Art & Lies (7 page)

The words come at my call but who calls whom? The shriek on the wind is ages old, the cry that comes before meaning, the cry that comes out of the wilderness without food or drink. The ragged prophet in burning clothes.

Day and night stretch before the word, hunger and cold mock it, but the Word itself is day and the Word itself is night. The word Hunger the word Cold. I cannot eat my words but I do. I eat the substance, bread, and I take it into me, word and substance, substance and word, daily communion, blessed.

Who calls whom? The word shaped out of the substance as the sculpture is shaped from the stone. The word imposed upon the substance as the wind reforms the rock. The clashing made and making words. The Word out of flux and into form.

On the barrel of the wind the falcon.

I love the deception of sand and sea. What appears is not what is. The long reaches of uncertainty draw me out, barefooted, half-dressed, when there is no colour in the sky. White skin in a white dress along the white edge of the sea.

She carried white roses never red.

As Apollo dragged the stars through his wheels she picked up the petals at her feet. Above her, the full moon like a clear coin, and in the water her reflection, horn slender horn white.

She wore the moon behind her head as a saint wears a halo.

She threw the petals in the water and stirred the stars.

This was what she wanted; to shift the seeming-solid world, to hang over it as the moon hangs over it, casting it according to the hour. To carry white roses never red.

The Wise Sappho. Am I wise? Was it wise to fall in love with Sophia, one of nine children, and if not the most chaste, the most difficult to please?

My Muse.

There was a time when she was courted by every poet and philosopher, even Socrates. She chose me. I was writing in those days, writing out of beauty, out of love, and because of her, out of wisdom. The wisdom of the body.

Our feet were bare, the sun was hot, there was no thought unpassed through the sun. No thought not pressed underfoot with the harvest grapes. Thoughts transformed by heat and weight until they no longer resembled the thinkers. Intoxicating thoughts, and we were drunk on the beach, Sophia and I, drunk on words and resin wine.

I put the words into a flask and flung them out to sea. Flung them far out from me, made through myself, but not myself. Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

The world is packed tight with fools.

Here, today, spread out in front of me, in numerous learned tomes, is a record of my supposed love-affairs, as construed from my work. Atthis, Andromeda, Gyrinno, Eranna, Mnasidika. They sound like precious stones. They were precious stones but not studded in my heart. They were studies of the imagination. The wind on that day, the purple sea, the copper drum flashing a message off a lovely face, were as much to me as that face. Some I loved, some I dreamed of loving, some were names carved roughly into the rock. It doesn’t matter, not now, not then, I was and am still moved by things remote from me. Things demanding words, things whose life I understood so well that they seemed to be my own. They were not my own. Not one flesh but one image and the image more potent than the flesh.

My Muse. Sophia and a passion that does not pass.

Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. Be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.

Across the burning beach a man bright-haired. His camel was the colour of washed sand. His hands and his face were golden. The light struck his shoulders and flinted away. He was run through with the sun. He carried a lance under his arm, and held, in either hand a shell and a stone.

He stretched out his hand and from the shell I heard the long poem of the world. I closed my eyes to find them full of starfish where the sun beat on them in steady rhythm.

My friend told me that it was his task to bury the shell and the stone before the end of time. They were all of art and mathematics. The pith and marrow of us before the end. I looked behind him and saw Time churning the sands in pyramids and river beds. The caravanserai of civilisation and the patient desert.

‘Dust to Dust,’ he said, ‘and the sun herself obscured.’

He turned away and I turned with him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. Ignorant of alchemy they put their faith in technology and turned the whole world into gold. The dead sand shone.

*

‘And what good are the treasures of Egypt,’ said Doll Sneerpiece, ‘if I never again see his sweet face?’

I am a Sexualist.
Casti connubi
? (as the Pope says). It’s all Latin to me. Why marriage? Why chaste marriage? Is there nothing else? Nothing more? An alliance of love.

