JD Howse: Picture of Gray (1922), Henry Scott Tuke

The intermittent spread of drifting cargo ships and the spinning of wind turbines dotting the horizon line broke the stillness of the water’s surface, but the hill was as close to silence as they’d ever heard. Just the low the whipping of the wind through branches, and the occasional call of a gull, but otherwise all was peaceful. Joseph and Sebastian were sat on a bench, trying to be close without looking like a couple; there was always the nagging worry about being too affectionate in public, a worry that grew the further from a city they travelled. The town they were visiting had been sold to them by its slightly bohemian, recently renewed reputation as a day-trip spot to escape London, but walking back to their airbnb the night before, feeding each other chips, a group of old men sat on a curb with a case of Heineken had called them faggots. And so they sat, close, but not too close, with Joseph’s left hand resting on Sebastian’s right, looking out on the stillness of the ocean in silence.
Joseph got up and walked to the bookcase, ran his fingers along the glossy spines of the law textbooks, frowning slightly as he tried to make sense of their titles. On the shelf above were constructed lego sets of cruise ships and pirate frigates, on the shelf below them was a basket of sex toys and bottles of lubricants. In the corner of the room, the TV was playing a reality TV show where glass blowers were judged on who was the best at making glass art to unclear, arbitrary judging criteria. Sebastian was sat up in bed scrolling his phone; he looked up at Joseph and tilted his head to the side, watching him examine the shelves as it if were the first time he’d seen them, before calling out to him:
“How was therapy today?”
“Oh, same as it ever was.”
“Did you talk about me at all?”
“No, not really.”
“But you did a bit?”
“No, not really. Maybe a bit. It’s hard to remember the whole thing exactly as it happened. But mostly no. Mostly we were talking about the war.”
“Which one?”
“All of them. I have this dream where I’m being chased through a bombed out house by a mortar shell, and I can’t turn back to look at it. I can’t stop myself from checking the news. I sit on my phone scrolling from one website to the next checking in on all the terrible things that keep happening until I can’t bear it anymore and throw my phone off somewhere, and then I go and sit in front of the mirror and just look at myself until I don’t feel like I’m real anymore. Until I look like a monster.” 
“But you weren’t talking about me?”
“No, not really. I don’t bring you up much.”
“How many sessions do you have left?”
“I’m not sure anymore. It was meant to be four, and then they could go as high as eight, and then he kept asking for special permission to extend from his registrar. So now I’m up to 20. I figure at some point he’s going to have to either end the sessions or commit me.”
“I’d miss you if you got committed.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“But that’s not about you, right? You’ve never lived in a war zone. So why does it have such an effect on you? Don’t you feel like you’re being melodramatic?”
“I feel like my body is melting off my bones. I feel like there’s no hope that anything in the world will ever be good again. I feel like I’m stupid for thinking anything in the world was ever good. I feel like people in the street are staring at me and how hideously deformed and ugly I am as a proxy for the feeling that nobody has ever really cared about me or put my interests before anyone else’s. Which one is worse? We’re both dying, slowly; my whole life is a melodrama, a narrative conceit. My body changes every time I look at it and I’ve no idea who you are.”
“It doesn’t matter who I am. It only matters that this happened.” 
Joseph’s right shoulder was connected to his body below his pectoral, lopsided like a factory second. His chest was uneven, and built out further at its extremities than in its centre, where it came together as two curves, to give him the soft, rounded appearance of a build up of unwanted breast tissue. Below his chest and above his crotch were cut-out marks of muscular definition, but his stomach bulged between them, a pile of fat on the platter of his abdomen. His thighs bulged out and then met the confused, twisted lumps of his knees, that sent his legs down at odd angles to his disproportionately large feet. 
The TV was showing a poorly dubbed anime, which Sebastian was watching intently; Joseph pulled out his phone and started scrolling through Instagram. Beautiful men in speedos frolicked on the beach, and muscular men in tank tops lifted weights in red and black premium gyms, and happy men in suits placed their arms around each other and embraced as if the camera weren’t there, and they were always this happy, and this beautiful, and this muscular. Feeling dizzy and nauseous he attempted to distract himself by clicking through the stories of the people he followed; a man had set himself on fire outside an embassy, livestreaming the whole thing on twitch. 
