Art & Lies (4 page)

A friend of mine whom I treat informally, he is not my patient, came to me after his second heart attack and said ‘Handel, I want to think about my life.’ I gave him Pascal’s
Pensées
, he was delighted and stuffed the book into his bulging briefcase. ‘Just what I need,’ he said. As he was hurrying off to pick up a cab, he turned back to me and said ‘Handel, I’ve been so much better for our chats, and I have realised that you are right about the importance of the contemplative life. I’ll try and fit it in.’

From my window I watched him disappear into the busy street that used to be flanked on either side with self-distinguishing little shops, each with its own identity and purpose. Each with customers it knew and a responsibility towards them. Now, the unflanked street has been widened, for a road too dangerous to cross, that roars between plate glass multi-national stores, that each sell the same goods, from the same markets, but in different packages and according to the rules of price war.

How shall I live?

The question presses on me through the thin pane. The question tails me through the dense streets. In the anonymous computer-face of the morning mail, it is the question only that I read in red ink, the question burning the complacent page.

‘How are you Handel?’

(How shall I live?)

‘What are you doing these days?’

(How shall I live?)

‘Heard about the merger?’

(How shall I live?)

The question daubed on the door-posts. The question drawn in the dust. The question hidden in the bowl of lilacs. The insolent question at a sleeping god. The question that riddles in the morning, that insinuates at noon. The question that drives my dreams to wakefulness, the question physical in beads of sweat. ‘Answer me’ whispers the voice in the desert. The silent place where the city has not yet come.

In the invisible city, the city incapable of being seen for what it is, the vanished souls pass their ghostly way, making no impression, leaving no mark, a homogenous people who act, dress, talk and think alike.

My own mind?

My right mind?

My true home?

Long trains leaving. The square light in the windows. The yellow light on the black train. The reptile train with yellow scales. Yellow and
BLACK
yellow and
BLACK
yellow and
BLACK
chants the train.

The light was fretted around the border of the train; decorative light that made a cornice for the unrelieved metal, pale patterns worked against an austerity of line.

Had the light been fixed in Victorian embellishment it would have tired the eye and not refreshed it. Its charm was in its movement, the play of light, beautiful and surprising, new. New light escaped from an ancient sun.

Sun-yeared light.

In its effect the light was choral. Harmonies of power simultaneously achieved, a depth of light, not one note but many, notes of light sung together. In its high register, far beyond the ears of man, the music of the spheres, vibrating light noted in its own frequency. Light seen and heard. Light that writes on tablets of stone. Light that glories what it touches. Solemn self-delighting light.

The train crawled on beneath the speeding light that had already belted the earth. The scientific train and the artful light.

I, Handel, doctor, Catholic, admirer of women, lover of music, virgin, thinker, fool, am about to quit my city, never to return.

This action, my friends conclude, comes out of an excess of what the French call
La Sensibilité.
Too much feeling is not welcome in a man and it is unhelpful for a doctor. Catholics, it is true, are encouraged to express their emotions, providing that the emotions they express are Catholic ones.

I saw a Confessional box for sale yesterday. It was eighteenth-century, Irish, portable. Made of dark heavy oak, with a half-gate and curtain across the front, inside, a warm wooden bench worn smooth by countless clerical bottoms. On either side were its little lattice grills, placed at just the right height, for whispered agonies and burning bodies.

‘Father, I have sinned.’

‘Sins of the flesh or sins of the conscience my child?’

‘Sins of the flesh.’

‘Begin.’

I went to the brothel this afternoon, there were six of us, all Seminarians. While my companions were flirting with the girls, I received a note to go upstairs, where a lady was waiting for me.

I went into her room. It was white. White walls, white rugs from Egypt, stone-whitened sheets and a deaf white cat. She was a famous courtesan, an adherent of Rome, and a friend of a man I once knew very well, but that was when I was a boy. She was wealthy, still lovely, utterly corrupt. She fascinated me but this was the only time that we had spoken. The room smelled of Madonna lilies. Downstairs, in the stalls, I could hear the boys impatient to be gelded.

