Artful

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better

Wherever you are all the trees above your head are flowering

EM Forster, though, saw it a little more evenhandedly: ‘when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.’

Careful, though, for the gods can take as well as give and they have a habit of giving complicated gifts, like shirts which stick to the skin so you can’t get them off without skinning yourself into the bargain, or showers of coins which leave you pregnant by Zeus and get you and your new son thrown into the sea locked in a wooden trunk by your father for defying him, as in the myth of Danaë and Perseus. It’s possible that the gift of wings, one way or another, always involves the net Michelangelo warned us of. But certainly gifts tend to breed gifts — that’s what exchange is — and with any godly luck an old fisherman will catch the wooden trunk in his net, open it up and free the pair to carry on with the story

Art is always an exchange, like love, whose giving and taking can be a complex and wounding matter

Because you were lit, you were lit by something, and it wasn’t the usual kind of light, and you were so beautiful I almost had to leave that room, I swear your beauty was changing the surface of my skin

God. If I had a chance to fetch you from the underworld, to go down and persuade them and fetch you home, I’d never look back

What’s liminal space? I’d asked you. Ha, you’d said. It’s kind of in-between. A place we get transported to. Like when you look at a piece of art or listen to a piece of music and realize that for a while you’ve actually been somewhere else because you did? I’d said. Or liminal like limbo? Maybe, you’d said, getting excited, wait, I’ll look it up, maybe limbo and liminal share a root, it sounds like they might.

When we made particularly good love it was as if a new place in the world, or maybe a new place out of the world, a place apart, revealed itself, a landscape just rolling itself open, in my head — was it in my head? because it was all around me, a great unfolding green landscape, and it’d be as if I was traveling fast through it and over it in flight, skimming it like a flat-edged stone can skim a surface of water, touching it to leap away above it. I thought how somewhere at the core of this lovemaking I had sometimes known, understood for a moment, what goes on at the core of the earth down through all the roots, past the taproots, way down through the layers of cold to the layers of heat, right through to platelet level. I thought, too, how at exactly the same time as going this deep I could understand any huge bell hung high in a bell tower, hollow and full, stately and weighty, as high in the air as a bird, beginning the slow ceremonious swing of itself against itself that means any second the air is going to change its nature and become sound

I nodded, I pretended to do as she said. But instead of imagining her film going backwards and forwards, I found I was thinking about how much I was missing making love with you