Art and Lies Read online

  The Spanish girl in the upper room was not a virgin and I have to confess that babies do not move me much. That is, not those healthy hospital lines of crocheted flesh, the mother and baby unit, factory and farm of the future. And I notice too often that the most unfeeling of people relieve their shuttered hearts by cooing over babies, who when grown, will be by the same people exploited or ignored.

  But when she took the child to her breast, it seemed for a moment that the desolate space budded, and that what had been harmed was given back undamaged. The grim room softened and the crack in the window was filled with stars. The baby could not see the stars but they fell on her little body and made a blanket of light.

  Now, with the ugly steel door nearly fitted, I had to insist my way up the wormy stairs to the abandoned room. The kerosene flare and the curtains were gone. The winded mattress was bloodstained from the birth. Nothing remained except for a piece of my shirt. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

  Outside, the graceful yellow fountains of the arc welder threw down the light into the oily pavement puddles. The light struck off the welder’s metal boots in glowing chips. He wore his halo around his feet.

  I questioned him again but all he said was ‘People vanish everyday.’

  He sealed the door into the frame.

  People vanish everyday … The Third City is invisible, the city of the vanished, home to those who no longer exist.

  This part of the city is far larger than you might think. Easy to target squatters and immigrants, black marketeers and tax dodgers, call girls and mad men released into the community. The list of official disapproval is heartily pinned up in every law-abiding square. We know who’s hiding and why, we are the clean outdoor types, we don’t go in for night work.

  People vanish everyday, but it’s not you and me, is it? We are solid and confident, safe and strong, we can speak our minds.

  Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?

  I have an affection for the mediaeval period, perhaps because I am a man of shadows, and the glorious lights of the Renaissance bewilder me a little. Perhaps because, in the mediaevals, with their love of systems and hierarchies, I find the fullest and most human outworking of the old theory of ‘Kyndly Enclyning’. A theory that starts with Plato and runs in a many-coloured current through Boethius, Chaucer, all the thinking of the Middle Ages, and is still lively in both Shakespeare and Bacon. A truth, still apparent, though disregarded, that things move violently to their place, but calmly in their place. To put it another way, everything has its right home, the region that suits it, and, unless forcibly restrained, will move thither by a kind of homing instinct. But how will I find my ‘right home’, that house not built with hands, unless I am in my right mind? Every day, in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question ‘How shall I live?’ is not one I can answer on prescription.

  Most common are the retired or fired businessmen who develop cancer. They come to me in broken health, in fear for their lives, and the phrase I hear first is ‘I’m not the man I was.’ As we talk it becomes clear that he is the man he has been always, yes, well-off, yes, respectable, but immature, without self-knowledge, a man without breadth or depth, but shielded from this lack by his work, by his social standing, by his loving wife, by his young mistress, by his slap-on-the-back pals. Often, as we talk, he tells me that he has never liked his work, hates his family, or that he has lived for his work and that without it he is a child again and what should he do in the mornings?

  Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing. While they wait their cancer does not.

  It’s awkward, in a society where the cult of the individual has never been preached with greater force, and where many of our collective ills are a result of that force, to say that it is to the Self to which one must attend. But the Self is not a random collection of stray desires striving to be satisfied, nor is it only by suppressing such desires, as women are encouraged to do, that any social cohesion is possible. Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. ‘What do you do?’ is the party line, where doing is a substitute for being, and where the shame of not doing wipes away the thin chalk outline that sketches Husband Wife Banker Actor even Thief. It’s comforting, my busy life, left alone with my own thoughts I might find I have none. And left to my own emotions? Is there much beyond a childish rage and the sentimentality that passes for love?

  A friend of mine whom I treat informally, he is not my patient, came to me after his second heart attack and said ‘Handel, I want to think about my life.’ I gave him Pascal’s Pensées, he was delighted and stuffed the book into his bulging briefcase. ‘Just what I need,’ he said. As he was hurrying off to pick up a cab, he turned back to me and said ‘Handel, I’ve been so much better for our chats, and I have realised that you are right about the importance of the contemplative life. I’ll try and fit it in.’

  From my window I watched him disappear into the busy street that used to be flanked on either side with self-distinguishing little shops, each with its own identity and purpose. Each with customers it knew and a responsibility towards them. Now, the unflanked street has been widened, for a road too dangerous to cross, that roars between plate glass multi-national stores, that each sell the same goods, from the same markets, but in different packages and according to the rules of price war.

  How shall I live?

  The question presses on me through the thin pane. The question tails me through the dense streets. In the anonymous computer-face of the morning mail, it is the question only that I read in red ink, the question burning the complacent page.

  ‘How are you Handel?’

  (How shall I live?)

  ‘What are you doing these days?’

  (How shall I live?)

  ‘Heard about the merger?’

  (How shall I live?)

