Monument Maker, page 4
Gislebertus made this, reads the tympanum of the Cathedral of Saint Lazarus of Autun. This is man, taking the blame away from Christ, for the first time. But this is man in the spell of the father, who, for us, is Christ Jesus and not his dad. And we weep at the funerals of our friends and family and lovers because we have sworn not to do a thing about them, we have accepted the rules of the game, which are birth and death, we are complicit and we weep when we hear of poor Lazarus, still living if not for us, but then, like Christ himself, like Pierre, who would bury a man in the tomb of his own creation just so that we may, one day, roll away the stone and see him rise, we turn to our own spells, and we look to stone, we look to the elements of the earth and we take them in our hands and we revivify them, and in their revivifying we admit that we knew, all along, that in the dross of existence lay its salvation, that in the making-magic of time we may reverse, or draw forward, all of the forces that are ours by inheritance and invention, of birth and death that would make of us, too, monument maker.
But Rilke says that Jesus was disgusted by the task. That Jesus felt himself reduced to some mere sideshow magician in his raising of the dead. But Rilke has a tendency to feel too sorry for Jesus. I doubt that Jesus was that squeamish. Rather, it would suggest to me that Jesus realised that he had done life, itself, a disservice, that the mocking, really, was by death, of life, because the Fall, if we care to recall, is described as being precipitated by a great act of disobedience. And this was Christ’s. He was most truly human when he raised the dead, when he grew sentimental about a story, and began writing what we would refer to, today, as fan fiction. A world where the son of God has to reanimate the dead—cut down, by his father, at their time—is a less than perfect world. In doing service to mankind, Jesus has risen hell. Even Martha, present at the graveside, protested that Lazarus’s corpse, surely, by this time, would stink.
In Autun, Gislebertus has risen Christ in stone so that there will be no stink.
Now I’m burping. Viagra makes me burp. Hold on.
If you could come back from the dead for one night only, what would you do? That’s the sort of stuff that was in Christ’s head right then, you can bet. What would you do? Probably go back and apologise, am I right? No one likes to think of Christ as apologising. Why? Because he was in on it from the beginning, possibly. If even Christ is apologising, then the entire game is a bogey. But isn’t that what the raising of Lazarus is? A moment of weakness. A sort of making it up to humanity. A slip-up, a consolation prize, but also the revelation that it didn’t have to be this way. That god-powers could turn it around. But also a demonstration of the tremendous guilt that Christ has had to take on. Nietzsche was all wrong about guilt but don’t get me started. Brave Christ came back to apologise so that we don’t have to. But still some of us have to. So some of us commit to resurrecting forever. Zarathustra. Monument Maker.
Beneath the words Gislebertus hoc fecit there is an angel carved in stone who separates the just and the unjust before the throne of Christ Pantocrator, revealed, truly, as ruler of this world. Shamefacedly so. I stand in stone, it says, I refuse forgiveness. I stand, to be judged.
Judge me:
Words I used as a young lecturer in art history at a provincial college for a single summer, in the Scottish Borders, girls only, where I stayed on a campsite, in a one-man caravan, overlooking the sea:
Swollen
Tumescent
Cakehole
Slit
Phallic
Fertile
Lingerie
Thighs
Dominating
Supplicant
Adorning
Free-for-all
No rules
My place
Harder
Boyhood is the most beautiful word in the English language. Christ that I could raise it again.
And here it goes. Rumfles.
I gained my first appreciation for the architecture of the past from summers spent exploring the network of abandoned quarries that surrounded the quiet village I grew up in. Scale was what wowed me, at first. The high metal ladders, rusting in the sun, caged in and claustrophobic as you scaled the sides of these huge silos, their terrible mouths filled with sand and stood up above the cliffs, and the town, and the tower blocks, stretching off.
As boys we would dare to jump into the silos, fearless, just about, of being swallowed by the sand forever. But more than churches, the rotting industrial architecture of the North was what made me first look up, and in terror, too, because scale was liable to bring on feelings of terror and insignificance in me, too, an anxious vertigo, me stood at their feet, terror, a nauseating dizziness, me, at the foot of all of this set to rot, this scale, set to dwarf me, just as huge ships, and oil rigs at sea, their feet in who knows what ink-black horrors, make me shudder, still, and I would think, for instance, how do you build a crane without a crane, how do you sink a mile-long concrete girth into the base of the sea except from a mile-long concrete girth sunk to the base of the sea; how to build bridges without bridges? This is what scale will do to you. There is a point where it overwhelms the sense and gridlocks the brain. Stood there, at the top of these leaning metal silos, leaning, like flowers towards the sun, my eyes refused to take it all in, to step back and experience it as, what do they call it, panorama.
The details, Flower, I must tell of the details. From up here, now, with cock pills and perspective.
