Monument Maker, page 25
Or was he, perhaps, a senior assistant at the Church of Scotland’s strange, funereal seminary built on an old MOD air force base in Fife which was known locally as The Sightless Head, and now it feels like the very stone itself is dreaming this tale, that sat around the world there is the topography of this story, dreaming itself into existence, churches and monasteries as First Stone, and Final, which is the name of another church, the First Church of the Stone of Silent Witness, who continue on, in the absence of Max and Pierre (although let’s be honest, we cannot say for sure as to the continued absence of Frater Jim, due to his ability with faces, and the nature of his powers, which we, after much research, are in no position to doubt, even as we doubt his very identity, the very cut of his jib), and who are all stony-cold and implacable in their coming back all over again.
Pierre argued in Full Length Mirror that Christ remained innocent, but God didn’t, God didn’t, so He blinded himself in a turning away from His son and His fate, but truly it was Christ that was blind, and that was untainted and pure, Christ was, like stone is, because there was no volition, which is what Pierre says live on Pebble Mill at One with Angela Rippon when he declares his final project to be a secret tomb for a private benefactor, I too am in the service of God, as Christ was, he says, and I thank God for it, he says, because there but for the grace of God go I, he says, and God is in almost every sentence of this talk and people are appalled or think he has a messiah complex, and instead of gargoyles to vomit wretched rain down cathedral walls Pierre installed lightning conductors on the roofs of his modernist churches, at the zenith of his strange ugly car parks and stacked stone towers and huge uncarved monoliths he installed attractors, so that when the clouds came together and gave birth to light, and sound, from soft friction, up above, like the account in The Bible of the true beginnings of the world, that the stone would receive it, and would channel the storm, and although The Sightless Head has fallen, its remains exist, and still, it is a place of veneration for the faithful, for the faithful of the First Church of Cold Stone, cold bone, this place of the skull, as it stares out over the sea, passive, and alone, now it is an evacuated head, a skull blown open, by a trio of shots from an illegal handgun, is what it best resembles, now, now that all the windows are smashed in, and this book is its dreaming, and the sides exposed, and the windblown through it, and even, on a recent visit, sheep living in the reception area, and there is a ritual, we have researched this, and there are still factions of believers out there in this world that genuflect towards the precise location of this skull-shaped concrete derelict, in honour of art, and vision, and eternity, fair enough, but also in honour of pathetic things like subservience, having no ideas of your own whatsoever, mistaking someone else’s story for yours, and just generally being deluded clowns, all the same, but then you think, what about true love, is that not the same thing, being subservient to an idea and demonstrating a commitment to true love as something that you bow down to, this yielding to something that is not you, and I realise I may be exceeding my remit here, and stepping outside of my jurisdiction, but by being able to say, I am less than this power, is that what naivety means, what true love, uncomplicated, and pure-spirited, is all about—ye shall be as innocent as stone, commandeth the Lord, does he not—and so it starts to look like some kind of weird bait-and-switch-type set-up, in that really the only person capable of taking on the sins of the world is God, and not Jesus, but in some kind of weird gross act of reverse humility God pretends that Jesus has to shoulder all of the blame himself when really He knows, full well, that He Himself will, silently, and forever, deal with it on His own, which is like when your dad pretends you are going to jail for some pathetic misdemeanour and you are terrified out of your wits even though secretly he just has to pay off your fine forever, and he has already agreed to it, to which you either want to say, that is the true labour of a god, or, you know, basically, you vindictive bastard.