  The question daubed on the door-posts. The question drawn in the dust. The question hidden in the bowl of lilacs. The insolent question at a sleeping god. The question that riddles in the morning, that insinuates at noon. The question that drives my dreams to wakefulness, the question physical in beads of sweat. ‘Answer me’ whispers the voice in the desert. The silent place where the city has not yet come.

  In the invisible city, the city incapable of being seen for what it is, the vanished souls pass their ghostly way, making no impression, leaving no mark, a homogenous people who act, dress, talk and think alike.

  My own mind?

  My right mind?

  My true home?

  Long trains leaving. The square light in the windows. The yellow light on the black train. The reptile train with yellow scales. Yellow and BLACK yellow and BLACK yellow and BLACK chants the train.

  The light was fretted around the border of the train; decorative light that made a cornice for the unrelieved metal, pale patterns worked against an austerity of line.

  Had the light been fixed in Victorian embellishment it would have tired the eye and not refreshed it. Its charm was in its movement, the play of light, beautiful and surprising, new. New light escaped from an ancient sun.

  Sun-yeared light.

  In its effect the light was choral. Harmonies of power simultaneously achieved, a depth of light, not one note but many, notes of light sung together. In its high register, far beyond the ears of man, the music of the spheres, vibrating light noted in its own frequency. Light seen and heard. Light that writes on tablets of stone. Light that glories what it touches. Solemn self-delighting light.

  The train crawled on beneath the speeding light that had already belted
the earth. The scientific train and the artful light.

  I, Handel, doctor, Catholic, admirer of women, lover of music, virgin, thinker, fool, am about to quit my city, never to return.

  This action, my friends conclude, comes out of an excess of what the French call La Sensibilité. Too much feeling is not welcome in a man and it is unhelpful for a doctor. Catholics, it is true, are encouraged to express their emotions, providing that the emotions they express are Catholic ones.

  I saw a Confessional box for sale yesterday. It was eighteenth-century, Irish, portable. Made of dark heavy oak, with a half-gate and curtain across the front, inside, a warm wooden bench worn smooth by countless clerical bottoms. On either side were its little lattice grills, placed at just the right height, for whispered agonies and burning bodies.

  ‘Father, I have sinned.’

  ‘Sins of the flesh or sins of the conscience my child?’

  ‘Sins of the flesh.’

  ‘Begin.’

  I went to the brothel this afternoon, there were six of us, all Seminarians. While my companions were flirting with the girls, I received a note to go upstairs, where a lady was waiting for me.

  I went into her room. It was white. White walls, white rugs from Egypt, stone-whitened sheets and a deaf white cat. She was a famous courtesan, an adherent of Rome, and a friend of a man I once knew very well, but that was when I was a boy. She was wealthy, still lovely, utterly corrupt. She fascinated me but this was the only time that we had spoken. The room smelled of Madonna lilies. Downstairs, in the stalls, I could hear the boys impatient to be gelded.

  ‘Take off your trousers,’ she said. There were tusks on the wall. I have very little body hair. I looked at myself in the mirror, so obvious under my short shirt, and I could only think of mandrake roots. I could see her behind me, quizzical, appraising, and I had an idea what it was that interested her so.

  She ran her hands across my buttocks as a dealer does with bloodstock. I saw her, through the silver mirror, into the white room, a looking-glass fantasy, a reversed image of reversing rules. I was there for her.

  ‘Did you penetrate this woman?’

  ‘No father.’

  ‘Proceed.’

  She stood behind me as I stood in front of the mirror and she flattered me with her hands. She had strong brown hands, calloused on the pads, hands I didn’t expect on a woman. She handled me like a bunch of sticks, my five tough skinny limbs, all hard. And then she turned me to her and bent down.

  ‘Did you ejaculate?’

  ‘Yes father.’

  ‘In what part of the woman?’

  ‘In a bowl on the floor?’

  ‘Proceed.’

  ‘She had a piece of porcelain decorated with Greek heroes. She told me to kneel and I went on all fours like a Passiontide donkey and when she dug her heels into my groin I came over Odysseus. She said she called it her Scholar’s Bowl …’

  Doll Sneerpiece was not a scholar but fond of gentlemen, although to dub her a limmer, would have been to do her a wrong. Her mother, on her death bed, had taken the young Doll’s tiny hand and given her this advice, ‘Never sell property.’ The Doll had taken this to heart and applied the lesson to her other more merchantable parts.

  She was not for sale, she was for hire only, and the rate was steep. She was rich. Rich on her round breasts. Rich on her curved belly. Rich on the peaches of her buttocks. Richest on the fleece of her triangle. ‘My Euclid’ she called it, offering geometric proof to those bogged down in algebra.

  Ruggiero, whom she loved, as a bird loves flight, was bookish, high-minded, chaste. When Doll Sneerpiece flaunted her mathematical credentials, Ruggiero fled into the ivory tower of art. Odysseus-like he lashed himself to his desk and plugged his ears against her siren-song. This was difficult because he loved opera.

