Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

we have stood by him even though he has caused us untold grief

a series of consecutive slaps, Your Honour

I hope he rots in hell, no right father would have done what he did to this family

a strong smell of soot and petrol from her, Your Honour

four types of psychotropic drugs in his system

woke up three weeks later with quarter of my skull gone and fitted with a titanium plate

you will have no luck for this you bastard

and so on and so on, a surge of red script flowing across the gallery, ceiling to floor, rising and falling in swells and eddies through various sizes and spacings, congested in the tight rhythms of certain examples only to swell out in crashing typographical waves in others, a maelstrom of voices and colour and it was quite something to stand there and have your gaze drawn across the walls, swept along in the full surge of the piece while resisting the temptation to rest and decipher one case or another, wanting instead to experience the full flow and wash of the entire piece, my gaze swept on in the relentless, surging indictment of the whole thing, its swells and depths, until I was startled from my reverie by Mairead who appeared by my side to press the exhibition catalogue into my hands with an anxious expression, positioning herself at my elbow where she looked fretful, not a mood I would have associated with her on such an occasion but one which became clear to me when I turned the catalogue over in my hands and read the cover title as

The O Negative Diaries

An Installation by Agnes Conway

Medium — Artist’s Own Blood

and I stood there in the middle of the crowd, vacant of everything save the single thought — that whatever dreams a man may have for his daughter it is safe to say that none of them involve standing in the middle of a municipal gallery with its walls covered in a couple of litres of her own blood because this, I slowly realised, was what I was looking at, this was the red mist that suffused the weak evening light which streamed in the front windows in such a way that the script itself appeared to project from the walls into the middle of the room, the livid words and sentences themselves hanging in a light so finely emulsified that we might take it into our very pores and swell on it, so that even if the crowd broke up the continuity of the space there was no doubting that the light served to make everyone part of a unified whole that occupied the whole gallery, Agnes’s blood was now our common element, the medium in which we stood and breathed so that even as she was witness-in-chief, spreading out the indictment which, how ever broad and extravagant it may be on rhetorical flourish, how ever geographically and temporally far-flung it might be, the whole thing ultimately dovetailed down to a specific source and point which was, as I saw it

me

nothing and no one else but

me

plain as day up there on the walls and in the sweep of each word and line, I was the force beneath, driving it in waves up to the ceiling and it was clear to me through that uncanny voice which now sounded in my heart, a voice all the clearer for being so choked and distant, telling me that

I did this

I was responsible for this

whatever it was

definitely something bad and not to my credit because only real guilt could account for that mewling sense of fright which took hold of me there in the middle of that room, something of it returning to me now

sitting here at this table

that same cramping flash within me which twisted some part of me with such sudden fear that before I had made any decision whatsoever I was praying, or rather

I was being prayed as

a prayer

torqued up out of me with an irreversible urgency, speaking itself to completion before the words had properly stumbled through me

Jesus Christ

let it be some vision ahead of her

and not torment behind

responsible for this

just as Mairead grabbed my elbow, a startled look on her face which, for one wild moment, had me believe I may have spoken my plea out loud like a madman because I was now finding myself scrabbling on a knife-edge of panic, a horrible vertiginous moment which I overcame only with a savage effort of will which pushed me in a sudden, awkward lurch across the floor and out the door into the March dusk where rain and the rush-hour traffic clogged the narrow street in which the gallery was situated and those few people who had stood out into the mist to smoke and chat along the pavement now stared at me in such alarm while I tried to gather my wits and steady my breathing that I had a clear vision of how I must have looked careering through the gallery and out into the street, the country man with the big farmer’s head on him in the collar and tie, shouldering his way through the crowd with his two fists balled at his side

fit to kill

fit to fucking kill

Mother of Jesus

and so much for the promise to put my best foot forward for Agnes’s sake on her big night, so much for making a good impression on her behalf I thought bitterly as I stood there with the rain pissing down on me, nothing but sour embarrassment churning around inside me as

a young man with a wispy beard took a step towards me, concern writ across his face and I can’t remember what I said to him or how I replied but his two hands were suddenly raised in front of his face as if someone was going to lash out and hit him — and how ever I responded at that moment it seemed to convince him fairly sharpish that he did not want anything to do with me so he backed off, leaving me alone on the sidewalk outside the gallery where I stood for a further half hour, trying to get a grip on myself, getting soaked through while the crowd gathered up and down the street, smoking and drinking wine before eventually breaking up and spreading out into the gathering night by which time I had calmed down a bit

just a bit

my temper and nerves under control somewhat, helped by the fact that I had gleaned from the snatches of conversation around me that the exhibition was a striking achievement and should, with any luck, be a real success, so I was relieved for Agnes — I did not appear to have done any damage — and could set aside those worries for the moment while I examined once again what I had seen of the installation itself and more specifically try to fathom the shock I had in its presence, why had I felt so deeply about it all, why had I taken it so personally and, most bafflingly of all, how a man of my age could be so overcome by his own feelings, so totally undone as to make him feel very foolish since all I knew, standing there in the rain, was that this was something I did not appreciate one little bit, sifting through feelings that grated and twisted within me, trying to give them their proper place and measure with my back to the cut stone wall of the gallery and I had no need to step outside of myself to know that I must have presented a strange sight to anyone who cared to look, this burly man with a suit and tie on him and the raw winter face of a farmer, standing there as if he was outside second mass of a Sunday, and how ever this may have looked to those last stragglers who stood along the pavement, it was safe to say that no one could have guessed the degree of turmoil and inner vexation which troubled me because never

had the consequences of fatherhood and everything it entailed weighed so completely on me than at that moment with

the anxious worry that I might be responsible in some way for what was on the walls of the gallery behind me, a wringing fear within me which gathered to its tight core two decades of consequence, so that it was now clear to me that this whole evening might be nothing less than a full reappraisal of myself as a man and as a father, something I had not reckoned on when I got into the car that evening and drove the sixty or seventy miles to the gallery, that I was travelling towards this moment of reckoning with myself because, like many another man, I had gone through life with little in the way of self-examination, my right to a life of peace from such persecution something I had taken for granted, something I might have acknowledged as the responsibility of others but not the type of inward harrowing I ever expected of myself but which nevertheless I now found myself subjected to in a way which took its prompt from a central, twitching nerve within me which kept asking