HARD LOOKS | LAURENCE DAVIES I wanted to photograph the bishop’s angels. Twelve of them there are, six soaring toward six, each with four wings open and two wings sheltering the face, serene among the vaulting of the bishop’s guard-house. The building stands quietly, flanked by cypresses, along the somber private walk from palace to cathedral. My camera has a rising front and bellows, my tripod’s made of seasoned oak; I had come to take the seraphs’ likeness in the good old slow way, on fine-grained panchromatic film – chiaroscuro studies of seraphic rapture. I found seventy-two wings, God’s flags, the fans of holy breezes, and something diabolic, dirty, that should not be there. Curses on the long-nosed, archeologizing fool who pried this demon from the buttresses, who brought him recklessly inside then sauntered off. How could I have known what lurked beneath the canvas? How without sliding the canvas back? The gargoyle lifts his chin, licks his lips, arches his eyebrows, smiles. He has me, he has the lower spaces of this chilly, twilit prison to himself. Never let gargoyles in your lodging, or your house, or the house of any other soul. Never so much as leave them in a shanty or a shed. Never shelter even one of them, especially a one of them; the peril lies in singularity. Beneath a roof, the beast will shake himself like a mucky dog, but what he spatters is far nastier than mud, or grit, or rancid gravy. See the tired wisteria on the deanery wall, how it springs and trembles in the slightest wind? How, even in the blessed open air, the cat creeps fitfully across the grassy close, taking the long way round? The force that shakes the creeper, terrifies the cat, must never be confined. They commandeer your dreams like a watchdog pinning a lost stranger to the ground, or a brute raging at his woman (as he calls her), trying to make her see his kind of reason, a man who will not let her leave. Gargoyles don’t approve of leaving. They bite, then watch you twitch and flail the tarantella. One of their stares can light the ground under your feet so that you dance, dance, dance on the flames; another can freeze you where you stand, boxing your shins in ice. My heels, my splaying soles hit and rebound, rockety rock, rockety, rockety, rock, always on the spot. When my feet freeze, my blazing bones can rest a while, but then my flesh will shrivel with the cold. Once, twice, my brutish choreographer puts me through the sequence. On the cusp between the roasting and the icing comes a moment’s grace. When the third time comes, I am ready. Fast as scorched feet allow, I hobble to the door and soon out into free air. Orange and green lichens flow across the ancient stones. Rooks circle blackly overhead. Imps, toads, and dragons are scattered everywhere. Who can help? That one: the shelagh-na-gig, lowered from her dizzy perch, now sprawling on a sunlit mason’s trestle — her with the splayed thighs and the fingers prising open her lips, a wonder-worker. So let her work her wonders in the bishop’s guard-house, where two heads are safer than one. The moist warmth of her groin presses against my heart and, quivering beneath her fullness, I stagger onward. A raw, malicious wind has held the door ajar. Through narrowed lids, I see her eyes. They’re starting from her sockets. He is willing me to turn, but even to save my precious camera, I will not. I set her gently on a massive lectern, dense with purple cloth. He’s jutting his chin, his brows, his tongue, of that I’m sure. Across the room from him she lolls, parting her curtains boldly. My time to save myself, their time to stare, pinning each other down, so many miles below the angels. Laurence Davies was born in the Irfon Valley of Wales and resides in Glen Ericht, Scotland. He is a regular contributor to Contrary. Read more of his work here...>Laurence-Davies.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0



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