Monument Maker, page 3
And there they are: the coloured silhouettes of my ex-lover and my mentor, against the horizon, which is blue, with white cliffs, at the bottom of the garden, and the breeze almost upsets the scene but rather, now, serves to bring it to life. Hold on to your hat, Pierre; goodbye my sweet love, Flower!
And hello you, you whom I am writing for and for whom I have called it stone, I have called it love, I have called it nothingness and void, I have called it baby, too, but for whom, for whom.
The smell of Shake n’ Vac in a hotel room in Durham. A toilet freshener with a thick green gel in it. Toilets. I had taken to observing toilets on the road with Pierre. Sometimes I would view these cathedrals, these monasteries and cemeteries, stretching off, as having less meaning than a WC with flecks of damp like the upturned breast of a thrush, still beating, in the corner of a white, plastic, shower. Well now, already, are these demon spores not so bold in their construction, not so specific in their place, as any manor house or castle or strange frightened bird took fright? Plus they smell the same.
Dampness. And we fall asleep, me on the couch, as usual, Pierre propped up on a pillow, on top of the bed, in a black Japanese kimono, and the television says (we allowed ourselves television on the road, Pierre and I, but never at home) “the true mark of a man” and it shows a coloured target and three arrows hit it and smoke comes up and a man emerges with no top on who has been throwing darts, in a pub, topless. The mark of a man, Pierre says, and he rolls it, in his throat, like a thrush himself, as if he were no man whatsoever, so removed from man, even, that he is capable of speaking him perfectly; the mark of a man, he burrs, as he looks over his glasses, for that is the sound, as he growls it, as he looks up from his book, he rolls it there, like an angel that weighs nothing at all (very few angels are light as air, talk to a sculptor), the mark of a man, he gargles, I suppose he does, he gargles, that makes sense too, in the context of his sounding: the mark of a man, he says, is persistence.
There was a piece of Pierre’s, a photograph in his book, on his travels, that he had painted on glass and that consisted of five words, written in a rippling orange text, on a sheet of frosted glass. Thank You For Your Persistence, he had written, and he had laid it outside an old abandoned nunnery in Normandy as some kind of offering or love letter—what’s the difference, really—and had walked away and let the sun shine through it until some teen kicked it straight through the face and smashed it, or some dilettante stole it, or some process of corroding and denegration (is that a word) drew it back down into the earth, in pieces. But still it persisted, was his point, and, still, he was grateful for it. Everything they teach you about art is wrong, I said, is misleading, when I first saw it.
Where the vines have been removed up the side of the Benedictine abbey of Notre-Dame, Bernay, whose monastic buildings date from the seventeenth century, there remain the tracings, like veins, over veins, of an invisible musculature, just as the abbey itself is the temporary holding structure for the invisible point of power that slows the past and the future, not to abeyance, but to a form of eternal rose garden.
The point to locate in this, and this is Pierre writing still: the point to locate would be the first instance of a smile in sculpture, the first evidence of a moving past the monument as a marking of death or an opening to a dark, sonorous beyond, the first instance of a smirk, even, let’s say, a funny face, and of course they bring up Egypt, they bring up Egypt every time, the high art of Thanatos is Egyptian in bearing, they say, before you can so much as protest, but look at those sarcophagi in the British Museum, you would respond, hopefully, if you could get a word in edgewise, go spend a weekday afternoon with them, you’d say, although preferably not a Friday or a Thursday even, for that matter, you’d be foolish not to add, a wet, drizzly Tuesday afternoon, I would say, is perfect, you would say, and not hard to arrange, obviously, unless you’re a working stiff, in that case God help you, but look at those sarcophagi when you next get the chance, is what you would suggest, I imagine, in my mind, now, and tell me, truly, you would demand, if you cannot detect the hint of a smirk on those cartoon faces that are the cocoon of the dead, and that seem to offer the first glimpse, perhaps, of the dawning realisation that humanity itself is in on the game from the beginning.
