Monument Maker, page 28
[Fast Forward]
[Play]
cards with his horror-show face that looked more like the Tarot of Mr. Potato Head, dealing the cards and talking about The Devil and his father and how The Tower was the whole edifice of personality when it becomes like a suit of armour that protects you from reality, from the fullness of experience of the world, from speaking your secret name, which The Devil can help with, for sure, and a card like The (Lovely) Star, it is me with my calipers on and wearing a mask of stars that I can’t even see clear out of and putting a single toe in this wave that is lapping against the shore and knowing that all it requires is a first simple toe-in-the-water and allow it to sweep me away, I wanted to take life as my lover when I was with Maxi, to make love to life, and they call that soft, they call that sentimental, when Perry Como sings it, but then there is that punk song that is so soft, “God Save the Queen,” with the beautiful refrain of No Future, and I heard it as Always Now, No Future, Always Now, and understood it completely as the same love magic we worked in our Church, which really was just the name of a group of fellows who saw themselves best reflected in each other and a part of the same passing-through of a certain moment in time. And we say it in my dying, now, too.
I no longer have the guts to blow my own brains out, not now that I should, not now that it is necessary. I no longer have that flair for the dramatic gesture. I’m sheltering in literature. I’ve failed to step out of the book. I’m still writing it, here, on my own, instead of living it, out there. I’m no Rimbaud. But we ran wild in it, once, didn’t we, baby?
[Silence]
I have argued with myself long and hard about the best way to go; the easiest (and so the saddest) form of self-murder will be mine. I intend to go under mush-mouthed with pills. Mush-mouthed with pills, how I love to say that phrase, imagine me foaming at the mouth and mush-mouthed with pills as I pass away, for that is how I would like to be remembered, which is to be in France and to say the word France, to be in Rimbaud and to say the word Africa, and look at me all going there already, mush-mouthed and foaming, where is Africa, I asked Maxi, where did you have to go to get to Africa, and he said, it is not on any map, the Africa of holy Maximilian Rehberg is not on any map, well, okay, I want to go there with you too, sweetie, in that case, for I am your wife in eternity
[Silence]
and what did we learn from our time together in this Church of Final Foundations, this Cathedral of First Stones, and lucky for you and me we learned nothing and even now are taken, unblemished by knowledge, up into the
[Silence]
was Rimbaud’s final mistake and Jim the Giraffe’s best realisation, which is that to be down below is voluntary exile from the sun, and that what disappears can rise again, in love, which is why there is a summer every year, because the promise of eternal life is a promise that can never be broken, are promises on earth broken, did life make a promise at the very beginning, with death too, in the end, in the end my mouth feels like candyfloss and helpless and I am lolling like a baby in a harness, but I doubt that death made a promise in the end, in the end I doubt that death made a promise in the beginning.
I made a promise to my Maxi always to be true in my heart and then I ran off with Pierre. Pierre was older. He ridiculed me and treated me badly and bullied me until I felt like I was back at school with my one true teenage crush. Maxi and Pierre were writing these science fiction stories together, these amazing outlandish tales, and selling them to magazines and then they started to get published and someone tracked them down and came to the village to interview them, which was the one name, Paimon, Paimon was the combined name of the two of them that they wrote under and when I read the stories I said, who did what, and they said they wrote them like an exquisite corpse, which is a surrealist idea, which makes them channelled texts, in my book, and my book includes things like A Vision by Yeats as a book, who I dearly loved, and of course The Book of the Law, by Aleister Crowley, as a book, and both those books were channelled by women for men, and I am a silent channel in time, now, channelling what we did and the comings and goings in those years as I swoon towards extinction, as my brain clouds and my hands shake but I continue this final telling, this final telling until my head lolls on my shoulders and I start to literally foam at the mouth, which is what they say will happen, that I will foam and bubble and sink and fall under and death will have me all spent on myself, is what they say, but Pierre says to me, come away with me, he says, let me steal you for a single summer, he says, and it sounds sexy, the way he says it, though Pierre is older, Pierre is older than Maxi, and I think can he even get it up, is that old cock of his even in working order, and of course with Maxi hard in me all night it makes a difference, but I’m tempted, girl, I say to myself, you only live once, and I think of Rimbaud and running wild in it and of my own story, I confess, it’s true, I think of my own story and what will be the best twist, the most surprise ending, the most daring telling, and I think of my own exquisite corpse
[Silence]
and I start to believe I will go for it, and I commit small betrayals in preparation, I engineer scenes and situations, and at night Pierre and I sit up late, in France, in the invisible garden of the mind called France we sit up late on our own, after Maxi has passed out and been carried to bed, and Pierre talks to me of Romanesque art and of sculpture in stone and of the churches in France, and I fall in love with the romance, and one night he gives me a medallion, he presents me with a medallion as we are talking in low voices by the light of a candle and listening to Bach, low, on the radio, he whispers to me, I bought you a present, and he gives me a medallion of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and he tells me to keep it secret, between us, he says, and the conspiracy is set, right then, I can’t resist the confidence of another, and the sharing of secrets is so erotic and sexy, and I say to him, why Bernard, and he says to me, faith, and awe, he says.