  He had never seen a woman’s … a woman’s … what should he call it? Inkpot?

  He fingered his pen and thought of Doll Sneerpiece full of red ink.

  It was Ruggiero’s life’s work to reconstruct an index of those manuscripts likely to have been stored in the Great Library at Alexandria. He was a scholar, and like other scholars, he believed that his work, however arcane, would be of estimable value to human kind. Ruggiero hoped that the estimate might be a pension. It is impossible for a man to read and earn money at the same time, unless he is a reviewer, and Ruggiero prayed never to fall so low.

  Doll Sneerpiece, who had fallen low on so many occasions that she had made falling into a gracious art, knew exactly what her labours were worth. She had found that by arching her bottom in a calculating manner, she could prop her forearms on the bed and continue to read undisturbed by the assaults on her hypotenuse. It was in this way that she had come to delight in the elevating works of Sappho. Her own copy, in its original Greek, had come from a one-eyed trader in antiquities, who claimed to have stolen it from the Medici themselves. It had come to them by way of Alexandria. When Ruggiero had asked to inspect it, the Doll had pointed to the fork between her legs, where, she said, such things were kept.

  A fiction? Certainly, although I see from the extravagant and torn frontispiece that it parades itself as autobiography: ‘The Entire and Honest Recollections of a Bawd’.

  Entire? Honest? I doubt it, but why should I? Even science, which prides itself on objectivity, depends on both testimony and memory. Scientific theory has to be built up from previous results. Scientists must take into account what others have recorded and what they themselves have recorded previously. Science deduces and infers from past explanations, past explorations, the investigative technique that tests its theory against all known facts.

  But not all facts are known and what is known is not necessarily a fact.

  There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer’s fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.

  Part of the problem with the neutral observer, who is in fact romantically involved with his subject, is that some time must always elapse between the experiment and the record of the experiment. Infinitely tiny, perhaps, but even without a lover’s gaze, how many fantasies can force themselves into an infinitesimal space?

  I know how difficult it is to say exactly what happened even a moment earlier. If someone were with me, their testimony might corroborate my own, or it might not. And if there is a photograph? The camera always lies.

  The most awkward fact in all this doubt is this: remembering, which occurs now, at this split second, does not prove that what is being remembered actually occurred at some other time. I may be convinced that it did, especially if a number of others, the more the better, are convinced too. When I am alone, and the experience, the emotion, the event, was mine and mine alone, how can I say for certain that I have not invented the entire episode, including the faithful memory of it?

  It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

  On what can I depend, if not my past, if not objectivity, if not the clean white coats of science? Should I acknowledge the fiction that I am? A man made of nothing but space and light, a pinpoint on a pinpointed planet stitched among the stars? Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie. A man caught on Time’s hook.

  What can balance the inequity of that vast space, which never ends, and my bounded life? Bounded yes, but not by mortality, which is not what I fear, but by smallness, insignificance, which is what I do fear. The unlived life. Life in its hard shell safe from the waters above and the waters below. The home-and-dry life. Sound. Dependable. True?

  The train had reached the coast. The sea-light crept in tentacles along the floor. Long waves of light that atomised the solid seats and rigid tables. The train itself wavered.

  The man shut in the bright aquarium floated on his own thoughts. His thoughts bubbled out of his head in ca
rtoon exuberance. He caught them, blew them, burst them. He dived down through the layers of light to his shipwrecked past. He had sunk himself so often that he found a whole fleet of boats, ghostly, unattended, changed by the pressure of the water and the work of time.

  How much of any value could be raised?

  The man forced open a small door. There were his toys, his narrow bed, the place where no light had ever seemed to fall. When he remembered his childhood it was dark, except for a short space in the afternoons between three and four o’clock. Except for two years coloured red.

  Above him the water shifted in chessboard squares of dark and light.

  How many fantasies in an infinitesimal space?

  The sun has turned the sea to diamonds. Behind me, the roar, roar, roar of the motorbikes on the motorway. The definite world of flywheels and tarmac is only the sound of bottled bees.

  The dirty sea is changing. It is no longer grey, no longer blue, no longer green, but white and white in peaks and troughs that shape themselves to the curve of my eye.

  I confess that I am frightened of the sea. There is the sailor sea and the commercial sea, the oil-well sea and the fishy sea. The sea that tests the land through sublunary power. The rise and fall of the harbour sea and the sea that exists to make maps look prettier. But the functional sea is not the final sea. There is that other sea simply itself. A list of all the things that the sea does is not what the sea is. Today, the sea has jewelled its surface, and silvered its fish under a band of beaten gold. Those who know it well will admit that they hardly know it at all. No-one has been to the very bottom. Except by inference we do not know that there is a very bottom. We do not know it from observation.

  And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That’s where I am alone, the observer and the observed.