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Always now and always here and always me: that’s what it’s like for you.
Now always and here always and me always: this is what it’s like for me.
Now. Here. Me.
Now always, even when it’s then. Here always, even when it’s there. Me always, even when I’m you; even when I’m in Hell and am I fallen, when am I a thousand fiends. They fold up into you. You fold up into us. We fold up into Him.
This will be very hard for you.
Above space, over history hovering, genocide and utopia in the downdraught. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff. Bullroarer breath through the white feathers sent to conscientious cowards, blood objectors. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
Seeing and being everything, never detached and never distant. Pitying you and admiring you, endlessly angry, endlessly in love. Auschwitz and Rembrandt in the upbeat. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
The view from here is fierce. The view from here is final.
From above, the world is a stupendous flayed anatomy. Motionless on its slab of stars it does not move or change or grow, save for the way it is expressed in the concealed direction. Burning gas and vaporised ore spinning into molten balls, the magma crusting over with a thin black rind of elements, and in the heat and poison there is life here even now, microbial seethings in the cyanide drifts and the hydrochloric puddles.
Reading cosmos left to right, from bang to crunch, from germ to worm to glinting cyborg and beyond, the woven tapestry unpicks itself, reorganises into new designs. The marbling of cloud changes its colour. Leaning closer like impassive doctors, mottled planet-meat is visible, exposed, a skin of circumstance pinned back in plump and larded folds. The worms grow backbones and the newts sprout feathers. Bus routes alter and post offices are closed. Perfectly ripe, the scab lifts from the knee intact, reveals a waxy pinkness underneath.
I know I am a text made only of black words. I know you are observing me. I know you, and I know your grandmother. I know the far threads of your family line reading me in a hundred years, reading me now, from left to right, from Genesis to Revelation. Syphilis and Mahler in the wheeling arc, the holding pattern.
Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
In my beginnings am I a black word against the blinding white, am I a meaning, staining the ineffable. All my identity is in this quadrant crease, this angle wherein am I folded down from singularity with my three brothers. Each of us, in ninety paces, count the gold degrees of our awareness, our domain. Each of us has his corner, has his pocket. Each of us has his own element to work with and his own direction of the wind. These are our nails, these are our hammers, fire and flood and hurricane and avalanche. We are the strong hand in the nuclear flash, the weak hand in the isotope’s decay. We are the hand wherefrom the lightnings bristle, and the hand that flings the apple or the suicide alike to earth. Four Master Builders, we have rods and we have measures. We are crowbars of creation. We are smiling in the hum and harmony before the world starts.
Here am I become a soldier at the Fall, my staff made slippery with the ichors of the fallen as we drive them down into the low geometries, into the hells of substance and sensation, torture-mazes of the intellect, maelstroms of bile and longing. We are loving them and weeping as we run them through and tread them under, out of mathematical necessity. The thirty-second spirit, who is mighty, drags himself towards me down the cue-shaft that impales him, coughing up a blood of logarithms. Rape is in his red eye, murder in his green one. Algebra spills from his punctured breast and he reviles me, saying, “Brother! Fellow builder! How is it you treat us thus, when are we but unfolded leaves of thee? It is thine own selves that are trampled here into this dark, into this worldly muck!” The words he speaks are true. I raise my naked foot and plant it square against him, push his gory weight along my spear’s slick length, kick him from its blue-powdered end to plummet howling into stars and calendars and money, into form and passion and regret. Around me in this slaughter-firmament, this massacre of clouds, our painful war rages forever and the maimed djinns are like locusts, raining on parched fields where have we sown a universe.
Now on the sheer plateau of signs and symbols where shall be raised up Hierusalem, where shall be raised up Golgonooza and Mansoul and all the higher townships, am I stooped in conference with fabled Solomon. My language breaks against his leather cheek. Crumbs of mythology flake from our blazing edges and I gift him with the ring, the holy torus where
by may the stumbling blocks, the satans, all be bound to the construction of his temple. Only harm can come of this: Hierusalem, Mansoul, they are the very seat of War, for warring devils fidget in their stones, their architectures. I am but a builder. What am I to do, when rubble and demise are in the diagram?
And in Golgotha now I touch the perspiration-heavy sleeve of Peter that is once called Aegburth, telling him to take the stone cross jutting from the dry earth at his feet; to set it at the centre of his land. I take a step. We are in Horseshoe Street and he is a year older, dying in the marvels; dying in the pigeons and the rain. The lines are all precise. The spot is marked. The rood is in the wall.
In Tennessee I seize a drunk plantation-keeper’s hand
Curl it to scrolls and triangles as he designs the brand.
On his cathedral platform Ernest Vernall screams and weeps. The fire burns from his hair to leave white ash as he receives the brunt of an exploded education. My lips, moving in the fresco. He is cowering amidst the tins and dishes, and I am remembering the episode when I am him, how terrible it is to see my giant eyelids blinking from the antic skitter of the paint; how comical it is when I explain the shape of time and drive him mad with chimneys. Thunders roll about the dome, which are my skirts of noise and electricity. I am a builder, and I bang the words and numbers into him so that his children tally different sums or dance to altered music. And now Ernest is in Bedlam. I sit here by his asylum cot, the sheets marked with a dried shit of delusion, where I wait for him to speak out and not only look at me and cry.
