Monument Maker, page 5
Look: I write this now in God’s hand, I carve it like so, and I say I, I still claim agency, even as this sentence unravels as another summer, in central France, and we are driving down a dusty lane in a beige-coloured Vauxhall Viva.
Your dress rides up your stockinged thigh. You are wearing oversized sunglasses. What does my perfume make you think of? you ask me. Go on, you say, say it, what you think. I can’t do smells, I say, my descriptive faculties fail me. It’s flowers, you say. Say it, you say, it’s flowers. Dark flowers, I say. It is dark flowers. Carnal, you say, it is Carnal Flower, and you hold out your wrist to me, like so.
The speed of gods time counts not, though with swiftest minutes winged.
3. PROCEEDS FROM THE FIRST SYNOD
OF THE CHURCH OF THE STONE OF FIRST WITNESS
We believe in one stone, eternal, stone without end, and in the resurrection, in stone, and the suffering, and betrayal, in stone, and of the virgin birth, from stone.
We believe in the stone of destiny.
Make of your heart a stone, we say, make of your heart a stone so that it may be held forever, and we say held as in fixated, on our own.
We declare Gislebertus the patron saint of our stone-cold hearts because he was first to say so, in stone.
We do not believe in denim trousers.
We laugh at megaliths and stone circles like we laugh at people who cannot spell.
Nothing beyond the Will of God. Stone.
We are the lovers of historical subterranean. Stone upon stone.
Yet we are the destroyer of The Tower.
Everything is holy and set in stone.
This is the voice of the first stone: silence!
The Lion of Judah is the Theologian of the Dream, stone.
These are the Pyramids, that is Africa, this is the Church.
This is the Church, which is the stone of our lives, foundation.
As faith trumps belief, stone.
God is both perfect and imperfect, contains both, and is neither; stone.
Make of your heart The Mighty Fortress, as Christ has commanded, in no wisdom and no understanding, then Yield! is The Law.
So is the ending of the first stone, as handed down, in the beginning, stone.
4. CHURCH OF THE BLACK EGYPTIAN, JACKAL
We are driving down a dirt road in the sun as your dress runs up your thighs. We pull into the driveway of a crumbling yellow villa with wild vines running and an old abandoned sailboat lying topsy-turvy on the green. In the conservatory, Pierre is holding court.
It is the smallest things, he says, it is the smallest gestures, at the end of a man’s life, that count. As if there is any other option, he spat, and he pinged a tang of phlegm that rang like a bell off the tin bin across the way, and he relayed a story, a story of his infidelities, without shame, and in front of the two of us, he listed his various misdeeds, some in lush detail, because by this point I am afraid that it gets a little tipsy and that the drinks cabinet (which was a globe, an Atlas with the world on his shoulders) has been well and truly raided.
Take that clown Joseph Beuys, Pierre said. Please, he laughed, take him. He became a Marxist simpleton as surely as you hypnotise a parrot, Pierre said. As surely as you circumcise a squirrel, he said. But then, now, he said. These, gestures. These, simple things. Like a single action, and then the next. Like a nick in stone, and then another, and that’s it; it’s all over. The span of a man’s life, he said, in a single incision in stone, he said. Think about it, he said. All this naturalistic statuary and has it gotten us any closer to the gods? he said, and I felt your dress run up your thighs, he’s talking of the gods, I’m no fool, sweetie, and then he started to name his conquests, dark-haired Japanese, obviously, dark-haired Japanese poets, he said, I screwed her in a graveyard, he tells you, I screwed her on a fallen gravestone, I nailed her on a memorial, he says, and he laughs, and she laughs too, he screws Japanese half to death in graveyards, okay, sweetie, I get it, my girl just had to put up with it, he shrugs, she had no choice, he admits, I told her, he says, how it was, you know how it goes, sweetie, you know how it goes just fine, I told my girl, he says, I have many lovers, he says, I am a man that has taken many lovers, he says, and with that he motions to you, Flower, and he taps his thigh as if he is offering you a seat there, and I see you think about it, I see you almost go to him, and I say to myself, you, too, are under this spell of stone. To be virtuosic in the moment, Pierre says, is the mark of a man, as you looked at him then, and almost went to him.
