Experience

IV: Experience

The passage of the years is measured in an increase of stacked copper plates. Tilt them against the light, and figures limned in brightness posture in night fields beneath jet skies. Piled watercolours, edges corrugating gently into estuary waves, black baryonic matter is accumulated on the nib, the ferule, over time. The downpour's stopped, its last sienna beads gleam trembling on the flaking lip of a tin waterspout. Across the flag-shaped puddle in a corner dip of Fountain's Court, the ripple orbits widen, disappear. And overhead the tattered under-britches of dyed cumuli, unpicked by jet stream fingers, one strand at a time, for future use. Immense gold girders of cast sunlight crash and tumble soundless in the street, lean propped haphazardly, a junk of glory up against the rooftop's edge.

He's sixty-nine. His passions come from a more muted palette now. And yet their glaze is deeper, with more subtlety, more truth. An understanding now of his career. It's never going to happen, was already happening, all this time. To think he’d never noticed. Catherine, at her sewing, chin tucked in, that smile of secret private satisfaction. Waking to the grey before first light, her breath beside him in its steady ebb and flow that laps the pillow shore. At this hour, with the sky's pall somehow lower, fresh whet birds form rings like goblet glass and is a wonder. Dawn is dabbed, uncertainly at first, upon the highest church spires, on the shoulders of surrounding hills. A rolling mail of diamond on the Thames. And sometimes drizzle, sometimes disappointment. An infection in his gallbladder, a weakness in his blood. Grown still with the unbidden memory of the exhibition at his brother's shop in Broad Street, where they'd known him since his boyhood, where he would be recognised, but nothing sold, and no one came. His sole review called him "an unfortunate lunatic," as did his friends. Shame, anger, pounding in his temples. And sometimes glorious and sometimes lions in his mouth and singing like a fountain, every thought a bell, a thunder. He need only give the word and breaking up as grass between the slab-cracks shall come saints, a crude and roaring throng, and in the armour of his mighty love he could kick mountains down, or kings. If joy were gunpowder then every moment is explosion.

The talcum quality of winter light, the clock creep of his shadow measures Cecil Court, and pointing children told "there is the man that speaks with angels." After rain, the shine and glimmer on the streets by dazzle broken into smuts of shape or movement fraught with imminence. A cheering porter belch. Sometimes at dusk the grudging river can seem almost luminous. Hung from the guttering, icicles, silent, chiming only to the eye. The incense of boiled bacon fills the close where arbour-weathered flags like fossil postcards ripped from Babylon, from Eden. Half-torn words upon advertisements and handbills, pasted-up, wound edged to brick, read as the names of undiscovered lands, forgotten martyrs, peelings of mythology. He has disciples now, young visitors who've come, unknowingly, to ape the mute and marvelling stare that often Catherine is caught with, watching as he talks. The earnest boys, not even twenty, leaning eager to catch every syllable, each cough. Samuel Palmer kisses the brass bell handle each morning with his own face swimming forward in reflection. All we ever really see. Out on the common, striding through a storm of thistledown like all the armies of the fall, he blows his nose, and in his kerchief spreads the frescoed wealth of Asia, ghouls and monkey lepers snarling in the wood grain. Given unexpected leeway to complete his life, he tends to work the detail finer. Layers of gold washed blue, grown rich and purple as a byacinth spy. And then Fuseli dies, the white and cataracted mare leans through the bedroom window and he’s gone, is carried off. Next Flaxman, on a Buckingham street breeze in the December chill. The diarrhoea, the piles, and sometimes Catherine can’t look at him without she weeps. Squatted about his scolding stool in the immortal stench of Adam, he grows tired, and thinks again of Job. And in their gloaming towers the clocks tick ever faster. But bursting aches of music, pockets full of war and in his throat cathedrals shuddering like wine. His words colliding stars and laughter smells of brass and honey, prayers taste of Vesuvius, and pigeons crash their cymbal wings together, startled at his smile. His hot eyes poked the runny albumin of clouds, make them opaque and London, London, London, London, London, is his chariot rumbling. Death a step unnoticed in his rush, a tissue torn aside impatiently from the Eternals, brilliant from [...], the unknown yet beloved book. With trees like fanfare in the parks to sound him home and lovely earthquakes in him, landslides of compassion in his breast. This blazing harmony, each dawn a charging cavalry and praise the flint and bless the cut and know the churning skies. And now the world sinks through him, pouring in a wondrous sink, and Kate is clutching at his hand, and sign it, it is done. And now, and now.

The bedroom comes and goes. He’s walking up the same familiar stairs again remembered from before, a wide-brimmed hat upon his head, a precious lantern in his hand, towards the door, its stone arch and its lock. The ancient knotted oak, the city fanned unseen beyond. The bedroom comes and goes, a feathered edge now on the light, the sound. He’s walking up the stairs again towards the door and at their summit he looks back across his shoulder at us. He looks back.