My eyes are carved by R.L. Boulton, late of Cheltenham. Unblinking over Guildhall Road, George Row and Angel Lane I stare towards the south. In my left hand is there a shield and in the right I hold the trilliard-cue. The eldest son of Ernest Vernall stands beside me, one arm draped across my sprouting shoulder-blades with an unsettling familiarity as he harangues the gaping crowd beneath us. Even when I turn my granite head to whisper to him he but laughs and does not seem afraid, so foreign is he to mankind, so distant from the habits of the street. His tragedies affect him only as theatre: scenes restaged from a beloved melodrama that still wrench the heart on each fresh viewing, although the experience is aesthetic and the tears no more than a sincere appreciation of the play. In my petrified sight, his final scenes are acted between mirrors: a concluding chorus line of kicking, struggling old men with petals in their beards. Ah, mad John Vernall, furious Snowy; when I’m you, it near to frightens me.
I am in all my images. I watch you through a billion Christmas cards.
May Vernall slithers bare into a Lambeth gutter choked with fish-heads, rainbows, sodden blossom. Bare she copulates upon the grassy shoulder of the river at Cow Meadow. Gasps of joy unfold to screams of childbirth and the green bank, damp with starlight, is become a narrow downstairs chamber still perfumed by excrement recently burned upon its hearth, an offering to winter spirits that have filled the lavatory with ice. The deathmonger is hovering in her white apron, where embroidered moths swarm on the frill. She takes the lovely newborn from its mother’s gaping and tormented birth canal, carries it eighteen months and some few steps into the grainy light of a front parlour. Here she sets it carefully in a small coffin, and May Warren brushes out the golden hair her child has grown in its brief passage from the living-room through to this dying-room. Her life comes charging in, sweeps her away into further maternities and air-raid nights, corpse-hoists and fever carts, abortion kitchens, until finally she stumbles in the hallway of her little King’s Heath flat, falls dying, and the last thing that she thinks is Charlie Chaplin! That’s who that man was! I talked to– Now it’s two days later and her one surviving daughter, Lou, is peering through the letterbox after receiving no response to her increasingly impatient rapping. Supine, the coagulated blood has settled in May’s face and turned it black. For several moments, Lou believes that she is looking at a bundle of old rags, carelessly dropped there in the circular-and-leaflet flooded passage.
I am there in all my words, there in the hymn, there in the lovers’ flattering serenade. A bland popular song plays on the radio and for an instant I flare up, albeit vaguely, in a million minds, an angle playing in your heart.
Louisa Warren is amongst the sweetest strokes upon the canvas, mixing lavender and russet, with the vibrant line beginning on the dun and dusty under-colour of the Fort Street labyrinth, born as a consolation prize replacing her diphtheria-departed elder sister, little May. The line continues through four brothers, Tommy, Walter, Jack and Frank, its fine sweep broadening to become plumed and adorable, a twinkling flapper clacking through the Drapery’s November mists upon the arm of her intended, Albert Good. Off in the fog a lovelorn beau is shouting “Gloria? Where are you, Gloria?” – so desperate and forlorn that Albert mentions it; wonders aloud who Gloria might be. “Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Lou mumbles into her fur collar, although Gloria is the name she’s given to the handsome chap who’s made an effort to romance her during Albert’s lengthy visit to the cloakrooms. Her bright line uncurls as she becomes Louisa Good, with children and grandchildren branching from the vine. Her eldest daughter weds a lighthouse-keeper, while the artistically gifted and bohemian daughter who comes next weds a French communist. The youngest child, a boy, sprouts washboards and a tea-chest bass as he grows through a skiffle band into an airline steward, marrying at first disastrously, then happily. Louisa finds her mother May dead, crumpled up like laundry in the King’s Heath hall. Louisa lives with Albert in their Duston home. In his decline he’s watching television dramas, afternoon plays that disturb him, even though the set is not plugged in.
At last her lyric contour is alone as it progresses left to right across the masterpiece, in the concealed direction. As she nears her eightieth birthday, her late brother Tommy’s kids, her niece and nephew, Mick and Alma, have arranged a party for her. This will be entitled “The Night of the Living Warrens”, so they’ve told her. All of the surviving family have been invited. It’s a few days prior to the event and Lou is having tea in the back garden of her nephew Michael Warren’s Kingsthorpe home. Michael’s wife Cath is there, and his two children, Jack and Joe. His sister Alma’s there and has a friend of hers in tow, another lady artist: an American girl called Melinda. At first it’s a nice day, but then some light specks of rain begin to fall. Lightnings attend our exits and our entrances.
Black clouds begin to gather and it is suggested everyone retire indoors. Lou finds she can’t stand up. As the two manliest amongst those present, Mick and Alma lift her chair between the pair of them, carry her like an empress on their improvised sedan into the living room. Her breathing is becoming difficult. The sudden stark reality of everything is overwhelming. Her niece sitting there beside her with one arm around Lou’s quivering shoulders, murmuring reassurances into her ear, kissing her hair. Cathy and Alma’s artist friend attend the worried children and then there are paramedics out of nowhere, lifting her up from her chair, calling her love. There is a mighty pounding like an anvil in her ears now. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
She’s somehow in the ambulance, motionless in the rain-lashed close outside. Her nephew Mick is with her while the funny modern doctor in his green work-jacket presses down repeatedly upon her chest. I can see Alma Warren there beneath me, stood some yards behind the modern fever-cart upon the spattering tarmac drive, soaked through in just her vest and jeans, watching the bobbing medic through the vehicle’s rear window. Her messy hair is plastered to her hollow cheeks, to her bare shoulders, and she seems to tip her head back and stare up into my eyes as I strike with my cue’s blue tip against the great ball of the world. The black mirror of night is shattered and, for but an instant, in the ravelling cracks and fissures can be seen the sky’s half-silvered backing. With this sizzling flourish I conclude Louisa Warren’s painted swoop. Seen close it is a mark, a daub, but oh, when we step back and see what it is part of …
Some leave with the thunder, some with trumpets, some with only mother sil
ence.
