Art & Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

the rules of price war.
    How shall I live?
    The question presses on me through the thin pane. The question tails me through the dense streets. In the anonymous computer-face of the morning mail, it is the question only that I read in red ink, the question burning the complacent page.
    ‘How are you Handel?’
    (How shall I live?)
    ‘What are you doing these days?’
    (How shall I live?)
    ‘Heard about the merger?’
    (How shall I live?)
    The question daubed on the door-posts. The question drawn in the dust. The question hidden in the bowl of lilacs. The insolent question at a sleeping god. The question that riddles in the morning, that insinuates at noon. The question that drives my dreams to wakefulness, the question physical in beads of sweat. ‘Answer me’ whispers the voice in the desert. The silent place where the city has not yet come.
    In the invisible city, the city incapable of being seen for what it is, the vanished souls pass their ghostly way, making no impression, leaving no mark, a homogenous people who act, dress, talk and think alike.
    My own mind?
    My right mind?
    My true home?
    Long trains leaving. The square light in the windows. The yellow light on the black train. The reptile train with yellow scales. Yellow and BLACK yellow and BLACK yellow and BLACK chants the train.
    The light was fretted around the border of the train; decorative light that made a cornice for the unrelieved metal, pale patterns worked against an austerity of line.
    Had the light been fixed in Victorian embellishment it would have tired the eye and not refreshed it. Its charm was in its movement, the play of light, beautiful and surprising, new. New light escaped from an ancient sun.
    Sun-yeared light.
    In its effect the light was choral. Harmonies of power simultaneously achieved, a depth of light, not one note but many, notes of light sung together. In its high register, far beyond the ears of man, the music of the spheres, vibrating light noted in its own frequency. Light seen and heard. Light that writes on tablets of stone. Light that glories what it touches. Solemn self-delighting light.
    The train crawled on beneath the speeding light that had already belted the earth. The scientific train and the artful light.
    I, Handel, doctor, Catholic, admirer of women, lover of music, virgin, thinker, fool, am about to quit my city, never to return.
    This action, my friends conclude, comes out of an excess of what the French call La Sensibilité. Too much feeling is not welcome in a man and it is unhelpful for a doctor. Catholics, it is true, are encouraged to express their emotions, providing that the emotions they express are Catholic ones.
    I saw a Confessional box for sale yesterday. It was eighteenth-century, Irish, portable. Made of dark heavy oak, with a half-gate and curtain across the front, inside, a warm wooden bench worn smooth by countless clerical bottoms. On either side were its little lattice grills, placed at just the right height, for whispered agonies and burning bodies.
    ‘Father, I have sinned.’
    ‘Sins of the flesh or sins of the conscience my child?’
    ‘Sins of the flesh.’
    ‘Begin.’
    I went to the brothel this afternoon, there were six of us, all Seminarians. While my companions were flirting with the girls, I received a note to go upstairs, where a lady was waiting for me.
    I went into her room. It was white. White walls, white rugs from Egypt, stone-whitened sheets and a deaf white cat. She was a famous courtesan, an adherent of Rome, and a friend of a man I once knew very well, but that was when I was a boy. She was wealthy, still lovely, utterly corrupt. She fascinated me but this was the only time that we had spoken. The room smelled of Madonna lilies. Downstairs, in the stalls, I could hear the boys impatient to be gelded.
    ‘Take off your trousers,’ she said. There were tusks on the wall. I have very little body hair. I looked at myself in the mirror, so obvious under my short shirt, and I