May: Against the Angels

Portrait of May Sartoris, Frederic Leighton (1860)

May Sartoris strides forth. A teenager in Hampshire – dreadfully dramatic – a fallen tree as though she’d just felled it, farm in the vale beyond and the ground at her feet a charybdis of green and grey. Amateur actress in velvety black with a red sash, May is unseasonable in autumn, all cloth and swathe and a side-saddle skirt not made for walking – fashionably handicapped, she holds herself up like a puppet. Or perhaps it’s the artist who jiggles and twists – the strings – plies tension to the lines of perspective that spool from the eyes and draws the body into motion for the face is only ever the gathering of the knot, the cross-point which clips the form into focus, and the artist – staggering backward, painting while walking– should’ve had a camera for all that is lost of it because May is a screen starlet before her time and her little boots chew up the ground underfoot. 

Paintings of the British Isles comes to light in Los Angeles. Pages of a corner-scuffed catalogue flare up all caught and crumply and the gold grinds the colours into clarity – the palette and the gradient ordained by the chief mediator, the one watcher, the sky. I believe the sky reveals itself to me one morning as I swim in the pool of the local gated community, at dawn seeing the surface slide between all the colours of a skincare brand: byzantium, limoncello, new-baby blue. Then the submersible lights clock off. The magic is swapped and lost. The sun rises, the water submits to the sky, and the surface syncs to brute eau-de-nil. Now the palm trees are flat as shadow puppets and the old men haul their bodies from the lanes, swapping bubbles of corporate banter, playing the part with left-to-right ease but the membership is not expensive and we all know the morning will rise away from us like rice puffs. Enough, sluff – elbows and armpits rubbed dry, I’ll watch them crank back to their modular apartments, optioned as neoclassical townhouse or grey-and-yellow high-rise, and reach to the top shelf for the cereal box.  

Sly acts illumined through chink of window and hollow of garbage chute, whispering down seven stories and into the water where, unreeling behind me, a line of gilded light like a streak of – glee? – no, at this stage it is proper that I respect our boundaries, avert social catastrophe, be turned and leave when my lane is ended, layer up quickly, make the veiny way through the changing room and via the corridor of 6th Street, hemmed by the roar of the traffic and purple stinking jacarandas so that, at the crossing of the road, the sun – a huge consuming beach ball – rests for a moment, the horizon, and rolls ready to meet my feet.  

May slices and combines. She swashbuckles – left hand gnarled as dried remedy and the red all wrong, the trunk of the tree collapsed backward and left its chronology stuck to the foreground and it’s the hack of it I love – the drive of it, not so much audacity as ease of taking and combining. Here I’d give her a home in Hancock Park – I, divine realtor, a house built of thick boudoir fingers, conjuring sugar-lite Regency parsonages, Jacobean halls, 1980s versions of Lutyens composites with pointed gables and top-heavy chimneys. At home I’ve seen their equivalents in the region of golf courses, the radius of the airports, stop-motioned from the road behind screens of thin trees, heaving the mass of their mock-Tudor beams and lintels and family shields, metabolizing back until they meet the green. 

There at the tidelines, even the houses of stockbrokers maintain their merry mystery – it’s the damp that rises from the layers of leaves, pages mottled by the microclimate of the downstairs lavatory and obituaries lain open by the lid. Transfer that and cross the pond – peel back the stagnant surface to unveil viriditas buzz cut and brilliant; air-strip of sharp synthetic spears ensouled by sprinklers, modelling the limits, marking the territory with ecstatic arches. 

The lie of a front lawn will suffice to start. For in this limited open-air and cyclical theatre, the task is to square the difference between here and there. Witness this from the sidewalk and be warned: one break, one vague or failed connection and water spurts low and gratuitous, quenching nothing, feeding nothing but the mud which pools around the mouth, a way of happening to fill time ’til the arrival of the gardener who readjusts and links back into the system and holds the shape of the house in all its basking scales. 