I am not feeling this art, this art of the young ones, Pierre says, in his pidgin English, this English he embraces like a pigeon, he says. This new art, he says, but still, I know there are problems, I know that art rises up to tackle problems, like windmills, he says, and he laughs, pointedly, like windmills, he says, and he looks around like I know we can all agree on the reference, he is quoting Don Quixote, surely, he is being quixotic, he is bringing up that whole idea of fencing with windmills, but then he says, a windmill, he says, made out of stone, he says, that is the problem that art must solve if it is to go deep, he says, and he taps his thigh again, like he is trying to tempt a cat or tame a pigeon.
What is the point of a windmill made of stone? he asks us. Then how much more pointless, he puts to us, a statue of a living person? Realist statuary is unholy, he says to us, and he is addressing Flower now. Realist statuary, he says, and he lights his pipe with an ostentatious pure-fuel lighter in the shape of Noah’s Ark, the exact co-ordinates of Noah’s Ark, he would say, and I would say to him, do you mean the exact measurements of Noah’s Ark, do you mean it is modelled on a ratio of its original specifications, his English was often quite poor, and approximate, but he said, no, I mean the co-ordinates, he said, this lighter is mapped upon the co-ordinates of Noah’s Ark, he said, in his room, in this dusty villa with the upturned boat outside, through the half-drawn pale-blue curtains, across the grey-green grass, this blue-yellow upturned boat, is the co-ordinates of Noah’s Ark, I hear myself say, so-called realist art, he says, is not of the gods, and he shakes his head then, he shakes himself and allows himself a wry smile at the folly of this world, and its pointlessness, which is how Noah must have felt herding animals two by two into this stupid wooden boat whose co-ordinates, let’s face it, are still unknown, a true offering to the gods would be to turn their own unrecognisable face on them, he says, and he rises, like a fucking paraplegic, if I’m being honest, he rises, quivering, from his desk, like a fucking paraplegic on his last legs if I’m being honest, and he puts his hand out to you, Flower, and gets far too close and invades your personal space and says banal things, with confidence, all night, banal things accompanied by searing insights, by circuitous digressions, by erudite passages of by-heart poetry and prose, these small gestures, at the end of a man’s life.
What other animal suffers in silence? Pierre asked us. Only that is not exactly what he said. He said, what animal expresses pain mutely? We have all heard of baby deer that weep in the snow like orphaned children, Pierre said, and this time that was exactly what he said. But what of animals that cannot cry out in pain? he said. Mute swans, he said. Have you ever seen a pigeon devoured by a raptor? Pierre asked us, only he pronounced raptor as you would trapdoor. It is the way you approach English, I wanted to say, I wanted to joke that Pierre’s approach to English was like a pigeon swallowed by a trapdoor, I wanted to say that, but I didn’t.
The pigeon, Pierre said, watches its own devouring in silence, and all around it, too, other pigeons are silenced. Does that mean that pigeons are capable of experiencing awe? Is their silence at their own devouring the workings of awe? Can we call a pigeon astonished? What other creature, and this was the word Pierre used this time around, what other creature expresses pain mutely? he asked us. We can imagine terrible flatfish with opaque eyes at the bottom of the ocean’s deep trenches, Flower said, we can imagine fish at the bottom of Challenger Deep, which is all of six miles down, staring up in mute astonishment, as teeth bear down on them from out of the blackness and devour them whole. It’s possible, Pierre said, at the bottom of the sea anything is possible, he conceded. Foxes cry out, Pierre said, and young calves. Dogs weep in the streets and in city parks. Snakes spit and curse till the last, and keep coming even then. Did the dodo scream in fear or stand in awe? That’s one thing we will never know, Pierre sighed. What about whales? I asked him. I made appeal to his namesake. Did not Melville liken the wounded cries of a dying whale to the atomic pain at the centre of the world? But he ignored the question. I had planned to bring up Nietzsche, and what he saw as Christianity’s failure to make suffering sacred, but I didn’t get the chance. Instead, Pierre said, the creature that expresses pain mutely, is man. All building up, he said, is the silent song of the wounded leviathan. And all stone, he said, is singing.
