How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

dear God dear Motherfather did I come the hard way back through the wall of the earth the stratifications the rocks and the soil the worms and the crusts the stars and the gods the vicissitudes and the histories the broke bits of forgettings and rememberings all the long road from gone to here

love is best felt : the acts of love are hard and disillusioning to

view like this unless done by the greatest master picturemakers : otherwise the seeing of them being done and enjoyed by figurations of other people will always lock you outside them (unless your pleasure comes from taking solo pleasure or pleasure at one remove, in which case, yes, that’s your pleasure).

But art and love are a matter of mouths open in cinnabar, of blackness and redness turned to velvet by assiduous grinding, of understanding the colours that benefit from being rubbed softly one into the other : the least that the practice will make you is skilful : beyond which there’s originality itself, which is what practice is really about in the end and already I had a name for originality, undeniable, and to this name I had a responsibility far beyond the answering of the needs of any friend. This is all in Cennini’s Handbook for Painters, as well as the strict instruction that we must always take pleasure from our work : cause love and painting both are works of skill and aim : the arrow meets the circle of its target, the straight line meets the curve or circle, 2 things meet and dimension and perspective happen : and in the making of pictures and love – both – time itself changes its shape : the hours pass without being hours, they become something else, they become their

How can we be friends now? he said. How can we ever not be friends? I said. You know I marry in the summer, he said. That you marry makes no difference to me, I said and this is the last thing I said that day to him cause he looked at me then with eyes like little wounds in his head and I understood : that he loved me, and that our friendship had been tenable on condition that he could never have me, that I was never to be had, and that someone else, anyone else, saying out loud to him what I was, other than painter, broke this condition, since those words in themselves mean the inevitability, the being had.

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, and Barto and I were soon friends again : no time at all : many things get forgiven in the course of a life : nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right : we were friends until I died (if I did die ever, cause I remember no death) and I trust that he remembered me lovingly till the day he died himself (if he did, cause I have no memory of such a thing).

nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do (and also tend disappointingly to die before they ought). Or our fathers, whose failings while they’re alive (and absences after they’re dead) infuriate. Or our siblings, who want us dead too cause what they know about us is that somehow we got away with not having to carry the bricks and stones like they did all those years. Cause nobody’s the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves – except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.

I don’t want all my memories falling on me like an avalanche, I said.

Barto was my friend so he wished me well : it was a warm-hearted game, sweet, wholesome, funny and hopeful : but perhaps too, I reckoned – I suspected him of it – what he really wished was for me to forget my self so I might be another self to him.

It’s yours, he said. If you’re leaving my tutelage, then I give into your care what little I still have of your child self. It also holds your mother in it, who will have helped you fashion it, cause you were very young when you wrote this and the sentences have her turn of phrase about them, as well as – look, here, here and here – her habit of putting these 2 dots between clauses where a breath should come.

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 : painting, Alberti says, is a kind of opposite to death : and though he knows that when we are bared back to nothing but our bones ourselves only God can remake us into humans, put faces back on our skulls on the final day and so on &c, which means there is no blasphemy in what I’m about to say – cause Alberti said it and it is true – all the same it’s many a person who can go to a painting and see someone in it as if that person is as alive as daylight though in reality that person has not lived or breathed for hundreds of years.

All stories, he says, really. They’re never the story I need or really want.

My friend looks at me : he shifts about on the stool : his eyes are blunt and aimed : the everything that he can’t say to me makes him even finer to my eye.

just don’t see why, he is saying. Why whoever is brave or lucky enough to win the gold and make it into the ring can’t have both the ring and the love. I nod that I agree and that I understand. I know now what to make of the rest of the landscape behind him.

That before and after thing is about mourning, is what people keep saying. They keep talking about how grief has stages. There’s some dispute about how many stages of grief there are. There are three, or five, or some people say seven.

Let’s not look anything up, her mother says. It’s so nice. Not to have to know. Her mother is going soft. Not that there’s anything wrong with soft. Her mother, soft, forgetful, vague and loving, like other people’s mothers always seem to be, is a whole new prospect.

This place is shaking loose everything I thought I knew, she said. All the things I’ve been taking for granted for years.

