Great Apes Read Online Free PDF

traduced again by the glossy and matt betrayals of photography, of advertising. Simon wouldn’t have been surprised if a
putti
had driven out of the frame of a Titian in a Peugeot 205.
    He wandered on, trying to lose his bearings, but not trying too hard, because then he wouldn’t – for he knew the gallery too well. Remembered being there aged sixteen, on the verge of a first kiss with a girlfriend. The two of them, palms cemented and oiled with childish sweat, had moved along, making up conversation, while his eyes took in the cornices, ventilation grilles, fire extinguishers, lightswitches, everything but the incandescent Blakes they had allegedly come to see. Such training – brain labouring while thin sixteen-year-old cock was straining against thin pants, and thin fifteen-year-old chest acted as crucible for the consuming heart of lust – was enough to stamp the floor plan on his neurons.
    But he was lost, or at any rate unknowing, when he looked up and saw the two canvases by John Martin, the apocalyptic nineteenth-century painter,
The Plains of Heaven
and
The Fall of Babylon.
In the former a conventional enough view of romantic upland – bluer and yellower peaks and valleys, receding to a hazy horizon – was reviewed when Simon saw that what he had assumed initially was a plume of smoke or spume, issuing from a rocky cleft in the foreground, was in fact a great tumult of angelic beings in close, but irregular, formation. There were so many of them that they altered the scale of the picture entirely. What Simon had thought a horizon of some thirty or forty miles seen from a peak perspective became an unreal hundred to two hundred miles of nonlocatable nirvana. An impossibilist realisation of another planet, leaning towards the spray-guns and computer manipulations of Now, rather than the layered, mannered evocations of Then.
    The other canvas,
The Fall of Babylon
, was both a complement and a corrective. A massive vortex of stone, wood, water, fire and flesh, gurgling down an invisible plug hole of destruction. Grey-robed Babylonians were caught up in this, flung holus-bolus, arms and legs cartwheeling, their disordered whipped-cream beards froth to the maelstrom. Martin seemed to be saying … what? Sayingnothing, only carried away by the sheer mechanics of the graphic destruction he had wrought. The painting was about this: that Babylon contained this moment of explosion, this blastosphere, latent in all its solidity, its municipality.
    And if not Babylon, why not London? And if not the plains of heaven, why not the moors of cumulo-nimbus? The smudged cotton wool that kissed the curved undersides of aircraft as they powered across the sky. Why not, why not indeed? Simon distrusted epiphanies. He’d been sent scampering down blind-alleys of endeavour far too many times to give credence to those moments of believing something was instinctively right. But he knew a good trope when one diverted him. He recognised an inspirational scaffold which would support him, if only for do-it-yourself.
    So it had been with the series of modern apocalyptic paintings he had embarked upon the following week. In Martin’s canvases the body was violate, or inviolate, but always violable. In Simon’s the human bodies would be scarcely viable: the massed termites of Lang’s city, their bodies uniform, their uniforms body-like. Insectoid humans – all carapace, all exoskeletal. They would sit in ranks, in an aircraft the size of a lumbering Chartres, whole choirs and transepts of them, reading blocks of wood with the pages delicately carved out, and playing Donkey Kong with twitching thumbs, tossing off the miniature plastic clitorises.
    Simon conceived of a large canvas showing the interior of a Boeing 747 as its nose explodes on the Earth’s crust, as its deathly decal – winged defeat – destructs in a thirty-two-feet-per-second/per second ram-raid on the concrete floor of an