Monument Maker, page 24
Only but it draws the heat, and the rumours spread, and soon the pair of them are being shunned and there are groups of villagers who immediately stop talking as soon as Jim or Max appear, and then there is graffiti on the house of Delius, across the front of it—of course the local history association and the village preservation bods are up in arms, this is sacrilege—but nevertheless, it is written across the front of that cottage that could Delius even remember, the words Thank You For Your Persistence, and of course there is a rumour that persists till this day that Max painted it himself, naked, and on smack, because this was the sense of permission he took from the general unease of the villagers that the sight of his flaccid passed-out cock on the river had presented, and what does it mean anyway, should we take some time to break it down, as Jim, when he visits, says, wow, beautiful sentiment from your haters, he says, basically, although of course that was not at all how anyone spoke back then, haters, but still, Jim says, who is he thanking for “their” persistence, and Jim makes the inverted commas above his head like horns or a headdress, thank you for your persistence, he says, and then he says, wow, all over again, he said wow when he first saw it, but it’s wow all over again when he says, thank you for your deathlessness, he says, thank you for your eternal energies, he says, thank you for your constant and complete transformations, he says, and then he’s back to the thing where every single fucking moment is copulating forever and the whole world is code, code, code.
Pierre gets back with Hildegard and there’s the first of several scenes. Pierre explodes, and is confused, and in a secret terror also, when he sees the graffiti on the front of the house. He neglects to tell Jim that he has in fact written the exact same thing elsewhere in this story. It was vandals, Frater Jim shrugs, even as he is half passed out at a table in the invisible garden known as France, even as he is sitting there in a pair of boxer shorts and even when Pierre finds tins of the exact same colour of paint alongside a paintbrush and another crumpled-up pair of paint-stained boxer shorts behind some pink plant pots in the greenhouse, even then Max denies it and he says, you have no idea of the persecution we have had to put up with since you left on your honeymoon, he says, and Pierre thinks, Paimon, is it Paimon that is writing this, he thinks to himself, and he shudders, but he holds his nerve.
It’s a paradox, Max says, I shall call it the Pierre Paradox, he says, and all the while he is slurring his words and a cigarette is rolling between his lips and spilling ash all down his bare torso, and the paradox is this, he slurs, you’re gutted if Pierre tries to fuck your girl, he says, and you’re gutted if Pierre doesn’t try to fuck your girl, and Pierre says to him, I fucked your girl and I didn’t even try, and he walks off, but then that’s when he discovers the fucking dog corpse.
There is some kind of liquid leaking from beneath the door of an outhouse, an old wooden door, flaked white. Pierre approaches and goes to open it. Max shouts to him not to do that. Don’t go in there if I was you, he says, and then he says, it’s a work in progress, he says, what the hell, a clumsy attempt at sculpture, he says, an installation by an idiot savant, he says, and now he is ranting and talking to himself about killing as naive art, what the fuck is he on about, as Pierre opens the door to a charnel house scene where a dog’s body has been torn apart and which lies, spatchcocked, its poor back broken so that it looks like a bat, like the stuff of the first nightmare, its wings spread and nailed to the floor, and holy fuck, Pierre cries, you fucking crucified a dog, and Max says, no, not correct, we crucified a dog, we took apart the body of a dog, we exposed the inner workings to the outside, he said, and when I say we, he said, I mean myself and your Frater Jim, but what the fuck, Pierre says, this is just pointless fucking cruelty, and Max said, you honour only cruelty with a point? and Pierre told him to fuck off, and the dog’s face, the dog’s face is fucking missing, oh Christ, what the fuck did you do with its face, Pierre demands, and he imagines its smooth, peeled-off face, lying folded somewhere like a towel, and he said, Jim has the skills of the old masters, he said, the old masters, Max says, which is a figurative art, which is a technology of reproducing reality, he says, perfectly, and he believed that dog to be a fake, Max said, and so he enlisted me in its kidnap, he said he feared it had escaped from some aborted tests he had made when he released automatons of his own creation into the wild, Max went on, and Pierre was incredulous, but you know he is ugly as sin, Max says, come on, we admit he is ugly as fuck, and Pierre says, sure, he is one ugly motherfucking giraffe-looking creature, that’s for sure, he says, well that’s because he is literally wearing someone else’s face, Max said, he got built a new face after he was scarred in the war, he said, and now he skins the face off dogs in revenge? Pierre said, and Max just said, compassionless love, he said, yes to what is, he said, even as the faces are peeled from dogs and they are nailed to the ground like bats while we search for signs of creation inside their bodies, and Pierre says, for fuck sake, what are you, a fucking paranoid schizophrenic now? were you looking for a fucking bug, for a fucking recording device? and Max said, no, we were looking for the fingerprints of its creator, and that’s it, they both stare at each other in silence in this garden that has been imagined so many times now, this garden that is multiple, now, this multiform garden that features a crucified and eviscerated dog, now, and what the fuck did Jim do with this new face of his, Pierre