Monument Maker, page 7
Harder.
In the gardens at La Bastie, Pierre writes, the Temple of Love that features an arched rotunda with a statue in its centre is also known as the Temple of Autumn. Does it take an autumn to make of a season summer? The price we pay for beginnings is endings. Are all monuments memorials? Here is a black-and-white photograph of Pierre and his lover Hildegard outside the keep of the royal Château de Vincennes. She seems dressed for another season entirely. With a long black mohair coat, black hat and kitten heels she looks like something from the 1950s. In the photograph she is looking in a mirror. She is looking in a hand-mirror and fixing her make-up, perhaps, I imagine, while Pierre’s attention seems to have been caught by the details on a low window, a window which may, or may not, look onto the kitchen where the corpse of Henry V of England, who died in a room on the second floor shortly after establishing his right to the throne of France, was boiled in a pot on the open fireplace in order that they might separate his skin from his bones, and post them back again. The identity of the photographer is unknown, or, rather, unrevealed. Every summer has its autumn.
What if I told you I love you? I said to Mary. What if I told you I love you, I said to her, over this noise like a dishwasher humming, which was actually a cassette of her music, if you can believe that. Mary took a last draw of her cigarette and then went to toss it out of the window but the window wasn’t actually open so it just bounced off the glass and landed on the back seat of the car and started smouldering so as we had to pull over to the side of the road and put it out and though I never got my answer, now I think maybe I did, in a way, after all.
She had a workshop in a garage in her parents’ back garden—I think they were dead, it was never clear, she lived there on her own—and in the middle of it there was a totem pole, that’s the only way to describe it, going right up the middle of the garage and out through the skylight there was this great stone totem pole that she said she had built by running a funnel up to the skylight and pouring concrete and stones and found objects and mashed-up bits of long-dead crap down this funnel thing, and then peeling this funnel thing away to expose this totem pole thing that she then cut certain incisions in—that was the phrase she used, certain incisions, like the brushstroke of a master—that created channels, she said, that created waterways, she said, that allowed all the rain that came in the skylight to course in certain patterns across it and when I asked her what it was she said, Jung dreamed of a phallus on a throne, I realised later that was what she said but at the time I thought she was saying that the sculpture was called Young Dream of a Phallus on a Throne and I was completely bowled over. Then I looked around and there was a wall-sized painting, I’m not kidding, of a naked woman in high heels bending over a bed and blowing some old guy. That’s me, she said, and I was so confused, so mind-blown, by this point, that I had no idea whether she meant she was the girl doing the blowing or the old guy being blown. Either seemed possible, at the foot of this mad weeping totem pole, poking through the roof of a garage, in Airdrie.
Look at this photograph of an old monastery on a deserted street in the rain. You can almost smell the damp dust in the air. That’s Pierre, as a young man, perched on the edge of what looks like a fountain or a well. That’s his father stood behind him. And on down the street, as far as the eye can see, not a single person in view, just like the world used to be, when it was half-empty, and filled with monuments to times when things were emptier still. What is the date of the first gravestone? Emptier, still. Which is Latin for the date of the first monument.
I became enthralled by this idea of simple gestures, of markings, of one movement of the hands and then the next. A face risen from stone. A piece of paper with an orange line and a black line, extended. An imperfect form, made perfect, by imprecision, is as perfect as a cloud, I told myself, as I left two cuts in stone and drowned it, in upside-down clouds, in the endless waters outside our front door, Pierre and I, that summer that I christen now, that summer whose soft baby skull I hold in my hands and am careful not to squeeze nor to poke around in there, now, this Summer of the Upside-Down City, I call it, which I realise now is Hebrew, maybe, for the Landing on Water of the Puzzled Turtle Dove, nor poke around with my thumbs in there, in the squish of its brain, quite yet, might be best.
“Is” is what we say in stone. “Is” is the only word we can trust. “Is” is the foundation stone. Is. Is. I do not think therefore I is. Is.
