The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  Conor’s method of working also knocked against my training as a producer/director, where once I’d called the shots, and the cameraman would challenge me for a direction: ‘Well, Michael, what do you want?’ I quickly realised that I was to have no input into what was happening about me in Spain, and through good manners, I felt compelled to acquiesce in this, and to trust him. When Conor was photographing Helen, I’d glance out through the window to find out how he was approaching her, alarmed to find that in one of the locations, he’d stood her up against a neutral wall, giving a photograph without a sense of place, although his scrutiny would concentrate on the sitter.

  The band behind us in the stalls of La Maestranza struck up a carefree paso-doble, blasting out support across the sand for the twinkling torero performing a series of death defying passes with the bull in the arena. He shone with wavering light in the scalding afternoon heat, each successive move captured by Conor with an extended lens, click click click, before the bullfighter brought the sequence of muleta passes to an end with the classic paso de pecho. Standing still, the lonely figure waves the muleta as the enormous animal bears down on him yet again. Without flinching, his cloth arm and the widespread horns of the bull move across the torero’s chest, click, click, click. At the last minute he sweeps the cape upwards and caresses with his cloth the whole length of the bucking bull as it passes under the muleta, click, click, click, and beyond. To an explosion of applause, the bullfighter continues the turn with his body, and walks away from the encounter with the puzzled bull, trailing his cape behind him across the yellow sand, raising a hand to greet the crowd, striding out of the simmering, swirling whiteness of the Spanish light, a hero who has overcome his brush with death at five in the afternoon.

  I viewed a remarkable, fascinating Self-Portrait hanging in the Alte Pinakothek, the old picture gallery in Munich; arguably the greatest portrait in existence. It resembles the conventional representations that are normally reserved for Christ: the mid-shot full-frontal pose, the position of the right hand raised in blessing with the forefinger erect, even to the extent of the short lock of hair extending down from the centre of the forehead as in Byzantine images. It was painted on a wood panel in 1500, and was astonishing in its audaciousness, because this is a secular self-portrait by the greatest German renaissance artist, who has painted himself in the image of God. The Latin inscription to the left of his face reads, ‘Thus, I Albrecht Dürer, painted myself in my true colours in my 28th year.’ His fellow countrymen refer to him as ‘The Prince of Artists’.

  The painting is highly symmetrical, very close to the vertical axis, built up of pyramidal planes. Ringletted tresses spread out onto the tips of the shoulders and frame the mask-like face. A moustache and neat beard draw attention to the sensitive mouth. But the soul of the picture resides in the eyes. They’re focussed ever so slightly to the left, which gives them an uncanny power. In the early 1900s, a woman found the connection they made with her so disturbing, that she scratched at them with her hat-pin, and the faint marks of her desecration remain. The eyes’ uncompromising gaze proclaim that this artist is no mere artisan, who in Renaissance times might have painted himself as an anonymous face in the crowd, but a man who’s so modern in his sensibility, steeped in the new intellectual currents of humanism, that he regards himself as being at the centre of the universe, and symbolically imbued with the authority of God’s creative spirit. His portrait crashes forward into the twenty-first century like a prophecy.

  This is the most important of Dürer’s great trilogy of self portraits. The two preceding fashionable likenesses are painted in the technically more difficult three-quarter length pose, which was the convention at the time. The first, which now hangs in the Louvre, was painted in 1493 in Strasbourg, when the painter was twenty-one: it’s entitled Self-Portrait with Eryngium Flower, and shows Dürer in his new role as a young husband. The second precursor, Self-Portrait with Gloves, is on display in Madrid’s Prado. It was painted in 1498 after Dürer’s travels in Italy, and shows him as a wealthy young gentleman of twenty-six. But the Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old, Wearing a Coat with Fur Collar shatters the conventions and confronts the viewer directly, full on. The absence of any background shows the sitter outside of time and space, so that the primacy and universality of the artist’s distinctive being is the only subject matter of this picture. The conflation of Anno Domini, the year of the Lord, with Albrecht Dürer in the ‘A.D. 1500’ inscription, written to the right of his face which seems to hang in the air, and by the positioning of the fingers of the right hand, which mimic those letters, re-emphasises the specificity of Albrecht Dürer’s name. Through this advertising self-portrait, Dürer has succeeded in painting the impossible: the immanence of an eternal God, who has incarnated in the individual nature of this particular artist.

  Conor’s eyes caught mine briefly. ‘I presume this second book will be brighter.’

  His take on the book surprised me. I hadn’t given any consideration to its temperament, to the mixing of qualities in proportion, because a book writes itself. The writing draws up the threads of life as it’s lived now and spins it into a finished narrative, almost like the spoken accompaniment to a film. During the producer/director training course I underwent in RTÉ, I was shown how the visual content of a film is primary, carrying its explanation within itself, while the verbal accompaniment is incidental, and always in the service of clarifying the image. At the time, I’d never considered that this perspective could put a photographer and a writer onto a collision course. Yes, I was thinking, Conor is probably correct in his assumption: the new book will be a celebration of being above ground. As I continued to watch him, he switched his attention to the chilli con carne that Terry had prepared.