What marries me to you? Is it a piece of paper? Then I am not married to you. Is it Church approval? Then I am not married to you. Is it the fact of a roof, the fact of a bed, the fact of two keys in one lock? Then I am not married to you. Is it the Eye of the Law? Then I am not married to you.

If it is the daily pleasure in your face. If it is the quickening of my spirits at your face, if it is your face I seek when I seek no other, if it is the love of you that is consent, if it is consent to be of the same mind, then let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. There is some Latin that I understand;
Consensus facit matrimonium et non concubitus.

And what about
copula?

Read between the lines and there’s nothing but dirt. Dirt under my fingernails, dirt in my mouth, dirt between my legs where the pleasure grows. Don’t trust Rome. It was Savonarola (Florentine 1452–98 Occupation: Martyr and Zealot) standing in the courtyard of the Medici who denounced me as a corruptor and a devil and had my work burned.

My work. My work. The words spitting upwards in tongues of flame. The words smoking the clear uncritical air. The words curling off the manuscripts. The manuscripts cracking in the fire.

Sophocles (Athenian 496–406
BC
Occupation: Playwright). ‘Gods, what impassioned heart and longing made this rhythm?’

My heart, my longing, the heart at bay where you hunt me. The heart that runs through the wood, sees a stream, crosses it, takes the cut against the cliff, and comes cornered to the sea. Where now? Where now, with the beating blue water behind me and your voice at my head?

Who calls whom? You call me your True Hart, a five-year stag with a beginning crown of surroyal antlers. Is it my hart-horn that pleases you? Is it your horn, brassy in the frost, that wakes me from quiet ease into this frothing chase?

This is the nature of our sex: I take bread from your hand. I take you on my horn. You skin me and call me ‘your little red deer’. You are fond of my haunches, I am fond of the flat of your hand. My heart. My longing. As the parched animal is slaked at the rich pool, I have satisfied myself with water from your well. My mouth knows the shape of you. My mouth overflows.

Out of my mouth, the words in frothing chase. The words that are spoken before they are written. The words that fill up the air and name it. Taking names out of the air I have pressed them on to the page. Atthis, Andromeda, Gyrinno, Eranna, Mnasidika. The burning and the burnt. The words that scorched my mouth and immolated themselves. The burning book that all the pyres of Time have not put out. Sappho (Lesbian
c.
600
BC
Occupation: Poet).

Doll Sneerpiece was a woman, and like other women, she sieved Time through her body. There was a residue of time always on her skin, and, as she got older, that residue thickened and stuck and could not be shaken off.

Her breasts, her thighs, were stippled with time. From her nose down to the corners of her mouth, were two river-bed creases where time flowed in obedience to gravity, a gravity Doll Sneerpiece denied by smiling at Newton in the street.

She waited for Ruggiero. Time mocked her.

Ruggiero didn’t love her. She looked in the glass.

‘Tar and Dross,’ she said to herself. ‘He is only a creature of Tar and Dross.’

‘And you?’ asked the glass. ‘What are you?’

She did not listen to the timely replies of scholarship and scripture. Had she, she might have been downhearted to find that every villainy in the world since Eve, was either from her or for her. The clock struck. Ruggiero was late. The clock struck again. The Doll answered the glass. ‘I am a woman who does not repent.’ The clock was silent.

She did not repent her past, she did not repent her years. She did not repent her gold, she did not repent the getting of it. She did not repent her lust for young men, her contempt for older ones. She did not repent her sex.

She reddened her hair, she rouged her cheeks, she bloodied her lips, she whetted them. That Time, the Destroyer, was a man, she had no doubt. She thought bravely about his indifferent scythe and that led her to think of Ruggiero, her own young blade, green as grass. Among the campion she would have him, chain him with daisies, prick him by the briar rose. She would roll him in buttercups until he was spread with her. There would be no clouds that day, and if the bells tolled, she would not heed them. She would be sweet in the meadow of her love.

