How to be Both

by Ali Smith

it so big and me so small it was as if I’d dressed in a field of sky.

though usually I caught not much, that day the fish had been opening their mouths at the surface of the water as if congratulating me on having been born

I once caught a catfish, the voice said, that was so big I couldn’t land it. In fact it almost rivered me. I liked the word rivered so I looked up

although it seemed to be the end of the world to me – it wasn’t. There was a lot more world : cause roads that look set to take you in one direction will sometimes twist back on themselves without ever seeming anything other than straight,

It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough. Fine.

We need both luck and justice to get to live the life we’re meant for, she says. Lots of seeds don’t get to. Think. They fall on stone, they get crushed to pieces, rot in the rubbish at the roadside, put down roots that don’t take, die of thirst, die of heat, die of cold before they’ve even broken open underground, never mind grown a leaf. But a tree is a clever creation and sends out lots of seeds every year, so for all those ones that don’t get to grow there are hundreds, thousands that will.

Go down and grind me some black, I said, just in case I find I’ll need it. (Cause black has great power and its presence is meaningful.) Black? the pickpocket said. No. It’s New Year. It’s holiday. I’m on holiday. Anyway, I’m sacked. Make it deeper than sable, I said. Get it as deep as a lightless night.

It’s a good question, he said. The kind of thing I’d expect you to ask. So. Ready?

Ow! he said. Right. That’s it. Hit me again and I’m leaving. I hit him again. He left. Good.

I know his frustration : I’ve always known it : it is almost as old as our friendship : the walled-up power, the dismay in the air round him like when a storm is unable to break. But as ever out of kindness he pretends to me to be feeling something else.

Past or present? George says. Male or female? It can’t be both. It must be one or the other. Who says? Why must it? her mother says.

Talking to you, George says still below the voice, is like talking to a wall.

Is it an elaborate hoax? (All hoaxes, on TV and the radio and in the papers and online, are described as elaborate whether they’re elaborate or not.)

The word mystery originally meant a closing, of the mouth or the eyes. It meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed.

You’d need your own dead person to come back from the dead. You’d be waiting and waiting for that person to come back. But instead of the person you needed you’d get some dead renaissance painter going on and on about himself and his work and it’d be someone you knew nothing about and that’d be meant to teach you empathy, would it?

Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.

H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse.

Also, although it was recorded decades ago, her voice is always, the moment you hear it, rough with its own aliveness. It is like being pleasurably sandpapered. It lets you know you’re alive.