‘Take off your trousers,’ she said. There were tusks on the wall. I have very little body hair. I looked at myself in the mirror, so obvious under my short shirt, and I could only think of mandrake roots. I could see her behind me, quizzical, appraising, and I had an idea what it was that interested her so.

She ran her hands across my buttocks as a dealer does with bloodstock. I saw her, through the silver mirror, into the white room, a looking-glass fantasy, a reversed image of reversing rules. I was there for her.

‘Did you penetrate this woman?’

‘No father.’

‘Proceed.’

She stood behind me as I stood in front of the mirror and she flattered me with her hands. She had strong brown hands, calloused on the pads, hands I didn’t expect on a woman. She handled me like a bunch of sticks, my five tough skinny limbs, all hard. And then she turned me to her and bent down.

‘Did you ejaculate?’

‘Yes father.’

‘In what part of the woman?’

‘In a bowl on the floor?’

‘Proceed.’

‘She had a piece of porcelain decorated with Greek heroes. She told me to kneel and I went on all fours like a Passiontide donkey and when she dug her heels into my groin I came over Odysseus. She said she called it her Scholar’s Bowl …’

Doll Sneerpiece was not a scholar but fond of gentlemen, although to dub her a limmer, would have been to do her a wrong. Her mother, on her death bed, had taken the young Doll’s tiny hand and given her this advice, ‘Never sell property.’ The Doll had taken this to heart and applied the lesson to her other more merchantable parts.

She was not for sale, she was for hire only, and the rate was steep. She was rich. Rich on her round breasts. Rich on her curved belly. Rich on the peaches of her buttocks. Richest on the fleece of her triangle. ‘My Euclid’ she called it, offering geometric proof to those bogged down in algebra.

Ruggiero, whom she loved, as a bird loves flight, was bookish, high-minded, chaste. When Doll Sneerpiece flaunted her mathematical credentials, Ruggiero fled into the ivory tower of art. Odysseus-like he lashed himself to his desk and plugged his ears against her siren-song. This was difficult because he loved opera.

He had never seen a woman’s … a woman’s … what should he call it? Inkpot?

He fingered his pen and thought of Doll Sneerpiece full of red ink.

It was Ruggiero’s life’s work to reconstruct an index of those manuscripts likely to have been stored in the Great Library at Alexandria. He was a scholar, and like other scholars, he believed that his work, however arcane, would be of estimable value to human kind. Ruggiero hoped that the estimate might be a pension. It is impossible for a man to read and earn money at the same time, unless he is a reviewer, and Ruggiero prayed never to fall so low.

Doll Sneerpiece, who had fallen low on so many occasions that she had made falling into a gracious art, knew exactly what her labours were worth. She had found that by arching her bottom in a calculating manner, she could prop her forearms on the bed and continue to read undisturbed by the assaults on her hypotenuse. It was in this way that she had come to delight in the elevating works of Sappho. Her own copy, in its original Greek, had come from a one-eyed trader in antiquities, who claimed to have stolen it from the Medici themselves. It had come to them by way of Alexandria. When Ruggiero had asked to inspect it, the Doll had pointed to the fork between her legs, where, she said, such things were kept.

A fiction? Certainly, although I see from the extravagant and torn frontispiece that it parades itself as autobiography: ‘The Entire and Honest Recollections of a Bawd’.

Entire? Honest? I doubt it, but why should I? Even science, which prides itself on objectivity, depends on both testimony and memory. Scientific theory has to be built up from previous results. Scientists must take into account what others have recorded and what they themselves have recorded previously. Science deduces and infers from past explanations, past explorations, the investigative technique that tests its theory against all known facts.

But not all facts are known and what is known is not necessarily a fact.

There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer’s fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.

