How to be Both

by Ali Smith

People like things not to be too meaningful.

You’re okay because you don’t think you’re okay? Mrs Rock said.

Si! the woman says. Bene. Unicorni. Cielo. Stelle. Terra. Dei e dee e lo zodiaco. Minerva. Venere. Apollo. Minerva Marzo Ariete. Venere Aprile Toro. Apollo Maggio Gemelli. Duca Borso di Ferrara. Dondo la giustizia. Dondo un regalo. Il palio. Un cagnolino.

Mando o andato a Venezia per ottenere il meglio azzurro.

It smells of jasmine, then more jasmine, then the occasional sewer, then jasmine again.

She closed her notebook and it was as if she’d closed her face too.

Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent) it is not fair for your friend, she is not going to get the important boredoms and mournings and melancholies that are her due and are owing to her just from being the age that she is, for now it will be interrupted by real mournings and real melancholies,

No, her mother says. I’m really not being patronizing. But understanding something like what I’m going to say takes having a bit of age. Some things really do take time. Because even though I suspected I’d been played, there was something. It was true, and it was passionate. It was unsaid. It was left to the understanding. To the imagination. That in itself was pretty exciting. What I’m saying is, I quite liked it. Even if I was being played. And most of all, my darling. The being seen. The being watched. It makes life very, well I don’t know. Pert.

Semper is always, George writes. Or there is a good word, usquequaque. It means everywhere, or on all occasions. Perpetuus means continual or continuous and continenter means continuously. But I can’t mean any of them because right now for me they are just words. Then she presses send.

It’s good, to be seen past, as if you’re not the only one, as if everything isn’t happening just to you. Because you’re not. And it isn’t.

Back came a text that pierced whatever was between the outside world and George’s chest. In other words, George literally felt something. It’s good to hear your voice

It is like being pleasurably sandpapered. It lets you know you’re alive.

I felt the air shift (still feel it now when I remember) cause the boy was himself all air and fire, a lit torch

but I spent most time on his back foot, the place with the curve of the sole on the rise : get it right, how it sprung the whole body, just that single detail and it’ll lift the whole picture like the foot lifted him : get it right and the picture itself will lift (cause the way he’d gone up the stone steps had made even the stone of them unheavy)

cause I had it, the place where his legs met his body, the muscular dark where his tunic flared up in the breeze as he went, I had it like telling the oldest story in the world cause there’s a very pure pleasure in a curve like the curve of a buttock : the only other thing as good to draw is the curve of a horse and like a horse a curved line is a warm thing, good-natured, will serve you well if not mistreated,

arabescato, just the fineness of the word near made me cry : breccia, made up of broken things

So always risk your skin, she said, and never fear losing it, cause it always does some good one way or another when the powers that be deign to take it off us.

Make it deeper than sable, I said. Get it as deep as a lightless night.

There are bees : there was a butterfly. That blossom will smell good to those who can smell blossom. How the air throws it into a dance.

The great Alberti says that when we paint the dead, the dead man should be dead in every part of him all the way to the toe and finger nails, which are both living and dead at once : he says that when we paint the alive the alive must be alive to the very smallest part, each hair on the head or the arm of an alive person being itself alive