Art and Lies

by Jeanette Winterson

  Uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, all the weights and ephemera of family life, were dreaming in colour that night. Fawn carpets turned to blood and all the beige bedding there was couldn’t suppress a single sheet of crimson. Even my younger brother Tommy, who had medals to protect him, woke in a blue funk.

  In the morning, it was raining, and the rain fell in orange points on their cream flesh. They were spotted with guilt, each could see in the other, the patterns of infection. They ate their family breakfast in solitary silence. Unclean, leper-spotted, found out over night.

  They wore their darkest clothes, their soberest expressions, they whispered like church wardens. They colluded in their grey, upright vanity, but when their eyes met they saw the stain.

  My mother poured the tea with trembling hands. Concentrate, concentrate, one cup, two cups, safe, safe. She dropped the pot. The white china shattered on to the white tablecloth and spread the tea in a five-point star of plum.

  ‘Why is the tea that colour?’ demanded father.

  ‘There’s no colour there father, no colour, just tea.’ She dabbed at it with the corner of her white handkerchief. She might as well have dipped it in blood. The family stared at the stain and the stain stared back. Impudent with summer, rich with fertile swelling, the plum stain on the Christmas tablecloth.

  ‘Go upstairs, why don’t you?’ My mother pleading, wringing her spotted hands on her spotted apron.

  They went upstairs. They went upstairs, two by two, to the comfortable ark of the Sunday parlour.

  ‘It’s raining,’ said Matthew, standing at the long window that overlooked the long garden. He saw his mother in the rain, orange arrows tangling in her hair. She was struggling to hang out the tablecloth.

  ‘Mother will get wet,’ he said to no-one.

  ‘Bit of rain won’t hurt her,’ said father.

  ‘It’s orange,’ said Matthew.

  ‘It must be the power station,’ said father.

  Picasso painted. She painted herself out of the night and into the circle of the sun. The sun soaked up the darkness from her studio and left a sponge of light. The light illuminated the four corners of the floor and the four corners of the ceiling in an octave of praise. As Picasso painted she sang in eight points of light. She opened her back to the sun and let it key her spine. She opened the window and the sun scaled her. She had the sun as a halo behind her head. She shone. The sun was in her mouth and it burned her lips. She held the sun between her teeth in a thin gold disc. It was winter but the sun was hot. She looked like a Buddha in gold leaf.

  Without thinking, Picasso ran into the parlour, into the newspapers, into the best clothes and the dead air. She was painted from head to foot.

  ‘Self portrait,’ she said to their astonished faces.

  ‘Call the doctor Matthew,’ said her father.

  The doctor packed his stethoscope, his gloves, his warrant and his syringe. The doctor got into his car and set off. The smooth powerful car purred underneath the purple clouds.

  ‘For God’s sake Matthew, the snow is NOT purple. Where is your sister?’ (Hello dear, you’re Picasso’s sister aren’t you?)

  Picasso packed her easel, her brushes, her paints, her bags. She packed her canvases and left her reviews. Outside, the sun had made a pole of light that struck through the cloudy hide. Picasso, in her camouflage, swung down it and on to the road.

  ‘It’s all over the tablecloth,’ whimpered mother.

  Picasso was wearing her deep boots, her leather jacket and velvet hat. She was warm because she had had the foresight to paint herself in for winter.

  ‘The central heating has broken down,’ said Matthew, kicking the white radiator.

  Outside, the snow was clean and fresh, it fell on her lightly like the touch of an old friend. She threw back her head, but when the snow touched her lips, it melted. She had the sun in her mouth. She smiled and walked through the silent city.

  On the way, after she had been walking for some time, a man skidded up through the breaks of snow, and asked her for help.

  ‘I am a doctor,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Picasso. ‘I don’t take drugs.’

  She walked on, past his purple face in his snow-shot purple car, through the silent city and into the railway station.

