Skin Piel (without sin)

Figure I : Male figure in vivo

This is the drawing of a man, age indeterminate, sitting in the countryside on a block of ancient stone. The horizon curves across the centre of the picture at chest height, dividing convoluted formations of cloud from a tidy, pastoral land. The man of age unknown looks down to his left and forwards, his expression mild, slightly surprised. He has a leather hat with long lobes for his ears and no other clothes. A cloth is draped for modesty. All is white or black and shape is given to objects using a great, harmonious grid of lines that thin and thicken to lead the eye. He is sitting with knees apart, waist twisted. A muscle from each arm stands up like a Japanese fan, cut out and folded flat.

“I cannot speak and so I will talk in whatever way I can. I cannot speak and so I will show, in whatever way I can, the way I am. Man or woman, what does it matter now but should you look, you will see. All of me is here, but no blood; the rivers and streams of my circulation are all changed into channels for formaldehyde. Browned and shrunken. I cannot speak and so will never lie and every word will be fiction. This page is dyed with the ink of my image, drawn from stone, like a fossil. An engraving. Wood, plant bodies and fibre. Block, ink and paper. Very auspicious companions and prepared with the greatest of care. I cannot speak and yet already you know how thin I am, one page thick – no, one side of one page, one face. The depth and thickness precisely of one atom, perhaps, but do not be deceived. I am not shallow, have more than one facet. I cannot speak and so how do we make this connection? In seeing my image do you read my mind or your own? Am I clear? Are you my interpreter, my life spoken through your mouth, or am I only a catalyst for interpretations of your own condition? I cannot speak but you know that I must be dead and no ghost, me, no apparition but six ounces per square yard of dried, pressed cotton pulp. A picture in a book, no, an illustration – a figure.
Each morning the sun. Each morning the rising, spinning round in axial rotation; passing through seasons and pulling the earth around with its gravity. Circle after circle drawn in space, year after year; the lines make a pattern like a flower that grow and repeat until the ink of their passage thickens and saturates. The passage of time has become like a pen, whose nib has cut through the paper and onto the table beneath. Is that a life then, the life of a flower lived out on paper? Circles and spirals and the pen running over, across and through its own history. The portrait is thickened one atom and one cut at a time. The portrait, once made is a continuous line and once cut through by the steel nib is a line coiled like a spring. This line of progress could be stretched out straight to great lengths, draped around the sky like paper chains at a party.
Take my skin that you can see here. It is covered in tiny lines and the older I become, the more lines it has as if some pen were writing out my life on its surface and passing, over and again the same places, cutting deeper by one atom at a time. Some where in my future the line will become clear, like a sewing pattern or a map and my skin can be lifted away in a long thread and curled or hung around like an unravelled sweater. Alas I am undone. Done and undone. Two states of being and more questions there: when your life is done, are you undone? I do until I am done and then I did all that I could. Will that be the grammar of my life? When life is passed and I am truly unfurled, like a great banner, I will be without skin. Sin Piel. No longer covered, no longer seen and recognised. As I walk through life I cackle like a bird, communicating in some way the intricacies and simplicities of each moment. A raven flying high over these fields makes one, clear call that spreads out from its epicentre, from its throat, to all of the surrounding air: a statement of clarity more wise and succinct than a lifetime of words. At that level, from there, the raven lives each moment and its grammar is present and simple.
Closed in the darkness of this book I can read the words that press me flat. Words embossed into paper by the weight of a printing press. Each letter bitten down, compressing the cotton fibres, flooding the indent with ink. The margins of the words, the heavy smell of their blue-blackness, pressed flat upon my body.

Storpiato. A contorted pose. Yes, I cannot deny discomfort: half sitting. My eyes will never see you. They cannot. They are dead and even were they alive my lids cover them to within the smallest slit. An enforced modesty this, in deference to you, the viewer: a posture of agonising punishment. Not fit, not at all fit.

The bent knee, sometimes supported on a peg, is also common to beggars and professional cripples. A sixteenth century mendicant. I don’t know, is that a nice thing to say about me? Muscles of the thorax, abdomen and arm – superficial dissection. Superficial. On the surface. Yes, that is where I am but not in my soul; not shallow in my heart. I have thought thoughts. I have looked inside myself and I have had revelations – startling, terrifying ideas. My elbow is resting on a staff. I am balanced to a kind of perfection. Like falling asleep in a carriage, or standing asleep to wait for the mail coach. Male figure in vivo, anterior view. Guilio Casare Casseri cut me and Adriaan van den Spieghel made me alive again with his art. De Humani Corpus Fabrica Libri Decem, 1627. Before them, before my makers I was a poor man. Nobody knew my name and I cannot remember it myself.” There are letters and numbers written on the page, indicating muscle groups. The skin of his arms is rolled down from the shoulder like shirt-sleeves in reverse. He wears a leather hat on his head and a length of cloth around his hips. He sits on a tomb: his own; not at all. His body was buried outside the cemetery and unmarked. He shared the ground with others of his social class, a bed of quicklime.

TAB XV is his name. Male figure, in vivo. The expression on his face is hard to define, a kind of reverie. He could be singing; a sad, slow ballad perhaps. TAB XV was no hero, led no armed uprising, was not assassinated for his beliefs but here, five hundred years on, he is an icon.