For now, undaunted, May is touring the neighbourhood, simply sampling, dipping a toe like a chip in mayo or call it testing the waters, gliding like golf cart through sheltered streets and – afforded the authority of clipboard and tape – observes that, were we in Wisconsin or Indiana these sites might be classified as outsider art, god-bothered masterpieces, some blown dreamer’s knitty fantasy of everything he loved and believed in but here, sublimated by wealth and the confidence of the metropolis, each house spits thisness as real as can be, every seam of a Hamptons sunroom, every bloomed iron bar of a hacienda window is rendered with accuracy to the cent, contractors selected by cost-benefit analysis and projects popped out like Catholic children. 

Here's a myth to live by. Authenticity is the gift of fakery – no house like the next, each a custom continuum of infinite cookie-cuts, pre-made modules, arranged and placed like laser-cut shapes plucked from cardboard baby books. Ogee-arched dormer windows and chevet-edged balconets, wall-mounted tiki torches and dutch gabled dust gutters – elements placed and replaced until the parts fuse together by sheer weight of combination and depth of finish. Within, the distinction between fancy and imagination is whipped pink – blended and aerated into rock-solid sofas which prevent even the green from going under. These streets of exquisite corpses and flying pigs. Here houses here live for as long as the joints hold out, then fold in accordance with the choreography of cranes. So follows the logic of the well-managed toybox; each lot at odds with the other, too swallowed in its own module to collate to a neighbourhood yet driven by a pioneer’s desire to capture and contain and put together at will, to dare the impure for the sake of a cure.  

Only sometimes does this order arrange itself to beauty. The framework for grace forged at the cross points of Las Palmas and Plymouth is gaudy as any dream-catcher bought at a desert gas station and they say it works all the same – all it requires is your presence at dawn to witness the clock of the lampposts switch off, the vacuum-closed click of the armed guard’s flask as it grots in the cylinder of the folding chair, stars and stripes nylon, flimsy as the bones of an bald baby eagle and scrolled in the netting a dawn-damp script is extracted at intervals of comparative safety and provides the lines that repeat in the head between here and his role as a mud-splattered action hero.  

So it is that the sprinklers sing and the trunks of the ficus trees are smooth as silicon, blanched muscular grey in the light of the in-between and momentarily stripped of inconsistencies. This is the bridge, the rill and the riff, the interval by which the sun extends a slinky finger to fiddle the roots and knot up the concrete, each morning reaching, each dawn consistently proving and choosing and condoning the meaning of those diligent few upon whom it falls, backbreaking and traceless, to make the necessary arrangements so that the sun might continue to move across the sky. 

I identify, I decide: it is here that May will stay. Surface is sufficient resistance against undertow so I’ll install her in the cove of a Queen Anne window, placed weighty on a sideboard, back facing the street as so often I see the morphology of a white Greek torso – laycoons hacked of arms and legs – or a nameless nymph, or a crystal vase of bony orchids.  

But the moment I bring her over, I don’t dare look, for fear she’s been shrivelled or lost like a lizard in a matchbox. Even now I can feel her fading so I’ll feed her through to the green fields, forwarded to the artist commissioned to catch her. Practicing backstage, he’s building a pyre of popular historical and allegorical paintings, his studio’s a setup for oriental visions, campy tableaux of maenads and satyrs, depictions of the mythy moments of action from which the world crumbles and rises. An order is established. Still-life and landscape settle like sediment, the mulch which grows-up gilded symbols and portraits are practice for greater places, faces, where colours clash and worlds are made. This syncretist stealer of the sun did not take his portraits seriously. May was a frippery, a favour for a friend – her mother, the opera singer – who asked, vaporous over a gin in the light of the green room, whether he might, and he may, embalm her daughter for eternity. 