says to Max after a time and Max said, he returned to where he was born and remarried his widow, again, he said, the woman who had long believed him to be dead, he said, he remarried her in secret, without her ever suspecting that he was the same lover, come back, all over again, he said, that is what he did with his second face, and plus he held his tongue, too, and never ever told her he had come back, and okay, that’s a good one, okay, Pierre says, that’s a good one, I’ll give you that, fuck me but that is a sense of poetry right there that your man Jim has, he says, and he feels a little awe at the balls of this giraffe-faced monstrosity, whether he’s telling the truth or not but fuck me, something in his face looks exactly like that, he has to admit, and then Pierre says to Max, so what happened to his wife and didn’t he ask us if we were gay almost straight away, and Max says, his wife died, he says, his wife died soon after he remarried her, he said, and Pierre said, don’t fucking tell me, he cut her open to see if he could find his own fingerprints, and Max laughed, ha ha, he said, that’s a fucking good one, you are on top form, Pierre, he said, and then he said, I was spoken to by a disembodied head that called itself the Lion of Judah from the bottom of a well in Africa, he said, just so long as we are stating bald facts incredulously, he said, and then he said, his wife and our mad giraffe friend moved in together, and she went to hammer in a nail to hang a picture, what picture? Pierre interrupted him, well, it’s funny you should ask, Max said, because I believe it to number among one of your favourites, and Pierre says, I know what you are going to say, she went to hang the painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger of peasants in winter, and Max says, grow some imagination, you louche, he says, this is France, baby, he actually says, and then he says, she went to hang a reproduction of Goya, and Pierre said to him, don’t fucking tell me, it was Saturn devouring his young, but no it fucking wasn’t, Max said, it was The Third of May, bitch—because by now he was out of control—and Pierre said, Jesus, no, and Max said, yes, but she was never able to hang that particular date on her wall due to the fact that she hammered a nail straight into an electricity cable and fried her brains out on the spot.
Events were overtaking them. Ideas were running wild. They stood there, silent, at the tipping point of our tale.
Then: did you know that Goya’s headless corpse is buried inside his own art? Max said to Pierre. It’s true, Max said, although it’s also true that Max was drunk as fuck by this point, and stoned, and off his head on smack. When Goya’s body was disinterred it turned out it was missing its head, so they took what was left and reburied it in the Hermitage of Saint Anthony of the Flowers in Madrid, Max said, the walls of which are lined with frescos Goya painted in his lifetime. And what about his head? Pierre asked. It has never been found, Max said. It has never been found because Goya’s head is secreted in his art, Max said, Goya’s head is secreted in the ark that illuminates The Third of May. Fucking hell, Pierre said, and the two of them just stood there. Fucking hell.
And now we have crossed over, and our tale starts to unravel, and Max kills himself, out of the blue, with no hint or build-up or any sense of dramatic denouement beyond this feeling, already stated, of being out of balance, beyond this feeling of somehow pushing beyond some kind of tipping point, although of course he had been behaving in such an extreme way perhaps they should have spotted the signs, but they were living as part of a black magick commune, so I think we can forgive them if the signals were a little muddied, but now they are sat around the table, and they are talking with Pierre who had some commissions coming in by this point, whose career as an architect, by this point, was starting to take off, he was starting to receive commissions, grants, acclaim, whereas Max was really only feted, publicly at least, as a never-guessed and non-rumoured half of Paimon, so where was his own signature, so that Max was contemptuous when Pierre announced he had taken big money for designing a building from a multinational company that had historical links to the Nazis, and Pierre had called him out on it, what about compassionless love, he said, and Max said, is it really, watching someone you could otherwise help, writhing, drowning, in a pathetic ditch, was he talking about himself, was it a cry for help, Max was incoherent at this point, drunk, and stoned, as usual, and he said, is it really, again and again, and then he brought up the case of The Kommandant, the unknown artist whose works had been identified, and verified, as being from the same hand—Lord knows how—in concentration camps around Poland, appearing in the early to mid-1940s, like environmental art with pointless tunnels that turned in on themselves to nowhere but that were miles long despite themselves, or the inexplicable three-tiered target signs, cut into barbed-wire fences around the camps, like an RAF sign or the three layers of hell, and Max said, the only person with the ability to create that kind of art is a Kommandant, is a prison guard, is an insider, and Pierre came back at him, quoting some fantasy or science fiction author, and he said to him, the only people that do not approve of escape are the prison guards themselves, he said, but Max ignored him and instead he leaned across the table and took Hildegard’s hand, with a dramatic motion, and looked into her eyes, and kissed her goodnight, and then he rose from the table, and went upstairs, to the guest room in Delius’s invisible house of the brain named France, in the summer of 1985, and with his one good arm shot himself three times—miraculously, impossibly—through the head, and died thereafter.