Pierre told this story about his mother. His mother was a young girl herself in this story, in a time that was half-empty, and still. His mother had never visited the neighbouring village. It was barely a dream to think of it, she had said, so circumscribed, she had said, was our world, that was the word she had used, so low, the horizon, was what she had said. Then a knight appeared, was how his mother had put it, as a young girl, an outlandish knight appeared, was the term she had used, which meant, simply, that he was from the world beyond the village, was how she had explained it, or rather, how I translated what she had said. I said to myself: his mother met an outlandish knight, and I told Pierre and he said, precisely, although of course he said, précisément, précisément, he said, and that this Outlandish Knight, he said, who, really, Pierre’s mother had said, was only a few years older than she was, a boy child, she had said, that was the phrase she had used, un garçon, she had said, un mere garçon, précisément, she had said, and she had shrugged, precisely, a boy child, she had said, and this Outlandish Knight had appeared, in a field, by the river, nearby, this Outlandish Knight had swum up from another village, and had been taken on the tide to Pierre’s mother’s village, a village whose name translates as In The Beginning, the village of In The Beginning, he had floated out from this other unknown village on the tide, seemingly, and had emerged, soaking—he was still wearing his clothes—soaking wet and with a pair of trousers tied by a single string—une seule chaîne, his mother had said—at the village of In The Beginning, and this figure, this wet figure come up from the depths and only a few years older than the young Pierre’s mother had held out his hand and in his hand he had a cloth bag, a sopping cloth bag inside of which were stones, plain stones, Pierre’s mother had said, plain stones, she realised now, but then, oh my, this Outlandish Knight come up from the waves had opened this sopping cloth bag and had produced this handful of small stones and offered it to Pierre’s mother, he had said nothing but simply opened his palm and offered the young Pierre’s mother a handful of stones and Pierre’s mother had recognised it, this gesture, these stones in this gesture, young Pierre’s mother had recognised it as the currency of the future, Pierre said, only he said it, l’appareil du futur, which is really the device of the future, in another way, but she had recognised it as currency, too, because she had understood it, Pierre said, as this mysterious waterborne man, this Outlandish Knight, had offered her these stones, these simple stones, these precious stones, she had understood that they were tokens of not only the existence but the permanence of the world outside these boundaries, beyond this village of In The Beginning, where the future, and the past, are written, forever. And at that moment of profoundest realisation she slides one delicate shoulder from her dress and then the other and lets it fall to her ankles, naked, but for this pool around her feet, and is taken then and there, in the soft wet grass on the banks of the river. And what became of this Outlandish Knight? Pierre had asked his mother. What became of this visitor to In The Beginning? He took to the waters, his mother had told him, and I watched as he drifted out of sight.
Or was that a story I read when I was a young man? It has the tenor of my boyhood novellas. Did I dream of a man washed down a river whose name was Pierre’s father? But already, there, I am conflating the stories. Pierre’s father is the name of a river, which offers stones, now, to my boyhood, un garçon is the currency of the past, in this village of In The Beginning.
Flower. Flower, is Flower, is Flower.
Harder.
One evening after a day in the fields making monument, I cooked Mary dinner at my place. I lit candles, and there were flowers on the table. Mary, I said to her, in the silence after dinner, but she held her hand up for quiet. I wanted to pour my heart out to her. I love you forever, was what I always wanted to say. But she held up her hand for quiet. Shh, she said. Listen, she said. Be still. Be still on your bed, I thought to myself, that thing in The Bible, in Psalms, where you are commanded to be still on your bed and to stand in awe and sin not. What’s that sound, she said. Shh. Listen. What’s that sound? But there was nothing but the sound of the wind outside and of this silent council house creaking in the wind. No, she said, can’t you hear it? Teeth, she said. The sound of teeth, she said, and she turned me on, in a flash, I thought she meant we were going to tear each other apart in passion but she said, no, over by the sink, she said, listen. But still I couldn’t hear anything. She dropped to her knees, by the side of the sink. There, she said, look, and she pointed to a tiny spider devouring another insect, eating it alive, tearing apart its flesh on the floor next to the sink. She had heard the sound of its teeth in the silence. The sound of its tiny blade-like teeth cracking through the shell of this tinier creature still and drinking down its blood and guts and shit-sack and entrails. Afterwards I sat on my bed, in the dark, and wept sopping wet tears because I loved her so much I could never tell her.