The footage had been taken down by the platform but had already been captured by that point, and was now freely circulating. Frame after frame, the man burned, as people offered their two cents, and issued their press releases on what they thought this particular death meant in the context of this particular war. One woman, a notable American Poet, had put together a sort of greatest hits compilation of self-immolation photographs, and was rhapsodising on the nature of death as an act of solidarity, while her comment section praised her for her radical tenderness as if she hadn’t just forced people to look at images of people moments before their death. People seemed aware of, and oblivious to, the impact of the fact that they were sending out permutations of the images of a death of a man. 
Sebastian had once told Joseph that his ex had made him watch dark-web footage of ISIS captives being executed, and he’d thought it was terrible that someone could do that to someone. What is the difference between a photograph of a drowned toddler, a photograph of a burning man, being pinned down by your much older boyfriend as he shows you videos from rotten.com? There is no line between the abuse Sebastian suffered and the poet’s performative display of radical tenderness for her social media followers. There is no such thing as a line, everything is a sea. An image prompts compassion, but compassion doesn’t stick.
Sebastian pulled at Joseph’s wrist as they exited the pub into the street. The sun had set but it was still twenty degrees, and the rain felt good against his skin, which was covered in red blisters, purple scars, and yellow-blue bruises. Joseph was in no rush to get out of the rain. “Skin,” he said, in protest, “is basically waterproof.” To which Sebastian laughed and turned around. “Fine,” he muttered, “fine, fine” and they kissed in the street, in the rain, and made their way slowly, arm in arm, to the tube station. As they walked, Joseph thought about the way his chest caved in on itself, like a suit of armour crushed by a hammer; like he had no heart, and the empty, gaping cavity of his chest had finally collapsed. “Nature abhors a vacuum…” Sebastian whispered, as he pulled down Joseph’s briefs and opened his mouth. 
“I think you’re going to leave me” said Joseph, with a studied air of casual conversationalism. 
Sebastian looked up from his sketching. “When you talk, you move. You need to keep still so I can get you down on paper.” 
“I think you’re going to leave me,” said Joseph, panicking, sitting bolt upright on the sofa. 
“Why do you think that? What have I done to make you think that?”
“Everyone leaves me. Nobody cares about me. I work in terms of evidence and, statistically, everyone leaves me. So you will too. That’s why I think you will.” 
“I was never here. This all happened, but I was never here. How can I leave you if I don’t exist? I’m a figment of your imagination, a collation of characteristics, a cardboard cut-out of a man, a series of speech bubbles. I don’t love you because you don’t love me; you only love the idea of me because you can change it at will.” 
“I’m not even thinking about you. I’m thinking about my body as a pile of rotten meat being eaten by ants. I’m thinking of my face as a gravestone; every time you look at me it’s like you’re rubbing against my texture trying to take a copy of my existence so you have something to remember me by when you’re gone.”
“You’re being irrational. Just because I ignore you for weeks on end, and don’t reply to your messages, and have forgotten you exist, you think I’m going to leave you.”
“You’re not even listening to what I’m saying.”
“What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. Are you sure you don’t talk about me in therapy?”
“I want to have this argument with you but you never stick around long enough to have it.”
They were in bed, naked, having just fucked, watching Pink Narcissus. Joseph had his arm around Sebastian, who was resting heavily on his chest, watching the film in utter bemusement. “I feel like a baby,” he said, “watching brightly coloured things on screen and not understanding anything about them except that they’re brightly coloured.” Joseph had seen the movie before, and loved the movie. 
There was something about it, something about time; the way that ornately constructed sets were constructed purely for the purpose of being ornate, and then captured on film, and then ripped apart due to the space they occupied being needed for something else, equally ornate. Wasn’t this what it was all about? The drive to create purely through the need to create? “But isn’t it just porn?” asked Sebastian, “and not even good porn, you can’t see anything happen.” 