Implacable. Flower would call them implacable.
GISLEBERTUS HOC FECIT: at the Cathedral of Saint Lazarus in Autun the sculptor Gislebertus emerges from the dark, sonorous beyond. His tympanum features a Christ that has worn two faces and none at all in an experiment with time that is the equal of the first animated cartoons. No one in the age of Gislebertus, which is the age of the twelfth century, which is the age of the pharaonic kings, which is the age of the entrance of the Christ child into time, would dare to depict a Christ without a head, a position reserved for John the Baptist for a great and secret reason, but first of all we must understand the position from which both the great cathedrals and the great pyramids were intended to be experienced, and that is from the inside out, the dead pharaoh is the experiencer of the architecture and the nebula at the heart of its schematic, the pyramid, then, the high cathedral towers, serving to connect him to the infinite, just as the outsides of cathedrals are fortresses, really, that mimic the tomb of the flesh—that sound the tomb of the song, more properly—and that contain the universe, as seen from inside out, inside them, which would speak, if you were an initiate, in stone, that truly there is no God outside of the centre, and that the centre is everywhere, inside, and so: Gislebertus.
He gives the removal of Christ’s head—and his ability to grow a new one, in imagination, in stone—he gives it, it is given, more precisely, to time. In the hands of Gislebertus time, itself, has become Monument Maker, even as it always was, even as his Christ is rendered as quite flat, as pancaked, as rising up from the elements, palms open, arms pressed to his sides, as coming through stone, from the interior of the earth, and now, suddenly, during the unveiling of the tympanum of the west doorway, which is the name of a ritual that took place in time, itself, after it had been covered over, the tympanum, during the era that was not of the Christ child’s entrance into time, and that considered reflection, itself, as profane, it was revealed that Christ’s face had been defiled, over time, removed, in the past, and been so damaged, in its passing, so that his eyes—Christ’s eyes!—were now the multiform eyes of mineral and crystal, of death, compacted, to the incendiary point of flint, which meant that now his eyes glistened even more, his multiform eyes are of the rock itself and are interior, and enterable-into, is the kingdom of heaven, kind lover Flower who I would return to stone.
And beneath his feet, trodden down and given life anew, is a mocking sinner, whose head is forever being torn from his shoulders by monstrous hands, even as his fellows contort and torment themselves with language, with the body as signs, and the sinner knows, because he has fallen into the pit called responsibility, that his fate lies at the centre, and that there is no joke between Christ and what he came to damn, which is the removal of the head, and its replacement, in time, again and again, forever.
This is a song I made up, this is a song I made up:
Flower/Flower
Spring and Autumn/Winter and Summer
January/Aquarius/February/Pisces truelove
March/Aries/April/Taurus
May/Gemini
Annus
Cancer
June/Leo/July/Virgo
August
Libra/September/Scorpio/October/Sagittarius
November/Capricornus/December
Flower/Flower
What is the spell that is set by the abandoned monastic architecture of France? Picture the dust in the air, the miraculous dust suspended in the air, illuminated in a shaft of cold, soft light. Feathers on the breath of God.
The great monasteries present one of the most dramatic architectural annexings of reality. Annexing, that is, the reality of God in his silent speech from the unreality of the profane world, intent on mixing it up with tongues, outside. This is art not for entertaining.
The abandoned monasteries of France—abandoned, again and again—present a secret network set on assassinating modernism and effecting a return to timelessness. The abandoned monastic architecture of France is frozen in silence, even when it has been repurposed, even when it is filled with dancing revellers, or mutinous soldiers, or accountancy firms, or taxi companies. Then this silent network is silenter still. These buildings which, like the pyramids, were set in order to establish a channel, a silent channel, in and out of time. I Am a Silent Channel in Time.
Harder.
