Ali Smith - How to be both

I what?

I, having been shot back into being like an arrow but with no notion of the target at which He is aiming me, find myself now in this intermediate place, albeit in a neighbourhood of grand houses but all the same next to a very low very poor piece of brickwork (which will not last 4 winters, by the way) with an unspeaking unseeing unhearing boy whose precipitate desires for a fine Lady he has seen in your Lord’s picture halls have dragged me very much against my will to this low wall away from the beauties of His palace, a place in which I should have liked to dwell for longer: but now find myself out in the cold grey and horseless world: such state of horselessness an unfortunate luck for its people, a creatureless world I thought until I saw the doves flying up in a flock like always, the same doves though greyer, filthy, squatter than, but all the same their wings and the clatter of birds were a salve even to a heart I no longer have.

By this I recognize, most excellent Sir and Lord, that this is a purgatorium, perhaps even your picture palace is a level of this purgatorium: and my St Vincenzo Ferreri panel, for my blasphemous sin of depicting Christ as older than 33, has resulted in the being placed, both picture and painter, in purgatorium as a reminder of my prideful wrong imagining (though consider, illustrious Lordship, that if this is so, then only 1 of my pictures has ended up in purgatorium, and there are 4 of Cosmo’s there, which in the end demonstrates Cosmo’s work as 4 times more blameworthy than mine, just saying).

Having myself been, I can only presume, formerly until this renaissance in a heaven of forgetfulness, am now for some unforgiven sin reborn into a place of coldness and mystery, with no means of practising my trade and nothing to my name but the broken pieces of a gone life like the breakage of a vase: each piece its own beauty in the palm of the hand but the whole thing shattered, nothing but air where it once was and all the air that was enclosed in it released, now unheld by anything, and the edges of each broken piece sharp enough to bleed me, had I still skin to be broken

but He or His clerks will know all these things already, so there is no need for me to note them in my petition, which is nothing but mewling and carping and perhaps I must just accept.

Cause I know this is not hell cause I am intrigued not hopeless and cause I am surely put here for some good use albeit mysterious: in hell there is no mystery cause in mystery there is always hope: we followed the beautiful woman until she came to the door in the house and went through it and shut it and left the boy, still unseen, outside, at which point he (and I) retired to the small wall across the thoroughfare but still in sight of that shut door, which is where we are now: though also I did notice, I could not fail to as we went, that the woman, who has about her an air of some beauty and grace, unfortunately has a walk like a swan out of element or a flightbird forced to walk, a waddle so unsuited to her beauty that in the end it endears in that it mitigates that beauty: if I had paper and a pen or a willow charcoal (and hands and arms, even just one of each, to do it with) I would show it with an unexpected angle, a flatness, the bodily form appearing a touch unknowing, and it would make her even more graced and likeable and I’ve had much time and leisure to think and plan these things cause we followed her a great distance and were I still embodied I’d be exhausted so it’s as well I’ve no legs: but this boy has some stamina, will by luck and justice live long I thought as we covered the distance: until I felt the dip in his spirit when the woman came to some steps and went up the steps and in through a door and shut the door behind her and

(oof)

it was a punch to the gut, a door shut on a boy obsessed.

It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things: cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence: paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first-hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and underdry of its feathers, a brick about the rough kiss of its skin.

This boy I am sent for some reason to shadow knows a door he can’t pass through and what it tells me just to be near him is something akin to when you find the husk of a ladybird that has been trapped, killed and eaten by a spider, and what you thought on first sight was a charming thing, a colourful creature of the world going about its ways, is in reality a husk hollowed out and proof of the brutal leavings of life.

Poor boy.

Just saying, even though these houses we’re outside are grand, well appointed and many-storeyed, the boy is on a small low wall whose bricks are crying out for love: the knowing of this is the knowledge of my father turning over in his grave in his natural impatience and knocking on the lid of the box I put him in to have someone let him up and out of the ground to remake such a wall: cause if all the dead were given this chance, with their hindsight and experience this world or purgatorium would I think be better made.

I am wondering where it is, grave of my father, wondering too where my own grave, when the boy sits up, faces the woman’s house, holds his holy votive tablet up in both hands as if to heaven, up at the level of his head like a priest raising the bread, cause this place is full of people who have eyes and choose to see nothing, who all talk into their hands as they peripatate and all carry these votives, some the size of a hand, some the size of a face or a whole head, dedicated to saints perhaps or holy folk, and they look or talk to or pray to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers and staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despairs to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons.

He holds it in the air: he is maybe saying a prayer.

Ah! I see: cause a little image of the house and its door has appeared in the tablet: which makes these votive tablets perhaps similar to the box the great Alberti had and which he displayed in Florence (I once saw) whereby the eye looks through the tiniest of holes and sees a full distant landscape formed small and held inside it.

Is it possible then that all the people of this place are painters going about their world with the painting tools of their time?

Perhaps I have been placed in a specific painters’ purgatorium –

but the boy slumps beside me again, his spirit in the gutter.

No: cause these people have none of the spirit necessary for a lifelong making of pictures.

Look, boy: cheerful thing: spring flowers in a sort of bucket hanging off the top of a metal pole stuck at the side of this roadway.

Is there spring in purgatorium? Do they have years in purgatorium? Yes, surely: given that purgatorium holds in its nature a promise of an end to it, when its inmates are judged purged, then it must have some way by which time can be measured: but I’d’ve thought such a place would be full of the moans and the supplicatings of thousands: no, purgatorium could surely be worse, cause look, at least there are blackbirds in it: one comes out of a hedge right now and sits along on the wall with his beak a good Naples yellow and a ring of the same yellow round the black of the eye: he sees the boy there, twitches his tail and wings back into the hedge: in the hedge he starts a song: can it really be purgatorium and not the old earth when it is so like the earth in the song of the bird, its everlasting unchanging fineness? Hello bird: I’m a painter, dead (I think, though I remember no going), placed here for my many prideful sins in this cold place that has no horses to watch unseen unheard unknown the back of a boy in the kind of love that means nothing but despair.