You know Dublin, I presume? It was there, in Merrion Square to be exact, that I met Bellows for the first time. It was a grey-green February. The city had been enjoying a last breath of wintertime that hung in the light suggestion of spring, both battling with one another for the few days around my birthday and leaving the city in a fog that refracted the light in the evenings, smudged its orange sodium-lustre. It was out of this fog that Bellows had moved toward us; our group the final commission from my birthday party. We had decamped to the park for reasons I now, many years later, no longer remember: there were lots of us, comings and goings, and out of the wet fog bank had come Bellows, attracted like one dog to another dog’s piss, his feet leaving dark crests in the old park’s grass.

At the time, the last lap of my lyric age, I spent my days at a circular table, a faux mahogany disc, looking out a sash window. I thought I was writing a sprawling portrait of Dublin at the start of the new century, distracting myself from a lost first love – not that such a project could be an antidote to a love-hurt heart. My view was mundane, yet I remember it being terribly entertaining: I had a redbrick wall abutting the part of the building I lived in, across the way was a flat, dull Georgian gable, one singular frosted window punctuating it I remember, small relief, a dirty black stain below its sill a teardrop in urban sorrow. Two pigeons, public lovers, fluttered and cooed between this sill and my own, their public displays of affection mocking my solitary travails – self deprecating, lonesome and fruitless as they so often were. There were sounds, much like the sounds I hear now in this sleepy town: a tocsin seeking attention, a constant electrical hum, a protesting church bell, a car door closing. And all this, at the time, had been my city. Each of us has their own city, including your good self, but it can never be the same city forever. I was dull to this fact at the time: I thought my friends and I were in the process of inheriting Dublin, that documents were being handed over and we would reach the mantle of the academy, the establishment, draw out the country’s newest art. Jejune, so the artist must begin his days.

Of all the painters in my circle Dave Hardiman was my closest friend. Dave knew of Bellows before the rest of us, had grown tired of him before we had even set eyes on his skinny length. They were rivals: Dave envied Bellows’ untamed run to the muses and mother perception, Bellows – so Dave had told me many a time in his studio – cursed the discipline and exposure Dave enjoyed. The warring twins, the North, the South. It was the way of it then and not one of us knew which was the more admirable direction. So yes you’re right in saying that Bellows was an artist himself, a failed artist mind you, a scrounger, a skinflint, trouble: he was a mad bastard and he mirrored our worst fears about our sinking artistic selves. But worst of all: he was free, asocial, a great friend of Mr. Asperger.

So up Bellows came and joined our group by the joker’s chair, a bronze memorial to Dermot Morgan. He grabbed a bottle and started to talk in an active but odd way; he talked and one or two of us listened as the rest ran around the fenced-in park, feeding off each other’s drunkenness.  Grasping for subjects, beyond sense, we were bollocking on about the city, how best to show it in art, or some such nonsense.

— What do you think the best way is to show a city? I asked him.

— Look at, people don’t understand often, Bellows started in his lilting Dublin burr, how cities work. They see the perspective but not the vanishing point. But let me tell you, I’ve walked through the vanishing point of Dublin city, it is a gate marked NO ENTRY CCTV IN OPERATION, it smells of piss and is littered with used johnnies, the pavement is cracked and the gutter runs a leak, and the night before some young one puked there. Think of it like this, answer me here now: why is it the humble cow is always, without fail, drawn much smaller than its real life beautiful form and the pesky, invisible flea always drawn larger? No, you don’t know why but telling by your smile ye are amused by this injustice. Let me tell ye a story to show what I’m talking about, he asked.

We had exhausted each other and were scared of any let-up so we let him get on with his tale.

— One morning Jerry Celine – do ye know Jerry? Awful dumbwit – Jerry and me woke up on a couch, without our bearings, cut loose. We started talking about where we possibly were in the city, the night before a blur to both of us. It got complicated when the silly bastard thought the Liffey flowed down the opposite way to the sea. Can you imagine? He was set on the idea that the Liffey flowed away past the Four Courts, on toward the Brewery, the Park, and the mountains beyond. That was the start of it, this mad fucking morning started when this scraw boy dragged me off the couch in Stonybatter we had crashed on to go look at the dirty river slouching in its trough. Look, he pointed, look at that water there and tell me its not flowing that way! And what direction do you think it was flowing? Due fucking west, I tell you! Due fucking west, away toward the park, the mountains. What with the wind. Well with what I don’t know any more. Nothing was set. I was shaking, and him all smiles and victory. The delight of the dumb simpleton. The rising sun pulled the plug, and the city was sinking so it was. There was a mad haze, a full-on crowd of red colours, no, more crimson, like a bawdy wet dream, baroque. I tell you what it was like actually, it was like the Yeats back over across the road, Bellows said pointing behind him toward the National Gallery.