[Silence]
my gorgeous groom. We sat around with our tops off in this invisible garden of France, we appeared carefree and at liberty to love, but there were fights and arguments and misunderstandings, I was never one for threesomes, I confess, I can’t stand lesbians, I’m sorry but on my deathbed it is true, so no two women for me, because women are expected not to behave like men in a threesome, in other words there is supposed to be some kind of interaction between the two women in a threesome, whereas men get to not even touch at all costs and even though Maxi said to me that three was the magic number because of all sorts of outlandish stuff, even then I said, well, I would prefer two men, I said, that’s the only way I would do it, and Maxi says, Pierre is getting his cock nowhere near you, ha ha, I can hear him in my dying head, through the fog of my brain banning any other cocks coming near me like a sniffing dog, I can hear him say it but I said, no, I don’t want a cock up my arse and one up my pussy at the same time, I don’t want a cock in my pussy and a cock in my mouth, I said, then what, Maxi says, then what do you expect from a threesome with two guys, and I said to him, well, one of them would be kissing me and stroking my hair while the other would be fucking me normal, I said, and then he says to me, you don’t need a threesome for that, that’s called straight sex, he says, stroking and kissing and fucking at the same time, and I saw in his eyes how he loved me, I never knew my traits were so lovable, and still I said, well, have you ever had a threesome, and Maxi tells me about the time when he tried to pick up two girls at an art school and they rubbered him completely
[Silence]
me who is completely rubbered right now but then the next week he saw them in a taxi queue and one of them said, fancy an orgy, and then the night went crazier when the taxi driver that took them home rolled a joint with one hand while he was driving and passed it through to them in the back because they were all pawing each other and obviously getting it on, which is an attitude of complete faith, and awe, it occurs to me now, and they got back to the girls’ room and it turns out they are sisters and I am not joking you one of them starts smoking a cigarette in her pussy, has it ever occurred to you such a thing, a pussy that can hold a fag tight between its lips and inhale smoke and breathe it out again, and there is a little mound of ash in her panties, Maxi says, which she has just slipped down a little bit, a mound of ash in a pair of panties, what a monument, I think to myself now, from the position of slipping into dying, which is what I am doing right in front of you now, I am dying in front of you.
[Silence]
Who am I even recording this for except the voice in my head but no, for the summer I spent with Pierre, who knows how long it takes to foam and to dissolve and to bubble over, and did it burn the panties, I think, did the ash char the panties, and even though I hate lesbians I think a lesbian little sister with red hair and a fag burn in the crotch of her panties is some kind of adventure, and Maxi said they interacted when he fucked them, that’s the word he used, not like men they interacted, they made sounds like owls, he said, he said they made sounds like owls
[Sound like two sister owls cooing]
and exhaling smoke from their vaginas and it is foaming at my mouth and now I am feeling unwell, I confess, I feel my chest to be exceptionally tight, and my organs like dead stones inside of me, and my breathing like owls, in the dark, but then he said, I will write you into a book, Pierre offered, I will photograph you into a history, he said. We will make a summer of this book, you and I, and of the book a cathedral, a monument to a single summer.
[Silence]
There is no such thing as a single summer, I said to Pierre, for if there were only to be a single summer we would have no word for it because we would have nothing to compare it against, so that only a summer that repeats can be referred to as a single summer, I said. But then he said, every summer is unrepeatable, and I said to him, well, yes, the contents of every summer are unrepeatable, the hours of sunshine in every summer are unrepeatable, the break-ups and the falling-in-loves are unrepeatable, the paths of the birds through the air, diving, into the river, that is unrepeatable, but the fact of a summer goes on forever, and he said to me, you talk like the Beach Boys, and he said, no, as in “Endless Summer,” “Endless Summer” is a song by the Beach Boys, he said, and then we picked up the young black boy who appeared out of nowhere by the side of the road and who sang songs in the back seat of the car, as we toured the monastic architecture of the Île-de-France he would strum his acoustic guitar in the back seat, he was paying his way across Europe, from Africa, by busking in the street, and he knew so many songs, he would sing them softly, almost under his breath, like a channel from out of the air he would sing a song about a lover who was mistaken for a swan, and got shot and killed for sport, and when the swans gathered round in tears—all of the swans were cursed lovers, lovers who had turned to swans and so lost their human counterparts, spurned lovers who were swanning—the swans asked the wisest swan of all—which is the eldest of broken hearts—what was the answer to why lovers turned to swans, and the first broken heart responds with a tear in its eye and asks, how many ships sail through the forest?