  SAPPHO

  IAM A SEXUALIST. In flagrante delicto. The end-stop of the universe. Say my name and you say sex. Say my name and you say white sand under a white sky white trammel of my thighs.

  Let me net you. Roll up roll up for the naked lady, tuppence a peep. Tup me? Oh no, I do the tupping in this show. I’m the horned god, the thrusting phallus, the spar and mainsail of this giddy vessel. All aboard for the Fantasy Cruise from Mitylene to Merrie England by way of Rome and passing through La Belle France. How long will it take? Not much more than two and a half thousand years of dirty fun and all at my own expense.

  Am I making any sense? No? Here’s a clue: Very Famous Men have written about me, including Alexander Pope (Englishman 1688–1744 Occupation: Poet) and Charles Baudelaire (Frenchman 1821–67 Occupation: Poet). What more can a girl ask?

  I have a lot of questions, not least, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS? When I turn the pages of my manuscripts my fingers crumble the paper, the paper breaks up in burnt folds, the paper colours my palms yellow. I look like a nicotine junkie. I can no longer read my own writing. It isn’t surprising that so many of you have chosen to read between the lines when the lines themselves have become more mutilated than a Saturday night whore.

  I’ve had to do that too; go down on the cocks of Very Famous Men, and that has put me in a position to tell you a trade secret: Their dose tastes just the same as anyone else’s. I’m no gourmet but I know a bucket of semolina when I’ve got my head in it. You can lead a whorse to water but you can’t make her drink. My advice? Don’t swallow it. Spit the little hopefuls down the sink and let them wriggle up the drain. No, I’m not hard-hearted but I have better things to do with my stomach lining. And I have another question: When did he last go down on you?

  So many men have got off on me. Large men, small men, bald men, fat men. Men with a hose like a fire-fighter, men with nothing but a confectioner’s nozzle. Here they come, poking through the history books, telling you all about me.

  I was born on an island. Can you see the marble beach and the glass sea? Both are lies. The white sand damp-veined is warm underfoot. The sea that softly reflects the hull will splinter it soon. What appears is not what is. I love the deception of sand and sea.

  ‘A Deceiver.’ ‘A notorious seducer of women.’ ‘A Venom.’ ‘A God.’ ‘The Tenth Muse.’ It is the job of a poet to name things, blasphemy when the things rise up to name the poet. The praise is no better than the blame. My own words have been lost amongst theirs.

  Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709–84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood? Rest assured I shall have to let go of one if I am to keep hold of the other. In the end the choice has not been mine to make. Others have made it for me.

  In the old days I was a great poet but a bad girl. See Plato (Greek 427–347 BC Occupation: Philosopher) then, Ovid came along in the first century AD and tried to clean up my reputation with a proper tragic romance. Me, who could have had any woman in history, fell for a baggy-trousered bus conductor with the kind of below-the-waist equipment funsters put on seaside postcards for a joke. Fuck him? I couldn’t even find him. He said I must have bad eyesight, I said it must be because of all those poems I was writing, late at night with only a tallow candle to keep me company. He said I should give it up, it was ruining our sex life.

  SEX AND THE SINGLE POET. Look at her, my sweet bird of prey, sleek head and gold-tipped feathers. She sits on my wrist while I stroke her. She makes a perch of me. She calls me her little perch and is glad to use her claws. I have all the scars of my art.

  Am I her keeper? Who calls whom
? Does she hear my cry or do I answer hers? She hunts. She hunts me. I have soft fleshy parts for the pleasure of her beak.

  She is acute, high-pitched, wind-formed. Invisible lines bring her back to me. I need not jess her. It is my legs that are strapped apart, restrained from false modesty by angles of desire, we are crosswise on the same current, falcon and falconer, falconer and falcon, in single prey.

  This is the nature of our sex: She opens her legs, I crawl inside her, red-hot. I crow inside her like Chanticleer, red coxcomb on a red hill. She says, ‘My little red cock, crow again,’ and I do, with all my pulmonary power. I crow into the faint red-rising sun. I crow into the dew-wet world. I split her with the noise of it, she shatters under me, in a daybreak of content.