Something caught in that painting. Got glued to the canvas like bristle under gesso, all those allegories, all those nymphs and odalisques compressed to a single figure – the speed of it, feelings that ran ahead of him like string-sent messengers, the desire for something other than the girl whose eyes would do for a handheld mirror. So he focused on the face, let the rest drape diaphanous and provisional and what’s left to see are the obscene traces of a process of formation, the channels and attrition by which one yields to another. In May he saw his own mastery. He swabbed and he swiped it and failed to cover the traces though he made of her remains a widowish figure, dress heavy enough to forget he had exceeded her. The method is not to be mourned. An artist is an angler, a fisher of men, whose maggoty fact is to show that the other is fated to disclose what is known about you and I / the sky. 

The trick is to let the catch remain intact – flip and curl and fold at will and so in being spun, May assumes name and shape and she is having none of it. A fast half hour before the painter is here she is placed before the three-way mirror – the feet of the dressing table are claws around orbs, the back of the chair is a legion of vines and she screams at the maid who is pulling her hair to match with the mirror. From the servants she learnt to distinguish herself at an early age, was tutored in difference and specificity, and for that a supply is siphoned up from the kitchen while others exit by the delivery door. Newly un-uniformed, they assemble – they are clutching carpet bags borrowed from costume shops and now a horde of their type surrounds the house – Victorian gothic rectory with dominant chimneys – and all together form a warning chorus, sounding board for May’s hisses and kicks, for the staging of a drama rests on lessons left unheeded. Their parts are collective, indistinct and instrumental but each maid has the paid obligation to afix May to chair, reattach brush to hair, and pull left-right to match the mirror. 

By this method May’s character is formed, pressed against a tableau of vines and slumped in response to the clamped hand on her shoulder, to which she extends, a little socked foot, like the head of a snake, placed as an offering atop the glass layer that protects the mahogany from powder and paint. A too-long index toe chews out, openly amphibian. For May is flexing her string-sense, bones popping wings beating at alarming angles, finding form, finding fall, attempting solidity ’gainst prop and appropriation and all only to be abstracted to idea – ether extracted like rope through the nose, ore weighted, inflated, a balloon trick tied to an artist’s allegory. At noon she is drawn, hauled, pulled kicking and screaming toward the painter so that he might work with her, that she might work upon him, so that – given form, she may be preserved long past the point that anyone would remember. 

So it is that she sloshes up on my shore. Not in the oil field mausoleum where her canvas is stored but via a bad reproduction in a gum-sucked catalogue from which pages fall like thin old teeth. I rearrange my relatives: a Pre-Raphaelite model with an ogival spine, a fat child trussed by ribbon under the chin, a Victorian reclining in a cage with lions, leopard, and a lamb. Pages scatter and surround me like handmaidens, populating a cell in transit – our palanquin, our burnished barge, our canvas-covered duck boat. Il-threaded, soft-sown – each character is a rope thrown to home and across the water they do not catch, the stakes are too high or not high enough – dug into the field or the sea bed without sufficient tension they are fished out as carnival characters, kitted out in gills and spotted neckties and neon-flecked tweeds, beholden to a narrative with no life of their own but grist to the general pattern. This is how we come and go and there is horror in that direction of apparent obliteration which opens kaleidoscopic to the life not-denied. Always it is easier to turn the tunnel to the mud. To cap the background to that draining and swirling, diluting and admixture, the light which makes known and the fact that resolves the whole.  

And with the sun, so the next scene. Tied by the inevitable drag of the pageant, a papier-maché vision sails toward the shore, conjured by the sun which stiches the sea and gathers the city to it. It is – whatever receives its drama in being seen, burning up in what generates and blitzes and makes so vertiginously aware of growth and decline. For even as depleted, May rises, is seen. Would not have been perceived by any other place, would not have caught my eye, her clothing so unseasonable, so – ill-associated with the heat that pummels from the sidewalk and collects yellow below the awnings where, toward evening, the show starts on the street and she – hiding so unconvincing behind those wide-eyed shades that look like they came free with a girls’ magazine.  