  ‘This is very good, Terry.’

  Bright means reflecting much light, or being pervaded by sunlight. I was aware that such an unqualified rejoicing would pose a difficulty for me. Grief, particularly from the cancer and its lingering aftermath of incontinence and erectile dysfunction, is like the purest soprano voice singing a plaintive melody, a Richard Straus lied for solo voice and piano, as a soundtrack to my life. I sometimes hear it defiantly piercing the solitary quality of the silence, in those inadvertent moments of absence when I feel no longer held in the gaze, and I begin to fade. Some psychotherapeutic clients get anxious when I bend to scribble a note on my pad: I notice they raise their voices unbeknownst, scrabbling for my undivided attention. The voice also sounds through those moments of relaxation that form the basis of living, which surface in Spain particularly, when the force of my concentration is loosened and time is forgotten, when the simple delights of the day seem to drive themselves, and the pagan pleasures of eating when hungry and sleeping when tired, punctuate the haze of the summer heat. They’re wordless, playful moments of pure being that pass us by, then begin their circuit again, with the voice always humming softly in the background. My mother has been overtaken by that ease: she’s lost her grasp on structure, whereas I can still accept the tightness of that discipline once again.

  ‘It’s going to be brighter, yes?’

  ‘Yes!’ I yielded to Conor’s persistent ultimatum impatiently, trying to cover over my reluctance. The book will be cheerful, full of animation and promise; a comedy as opposed to the cancerous tragedy of At Five in the Afternoon. I was anxious, because the underlying emotional complexity, the negative as well as the positive, would have to be managed carefully, in order to give a surface impression of cheerful simplicity as a decoy.

  The figurative meaning of a portrait is to picture in words, to describe or illustrate, literally to drag forth or bring to light the likeness of an individual through the use of prose. It refers especially to a verbal description of a person’s character. The word portrait is a contraction of the Latin provorsus, straightforward, moving straight ahead, turned forward. ‘Forward, forward with courage!’ were the words that I offered to Helen when she’d completed her analysis. During those y
ears when she faced down her shadow, Helen had divested herself of all the props that had sustained her in a previous life, choosing to act more and more in accordance with her true self. She’d become a pilgrim in Spain, facing into life as a soltera, a woman alone, in a language not her own, in an adopted country where she still feels a stranger. And ‘Forward, forward with courage!’ was the same phrase that I repeated to myself, a motto I adopted to help me to survive ‘the with, through and the beyond’ of my cancer. The practical method I chose of writing my memoir every day was a living out of that concept, leading to the assumption of my own history. The permanence of the written word was a portrait that held me above ground. Like the sudden shock of yellow from massed spring daffodils, the yearning of my spirit for the hope of another chance, for looking forward, for a future, incarnated in the words that I wrote at my computer. They burst into flowers of wishing and expectation, blooms that beckoned me forward from the half life of disease and into health, into joining once again with the legions of the living, nevertheless permanently marked by the scar of death on my body, and bearing in particular on the non-functioning organ of regeneration, which badgered my being with a fierce questioning about being a real man.

  The fundamental fantasy of a psychoanalytic client has been to have my erect penis inside her. This erection, and she has specified it has to be mine, has acted as a guarantee of her world, a supplement of sanity, until such time as she can function on her own. Since the operation, she’s berated me fiercely for my impotence, for literally letting her down. ‘You’re fucked!’ she said. Once when I complained about the increasingly hurtful and deeply personal nature of her attacks, she questioned whether I was allowing her the right to say anything that occurred to her. Wasn’t that what she was paying me for? She was right of course: I’ve a good-mannered sensitivity problem, which clothes the brutal horror of what cancer has done to me, and I apologised to her for letting that intrude into her analysis. The analysis requires me to have balls, to challenge her and to struggle with her in the transference, and to put my being on the line for her. Recently, she’d a dream that she was lying on the couch, and that I was seated behind her, which is the configuration in the consulting room. She said I leaned forward and put my forefinger into her back passage, and touched her G-spot. That was the dream. She found it very consoling, very sexual because she had an orgasm in the dream, and afterwards I noted that in subsequent sessions her complaints had diminished. She decided that I’d been doing ‘anal-ysis’ with her, and that my erect finger substitute had hit the spot. We were both relieved, and she continued to come.

  I was speaking the dream to another, lying on a psychoanalytic couch, tip-toeing around the words, unpacking some, wary or forgetful of others, unravelling a particular thread of association, bemused by and unable to comprehend the warp of another. Such a method portrays the truth when it has just woken up, with a face full of creases. The folds and ridges in speech can hide the deepest emotion that gushes out to irrigate some long-neglected fields. The truth swells the bulbs that are hidden underground so that their stems can tunnel up and reach for the sun. ‘I have …’ it begins, the dialogue that seems to speak me, ‘I have …’ it continues, as I position myself in a world of words, translating the images into prose approximations and paint a picture for a silent listener, over my shoulder and out of sight, who has one ear attuned to what is not being said. The drama of the dream can be inconsequential, irrelevant, insulting, difficult to put into speech, but it’s where I live and have my being. For the dream is my portrait, illustrating the combination of traits and qualities that’s been put there by the engraver’s tool. And the impossible piece occurs when eventually I can slip sideways and inhabit the poetry of the painting, and not feel confined within a frame: when the eyes can see off-centre and set my soul aflame.

