stroke of colour and it was the colour that made a bridge for her, not out of time, but through it. She did not drop, she crossed herself, and in the moment of crossing herself she was freed.

  Free. Free
from the outcrop where she had been marooned. The rocky place of thistle and salt. The heart beat back so many times that it finds its only home in isolation. The isolated heart, that in protecting itself from pain, loses so much of beauty and buys its survival at the cost of its life.

  Better to go forward than to retreat. Better to fight the hurt than to flee from it. She did not know this until the quick second of her fall and as she fell she prayed for wings. She prayed not out of self-pity nor regret, but out of recognition. She need not die. She could fight. Too late? No. Not for her. For her it was not too late.

  Many times I returned, but it was on this one night, years later, that what was lost was found.

  I like to walk at night, it is my habit, I walk at night to rid myself of too much day. Too much daylight that pretends to show up things as they really are. No such thing as natural light.

  Crossing by that house again, now threatened by a crane, I looked up to where the parapet met the plane trees. She was there. There on the ledge, there in bare feet, balanced on herself. I should have been afraid because history always repeats itself. The past fitted in a new wedding shroud and married to the future. I should have been afraid, waved my arms and shouted, not stood in quiet wonder at her grace. I knew she would not fall. I knew she had a different reason for her risk. I knew that she had seen me although I could not see her face.

  Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family’s claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battleground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be the healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.

  ‘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 throa
t 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.