Through the train window Picasso saw the cemeteries of the Dead. The box houses in yellow brick, each fastened against its neighbour. In the cold air the sulphurous walls steamed. There was no sign of life. If she could have looked in what would she have seen? Rows of scuffed couches identically angled towards the identical televisions offering, courtesy of the bold white satellite dishes, 45 different channels of football, news, comedy, melodrama and wildlife documentaries. Her own mother and father were no better, only, their sofa was leather and their television was concealed behind a sliding panel in the wall. The panel was a mural of Christ turning the moneychangers out of the Temple. Sir Jack never took his wallet to church.
Although there were many more divorces than previously had been known there were many more marriages too. No sooner had one pair hastily slashed the knot than both parties were rushing to re-tie it with a new bit of string. Down the aisle they went, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘till Death us do part’. Death did part them; dead to feeling, dead to beauty, dead to all but the most obvious pleasures, they were soon dead to one another and each blamed the other for the boredom that was theirs.
In the new Church-abandoned morality, a curious hierarchy of values had asserted itself. The serially monogamous, as the magazines called the marriage junkies, were a step up in virtue from any couple who either would not or could not marry. The unmarried, however faithful, were at least two steps down from the man who kept his wife but enjoyed his mistress(es). He in his turn believed himself superior to the divorce statistics. The Church looked on. Under the firm hand of the new Archbishop, himself a twice-married accountant, the fully privatised disestablished Church of England charged for weddings, funerals, communion, counselling etc. They were doing well. Picasso had sometimes gone to church to sit in an empty pew to listen to the God-fled monotone of the anecdotal vicar. The hail- fellow- well- met- shallow- hearted- dull- brained- cost- effective- worldly- wise- over- weight- ill- read- ill- bred-golfing vicar.
She remembered the time when she tried to speak to him, and tried for two weeks before she could get an appointment, and the day and the hour had come and he was busy. She had gone over to the lectern and read the Lesson, and read on past John, 14 through chapters 15 and 16, while the Vicar talked fund-raising with his Bank Manager. She was afraid.
(Let not your hearts be troubled. Neither let them be afraid).
Yes, he had five minutes to spare before his dinner, would she like to tell him her little problem while he got changed?
(Come unto me all ye that labour and I will give thee rest).
Would the Vicar ask her brother Matthew to stop molesting her?
(Ask anything in my name and I will do it).
Horseplay? The Vicar couldn’t interfere in a bit of horseplay … she had a loving family, she should be careful, very careful what she said …
(Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God).
She showed him her bruises.
(A new commandment I give unto you; that you love one another as I have loved you).
He patted her on the back. He understood. Every family has its problems. She should talk to her mother, yes, talk to her mother. Matthew was a good boy at heart. He played the organ.
*
Picasso had a slight limp. Years ago she had thrown herself off the parapet of her house. It had been Christmas and she had been saved from death by a deep bank of snow. Still she looked down and remembered it. How could she forget when the day and the hour were written on her body?
Couldn’t she have talked to her mother? Couldn’t she have talked to her father? Her father had said ‘You must earn my love’ but no matter how hard she saved up she could never afford to buy it. The opening price had been steep enough, but, Sir Jack was a man of business and the price grew steeper as the goods were more desired. He wanted her to long for him.
She wanted to love him but when she ran to him with her arms open his hands were full. ‘I’m busy’ he said ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’
She dropped her arms and learned to keep them by her sides.
‘If only you were more affectionate,’ said her mother, buttoning the rigid body into a stiff frock.
At night her mother pecked her on the cheek as hens peck at their food. Her face was a dirt yard where hens peck.
‘Why don’t you smile like other little girls?’ Her mother’s beak came towards her, ‘Come on darling, do smile.’ Picasso did smile. She learned the rictus of the jaw that indicates pleasure in the female sex.
Years passed.
One night, after Matthew had torn at her body as crows do lambs, attacking the soft fleshy parts and leaving the creature alive, she had got out of her wet bed and tried to dry herself in the night air at the top of the house. She was naked. Naked when the ambulance men found her. Naked she remained for most of her stay in the psychiatric unit of St Sebastian the Martyr, private hospital for the mentally ill.
Matthew went to Sandhurst.
*
It was morning. The pale light behind the pale blind stretched the woven fabric. The woman could see the nicks in the canvas and the flaws of the stitching and behind the blind the frantic shadow of a bee.
The pale light warmed. The pale light became yellow of primroses, became deep daffodil yellow, easter yellow in ovals on the floor.
It was spring. The light blared out of the trumpets of the daffodils and ranked the path with tulip horns. The birds sang through the light but the light was louder. There were drums of light in the room. The naked woman watched the uncontained light. Loose unshaded light that fell out of the sun on to the houses into the gutters over the streets to slab the pavements yellow. A man walked by in a golden suit.
The light unpeeled the brown streets. There was new paint on the doors, men came and swept and swept and swept. The woman took a brown broom and swept her room. As she swept she painted. Each stroke of the brush drew the yellow up against her feet. Her body, in graceful motion, pulled the light with her as she went. Was she sweeping or painting or punting down a yellow river with the sun on her face?