Joseph felt like he was being flushed down the toilet, like there was a boot on the back of his neck with his face in a urinal. He wrote until the nibbled edges of his fingers began to bleed. He remembered thinking that even if nobody would ever read it, he wouldn’t stop. That it was the only way for him to exist; thinking about things over and over again until they were finely wrought things that could be expressed as objects; words spewing out of him onto pages to purge himself of thoughts, and in turn become something entirely other than what he thought to start with. This was part of the problem, or else, this was his salvation; that in expressing himself, he ceased to be what he was expressing, and instead became free of it, became just a body, without any thoughts trapped inside of it. 
“I can’t help it,” Sebastian said, “I’m just too much of a people pleaser and when they asked I felt like I couldn’t say no.” 
You have a hard time getting your words out; “The thing is though, I am also a person, and I was not pleased by it. You already had plans with me, so just going to do something else makes me feel like I’m less important, and that hurts.”
“Stop yelling at me, I already said I’m sorry.”
“I’m not yelling, and you’re not sorry. If I were yelling I would have raised my voice; if you were sorry, you would have stopped doing this shit the first time I told you it upset me.”
“Well maybe we shouldn’t see each other if you hate me so much.”
“What the fuck are you even talking about Sebastian, in what world are we ‘seeing each other’? I haven’t seen you in person for 2 months.”
“It feels like you think I don’t care about you. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I can’t even follow your train of thought here Seb! What do you even want me to say? What is even happening?”
They were in bed, naked, having just fucked, watching A Chorus Line. Before turning it on, Sebastian had explained to Joseph that the stage musical was better, and laughed when Joseph had asked if they could watch the stage musical instead. “No,” said Sebastian, “the movie is all we have.” 
They sat watching the movie, which Joseph thought was deeply sad for reasons he could not explain and so didn’t bother to say anything about, and Sebastian sang along loudly to the musical numbers. They sat in bed, resting, watching bodies on the screen throw themselves around in acrobatic dance numbers. There is always a disconnect from the action as observed to the action as performed, just as there is a disconnect from the action as occurred to the action as recorded. 
Joseph leant Sebastian a copy of 86ed by David B Feinberg and Sebastian dutifully read it, but upon handing it back, said that he did not enjoy it. “It was sad,” he said, quietly, “even when it was funny it was so sad. When he answered the telephone at the end, I cried and cried and cried, as if I were trying to purge something from my body, something that couldn’t be purged.”
“Do you think,” asked Joseph, “that we would have met in the 80’s?”
“Maybe. I think if we were in our twenties in the 80’s we wouldn’t live to our thirties, either of us. You’d catch AIDS through a hangnail fisting a stranger at Pleasuredrome, and I’d throw myself into a river with my pockets full of books.”
“Books aren’t heavy enough to weigh you down.”
“That’s not the point. I’d tie a TV set to my ankle, one of those big 80’s box ones as deep as they are wide, and I’d throw myself off a pier.”
“Is this because of me?”
“No. It’s just because it’s the 80’s.”
“This got dark very quick.”
“You’re the one who asked.”
The screen was a blunt instrument; the screen was a dark void at the centre of the universe, a hole full of nothing. As they sat watching it, it contained everything, and then when they thought back on watching it it went back to being nothing again. Just something to point themselves at when they couldn’t talk to each other anymore. A distraction, a terrible thing. It whispered all the evils of the universe to them, and then flipped the channel to pornography. They watched themselves on it, they tried to escape it. The TV told them stories, and it told them lies, and they continued to watch because they needed to be distracted. 
Joseph felt the anxiety rising in his chest as he entered the museum; Sebastian would be meeting him afterwards. Would he show up? Marina Abramović’s show Gates and Portals was positioned as an opportunity for the internationally famous Abramović to remove herself from her art, with the idea being that she had become too big of a figure to allow the experience to speak for itself when she was present. The show had been thoroughly trashed by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, who took issue with Abramović’s absence, arguing that without Abramović’s presence the work was pointless; “it focuses your mind on the ideas behind the art – and they are wafer-thin.”
Joseph explained this to Sebastian as they sat in bed that evening, excitedly explaining the revelatory nature of the experience, and, gesticulating freely, decried Jones’ arguments as asinine. “There is no idea behind the art in Gates and Portals; that is the idea behind the art in Gates and Portals.”
“Right.” Sebastian said, stroking the hair on Joseph’s stomach.
