Monument Maker, page 29
I sit in this unheated studio, wrapped up in a blanket, looking out to sea, and I read contemporary accounts of how locals were warned, by white GIs, that the black troops were dangerous, that they were thugs and would-be rapists, even as they fought alongside them by day. The photographs tell another story.
Here is a picture of a young black man, a kid, really, in a training session in the woods in France.
Here are a group of black men in full uniform, shopping for gifts at a market stall for their sweethearts back home, some of whom they would never see again.
Here they are tending to the survivors of a Nazi time bomb on a street in Coutances, the bodies of the dead and the dying mercifully obscured.
Here they are lying wounded in a field hospital.
Now they are holding up the bullets they dodged, and grinning.
Now they are pictured with their new extended families, with the lovers they took in France, and with the babies they made together.
Here is a young black man, a tank driver, looking around, and behind, the camera, his eyes fixed on something that is permanently out of sight, something that is not himself. His name is Claude Mann, from Chicago, Illinois, and he is two hours from death. Ecce homo.
I am walking in the dark along the front in Normandy and the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel is illuminated in the fog. Sculpture comes out of the invisible. Stone speaks of what we cannot see.
Picasso says that the Spaniard spends his mornings at Mass, his afternoons at a bullfight and his evenings at a whorehouse. But I am a Scot, in France, and I am going to the dogs.
The artist Carl Fredrik Hill, who went mad, and who lived in Grez-sur-Loing, and who, as I say, went mad, near the end of his life, as usual, for that is most likely when you will go mad, my friend, believe me, you are too young to know, but the end of your life is most likely when you will lose it completely, even though you might feel completely sane right now (you think), Carl Fredrik Hill made drawings of sculptures, pointless drawings of sculptures, what is the point of drawing a sculpture, you might think (he was mad, surely), why not just make one, but you can find them in the huge books dedicated to the degeneration of his madness and there—look—these drawings are uncanny, believe me, these drawings that capture the movement of sculpture, which is the coming into creation of something invisible, in simple lines, how do we create the invisible, you might ask, well, better ask a madman, a madman like Carl Fredrik Hill, poor soul, who saw the invisible coming into being in simple coloured lines, like the very raiments (what a word, it is these), the very raiments of the word, I say, made flesh, his simple coloured lines as complex, and as technically difficult, and as simple (like I said) as the folds on the cloaks of classical statuary, as the folds on the skirts of classically beautiful girls they are simple, these drawings, and so he made it so, as a drawing of stone, as in “Skulpturer i museum I” and “Skulpturer i museum II” (do you know them?), which are to pen and paper what absence is to stone, which is the voice of silence, speaking, and which Hill takes further and now, in his drawings in the “Publik i konstmuseum” series, he pictures figures, too, coming from this silence, to witness the coming through from this silence itself, it is uncanny, and it is a scribble, and it is a single gesture, extended, from both sides, from the other side, and again, of this selfsame silence, and you can see what I am trying to do, I am using words to describe, which is not a mirror, as Hill draws it, but a coming through from something opaque, only but from both sides this is a coming through, as in God is not a mirror, this coming through, but a screen that divides, but a hand that says, this way, and the other, and a head that speaks, through its eyes, and that is a meeting place, and that is in the middle, and that is called madman, painting; Carl Fredrik Hill.
Everything is filled with meaning: the endless summer fields, the pure blue skies, the churches perched on promontories above empty villages, the gravestones there, too; yet meaning remains silent.
The pigeons outside my window are singing: Ook, Ook.
The Église Saint-Martin de La Genevraye is one of the most forlorn and beautiful of the secret churches of the Île-de-France. It has the most touching graves. Everywhere, all around the cemetery, there are memorials to what the dead loved to do most among the living and it is touching that the dead, forever, go on just like the living, in their dreams of easy leisure, in their dreams of another summer, please God, another summer dedicated to cycling to small villages and gazing up at old churches whose stonework is crumbling, and whose plaster is coming away, and that are masterpieces of décollage (be gone with you, German avant-garde types) and infinitely fascinating, in their decay, standing hand in hand so that their silhouettes seem impossibly large on the fallen memorials, memorials to days spent fishing while alive, to hillwalking, and to reading the dedications on the gravestones, one of which reads, perfectly: I recline. Sorrow.