It is so bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit! she said. She looked genuinely happy there on the pavement outside the shop selling the souvenirs and products of Ferrara.

Finally she lets herself think about how it feels: to be so frightened that you almost can’t breathe to speed so fast and be so completely out of control to know the meaning of helpless to spin across a shining space knowing any moment you might end up hurt, but likewise, all the same, like plus wise you just might not.

Would it be better, or worse, or truer, or falser, if I didn’t? her mother says. George scowls. History is horrible. It is a mound of bodies pressing down into the ground below cities and towns in the unending wars and the famines and the diseases, and all the people starved or done away with or rounded up and shot or tortured and left to die or put up against the walls near castles or stood in front of ditches and shot into them. George is appalled by history, its only redeeming feature being that it tends to be well and truly over. And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see?

Yeah, but that thing happening. With the shooting. It was aeons ago, George says. Only twenty years before me, and here I am sitting here right now, her mother says. Ancient history, George says. That’s me, her mother says. And yet here I am. Still happening. But it isn’t, George says. Because that was then. This is now. That’s what time is. Do things just go away? her mother says. Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can’t see them happening in front of us? They do when they’re over, George says.

Do tourists see differently from other people? her mother says. And how can you have grown up in the town you’ve grown up in and not consider what the presence of the past might mean? George yawns ostentatiously.

How does she even remember seeing all these things, George thinks. I saw the same room, the exact same room as she did, we were both standing in the very same place, and I didn’t see any of it.

She was always so curious, about where I was, what I was doing, who I was doing it with, who else I was meeting up with or working with, especially that and what I was working on, what I was writing about, what I thought about this or that, it was constant, and I thought, well, that’s a bit like love, that obsessiveness, when people are in love they need to know the strangest things, so maybe it is love, perhaps it just feels this odd to me because it’s the kind of love that can’t be expressed unless we both choose to really mess up our lives.

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.

And God, George, something about it made me feel permitted. Permitted? George says. That’s insane. I know. Allowed, her mother says. Like I was being allowed. It made me laugh, when I realized it. Then it made me feel rather, well, special. Like a character in a film who suddenly develops an aura of light all round her. Can you imagine? Frankly? No, George says. Can we never get to go beyond ourselves? her mother says. Never get to be more than ourselves? Will I ever, as far as you’re concerned, be allowed to be anything other than your mother?

But that’s good too. 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.

It is lovely, being intoxicated, her father said the other night. It is like wearing a whole fat woolly sheep between me and the world.

It must have felt like being hit by the rounded front of a giant treetrunk that’s been swung through the air at you without you knowing it was coming. It must have felt like being punched by a god. That’s when she sensed, like something blurred and moving glimpsed through a partition whose glass is clouded, both that love was coming for her and the nothing she could do about it. The cloud of unknowing, her mother said in her ear. Meets the cloud of knowing, George thought back.

Halfway through writing this email George noticed that she’d used, in its first sentence, the future tense, like there might be such a thing as a future.

Think of her father taking what was left of the shape her mother had when she was alive and driving round in the rain to find the places she’d want to be.

Perhaps somewhere in all of this if you look there’s a proof of love.

He says he has been infuriated by a story. It haunts him, he says : he can’t stop thinking about it. What story? I say. All stories, he says, really. They’re never the story I need or really want. I ready the picture : I am quiet : I let the time pass : after a bit he speaks into this silence and tells me the bones of the story. It’s about a magic helmet which allows its bearer to turn into anything, transform into any shape he likes, all he has to do is put the helmet on his head. But that’s not the part that maddens him : he likes that part of the story : there’s this other part of the story and it’s about 3 maidens, guardians of a store of gold, and whoever wins the gold from them and forges it into a ring will have power over everything, over the land, the sea, the world and all its peoples : but there’s a snag : there’s a condition : he’ll have all the power, the man who forges the ring, but to keep this power he’ll have to renounce love. My friend looks at me : he shifts about on the stool : his eyes are blunt and aimed : the everything that he can’t say to me makes him even finer to my eye.

I just don’t see why, he is saying. Why whoever is brave or lucky enough to win the gold and make it into the ring can’t have both the ring and the love.