It was a long time ago. Picasso had been released into the community, welcomed back into her family. Her mother cared for her. Together they went shopping in the village.
Les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec sursis indéfinis. Picasso had come back from the dead and she wanted life. She wanted to force life through the hour, to make it yield up its secrets, to waste no days of her reprieve in a self-built tomb. How much time did she still own? One year, twenty, fifty? The clock ticked as it always had but now she could hear it. Would it make any difference to her if the fiery finger on the wall wrote, one year, twenty, fifty? If she knew the date and the hour would it alter what was left? What is left? What was ever there? Is life any more than a slop bucket of accident and confusion? The freedom of the individual is the freedom to die without ever being moved by anything. What can pierce the thick wall of personality; your voice, your hand, a picture, a book, the sweet morning air? Myself imprisons me. The lead shield of my habits, that heavy, soft bluish-grey dead defence. pb No 82 of the Periodic Table, that useful list of contents that includes at no 26, Fe, the iron in my soul.
How to escape my element? First, run away. Objections from Family Life as follows:
1) You’ll be back.
2) Don’t think you can come back.
3) Running away never solved anything.
4) You can’t manage on your own.
5) Where are you going to go eh?
6) I suppose you think it’s different out there?
7) What’s wrong with this house?
8) Not good enough for you here?
9) What’s wrong with you?
Answers to the above.
1) no.
2) no.
3) yes.
4) yes.
5) ?
6) yes.
7) this house.
8) no.
9) Pantophobia.
Fear of everything. Fear of everything keeps me sealed up against everything. I fear the coloured world on my neutral body. I fear the bright red sun and grass matt green. I fear the cows whose black hides reflect purple. I fear the brimming blue that bees love. I fear the thirteen yellows and the madness of Van Gogh. I fear the sunflower, the straw chair and the boots donkey brown. Every moment intensity collects on the tip of experience as leaves collect rain. The moment swells, bursts, is gone, and passes unnoticed. Intensity dripping away, the moment gone. Isn’t that the science of life?
I do notice but I turn away. I turn away from the sharp points of beauty that arrow me through. Sharp beauty able to pierce the thick purple hide. I am in hiding from the slings and arrows of outrageous beauty. It is outrageous that there should be the sepia fox on the tones of snow, his brush sudden-red, his brush shed-blood red on the unmarked snow. Behind him, the Chase, the horses in thick vapour, their mounts half risen in perpetual action, the pink coats and the golden horn that lose their colours in the early setting sun. Dusk frees the fox. The badger wears his night-stripes and snouts among the stars.
Nature is excess. She is beyond the mean. A single rose-hip bursts in praise. What to do with rain, with snow, with sleet, with leaves, with comets, with hail, with lightning, with apples, pears and plums, nature shaking out her excess, the gravity-delighting objects that spill around my head?
Get an umbrella. A folding pocket-sized all weather friend to bounce off the booming world and keep me dry when I should be drenched through. Shall I be dry? Dust-dry, dried flower neat, pressed and labelled, in the right section, saved from moisture and rot. I can live like that, under the rim of consciousness, in the nylon shelter of my own thoughts, safe from beauty’s harm. I think therefore I am. Does that mean ‘I feel therefore I’m not’? But only through feeling can I get at thinking. Those things that move me challenge me. Only a seismic shock can re-order the card index of habit, prejudice and other people’s thoughts that I call my own.
In spite of fear, there are talismans I keep, pebbles I turn over in my hand. Remembered stones whose mineral surface is pocketed with gold.
Autumn in a London square, the still-hung air round the Yew, pink-barked. A terrier routs the leaves. The black-yapping dog and the Yew pink-barked. Dog, Yew, the plane tree leaves in piles of tan and the café where the coffee steams.
I bought a cup, burnt myself, but glad of coffee and money to buy it. Glad of the cardboard smelling steam and this small space on this wooden bench.
A woman passes and is gone. The birds take turns at the fountain. I have taken my turn at coffee, at bench, both remain, not me. Even now, when I know the moment, the moment is gone. The clock won’t stop, though I do, or seem to, holding the coffee as a shield against time. I want to walk so slowly through the square, to be continually walking through the square, the dog still yapping and the Yew pink-barked.
The tourists queued outside the British Museum.
The soft air and the hard path. The air caught on the wrought-iron railings and the path buried under the leaves. An old man spiked them away. Familiar in London squares, leaves and soft air, the last roses splashed upon the stem. A dun sparrow snatched a crimson worm. Why is it painful to me, that day, though long gone and unreturnable? Painful, so that I slow my steps on the busy streets, pausing as one who has forgotten something important. I have forgotten something important; forgotten how to look at pictures, the unpainted beauty of the everyday. This now, the quality that the artist can take, but which is always visible, if I will see. This now, itself, not the shock of the new, but the shock of the familiar, suddenly seen.