Gates and Portals is an opportunity for stillness, for nothingness, for space and tranquillity. Jones wishes Abramović’s ‘extraordinary presence’ were in the room with him, complaining that the team of facilitators cannot replicate it, but they are not attempting to. They are there as neutral entities guiding you through an experience that systematically obliterates outside stimulus. 
Joseph became aware, looking at walls, sitting blindfolded in dark rooms, that he never experienced stillness, silence, absence in this way in his actual life. There is a kind of clarity and purity that overcomes your mind when it is so completely removed from input. In the final room, he was left and told he may stay as long as he’d like, in a nondescript space with a giant glowing crystal gateway in the middle of it. Joseph sat looking for what turned out to be over an hour, aware and unaware of time passing, and so enthralled by the stillness that everything else left him. And not once did his thoughts go to Abramovic. Not once did his thoughts go to Sebastian, who sat in the courtyard waiting for him for over 45 minutes, despite being late himself. It was a reversal. It was a transformation. 
Joseph tried to explain to Sebastian the trick she had played; creating a piece of performance art that removed herself as a figure and a symbol from the performance and instead focused entirely on the audience, leaving them alone with themselves, trapping them inside an abstraction, with their own thoughts. Sebastian was sceptical. 
In the Southbank Centre, one of the lifts up to the National Poetry Library was broken. The broken lift is a large glass box, which lets you see out on all four sides as it rises and falls, and contains an installation of noise art by Martin Creed, in which a chorus of voices serenade you in rising or falling tones as you ride. However the broken lift is broken, and so Joseph and Sebastian get into the small lift off to the side, which has barely enough room for 3 people to stand in it, and mirrors on all walls. When so many mirrors are placed so close together in such a small space, they replicate the space infinitesimally with an uncomfortable insistence, until at the very edges of the repetition you can see everything start to curve and go green. The world is too small. They exist. They exit. Sebastian flicks through a shelf of books and then whispers to Joseph “don’t you find all this confessional poetry kinda embarrassing?” They are asked to leave.
Further along the river, at Tate Modern, they went to see an exhibition by Yayoi Kusama titled Infinity Mirror Rooms. The title’s plurality was, technically, correct, in that there are two mirror rooms present in the exhibition. Kusama describes her mirror room installations as being like abstract paintings you can live within. The best abstract art offers up eternity to a viewer, a fixed plane that does not remain fixed, but instead roves with the eyes and the thoughts of its audience, allowing endless possibilities of interpretation and emotion to live within them. 
Joseph tried to explain to Sebastian the feeling he gets sat in a silent room filled with the Rothko Seagram Murals, for example; one of an unfathomably deep red and black sadness, the tranquillity of the images suggesting doorways, scabs, and ashes, violent emotions that you are unable to access through a sorrowful, numb disconnect. Sebastian thinks he will need to try it for himself to get it. Kusama’s proposition, to turn an abstraction into a concrete, physical world that one can live inside and get lost within, is a fascinating one, but this is not the experience of going to see an Infinity Mirror Room at Tate Modern. 
Tickets for the exhibition sell out months in advance, and the exhibition has been extended multiple times in order to meet demand. First, you queue to enter the exhibition, then you file past some photographs and a single Kusama sculpture that used to be freely available as part of the Tate’s collection display, until you reach the queue to enter the first room. Upon reaching the first room you are batched up with a group of strangers and told that you have exactly a minute in the room. The implication is simple. Get in, get your selfie, and get the fuck out, there is a queue to keep moving. 
Your selfie, should you choose to take it, has several strangers in it; there is no way to take a photograph without capturing everyone else in the room due to the way the mirrors are arranged. Should you not wish to take a selfie, you are awkwardly standing in the background, ruining a stranger’s selfie regardless. You repeat the process for the second room, there is a slideshow of images, and you leave. 
Joseph and Sebastian were crowded into a room with a mother and a rabble of five children under the age of ten, who began excitedly shouting and running through the room and the woman called out to them to be careful, while shooting embarrassed, apologetic. She tried to gather the group up together for a photograph, and Sebastian grabbed Joseph’s arm while the group had their backs turned. Pulling him in close, he took a photograph and the exact moment he kissed him on the cheek, a smile of surprise spread across his face. 