The sun decides what keeps. Paintings of the British Isles curdle and expose where the flowers tend so shamelessly to plasticky pink, where seasons are muted so as not to disturb the heart and the sky is juiced to evening peach. Just for the sake of it, chainlink fences transform into trellises and lilacs emerge from the hedges like horns, the wig shops proliferate on grounds of religion, dissimulation, and dry cleaners borrow signage from motels and diners, so shapes taut as sails blow into the road, longitudinal structures best seen through a windscreen and angles and fins catch in rear view and wing-mirrors.  

Design and reason smuggle within the invisible. Currents and tunnels. Defining and streamlining, driving you and I toward Smart and Final and out to other side where – known only by those who have reason to walk – root systems generate concrete gradients, mini mountainsides made for beagles and pomeranians and they are reaching their peak, on leads, toward a squatted and sanded corner of the park where owners swap pedigrees and hard bevelled cards. Railings are clean and free of impalings. Birds of paradise skulk municipally. At the periphery. Nosily pointing, poking and waiting and surveying their prey, sometimes ripe and beaky at others scrabbed and peeling, stiff headfeathers bent like they’ve been sleeping rough. 

In the skin-deep city, for everything that rises is an underlying side, the divide so thin you could flip the weft and see no difference. The worshipful drive to envisage has its inverse in the more-than-imagined, exceeding dreams that bleed like runoff beneath the brush-based doors of the bow-trussed studios and those headshots follow me to unforseen places – faces, blued by the sun show that Tyra and Ellen teach senior splash and aquapump, dance moves for pool parties of low-impact intensity, and back at the dry cleaners – these sites are cyclical – I see that Joan Rivers, Vin Diesel, and Richard Dean Anderson have submitted their pictures to the revolving system, signed over by surrogates with pens that are squeaky who receive what is cleaned in wrapping transparent to remove and discard and be expanded in landfills to scales beyond the bloom of the brain. 

May, here you could find a home. May and those angels, for whom conjuring is the beginning and end of it, where construct and growth transfigure together in a quic-mix coming-of-age story. I identify, I decide – that it is here that May shall grow, here that her gussety gusto may be shaken like milk formula until she takes shape and weight under the sun. Yet even as shaken there is a rusk, there is a risk, that the bones will spindle too soon.  

Mayday, mayday, no way to escape – take aim, walk straight – attach a chord to each tiny crosshatch at the centre of an eye, for the effort is only ever to square the difference between here and there. Nothing to do but wait; because May is a name that fails to translate. In the present hemisphere, the pole provided is slightly sanded for friction, the ribbons are faded and sweat-seeped at the edges and colours blur to marine-layer grey. Clearance is – uncertain, every smog-check an augury of the gloom that gathers in June, that is made through May, is a forecast of mornings stolen and smothered – no golden light, no bells from the tower, no pagan prayers to a Mary who opens and compresses like a spiral staircase and spits her song over the furrowing fields.  

In the ripeness of silence – the raspy keen, dust and scrape of stories long since lost of meaning, forms that hold no water under the sheltering sun. Unendurable grief – rupture of brain from membrane – no use in tying loosed language, frayed cord from a gate. In the interval, imagine. An antidote, a parallel anecdote, scene borrowed from another stage, transferred from another land –  a palm tree, painted outlined and powdery and glued to the canvas – dates – weighty and unstable, fall to feed a mother and her son. Heard on a separate stage by grace of failed soundproofing, a lion is singing the stars into being in a voice low boomy and operatic to be heard by others as a whistle or a trill and elsewhere – toward a tree – arrives a plate of new milk, stench of sugarcane and goat, a few hairs resting still on the surface of which one tug might extract a god, or not. 

Soon the stage set is due to produce – can it be true – coo coo – the good news, closed-captioned by two men dressed as doves, hovering heavy with a silky scroll. A suspicion, a subtext, that this balancing of the books is only ever an attempt to adjust against grief. It is a shame, this assuaging. This quic-fix relinking against relinquishing. And thus May is muddled in afterbirth and transfer, botched by a contract which squidged the difference between summer and spring. 

