Art and Lies Read online

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  It was a long time ago. The fish-swelling sea and the boss of the sun. Between her eyelids the sun is still caught. When she presses her fists against her eyes, the sun prints starfish on her retina. She can see herself reflected in the water, the waves breaking up her image, carrying it in pieces across the sea.

  It was a long time ago. Longing belly-swelling under the sun. She had a daughter called Cleis. She lay on your sunned body as a lizard lies a rock. She didn’t blink, she never closed her eyes, she kept her eyes open while she loved you. Did she write to please you? She wrote to please you as the sun pleases the water where it falls.

  Shine on me Sophia, purge me clear and white, burn the dead places and quicken the live. A fish jumps in the pool.

  Love me Sophia, through time, beyond the clock. Help me forget my life.

  Sappho, passing through the dark streets, leaving no footprint, no trace, saw two women embracing in a doorway. What were their names? Andromeda, Atthis, Dicca, Gorgo, Eranna, Gyrinno, Anactoria, Micca, Doricha, Gongyla, Archeanassa, Mnasidika …

  It was a long time ago.

  I thought I saw something tonight. It was some time between 4 and 5 am, after the last drunk and before the first bird, the happy hour when even the supermarkets observe a small raft of silence. I like to walk through the city then, square-inch-packed with wasted life, mile by mile government deserted. This is a place to be alone.

  Nobody talks, and if they do, it’s knife talk or money talk, please don’t cry for help. Please don’t cry.

  You won’t will you? It’s a physiological fact that under torture it is not possible to cry. ‘She shows no remorse. Stab her again.’ This is the desert. The damned circle of the dry.

  Please don’t cry. The government has offered the private sector a gold-plated watering-can to refresh the city. Over there, by the last Queen Anne house, marooned by the stockyard, gaoled by the crane, they’re going to build a cancer hospital and forty-five period residences for the terminally ill. Wonderful. Think of the jobs. The cleaners, the patrol guards, the night staff, the bedpan swillers, the dog handlers, the driver that brings the sterilised dressings, the operators that hygienically dispose of pancreas, bowel, stomach, voice box, liver, bone. One man’s raddles are another man’s pay. They are calling the scheme Prometheus.

  I looked at the house, dark, a face turned away, but then I thought I saw a face turned towards me. A woman, slender, without means, balanced on the thin ridge of the house. Beside her, the winking red warning lights of the stockyard crane, behind her, the rose white moon.

  Sappho, standing under the street lamp in a wide skirt of light, thinks she hears the sea dashing at the kerb, thinks she hears the wind through threadbare sails. But it is only the wind blowing the litter, only a leaky cistern above her head, what will remain? What she hears or what she thinks she hears? What she sees or what she believes she sees? After all, what does she see, but an arrangement of molecules affected by light, what does she hear but a story of her own?

  This is what I saw. A woman, naked-painted, in camouflage colours. Orange against the sodium lights, purple against the livid sky, gold against the lure of money, silver-dabbed for luck.

  At her head, the band of Orion in three stars, faithful dog-point, alert at her heels. She broke up the flat land in rock-erupted earth. She stood over me in judgment. Her hair a flaming sword.

  She was branched as an olive tree, the weight of her, the spread of her, arms outstretched, the much supported on the little. She was half-turned, the trunk of her smooth-whorled. Her hair was thick with leaves set fire. She was Daphne in green flight. She was Apollo in golden pursuit. The Chaser and the Chaste.

  Aphrodite, goddess of desire, rise naked from the foam of the sea and riding on a scallop shell, come here, where grass and flowers spring from the soil at your feet. Doves and sparrows accompany you in the air.

  Sappho hears the sea, hears the wind in threadbare sails. She travels time in a new-moon boat.

  Sappho knows desire, knows the blood-abandoned body, knows the loss of courage in her limbs. She knows the single look that bids her gaze.

  Down on the dirty pavement Sappho looked up. She was looking at a cliff bent over the sea, she was looking at her body bent over the cliff. The hard white drop and the unforgiving sea. Not for love of you Phaeon but for loss of her. Not once, but many times, for loss of her. (‘The poet Psappho, for love of Phaeon the Ferryman, who spurned her, flung herself from the cliffs of Lesbos, into the dark Aegean sea.’ Ovid, Roman 43 BC–AD 17 Occupation: Poet.)