The one truly pure work of God-comprehension, of sacred visioning, of transcendent creation in modern painting, is that of Cecilia Giménez’s “failed” and much-ridiculed 2012 restoration of Ecce Homo, an awful 1930s fresco of Jesus Christ at his most simple-minded, in Borja, Spain. Through vision and belief and—not naivety, but innocence, let’s (dare we?) say, true innocence, which is the opposite of naivety, she rendered Christ unreal for the first time in how many centuries. Which is to foster Christ, in time.
Harder: she was possessed by Christ himself and was made to paint him as divine, his features horrored, the angle of his face occult, dimensional, in—and out of—time. This is the great bending force that Logos enters the world with. Bending. Reality-defying. Artlessly so. Yet how could anyone laugh? How could anyone resist a shudder, at the broken neck, at the mouth that is up in smoke and ectoplasmic? At the eyes no longer rolled back in his head like a sham act for his father or a frigid suburban housewife’s idea of ecstasy? Rather, they look to you, or almost, the eyes. One eye, the left eye—Christ’s left eye—looks behind you and over your shoulder and he sees something that is not himself there.
Harder.
Otherwise fuck painting.
Harder.
Why this interest in mausoleums, in monastic architecture, in tombs, and I say: for I am over the hill, my friend, for I am lying in state, and moving closer to silence. And the work of this man, my mentor, I call him so, now, working to entomb another man through the twilight of his own dotage, what were the chances, and I came to realise it was I, too, who had come to be buried, it was my life, and love, he stuck a headstone on and dynamited, it was all of these churches that pointed straight to galactic centre, and that we spent a summer touring, a summer out of time, is how it seems to me now, now that everything is a counting down, these churches that stood in for the state of my body, as surprised, and betrayed, as any stone sarcophagus, by the onset of age, by the disfiguring of death, by the absence, once more, of the answer to a woman’s body in my own, which is the saddest thing, cathedral, I say, which is the saddest thing, tomb, at the Cathedral of Chartres, your own stones so careless of time as to betray an intuition that back of time, that in the back there, friend, there is a stone of stones, a love of love, a remembering of remembering, which in the voice of the stones themselves is a Final Judgement.
You, on the grass, I must not name you, Flower, we picnicked on the grass and afterwards we walked the streets of the old town. Rumfles, your rumfled skirt, what a word, these rumfles, the folds and creases that do more to reveal your leg than any disrobing might, and that religious statuary could never give up on, even after the age of the perfect nude, which was the perfect Greek, even then the flesh itself was sweeter in its hiding, in its intimating in drapery, just as the Holy Ghost needs a white sheet with holes and the silent interior of a monastery needs its cloisters, the sacred is something that we must adorn, ourselves, as it is revealed: your thighs, rumfled, in your summer dress.
And afterwards, that evening, we had dinner on the deck of La Vanne Rouge, in Montigny, as the sun was going down, blood-orange, and immense, as if it were the mere sign of the sun, and had taken to play, its duties so light, and immense, to bring to our eyes an intimation of something that was not itself, in its coming forth by day the sun is aware of itself as creator, lover, as you and I, its witnesses on that holy evening of long ago, and the dogs, the stray dogs of the area, do you remember, they seemed to appear as if from nowhere and to assemble on the deck, sat there, staring into the same sun, in silence, and me thinking, what does the sun appear to a dog, but really, why does the sun appear to a dog, and I still have the menu from that night and I have underlined—and initialled—the dishes we had that night and I will read it to you now, that night, as it is written, in stone:
Le foie gras, mi-cuit, chutney aux pommes acidulées Granny Smith et pain brioché toasté (D.K.)
Le maquereau, gnocchi de patate douce, mousseline d’haricots blancs, beurre blanc aux œufs de poissons (F.F.)
Les coquilles Saint Jacques, lard, mousseline de butternut, jambon espagnol, coulis d’oseille (D.K.)
L’épaule d’agneau confite, panisse, tagliatelles de courgettes, sauce vierge, caviar d’aubergines (F.F.)