Behind the eyes, I decide. She is the price that is paid in exchange of the seasons: rhythms of rise and decline are speeded to insignificance and the scenes of the almanac fail to match, in winter the plants drink deep and green and May marks descent of the grey and the heat. This is why, twisted to hypertight cycles, a scent-stripped Floribunda climbs on a single leggy stem and is relied on to die and rearrive throughout the year. No reason for grief when the petals curl and turn, fusing to mark time as they loosen from their core; the roses will come and go by their own complacent cycles and these sprinklers are just a front for familiar rhythms. 

In a proximate paradise, matter is measured by figure, weight, and number and patterns of transformation are grist for an industry, the city’s tested method to pre-empt its own ending. And so the princesses process: the sallow and the blonde, the vapid and the wise, stories shipped with silica from European salthouses and preserved in static gestures of struggle and escape and embrace. Because enchantment is a fact that must be managed. Arcs of adaptation are repackaged as animation and that is a game best played with cathodes and frogs legs because here it is clear as filmed water in a magic wishing well in a stucco chateau courtyard, that ashy mattresses, broken bassinets, and splat-snapped baroque chairs on root-shot sidewalks are all links in the same system, the thick wit of the old world that lymphs through the channels of illusion and pageantry and is always pushing upward, it is breaking, is branching, because enchantment is a fact that must be mangled and is kind and unnatural and in the final instant is lived and denied at the same time. 

To be fitted and riveted back to life. It is, will be – someone once said with a silly lisp – an awfully big adventure. Until then, futurity is forever present and the princesses will be flat-packed and unfolded and smelling of dessicant, refigured as plastic apparitions with pleasing skin-tag seams. This catch, this tag, this calcic-skin at the surface will serve as a safety valve if twisted and pinched, is the wax and the stamp and the emptiness at the centre, the municipal seal that proves that this is all there is. May the city continue to feed and breed and doubt its own mystery. At this scale, it is the only means of survival. And to survive is terribly tiring.  

And so, even as seen, she depletes. Recognised through the thick space of a heatwave, I see that she may not have made it; that what I saw on the sidewalk of heavy drapery and shaded eyes has subsided to a sleeping bag and two empty beer bottles. May, Mary, my marionette – the weight of our blue-black folds gloss heavy upon us. Still, I do not believe she stayed in those fields. I do not believe that she walked, posed, turned, and returned with the artist, back to the viewer, back to the grim brick house where the maids are waiting to unclip the heavy skirt; dislimn – left-right – reattach the bone-blank shape to brand-new costume. Prepped for the artist’s squeezy sequel, the face rotates; is un-widowed by white lace, and jaw a little fuller and nose a little longer and the scales rubbed from her back and the shins healed from bruises and – marbled only very slightly by age – the form re-fitted and delivered back to the artist. 

But that must and cannot be the end of it. I do not believe May stayed and settled because she is walking, out and over the painting, and I would draw her toward my shore but imagination follows only so far. This is the risk of it: if she is permitted to make her own way, to step forward and through me and of me a nothing, she falls off the slice of land at the edge of the coast. It’s a slapstick, trapdoor, spongecake fall, no bones broken. And with luck the waves will take her, tumbling over and over and tied like a raft with rope and kelp until affixed once again; yet another character delivered in time, wrought into the world like a reduction of a pool of tadpoles or the final survivor of a batch of white mice. If arrival is timely, we can expect a theatrical entry: here may she stand, splendid and pearly, heavy boots still tied to her own two feet and her sash kelped to seagreen, secured by an ungloved hand not distinctly mottled. 

The scene relies on an arrival unnoticed, an engineering precalibrated for tension and resolution. From the beach, the gradient is steep. But it is a ratio she knows and was made to raise in relation to the cliff-face, a shape like a rope which turns the body inside out. But how and for what would she be found here. The birds of paradise stretch their scraggy necks to see, beaks reach and wrench across the lip of the cliff to spy the figure on the beach. A stack of metal and samphire. Too much, too soon, too late. Their necks are snipped and headfeathers sent to make Thanksgiving turkeys in a in a northern state – all it takes is sticky-back eye to twist a bird of paradise to a moss-bodied centrepiece – and thus she is unstrung: she extends between here and there. 