  The bone-white body broken beside the cuttle-fish sacred to Aphrodite. The bone-white body and the white cuttle bone. Bone and black ink and the dry sands of time. The writer and what is written. Sappho (Lesbian c. 600 BC Occupation: Poet).

  This is what I saw.

  A woman balanced on the edge of a parapet, her arms pulled out in long wings. She had feathered her fear, wrapped a borrowed plumage around her heart. How else could she escape when her dark house was fastened and guarded, deception of windows and doors? She had been bricked around with lies, cemented in with falsehoods, the wide wooden staircase had rotted at her feet.

  There was no escape except by the route which could cost her life. Accordingly, she costed her life, and found it to be worth more than deep carpets of lies and the airless rooms, she called Home.

  She made wings out of feathers she found. There was nothing in the house that she could use. She made wings and strapped them to her, a fancy dress of bravado, war-paint against fear.

  Jump. She must jump. The heavy body in the unweighed air. She would use her own heart as a baroscope. Calcium and water v. Nitrogen and Oxygen. The inhospitable element and the object of her desire.

  Her opening aileron makes a pause in the too smooth current that bears her down. For a moment she can hover à la belle étoile. She told me her name was Montgolfier but she spelt it ICARUS.

  Wind enwomb her. Make her a thing of air welcome in air. Make her bones breath, make her liquids into vapour. She must take the current on a confidence of wings.

  If I call her will she answer in a long swoop through the trees? Fold her glory at my wrist? If I call her will she fly in equidistant mean, not risk the burning sun, nor the swamp of the sea?

  Balanced on the primaeval ledge she waits for the gift of tongues. She is a howling belly before the coming of the Word. She has no name for night, no name for day, no name for the things she fears. Nameless things possess her.

  The Word calls her. The word that is spirit, the word that is breath, the word that hangs the world on its hook. The word bears her up, translates the incoherent flesh into an airy syntax. The word lifts her off all fours and puts a god in her mouth. She distances up the shrunken world in a single span of her tongue.

  The wingèd word, Hermes, god of Eloquence and Thieves, Mercury, to give him his Roman name. The fleet-footed spreading word that learned divination from the Thriae on Mount Parnassus. The word amongst the pebbles in a pool. The male drill in the female stock, the art of making fire, fire by the rapid twirling of a stick in a stone. The word made out of fire and fire from the word, Sappho, 600 BC, or call her Hermaphroditus? The boy-daughter, girl-son, the male drill in the female stock, born out of a night of lust between Hermes and Aphrodite. The boy-daughter, the girl-son, the union of language and lust.

  This is the nature of our sex: She takes a word, straps it on, penetrates me hard. The word inside me, I become it. The word slots my belly, my belly swells the word. New meanings expand from my thighs. Together we have sacked the dictionary for a lexigraphic fuck. We prefer to ignore those smooth, romantic words, and dig instead for a roue’s pleasure. The mature word, ripe, through centuries of change, the word deep-layered with associative delights. The more the word has been handled, the better we like it. For me, the perverted challenge of re-virgining the whore. Aren’t we a couplet? Two successive lines of verse that rhyme with each other? Press your eye to the keyhole and you can
see us, one on one, swiving at the perfect match of dactyl and spondee. The coupling-box where we must make ends meet. My well-coupled filly, me, her rider in mid-air.

  See me. See me now. I’m not a r(R)omantic, I’m a true C(c)lassical. I don’t believe in love at first sight. I’m not falling for you, but one step forward, and you might fall for me.

  What things fall?

  Once, an angel, leaping out of heaven to find new worlds, his hands snagged on a zigzag of stars. Lucifer, whose cuts bled light …

  *

  The thunderbolt, Zeus-hurled, through the timid clouds, the comet’s head, nuclear discus gold-thrown.

  The Dead, down to Tartarus, black poplars by a black stream. The black shaft smooth-sided and the jag-toothed dog.

