How art holds us (part one)
Pale marble steps tap tap as I trot, quickly, then slow so I look like I’m part of the group. Mutabilis planted at the base of the high stone wall nods pink-orange-pink. A cool wind buffets stacked block corners, and whistles me through the iron gate. The scent of roses, a bite of salt in the breeze, my chest warm from rushing. Quick, stay with the group, they’re going inside.
Inside. A woman with bobbed hair and bright coral lipstick smiles at me, asks if I want a photocopied guide, at least I think she asks, I can’t quite make out the words for the immense hush. I smell old wood and stone. I shake my head, I say, ‘No thank you.’
‘Where are you from?’ she asks.
‘Dunedin.’
‘Dunedin?’
I nod.
The group of (Italian?) tourists veers left, her eyes follow them. I glide right. One thing. I’ll look at one thing, then go back to work, back to the office and the shelves of books. A fall of marble steps calls to me like water, but a sign says they lead down to the ‘vestry and office.’ I don’t want to go down there. Then, I’m caught on a pale slab of stone at the top of the stairs. Light flashes. There’s an angel in a cobalt sky. Remnants of wind flicker behind glass. Not one, but two figures. One is an angel with white and gold wings, the other a soldier in mediaeval armour.
I shift to hold the marble of the banister, it’s cool and smooth under my palms.
I glance between the panels, back, forward, back, forward, there’s something — then I get it. He died. The soldier in the grey mediaeval armour died. The angel is him again, transcended. And this angel tries to comfort me at the loss of the soldier. For a moment, the three of us stand there: me, the angel, and the soldier. Then the tour group flows past, down to the vestry and office, and my eye travels to the tops of their bobbing heads, and glossy hair to the base of the stained glass where an inscription is written:
“To the Glory of God and in loving memory of James Livingston, killed in action in France 26th Sept 1916. This window is erected by his wife and children. R. I. P.”
A little stunned, I return to work. The light outside is sepia. The wind is a cloak. The mutabilis waves me on.
At work, look things up. I find traces of James Livingston. I find him scrawled in army records, in his slap dash slanting script as he signs his life over. Yes. he writes to the question of whether he will serve. I find his regiment in the Otago Regimental Histories. Winter in France. A dead, torn and despairing landscape. I find out that a salient is an outward bulge in a line of military defence or attack where soldiers are exposed on three sides. James Livingston died somewhere on the march from a training campsite to the Ypres Salient. Killed in action, his file says, and says no more.
In Dunedin James Livingston’s wife wraps herself in a long wool coat, she huddles against the wind, and walks to an artist’s office. He listens. As he listens he begins to draw.*
He draws for days, wanting to get it right, capturing the shadows of the everything of the loss. He takes the work home at night, sketching late.
Days pass. She’s at his office again.
‘Something like this?’ he asks.
She nods, ‘Yes.’
Two little girls are with her this time. He gives them each a pencil, a sheaf of paper, four blackballs from a jar he keeps in his drawer. It’s not enough.
‘You’re very kind.’
He shakes his head, ‘It’s the least I can do.’
That night he reads In Memoriam by Tennyson, and words hold him a little.
The next day, he draws a full scale plan, sweeping lines across a table covered in butcher’s paper. It’s a big work. It will go in the new St Paul’s Cathedral, eventually, but for now he draws and thinks of the shapes of the glass he will need to cut, the fire of molten lead, and structure. When it’s time to paint, he fills a vast empty sky with shade, etches a handful of stars. Careful with each plate of armour, feather, flame, he brings the soldier home in the only way he can.
Detail from stained glass in St Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Flying through rain.
I painted this outside, painting with and in the rain. A way of holding and releasing grief, mine and others'.
Night prayer
This painting is one of a series of night prayers. The emotion of the day flows though, there’s a movement towards peace.
Notes
* My research leads me to believe the stained glass artist was most probably John Brock. My retelling of the circumstances around the making of the glass is fictionalised.
Dearest Carolyn, ah! This is what I love about writing these things: the discussion. Yes. I totally agree about the grandiosity of the imagery, when I first looked at them, I thought: why this medieval stuff for a WWI soldier? A see-saw sort of moment. And then, at some point in the staying-with-it and continuing to look, a kind of story began to unfold in my head. The three angels, seemed to me to be not angels but the family left behind. The work seemed to say to the soldier's children: he's in heaven, and here is is here whenever you wish to see him — comfort for a child. But of course, this is just my imagining. Then I started thinking about the scope of work for a church, the artist had to work with what-would-be-accepted, so the images are St George and St Michael according to the pamphlet about St Paul's stained glass. The pamphlet also says the three faces I took to be the soldier's wife and two children, are: "three angels." The mediaeval armour made me think of Tennyson and his poetic quest to write about Arthur and his Knights, and how Tennyson's poetry would have been known and read by New Zealanders of 1916. All this came into frame slowly as I researched the glass, and landed as a story. The other thing that struck me is that there is no mention of the artist in the pieces of information I found about this work. Maybe stained glass wasn't considered to be art? Merely functional with strict, grand forms? I figured that John Brock was the artist based on style, time and his very distinctive skies. I also reflected on how much time artists spend with a subject. We see the end result, which feels sometimes like a shortcut.
But, all this, and I'm not really responding to your response. Yes. The glass is wobblingly grand, and yet, how to explain my reaction? The sense of being caught? None of the other glass drew me. Why this one? Not sure, but maybe this:
I have a practice of really looking at a thing. Just one thing, for some time, to see what's there, what speaks. Once, on Milford Sound I saw a person video the entire journey, the walls, rocks, waterfalls never once glancing up from the video camera screen, capturing everything and somehow, it seemed to me, missing it all. This translated into a decision on my part, to at least see one thing, which in the case of the Milford Sound, was the continuous gloss of water over dark rock.
I wondered actually about leaving my dreadful snap of the stained glass out of the post, because though you can see the gist of the imagery, my shoddy picture doesn't capture the sunlight, the quiet, the awe at the piece-by-piece making. My photograph seemed to me, like a bad ending in a poem, a kind of collapse. But still, I put it in because: maybe that felt honest? Perhaps allowing for the possibility that what I saw there in that just-look-at-one-thing lunchtime dash was not there at all.
And yet, I couldn't get away from the artistic response to grief. The way we, in our helplessness and protest, make poems. There's a much larger memorial glass to many soldiers in St Paul's, but somehow the stories of these many became more clear to me in the one.
Thanks Kirstie. Beautifully, tenderly described. It has taken me a while to think my way into the mind-space where this is a response to grief, into a different world view. At first there seemed to be a grandiosity in the images that repelled me. Then I wondered whether the scale of them, both the images and the concept were a counter to the grimness of the death, and war's reduction of the loved person to cannon fodder, just decaying flesh among other unknowns, who will be largely forgotten by history. Is she saying: he was not nothing; he was not no one, and so the mythic splendour reflects the power of her refusal to allow his humanity to be diminished? Transcendence. I'm still not sure that I've understood. Your butterflies get more and more eloquent. Painted in the rain, and therefore partly by the rain. I love that. Exquisite.