Exchange Place

Through a Glass Darkly

Kilpatrick felt a tap on the back of his hand. Kilpatrick? said Gordon. Kilpatrick looked up and met Gordon’s eyes. For the first time he noticed that they were green. You can stop listening now, said Gordon gently. Kilpatrick came to. Where was I? said Gordon. Yes, said Gordon, I was speaking of the interlocutors. The members of the club. As it happens, I picked up an odd volume of Emerson’s essays the other day in Passage des Panoramas, and when I opened it my eye fell on a sentence that seemed very apropos. Library angel sort of thing, you feel some higher power has intervened. Call it coincidence if you will, but then in our line of business there is no such thing as coincidence. Anyway, essay entitled ‘Clubs’. Discourse, says Emerson, when it rises highest and searches deepest, when it lifts us into that mood out of which thoughts come that remain as stars in our firmament, is between two. We apply that sentiment as a rule. Tête-à-tête that is. You spoke of a John Bourne earlier, said Kilpatrick. Ah yes, Bourne, said Gordon, a long story. Tell you what, why don’t we do this in the spirit of Les Caves, said Gordon, you can tell me your story first, then I’ll reciprocate. You did know a John Bourne in Belfast, did you not? Kilpatrick nodded, took a sip of absinthe, and began.

I seemed to know John Bourne before I met him, said Kilpatrick. I guess there would have been prior talk of him in the circles I moved in, so maybe that’s how I picked up that impression. From elsewhere rather than from myself. We are wont to do that, are we not? And Gordon nodded sympathetically. At any rate when I did meet him, and really got to know him, I was beguiled by him, said Kilpatrick. About my height, about five foot eight, dark hair flopping over one eyebrow, somewhat sallow skin, a Roman nose a trifle too prominent for his face, ears likewise, he was not conventionally handsome, but he had presence, and when he smiled that broad smile of his, it seemed to illuminate one’s own face besides his own. I first met him in the Crown Bar in the seventies, I spoke of it before. And one thing led to another. I became his friend, he mine. Perhaps everything seems inevitable in retrospect, but so it was. Why was I attracted to him? I can only answer, because it was he, because it was myself. We were each other’s fate.

Your Bourne is an artist, you say. So is mine. I used to frequent his attic studio at Exchange Place in Belfast. Have you ever been to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin? Some years ago the entire contents of Francis Bacon’s attic studio at 7 Reece Mews in London, from the very plaster of the walls down to the floorboards, were removed and painstakingly reconstructed in Dublin, the floor ankle-deep in archaeological layers of printed materials, photographs, posters, champagne boxes in various states of decay, torn, crumpled or trodden on; everything, including the walls and door, spattered with paint, pots of paints and brushes here and there amid the chaos. When I visited the gallery last year I was forcibly reminded of Bourne’s studio. One of the features of the Bacon studio is a big round art deco mirror propped on a table, the glass covered in hundreds of pockmarks where the silvering has degraded. When Bourne went to view the attic room at 14 Exchange Place, he was delighted to find in situ an old art deco dressing table with a round mirror similarly dimmed and pockmarked. I saw myself through a glass darkly, said Bourne. It confirmed that this was the place for him. He was very influenced by places, by the atmosphere of a room, and it seemed to him he had been here before, perhaps as someone else.

At any rate, when Bourne asked me to write a piece for the catalogue of a show he was putting together, I was flattered, said Kilpatrick. I spent long hours watching him paint, his eyes darting from subject to canvas and back again in a fugue of rhythmic glances, his eyes at times so narrowed as to appear shut, eyelids flickering as if in REM sleep. I see him now in his painting clothes, floppy-collared indigo denim workman’s jacket, yellowed white flannel trousers, white boots, all spattered and smeared with a myriad of colours. When I remarked on the white trousers and boots, Bourne replied that he had once played a bit of cricket; they were relics of his varsity days. And I remembered that in the summer months he would often have the radio in the studio tuned to the cricket, one of those big old Echo, or was it EKO valve radios, ee-kay-oh that is, all hiss and static, Bourne would keep fiddling with the knob, but I gather that the bad reception had more to do with relative wavelengths than with any fault in the receiver. According to Bourne, light was the fastest wavelength in the spectrum, and given ideal cricketing weather, long bright sunlit days, it would interfere with the slower radio waves. And indeed, as the light began to fade, so reception would improve. The improved reception seemed to clarify one’s inner vision of the match, and as I heard the commentators speak of what was happening, I could see the white-clad figures poised in their fielding positions on the greensward and the sun setting behind a bank of mauve and russet cloud; hearing the pock of bat on ball, I saw the batsmen flickering between the wickets. In lulls of play there would be discussion of the weather conditions, or the state of the pitch, where it might be breaking up as the fast bowlers further wore down an already worn patch for the spin bowlers to take advantage of. I knew little about cricket, said Kilpatrick, and Bourne’s talk was an education for me. Cricket was a game of many dimensions including chance and skill. Temperature, wind, the ambient humidity of the air, all affected the flight of the ball. No one, neither bowler nor batsman, could predict how a ball might spin off a breaking wicket as it landed on a bump, hollow or fissure in the earth. It was the bowler’s job to enlarge the parameters of unpredictability, to keep the batsman guessing. And again Bourne would quote Bacon, The hinges of form come about by chance.

So when I came to write the catalogue essay, said Kilpatrick, I used some cricketing analogies. Bourne had talked about cricketers of the past and how he used to try to emulate them. When he was a boy he read of how the great Don Bradman would, when he was himself a boy, repeatedly hit a golf ball with a cricket stump against the curved brick base of the family water tank, trying to anticipate the unpredictable angle as it bounced back, the boy Bourne copying the boy Bradman, except in Bourne’s case it was an ancient garden wall covered in mosses and lichens. He dreamed of being Bradman, as if he remembered being him in another life, on the other side of the world. In sport as in art one learns by imitation; one can only be oneself by first trying to mirror another. Bourne was indebted to Bacon; through that emulation he had become someone he would never otherwise have been.

Most interesting, said Gordon. I am reminded of the Meno of Socrates, where Socrates says to Meno that all enquiry and all learning is recollection. You already know what seems unknown; you have been here before, but only when you were someone else.