A Love Letter from a Stray Moon (8 page)

The fallen. The young widow, despairing and penniless in her high-rise flat, gives a party on the last night of her life, she thanks her friends, finishes the vodka and jumps to her death. I painted her flight, to give her soul wings.

The fallen. The psychiatric case. In bed seventeen hours a day, his mind too dulled by tranquillisers to fly a kite or crack a joke. Tamped to nothing with tranx, sleeping the dulled sleep of the torpid: eating jelly and pills. Is this, too, a self-portrait? Under my flowers and jewels, am I the soul limping to its pedestrian Gethsemane?

The fallen. I see these minds which no longer fly. The fallen. Bleak eyes in beakers at parties, in a disheartened tarting for a one-night sop to their loneliness.

The fallen. A fascist priest, rifle to his shoulder in his own church tower, aiming at a nineteen-year-old anarchist. Christ Almighty, is this what Jesus died for?

The fallen. The children constantly chided, the girls with their will overruled, boys with their spirits broken, aged eleven, putting on a suit and tie to go to the office of maths and double chemistry. They fall for it, fall in for life. In step. Hup two three four. The fallen who fell before they ever had a chance to rise. (Though some mornings, shaken awake for school, and still misty with sleep, they look strangely up and murmur: ‘
Mamá
, why do I dream of flying?')

The fallen. The old man looking blankly back on the nothing-really of his life, the job done a bit badly, the money he chased which sparkled his mind is now got and hoarded, gathering dust in the attic. Sometimes all I can do is curse
La Destina
.

The fallen. In the garden of the house next door, the beautiful beekeeper, her soul the colour of honey, her body humming with pregnancy, lives in the shed and her baby, coming too quickly, is born on the wayside. She alone of all of these looks up at the moon and laughs silver and glad, and she alone is unfallen, she is flying still.

The people of Chiapas are falling into despair, victims of malnutrition and government-issue TB, crying for land and freedom, pulverised by poverty. ‘Money talks.'
But only the poor know what it says.

The Chase Manhattan bank issues a report calling for the Mexican government to ‘eliminate the Zapatistas'. The armies of the state flood the Lacandon jungle to capture the leadership, particularly Marcos, that most wanted man in Mexico. The soldiers didn't notice that the moon (the insurgent moon, rebel of the night, first exile of the cosmos) had climbed the ceiba tree, slung her hammock between two branches and scooped him up, holding him tight, saying, ‘you're one of mine'— and all that the soldiers found of him was his pipe, still smoking and warm.

Risorgimento

S
till smoking and warm, the story is not ended, but the end is near. ‘I hope the exit is joyful,' I said, for a messenger drawing a black angel flying up into the sky, ‘and I hope never to come back.' But this death in this life is a death from which only more life can come. A different life, better, stronger and kinder, and I painted the
Love Embrace of the Universe
. I mother death into life, and life into death, my jingling skeleton got the giggles and fell off the bar stool, weeping hot and real tears.

I can hear the ringing of the copper bowl in the hands of Txati, goddess of breast and grave, whose bowl contains the souls of the newly dead and from whose bowl life is fed. I can hear the bells, the golden bells, of Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the moon.

When I died, they said he looked like a soul cut in two. He said of that day: ‘Too late now, I realised that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.' As my cortège passed, my mourners sang: ‘
La Barca de Oro
', the ship of gold. (In the accident, all those years ago, I was like an icon, shining with gold, and now again I am drenched in it.) ‘This is goodbye… you'll never see me again, nor hear my songs, but the seas will overflow with my tears.' Half-right and half-wrong. He did see me again. As I was being cremated, the heat of the furnace made my corpse sit bolt upright and my hair was in flames, a death-halo around my head, my face in the centre of a sunflower—this end which I had tried to scratch out with a knife but which came to me anyway. The seas will overflow with my tears—well, that bit was right, too right.

My ashes maintained the shape of my bones for a few seconds before the softest whispers of air brushed them away. But those few seconds were long enough for him to take a sketchbook from his pocket and draw my silver skeleton. The pity of it. The tears of it. The death of it. But look again, my darling, look again, at the last painting I ever did, where I wrote in the colour of blood my most enduring faith: ‘
Viva
La Vida
.' Long live life, wherever and however she flows. (‘But all should know that I have not died,' said Lorca.)

So fly me to the earth, and if he will create a new heaven there with me, I will find the wings for it. I do not know if he will, or if he wants to, my Diego of undying flight, so I make this as a votive painting, a prayer, a vow, a plea, painting to win him back to me. Always more prayers than artworks, my paintings were ex-votos, and if art is said to mirror life, then I want more—I want life to mirror art, so I will choreograph my images, infuse them with luck and seduction, with vulnerability and defiance, so that they might be a spell to ask for his hand. It was a magic charm, to draw a hummingbird around my neck to draw him to me again.

Start small with a seedling, a kitten, a pun, a note or a bucket of small water. Small journeys on small wings for a flight not small, for the soaring again of an old belief, oldly new, ancient and radical. Do not despise the small, the earthy, there is faerie in that, the glimmering knowledge of earth in whorls, the fertile mind of green, and a translucence of love when everything outside is also inside, green and growing.

Fly deeper into things, fly slowly, fly gently within yourself, for this is how flight becomes sublime and ecstatic. The mind's flight is fire, inflaming and glowing, and I wanted to think with a streak of flame so I dared to soar with the fire of flight, where the perfection is in the tension of tangent, the aim, the furthering— the flaming arrow ever in flight, never wanting the target.

When I write to my friends, I send them scarlet feathers which whisper flight, especially in airmail envelopes, for flight, like love, is magnetic, irresistible and charismatic. All those I have loved the most have a quality of flight.