  At University College in Dublin, in the crowded, raked lecture-halls of Earlsfort Terrace, Professor Denis Donoghue had schooled me in the Cambridge school of literary criticism. ‘My college was Magdalen,’ he’d proclaim proudly, so that I believed my book should stand alone within that tradition being handed on, and be my ambassador. I’d made sure that all of the necessary information was given there in ‘the words on the page’. I’d worked at and re-worked the text so that each word counted, and as far as I was concerned, within the covers was where the reward had to be sought. The first intimation I had that matters were arranging themselves otherwise, was a phone call I received from my publisher, Steve, down in Dingle. He requested that the photograph for the front cover be my portrait, open and smiling. The photograph that I’d suggested to him was a striking one of me with my back to camera in a bullfighter’s pose, walking down a parched country lane within the evident, oppressive heat of late summer in Spain. After my account of the bleakest winter battling with prostate cancer, I felt that the image would lead the reader into the subject matter of the book, which was entitled At Five in the Afternoon, the time that the bullfighter’s dance with death traditionally begins in the arena: a las cinco de la tarde.

  By putting my face on the front cover, Steve seemed to be hoping that my fame would sell it. Always I’d known that I wasn’t a celebrity. I’d never courted publicity in my career as a broadcaster, preferring to hide behind the inherent authority of the news bulletins, which don’t have to be sold because the news sells itself; however, the publisher had set me on that politician’s path of garnering votes to come top of the poll. After publication, FMcM Associates, Steve’s publicity machine in London, had organised the book tour.

  One Saturday afternoon in Cork, I stood dressed up in my finery in the middle of a shopping mall beside a table overflowing with copies of my book, in front of the small Eason’s bookshop in Mahon Shopping Centre. Harassed shoppers walked up and down the wide mall passing me by, trailing kids and pushing trolleys and buggies, sometimes audibly asking, ‘An’ who’s yer man?’ I was unable to hawk my book by calling out in the street, and thrusting it into their faces: too effete for that. It was a humbling experience, and very awkward, because I felt that I was letting Steve down by not fulfilling my promise. The painful mortification I was feeling had tapped directly into my sense of inadequacy. I didn’t believe the insight of the kindly Eason’s manager, who joked that their put-down was delivered ‘in typical Cork fashion!’ in that they knew who I was really. I could see that I didn’t matter to them, and neither did my book: they had more pressing concerns. Eventually I sold one copy to an elderly man from Wexford, out for the day with his son, who wanted a souvenir, any souvenir. He asked me who I was, flicking through the pages of my book like a gambler shuffling cards, and told me he’d never heard of me, never listens to the radio. Then, ‘Is it a good read?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered unhesitatingly, ‘and it will surprise you.’

  I’d seen a remarkable photographic exhibition entitled ‘Untold’, a piece of work about the women of the Troubles, hanging on the walls of a gallery in the former British military barracks in Glencree, outside of Dublin. The large, perceptive portraits were taken by a young photographer, Conor Ó Mearáin, for which he was awarded the Salisbury Bursary. I contacted him, and he agreed to come down to the south of Spain with Terry and me, to do a photo shoot for the first book. He’d taken the cover photograph that I’d suggested to Steve, one hot afternoon when we’d stopped the car on the road to Ronda. I was feeling very depressed, finding the recovery from prostate cancer too slow and intermittent. I was plagued by incontinence, which was as vile as the fishy pollution of Anna’s jeep, a defilement disgusting to the senses and emotions. As I walked away from the camera crushing the dried golden grasses underfoot along a laneway lit by the slanting sun, yellow light which seemed to diffuse through different gradations of smoky blue mountains, hardly aware of Conor’s instructions, ‘A step to the right, forward, hold out your right arm, a little more …’ my head hung low, and I was turned in on myself. I wanted to be gone, out from under the oppressive autocracy of the disease which had i
mprisoned me. I was blind to the harsh beauty of the tawny, Spanish countryside, until I looked at Conor’s printed image. If you examine the photograph closely, you can see the outline of the heavy pad I was wearing at my behind; as I remember, it seethed and squelched with urine. Steve was of the opinion that the photograph would look well on the back cover of the book. Conor said we could do a version of the same photograph again for the second book, with me approaching the camera, walking uphill.

  But the intervening three years had changed both of us. Conor wanted to take some photographs in a bullring, so in company with Anna we drove the thirty kilometres inland from the coast to the Real Maestranza de Caballeria de Ronda. The Ronda bullring is the first purpose-built space for fighting bulls in the world, and the birthplace of modern bullfighting. It’s a baroque structure, built in 1785, surrounded by an elegant two-storey sandstone arcade of Tuscan columns. We positioned ourselves on that upper tier, where Anna sat on the wooden bench holding a fan in the colours of the famous bullfighter, Manolete. As Conor checked and rechecked the light and found his focus, I heard Anna say, ‘I could move my foot a little this way?’