Free Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson Page A

plunge away. The people behind I hardly know. Do they see me? I doubt it. The cars are hinged from view. Get in with me. Hold my hand. Does that help? Not much.
    The fairground man has a familiar face. ‘I’ll see you at the other side,’ he says, and shuts the metal bar across the cage. THEY’RE OFF! His upturned face blurs. For those of us on the wheel there is only the wheel. The swinging up, the long deceitful pause, the sudden falling away. That which is only living can only die.
    Time turns me under the sun but I can turn the sun through time. Here, there, nowhere, carrying white roses never red. Mitylene 600 BC , the city 2000 After Death. All art belongs to the same period. The Grecian drinking horn sits beside Picasso’s bulls, Giotto is a friend of Cézanne. Who calls whom? Sappho to Mrs Woolf – Mrs Woolf to Sappho. The Over-and-Out across time, the two-way radio on a secret frequency. Art defeats Time.
    I get caught in my own past. I see other people acting out long dead roles. I want to put out my hand to stop them before it is too late. Too late. Does my hand pass right through them? They can’t read my work and they don’t notice me. There are problems with being a long dead poet; not least being still alive. The artist dies but not the art, not even when so much of it has been destroyed, word of mouth passes it on. Impossible to silence me. I have been speaking through so many life-times and I will speak through so many more.
    Go home Sappho? Jump into the wide-necked funnel of the present and slip through the gaps in history. Go back to the high harbour rocks. Go back to the flat sea. Go back to where the words began and throw them up through time until they catch in a new mouth and speak again.
    GO HOME SAPPHO. The graffiti on my house wall. I live in a bullet. That is, a house locked in a tough steel shell, to keep out squatters, like myself. A steel door, steel windows, steel plates padlocked over the toilet and the sink. A steel clamp round the water main and a steel box guarding the electricity supply.
    Where there is no ugliness there is no fear and this city thrives on fear. The city is old and patched. The city is modern and brash. The genteel city in quiet decay and the bully boy city, not alive, but hyperactive.
    There is another city too, but we don’t like to mention it, because officially it doesn’t exist. People vanish everyday. That’s where I live.
    The invisible city is a monkey’s collage of materials that don’t match; concrete blocks and corrugated roofs, Georgian brickwork painted orange to show that it has been condemned. There are walkways fifty feet in the air, wind traps, death tunnels, rat connections to monoliths made of mono-stone. Where there used to be narrow streets and roomy squares there are now the favourite throwaway lines of People’s Architecture.
    The plate-glass obsessions of smart retailers have had to give way to boarded-up hatches crude-nailed below dead neon signs. I buy my goods (goods, what’s good about them?), through a plywood hole from a severed hand. The hand takes the money, passes out the frozen meat, the dead go and eat it to nourish their frozen hearts.
    I work hard to keep warm.
    GO HOME SAPPHO. It’s true, I do have a lot to answer for, all those imaginary seductions in the flesh and on the page. Don’t you call me a Sexualist? Then I have to practise what I preach. I call myself a poet, I have to invent what I practise.
    After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, ‘I fuck therefore I am.’
    Why do you ask me about my lovers, one, two, twenty?
    Why do you visit a lost island looking for me?
    Why do you say ‘When was that day when the sun splintered the clouds and broke the light in shards on her head?’
    There’s no such thing as autobiography there’s only art and lies.
    Sappho, passing through the dark streets, leaving no footprints, no trace, looks ahead and