Monument Maker, page 9
Harder.
The past and the future are tombs from which Christ is risen. A stone is a stone is a stone. Is.
Harder.
In order to demonstrate my facility with the French language, and to convince you that I, too, am one hell of a man, here are some poems by my favourite religious poet, Pierre Reverdy, that I have translated from the French and that, I think you’ll find, are vast improvements on the nascent versions published by that clown Kenneth Rexroth via New Directions in some flimsy paperback or other.
SECRET
The empty bell
The dead birds
In the house where everyone is falling asleep
Nine o’clock
The earth stands still
It is as if someone sighed
The trees seem to smile
Water trembles at the tip of each leaf
A cloud crosses the night
Before the door a man is singing
The window opens without a sound
GOODBYE
The glow that overwhelms the head
The leap of the heart
On the slope where the air rolls his voice
the spokes of the wheel
the sun in the furrow
At the crossroads
close by the hill
a prayer
Words you cannot hear
Closer to the sky
And in his footsteps
the last square of light
JOURNEYS WITHOUT END
All those we saw from behind who went away singing
Who had been passing along the river
Where even the reeds repeated their prayer
Which was taken up by the birds stronger and further
They are the first to arrive and will not leave
They counted one step and then the next along their way
Which disappeared as they went
They walked on the hard stone
At the edge of the fields they paused
At the edge of the water they quenched their thirst
Their feet raised the dust
And it was a cloak embroidered by light
All those who went
walking in this desert
And for whom the sky was now open
Still seeking the point where the world ends
The wind that drove them continued on its rounds
And the door closed
A black door
Night
Everyone around here hates August Strindberg, God knows why.
7. MINISTRY OF THE LANDING ON WATER
OF THE PUZZLED TURTLE DOVE
The perfect French country lane is to be found in small villages south of Paris, running between abandoned villas and shuttered summer houses, with single tyre tracks leading off and soft dandelions and daisies rising up, and with moss growing in the stonework and with locked wooden doors painted green and flaking in the sun and with overhanging foliage and with red-tiled roofs to the left and right and the smell of warm grass and manure in the air and with dark shadows across the way and not a soul in sight, not a single soul in sight, and that appear endless, and that seem to lead to the place you have been dreaming of your entire life, the place you left somewhere dear in childhood, perhaps, and which now, once more, is just up ahead, in dappled shadow, where the birds circle, just out of sight, and where a solitary nameplate, gone rusty in the sun and the rain, reads Ruelle de Squab. Ruelle de Squab, baby. That is how it reads.
There is a bar in Bourron-Marlotte run by an actual Frenchman in an actual beret with an actual goatee who plays atonal acoustic guitar between serving overpriced French artisanal beers and shaking his head over his lack of a single fucking word of English. On the wall Elvis Presley appears to have donated one of his gold records to the cause (“Rock-a-Hula Baby”) alongside framed photographs of Marilyn Monroe, B.B. King and Johnny Hallyday (“Le Rocker Originel”). They charge you to take a photograph of the photographs. It is my favourite bar in all of France. My Flower and I sat outside, drinking beer in the rain. Don’t you want to go inside? a drunken French rocker with swollen calves and a precocious beer gut asked us. Non, monsieur, I assured him. We’re happy where we are. Where are you from? he asked me. From Scotland, I said (in French). Ah, he said. In that case it is easy for you. It is easy for me, I said to him. You have no idea. It is so fucking easy for me you would not believe.
The Lord is my rock and my fortress: at the centre of the world there is the castle of heaven. But this does not mean to say that somewhere, locatable, there is an actual castle in which God sits as some kind of feudal baron (?). It says that every moment, every second, is fortified by the living presence of God. That there is something to which the present moment cleaves, as in a rock. But this rock is not a rock, an actual rock. But actual rock, creation in stone, in its solidity (its fixity?), in its memorialising in time, is closest to God-work. And so, I have come to love the churches that are fallen down, that have been eroded and eaten away, for in their not-God-ness they are more fastly held (?) in the arms of God. I prefer God as a rock, God as a stone (but what cares God for my preference?), to God as a father, simply because stone is less comprehensible than fatherhood, and I say that as someone who has never fathered a child, though not for want of trying (?!), and for whom fatherhood is not something uncomplicated, not something straightforward, but still, it makes of God and man a mere human relationship, and while of course God must contain all of the attributes of man within Himself, as all of the attributes of fatherhood and of rock and of stone, He must also exceed and encompass (?) them. God-ness contains both fatherhood and stone but God-ness is neither fatherhood nor stone. But if God is not entirely of anything of this world, then how do we come to Him? Answer: we do our best. And no more. For He is here already, and so cannot be sought.
