How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

: in hell there is no mystery cause in mystery there is always hope :

This line appeared suddenly in the narrative, lightning bolt-like insight. Hinting at connected other thoughts unsaid.

It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things : cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence : paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first-hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and underdry of its feathers, a brick about the rough kiss of its skin.

The great Alberti, who published in the year in which my mother birthed me the book for all picturemakers, and wrote in it the words let the movements of a man (as opposed to a boy or young woman) be ornato with more firmness, understands the bareness and the pliability it takes, ho, to be both.

Hinting at the novel’s big theme—delightfully tricky syntax (that ornato and ho).

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

Artist’s eyes

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.

How will the novel affirm or deny this central piece of given by the artist’s mother?