Le crumble d’hiver, pommes, pruneaux, glace caramel (D.K.)
La sphère au chocolat, façon profiteroles, glace vanille, choux garnis de crème pâtissière, Chantilly (F.F.)
Where is the wine from that night? Where are the coffees and the cigarettes smoked? They are extinguished, my friend. This is Chartres Cathedral.
2. CATHEDRAL OF SAINT LAZARUS OF AUTUN
I have taken Viagra and I await its onset.
Harder.
Viagra always gives me wind, it makes me burp and it makes me dizzy too, all this blood, flowing, but still, I do it for recreation, in these final years I do not even masturbate with it, instead I take a pill, a mere 50g one—you may have no fears of Priapus—and I write on it, I write with the memory of my schlong (another favourite word: my schlong, causes rumfles, in my trousers) as it once was, I write a paean to my schlong in the medieval architecture of France and in the memory of a summer, through the memory of a summer, through the memory of a summer, which is like the feel of my schlong, now, through the material of my pants, you call them, Americans, through the material of my slacks, thank you, and the memory of an erection, through the memory of an erection, through the memory of an erection, through my slacks, is where I am writing from, is a cathedral in France dedicated to the man who rose again, whose dead member walked, because Christ made it so; make it so, Christ, for what we long for is corporeal form, what we long for is schlongs forever; promise us our schlongs and we shall fly to heaven on them, and already, see, the Viagra is kicking in, and I achieve a strange breathlessness, and a need to pass wind, and a constriction, in my chest, and an intimation of that old power, that imperative: captain, of my heart, make rumfles, in my trousers.
Yet the source of the Nile remains a mystery. Neither a thought in my head nor a hand on my schlong may restore it, even as, once, both sources fed it and fed of it. I am no longer stone.
Who rolled away the stone? Christ did, presumably, or a secret player, unknown to history, who was instrumental—by accident or design, who knows—in the resurrection of Our Saviour. “Stones in My Passway,” who wrote that again? Christ, presumably. Or a secret hand. Does God operate in man or does God operate in man through Jesus Christ? Remind me of what the difference is, will you, Cathedral at Autun, of the Risen Saint Lazarus. Remind me again.
And now I’ve got the sniffles.
Jesus was the one to roll away the stone from Lazarus’s tomb. Jesus wept, did you know, which phrase appears in John alongside our Lazarus, and is the shortest verse that The Bible would ever be divided into, which means that the atomic core of The Bible, its smallest indivisible whole, is Jesus wept. And he wept because he was taking the blame. Lazarus’s household was up in arms, claiming that had Jesus dropped by even a few days earlier, then Lazarus would not at this moment be lying dead behind a boulder in a cave. And Jesus wept. He wept to see the weeping of those around him whose weeping was the cause of his weeping. Jesus wept is crystalline, is smallest stone, is indivisible. He will rise again, Jesus tells them, through the tears. And everyone is like, yeah, yeah, whatever, we know, he will live on in heaven with your dad but still he is dead right here. And that’s when Jesus realises: heaven is not consolation enough. Heaven is not consolation enough for weeping on weeping. Jesus wept is the atomic pain at the centre of the world. I will unseal the stone, he says. Jesus says. I will roll it away, he says. Why? To expose a dead man who has risen, already, on the other side? Jesus wept because he was about to do something that would expose himself and his own powers, but also: that he, too, remained under the spell of the father, and even his own death, the sacrifice of his own life, would never be enough to atone for the truth that he has lied, the truth that he has betrayed, which is that eternal life is here and now a reality on earth if God bids it so. But he does not bid it so. God wishes for us to die, forever. Just as he wishes us to be born, too. Terrible father and mother are you, God, is the next smallest verse of The Bible, more atomic still, for Kabbalists, really, rather than for lay readers, which is what cathedrals are, texts for Kabbalists, only but where you read the word texts as points of ingress, as a lettered arch which you pass through; Gislebertus hoc fecit.