Harder.
On Egyptian monuments to the dead, the male lion takes the place assigned to the gargoyles on the great cathedrals due to a belief that Seth, the disharmonious brother, and his armies attacked the temples of the gods and goddesses in the form of rainstorms. The stone lions on the roofs, they believed, would devour their enemies and spit them out in streams of water.
Harder.
The Gnostics sought for a release from time by insisting that Christ had urged us to give up the flesh because he himself had no body to speak of. If the church is the body of Christ, then the church, too, is invisible. To make monument, then, to make religious statuary, is to mirror nothing. Which is the way of the greatest art. Monument maker.
Harder.
I’m following in the footsteps of Pierre, I tell myself, as I stand in front of some forsaken monument, and cross myself, and this wind, these hailstones coming down, is this how it was for you, Pierre, I think to myself, and right then I see my Flower, coming out of the past, now, coming out of the past with her raincoat held over her head, her blue raincoat and her wet hair, running across the road, this cobblestone road chiselled straight into the flesh of my heart, and she has bought us cigarettes, a handful of single cigarettes from some old man in a bar, and here she is, now, out of the rain, and fuck you, Pierre, my shadow, fuck you, as I cross myself in the hail and in the rain, that time, and harder, Pierre, you bastard.
Harder.
I lined that metal container that lay on the edge of the still grey lake in this strange forgotten quarry that I lived in (and that would have felt like an oven had it not been used as a storage hut for certain volatile chemicals, previously, certain experimental cocktails, or so local legend had it, that meant it was perforated and lined with odd ducts and foams which contributed to the constant feel of being inside of a lung, of feeling that metal, too, is breathing, but slower than trees) for one momentous summer, with sheet music, I crammed it into all the walls, I felt better for it, (crammed in), beautiful editions of old religious sheet music that I picked up at the same weekend market I scoured for stoneworking materials like penknives and compasses and old bottle openers and potato peelers and weird rusted tools like grave pickings. Above my bed, in a section of the container that I had walled off using old wooden pallets, I hung the notation for one of the greatest pieces of religious music ever made, Spem In Alium Nunquam Habui, a motet in forty parts (do you even know what a motet is? It is a form of vocal polyphony that would open man to God, as in open up a space in his heart, a negative space, fashioned by a withdrawing, in the perfect shape of the heart, which is where Christ appears, as he does on walnuts and squashed fruits and the pips of tomatoes in strange outdated villages where superstitious farmers truly understand God’s love for everything created, for everything created, I say it again, from finely carved seeds and perfect snowflakes through monumental cathedrals of stone, this is the space where God enters, for man cannot come to God except as a man, or a woman, for aspiring to ascend is spiritual hubris of the highest order, is not truly union of man-as-man with God-as-God, which is a Christ-shaped hole in the heart, which is permanently there but which like in the superstitions of the Sufis, just as in the mathematics of the Trinity, requires a mediator, it would seem, the Sufis, I say, a particular Glaswegian sect of which I was once, briefly, an initiate, in which I entered into the lineage, made the connection, was the religious term, via the heart meditation known as Qutub, where the heart is located between the ribs, on the left side, as a point, as surely as a spear had been thrust in there, or more properly a cable, a heavenly expressway by which, in its piercing, God gains access and meets the man of his creation, and which I experienced, in a community centre in the Garnethill area of the city in which I was initiated, as an ecstatic sense of sexual communion, just as in the music of Thomas Tallis, of this Spem In Alium, which means Of Hope In Any Other I Have None or better still Hope In No Other or better yet Hopelessly Devoted To You, and which I hung above my bed, whose pages I cut out, whose pages were mostly taken up with instructions for the multiple choirs to be silent, as if the music, too, music on music, more truly, was received through an empty hole in the heart whose name was Christ and who was the entry point to the Father, these empty bars marked by a single dot, again and again, a single black dot as the infinite point between this world as it is and this world as it lies behind it, these strange symmetrical tears, falling down, it would seem to me some nights, as I lay upside down on my bed, in the candlelight of my past, and dreamed of the empty insides of the great cathedrals, the echoing cloisters of all this continent’s crumbling monasteries and the negative spaces they were built, not so much to contain, but to invent, to sound out, the lacks they sounded, this silence of the great empty cathedrals, that summer, and for the rest of my life, is the empty music, whose greatest composer was Thomas Tallis, who was an architect on this earth in as much as he was commissioned to sound the spaces that the cathedrals have come down to this earth to draw our attention to and yet he was the same empty size as them, he was in that sense equal to them, as a diving bell goes down to the surface, so is the church as the body of Christ, which is the zero that is at the centre of everything, and which is a halo, as much as a mouth, as much as the trim little hole of my darling, Flower).
