Sudley
for
Scott Thurston
Suddenly. You are inside the
house. Standing in the old entrance. The garden hall or vestibule. The little
Corot landscape’s here. All pictures domestic scale. The Holman Hunt propped on
an easel. A magnifying glass swinging on its string. One painting shifted a
little to the left to fit another in. The nightmare of George Holt’s handyman. Trade
with Brazil.
Florentine swelter. Crackling through the horse chestnut leaves. Crisp. Liquid
electricity. Doric columns rise either side of the fireplace. The faint tinkle
a chime. A tintinnabulation of the silence out of which a painting may be
conjured. Into which it might disappear for the ambulant solitary in
performance for a group walking far from the Paris Commune. A tornado of
options. Poplars. As though time has ceased. Moments stretched. A loose
bowelled cow flaps its flanks: chiaroscuro
whisper. We pick up. Each other’s senseless sense and fly with it. Rough of a
sensibility. Bull’s spittle dribbles on stones. A rumour a promise. Unconfirmed
broken. Autumn shiver. Beasts dung the tilled field. Fecund chill. Enter.
Gainsborough over the fireplace. The latest purchase. Perspective distorts the
carpet’s intention. Poems were written at this desk. Liberty spelt out. The tomb long open and the
trees crouching for a peep. Tall windows: granite melody in a haze. The
channel. Silt bank. Catches light from over the water. Wish for mist. On the
distant Welsh hills. Or mountains. The single hammering at 1 o’clock you
mistake for the butcher boy’s sharp bell. In the name of God silence pierced
her side high and plaintive as a silken moth. Posed but never poised. A dreamy
girl with a creamy neck. Ready for a ball or bell. Who has no servant to call
remove the dying flowers their odour sickens. She should know these things you
don’t. She’s designed to be merely cherished. After death, bookmarks mark.
Wisdom, a crumple of promises clutched in sweat. The cobbler bangs out his
unspoken love for her on the soles of her broken shoes. Byron might have
imagined her. Shelley would have mirrored her. But she’s tucked away that
unique thing a fake. Insert her into the language of which she is composed. Trees
weave. Time is a turning page, every quarter of an hour. A slow three-decker
telling of empty dandy chairs lusting the wrong way round. Chime. How do tall
shelves of books become a Library? At the sarcophagus your writing will be
prophetic. What will be. When it is done: Unitarian, Liberal, Philanthropic. Someone
will slouch in your creaking armchair and frown at your words. Its marbled
blanks. Desiccated edition of Cowper’s Poems.
Dropping brown powder from its spine. Into your lap as you turn the pages.
Curtained secrets. Of quiet decay. Exposed to light, crumples. Breathless
wind-chimes. You were looking for a remarkable symbol. Trudging the green lane.
To the front doors you have already forgotten. A silver glow behind the nets.
Illumines the desk upon which the bills were once paid. Archive of illegible
documents preserved in paint. Ribs blush over a riverine council. Of peasants.
The drought. So perfect that any blemish would turn the day septic. The title
sprinkled from this book. Tinkling. Angel dust flaking from the walls of a
fresco. During a riot, something. To be something. Must be darker than
darkness. Viol burns its madrigal. Out into a room which is not a room. The
unseen inhabits the scene. Dwarfs the people. Undiminished not quite
vulnerable. In the oil sketch. Measured chimes of human anthems. Weirs crash
upon Venetian thoughts. She’s suddenly seen you. From the new entrance.
Entranced fascination. Opening your hatch you admit such pleasure. Delirium
soaks the tedium, etiolated and brittle. Bristles of genre. Lavender alive with
bees swaying after the storm. Amber glow rises from polished boards soaked into
scarlet walls. Somebody watches you from the balcony. A flicker of interest
in your lack of interest. Your room a tumbling red cube for his pitching
vertigo. The window at this diagonal. Nine more steps. The morning room saw the
child stamping and stamping on the ants. Trees, the slate-grey Mersey. Industry at its shore ‘ruralised by distance’ in
the Romantic conceit. That other blue distance. Welsh mountains. Or hills. Slit
the morning post beneath the woodblock variegations, the Pre-Raphaelite dazzle.