Ruggiero was nervous. He had been sent a note from Doll Sneerpiece to meet her in her rooms in one hour. The clock struck. How could he go? He was a scholar. He gazed at his strong straight body in the glass. The clock struck again. It was true that he did not look like a scholar. He was neither hunched nor whiskered, he did not smell, he kept no noticeable stains upon his clothes. He had good eyesight and he was not ill-tempered. His nose and his ears were clean. No-one would have taken him for a scholar.

‘But women,’ he said, ‘Women are venom and rot. Women are the sweet painted screen around the night-soil trough. Women are the lure of passing flesh stretched over the everlasting carcass. Their end is food for worms. There is no sin that a woman does not know, no goodness that she knows of her own accord. She tempts me as a feed bucket tempts a hungry horse. She plagues me out of Egypt with locusts and honey. Her mouth is a wound. Her body is a sore.’

If the clock struck again, Ruggiero did not hear it, perhaps he was a scholar after all.

To carry white roses never red.

White rose of purity white rose of desire. Purity of desire long past coal-hot, not the blushing body, but the flush-white bone.

The bone flushed white through longing. The longing made pale by love. Love of flesh and love of the spirit in perilous communion at the altar-rail, the alter-rail, where all is changed and the bloody thorns become the platinum crown.

Crown me. You do. You weave the budding stems, incoherent, exuberant, into a circle of love. I am hooped with love. Love at my neck, love at my heels, love in a cool white band around my head. The bloody beads are pearls.

This love is neither wild nor free. You have trained it where it grows and shaped me to it. I am the rose pinned to the rock, the white rose against the rock, I am the petals double-borne, white points of love. I am the closed white hand that opens under the sun of you, that is fragrant in the scent of you, that bows beneath the knife and falls in summer drifts as you pass.

Cut me. You do. You cut me down in heavy trusses, profusion, exhaustion, and soak me in a stream of love. Love runs over me. Love at my breasts, love at my belly, my belly heaped with petals, a white hive of love. White honey at your hand.

Who calls whom? Do I call you my rose? Do you call it me? Do we call it the love that grafts us twice on one shoot? Muser and Muse. Out of those two, the mysterious third, two spirits, one word …
(tertium non datum
). The Word not given but made. Born of a woman, Sappho 600
BC.
The Rose-bearer and the Rose.

In the sea-green hall where the colour slapped against the walls in shallow wash, she held me against the rocks, she kissed me. Her mouth was full of little fishes that swam into mine. Little fishes between tongue and teeth, little flicks of sex.

There was salt on her hands, salt rubbed into the wounds of me, wounds of waiting, wounds of pain. Wounds in need of salve yet fearing it.

‘Kiss me,’ she said. I did. Kissed her mouth where the sea was, kissed her mouth where the ship was waiting, kissed her mouth on a flotilla of time, jumping, ship to ship, mouth to mouth, all the mouths kissed through time.

I knelt at the V of her stomach muscles lifted up, two hands in prayer. I sang the long praise of her belly. Her fingers coraled my hair. Love me Sophia, on the narrow band of white sand, that separates us from the sea.

In the dark places that do not need light, where light would be a lie, overstating what is better understood invisibly, it is possible to resist Time’s pull. The body ages, dies, but the mind is free. If the body is personal, the mind is transpersonal, its range is not limited by action or desire. Its range is not limited by identity.

I need the dark places to get outside of common sense. To go beyond the smug ring of electric light that pretends to illuminate the world.

‘Nothing exists beyond this,’ sings the world, glaring at me from its yellow sockets, ‘nothing exists beyond now.’

I challenge the stale yellow light to a duel.

Fight me. Fight me now. Hand to hand combat between the living and the dead. The optimistic flesh and the spanner-twist of mortality. One full turn clockwise and the rusted bolts seal the lid. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the tick, tick ticking, and the ghastly fingers creeping round the smug enamel face.

Time and the bell. The sea-bell through the sea-fog. The warning bell at night-time, the waking bell at day. The wedding bell and the final bell. The black-clappered bell and the broken day.

Under the black bell, lie the bodies in single file, one behind the other. One hard on the heels of another, one by one, the fall, the clang, silence.