Ships
He wished he hadn’t heard the artist say how long she’d lived in the town. He was troubled by his urge to claim provenance, to own this view she’d painted and to deny all other perspectives.
The paintings were entirely pictorial, she told a couple of down-from-Londons. But how can anything be entirely pictorial, he wondered, just a composition within a rectangle, when you bring your own mind to it? He came to the exhibition to consider someone else’s angle on what he saw from his high window. Yet even in simply looking, trying to observe without preconceptions, he was still looking for something. Why couldn’t he leave his tangles on Marine Drive and enter the gallery as pure space, only a container, a setting in which to feel his composition, his own music, without trying to understand, without relentlessly seeking meaning? What was wrong with him that he couldn’t free himself from story?
The down-from-Londons had brought London with them. He didn’t want to listen to their opinions about concentric circles and how the outer one had finally reached Margate. He moved into the next scene. In greys and soft browns, this painting drew attention to its being constructed from brushstrokes. He tried to go into the seascape, as he used to transport himself into the painting in his grandmother’s house, but the brushstrokes resisted; he couldn’t maintain the illusion. Frustrating, he thought, yet this refusal to bend to his will was interesting. This snag told him something about himself. Why this need to sink into a vision, to surrender?
The mind searches for a hook, a barb, a realistic detail on which to suspend itself. When it’s thwarted by soft textures what does it do? Searches within, examining its own structures for the hook on which it wants to be caught. Better caught than free, roaming the world without a rhythm telling it what to do.
What was he seeking in these paintings? A way back...? Or a path through water to where he must go but couldn’t. Frozen like the ships as they pass across the frame. Only they’re not traversing; they never were. Ultramarine came to Rome from beyond the sea, but these ships of raw umber suspended in oil are nothing but an image within a tunnel of mirrors. The same pieces rearranged with each turn of the scope, the ghosts of occurrence reflected in someone else’s eyes. You are the mirror that refracts. You distort light, transubstantiating one image into another as it passes through your matter, reacting with your chemicals, structures and electrics, your spaces and liquids and umber. This is water that doesn’t reflect. It creates something new with its medium.
Another painting. The white ship with the dark blue hull, a merchant ship, argosy— And now the turrets of a tower obscured by cloud. He tried to see the ship again but it was lost. From now on this painting could only be the battlements of a tower cloaked in fog. He was observing from the same elevation, or from the top of his own tower. Locked in battle with the people of the other turrets.
Inside himself, he fell. Tissues separated from their scaffolding and appeared to turn into a gelatinous substance, egg white perhaps. He was preparing to suspend pigments, as he could not bind his own mineral deposits into a paste to cover surfaces and conceal. No, not conceal. Reveal in new forms, these liquid insides that held in suspension the cold metallic deposits of all these years alone, removed, watching from the battlements of his own tower shrouded in fog, hoping for a signal from the other one.
If I were a plant, she’d asked, would I be a bramble or a rose?
Does it matter? he replied. They both have thorns.
Was there any way out of this tangle? What would they be without their barbs, these teeth locked together, meshed cogs driving each other into greater anxiety, abstracted from any cause? Was it possible, though, to soften, to blur two states into equilibrium, and see how as in the painting the white band must be bounded by the blue? You bring yourself to everything; you can never escape. The clouds will never dissipate, the fog never lift; only through logic do you know that towers must stand on the ground. But if you’ve never been to that level, how can you be sure that your tower isn’t floating on air?
Science had taken a hike, arm-in-arm with reason. They had no patience for his new whimsies. Let him discover for himself what happens to a man who lives his whole life on top of a tower waiting for someone to notice his pain.
There was logic here after all. He hadn’t seen it before, never put one thing and another together without first knowing where it would take him. He wanted the whole picture, all its components arranged just so, before he’d commit to being a part.
In the gallery, he felt himself to be a participant at last. Removed from his own remove as the detached observer, watched by the statue of the painter’s son, who was present in his printed form; the seams of his building blocks ambiguous, disquieting. Was he becoming or fragmenting in response to the closed-eye serenity of the female figures? Who was the viewer here? Who were these paintings for? What were they for– What was he for if he stopped watching from above?
Would time keep ticking, was there any such thing to mark off? But how else to describe the arbitrary units of life? If time had diffused into the fog, what on earth was he waiting for? He’d visited this exhibition every day for a week. The paintings, lacking a third dimension in any significant sense, had somehow acquired the fourth. But time was only the measurement of change. He couldn’t escape change now he’d inserted himself into the exhibition. The artist and her assistant had begun the week with a nod. Over the days they progressed to a smile of recognition, which yesterday turned into the sound of hello. What would happen tomorrow? A conversation he couldn’t politely avoid?
Beyond the barbed words spoken on the shore, beyond the sea, ultramarine, on those ships there was something he wanted. But what? A message. Why did the ships never arrive? Just passed across the frame, past his window; always for someone else.
He had to watch the ships through his window. It wasn’t safe if he stood on the shore. They needed to be contained within the frame, as he needed to be held by his flat in the tower block. Once, he swam in the lido at low tide. Now he couldn’t go near it, afraid he wouldn’t want to come out again, wouldn’t be able bear his own weight once he’d felt it gone and thought of himself in pure space, the space in which he might discover more than he knew; that might allow him to move in another direction, because at every point in spacetime there’s a tiny curled-up dimension, invisible to human senses.
Whatever he’d seen in the paintings was gone. Now he was responding to his own thoughts, as limited by his quickening breath. The words began to do their own work; their sonic shapes leading him onward, into the rhythm out in front. He was being led but he didn’t know whether he was doing it or someone else had meshed with his cog, in this grand collaboration of all the voices and ideas that had ever been stored in his memory. It wasn’t him at all; he’d never been distinct. He was nothing but a tangle and had no choice about which knotted threads to cast into the world.
It occurred to him that there might be no separation between the towers in the cloud. They were simply two projections from the same hidden construction. He’d always been joined, tangled briar with rose.
*
Written in response to paintings by Pippa Darbyshire.