The door swung open and a guard told them to leave. As they turned to go, they saw the woman’s apologetic smile had turned into a thick set glare. She corralled her children away from them as they queued for the next room, and then kept her mask of barely concealed rage on through the entirety of that infinity, visible in every mirrored surface, inescapable. 
They sat together on a bench by the side of the river and looked out at the movement of the water. That had not been infinity. That had not even been an event in their lives.
Joseph held Sebastian as he slept, trying to find the point where the pattern in the wallpaper of his bedroom repeated. Like shadows on a wall, men sprawled outwards over the wallpaper, bustling together like a city, the geometries of the world unable to decide their relation to the figures looking out from it. It was inconsistent, and so it was truthful, like the wallpaper of the city itself, with men coming out of the dog ears and lifting the seams between realities, where the shadows of London cast back shadows onto themselves in tesselating grids of street, building, head, chest, body. 
At first glance, there was no structure to the creating wave of men, then upon inspection, a body became distinct, only for the billow of a shirt to cease its integrity, where a hem transitioned into the opulent ruffle of a neckline, and was met by a harsh border of a neighbour’s shoulder, and the whole thing becomes unstable once again, as he moved his eyes across the scene, trying to make sense of it all. The first man at the edge of existence was barely tangible, his hat given shape by a torn edge, and his body too slender to be fully materialised, with hatchings of back from the void he partially emerged from, encroaching upon his garments. 
The figures who moved across him billowed into existence, in direct opposition to the detailed geometries of their world, which began to fall apart as they proliferated and distinguished themselves from each other. Joseph began to wonder if he was seeing the same body reiterated again and again or a crowd of individuals, distinguished from each other. 
One man was green, three were orange, with tentative blue abysses offering space between their hooded bodies. This man, dressed in a suit, appeared to be part of the orange tangle, only for his head to be wrapped in the same purple that swallowed seven more heads into an amorphous bundle of bodies and cloth, before colour failed altogether, and the world became merely a whirligig of outlines, where each figure was only a face and the barest suggestion of motion, moving left into a tangled knot of swirls and borders. 
This was one conception of the universe, where the impermanence of a body was mirrored by the impermanence of the understanding of a body. All things hold back into nothingness there, only to reveal themselves again in infinite reiterations, each one the same while at the same time being different purely through virtue of its existence, or lack thereof, being called forth and dismissed again and again by observation and description. 
When the colourless men met the red again, they were taken into the crowd. There, all the paper was either a face or a looming tower, the height of the city moving back, west to east against the progress of the bodies. They clustered together and looked out directly at Joseph as he observed them. But locking eyes with each of them drew and uncomfortable awareness in him, that they were not looking at him, but rather at their creator, who dismissed that distinction, knowing instead that they moved through him onto the paper, compelling themselves into existence through sprawling patterns over a blink white roll of paper, which was then pasted up onto the walls of his bedroom. 
The flair of a man’s body repeated itself, but was darker, more filled in with black ink that its first iteration. Where the hem of a man’s dress meets the thrown up hip of another man’s body, he seems to topple forward in the continuing motion of the crowd, and again the spiral appears on a man’s hat, then in the disproportionate excess of the bottom of his shirt, a small figure emerges, who is the first to find himself, once again, inside the heavy black etchings of the void. 
What did it mean to have all these men exist, in some large amorphous whole as much as they were distinct figures? Why was he constantly drawn to the heaviest concentrations of red? The faces seemed to become smaller, then the bodies concretely were so, merely the barest possible flickers of detail that allowed them to be called into existence as they met the black edge of their reality, like a circle of spirals, coming in and out of themselves, in an infinite tumble of bodies and cloth against the abstraction of existence. 
The next morning, Sebastian slipped his body out of Joseph’s arm and got dressed silently in the dark, dawn just peaking through the windows. He sat in the hotel cuck chair for 2 to 37 minutes, checking his phone, and then tied on his shoes; all he had brought with him to the wedding were the expensive brogues he’d bought for work, and they were entirely unfit for his purposes, but he had no other option. He took one last look at Joseph, the way his stomach rose and fell as he slept, the peace of his inert face, with the sun casting a knife edge of light across his body, the gold of his hair, his pale skin, his lovely fingers gripping the duvet as if he were scared it would leave. 
