Monument Maker, page 27
He is lying on the floor of the bedroom of Delius’s old house, the same one with the garden that was painted invisible by his lover. And Delius died of syphilis and went blind, died of syphilis from whores and a life lived, and went blind for it, too, his calcified cock, because he used up all his sight with his greedy eyeballs, greedy eyeballs all protruding like goldfish is his cock in his pants. And here’s Maxi on the floor like a broken doll, his limbs gone this way and that, and I thought, I wanted you to rearrange me, that’s what I wanted most of all, baby. I wanted you to orchestrate me. And now my darling is on the floor with his limbs cast left and right and is disarrayed in a photograph forever.
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The light of death is monument maker.
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Have you heard of an angel called the Brown-Skinned Virgin? She came down to earth and fucked a man silly so that the image of her was left on his heart, and on his skin, beneath the veil where she fucked him. She gives you power to do things. For instance, if you wanted to stop drinking you would promise her that you wouldn’t drink for a year and then miraculously you wouldn’t. I promised Max I would kill my heart dead for him, but I couldn’t.
When I look at that photograph, I wonder if his powers were real, my baby. My baby died to a shooting in the head. And yet he has a power on me still, my baby. Compassionless love, he said, it’s compassionless love that we practise, but to me it was like killing your heart dead, but it’s love, he said, no, it’s true love, was what he said.
I can’t tell you what went on behind closed doors, no, not what we practised, not what went on in the initiations. No. Not because it would blow your mind even though it might, but because I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. I wouldn’t want to ruin it for anyone who might be thinking of initiation themselves. If you knew it then it wouldn’t work, that’s all I’m saying, or wouldn’t work as good, is what I’m saying, so I guess I am saying it works, and here I am all over myself again.
Their ideas were aristocratic, though really most of them were manifested in art, and in writing. They pictured a ruling elite, they were anti-democrats, and so people called them fascists. People? People weren’t even listening. They envisaged a band of warrior monks, aesthetes and thinkers and spiritual libertarians who were tough enough to kill their hearts dead so they could beat off the barbarians when they came running. ’Cause that’s the trouble with intellectual spiritual aristocratic types, on the whole, Maxi said, they’re normally a bunch of crap poofs who are overthrown at the first sign of a thug. To beat an illiterate thug half to death is a mercy beating, is compassionate and graceful, was the thinking.
Here’s how they attracted initiates. They left cassette tapes in strategic locations. Cassette tapes with specific instructions and the build-up was intense. We would announce initiations taking place, initiations taking place, we would say, this is the Church of the Stone of First Witness, we would say, initiations taking place, and we would give a precise set of instructions, a precise set of instructions in a voice like an automaton or a mannequin or a music box or a computer—to be here at a certain time, to find your way here—and we would leave the cassettes in phone boxes and in charity shops and pop them through random letter boxes and drop them in shopping baskets and on church pews in the dark and then we would wait.
Who listens to cassette tapes that just appear in front of them and then goes ahead and obeys their commands? Would-be initiates do, was the thinking, the faithful, in themselves, and the rightness of how things went, was the thinking. Which was our core audience, was the thinking.
And we would wait at the intimated location, the intimated location was what Max always called it, always those words, and Pierre and Jim the Giraffe as well, and we would wait in the dark and mostly they would never show up, but sometimes they would, and we would hood them and put a knife to their throats and wrestle them downstairs and into a back room as if we had press-ganged them into life itself, which is where it would begin and what I can’t tell you any longer. Soon we had a band of believers, a mission of cold dead hearts.
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claimed he liked psychedelic rock, but really his favourite song was “We Are the World.” This was our favourite ritual I can tell you about. We would watch a video recording of “We Are the World” and we would try to name everyone as they appeared on camera as quickly as we could and every time we would do it Maxi thought Dionne Warwick was Tina Turner and he would shout, there’s Tina, before going on to, I don’t know, George Harrison, I think, it’s a long time since I have watched this video because my heart would surely break to see it one more time and not want to name anyone, any more, except to want to get Tina Turner wrong, come back and get Tina Turner wrong all over again, Maxi, my baby, and he had so many different faces, my Maxi, so many looks, you would never tire of his face, his good looks, because every time you would see in it a mystery, you have the body of a twenty-one-year-old, he would say to me, and he wouldn’t even open his eyes when he said it, he is feeling me with his fingers and he has his cock inside me, his hard cock and trying to sleep with that, sometimes he would pulse it, in his sleep, he would pulse his beautiful cock inside me and I would wonder how can you stay hard all night and I guess it’s because he was non-stop thinking about sex when he was unconscious, that’s what he would say, my night-time thoughts are pure sex, baby, he would say, or he would pull me and throw me over him so I was on top and he would take my tits in his mouth, my twenty-one-year-old tits, baby, I would say to him, you like that baby, he would say, you like sucking my beautiful tits, I would say, and we gave each other those gifts, the words we gave as gifts to each other, and somewhere it is written forever, right
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enter me best that way, I gasped, I gasped when he entered me that
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of an outtake when he was trying to record his lines for “We Are the World” and it was our favourite cult film and we would watch it and laugh so much at Dylan because he could barely stand and his singing is awful and Lionel Richie is starting to despair but even Dylan is laughing, he is laughing at how laughable the whole scene is, he is laughing at how awful his singing is, he is impressed that he is so wasted and unconcerned on an afternoon spent recording a big charity single and he says things like, I think you can just go ahead and delete that one right away, he says, and he laughs at no one in particular, and we would laugh too, for pure joy at that video which was our cult favourite back when we had just met and instantly fallen in love and when they would sing, “we are the children,” I knew it was us, back in the garden, they were singing about you and me, Maxi, and the way that we fit, together, in an invisible garden.