I knew the painting Bellows was talking about. At the time I felt let down by Yeats, I studied him closely and wished to find in him a Munch, or in real moments of naïveté a Warhol, a Rauschenberg, or even – why not? – a Richter. But now I respect Jack Yeats, I can see Morning in the City clearly in my mind.

— Fat brush strokes, wild. It was like we had woke up to another world, a real world of morning and blood and vino rosso. Sweet Jesus I said to Jerry Celine, what are you doing to my head? The river runs fucking east, I’m telling you. He smiled. He smiled with the scary menace of the really stupid. He walked, and I let him walk. I was left on my own so I was, by the river, by the courts. Their heaviness, water and stone, the green dome – they were all transformed in the morning into gates of some sort of hell. The inferno of the city that morning terrified me. I can’t say what was happening exactly, what change he had put on me, but it was there all around me, and I’m telling you now so you’ll know yourself when it comes, when the vanishing point is a step away. I can’t draw you a picture with directions on it, or the point of a clock-face that will caution you. All you need to see this city is the briefest of glimpses, the most sidelong of glances. A bad nights sleep, a visit to an early house, a swell of coloured love. Isn’t that right brother? He said, nudging me blithely, Bellows knowing our business better than we ourselves did. Trust me: an opening amidst the cityscape, a glint of streetlight in morning fog, the chitchat of train passengers as you doze off at the end of your day. Whatever.

That morning Bellows told us he was through the gates, past the vanishing point, the old city no longer there. Piece by piece this other city formed itself, shifting but clear enough to see, to feel. Neither horrified nor amazed with this glowing city, this hung-over city, he went about his business as he would normally, fresh from some young one’s couch: he went to get a breakfast roll and a pint of milk.

— Is that guy still talking? Dave Hardiman came along, shouting. Would you ever fuck up Bellows and go home. If you can find it. Laughter: dark laughter off in the shadows. I offered him my bottle to keep him focused, from pity or generosity I am not sure.

— Don’t listen to them fuckheads, he said defiantly to me, they don’t know that it is a contradiction to be at home in a city. This city at any rate. If nothing stops your gaze he went on, your gaze will go far. And hear this, the city is what will always stop it, it is what catches it. But this morning, lads, this fucking morning Jerry Celine shaved off all the angles to everything and the hangover and the shakes and the hour or two on the grotty couch, all showed me the point to this other city hidden to the likes of Dave Hardiman, to all of us. Isn’t that right Hardiman, he hollered into the bushes, you fucking ignorant prick (we all smiled in the darkness).

Bellows’ new city was difficult to get a hold of in the damp dawn. Some listeners drifted off to join in the drunken game of hide and seek the others were all playing. I lit a cigarette and offered Bellows one. When he lit it, he went on with his story.

He told me how he went across the river, as steady as he could, and tried to keep it together. The horror came on him, nothing doing to get rid of it; what would happen, he was thinking, to the city if you took the bridges away?

— Division, that’s what! But you see, he said excited, scared almost, that is what I’m telling you, there was no need to do anything: the city was dividing itself up anyhow.

He made his way to Dame Street, the Londis there – always had been his favourite place for a breakfast roll. The young one, this fine one from Poland, always gave him the eye, you know, gave it to him right there in the morning. Wake you right up so it would. I remember taking this on board. You look very sad, she said to him, out of the blue, you look unhappy today.

— I had to clutch onto the glass display case Bellows said, her breakfast wares like vomit collected off the morning streets. The mad beauty of her, would break you in half. What are you on about? I had shouted at her. Remember that happiness is all around and it can be yours as much as anyone’s, this is what she said, I kid you not. She was smiling, this gorgeous, stiff in the pants smile. I couldn’t say anything, I stumbled out of her sight, off back onto the red street. Two buses trundled by, a group of Italians, a black man on a mobile phone.

He could remember it all, there hidden was the thing that kept everyone in the city together, the city itself, a chain connection: its rings happiness and unhappiness in equal measure. He could barely handle the idea of it, all that sadness in the city, all that happiness, hidden from one to another.

— What a morning, he said drawing on his cigarette, right up close to my face, you wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

— No, I said (I had to say something to calm him down), you wouldn’t by the sounds of things.