So it turns over – the shore, the edge, lines tending to order then sparkling to sand. There is hope, only, in sequencing glinty aspects into something temporarily stitched and intact, levering up by pulleys and buckets, bumping softly against rock and occasionally knocking a nest. Eggs shiver and applaud like an ill-synced chorus and on the decks of dwellings shaped like waves or ships, tennis-white figures forget themselves or what it is they may have seen, fold-forward to inspect the tread of a sneaker or to scroll the suns that show the weather is still expected, and so select that particular instant to walk inside. 

And what would be lost if she were seen. An elimination of gradation, an anarchy of the golf course – middle-management flattened to waxy origami, holes to infills, air sucked through the jets of rooftop jacuzzis and passed through capillaries of the bristling hills; all peopling and cantilevered with flat-packed morality, episodes and sequels of platforms and stairways, those modestly dimensioned private balconies – the sudden stopping of a prolonged gestation, a strata of narratives forgotten and boxed and not on their way to becoming something else – only, optioned – a life no longer modelled on the logic of the franchise and instead – stymied, grieving, no sequel. And so – I decide – she is to slide, sightless, into a chink in the cliff, a trick, of the light. 

It is better – this branching, this palmy stage on the way – the fact that the sun is predicted consistently means she is only sometimes seen. Bleached of green she is a shade, a grim thought in a city that makes its living within the thinned partitions of a continuous coming-of-age story. Better to be where it pays to stay nascent, where scuffed sneakers are a symbol of status and bodies are buoyant and glossy. Because May will not persuade. The stakes are too great, the made-world is too tame – the horror and relief and defeat of believing that the game we’ve been playing has been true all along. 

Father, formal, forked, and fonted, may an ending emerge. May she arrive in all her pearly splendour and soap box monotony and jog trot prose pronged to every tree. Fix her a figurehead: give her a symmetry sketchy and silly, a bridal train that parts the waters and leaves a lining of dry red dust. For this is the world May pulls with her, virtuous puppet; her troussage is only phony sea foam and the rope thrown to home is shackled to an ankle and the end nipped and frayed and at less than an arm’s length may pluck out a whale, or fortune teller’s fish, or fragment of the barrel that holds the secret to her circling, the deceiving of charybdis, by which we have persisted, until the game grew grey in turning. 

So, no more – imagination stops at the shore. It is the putting out of eyes. Sunrise – and what hope there is for arrival. Only that you and I might catch the maker at it, that we might twist my neck two notches to the left and see him stringing us along; if we catch him at that game we might learn to play with it. For this is the method by which a child or a lover learns to split the difference between a fishy forked tail and a bushy white beard – split-ended accessories borrowed from the box of tricks and worn according to caprice, the unpredictable lot of the playing and the played.  

For the trick which amounts to an ending is to be – straightforward. It is a measure of character. And May is facing the painter. There is the light there in the breaking sky. Not the one watcher but a break of white and grey and weighted to the horizon, no lightening, but a sky lowered like a curtain call and the cattle kneel to the rain. There is the slope of the hill, the farm and the fields, the church with snipped spire. The stooks of grain, unthreshed and waiting and the windmill is angled away, is unstable and still a source of propulsion and beneath grain and blades the plane of a hill, is flat as a face or a plate, indicative only of slope and failed depth.  

The tree recedes and May is lived backward and understood forward and for that the frame contains and makes that she walks in laced black boots at midday. Stroke forward, pull back – the hands of the sea turn us over and over and o, that it opens. Inside the sun slices, furnishes, wears away at the room. Light collects there, on the dresser, gathers hair, in corners golden, buckles and fastens – the glass – casts the floor into pointless pattern. And so the table is set for two: dirty quince, bad-blue plates, the cups for his and hers not yet chipped. It is all seen, it is all before her, and it is May who must walk forward and for that she will gladly trample us underfoot.