  ‘My little red cock’ she calls me and I am glad to be a small domestic fowl who lives in Aesop’s bliss. The Tale of the Falcon and her Cock.

  ‘The Works of Sappho,’ said Doll Sneerpiece.

  The excellent lady was dressed in red. Red from the ruby comb that pinned up her henna hair. Red at her throat in a slash of agate. Red lips in cherub bows. Red beneath the pinnacle of her bosom, and, below her waist, a parting Red sea, that fell on to Turkey slippers, snug on a Turkey rug.

  ‘The Works of Sappho,’ said Doll Sneerpiece.

  ‘Very Right. Very True.’ said Miss Mangle, who had at last seen the Doll’s lips move.

  ‘The greatest poet of Antiquity,’ said the Doll. She drew on her bubbling hookah until the narcotic calmed her. She was not calm, she was boiling with love, she opened the book.

  ‘Love has taken me captive.

  I tremble with desire acid now now sweet.’

  She closed the book. She closed her eyes. Behind her eyes Ruggiero’s face.

  ‘I long for him as a hind longs for a belling stag.’

  She imagined Ruggiero’s antlers.

  In another room across the city Ruggiero stared at the inkpot.

  ‘I am sick of love,’ said Sappho. She laughed and picked up her suitcase. Sick of love was surely better than sick with love?

  In the past, she had been glad to get aboard any vessel that pulled alongside, show her a fat hull or a slim keel and she stashed her baggage in the hold. When her new quarters had become too cramped she had jumped ship. That had been Sappho and a pile of papers to prove it. Why was it that the Church of Rome had burned her poems and excommunicated her? Galileo has had his pardon but not Sappho. Galileo is no longer a heretic but Sappho is still a Sapphist.

  ‘Know thyself,’ said Socrates.

  ‘Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.’

  The Word terrifies. The seducing word, the insinuating word, the word that leads the trembling hand to the forbidden key. The Word beyond the door, the word that waits to be unlocked, the word springing out of censure, the word that cracks the font. The Word that does not bring peace but a sword. The word whose solace is salt from the rock. The word that does not repent.

  The words come at my call but who calls whom? The shriek on the wind is ages old, the cry that comes before meaning, the cry that comes out of the wilderness without food or drink. The ragged prophet in burning clothes.

  Day and night stretch before the word, hunger and cold mock it, but the Word itself is day and the Word itself is night. The word Hunger the word Cold. I cannot eat my words but I do. I eat the substance, bread, and I take it into me, word and substance, substance and word, daily communion, blessed.

  Who calls whom? The word shaped out of the substance as the sculpture is shaped from the stone. The word imposed upon the substance as the wind reforms the rock. The clashing made and making words. The Word out of flux and into form.

  On the barrel of the wind the falcon.

  I love the deception of sand and sea. What appears is not what is. The long reaches of uncertainty draw me out, barefooted, half-dressed, when there is no colour in the sky. White skin in a white dress along the white edge of the sea.

  She carried white roses never red.

  As Apollo dragged the stars through his wheels she picked up the petals at her feet. Above her, the full moon like a clear coin, and in the water her reflection, horn slender horn white.

  She wore the moon behind her head as a saint wears a halo.

  She threw the petals in the water and stirred the stars.

  This was what she wanted; to shift the seeming-solid world, to hang over it as the moon hangs over it, casting it according to the hour. To carry white roses never red.

  The Wise Sappho. Am I wise? Was it wise to fall in love with Sophia, one of nine children, and if not the most chaste, the most difficult to please?

  My Muse.

  There was a time when she was courted by every poet and philosopher, even Socrates. She chose me. I was writing in those days, writing out of beauty, out of love, and because of her, out of wisdom. The wisdom of the body.