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no, the Nazis never cared for animals, he said, the Nazis made robot dogs, he said, the Nazis created strange mutations, he said, because it was the only way their hearts could feel, instead, he said, instead we make of our hearts a mighty fortress, was what he said, and then, he said, we yield, that was the phrase he would repeat when I asked him about dogs and trust and vivisection and what the Nazis were up to during the war, when he would kneel by the bath and stroke the single leaf of a plant like a dying relative in a peaceful hospice at the very end of their life.
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into the bathtub one by one and he would kneel down next to them and he would clean the dust and the weird mites and the disease from their leaves with a soft wet cloth and he would take each trembling leaf in his hand and he would spread them out and then he would run the cloth along all of the veins in the leaf, and he would do it so delicately, like a hand in marriage, like a trembling nuptial palm, and I thought of Hitler and his dog, didn’t Hitler love a dog and care for animals and paint flowers growing up? No, the Nazis
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seafood restaurant we loved to cycle to where we would sit outside and always order a prawn cocktail in a big cup with a long spoon at the noisy market where you could watch everything going on in the street and I would have tomato ketchup in mine and Maxi would pull a face even though his glass was basically crazier and didn’t even have any salad in it, only prawns and hot green Tabasco sauce like they do it in Mexico, only this is France, silly, and a place that sold steaks, steaks from Argentina, I think, only it had a wide smoking gallery where we would sit and smoke for hours and share the same piece of steak back and forth, and some wine, and a Corona beer, like they do it in Mexico, only this is France, Maxi, how about a Kronenbourg 1664, you silly, and we sat on a bench in the square and Maxi told me this awful story about his mother, how at the end she was alcoholic and dying of cancer and would get drunk and take pills and end up naked in the bath and unconscious and he found her there, naked, with her head all shaved and dying of cancer, and passed out unconscious, and how he couldn’t lift her, how he couldn’t lift his old bald sick mother out of a coma in the bath, basically, and then the ambulance arrived and it took the ambulanceman and himself, combined, to lift his bald naked mother, she was naked as well as bald in there, you can picture the scene, and she’s dying and who knows, has probably gone on herself already, but then Maxi says that while he was waiting for the ambulance to arrive that he had the urge to strip off his clothes and get into the empty bathtub with his dying mother, his dying mother who has passed out cold and who knows, undoubtedly wet herself, he climbs in but he can’t fit next to her, he can’t move her and there’s no room, so as he has to go top-to-tail with her, he has to lie down with his face at her feet and his feet up around her passed-out face, and he takes her feet in his hands, these hideous old feet, who could imagine them, and he holds a foot in each hand and right then I saw him there, with this delicate plant, in the bath, stroking this trembling leaf, at the end, and that was the first great lesson that love taught me against my will.
Who knows where else in the story these words are speaking.
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It’s autumn now. The warm September of my years. And I feel Maxi as if risen out of the page. And come in, a man.
Maxi, darling, how much did you love me, once, and he says, all my love, he says, all my love, and he quotes to me a poem where there is a wet road after rain like a river running uphill, and there is a yearning to be up amongst the sun, forever, which is to lie in your arms, princess, and when he would call me princess I would say to him, only if you can redefine your notion of a princess who belches and doesn’t have a magic wand and has calipers on her legs
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about how we are the first lovers, about how it is like two people invented fucking, like we had no idea of technique or of the rules of love or etiquette or performance, or words for it, even, we just went at it, and it was beyond language, beyond ideas, beyond anything but the longing of the flesh for the flesh, the best sex is beyond language, Maxi wrote to me, and he said, that is why the best sex writing is by Julio Cortázar in his book Hopscotch, where he makes up words like
[Unintelligible] [Unintelligible] [Unintelligible]
There’s nothing to do but act like you can handle it, is what Cortázar says, this is in another poem, although he doesn’t say that exactly, I’m going on memory here, my faulty memory which I can feel slipping away already, this poem I remember about time being ahead and time being undone and everything out of joint with itself, except for writing, I think it is he says, except for writing, I believe, is his point, so write for the present, he says, and for the future, he says, make monument of the journey, he says, then he ends on one word: turbulence, he writes. Turbulence, I think, is how it ends.