For God has commanded, and this is Pierre speaking now: stand in awe, and sin not. Lie on your bed, and be still. Selah. And so stone, stands in awe, at its reckoning, which is man, is how I rendered the final words of Pierre’s remarkable account of his search for the sacred, in stone, and how he carried a love affair, on his shoulders, once upon a summer, an affair that I based our own romance around, Flower; for how could I not see us in this Full Length Mirror?
I let Flower know that we were to have an illustrious visitor. He is kind of my mentor, I told her. I translated his book, I told her. He is a legend, I said, a very eccentric guy and possibly a genius too, I said, though I’m not one of these guys who equate eccentricity or just plain lack of social skills with genius, he really is, weird, I mean, strange, but don’t worry, I assured her, he is admirable, and of sound mind and with a real education, I told her, they don’t make men like this any more, I told her, he’s the last of his kind, I said, by which I implied that I was the last of the kind to recognise the last of his kind, so uniting us across the miles and decades and language barriers (though for me, not so, I could speak better French than Pierre could English) as twinned spirits and fellow travellers and as the type of guy it might be worth holding on to and never letting go of.
I had set up camp in a steel container in the same old strangely beautiful quarry with its terrible lake at the centre (a lake of who knows what depth, as we shall see) that Pierre had lived by, years earlier, and where he had compiled the details of the grand summer that was the tympanum of Full Length Mirror, the entrance to its glassy reflection. I had come to an arrangement with the owners. The quarry was abandoned, they said, apparently, the rumour was, due to the entire area being riddled with mineshafts and sinkholes and terrible depths and tunnels, and so the quarry had been emptied of heavy machinery, but still, a single metal container leased to a religious hermit, why not.
Why not? I said to the professor, which is what I called him, at first, when I called him from a phone box about a mile down a moody country lane with all of the birds perched like musical notes on the telephone wires, why not, I said, revisit the old stomping ground, as it were, take the temperature of old times, I suggested, I have a metal container set on the very spot of the old, I told him, it won’t be going anywhere any time soon, I said, I thought he would appreciate that, the elements, up against the elements, and time, was my thinking, but no, no, he said, entropy, he said, entropy, as if he had misheard me and was asking me to clarify, entropy, he said, without entropy how could a single note die, how could we recall a melody, how on earth could we be taken there, back again? I changed the subject by making a joke about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I knew that he was a fan. He made a joke about Moriarty, in return, and though I knew my Doyle as well as the next enquiring teenager, I was at a loss for words. He said, Moriarty tempts Sherlock Holmes to the falls by the insinuation of an imbalance in the cosmic stack, he said. And then he said, their first, and only, fully documented adventure is titled, after all, “The Adventure of the Final Problem.”
After that there was silence on the line, which I took to mean that he was coming, that the first adventure was written, and sure enough a spare three weeks later a taxi pulled up at the lip of the quarry and Pierre hobbled out, dressed for some kind of mid-century European spa, or a yacht, down the Suez, between the wars, and with a secretary named Claude who dropped him off and waved him adieu, and on first seeing the metal container that I had landed, on the spot, the exact spot, where he had spent those years himself, those years in which he put together the book that had brought our lives to this exact same spot, he said, I hear you, and he pulled his earlobe, his strangely elongated earlobe, and walked right inside, and took up court, and that first week he taught me to fish, in the lake, that was the first lesson, in the terrible lake, and to develop a taste for pike, which, as a Scotsman, I was repulsed by and thought of as Gypsy food, at best, but no more, my friend, no more, a pike lured up from the depths, with its opaque eyeballs in silent awe as its head is caved in and remodelled by the professor back in his own stomping ground at last, is its own memorial, I said to myself, as I bit through its charred eyeball, in delight and disgust, I said, yes, I’ll have a bit of that, why not.
