Everything had been leading to this. He didn’t know that, of course. None of us ever know that kind of thing. But everything is leading to something, for each one of us individually and for us all collectively. Reconciliation or Absurdity, Chaos or Harmony, Personal Communion or Impersonal Totality, take your pick and stake out your variety. But motion is. The spatial is consecutive: it starts, it progresses, it terminates (as in ‘terminus’, a goal, a destination, an End to which all is rushing or slouching or shuffling or limping; or hideously scrape-thud-crawling or gloriously leap-thrust-soaring. Or some of both, no doubt. Some of both. Surely. It was certainly some of both for him).
But the corollary of the fact that the spatial is consecutive is of course that the chronological is dimensional: just as space is hurtling through a continuum so time is weighted and extended materially with volume and viscera. The latter was the significant thing for Hadwin Heath. Space. Space and its textures and possibilities, meshed in time… and times. Everything had been leading to his discovery of this (or rather, its terrifying discovery of him). As he stood before the painting for the tenth time in a week. After travelling so far to stand before this particular work. As he pondered its physical texture of paint, the colours brushed and congealed to this emotion, this psychological state. He was discovered.
He involuntarily tried to move his head to glance round the gallery and see if anyone else was looking at the painting or at him, but his head would not move. Or rather, it would move in no direction but impossibly slowly and inexorably toward, into, the painting. He stood thus for hours. No one could have observed him move in ‘real time’ (as we say). But over a period of six hours his head was not in the place it had started. It was moving into the painting.
Those ‘six hours’ were not for him the experience that phrase conjures for us. For him, everything had ‘slowed’ – each thud of his heart was a long, sonorous and deep-growling b-o-o-o-o-o-o-m. Each breath was a completely strange and alien all-sucking inhalation followed by the mighty god-like blowing of the exhalation – his breathing became a mythic cycle of these roaring and warring winds. And each emotion… each emotion of appreciation and wonder and agitation and queer joy and hinted terror, intermingled and interlocked in wrestling and dancing, became like the paint, flowing but frozen, fixed in flux. Each emotion was thereby for him a topographical piece of terrain, a ‘place’ to ‘go to’ and occupy before exploring onward, to be returned to in the meandering.
This state occupied him so long and so utterly from the moment he had tried to turn his head (which had been his last moment of awareness about his surroundings outside the painting) that only after these many engrossing hours did he once again give thought to trying to move his body and this time only in response to his engagement with the painting. He involuntarily reached for it, to touch it, the impulse always suppressed in the public space where this gesture was forever and fiercely forbidden by social cherubim with flaming swords and radios, closed circuit television, badges, respectability and respect, the (understandable) need to preserve precious physical artefacts.
When he reached for it he found he could. He could move. This movement only, in response solely to the painting and in motion toward its surface—this only was ‘allowed’ for him, though all the world around he and the painting may have disallowed it.
The para-temporal experience he was having did not cease with the movement. No, this singular gesture was an epic part of it. The alien god was majestically, miraculously bearing his arm to the creation not his own. The colonised paint received him regally and ritually with statecraft and pomp and pageantry. Its textures and tones were reaching also for him. Its sweeps and layers were longing and plying toward his touch. Its pigments made supplication to him and resigned themselves to wait patiently for his sign from their watchtowers. Were security guards this moment shouting to him, rushing him, even tearing at him, pulling him back? He was not aware of it. He had no experience of it. Were mortified alarms blaring and angry lights flashing redly? They were meaningless to him for they were unknown to him.
He touched the sacred surface of the painting. Skin contact on oils coated in invisible protective chemical shields. His forefinger, then each of the others and the thumb, a geologically gentle and reverential clawing or pawing of the paint.
And the paint discovered him. The oils rose and lapped his fingers, withdrew, receded, then lapped again, then leaped and covered his whole hand.
His nose was now only a centimetre from the painting’s surface. He did not see the painting envelop and welcome his hand into its oils. His eyes were long-locked in a great age of staring upon the painting at a proximity known only to the master who had made it. He was seeing what he could never have seen before, nor would he ever ‘un-see’ it. In a vast pilgrimage of time-movement he barely perceived, his head too was received.
Into the paint. Into the painting. This is what he began to see on the other side, from within the within.
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