[Silence]
Life is clingling, dwindling . . .
[Silence]
And of course I was convinced into having a threesome with two boys, with the black boy and with Pierre, and just like in my dream the black boy stroked my hair and kissed me softly on my forehead and whispered my name while Pierre made love to me, and it was a tender moment of sharing, and the boy sang in my ear, and it was that same song like owls, that song like owls that had uncurled like smoke from the pussies of my Maxi’s lovers was now seducing me and calling me like a final bird, which is what I expect to hear in the end, a final bird, Borges wrote about it and he was blind, for godsake, and so was able to hear it better than anyone else, there is a last bird, he says, that sings, and I can hear it, and I imagine a vision of complete white-out, but with a dawn, rising, somewhere behind it, and a single bird sounding, like an owl, like a tender threesome, and then Borges says about how he leaves nothing to no one, and I heard it like No Future, no one can have nothing, he says, I leave it to no one, I leave something to everyone and nothing to no one, which means the dead are something, I read it as, in Borges’ code, Borges who could hear so well he picked up on the fact that the last bird is a sound, the last sound a bird, and not a mute swan, but a swan that speaks, and I feel as if I have known all this before, as I’m swimming in the past now, now that I am just about all out of future, no future for me, but now, forever, is how Pierre meant it when he said he would make a book of us that endless summer, oh my, I could cry at being so far out at sea that there’s not a single soul to see me drown, drowning on the foam but still the dead are something and nothing to no one, I am thinking myself into a spell to best see me off, though I am not looking for conclusions, that is something I am not looking for, I don’t intend to tarnish our creation with petty responsibilities like that, I draw no conclusions, I loved, and was love in return, I betrayed, and was betrayal in return, both were asked of me, and I hope I lived up to their request, angels, thank you for your persistence, your hunting of my own, your relentless pursuit, even now, with no one to witness my going under, but you, I’m still grateful, to you, who knew my name better, even, than my Maxi, than my summer of Pierre and I, and I, who speak it, I, in closing, my I is spinning, and my I is spinning as I cast off I, farewell my Maxi, farewell long-lost love Pierre, lover Pierre, and thank you for our infinite summer now I can hear the last bird as the last bird in the invisible Eden is spoken with me as I must retire these owls and I
[Silence]
[Stop]
8. APOSTOLIC CHURCH OF THE LION
WITH A BULLET IN ITS HEAD
A primitive church. A simple house. The sign of a heart.
The paintings of Rembrandt are the loneliest paintings in the history of religious art because they are suffused by the shadow of death, and none of its lighting.
Things fall apart. Cico, who runs the cafe where we watched the baroque music trio, has developed a tremor that they believe to be early-onset Parkinson’s, and he has begun to forget, and to be invisibled, and to disappear. He cornered Babette in the toilet and tried to force himself on her. His wife is suffering from depression and rarely leaves her upstairs apartment.
There is a painting class on the opposite bank of the river. They wear white lab coats and stand to paint, all except for one old dear, who sits on a stool and faces the other way. The instructor has a pipe in his mouth. A sunbather in a bikini lies on a towel at their feet and refuses to move. I cross the bridge to look at the paintings. They were painting me, and the view across to me, only they have erased the single sunbather from the scene. Now my presence on the other side has ruined the picture completely.
Flower tells me she wants an open relationship. I love her all the more for it, but I can’t let her go. At least let me dress you for your other lovers, I ask her, and she agrees. But still, I can’t let her go. I dressed her like the girls of another summer, all of whom I remember so well.
And now I am Strindberg, and I am one hell of a man, and I visit my Flower in my dreams and watch as she is fucked by other men, and by other women, too, assignations whose details I, myself, helped plot, in order to aid my imagination, like fetishes, or primitive weaponry, to ward off demons, or ghosts, and to invoke them, too, as I hold my cock in my hand and inseminate the air, as I think of turquoise panties, the colour of that summer’s dragonflies.
Excommunicated. What a word. To be excluded from participation in the sacraments. In Normandy, William the Conqueror and his wife built two abbeys in order that they could be reconciled with the Church after they married without the Pope’s consent. This is the threat of excommunication written in stone. The Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames. They made monument to the passion that brought them together, so these same monuments would bid them entry. To build a church in order to return to it. Monument Maker.
I am on a solo trip to Normandy. I have the use of a little artist’s studio with windows onto the sea. My Flower is with another man. I am looking out to the country I came from and I know that I will never return.
I was given use of the studio by the woman I met in the baroque cafe who dedicated nine years of her life to uncovering the role that black GIs played in the Normandy landings in 1944. Black GIs that had been excommunicated from history.
The official line was that there were no black GIs at Normandy. There were no black GIs who returned from Normandy to a country they had fought for, their friends and comrades had died for, and that was still segregated. There were no black GIs that were treated as invisibles.