Harder.
What is Not Man comes to Man so that Man can be as Not Man. This is the story of the Gospels, the history of religious art, and the story of my life.
Harder.
Her trim little hole. She spreads it for me, there, on a stool in the container, by the light of the moon, I almost said, rising up, from the waters, I almost said, to the vision of her trim little hole, forgive me, it’s the religious in me, whose name is Faith & Awe, her dark-green eyes, by candlelight, her red-painted fingernails, spreading her lips, like a perfect butterfly designed by an incomprehensible god,
and weeping, too, in sorrow and in pity, now, at what God has only gone and done with Himself, and delight in it, too, which is the Devil, I thought to myself, as I got down on my hands and knees before her and entered her with my tongue, and prised apart the belly of the butterfly, slid my fingers to the meridians, and held them there, pulled her black panties to one side, and felt them tear, and wet, and wondered about proxies, about counterparts, about intermediaries like butterflies and devils and panties in between, and knew God, more truly then I knew God, than in the silent womb of the great cathedrals, even. Right then, I said, there is a time for making monument for everything that is built. Yet some things are longing not to be built. I said that too, and then I thought:
Harder.
Flower’s old boyfriend Davide finally gave me a doing. I was browsing in a bookshop in town when he approached the window and pressed his face against it and made a mime of flicking his tongue between his index and middle finger. I went outside and challenged him, and he gave me a right good pasting on the spot. Then he said that Flower was just his bitch on the side and that he couldn’t care anyway and he walked off, with a leer on his face.
Harder.
6. MONASTERY OF THE COLLARED DOVE
COME PUZZLED DOWN FROM HEAVEN
Everything is empty. I am sitting in a garden with my Flower, next to a slow-moving river, in the twilight, talking to a drunken Finnish poet that we met in the hotel. A female duck is stood on the wall facing us. Saliva trails from its open mouth. Everything is empty, I am thinking to myself, as my beautiful Flower sits with her feet up on the wall drinking from an impossibly large can of French artisanal beer. The poet has just returned from an ashram in India. Have you ever been to an ashram? the poet asks us. You forget everything you ever wanted, she says. You go to bed at four and you get up at five, she tells us, drinking from an impossibly large glass of wine. Then you do yoga, she says, and that’s when you forget everything. The discipline, she says, and she nods her head, it’s the discipline that does it.
Everything is empty, though now, as I relate this to you now, I think, maybe it was just me, maybe I am the one who is empty, and who cannot be altered, because I recall feeling nothing, profoundly, but still, nothing at all, as I sat there in what now seems to me most like everything I ever wanted, a retreat in France, my beautiful Flower, an impossibly large can of beer, the slowness of the evening and the slow rippling of the river, the sounds of the birds in the high trees and the kids across the way, yet as I sat there I felt nothing, as though I had been lowered into the scene, again as in a diving bell, and was bearing witness to simple happenings at the bottom of the sea or the beginning of time, as implacably uninteresting as that, the only sounds as echoing, the beat of my heart, the sound of my breath, in the cocoon of my body, which was made to wait for God who is already here, God is already here, I tell myself, and you are empty to receive Him. For God made emptiness and pointlessness, I am thinking to myself, if things weren’t empty, I am thinking, if things had a point, then we would be permanently distracted from God. But God is in everything, God says to me, in His echoing, and I am left puzzled, and come down from heaven.