I have just performed a joyless wank. As you get older masturbation becomes less satisfying. You may know that already. Or you may be shocked and dismayed to hear it. It is no longer yourself that commands it, rather a form of libidinal debt upon which the soul shrinks and recoils, as does said member, in the sorrow of its coming, on the ghastly bathroom floor. Sorry to break it to you, if so.
Harder.
Harder.
But what of the miracle of the Mass? God descends into simple bread and wine and permits us to partake of his body. Because Christianity is a religion for all and does not permit access to only rarefied (?) spiritual thinkers, because there is no qualification required for spiritual communion, because there is nothing to be solved, and nowhere to go, and nothing to be uncovered. For the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Because of this, God, too, is a father, and a bridegroom, and is cold, hard stone. And Jesus is born in a stable and cradled in the feed box of a donkey. John of Damascus called these monuments the Books of the Unlearned. But because of this too (and how to escape it?): biblical literalism, the historical Christ, religion as the obeying of arbitrary rules. God ties Himself up in confusions in the name of spiritual democracy. He loses Himself in order that every man can find Him.
But didn’t Pierre already say that He cannot be sought?
Here is a picture of Pierre from the time of the Church of the Stone of First Witness. He is sat on a rusting wrought-iron chair at the foot of the garden of the riverside house previously owned by the composer Frederick Delius in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, the same composer who set words from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra to music and titled it A Mass of Life. The man to the right of the photograph, the exceptionally tall man with the round spectacles and the liver spots on his head that make him look like a terribly cultured giraffe, I believe to be the man known as Frater Jim. The couple to the left are the ceramicist and painter Hildegard von Strophe and the religious polemicist, writer and soldier of fortune Max Rehberg in the wake of the campaign in some tinpot military dictatorship in Africa during which he lost his arm (more of which anon).
But what strikes me most about this picture is that Pierre is wearing an eyepatch, a black eyepatch, over his left eye. At first I thought it was a shadow, a dark shadow over his left eye, as in a painting by Rembrandt, then I wondered if it wasn’t in fact an erasure on the photograph itself, a smudge like on an old icon or a damaged mosaic, how appropriate, I told myself, but then I realised, he is wearing an eyepatch, he is wearing an eyepatch as some kind of affectation, I told myself, like James Joyce, didn’t James Joyce wear some stupid eyepatch to appear more literary or was it to focus one side of his brain, isn’t that what they say, that the left hemisphere is attached to the right eye and the right to the left? And when one side is impaired then the other compensates? And so I convinced myself that this was no mere affectation, no fey artistic pose, but rather an experiment in consciousness, and in seeing, and I purchased an eyepatch myself, and I entered churches, and I took it all in, in emulation of this photograph, this photograph in which I neglected to say that the woman was topless, and the men in their vests and shirtsleeves, as if they were part of some liberatory cult, or experiment in communal living, which, I was to find out, was very much the case, though, in another way, not at all.
And of course I thought of that passage in The Bible, that beautiful speech of Christ’s which is his true teaching, which is faith and awe, where he beseeches the true believer to give no thought to tomorrow, to food and to shelter and to money and to reputation, and no thought to clothes neither, because God has clothed the flowers of the field, even though tomorrow they are headed for the furnace.
