The Old Lid

Today, with the lamplighter having been called out early as a duty to counter fog, it didn’t seem to matter how old the two self-portraits I found in an attic happened to be, as they were obviously older than anyone alive today, but just which of the two men (or who appeared to be two men) owned them last of all and had thus been responsible for leaving this evidence of their life together in two mutually painted portraits in separate configurations of a shared would-be joy? Whatever the answer, I assumed these paintings, separated by frames, had been completed with oils from the same tubes and mixed upon the same palette, using the same palette knife that helped thickly smear the ready-made craquelure over the youthfulness and hope beneath it. Whether the two subjects, as sitters for themselves if not for each other, needed to disguise their fresh respective likenesses in this way, they certainly had been left with a twisted torment facing up front. I delved into the backs behind the canvases to find what markings I could below the painted surfaces that were, in turn, behind the vertical glass lids, as I painstakingly unnailed such backs, the dusty woodbases of the equally vertical containers to allow the parallel transparent lids to stay in place above the faces. The final shocking realisation was that, despite two backs, it possessed only one framed frontage effectively holding a single slow-blinking eyelid, with notably tickly lashes uncurling after being laced, until their new freedom today, within the texture of paint, the eye itself seeming to be like a slug with a pupil, still alive however many centuries had since gone by. Not a diptych, as such, to have its backs scratched, but something else altogether previously unknown to the art world, soon to become a new movement in Aesthetics and a philosophical watershed. A canny arrangement of bodily assuagement with oodles of abraded grey later discovered to be under the front counter of colour. Whether perpetrated by master or student, or by both, the result, now newly gaslit as a whole, was priceless. Indeed, it was the Real Muckie. A joy fulfilled.