Ultimate Creative
A collaboration with Margaret B Simon



I measure the circumference of your head; it won’t fit into the trellis as I’d planned: you are also screaming which annoys me no end. You’ve got blood on your face and you can’t stand it, can you? Blood is purity, they say. You should enjoy it for what it’s worth I tell you imagine where Roualt would be without the colour of blood, or for that matter even the faded blood of the Sistine Chapel siennas’ Blood is beautiful and should not ever be associated with pain.

Oh, what times we had as artists, no? You and I, together painting black on blue the canvas of life as you laughed why can’t you laugh now with me? We are still together in this final creative work. I’ll bow to you first, not in alphabetical order for once. Your name will be on the placard before my own, I promise. Now please you must stop slobbering such a distraction here while I must think - and you are wetting yourself For shame! See how fallible you are within? No control, really. I told you that years ago but you never acknowledged a thing I told you, did you? Now I’ll have to shave your head for the fitting which is quite a shame to trim these golden tresses down to brink of bone. No, it will be more than that this one time I’ll have to clear another inch.

So happy you agree; silence is consent as you are wont to say. Yet this won’t be as easy as I’d thought. All I can find is a hammer from our toolbox and it’s making quite a mess I fear. As I work, I remember how we used to do things together - how you would pose pouting prettily so that I could capture your image flick of camera on white, then brush and polish (we knew all the tricks didn’t we?) and how your friends adored you and the critics were your friends not mine but we were rich and we would laugh together in that dichotomy of what was real and what was not which brings me to this last work - a statement of life and death with worms and holes those multiple facets of colours revealed as a virgule sculpture beyond temporality the one thing that cannot be duplicated, nouveau without self-destructing; a statement that worms and flies will follow; critics of the finest taste and bittersweet reviews which due to form and societies will remain unpublished...

See now! Your head fits perfectly through the bars; honeysuckle becomes your face and the light is perfect! Pale yellow kisses on red, and best of all the centre of interest appears as your left eye emerges from its socket, sleek and slow and terribly fascinating.

I couldn’t have done it without you! Marvellous, my darling, simply marvellous. ‘Blood is God’s correcting-fluid,’ I hear you say, in return, this time with a silence you really mean. What can I? Say in return?

My own dress is prettier. Than yours whilst you continue to preen your head as though your head is an ordinary head, a head, that is, owning a head’s body, a body that all heads should have as a head’s body. Caesura carving, Alexandrine alembic. These are. Words that only you, my darling, know the meaning. Of.

#

The story the head told me went like this.

‘You have measured the circumference of my head, so that you can test its threadability vis-a-vis the trellis. You have stolen the crimson from my head so that you can paint its pain, as well as carve its essential headness.’

‘No! No!’ I protest loudly.

‘This my mouth I speak with which you gashed with your chisel...’

‘Margery! Margery!’

I turn my head for this is a new voice. One that interrupts my communion with the head I have sculpted.

‘What are you doing?’

I blush for this is Desmond, come to spy out my doings.

‘Nothing, Desmond. I merely doodle.’

I point at the piece of paper fluttering in the trellis, upon which I try to sketch a woman’s head without the necessary firmness.

‘You cannot draw standing up...’

Desmond is dressed in a gown that reaches his feet. He was once my shrink, now he is my Corrector. Counselling and psychiatry and nursing and guidance and therapy have long since been abandoned - a fact of which you may still be unaware - and, instead of such caring professions, everything has become much more stringent, much more prescriptive, much less descriptive, essentially not taking ‘no’ or even ‘yes’ for an answer.

‘You know we can’t go on like this, Margery!’ Desmond lurches to grasp my right wrist in an iron clamp. He always carries the clamp with him, even when in his bathrobe. It’s disgusting.

The head gives me a condescending smirk, only Desmond doesn’t notice. This infuriates me so much that I call him a nasty name. The name. He jerks my wrist about and shoves my hand into his mouth, severing three fingers.

‘I am not amused, Margery! As your Corrector, I am obliged to - excuse me ‘‘ (he wipes the blood from his beard) ‘‘to order you to cease all creative endeavours, and I am insuring that this nonsense will end.’

Desmond leaves me trembling at the trellis.

‘I can!! I can draw standing up!!’ I scream, as he slams the porch door. Possibly he heard me, because he returns with an axe.

The story the head told me either ended there or paused, only time would.

#

Tell.

There was a Swiss man called William who shot an arrow at an apple on his son’s.

Head.

I couldn’t get away from the head, it seemed. I’m glad you agree that art is worth more than the paper it’s printed on. A head in the trellis is worth two in the pubes. A stitch in time saves two hundred and six.

Bones in the body.

‘Hey!’

I looked to see who spoke of such soft straw.

It was Desmond, with axe hanging between his legs like spare meat.

The delayed pain in the three erased fingers seemed now to seep into the paper with a redness that was so red no palette could ever own it. He was now evidently come to come.

Or to remove the head I’d carefully drawn between the cage-bars of the iron trellis. The axe-blade was made of rubber, I guessed, as he began to rub its rubber edge like a rubber up and down the features of the head’s essential headness; the nose went first, eyes next, ears softening like HB lead with each stroke, mouth left to last still mouthing the pain the trio of finger stumps still squawked.

He had a bloody cheek.

#

‘Blood is God’s corrective fluid’ - somewhere in the dull thumping of my veins, echoes of Desmond’s admonition. Or was he attempting to salvage me, my precious head or my dissolute spirit’

Where the bones hold as a tripod, seductive maddening rhythmic - Desmond’s leering face and the head, the erasure of the head!

‘Too much!’ I cry, shaking with fury. ‘You will tamper no more with my apples, nor my heads! These are my original rights!’ I rush forward, wrenching the iron clamp from my wrist. With this, I attack, ‘STANDING UP, creating new optical illusions, Desmond, watch me put the touches on your portrait ... and I’ll leave your eyes for last. I shall!’

Yet in my outrage, I forget about the missing fingers.

Roualt would have been proud of me, Chagall two.

Yes, I could paint like acupuncture. A needle to the eyeball to cure iritis of the soul. Scrimshaw techniques to the bone-that-shows. Then dipping his beard-tip in the blood that oozes from the corner of each eye, Desmond shows me how to paint with no fingers. How to draw. Without strokes. Merely daubing up and down with his beard like a fisherman casting a line in a broom-cupboard. Up and down. Dab, smudge, smear, smut. Each stub then takes their own blood and daub away like kids in infants. Stumps where digits once dangled. Ragged butchered knuckles scraping each clean swipe of tippex/snopake/plasma across the good looks.

#

There the head’s story paused again. Desmond said he wanted to kiss me.

‘Correction, Margery. I do not want to kiss you. For people with no heads find it hard to kiss. No, what I want to do with you is crowbar names from your mind. The names. Together with the laughter we once shared, where our names of kinship were writ. And with what shall I crowbar it forth, I hear you ask...’

‘I ask no such thing. I can see your beard-tip is no rubber axe-blade. It is sharper, gougier, jaggier, jabbier than any divot-digger. Even with my imaginary finger-tips, I wince as I touch its ultimate point.’

‘Ultimate point. There is no ultimate point. Only the thirsty crucible of pain. The ultimate creative lurch towards the never-ending pause...’


Published ‘Zine Zone’ 1997