Ali Smith - How to be both

(I will take it as an omen.)

But this time the boy looks straight through me as if I’ve swallowed a magic ring and the ring has rendered me invisible.

(I will take this as an omen too.)

First he was all sainthood: now he’s all lovelorn: what use to him is a painter?

I’ll do what good I can.

I’ll draw him an open threshold.

I’ll put a lit torch in his hand.

For the making of pictures we need plants and stones, stonedust and water, fish bones, sheep and goat bones, the bones of hens or other fowls whitened in high heat and ground down fine: we can use the foot of a hare, the tails of squirrels: we need breadcrumbs, willow shoots, fig shoots, fig milk: we need bristles from pigs and the teeth of clean meat-eating animals, for example dog, cat, wolf, leopard: we need gypsum: we need porphyry for grinding: we need a travelling box and a good source of pigment and we need the minerals which are the source of colour: above all we need eggs, the fresher the better, and from the country not the town mean better colours when dry.

We can dull things down if they’re too bright with earwax which costs nothing.

We need skins of sheep and goats, clippings of the muzzles, feet and sinews, skin strips, skin scrapings, and a source of clear water to boil them in.

I think of all the sketches and dessins and paintings on panels and linens and crack-covered walls, all the colours and the willows and the hares and the goats and the sheep and the hoofs, all the eggs cracked open: ash, bones, dust, gone, the hundreds and hundreds, no, thousands.

Cause that’s all the life of a painter is, the seen and gone disappearing into the air, rain, seasons, years, the ravenous beaks of the ravens. All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

I’ll tell him instead about the small boy who wished to see the Virgin,

he prayed and he prayed, please let me see the Virgin: let Her appear here in the flesh before me: but an angel appeared instead and the angel said, yes you can see the Virgin, but I don’t want you to be naïve about it cause seeing Her is going to cost you one of your eyes.

I would gladly pay an eye to see the Virgin, the boy replied.

So the angel vanished and the Virgin appeared instead and the Virgin was so beautiful the boy burst into tears and then the Virgin vanished and when She did, just as the angel had said, the boy went blind in one eye, in fact when he put his hand up to feel his face with his hand there was no eye there, just a hole like a little cave in his face where the eye had been.

But even though he’d lost the eye, he had loved seeing Her so much that he wanted nothing more than just to cast eye (not eyes, cause he only had the one) on Her one more time.

Please let the Virgin appear to me again, he prayed and he prayed until the angel got fed up listening to him and arrived in a flashing of purple-gold-white wings and stood in front of him folding these wings with a graveness that meant business and said, yes you can see Her again but you have to know — I don’t want you entering into this contract naïvely — that if you do you will have to pay for it with the loss of your only remaining eye.

I rocked up and down on my mother’s knees with the blatant unfairness of it, it was a story in the pamphlet of Vincenzo illustrated by the nuns, one of the stories Vincenzo liked to tell to the multitudes who could hear every word he spoke for miles regardless of whether they knew his tongue or not, and it wouldn’t be till I could read for myself, some time after my mother had gone, and I found the pamphlet, True Happenings From The Life Of Most Humble Servant Vincenzo Ferreri Including Countless Miracles That Came To Pass screwed up behind the bedhead and I unfolded it and sat and read it to myself the first time, that I found that my mother had never ever, in all her tellings of it, told me the end of the story where

1. the Virgin appears again

2. the angel takes the second eye

3. then finally the Virgin gives the boy back both his eyes out of kindness,

instead she had always left me twisting myself in her arms on her lap with the dilemma of it.

Will he give away both his eyes? she said. What do you think? What should he do?

I put my fists up to my own eyes and dug the heels of the hands in to see if my eyes were both still there, to torture myself and imagine them gone while I waited for her to turn the page over from the drawing of the boy with the black holes where his eyes had been to the drawing which did not scare me so, of Vincenzo curing the dumb woman: one day Vincenzo met a woman who could not speak: she had never been able to speak: he cured her, after which she could speak like everybody else.

But before she’d uttered a word, he held up his book and his hand and he said — Yes, it’s true, you can speak now. But it’s best if you don’t. And I’d like you to choose not to.

So the woman said Thank you.

After which she never spoke again.

My mother always laughed hard at this miracle: one day she fell off a stool she was laughing so much at it, and lay on the floor beside me next to the upturned stool with her arms holding her chest, tears coming out of her eyes, laughing in a way that meant it was fortunate we were in the thick-walled part of the house and no passers-by could hear her laugh like that, like the wild women did who lived in the forest and were shunned, cause known to do witchery.

Otherwise she held me on her knee after my bath and told me the terrifying stories like the one about the boy whose father, Apollo the sun-god, forbade him from driving the horses who drew the sun across the sky from its place of rising to its place of setting every day cause those horses were too wild for him and too strong, and she glided her arm through the air to show the horses and the sun all going their steady way: but when the boy took the forbidden horses out she shuddered her arm (the horses getting a little bit too strong) then shook and threw her arm from side to side (the horses getting stronger and stronger) then her arm threw itself wildly about as if it was a wild mad thing no longer even a part of her (the horses out of control, the reins flapping loose in the air) and the day passed and became night in a second or 2 like the whole day passing in the swoop of a bird across the sky, then horses chariot boy all dashing to the ground so fast that words can’t — and here she made as if to drop me off her knee, as if I’d fall and hit the ground like them, but no, cause as soon as the fall seemed to start I’d find myself instead flung upwards not down, cause she’d stand up just as she dropped me, swing me up instead into the air very high and dangerous and free as if my heart and throat might leave my body and leap up above us both towards the ceiling — yet she never let go of holding me firm for a moment on either the down or the up, my mother.

Or the story of Marsyas the musician who was half-man and half-beast and who could play as sweetly as any god on his flute and did so until Apollo the sun-god himself heard rumours about how good the earthly musician was, came shooting down straight as a ray of light to earth, challenged him to a contest, won the contest and had the musician skinned alive as his prize.

Which isn’t necessarily the injustice that it sounds, my mother said. Cause imagine, the skin of Marsyas slipped off as easily as a tomato’s will in warm water to allow the red raw sweetness out of the fruit below. And the sight of such release moved everyone who saw it to a strength of feeling more than any music anywhere played by any musician or god.

So always risk your skin, she said, and never fear losing it, cause it always does some good one way or another when the powers that be deign to take it off us.