I take a photograph of my Flower, who is taking a photograph of a stone angel in the cemetery at Église Saint-Martin de La Genevraye, a stone angel so worn down by time that it is impossible to read the dedication beneath it, stone in memorial to the invisible, and suddenly she screams and throws her camera in the air, and says she has been stung, but then she changes it to poked, I have been poked, she says, I have been poked by a ghost in a graveyard, she says, and it is true that the dead go on dreaming of the same fun they had with the living, poking the asses of girls in short dresses as they bend to photograph angels, for the asses of French girls provide slim pickings so they must grab their fun when they can.
I am drinking on my own on the terrace of the Auberge de la Vanne Rouge in Montigny-sur-Loing and I am swooning over the little girls of France and how their fathers kiss them, and hold them close, and I think of the mystery of fathers and daughters, and, of course, mothers and sons, and feel bereaved for the first time, but more for that I was never a daughter, and held by my father, than for that I am a son, and can never again be held by my mother.
Have you heard of the doctrine of the Merits of Saints? The idea is that during their lifetimes the saints accumulated more spiritual merit than they could actually use themselves, thus generating a surplus (sounds like Marx? ha ha ha). This surplus is stored in a heavenly bunker known as the Thesaurus Meritorum Sanctorum. The Pope has access to this bunker and can draw from it in order to pay penances and commute guilt, and he can draw from it as much as he wants because Christ’s merits, which as we have established are infinite, are included in its store. Of course, the papacy took it a step further and claimed that the Pope could commute sins of souls awaiting judgement in Purgatory, as well as those in the flesh, but bear with me. And though I despise the psychologising of the sacred (call me Bernard), really, the neuroticising of God (call me a Gothic cathedral), but if the saints truly have the power to forgive and commute, and I have seen it happen, my friend, and if Christ is infinite, too, and he must be, then there is more love and forgiveness in this world than we can ever make use of, and all we have to do is ask, but man is troubled by guilt, and cannot raise himself by his own bootstraps, cannot lift this burden of guilt because of the sure knowledge, accepted or refused, but the sure knowledge all the same that existence generates suffering (a noble truth, indeed), that life feeds on life, and that inside we are a mess of nasty and rejection and hatred and hubris and confusion, inside we are seething, and feel awful, and in need of something else, something outside of us, someone outside of us who resembles us, who is us, but who has the unequivocally established ability to redeem the flesh, a hero who must enter history, as a word, for our comprehension, and whose ministry must be taken up, in time, which is the power of Logos, which unfolds, as a story, and this is where the evangelists and the missionaries come in, because if there is enough belief in the Thesaurus Meritorum Sanctorum, in the secret bunker, in the powers of the saints, in the forgiveness of Jesus, and in the concomitant promise of eternal life, then it is, it simply is, and man is capable of entering into it, but only if we truly believe there is a son of God, and that the ultimate nature of God is love, which is expressed throughout His creation, and whose entrance into history is the most significant event in time, hence our calendars begin at the approximate date of the birth of Christ for a great and beautiful reason, because marking history with his birth means every day is lived in the knowledge of forgiveness and the absolving of sins, for who amongst us has not been less than life, and knowledge of God through the example of Christ and of sainthood becomes the most significant fact, the greatest example, the ultimate manifestation of a revelation that is capable of marshalling all of our belief, our combined psychic powers, and our longings, too, and our love, even, all of our foiled love, and transmuting it, through belief and surrender, into so much candyfloss, but rivals spring up, temporal powers inevitably channel the same urges, the same needs, that less than life should require more than life, in the balance, and so make it so, is obvious, and so all of the Caesars and all of the Hitlers to come, who must be reckoned with, but who God, through the ministry of His son, and the example of the saints, will also forgive, thanks to the surplus of merit and the overflowing of good, which is infinite, and so will always triumph, in this world, where everything is forgiven, if we make it so. And if you think you understand that, then you have understood nothing, and you are the perfect fool (on a donkey).