And, giving further credence to the idea that the raising of these poems in stone, (poems to stone), (poems to permanence and absence), (stones in poems), was some kind of autobiographical statement, some kind of hermetic personal ritual dedicated to the preservation, (in stone), of a certain summer, is the rumour, much circulated at the time, that the commercial works of Pierre Melville, works that ran from the notorious stone windmill (“Melville’s Folly”) in Africa through to the simple stone cube positioned on Skaw Beach, in Shetland, with the enigmatic markings on its sides,
~^~*~^~
when taken together made up a map of the solar system akin to the one in the Paimon story “Victory Garden,” where each building, in the precise ratio of the distance between them, and their comparative sizes, in their precise hewing-to-scale, matched the relationship of the planets in our solar system, out here in the Milky Way, out here in the loneliness-to-scale of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, which makes of the poor, blasted Sightless Head in Fife, Saturn, unsurprisingly, as if it were literally written in the stars, and let me point you to Venus, which sits on a beach in Normandy, now, as stone is drawn to the sea, as Venus is Aphrodite, is as a pillbox on a beach in the South of France, a simple cube, fallen from the sky, and Pluto may as well be a single grain of sand on the Faroe Isles, for all that astronomy cares, and there are those, too, I don’t doubt, that have followed the stations of this solar system as devoutly as pilgrims on their way to Holy Canterbury, which is to follow the path of The Lovers, and earth is an invisible garden in France, where The Lovers dreamed a dream, and the sun itself, then, is a stone windmill in Africa, a huge stone windmill in Africa whose arms would block out the sun behind the sun, and divide it into rays that pilgrims would dance around arm in arm at certain points of the year, they would dance in and out of the light that the stone windmill provides, and would be called pagan, which is what a stone windmill as the site of the sun would do to us, even though it is modern art, surely, and not archaic or traditional at all, and Mercury, well, Mercury is a secret known only to initiates, it is a secret sculpture in secret, in other words, but unlike Saturn (or Jupiter) (say), Mercury is not recognisable as sculpture, as building, or as anything man-made, it is unknown as sculpture, or sign, or dwelling, it appears, rather, God-given, and when you fall in love you can decide whether the love is something found by you or gifted you by God, is what Mercury says, and who would not choose of their lover to be delivered to them by God Himself, which is to be shot through the heart and to be called Astonished at the end of your life.
And Mercury, too, has disappeared, now, or rather become so confused with its setting that no one could tell you—outside of me, secret me, who will not, and who will scurry off like a mouse at the very suggestion—what is creation, and what is simply the work of creation, so perfectly has it become part of the scene, which is art’s most secret wish, that it could be mistaken for simply being, that it could be overlooked as simply Spontaneous Beauty Occurring, so, overlook me, please, I am as beautiful as a simple flower, is what Pierre’s secret sculpture says, come upon me naked, it says, but the disappearance of these markers in stone time (for this will always be the Stone Age), the absence of these cathedrals to the first minglings of creation, their very disappearance, is what makes us fall in love with ghosts, for which of us is not occupied, which of us is not haunted as a castle, which of us is not a resonant stone dungeon for all of the dead come back to haunt us, and I nearly gave it away there, Mars, a resonant stone dungeon, Frater Jim; I’ll say no more. But what happens next.
Next is this: Pierre goes into seclusion. Everyone thinks he is living in luxury but really he is still kipping in an old rusty shipping container at the arse end of some half-flooded quarry. Then he does the thing on Pebble Mill, the thing. Then he disappears.
You have to wonder what happened to all their books. Where is that library? And what was in it? Is there anything more seductive than a great, secret, uncatalogued library, newly dispersed to the winds?
And then what happens: a body is discovered. A body is discovered come down a river entombed in a mysterious stone. It is a river of Africa. An unknown stone is come upon by a group of villagers in a river of Africa, which like the garden of Delius is for us an invisible village, a village of the mind, as a book is, an unknown stone is carried on a current throughout this book and is now washed up at a village of Africa in this book where the villagers claim that they heard the stone speak, which is why they attempted to prise it apart and when asked in this book, in the village of this book which we must imagine, what sound this stone spoke in, it was described as being like a screeching bird, like a parakeet, was the consensus, like a warning cry or a territorial marking, but then they thought, someone is entombed in the stone, they said, are there floating cemeteries now, they wondered, has someone been sealed in concrete (like a doomed dam worker on the Colorado River, is how the song goes, fallen into the wet concrete below), and so they lift this stone from the water, this coffin stone, is how they describe it, this black headstone, and it makes the sound again, the sound which one of the villagers impersonates, it goes Ook, Ook, she says, for it is a female villager with a lazy eye who presents the