I must fix this summer in stone, this summer of my Flower and I. The evening we attended a concert of baroque music in the country villa of a couple who lived just outside the village of Villiers-sous-Grez. The time we cycled through the overgrown tracks of the Forest of Fontainebleau and got lost in the gloom and covered in mosquito bites only to emerge into the most perfect sunset over the cornfields and wild poppies, with happy cats clawing at wooden fences and fat old women in headscarves walking with canes down perfectly tended country lanes. The time we bought home-brewed beer from some red-faced, white-haired ex-sailor in his cottage with a thatched roof. The baroque music trio with the unforgettable singer who looked just like my sister, and whose face seemed like the perfect mirror of my own, which is divided, and mismatched, the left side of her face fallen, the right perfectly formed, and who played bass recorder accompanied by a huge old lute and a bass viol, and whose music seemed to speak of a time of divine regency, which is to say a time when it was commonly accepted that everything is appointed by God, even, perhaps especially, baroque music trios in dreamy book-lined country villas, which is now, which was now, with huge friendly Alsatians in the kitchen and wooden beams and replicas of Picasso on the walls (I’ll get to Picasso, in my survey of religious art I must, of course, get to Picasso) and everybody singing, everybody singing a soft, melancholic ballad in French that spoke of different times, I almost wept, different times, I almost cried to myself, different times are here before us, I almost burst, as they performed pieces by names I did not know but names on which I have long since pinned my heart, but don’t play them for me, please, don’t gift me a CD of their works, for, as I say, I may just burst if you were to play me something by Robert de Visée (please don’t) or Jean-Féry Rebel or Jacques Hotteterre or Charles Mouton (I simply couldn’t stand it) or Antoine Boësset or Tarquinio Merula or Claudio Monteverdi (back then the only one I knew, but in the light of the past, please, I beg of you, don’t) or Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger or (please no!) “Guárdame las vacas” by an anonymous Espagnol circa 1550. I beg of you, please, lay off, let go. And all the while there are a pair of friendly drunks behind us, throwing scraps of bread through the door of the living room in order to encourage a fat chicken, running wild, to cross the performance space like some kind of avant-garde intervention, and I thought of Mary just then, “candied friend of my youth,” I thought, which is a line from a poem, do you know it, and I wondered if she was even still alive, and we cycled back to the hotel, happily drunk, the two of us, through the dark forest with strange sounds all around us, and I recalled my sister, in another life, whose beautiful broken face had looked into my own, had she had a stroke, I wondered, are all choristers touched, I asked myself, as we sat at the open window and drank a final beer together and heard a crash, a huge bang, somewhere in the distance and then, silence. Different times are right here, I tell myself, as I make monument of those evenings.
The little boats, on the river, at the bottom of the garden, are pure joy. They are supported by my father, who I drowned in the river, but who can never drown. I walk in until I am submerged, and I rise again to the surface. The little boats are pure joy, Dad. And now you are in every river of the world.
We bumped into another artist at the hotel, my Flower and I, a boring Swedish artist who was paid by the government to doodle, but we thought he might be a good companion for the drunken Finnish poet, who by this point was really starting to do our heads in, so we invited them both for another night out at the country villa where we had seen the baroque music, and the four of us cycled there in the evening. We ate outside in the garden while the Finn and the Swede discussed Marcel Proust and how he was so incredibly detailed. He will talk about a tree, then a flower, then a view, then a bedspread, the drunken Finnish poet marvelled. I don’t remember the bedspread, the dull Swede, who actually looked a little like the poet Robert Creeley, said. There was no set menu, so of course the timid Swede was anxious, but when the plates arrived, with French ham and pork and lettuce and cheese and tomato and cherries and strawberries, he exclaimed and said, ah, this is exactly what I would have liked. I hate you, I thought, underneath my breath, I fucking hate you and hope you die.
In my quest for homemade beer the proprietor introduced me to a local woman who grew her own hops and we fell into conversation. She and her husband had moved to the village two years ago, with the intention that her husband would work on his sculpture while she indulged her own passions, but a mere two weeks after their arrival he collapsed and died from a sudden brain aneurysm and so she had been taken under the wings of the local artistic community because she knew no one else, no one else at all. Her passion, she told me, was African American men. Particularly their presence, or not, at the Normandy landings, she clarified. There are photographs of African American men at Ardennes, she said. There are photographs of African American men at many of the flashpoints of the Second World War, she said. That word, flashpoint, I thought, when she said that. Yet there are no photographs of African American men at Normandy, she said. So I looked into it. I looked into it, she said, and I found out that, yes, indeed, there had been many African American soldiers at Normandy and yet there was no documentation of them. It became my passion, she said, I have no idea why, but it became my passion to reinstate (another word that struck me when she said it) African American soldiers into the historical narrative of the Normandy landings (“historical narrative” was another), although no one wanted to hear it, she laughed, so I was forced to offer my services for free and to inform anyone who would listen, which was inevitably ladies’ groups in small villages or homeless communities (“homeless communities”) or even, she laughed again, institutionalised retards (“institutionalised retards”).