The moon in June is a strawberry moon, over the garden where my Flower and I are eating dinner, a poulette, roasted in the oven, and some local beer, served with potatoes and green beans, a poulette I had a woman in Nemours prepare for us, and watched as she hacked off its claws, and as I watched I thought, this is eternal, there is no end to the removing of claws and the displacing of limbs, and I thought to myself, this whole world is a hospital, ha ha, then I had to laugh, ha ha, I am buying an organic chicken for a romantic dinner for two and I believe myself to be in a charnel house or a hospital ward with severed limbs piled up until heaven, and I saw how both were possible, what a nut, I said to myself, what a nut as I staggered out into the sunshine, and cycled back to the hotel, along the canal, along this route I have come to love so well, past the hopeful gardens and the little shacks with people fishing and wishing each other a good day, and how precarious it all is, what holds up a summer field, what moves it in the wind, and my Flower points up to the night sky and calls it a strawberry moon, and next to it, she says, Saturn.
I discover a bookshop. I am not going to tell you its name, because it is a secret bookshop and, besides, I doubt that it would exist for you should you try to seek it out. It appears on no maps or guides, it has no phone, and its hours are sporadic (like all of the best bookshops). On its shelves are models of Baphomet and on the walls hand-painted Templar crosses. It has the best selection of books on churches, cathedrals and Romanesque statuary in France. The owner insists that I travel to Milly-la-Forêt to see the Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples. Simple is a kind of flower, he says, and I have to agree. Jean Cocteau is buried beneath your feet, he says. His English is very poor, but I am enjoying it so much I refuse to speak French. It is the best of the west, he says, and he loads me up with books on Chartres and Metz and the Gothic churches of Brittany. Before I go, he asks me if I would like to take a medallion for free. I choose Saint Bernard. Simple is a kind of flower.
On a walk to Montigny, in the rain, my Flower and I come across a lost dog, a white spaniel, who approaches us cautiously from the other side of the road, bowing down and gazing meekly up, now shuffling towards us from out of the past, and at the last minute she flips over, onto her back, in submission, and lets us tickle her. Now she is ours completely. She leaps up in joy and speeds ahead of us, scrambling beneath the fencing around the football field, jumping in the air and snapping at the white butterflies, running back to us for approval before speeding off again. In the distance we can hear thunder; a storm is approaching. A red duvet hangs from the high window of a chateau while an argument rages inside.
The dog runs out into the road, which isn’t busy, but in order to get her attention and to keep her out of the way of traffic I give her a name, Clara, I say, and I call her, Clara, and I point with my finger whenever a car approaches and she obeys right away, running to me, falling on the ground in front of me, and rolling over. I kneel down next to her and hold her to the ground every time a car passes and feel her full stomach, rising and falling, her little teats, her tongue lolling on the ground; she gazes up at me in perfect surrendered happiness.
But we’re getting closer to the village and the storm is about to break. I’m running all these scenarios through my head: how I will have to find a leash somewhere; how I will have to take her back; how I can improvise with a piece of rope; what I will say to villagers as we pass in case anyone recognises her.
Just as we meet the steep curve that leads to the centre of the village a car pulls up and an older woman says something in French about how lovely the dog is. This dog is lost, I explain. She’s lost? the old dear says. Well, where did you encounter her? she asks me. Back at the entrance to Montigny, I say, just before the football fields. Okay, she says, could you lift her into my car? I have a bad back, she explains, and she says that she will drive along the road and see if the dog can be returned.