impersonation, Ook, she says, Ook, and she waggles her arms like a chicken or maybe an actual parakeet, who knows, and when they lift this coffin stone from out of the river they are surprised at how light it is, that’s exactly what the female villager with the lazy eye says, can you imagine her, she says, it was as if the stone was filled with light, she says, which is an odd thing to say but not if you think of how light the sky is when it is filled with light, which means, I think, that there was some kind of confluence of the elements going on, is absence light, is light mass, is absence present, is mass absence, are the thoughts going through these villagers’ minds, we can imagine, as it goes through our minds, our invisible minds in concert with this book, as we imagine Delius, in his garden, which now is the tomb of the song, and this stone, light-filled, now risen from the waters and prised apart, yes, that is the beautiful phrase we will use because to be prised apart is what the first stone demands, and it is love that makes demands, I don’t care what you say, call me apolitical, it is love, ultimately, that makes demands, and that is to be prized, apart, so as to come together, all over again, and so they crack it open, they crack open this light-as-air tomb, and what do you think they find, well, first they talk about the sign that was engraved on the front,
(~^~*~^~)
which the villagers, and there were three villagers in the beginning, we will reveal at this point there were three female villagers, although one goes completely unrecorded except for her presence, except for her attendance there is nothing else known about her, as if a lazy eye permits us knowledge, as if the scarification on the other villager, which appears as tiny tears, or as footprints, away from, and into, her glassy blue eyes, as pools of pure water in an endless desert, is how we will imagine her now, in this book of invisible encampments, and she says, it was a sign of the sun coming up between the mountains, was how she read it, she says, in a badly subtitled interview afterwards, and then her companion with the imagined lazy eye says, no, to me it was a woman lying back and giving birth, and she says, her legs are raised, in calipers, and the sun is shone between them, she says, in the same badly served translation, she says it, but then she says, ah, she says, it is the third eye on a Chinaman, I realise, it is the creased forehead of a guru, she says, it is a Sahdi Song, she says, but she declines to elaborate, but what I have gleaned is that a Sahdi Song is a song that sounds like it is coming from a long way away, just as tears often feel as if they have been coming forever, just as tears feel as if they were forever being cried, just to arrive, now, in our eyes, is the feeling that she received from the presence of this light-filled grave on the waters at this village of Invisible Africa, is a rendezvous, she is saying, which is one hell of a way to think of everything that appears right in front of you, that it set off towards you somewhere round about the beginning of time, that heartbreak and tears have been stalking you since year zero, and love too, and magic, also, set out long ago, as their companions, and here it is, now, an impossible light-filled stone on the water had made its way towards us, they said, this first three, and it was crying in distress, is what the woman with the water-filled eyes is saying in this book as if it were a memory or a fact, but how else has it come to us, and it is as if we are uncovering some kind of secret causeway, some underground railroad, some series of words and letters that would allow us ingress, and they start to break the stone apart like in a rescue mission and it seems almost impossibly dense compared to how light-filled it appears to be, and it is designed like an Egyptian bark but like a motorboat too, our lady of the pale-blue eyes says, because there is an engine, she says, and the first uncovering, through pickaxe and crowbar, and what were they doing with a pickaxe and crowbar at the river that sunny morning, it begins to sound more and more suspicious, or devious, maybe, devious is the word for the beginnings of us all, after all, but in its unlikelihood is its truth, it seems to me, but they split part of it apart, they sunder it like an Old Testament God, and there they have it: a white cube, all stained and damp with the tears that have been chasing after it, no doubt, and they say it is hermetically sealed, although of course they do not, they say no such thing, the subtitles say, I should say, the subtitles say, they say something like—and this is going on memory now, faulty memory in a book about imagining—something like, there were no seams with which to prise an entrance, I think it was, and seamless, I thought, seamless, not even a pair of testicles is seamless, but this seamless cube takes some imagining, which is as it should be, because as gods cannot we always do better, so they uncover this thing in a white cube, which is like a square of mathematics, I think, now, which is like an imposition of rules, well, okay, stone is the first rule, so what, and inside this impregnable white cube there is a dreaming head, is what this story goes on to reveal, and they take it out and it is a Sightless Head, a Sightless Head whose face has been effaced, whose face has been supplanted, whose face has been removed, and they say, oh my God it is a faceless head speaking and this is what it speaks:
Ook.
And then they discover the body, inside. It is a stone sarcophagus that floats on the water and it is the tomb of a man. And his face, there is something wrong with his face.