He took me to nearby cathedrals and he ranted in the grounds. Ranted is the only word for it. Ranted, in this strange pigeon amalgam of French and English, snapping between one and an approximation of the other. Le sacré, he would say, suddenly, interrupting himself in mid-sentence, and he would hold his hand up and point to a dark cloister with the silence ringing out, in hope and loneliness, he would say, the formula for the sacred is hope plus loneliness, is how I translated it in Full Length Mirror, it’s no secret, the formula, and he would put his finger to his lips and he would announce, le sacré, as if it had come on the air, but this is the spell set by the world’s most sacred sites, Pierre taught me, hope and loneliness have conspired to set a stone, in the places we go to stand in awe, Pierre said, and of course I thought of that damn pigeon, first held tight under his arm, then spoken, then pinned to the ground in wonder as it is torn to pieces, of course I thought of those silent pigeon eyes and that word that came to me, all over again, that word implacable, that word that stirs me in envy and in jealousy, somehow, there is no such thing, I say now, implacable is unworked stone, and unworked stone is a contradiction in terms. Stone is the working. So where does that leave hope and loneliness? Here, written in stone, for all to see.
I raise it, like Atlas, this summer. The way the heat would rise from the fields around the quarry in the early-summer dawn, so that everything seemed as if in a distant childhood looking-glass, is what asks me to remember it, and even you, Flower, who broke my heart, your silent eyes signal it, now, as Pierre serves brown rice baked in a tin on the old stove and serves it in slices, like a cake, in the semi-darkness, your silent eyes, as he served slices of brown rice alongside pike roasted in the embers of the fire, and as he does so he is naming the constellations above our heads, in darkness, I can’t see him at the other side of the table, was he right, how would I know, I know little of astronomy, I’m afraid, which in Pierre’s book made you unqualified for architecture, or for poetry, or for love of the arts, in general, if you hadn’t even taken the time to name what’s right above your head, or to stand in awe, beneath it, but he wheeled through the constellations of the night-time northern sky, I know that much, I can vouch for that, and he served us this food, in the dark, within this circle of light, and it felt like Freemasonry, is Freemasonry the study of the architecture of the universe, because if so that’s how it felt, that night, in the dark and the light, that the architecture of the heavens was there to be named, hope and loneliness, which is a church, wherever it is gathered.
Is it true that dogs can smell cancer? Is it true that old men smell of stinky death? It’s true, my friends, I smell me, it’s true. Stinky death is the body uncared for, which is how the universe feels about old men, stinky death, somewhere in the wings, preferably, these chicken wings that smell of sweat and of old seed. What is the smell of old seed, you might ask, and I would know, a stain is an old seed, dried up, and goes well with tank tops and dark-brown corduroy and writing by candlelight, into the night, and not sleeping, and waking up, and doing it all over again.
We are sat outside the steel container, on the lip of this infinity of water beneath us. These caves and tunnels and canyons running on forever beneath us, and the soft sun coming out of the past, and he says, with a shawl over his knees and some kind of contrived fisherman’s hat on his head, and with a fresh bottle of plonk on the ground, he says, I have always understood the word redemption to mean as in when you return a glass bottle of pop in exchange for small beer, he says, and I went to correct him, you mean small change, I said, you mean shrapnel, I said, you mean peanuts, and he said, no, small beer, delicious, don’t you understand, and I thought of those gestures, those small gestures he had been on about in art, at the end of a man’s life, and he said, they call it the angel’s share, in English, he said, in Scottish, more properly, he said, I call it small beer, it is what we receive in exchange for the true fulfilment of our lives, which, in contradiction, is only, truly, what we were able to give to them, our angel.