I pick her up, I pick Clara up for the last time, unaware that something that has only just begun is ending, and I hold her one last time, and she shivers and is afraid as I put her in the passenger seat and close the door. The old woman asks me where I’m from, tells me her daughter studied engineering in Glasgow, boasts of how beautiful her house is—although you can’t tell from the outside, she says—and then drives off, and Clara is gone, and we look at each other, my Flower and I; we didn’t even take the chance to say goodbye.
Why didn’t I even take a photograph? Flower asks me, and then the rain comes down, and the storm breaks, and we walk off into the village, discomfited, heartbroken, even. And now I wonder what happened to that dog. Although she’s long dead by now, I’m sure.
The Christ of the tympanum of the Abbaye Sainte-Marie-Madeleine de Vézelay is the most imperturbably alien manifestation of the unknown God in Romanesque sculpture. Its eyes are blank planetary orbs. Its beard and hair bear the simple marks of its maker. Its mouth holds a single elongated breath. Its nose is eaten by tools and time and appears as a syphilitic wound. I am the unknown God in human form, it says, though I appear in no human form. Should this Christ come down to earth we would run shrieking in terror. And rightly. All the same, he is here, right now. Run.
A tiny girl in a red swimming costume is turning cartwheels on the opposite shore. A dog breaks free of its owner and pursues a duck across the water. A young boy in oversized yellow armbands leaps from the bank. Some idiot in a bunny costume is acting the goat. Old grey-haired fishermen float past in canoes loaded with bucketfuls of live bait. Two guys stroke each other’s arms on a bench. Three boys goad each other into leaping off the bridge. Somewhere in the distance a child is crying. A girl in a dark-blue bikini with the most perfectly pert young teenage ass (a rarity in France, as we have established) moves her towel into the sun. An obvious drug dealer stands next to his bike, propped up against the public toilets. I am suffering from a hangover. There is an obnoxiously fat woman with no top on. Someone just leaped from the bridge—splash! A white motorcycle pulls up on the grass. A man in black trunks is applying suntan lotion to a blonde woman in a turquoise bikini who is complaining that he is too rough with his hands. Three giggling Japanese girls are launched in a canoe into the water. An insect with gentle antennae-like lashes and an impossibly delicate body, bronze-gold, lands on the table next to me. I am debating a first drink and imagining what I will have for lunch. A duck floats past with three babies (the next day there are only two). My Flower is writing in her journal. More ducks. A white dog lies in the grass and yawns in blissful boredom and with great skill. Splash! I think of Ook, and Babette, and Clara. A white rugby ball spins in the air and some athletic meathead leaps up to catch it. A pair of shoes are launched into the river. A kid dives off the bridge but lands on his back in the water. A chubby girl in a purple one-piece bathing costume with the word Disco written on it in lurid electric green paddles past. Somewhere in the distance there is music, electronic music, indistinct. Seven boys and a single girl in a black bikini stand around an inflatable ring, waist-deep in the water. More ducks making a pointless din. Now a white poodle that looks crazy and that swims in terror back to the shore when its owner throws it in. An English accent, how annoying. A guy in a red headband, idiot. A pied wagtail lands, for a split second, on the wall.
The strap of my Flower’s bikini falls down her arm as she writes. Now a white butterfly. Now a guy in a baseball cap and a turquoise T-shirt with the number 10 on it is trying to tempt his dog into the water with a tennis ball. Now he drags it into the water backwards and lets it swim back to the shore. A young mother and a baby pose for the camera. Splash! A burly French youth pulls his girlfriend’s hair. Splash! Splash again! They play frisbee, and lie around on towels, and kick their feet in the water and look moody together. A guy in a white trilby, knee-length shorts and an unbuttoned purple shirt, who I recognise from seeing him roaring drunk in Nemours.
A chestnut falls from the tree above my head. Jeans and no-top guy, talking on the payphone, I hate you. Doris, the talentless Swedish painter’s friend, interrupts me to say goodbye, she is leaving at five o’clock. I kiss her on both cheeks and wish her safe travels and am glad to be shot of her.