  Icarus, the flying boy, his body sun-glazed. His sun-glazed body that shattered the glassy sea.

  Autumn. Long leaves of bright undress.

  Hermes. Star-spurred.

  Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

  She fell like a choirboy on a stave of lust. Head back, throat bare, breaking body, breaking voice in an ecstasy of praise. Praise out of the mouth and out of her thighs, aesthetic and ecstatic in a garment of flame.

  Pull the shirt over your head, drop it, drop into my arms, lovers have no need of time. Aphrodite murders Cronos. Drop through the long cylinder of our hours. Ours this time not Time’s. Here, there, nowhere, carrying white roses never red.

  There was no colour in the sky when she walked along the beach.

  The white shells sea-glazed shone. She put one to her ear and heard the strange moaning of the sea. She looked out to where the light skimmed the water. The light that balanced on the narrow crests of the waves. The light that tumbled in the water’s concaves.

  The light whipped up the dull foam and threw it in petals over her feet, her feet glassed in by the shallow water.

  The water, dashing the past at her feet, the water dragging her future behind, the hiss and pull of the waves.

  Driftwood on the sands. She picked up a wedge, too light for its size, its substance beaten away. It was only the past, a hollow thing in her hand, only the past, but a shape and a smell that she recognised. The comfortable old form its uses dead.

  Clouds in the sky. She wanted a view but the clouds were pretty. Vague, pink, well known. Weren’t driftwood and clouds enough? Memories, and what she still had, enough? Why risk what was certain for what was hid? The future could be just as yesterday, she could tame the future by ignoring it, by letting it become the past.

  She began to run. She ran out of the day that coiled round her with temperate good sense. She ran to where the sun was just beginning the sky. A thin rung of sun within reach. She leapt and grabbed the ladder bar with both hands and swung herself up into the warm yellow light.

  The train was crowded. Is that Sappho, both hands hanging off a neon bar?

  Picasso

  PICASSO opened the book.

  ‘Ruggiero, surely, he is not a Gentleman of the Back Door?’

  It was night, Doll Sneerpiece sat by the candle. Ruggiero had not come. Why had he not come? There could be but one explanation and the Doll was explaining it.

  ‘If his pintle will not stand for me then for whom?’

  The Doll had seen Kings and Bishops stand before her and she had most submissively knelt before their stand. She had held the royal sceptre and the less seen crown. She had pumped the Bishop’s Pomp. Her skilful fingers were as celebrated as Arachne’s. Her Top and Bottom hatches the toast of His Majesty’s fleet. In her presence there was not a man whose nethers stayed unmoved.

  ‘Not a man’ said the Doll, ‘But a Molly?’

  Lady Cleland, the Doll’s friendly rival, ran a Molly House in Gun Street. At The Cock and Gun, dress code was strict; bosoms, bodices, laces and stays disguising the breeches beneath. It was a pleasure house for those whose delight was not found in the opposite sex.

  Ruggiero in a Buggering Den?

  Slipping aside the young lad’s shirt, he exposed to the open air those Mount Pleasants of Rome and all the narrow vale that intersects them. First then, moistening well with spittle his instrument, to make it glib, he pointed it, he introduced it to writhing, twisting and soft murmuring complaints from his young sufferer. At length, the first straits of entrance being got through, everything seemed to move and go pretty currently on, as on a carpet road, without much rub or resistance; and now, passing one hand around his minion’s hips, he got hold of his red-topped ivory toy, that stood perfectly stiff, and showed, that if he was like his mother behind, he was like his father before. This he diverted himself with, whilst with the other he wantoned with his hair, and leaning forward over his back, drew his face, from which the boy shook the loose curls that fell over it, in the posture he stood him in, and brought him towards his, so as to receive a long-breathed kiss. After which, renewing his driving, and thus continuing to harass his rear, the height of the fit came on with its usual symptoms, and dismissed the action.

  Doll Sneerpiece closed the book. Ruggiero, a Gentleman of the Back Door? Ruggiero, preferring a leg of lamb to proper English beef? Ruggiero, importing Turkish wares to an honest English stall?