Can I summon you in stone and still not name you? I used to dream of a mausoleum made up of books, of walling myself in on all sides with words, but I read myself out of it. I read myself through books and all the way out the other side, where life was waiting, only life never waits, and what I thought I had come to, then, had already fled the scene, and I turn, now, to art to be cured, to statuary to cure me, to cure me as Pierre cured himself, I have cured myself of art, he said, and how? How had he done this? By exhausting where the greatest art was, which is France, by touring through France, by plotting its cathedrals and nunneries and religious architecture, and writing his name on every one of them.
Of course it is France where this epiphany takes place, of course in the land of romance, land of the end of summer, land of the benediction of beautiful girls with tan lines in the summertime, of course it is France, of course there are glimpses, of course, there are tracings elsewhere, in England, and in Scotland, even there, in Spain, on the thin bony shoulders of girls in bikini tops too, as it is in Greece, as it is in Rome, and in remnants of Byzantium in the now-East, of course, we mustn’t forget the Byzantines, but then how could we, as they have become so obvious, so glaringly otherworldly, that they exist now merely as shorthand, at best as “the past,” but not as the sacred-in-itself, history won’t shut up about them, dull, narcissistic, secular history, which is where Christ comes in, Christ enters history, as a word, to cure us of words, and to enable us to look outside and to see something that is not us.
Flower, that is not us. In the summer of 1993. At the cathedral in Autun. You were dressed in heels and with a short summer dress and with a black leather jacket which you wore over your shoulders, we hunched in an alcove outside the cathedral and kissed in the sudden storm that had come on and that had emptied the cathedral, sending everyone running outside to witness the scudding clouds shoot over its slanted roofs, heaven is no mirror, I thought then, no mirror to the wet roofs, no reflector, to kiss in the sudden storm is not to double heaven, I say to you now, to kiss in the sudden storm is to make monument. Gradually, I am working my way out of art.
Harder.
Marmoutier. Fleury. Saint-Sauveur. Notre-Dame de Dole. Trinité de Vendôme. These are beautiful words in the throat, wondrous places in the mind, the Congrégation Gallicane des Exempts, they called them, spells that would desecularise the world. And now that they are abandoned, many of them, and bereft, so many more, but still, there is that too, forever, in their place, that feel of an absence, of an opening, stopped up and abandoned, as an old tunnel or the path through an overgrown wood or the silent realms of a fairy-tale castle, only one that looks onto something that no longer goes by a name.
The repurposed monasteries of France are a vast network of precipices, then, or piers, let’s say, crazy wonder piers out into the clouds, and fog, and their legs running down into who knows what bottom of the world, bridges without bridges, and then . . . language stops; we say words like Marmoutier, we say Fleury, Flowery, to prevent us from falling, but still, to bring us to the cliffs, all the same, Flower, that is not us.
I threw my father into the water where he could not be drowned. I tossed his caul into the river. If you are born with a lucky cap—a transparent shroud that grows from the crown of your head—then sailors believe you will never die by drowning. At one time there was a trade in cauls. People would advertise theirs for sale in the classifieds, sailors would pay over the odds, families would divide the cauls up after death and secrete them on their person, traditionally in a hand-sewn pouch with the first initial of their name on it in black thread, which is what mine read, D, and inside, a parachute, to the bottom of the ocean, and back again, maybe. I threw it away in rage and tears and confusion, from the bridge beneath Durham Cathedral, because a voice told me to, a voice that spoke in terms that were taunting and daring but also deep, and right, though unsentimental and cold as stone. Dispose of your father, it said. Make a symbol of his death. And see if the old folk tales are true. And he came back. Of course, he came back. He came back, and he tempted my lover from me and was every man around me a danger. My sweet Papa.
I saw her. I saw my Flower through a window at the party.
She has her nylons and her panties pulled down round her ankles, her skirt up round her waist. She is pressed to the wall. I write it like this, as if it is now, as I call myself Monument Maker. Davide is behind her. He hasn’t bothered to pull his trousers down. He has entered her through the zip of his fly. Something about this detail makes my heart drop inside me, and my balls sing. It is a manly thing, to live through the humiliations of a lover. You too, Father. I said nothing.
The moon too, Father, is made out of stone, and suspended.
Just now. Just now I am sitting in the front window of the house we stayed in that summer, you and I, the house we shared with artists and poets for a single summer. I doubt if you remember this. Just now I am writing. Do you remember? I am writing this as I can hear you singing in the other room. I can hear the sound of the dishes in the sink. The splash of water. The sound of your spirit, which at the time I could never have brought myself to say, that your song, that you singing in the kitchen was the sound of your spirit, then, because, even then, we were already estranged, even then I held you, at a distance, which is what time did to us, you could argue, was what drove me to this, this love affair in stone, which is your voice now, the sound of your footsteps as you enter the room and walk towards me, your dress in billows behind you, it’s the dress you bought with your birthday money, and we embrace and here it is, do you remember, honey, your birthday, just now? And the light, through the slats in the window, as I sit here, now.