Part of the problem with the neutral observer, who is in fact romantically involved with his subject, is that some time must always elapse between the experiment and the record of the experiment. Infinitely tiny, perhaps, but even without a lover’s gaze, how many fantasies can force themselves into an infinitesimal space?

I know how difficult it is to say
exactly
what happened even a moment earlier. If someone were with me, their testimony might corroborate my own, or it might not. And if there is a photograph? The camera always lies.

The most awkward fact in all this doubt is this: remembering, which occurs now, at this split second, does not prove that what is being remembered actually occurred at some other time. I may be convinced that it did, especially if a number of others, the more the better, are convinced too. When I am alone, and the experience, the emotion, the event, was mine and mine alone, how can I say
for certain
that I have not invented the entire episode, including the faithful memory of it?

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

On what can I depend, if not my past, if not objectivity, if not the clean white coats of science? Should I acknowledge the fiction that I am? A man made of nothing but space and light, a pinpoint on a pinpointed planet stitched among the stars?
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.
A man caught on Time’s hook.

What can balance the inequity of that vast space, which never ends, and my bounded life? Bounded yes, but not by mortality, which is not what I fear, but by smallness, insignificance, which is what I do fear. The unlived life. Life in its hard shell safe from the waters above and the waters below. The home-and-dry life. Sound. Dependable. True?

The train had reached the coast. The sea-light crept in tentacles along the floor. Long waves of light that atomised the solid seats and rigid tables. The train itself wavered.

The man shut in the bright aquarium floated on his own thoughts. His thoughts bubbled out of his head in cartoon exuberance. He caught them, blew them, burst them. He dived down through the layers of light to his shipwrecked past. He had sunk himself so often that he found a whole fleet of boats, ghostly, unattended, changed by the pressure of the water and the work of time.

How much of any value could be raised?

The man forced open a small door. There were his toys, his narrow bed, the place where no light had ever seemed to fall. When he remembered his childhood it was dark, except for a short space in the afternoons between three and four o’clock. Except for two years coloured red.

Above him the water shifted in chessboard squares of dark and light.

How many fantasies in an infinitesimal space?

The sun has turned the sea to diamonds. Behind me, the roar, roar, roar of the motorbikes on the motorway. The definite world of flywheels and tarmac is only the sound of bottled bees.

The dirty sea is changing. It is no longer grey, no longer blue, no longer green, but white and white in peaks and troughs that shape themselves to the curve of my eye.

I confess that I am frightened of the sea. There is the sailor sea and the commercial sea, the oil-well sea and the fishy sea. The sea that tests the land through sublunary power. The rise and fall of the harbour sea and the sea that exists to make maps look prettier. But the functional sea is not the final sea. There is that other sea simply itself. A list of all the things that the sea does is not what the sea is. Today, the sea has jewelled its surface, and silvered its fish under a band of beaten gold. Those who know it well will admit that they hardly know it at all. No-one has been to the very bottom. Except by inference we do not know that there is a very bottom. We do not know it from observation.

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That’s where I am alone, the observer and the observed.

I descend, I try to tell the truth, but the primitive diving-bell that I call my consciousness is a more fallible instrument than the cheap thermometer in my fish-tank. I may not have a very bottom, I may be much shallower than I like to think, or I may be a creature of infinity, for now confined. My real world, as I fondly call it, may be the necessary cable that holds me in waters I can manage.

I, Handel, ask questions but can’t answer them, I’m not a hero, only a chessboard knight hoping to be swifter than the game. While I kept my life to a series of clever moves, I felt well, almost happy, I left no time for reflection. I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror. The tight chain of events began to separate, not physically, I was as busy as before, but emotionally, spiritually. I began to slip between the gaps, the reassuring stepping-stones were pushing farther and farther apart. Handel, holding himself above the water with a pair of forceps, Handel, whose faith did not prove to be a life-belt. When I could no longer cling on, I let go, with some terror and yet some relief. Let go into unknown currents, a voyager through strange seas alone.