  ‘Well then,’ said the Doll, ‘If it is Sodomy he wants, then a Sodomite he shall have.’

  ‘Very Right. Very True.’ said Miss Mangle sucking on the Hookah.

  This was a breeches Doll, a periwig Doll, a Doll with a flowing shirt, a turned-leg silk-stocking Doll. A tri-corn hat and buttoned Doll. A Doll with a fine moustache and a military swag. A well-packed cod-pieced dildoed Doll.

  ‘I am ready for that Reversing Buck,’ and she left the house as midnight entered it, both by the back door.

  ‘Now,’ she said ‘I am a proper Bradamante’ and without a second thought she swung through the gateway to The Cock and Gun.

  Picasso closed the book and put it down quickly. It belonged to the man sitting nearby. He had fallen asleep and she had seen the strang fat square volume that attracted her hand with a power of its own. It had no cover, it was not a book she recognised. What was it? Eighteenth-century pornography? The man stirred, Picasso moved back to her seat.

  She looked at him. He was perhaps fifty, a man who carried his age rather than bore it, and what he carried he did not try to hide. He was white at the temples, creased in face, his closed eyelids slightly thickened, a purple sheen over the brownish skin. But he was delicate, haughty, light-looking, a Purple Emperor butterfly asleep on a grey seat.

  His hands were conical-shaped with long thin fingers that betrayed unusual strength against the obvious sensitivity. His fingers twitched as he slept and Picasso thought of snakes.

  His body, even beneath his shirt and loose trousers, was more of bone than of flesh. He was anatomical, an object lesson on the rough bench of the human frame. She thought of him at the autopsy; the neat fibrous squares being cut away from the simple skeleton. The teeming symbiosis of muscle and nerve, tissue and fluid, hung in complex on that obvious rack.

  The bolts of his collar bone moved her. What if she drew back that tight throat to expose the thyroid cartilage, his Adam’s apple, that warned them both that he and other men had been vulnerable before? If she stretched out her hand to offer him fruit would he take it?

  They stood in the garden together looking at the tree. The green tree lit with red globes. She said, ‘Eat it and you eat the light it gives, a lantern in the gut of Man to read himself thereby.’

  She held it out in her glossy fingers and he thought of snakes.

  Handel struggled in his dreams.

  His throat was emphatic, bare-cast. He had a singer’s throat, self-expressive, the arrogance of something well-done and beautiful. He was not beautiful, he was too spare and restless for that, but his throat and his hands were his advocates. A woman could love him. She guessed he was desirable to men. She sighed. What was desire? Certainly not the safe excursions into family life. Had he
r mother ever desired her father? Was her father, fat, greedy, cruel, desirable? He had had nine mistresses and was active with his tenth. Did she put out her hand, glad only of his skin? Did she loathe his text-book six inches wedged in his spreading mottle? Picasso thought of her brother and his angry Prod that punished her for being lovely, clever and quick. Under his insistent tutelage she had learned to be shy and slow. She had learned to hate her body because he said he loved it.

  She did not hate it now. She feared it, was a stranger to it, but she did not hate it and she wondered if she would ever feel the acute sensuality she saw in pictures. Things of canvas and paint, not flesh and blood, they told her of a fire she did not know. She would find it or light it in herself somehow even if the coals were her bones and her heart the kindle. What was it St Paul had not said? ‘Better to burn than to marry.’

  She imagined making love to this man, his gentle weight and stringed fingers, she wondered if she would enjoy his clean, shaved skin sanded with expensive astringents? He was very smooth and she sensed this was an effort. Was he a vain man? Would he be vain in loving her and need to prove himself and his superiority with each careful move? Making love. Another of the sick semantics of family life. What had the love to do with sex and what had the sex to do with love? She felt lust for some people, affection for others (disgust for even more), but even when lust and affection grew together was that love? And if they were apart did it matter to pretty up one and overstate the other? She had been told that many women looked at a man and wanted to have his children. She could understand that but then marriage became survival and economics with a dash of primaeval mystery thrown in (or genetic recognition as the scientists call it). Could genetic recognition and a bank account truly be hailed as the cornerstone of all that is Good?