bridge as the signal goes, and splashes through the tracks in a siren of joy. A little boy leans out of the window, shouting with the double bell of the long train.
The train passes, a yellow band pulled through a black cloth. The houses spring back and take up their rightful place in the darkness. There’s nothing here but bricks and dirt, but metal and dirt but habit and dirt. The 5:45 to the suburbs.
There is more; a lean of beauty as the train judges the bend; an arc of mechanics that allows 180 degrees of admiration between the hard metal and the curve it implies. The simple clash between subject and style is a painterly one; the uncompromising line is made to yield to a curve. Only this defeat makes movement possible.
The curve seems to be so many afternoons, travelling slowly to the sea, the silver train towards the gold coast. The long wind back to childhood through memory, the romance of the train not killed by the 5:45. Each carriage articulated to its next, takes the bend, the vertebrae of the train that runs through my past like a rosary. So many afternoons travelling slowly to the sea; the rocking train and the rolling water. My mother smiling at the sea.
The smiling of women and the motion of great waters. These things moved Leonardo. Both at once mysterious and transparent, he took them into his paintings as things and meta-things: Madonna of the Balances, Madonna of the Lake, Madonna of the Rocks, La Gioconda, Saint Anne, Medusa, whose snake hair parts in reptile waves, sea-hue on her dead cheeks.
Leonardo who knew neither Latin nor Greek, and who described himself as an unlettered man (‘omo senza lettere’), loved words and fought with them, receiving many wounds. Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. No love that leaves the lover unmarked. In later life, Leonardo, branded by words, gave up painting and worked only on his fugitive manuscripts, writing from right to left. Who knows what he hoped to find? For me, it was found already, in the fearful face of Mona Lisa, corrupt crimson on lips and cheek, faded now into a modest blush, that rises so strangely beside the sea.
The train had reached the sea. The sea caught between two legs of concrete where the ferries unloaded their blunt cargo. The convenient sea, still as a child’s pony, but further out, past the hobbled water, the white-maned waves hurdled the buoys.
*
The unsaddled sea twice daily ridden by the moon. The 239,000 mile distant moon that daily rides the sea. Outrageous, the connections of the natural world; the planets in musical intervals around the sun. The canyons here that have made the mountains there. Even the flowers in my garden seed themselves in yours. The moved and still moving world rotating on its axel-tree. The daily death and resurrection of the self-renewing world.
I wanted to open the window to hear the sea no longer glass-paned. The tenor of the sea and the pitched gulls. The beauty of the sea in its movement and mass. The deep tidal swirls that cease as soon as it is contained.
What contains me? Fear, laziness, the opinion of others, a morbid terror of death and too little joy in life. I am shuttered at either end, a lid on my head, blocks under my feet. The stale self unrhythmed by art or nature.
Does it matter? Yes, to me, who suspects there is more than the machine-tooled life offered as a nice copy of millions of others. Won’t a reproduction do? Who can tell the difference these days? There’s no such thing as art. Settle for a designer suit to throw across your carcass. No-one can tell the difference between the living and the dead. And who are you to judge? This is a democracy isn’t it? We’re all equal now, apart from the money, all equal now. One size fits all.
It doesn’t fit me.
‘Why blame yourself? Why blame yourself?’ the liberal consolations of the anecdotal Vicar who’s missed his birdie putt.
Who else shall I blame for this drought stricken life?
The train passes, a yellow band pulled through a black cloth. The houses spring back and take up their rightful place in the darkness. There’s nothing here but bricks and dirt, but metal and dirt but habit and dirt. The 5:45 to the suburbs.
There is more; a lean of beauty as the train judges the bend; an arc of mechanics that allows 180 degrees of admiration between the hard metal and the curve it implies. The simple clash between subject and style is a painterly one; the uncompromising line is made to yield to a curve. Only this defeat makes movement possible.
The curve seems to be so many afternoons, travelling slowly to the sea, the silver train towards the gold coast. The long wind back to childhood through memory, the romance of the train not killed by the 5:45. Each carriage articulated to its next, takes the bend, the vertebrae of the train that runs through my past like a rosary. So many afternoons travelling slowly to the sea; the rocking train and the rolling water. My mother smiling at the sea.
The smiling of women and the motion of great waters. These things moved Leonardo. Both at once mysterious and transparent, he took them into his paintings as things and meta-things: Madonna of the Balances, Madonna of the Lake, Madonna of the Rocks, La Gioconda, Saint Anne, Medusa, whose snake hair parts in reptile waves, sea-hue on her dead cheeks.
Leonardo who knew neither Latin nor Greek, and who described himself as an unlettered man (‘omo senza lettere’), loved words and fought with them, receiving many wounds. Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. No love that leaves the lover unmarked. In later life, Leonardo, branded by words, gave up painting and worked only on his fugitive manuscripts, writing from right to left. Who knows what he hoped to find? For me, it was found already, in the fearful face of Mona Lisa, corrupt crimson on lips and cheek, faded now into a modest blush, that rises so strangely beside the sea.
The train had reached the sea. The sea caught between two legs of concrete where the ferries unloaded their blunt cargo. The convenient sea, still as a child’s pony, but further out, past the hobbled water, the white-maned waves hurdled the buoys.
*
The unsaddled sea twice daily ridden by the moon. The 239,000 mile distant moon that daily rides the sea. Outrageous, the connections of the natural world; the planets in musical intervals around the sun. The canyons here that have made the mountains there. Even the flowers in my garden seed themselves in yours. The moved and still moving world rotating on its axel-tree. The daily death and resurrection of the self-renewing world.
I wanted to open the window to hear the sea no longer glass-paned. The tenor of the sea and the pitched gulls. The beauty of the sea in its movement and mass. The deep tidal swirls that cease as soon as it is contained.
What contains me? Fear, laziness, the opinion of others, a morbid terror of death and too little joy in life. I am shuttered at either end, a lid on my head, blocks under my feet. The stale self unrhythmed by art or nature.
Does it matter? Yes, to me, who suspects there is more than the machine-tooled life offered as a nice copy of millions of others. Won’t a reproduction do? Who can tell the difference these days? There’s no such thing as art. Settle for a designer suit to throw across your carcass. No-one can tell the difference between the living and the dead. And who are you to judge? This is a democracy isn’t it? We’re all equal now, apart from the money, all equal now. One size fits all.
It doesn’t fit me.
‘Why blame yourself? Why blame yourself?’ the liberal consolations of the anecdotal Vicar who’s missed his birdie putt.
Who else shall I blame for this drought stricken life?
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