Long trains leaving. The cathedral vault of the station used to receive an incense of steam, now it makes a living sacrifice out of pigeons caught in the electricity terminals. No-one looks up at the blackened birds voltaged out of life and remnanted among the girders. Underneath the dead birds the passengers to and fro. The to and fro of tired bodies pushed on invisible lines.
But outside the train takes the cutting in a scythe of light. The crescent curve of the train mows the houses as it passes, the houses disappear behind the moon metal blade of the silver train.
The train, vibrating in its own power, as gun dogs do, rushes for the bridge as the signal goes, and splashes through the tracks in a siren of joy. A little boy leans out of the window, shouting with the double bell of the long train.
The train passes, a yellow band pulled through a black cloth. The houses spring back and take up their rightful place in the darkness. There’s nothing here but bricks and dirt, but metal and dirt but habit and dirt. The 5:45 to the suburbs.
There is more; a lean of beauty as the train judges the bend; an arc of mechanics that allows 180 degrees of admiration between the hard metal and the curve it implies. The simple clash between subject and style is a painterly one; the uncompromising line is made to yield to a curve. Only this defeat makes movement possible.
The curve seems to be so many afternoons, travelling slowly to the sea, the silver train towards the gold coast. The long wind back to childhood through memory, the romance of the train not killed by the 5:45. Each carriage articulated to its next, takes the bend, the vertebrae of the train that runs through my past like a rosary. So many afternoons travelling slowly to the sea; the rocking train and the rolling water. My mother smiling at the sea.
The smiling of women and the motion of great waters. These things moved Leonardo. Both at once mysterious and transparent, he took them into his paintings as things and meta-things: Madonna of the Balances, Madonna of the Lake, Madonna of the Rocks, La Gioconda, Saint Anne, Medusa, whose snake hair parts in reptile waves, sea-hue on her dead cheeks.
Leonardo who knew neither Latin nor Greek, and who described himself as an unlettered man (‘omo senza lettere’), loved words and fought with them, receiving many wounds. Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. No love that leaves the lover unmarked. In later life, Leonardo, branded by words, gave up painting and worked only on his fugitive manuscripts, writing from right to left. Who knows what he hoped to find? For me, it was found already, in the fearful face of Mona Lisa, corrupt crimson on lips and cheek, faded now into a modest blush, that rises so strangely beside the sea.
The train had reached the sea. The sea caught between two legs of concrete where the ferries unloaded their blunt cargo. The convenient sea, still as a child’s pony, but further out, past the hobbled water, the white-maned waves hurdled the buoys.
*
The unsaddled sea twice daily ridden by the moon. The 239,000 mile distant moon that daily rides the sea. Outrageous, the connections of the natural world; the planets in musical intervals around the sun. The canyons here that have made the mountains there. Even the flowers in my garden seed themselves in yours. The moved and still moving world rotating on its axel-tree. The daily death and resurrection of the self-renewing world.
I wanted to open the window to hear the sea no longer glass-paned. The tenor of the sea and the pitched gulls. The beauty of the sea in its movement and mass. The deep tidal swirls that cease as soon as it is contained.
What contains me? Fear, laziness, the opinion of others, a morbid terror of death and too little joy in life. I am shuttered at either end, a lid on my head, blocks under my feet. The stale self unrhythmed by art or nature.
Does it matter? Yes, to me, who suspects there is more than the machine-tooled life offered as a nice copy of millions of others. Won’t a reproduction do? Who can tell the difference these days? There’s no such thing as art. Settle for a designer suit to throw across your carcass. No-one can tell the difference between the living and the dead. And who are you to judge? This is a democracy isn’t it? We’re all equal now, apart from the money, all equal now. One size fits all.
It doesn’t fit me.
‘Why blame yourself? Why blame yourself?’ the liberal consolations of the anecdotal Vica
r who’s missed his birdie putt.
Who else shall I blame for this drought stricken life? My mother? My father? My brother? The world?
I’ve been unfortunate, it’s true, hard-hurt and despised. But should I tell that tale to every passer-by? Should I make my unhappiness into a placard and spend the years left decorating it?
There is so little time. This is all the time I’ve got. This is mine, this small parcel of years, that threatens to spill over on to the pavement and be lost among careless feet. Lost. The water out of the sieve and the river run dry. The quietly contained sea where the waters don’t break.
I want to run up the hill in the freedom of the wind and shout until the rains come. I call the rain with my head thrown back. Fill up my mouth, fill up my nostrils, soak the parched body, blood too thick to flow the channels. I will flow. Flow with summer grace along a crystal river. Flow salmon-flanked to the sea.
Why dry? Why dammed up when the hidden spring informs the pool? How to bore down to where the water is? How to cut an Artesian Well through the jelly of my fear?
I blame myself for my part in my crime. Collusion in too little life, too little love. I blame myself. That done, I can forgive myself. Forgive the rotting days where the fruit fell and was not gathered. The waste sad time. Punishment enough. Enough to live wedged in by fear. Call the rain.