Is there an interior life? The Lord commands that we become as living stones. Because there is no interior monument. I read a story in the newspaper, by a psychologist, on the nature of consciousness. There is no interior life, he maintained. By which he meant, there is no body of consciousness, there is no ever-present lagoon, flesh, carnal, in which our thoughts and our memories and our feelings could mingle as in a body of water, the Red Sea, the Black Sea, no, no ocean for us, no depths to plumb, but moments, instead. Everything, in a moment, and then forever, gone again.
Have you ever sat through a performance of that idiotic old fart Stainer’s Crucifixion? It is complete tripe. But wait. Wait. I feel that I am here to make an argument for the presence of the sacred in what seems most stone and alien and unyielding to soft touch.
Is this the meaning of the resurrection, I ask myself, as the choir comes in, His Royal Banner held high by a woman with a twisted spine and a contorted neck and an involuntary spasm who obviously—God be with her—cannot sing. Little sparrow, why can’t you sing? For I was crushed between the fingers of the Lord, my Lord, my little larynx was held tight, and stopped, it says. And reopened, too, it says, again.
The choir is monotonous, incredible. There is one voice, and there is many. The words are simple, uncanny. Lift up! But who is lifting? Lay down! But who is laying? In front of me a young black woman shifts in her seat. An old man falls to his knees in a pew across the way. How will he rise? How will he regain his composure? The mystery of the divine humiliation, the little sparrow sings in a voice that cannot sing, by God. Jesus, you were less than flesh, and left us stone, in your memory. I remember, too, when my cock would get hard at such things. I left them in your memory, stone, now flesh.
Jesus was a corpulent Scoutmaster; fuck you and why not. Why not. You call your heroes as in Che Guevara. My hero is a corpulent Scoutmaster why not. This is the first lesson of churchgoing. I adore thee, I adore thee, is the first lesson. I adore thee, fat vicar of the past, you there, too, with your prayer book and your double chin, you too, sweetie, dark-haired sweetie on the choir to the left, your sexy librarian glasses, the way the light of the cathedral—they call them shafts—teases the shadow of your cheekbone, and you, of course, bird with a broken larynx, as you brush your hair aside, your barbed-wire hair, I have watched you do that at least ten times already, your fat body, pulled back, not by gravity but by God as an archer, the mystery of the divine humiliation, which is where the congregation all stand, and say, God gave way to death, God gave way to his own idea, and submitted to it, in order that it might say I adore thee, a God so lacking in love, I love you so, like my father, he, too, so lacking in love, and attempted drowned now, in the sea, and bald guy with big ears I see you too, back there, lugs, I call them, beneath my breath, as we sing together, blessed lugs, I mean to say, and there is a small dog in a pew behind me, they let small dogs in here, will there be dogs in heaven, I think to myself, even as Christ himself is given up to pure passion I am thinking to myself, is it allowed to have dogs in a church and how annoying is it.
To have ideas to love you, to have ideas to fall in love with you is to be God and to build a great cathedral out of stone and in it the faces of the people all around me (in the midst of keen disgrace, is what the word of the song says, is how it sings it) as a corpulent Scoutmaster turns to the congregation and with his hands and his mouth he rises from the tomb of the flesh, the tomb of the song, is how he sings it, and he fills the cathedral with an exhortation that is banal and simple enough to be perfectly impossible. This is called Good Friday, and I return home, and I get drunk, and I come all over the spectacles of the dark-haired sweetie on the choir to the left.
I call her Flower. I call you Flower. I call them Flower. And I return to the cathedral the next day and I make supplication. And I do it all over again. This is a summer. This is the character of a summer. Which is what they call Atlas, raising the world on his shoulders. Atlas stands in for summers. It’s obvious. Think about it. It is architecture, summers. Raise it.
Another summer.
We are driving down a dusty lane in central France in a beige-coloured Vauxhall Viva. The windows are rolled down. We are driving into the sun. Her name is Flower now, too.
The Greek Zeno of Elea never mentioned the magic of a flower when he claimed that no race can ever be run, that no church can ever be built, that no monument can ever be raised to our love because the space between us is infinite. To run a mile, you must first run a half-mile. And then a half-mile further again. Which requires first an eighth of a mile towards that, which demands a twentieth of a mile towards that, first, which requires the conquering of a divisor again and again, in other words, infinitesimally, which means that no race is run, that space is opening up and receding, forever, that we are once more on a strange wonder, held aloft above what depths, as in vertigo, forever. Which is why a statue of an elegantly dressed woman in the summer in France is a perfect impossibility. Which is why art is provisional. Provisional on what? On the will of God. Which is what the churches and the great cathedrals of France say, what Zeno of Elea says. That there is no raising up that is not of the will of God. And that, in the end, nothing is built. Nothing?
