Will Self - Great Apes

And it had been. A fly-on-the-tube-wall report of shuffling anonymity, every body reduced by the Frankensteinian future to no more than the sum ofits fellows’ parts. And by the vending machine Simon blanched, and under the train indicator Simon sweated; he felt the ridging of sweaty cloth cut into his perineum — visceralupdateviscera-lupdatevisceralupdate.

He had also lied to the woman at the opening, the pushy hack from Contemporanea. It wasn’t true about the forthcoming exhibition of his work. It wasn’t true about his love affair with the human body. He hadn’t painted pictures that displayed the ideal couched within the real flesh, the real bone, the real blood. He had painted the unreal, the twisting and distressing of that body by the metropolis, by its trains and planes, its offices and apartments, its fashions and fascisms, piazzas and pizza parlours.

A year or so before, in the dark age between Jean and Sarah, Simon had lunched one day with George Levinson at the Arts Club and then sliced his way down through the cake-and-icing streets of Chelsea to the Tate. He knew why. He was blocked again, badly blocked. He not only didn’t want to paint, or draw, or construct, or carve. He felt like some frontal-lobe fuck-up, incapable of remembering why it was that anyone should paint, or draw, or construct, or carve. The world seemed replete with its own imagery already — too like itself already. In this mood he forced himself in the direction of the gallery, urging one foot in front of the other. He had arrived for lunch stoned, and left drunk.

The visit to the Tate was a bit of masochism for Simon. Worse than that — a failed bit of masochism. Simon felt himself to be a middle-aged JP with a taste for birching, picking up a boy in the Charing Cross Road with the sure knowledge that his money will be taken by the pimp, and that the police will pass him on to the tabloids.

He scuttled up the wide stone stairs and entered crabwise, skirting the main hall, ducking past the arch leading to the contemporary galleries, eyes averted, lest he catch sight of one of his peer’s works, or worse, one of his own. He escaped into the Renaissance and hung out there a while, feeding deer and goats in the blue distance of Umbrian panelling. It meant nothing to him, the colours, the positioning of figures, the lines of sight, the religious iconography. Every aspect of the paintings he stared at had been traduced and traduced and traduced again by the glossy and matt betrayals of photography, of advertising. Simon wouldn’t have been surprised if a putti had driven out of the frame of a Titian in a Peugeot 205.

He wandered on, trying to lose his bearings, but not trying too hard, because then he wouldn’t — for he knew the gallery too well. Remembered being there aged sixteen, on the verge of a first kiss with a girlfriend. The two of them, palms cemented and oiled with childish sweat, had moved along, making up conversation, while his eyes took in the cornices, ventilation grilles, fire extinguishers, light switches, everything but the incandescent Blakes they had allegedly come to see. Such training — brain labouring while thin sixteen-year-old cock was straining against thin pants, and thin fifteen-year-old chest acted as crucible for the consuming heart of lust — was enough to stamp the floor plan on his neurons.

But he was lost, or at any rate unknowing, when he looked up and saw the two canvases by John Martin, the apocalyptic nineteenth-century painter, The Plains of Heaven and The Fall of Babylon. In the former a conventional enough view of romantic upland — bluer and yellower peaks and valleys, receding to a hazy horizon — was reviewed when Simon saw that what he had assumed initially was a plume of smoke or spume, issuing from a rocky cleft in the foreground, was in fact a great tumult of angelic beings in close, but irregular, formation. There were so many of them that they altered the scale of the picture entirely. What Simon had thought a horizon of some thirty or forty miles seen from a peak perspective became an unreal hundred to two hundred miles of nonlocatable nirvana. An impossibilist realisation of another planet, leaning towards the spray-guns and computer manipulations of Now, rather than the layered, mannered evocations of Then.

The other canvas, The Fall of Babylon , was both a complement and a corrective. A massive vortex of stone, wood, water, fire and flesh, gurgling down an invisible plug hole of destruction. Grey-robed Babylonians were caught up in this, flung holus-bolus, arms and legs cartwheeling, their disordered whipped-cream beards froth to the maelstrom. Martin seemed to be saying… what? Saying nothing, only carried away by the sheer mechanics of the graphic destruction he had wrought. The painting was about this: that Babylon contained this moment of explosion, this blastosphere, latent in all its solidity, its municipality.

And if not Babylon, why not London? And if not the plains of heaven, why not the moors of cumulo-nimbus? The smudged cotton wool that kissed the curved undersides of aircraft as they powered across the sky. Why not, why not indeed? Simon distrusted epiphanies. He’d been sent scampering down blind-alleys of endeavour far too many times to give credence to those moments of believing something was instinctively right. But he knew a good trope when one diverted him. He recognised an inspirational scaffold which would support him, if only for do-it-yourself.

So it had been with the series of modern apocalyptic paintings he had embarked upon the following week. In Martin’s canvases the body was violate, or inviolate, but always violable. In Simon’s the human bodies would be scarcely viable: the massed termites of Lang’s city, their bodies uniform, their uniforms body-like. Insectoid humans — all carapace, all exoskeletal. They would sit in ranks, in an aircraft the size of a lumbering Chartres, whole choirs and transepts of them, reading blocks of wood with the pages delicately carved out, and playing Donkey Kong with twitching thumbs, tossing off the miniature plastic clitorises.

Simon conceived of a large canvas showing the interior of a Boeing 747 as its nose explodes on the Earth’s crust, as its deathly decal — winged defeat — destructs in a thirty-two-feet-per-second/per second ram-raid on the concrete floor of an empty reservoir near Staines. The ripped up rafts of human figures flying actually inside the disintegrating plane, achieving true weightlessness at last, just at the point at which their burial anticipates their burial.

And once this canvas had come to him, the others had followed. They were all depictions of the safest and most urbanely dull of modern environments, but subject to an horrific destructive force which shook, stirred and ultimately shredded their human cargo. The interior of the Stock Exchange beneath a tidal wave; the booking hall of King’s Cross tube station on that November night in 1987, at the very instant the fireball erupted; the car deck of a ro-ro as the green gush rolled in, and the red and blue cars were flushed out; instant Ebola attacking Ikea, the processing hordes of young newlyweds purchasing flat-pack furniture liquefying, still hand-in-hand. And so on, twenty canvases in all.

And while at the point of conception Simon had imagined that these paintings would be satiric, concerned with the futile impermanence of all that was held likely to last, as he worked on them he saw that this was not so. That the paintings had nothing to do with the settings, the backgrounds. That these were little more than montages, depictions of crude massifs and underwater reefs, on to which children might rub celluloid transfers of suitable human figures. And that it was those figures that were the real subject of the paintings.