  Our feet were bare, the sun was hot, there was no thought unpassed through the sun. No thought not pressed underfoot with the harvest grapes. Thoughts transformed by heat and weight until they no longer resembled the thinkers. Intoxicating thoughts, and we were drunk on the beach, Sophia and I, drunk on words and resin wine.

  I put the words into a flask and flung them out to sea. Flung them far out from me, made through myself, but not myself. Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

  The world is packed tight with fools.

  Here, today, spread out in front of me, in numerous learned tomes, is a record of my supposed love-affairs, as construed from my work. Atthis, Andromeda, Gyrinno, Eranna, Mnasidika. They sound like precious stones. They were precious stones but not studded in my heart. They were studies of the imagination. The wind on that day, the purple sea, the copper drum flashing a message off a lovely face, were as much to me as that face. Some I loved, some I dreamed of loving, some were names carved roughly into the rock. It doesn’t matter, not now, not then, I was and am still moved by things remote from me. Things demanding words, things whose life I understood so well that they seemed to be my own. They were not my own. Not one flesh but one image and the image more potent than the flesh.

  My Muse. Sophia and a passion that does not pass.

  Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. Be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.

  Across the burning beach a man bright-haired. His camel was the colour of washed sand. His hands and his face were golden. The light struck his shoulders and flinted away. He was run through with the sun. He carried a lance under his arm, and held, in either hand a shell and a stone.

  He stretched out his hand and from the shell I heard the long poem of the world. I closed my eyes to find them full of starfish where the sun beat on them in steady rhythm.

  My friend told me that it was his task to bury the shell and the stone before the end of time. They were all of art and mathematics. The pith and marrow of us before the end. I looked behind him and saw Time churning the sands in pyramids and river beds. The caravanserai of civilisation and the patient desert.

  ‘Dust to Dust,’ he said, ‘and the sun herself obscured.’

  He turned away and I turned with him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. Ignorant of alchemy they put their faith in technology and turned the whole world into gold. The dead sand shone.

  *

  ‘And what good are the treasures of Egypt,’ said Doll Sneerpiece, ‘if I never again see his sweet face?’

  I am a Sexualist. Casti connubi? (as the Pope says). It’s all Latin to me. Why marriage? Why chaste marriage? Is there nothing else? Nothing more? An alliance of love.

  What marries me to
you? Is it a piece of paper? Then I am not married to you. Is it Church approval? Then I am not married to you. Is it the fact of a roof, the fact of a bed, the fact of two keys in one lock? Then I am not married to you. Is it the Eye of the Law? Then I am not married to you.

  If it is the daily pleasure in your face. If it is the quickening of my spirits at your face, if it is your face I seek when I seek no other, if it is the love of you that is consent, if it is consent to be of the same mind, then let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. There is some Latin that I understand; Consensus facit matrimonium et non concubitus.

  And what about copula?

  Read between the lines and there’s nothing but dirt. Dirt under my fingernails, dirt in my mouth, dirt between my legs where the pleasure grows. Don’t trust Rome. It was Savonarola (Florentine 1452–98 Occupation: Martyr and Zealot) standing in the courtyard of the Medici who denounced me as a corruptor and a devil and had my work burned.

  My work. My work. The words spitting upwards in tongues of flame. The words smoking the clear uncritical air. The words curling off the manuscripts. The manuscripts cracking in the fire.

  Sophocles (Athenian 496–406 BC Occupation: Playwright). ‘Gods, what impassioned heart and longing made this rhythm?’

  My heart, my longing, the heart at bay where you hunt me. The heart that runs through the wood, sees a stream, crosses it, takes the cut against the cliff, and comes cornered to the sea. Where now? Where now, with the beating blue water behind me and your voice at my head?

  Who calls whom? You call me your True Hart, a five-year stag with a beginning crown of surroyal antlers. Is it my hart-horn that pleases you? Is it your horn, brassy in the frost, that wakes me from quiet ease into this frothing chase?