One whose quixotic flight was spurred by romance and honour, righter of wrongs, tilter at windmills, whose questing imagination gigantised the heart.

One whose soaring quality of flight was to believe in a symbol so powerfully that he became one, El Che, another journeyer, motorcycling the length of South America to find the story for his life, who refused to believe in the power of national armies and who could only be killed by trickery.

One whose flight was audacity on horseback, the political toreador, the original Zapata, taking on the bull of landed interests, seizing land for the
campesinos
, and who, like Che, was assassinated by a trick.

And then there's Chico. I never knew how the human face could smile until I saw the smile of Chico Mendes. More facial muscles than anyone, a myriad joy, Chico lived like me in a Casa Azul, and he was assassinated in that Blue House. His flight too was a journey, the expansion of his love: ‘At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity.'

They all refused to believe that they were the size they were told they should be, and in this is heroism, through that belief we are all heroic, all those who fly.

One whose heart is so deeply winged I have not seen the limit of it yet. One whose flight is with birds in music as he played jazz duets with a lyre-tailed nightjar. One whose gift of flight is an animism of the ordinary—I've seen her take a glass of water and distil it by pure laughter into silver gin. One who causes daughters to flock to her, lost fledglings which she finds and helps to fly.

These are the loveliest aviators I know and their flights are all forms of rebellion, all ways of re-enchanting. For now the shamans are needed, the artists and everyone who lives by love. What is needed now is enchantment both magical and real; an enthralling both ordinary and ecstatic. And they are all there, on the sudden, a passion of poets, all of those through whom Orpheus lives: Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Auden, Rubén Darío, and César Vallejo, who fought with the anarchists in Spain. Neruda and Lorca sing a duet in Spanish for all the Romantics and Dylan Thomas arrives later and drunker than any, and leans against Whitman's shoulder and sniffs his beard for butterflies while Whitman smiles so fondly towards the doorway that Ginsberg knows he has the welcome of the ages, and they held the moon and came in her arms and cried for her farways always farlove. I saw the best minds of my generating, for their minds were generated by moonlight, these nightwalkers on the song.

I would re-enchant myself with mankind, nothing less, I would put my head in your lap and lap your mist-touched lips which would tell me again what I once knew, that there is nothing lovelier than mist drinking sunlight and no time lovelier than the dawn is now, and in that
now
I give you all the words for sunrise, in all the languages on earth, and I will promise to find the god of new beginnings, on whatever sad shore. In our choreograph of love, we danced on a boat all the way from Mexico to New York, coming to the shore, as you are deep inside me, held, still, one moment longer. Love, my sweetheart, and I shout in tears, crying for how much I love you: so precious it is to love like this, so ordinary it should be, and you laugh and stroke my back.

I will lead you into the sweetest skies of silk, if you will let your mind linger again on the kind side and in this way we will begin again at the original benignity, knowing that every moment is that midsummer afternoon when you were immobilised by the depth and profusion of beauty, when you laughed because you loved each willow leaf as much as you loved me, when you knew, with the purest certainty, that love is the most necessary thing on earth, a re-enchantment between you and everything. Love is not romance. Romantic love (the most that maybe I have managed) is the meanest love there is, that exclusive love of just two people. Mankind was made polyamorous, Pan-Amoric, loving many things, sometimes able to love everything. I love the forests and the flowers and I love women, too, increasingly, these days. But always at my core is you.

Can I re-light this votive flame? In the hearth of my own heart I know a re-devotion to my true
lares
and
penates,
the gods of earth and I require my mind to rekindle its exquisiteness, to re-fiesta every evening, to re-see every dawn, and in cursive love for the seasons to see again how the year nuzzles its nose under its own paw, this lion old in winter, young again in spring, turning in its bed of dry grasses. To tie the threads of thrall again, the re-thrallment of mankind to earth, the lovely tapestry of every corner of the world. The mirrored threads of Rajasthan, tying you to desert song; the faded threads of prayer flags tying you to the floating world; the silk of blue in Mongolia, each thread a skein of holy sky; the woollen skeins dyed in cochineal and indigo, the wool of Mexican rugs, the veins, the roots.

‘I am large, I contain multitudes.' I am Frida, and I am not Frida. I am Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas. I am, of course, Lorca. I am the insight of grief and I am the moon, hollowed out by remorse. My prayer is a novena, prayed nine times to Mary, mother of sorrows. My prayer is from the forests of Mexico, from the molten heart of the earth, from
El Duende
which charges art with power,
El Duende
, the mysterious energy, the life force in its demand for the dark, deep blood-sap. It comes from the strings of the blue guitar, Paganini's violin, Orpheus's harp strings, when veins are roots, drawing up ancient knowledge from
El Duende
, the spirit of the earth. It is unmistakeable,
El Duende
, deeper than politics, wiser than philosophy, to let knowing come from the soles of your feet, warm to the thinking earth, to let your mind be a flute for the moon to breathe through and write with blood as ink so you do not, cannot, falsify.

It takes courage even to say ‘blood' in these days ruled by the bloodless: the metallic bureaucrats, the cultural assassins who mock the ‘others' for having strands of politics woven into their art, those who sneer, their mouths full of nettles, who killed Keats and brayed about it afterwards, who would silence a Lorca without regret. Malice is in fashion and spite pays by the word. It takes
El Duende
, now, to find the courage for the flickering, self-sacrificial urgency of necessary insurgent art. The best artists are not found in the cliques of cold steel but in those who inhabit the warm world, who hear the blood of the moon humming in the seas and who know the dark sounds of the human body, hearing their own blood in their own ears.