5. BASILICA OF THE BORNLESS ONE
They tell the story of the doe. Three great Tzaddikim awoke one morning to find a young doe gazing at them by the side of a small pond with two peacocks and four grey herons. The doe had a deep wound in its leg and was close to death. One of the Tzaddikim, who had been declared to be the wisest Tzaddikim in one of the secret kingdoms known only to God Himself, blessed be His name, held up his hand and made a spell that turned the doe to stone. When this was achieved the other two Tzaddikim lifted the stone and dropped it into the water so that it floated down through the water and lay there motionless at the bottom of the water. He then commanded that the birds should sing and raise the stone from slumber only when the other Tzaddikim were out of earshot. Later the wisest Tzaddikim gave a series of oral instructions where he sang to students the song of the birds. This song went unrecorded until the writings of Benzillah of Diagoras or Benzillah the Low to the Earth, whose work The Qutub was said to be the final resting place of the song. Indeed The Tomb of The Song, it became known as, with its correct enunciation hidden throughout its 241,334 words.
There is a ritual known as The Bornless One, but which is known to initiates as The Headless One, which means The Deathless One in the Light of Death but also it spells it thus: that the Light of Death is called Monument Maker.
There is a rumour that the Knights Templar worshipped a talking head named Baphomet.
There is a story that Frater Jim reanimated the dead and could read the future—and rewrite the past—due to powers gifted to him through great suffering and the grafting of another man’s face onto his own, a man who had the power to reanimate the dead and to read the future and to rewrite the past.
There is a rumour about the disposal, in the invisible garden of Delius, in France, and the subsequent disinterring, of the decapitated body of Holy Maximilian Rehberg.
There is a literary subterranea, with access points in, and out.
We know roughly what happens in the hours following Max’s death. In the hours following Max’s death Pierre, we presume, and Frater Jim, it seems likely, saw through his neck with a two-man blade, the kind used for felling trees. The head then disappears, along with the ceramicist Hildegard von Strophe, who leaves the village and disappears into obscurity at this point; we think.
There is a reading of The Bornless One, we believe, MacGregor Mathers’s rendering of it, we believe, and afterwards the two take the magickal name Monument Maker, a name that is fraternal and pronounced in its sharing (cf. Paimon). A sky burial is proposed; too messy, will attract raptors from all over, the stench of the corpse will bring us to the attention of the neighbours; we can speculate, endlessly, but the point is it never happens. We can also speculate, from what we know of the history of these two, the affiliations of this pair, and of their, let’s say, historical proclivities, so that we may assume, in not too fantastical a manner, that the headless corpse may have been interfered with in some way, we speculate that perhaps this notorious pair took turns embracing it, or who knows, lay down and spooned with it in the grass as it leaked all over itself, or who knows, (more probably) lay upside down with it and held it by the feet as though its head had simply been lowered down through some kind of noumenon from out of the air, as if poor Maximilian merely dipped his head into the waters of death as an intrigue or a refreshment.
And then, this final water, this first stone: Pierre is living in an industrial container in an abandoned quarry in France, somewhere isolated, somewhere impossible and unexpected. He is engaged in building a city beneath the waves. Occasionally he puts his head in. He gets down on his hands and knees and he dunks his head into the waters, which is a murk of shapes, which is permanently occluded, but which he recognises as something that is not himself.
The light of a religious painting is facile, now. The light in a rotten old cloister, in a monastery, in the summer of its abandonment is, too, facile, compared to the way the light is never still beneath the waves, although, of course, go too deep and it is darkness forever, but it is in the rising up, into the sun, from beneath the waves, the blessed rising up, that we hold our trust in, because it is where religious art finds its summer, its perfect meridian, in resurrection.
But the cathedral does not want to be built. Pierre has become a mere architect. And as his fame and reputation grow he publishes, privately, Full Length Mirror, that enigmatic account of a summer, that guide to odd religious architecture, complete with those evocative photographs, and those strange lines about how the elements are longing in love for everything that they are not, he publishes it privately, in a subscription edition, though secretly most of the copies end up at the bottom of the flooded quarry, where he drops them in, one by one, into that same mirror that held a whole city beneath it, an inverted world to which he made offerings of a single summer. And where has Frater Jim gone?
Perhaps he is with a new face, perhaps he has returned as someone in disguise, perhaps he lurks, still, on the edge of our telling, secreting himself in our story as another character completely. Perhaps he is an assistant on the realisation of the Church of Christ the Scientist, as designed by Pierre Melville, in the fields, outside East Kilbride, in Scotland, all that is left of which, now, is an overgrown car park, with scorch marks still in the stone, as if Christ had touched down in his spaceship and everyone had gone running, is all that’s left of Pierre’s first modernist church which was known locally as The Slab, The Pool Table and, yes, unbelievably, as though precognitive of its future as ruins (which is the spell cast by the ugliest of architecture, I’m sorry to say but it’s true): The Multi-Storey Car Park.