His face has been augmented, is how the badly subtitled interview puts it, his face has been augmented, by which the natives meant (natives, how offensive, although native is one thing I have never felt, one thing that has been denied me, in my voyeurism) he was wearing a death mask, they thought at first, and they thought, this white man dressed in a formal suit is wearing the face of his ancestors in death, perhaps, they thought, and they reached out and they were almost able to insert their fingers beneath the skin, they could slide their fingers up and underneath the skin of the face, it was a primitive job, this new face had been sewn on, the body embalmed, dressed in a suit and tie, and then encased in stone, and then the miraculous woman with the pools for eyes said, it is the face of the head, and all three of these villagers in the beginning, and this is sounding more and more like a parable, like a Kabbalistic parable, like the story of the doe, the story of the doe that passed through three iterations of water as a stone, and all three of these imagined women, these headless speakers, turn to face the Sightless Head and it is missing more than eyes, it is a skinned, mummified head, and its face, clearly, has been transplanted onto the body in the tomb, and who rolled away the stone, after all, it was three imagined women in a garden of Africa, inevitably, who were the ones that rolled away the stone and revealed this silently dreaming head as the engine, this face-swapped corpse as the deliverant, which is another word from the subtitles but this time an inspired one, a mishearing, and my own mishearing is to mishear the face of the head as the place of the head, for some reason, that’s how I hear it, and the place of the head is gifted, anew, to the dead, which is why Christ is crucified on Golgotha, which is the place of the head, of the skull, of the head, Golgotha itself means a sightless head is dreaming history, is what the subtitles fail to elucidate, this is prime-time TV, what the fuck do you expect, a sightless faceless head is dreaming history from the beginning and its revelation is a stone that floats on the water in a river in Africa in an invisible garden which is the mind of this book dreaming is not prime-time viewing, so then they call the police, this is what happens, they panic and they call the police, which is always a last resort and let this be a cautionary Kabbalistic tale, they call the police and the police turn up and they panic, two police officers turn up hours later, what the fuck took them so long, how many bodies in Africa, I guess, but they turn up and they panic, up until now thanks to the three dreamy disembodied women it has all been faith and awe but now that the police are here, well, it’s big trouble, buddy, and it’s a whole other drama, as the first of the two police (for police inevitably traffic in twos the whole world over, and now there are five ghosts at this exhumation of the First Church of the Stone of Silent Witness), the first police becomes the police as soon as he sees the body, and its face, and its head, and he says that this is fucking voodoo black magic shit and get this the fuck out of here, this is bad voodoo, he says, this means that someone will die, he says, this says, with certainty, he says, that someone will die, and soon, and that violence will take place, and that there will be much suffering across the land, he says, he, too, is caught up in the bibliomania that is taking place around this entombed corpse, this rolling of the stone, and wasn’t there a story that when the stone is rolled away, in The Bible, that one of the Apostles mentions the presence of someone else in the tomb, of an unknown person, resident, in the tomb of Christ already, when Mary and the girls show up, and so there is (I have always been here before, is how the song puts it), there is an unidentified body in the first tomb, and the police are the first to say that this first dying presages death forever, which is why you should never trust the pigs, and they say, get rid of this fucking thing, they say, this fucking thing needs to be destroyed, and seriously, one of them picks up a big fucking rock from nearby and starts assaulting this excavated burial, this crime scene, possibly, technically, probably, the police just start laying into it and they don’t attack the head, it’s weird, they attack the body, only, they assault the body as if they are afraid to let go of their own ideas, they assault the body in the name of holding off death, which is the worst name of anything, ever, they mutilate this precious corpse, essentially, precious because who has ever seen anything like it, is it not incredible, this stone held up on the waters, these arms fed into a suit, this head, its face replaced, forever, I fear it is my favourite poem, and I fear I may have written it, is what the violence of these pigs says, fear of authorship goes deeper than anxiety of influence, these pigs are saying, as they lay into this corpse, these literary critics are expounding, and soon the corpse is just a bloody mess and its half-sewn face is torn off and it resembles the first man forever, which is a mashed-in man, is that not what some other cop said, something about the future being a boot in the face forever, typical response of cops, this belief in the beating of corpses, in the flogging of horses, which is why Nietzsche lost his mind, because he was not a cop, and here are these cops, flogging a dead horse, flailing a dead businessman, is my theory, because then what happens is the stone disappears, the stone that floats on water was stolen or secreted or smashed up and sold off, but what happens is it disappears without a trace, although go to this village in Africa, look it up, I’m not about to add to its notoriety by naming it, go there and you will inevitably be offered fragments, ashes, chunks, brick-loads of black stone that claim to be from the First Stone on the Water and most of which is mere volcanic rock, aerated stones, badly painted replicas, and but they take away the head, for some reason the head in the cube is taken away, the police make the three girls lift it, by the light of the moon, which had just then come up and made of them silhouettes as they lifted and moved this glowing white cube, glowing faintly now, in the dark, it has to be said, and they carry it like some scene in The Grapes of Wrath, where we view them, somehow, from an angle that pitches them perfectly against the horizon, that makes of them dark ciphers and ghosts, as they accompany this ghostly head on its last verifiable journey, this dream that has dreamed this book, certainly, this dream that has loved and been loved by women and men, this church of memories, this Cathedral of All Summers, and there is something tender, after the violence, in the removal of this head, something grateful, and forgiving, too, as we watch them from this uncanny viewpoint where the moon seems impossibly large, and stained yellow, in the sky, and the women like a painting, on the moon, or a flag, flying, and this stone, silent.