But I won’t talk about poetry too much, although poetry is my love, poetry and ceramics, in the end, and I combined the two throughout my life, I have worked to reconcile poetry and life, which is to cure yourself of poetry, to walk out the other side of it, like Rimbaud, Rimbaud, too, who wanted to be up in the sun and forever, only I used ceramics
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simple things on simple plates that I painted and hand-glazed myself in a workshop just along the way from the imaginary garden we inherited from Delius, for a summer, anyway, when the three of us lived there, Pierre and Maxi and myself, and I would rise in the mornings and leave Maxi sleeping, as blind and as fulfilled and as dreaming of a garden as old Delius himself, and I would tiptoe out, into the sunshine, into the hot street with voices calling from windows and a stray drunk from the night before, and speak to the white-haired man that ran the boulangerie in my nightmare French and he would laugh and I would take a coffee and a little cherry tart and I would head for my studio with the light streaming through the high windows—it was an old garage where I think buses had been stored—and I would paint dancing figures on these plates and I would adorn them with words, that’s exactly what I would do, adorn with words, my Maxi, who walked me through poetry and out the other side, is what he did, and then we actually used them and never put them on display ever, which meant I barely made a penny to support my art except for when friends and neighbours bought stuff from me or commissioned me to do something for them, but my plates were simple spells, minor enchantments, tiny little gifts for the times that were ours and our attempt at living in them, Maxi and I, and our delightful eccentric friends who claimed they were out to cure themselves of magic, which meant they were looking to be disenchanted, they wanted to cure themselves of magic like I intended to walk out the other side of poetry, which is like Rimbaud up in the sun, Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Rimbaud up in the sun, and with an emu stood outside his house, which is made of clay
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that summer, in Grez-sur-Loing
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and believing it took magic to cure you of magic, which is magic’s most secret wish, with these simple plates that I cast with circles of dancing women in abstract shapes as if on a flag on the moon, a figure of universal hope, I think we can safely say forever, is a group of women dancing arm in arm, but then I think, wait, what if it were Nazi women at a party, what if it were Nazi wives backstage at Nuremberg having a right old knees-up, but then I thought do you forfeit your right to joy by being complicit in the destruction of another’s, but then I thought, well, but, where’s the joy in that, so I went daring and went for universal joy
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which was the spell of these plates, I believed, but then again, everything was magical, we believed, in our right to joy, I think, at the expense of nothing, Maxi would say, because we asked for no more than what we had, dreamed of no less than everything in front of us, my Maxi and I, dreaming so deep, doing sex magick, which means waking up to the current running though you and your princess, which literally comes out through the crown like a beam of light illuminating how holy your union is, which is what is happening every minute, in reality, which is copulating, this is what they taught, I’m giving nothing away here, everything is copulating, change is the base erotic, from the displacement of my limbs in the arms of my lover through the displacement of his own in the arms of his death, so allow yourself a devilish smile, Maximilian.
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one same point again and again forever, which is that we are all in on the game
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I no longer have the guts to blow my own brains out, not now that I should, not now that it is necessary
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twilight, I can no longer be brave, for the weight of memories I can no longer be brave, and now of course we have his true name, Maxi’s true name, for it was finally spoken in death, death is the speaker of the true name,
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is the idea I am coming to in my dotage now, as I prepare to give up on ideas whatsoever, and late at night we would do Tarot readings in the garden, the garden that we named France, this garden in France that we named France itself, we would say, let’s eat in France tonight, and France was the invisible garden in the mind of Delius, and we would deal the cards and Jim the Giraffe would read the cards in France and when he turned over The Emperor he would say, the wound that is given birth to must be greater than the wound that gives birth, and he would say it was his father, The Emperor was his father breaking the bonds of the grave, he would say, through love, he would say, through the power of love my father has returned as one of the living dead, he would say, and he would regale me and Maxi and Pierre and I with the tale of his recurring dreams wherein his father comes back as a zombie, every time he is worse for wear, his leg is gone, he is holding in his own entrails, half his face is putrid, and he eventually realises that it is because he is unable to let his father go, and because his father still loves him, that he is breaking the bonds of the grave, even as he has become a zombie, even as his eyes are pleading with Jim to let him go—he is dead, Jim, can’t you see—and when Jim finally lets him go, he disappears, and never returns in dreams, and that is where the archetype of the zombie comes from, Jim says, and it comes from true love, he says, The Devil, he says, is an eroticising of change, he says, and we are back to the copulating forever, which is so devilish, and we require