He tried to make no noise as he closed the door behind him, took the lift to ground level, and wound his way through the deserted cobbled streets out of town. He walked along the road for what felt like hours, paving slab after paving slab, the sea on his right hand side, until finally he found the right place, facing out to the open ocean, with nothing on the horizon, and stepped down a set of concrete steps into the sand. 
Sebastian removed his coat and folded it into a neat parcel of fabric, which he placed on a rock at the edge of the beach. Bending down, he undid his laces, and slipped off his brogues, then his socks, placing them inside their relevant shoe before carefully balancing both shoes on the coat. It was so warm, the sun was so bright, the weight of his body made him sink into the sand, which was rising up around his toes. He carefully undid his tie, the practised movements stumbling slightly by the quivering of his fingers; he threw it down where the shoes and coat rested on their rock and took a step forward away from the meadow. His fingers now shaking, he clumsily fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, ripping at his sleeves and letting it fall to the ground behind him as he picked his pace up to a jog, tugging at his belt buckle and the zip of his fly. As his trousers slipped down his legs they caused him to trip headlong into the sand, and so he rolled onto his back with the sun burning everything white and blue, ripping the fabric over his feet, rolling onto all fours, struggling off with his briefs as he got upright, leaving them in the sand as he began to run across the beach, as fast as he’d ever run before, headlong into the sea, the warm embrace of the sea, which seemed to pull him in, the waves rolling in the wrong direction, embracing him and pulling him away from the shore, and under its surface. 
Under the surface, he allowed his lungs to fill up with the liquid, and soon he was breathing it as if it were air, the salt crusting around his lips like crystals, and seaweed tangled in his hair. He found he was able to walk with very little resistance, as if each step along the bottom of the ocean were as regular and natural as a step on a street, through a city. He walked for miles until miles were no longer an adequate measure for the distance he’d travelled. 
He walked through ships where dead sailors embraced each other, their skeletal remains tangled together, and he walked over whale falls, where entire ecosystems had come into existence for decades following a single death. There was no light coming down from the surface any longer, but his eyes, having been replaced by pearls, were able to see everything in precise detail, in so much detail that it threatened to overwhelm him.
Used condoms billowed in the warm current, ballooned open and drifting like blooms of jellyfish. Sebastian reached out his hand to feel the softness of their gelatinous forms as they floated past him, reflecting light in shades of yellow and white into the endless blue of the water. It was curious; he felt they ought to be hurting him, but it was like his skin was numb, able to feel the physical contact but attribute no sensation to it, feeling the serrated edges of condom wrappers shred his fingers to ribbons and associating nothing more than the parting of flesh to the experience. There was no pain; there was no pain at all, and as he looked at the wounds on his hands, they crusted over with crystals of salt and then healed into immaculate flesh, blue and translucent like the water. 
He soon began to feel that he had no need of a body; what purpose did existence serve him? His chest was scaled like the body of a fish, and, picking at it like a scab, he began to let filigreed fragments of himself come away from his body and be taken by the current, slowly at first and then frenzied by the adrenalin he pulled at his viscera, emptying it out of himself into the ocean like knots of silken handkerchiefs from a magicians hat. He was a god in the water, and gods had no need for their bodies. He was everything and nothing; the current carried him in the same sense as he carried the current. He had grown sick to death of the weight of narrative, it was better to be free, to cease to exist, to write himself out of the story into the ocean. 
Joseph watched it all happen on television. He was lying in the dark, lit only by the light of the screen, curled up into a foetal little ball on his bed. He pulled the blankets tighter around him and felt salt sting the rotting corners of his sunken eyes, rolling down the broken ridge of his nose and onto his dry, chapped lips. “I knew it,” he whispered, “I hate myself, I hate everything, I want to die, I want to be loved.” 
I am sorry, I love you. There is nothing else to say. I feel like I’m getting there, and then it falls apart. It’s impossible to tell if that’s choking or laughing. Consider the hedgehog, huddling up against another hedgehog for warmth, and in the process hurting the other hedgehog and likewise being hurt in turn. The water filled his mouth and he dreamed.