Ali Smith - Artful

The girl in this photo looked like she was asleep too, but the layer of dust on her lips and her face, on her perfect row of teeth, dust from the streetfighting and the explosions, meant that now she was just another surface in the room.

You told me how Miller’s photographs had been lost, completely forgotten about in the final decades of her life, while her husband, who’d taken the photo of the four sleeping women holding the cups, Roland Penrose, carried on being the important figure he was in Surrealism and British art. Then one day, some time after her death, her son’s wife went up into the loft and found thousands of negatives, and a set of astonishing and vivid written dispatches she’d sent from the front to Vogue, who’d published them, in the war’s final push.

Then you’d pointed at the dark-haired woman sitting lowest in the picture. That’s Leonora Carrington, you said, one of the most underrated of the British Surrealist artists and writers. Why we haven’t had a huge retrospective of her work at the Tate I don’t know. Best known, because she was Max Ernst’s lover, as a Surrealist wild-child and muse. But her own work is unique, startling, completely original, a cutting-edge all on its own.

That night in bed you showed me some of Carrington’s pictures. They were dark and bright, playful, like pictures from stories, but wilder, more savage, full of sociable-looking animals and wild-looking animals, beings who were part animal and part human, looking like they were all having a very interesting conversation, masked beings, people who were turning into birds or maybe it was birds turning into people. You got up and left the room, came back through with another couple of books. You opened one at a story called As They Rode Along the Edge. It was about a parsimonious saint who tries to fool a lot of clever creatures, led by a wild hairy girl called Virginia Fur, into letting the church have not just their souls but their bodies. Virginia Fur spends her time, followed by a large number of cats, whizzing about at great speed on a single wheel, in a balancing act on the borderline between divine and bestial where it soon becomes apparent that saintliness is pretty beastly and that animals have real spirit.

You flicked further into the book and read me this: ‘However deeply we look into each other’s eyes a transparent wall divides us from explosion where the looks cross outside our bodies. If by some sage power I could capture that explosion, that mysterious area outside where the wolf and I are one, perhaps then the first door would open and reveal the chamber beyond.’

It sounds like it could be good and it sounds like it could be bad, I said. It sounds ceremonious.

You told me Leonora Carrington was an expert in liminal space. What’s liminal space? I’d asked you. Ha, you’d said. It’s kind of in-between. A place we get transported to. Like when you look at a piece of art or listen to a piece of music and realize that for a while you’ve actually been somewhere else because you did? I’d said. Or liminal like limbo? Maybe, you’d said, getting excited, wait, I’ll look it up, maybe limbo and liminal share a root, it sounds like they might.

I’d started singing the Doris Day song called Let the Little Girl Limbo, which we had on an album of lost songs of the early 1960s, it was a song her husband/manager had banned her from releasing and you and I had listened to it in bewilderment trying to work out why. Because limbo was too sexy? Because it rhymes with go so low , and he didn’t want anyone to think Doris Day would? I said. You thought it was probably because it sounded too Afro-Caribbean, too close to an ethnic border for the marketing men to take a chance on in the early 60s.

Now, sitting at the desk, with you well beyond whatever liminal was and me stuck firmly in the overworld, I looked at that picture of the four sleeping women. I wondered who the other two women were and what had happened to them in their lives. In the picture it looked as if they’d all been having tea together and a spell, a sleeping enchantment, had been cast on them. The two women in the middle of the picture, the two not holding the cups, looked like they were actually getting a lot done in their sleep. They didn’t look unhappy, no, they looked serious, as if sleep was a serious business, even a kind of work rather than something peaceful or absenting. In fact, it was as if sleep had made them even more there — or differently there.

In Oliver Twist there were a couple of times when Oliver was in a sleeping/waking state. In one, he’s miles from his old life, safe in a lovely upper-class house with the Maylies, and suddenly, in his half-sleep, ‘a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which…holds the body prisoner,’ he knows for sure that Fagin and Monks are just beyond the window, just the other side of it. So he’s still not safe, regardless of how safe it seems in the country with the Maylies. He’s still not free. There was another description of that sleep state much earlier in the novel — a much more empowering-sounding one:

a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such times, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

That’s on his first night in Fagin’s underworld; in this in-between state he ‘sees’ Fagin open a box of stolen watches, rings, bracelets, brooches, one with ‘some very minute inscription on it,’ exactly like the kind of thing that would be the proof of Oliver’s true and stolen identity. I wondered, thinking of it now, whether that empowering sleep-vision meant that Dickens had maybe planned at one point for Oliver’s mother’s stolen jewelry to be in Fagin’s box. I knew he was very much writing the story as he went along.

Empowering. See what happens when you enter therapy land? Everything gets therapeutic. I thought about that counselor I’d seen earlier today. I imagined her waking up and coming downstairs and finding someone has broken into her house, some small boy has been pushed through a window and has opened the door to thieves who’ve stolen her — her what? It didn’t matter what; I just wanted to be able to imagine for a moment, on the face of someone who’d seemed to know better than I could how to decipher what was happening in my life, a passing shadow of the world I felt so close to and which she, and her husband who sang in the shower, who could speak a language I couldn’t, and all the other people in the world whose lives were still so whole and simple and unmysterious, lived so very far from.

I needed drugs. I needed alcohol. I put my head down on the dictionary that had no word for overworld in it and wished I could fall asleep. In my sleep, I would stand up from the desk and pull on a coat. It would be like the one Harpo Marx wears in the old Marx Brothers films, or the one Dickens describes the Artful Dodger wearing; it would be far too big for me, capacious and patched, tramplike, and as I buttoned it I’d come across a hidden pocket full of handkerchiefs knotted together like a magician’s trick. I’d open the coat and run my hand down its inside lining, full of hidden pockets and compartments. I’d put my hand into one and pull out — what? a hand, on the end of an arm — a limb. A passport into limbo. The hand at the end of the arm would speak through a mouth made of thumb and first finger. You need to take me with you, it would say, so you don’t come to no arm.