— I’ve painted a few pictures, Bellows said retreating from under my face and then, up on his tippy-toes, shouted: I’ve painted a few pictures isn’t that right Hardiman? But never have I been able to capture this morning, he said back in my direction.

— Really? I said, I think I can understand why.

— The lurid redness of it, he went on. Impossible. Everything was upside down so it was. The city had never been so naked in front of me. I saw the pigeons scrabble after some crisp packet and all I saw were the swallows on their way till no time: I saw, and you are going to just have to take my word for it, the end of the millennium of the Irish underdog, and the beginning of the new millennium of the risen man, the well presented morning paper and cappuccino man. Because trust me when you’ve been out all of a night on the batter and you’re swaying there by College Green near out of your senses and you see a squabble of pigeons scatter at the feet of a well heeled gent of financial exchange all you see is the moment of the pigeon being replaced by the swallow, the underseer replaced by the overseer. That’s the best way to show a city in art, that’s our job, the task at hand: to see this, to show this. The later trying desperately to free itself of the former, and always, as I see it, failing.

— I think I know what you mean, I lied.

— You know that morning, Bellows said more calmly than before, the way I remember it the whole city had other cities hiding behind it. I saw it clearly. The Gaelic city had the English city there alongside it, which one first or second impossible to know. And behind them, or in front of them, you had the Polski city, the Frenchy city, the African city. The American, we-are-the-world, bullshit city. And when you’re seeing all that, how pray tell, are you supposed to function? I thought of going to the early house seeing how I hadn’t managed the breakfast roll. It was that bad. For every building I saw a ruin. I was down by Tara Street staring at a black puddle of shite, seeing the floods to come. I was freaking out!

Laughter, snickering in the dark. Then:

— Go on Bellows, go on. Pay no heed to that eejit.

— Well it’s there for all to see. And when you see it you’ll know what the job is. To draw out the hidden we keep so well undercover. It’s all on its way to the landfill, Bellows said with a sweep of his arm, its all a thing in passing: the city, all that’s in it. Because I tell you what – a fucking bin truck, around the corner from Pearse Street a fucking bin truck came flashing! Rubbish! Relegated since all time outside the body city and I saw then, this the final layer of icing on the freak-out cake, that it was amassing. In darkened allays, its sentries stationed along the city’s footpaths and streetcorners, each building secured with bins, rubbish bins, waste centres and chutes, dust containers, full hoover bags, recycling boxes, bosca bruscars, ashtrays, sanitary towel bins, wastepaper baskets. Waiting, ready, about to overrun us all…

He had emptied himself of all he had to say on the matter of the city, and the artist’s job to portray it. Bored, he finished the bottle, my bottle, that had been in his hand and threw it behind his shoulder. It landed out in the grass lawn, a dark marker in the white dew-field.

— Now lads, I’ll go get the waste to recycle, I’m not one to litter, if you know what I mean. Then in close under our faces: Only I’ll get to it by cartwheels. Don’t get used to anything lads, familiarity’s the artist’s death knell. He did a backflip then, right by our sides, the whole skinny length of him, his hands landing on the grass verge; he remained upside down for a moment or two, the quietest moment I’ve ever known in that loud city. I could see his smile in the dark. Someone let out a hoot. And off he went then, wobbly cartwheels out across the crested lawn. Others joined him. The debate was over. We finished our bottles, wandering in chat, someone else starting a long story about crab fishing. The sun rose and the active ones went on greeting the city with cartwheels.

There’s the fog, and one more year-notch to my age-stick, and as I write I’m no longer by my circular table, no longer privy to the private lives of two shy pigeons. There’s the electrical hum and soon there’ll be six protesting bells. But there isn’t much art; that has sunk, like so much of Dublin, that city it was to represent. And there is no love: that too is still lost. Yet I can still see Bellows there, wheeling over and over in the grey dawn, and I feel now as I felt then: that what you need for that city Dublin, like all the rest, is nothing less than a new lexicon of experience by which to read the familiar streets, the prosaic parks, the immediate river, the self-evident sprawl, the rising sea.

To follow someone for a working day, a stranger, and document your findings. Once at your door to keep on walking for another fifteen minutes and see where you find yourself. To decide what your favourite street is and then endeavour to see its buildings from behind, from inside, from above. To skulk in alleyways, cul-de-sacs, lanes and any dark spaces between buildings. To go to the tallest building and demand to partake of the view from the top (usually, you’ll be welcome) and look at the city from on high. And to take pictures. Or perhaps just to have a bad night’s sleep, to pay a visit to an early house, or to feel, simply, a swell of coloured love.

Cadaverine Magazine 2008