The tinfoil-crackle tones of Tennyson and Browning. Play them this morning’s
lesson: the dust that rises from a beaten carpet. A knocked up bit of
greatness. A hand on a keyboard, too many naturals. A fantasia in black and
white, the temple (again). Without even a Fra Fillipo Lippo wink at you. A
startling eye looms in the magnifying lens. A falcon dives. Rips into the neck
of the dove, this premature Transfiguration. Bays picked to shreds. She threads
beads. Roses, the tiles at her bare feet. As though a wish could fall true on
this marble. Breasts ghosted through thin robes. Poised as a sponge of poison
squeezed into your limpid pool. Past the Italianate marble fireplace with the
Holt crest, Schloss Rosenau. It’s an isle, an aisle of light. Sufficient to
allow divinity or human majesty its
approach. The radiance of patronage. A smeared palette. Or the palpitating
shade which you cannot penetrate. They are not human enough: boy tensing his
fishing rod, girl floating on collapse. Their scattered picnic. Crouching
mendicants at some filthy game. Fawning before an oblivious consort, they scratch
away the cracked sky to find Margate
sun. The ‘lighthouse’ is a white-hot brushstroke a blemish on the skin of
night. With what confidence could you mount those steps to the promise of a
quayside? It comes out with a whitened misty sky and a double rainbow. Spectral
retribution. Painted over. Not over. When it returns the painting has darkened.
Less lightning burst than rainbow. Obliterate the eye’s asperities. Look close
Cousin George in the magnifying glass. The eye looms. The beginning of his
interest in Surrealism. Reading to yourself. Reading yourself. A monstrous
porthole. This rectangle, no larger than a servant’s mirror. Black is a shade
of white. Clouds, sails, sea-crest. Black-tipped gull comes to rest. In the
rest. Say you are rendered. Wordless the memory of a memory of men. Loading a
ship dreamt about, stark. Bonington’s moment for as long as you dare. Look
away. Listen. Tear the image as though it were rotten canvas. An old painting a
dead sail. Part the net. Curtains. If anyone is watching. A triangle. With both
your hands, either side. Watch yourself from behind. This is the view they
built here. The sloped lawn, the billowing trees. Afar: the same hills or
mountains without features. A study, a framed tangle of light.
2004/2012/2016
Note
This text is the latest 'remode' of a piece that has had a long life (and a life largely online since its first enactment). ‘Sudley House’, as it was originally entitled, was
realised as a guided tour/performance at Sudley House, Mossley Hill, Liverpool, in four shows on 6th and 12th
November 2004, with Scott Thurston as second voice and presence. Props included
recordings of Tennyson (1890) and my 1793 edition of Cowper’s Poems (Vol I). I would like to thank
Scott; and Jane Duffy and Alex Kidson of the National Galleries of Merseyside
for allowing me to act as Visiting Scholar to Sudley House, and to the latter
for his whistle-stop private tour of the Emma Holt bequest. Thanks to all the
staff at the House for making my writing visits so pleasant, and for the smooth
running of the performances. I readily acknowledge monies from the (then) Edge
Hill College of Higher Education School of Humanities and Arts Research
Development Fund to enable this work to be developed in its original form. The
full performance text is available on Great
Works at http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/sh/rs1.html.
Many thanks for Peter Philpott for publishing it. The first remode was largely
prompted by the re-hanging of the works and thus the rendering fictive of my
movement instructions and narrative. It was omitted from my Unfinish (Veer Books: 2016.) This version may be
read here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/sudley-house-for-scott-thurston.html.
The second remode – this third version – was made in March 2016. ‘Cousin
George’ is George Melly. There are several quotations melted and re-formed in
the text, particularly Ruskin on Turner, but also Turner’s detractors. More on my work here. 
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| Photos of the first performances (c) Andrew Taylor, 2004 |
