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A string of mysterious echoes
THE best mysteries are solved in the dying moments of the
last scene. Turn the final page, and all the facts will be
spread before you, all the leading characters assembled and
the solution revealed.
I cannot offer anything so satisfying. I have been drawn into
a mystery full of wonder and fascination, pulsating with magic,
but the last page has been ripped out.
All I can do is lay before you the facts, introduce the characters
and invite you to be the detective.
There are five bodies, but there has been no crime. I discovered
this mystery in a pitch-dark room, and none of the many clues
sheds any light.
And at the heart of the investigation something essential
is missing. There is a positive absence - a star-shaped hole.
In my favourite Sherlock Holmes story, just such a gap points
the detective to the solution.
A horse called Silver Blaze has been stolen, and Holmes draws
Watson's attention to "the curious incident of the dog
in the night-time."
Watson protests, "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock
Holmes.
I think Holmes might refer to my mystery as "the curious
incident of the Jew at the exhibition".
And Watson would warn him, "Steady on, Holmes. Can't
say that sort of thing, you know. Chap being Jewish has got
nothing to do with it."
"That," Holmes replies, "is what I find so
curious."
No mystery can be solved, as every detective insists, without
facts - so here is all the concrete information I have:
The leading suspect is a Californian named Bill Viola. It's
a name straight out of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler,
but Viola isn't a crooked cop or a gem smuggler: he's an artist.
The five bodies are angels that rise up through water on television
screens. And the mystery is that I walked into a video installation
at the Tate Modern, and was confronted by a scene from my
own imagination.
Bill Viola's artwork, Five Angels Of The Millennium, runs
continuously in a blacked-out chamber on the Tate's top floor.
Each of five screens shows the surface of a pool or a lake,
flooded in colour, almost still but shivered by ripples just
strong enough to mask whatever lies below.
The room is filled with the echoing, suffocating noise of
immersion. A throbbing rush pounds your ears, like blood in
your brain when you cannot breathe. And suddenly, with a thunderous
roar, a body erupts from one of the pools.
This happens over and over. Sometimes a span of several minutes
elapses between eruptions; sometimes two bodies sound almost
simultaneously.
Each screen appears to be running a loop of film independently
of the others, and all the loops are of differing lengths
- it's possible that once a day, or once a month, the five
loops are in synch, so that all the angels appear together.
I have no idea how long I stood in the room, mesmerised. The
screens gently submerged me in a state of deep meditation,
as if I had been tipped back and held under water.
Viola believes the work was partly inspired by a boating accident
when he was about ten.
He remembers that he almost drowned but was saved by an angel
who appeared as a light, floating above the surface, who reached
down to save him.
I cannot find any references in angelic lore to such a miracle.
Biblical angels are saviours and heralds, but they appear
in fire and light, not from water.
My own name, Uri, recalls the angel Uriel, the Fire Of God,
the Prince Of Lights, who stood at the Gates of Eden with
a flaming sword.
The Archangel Gabriel rules over the element of water. He
is supreme among angels not only in Judaism but in Christianity
and Islam - but nowhere can I find an image of him rising
from water, or reaching into water. Viola says he originally
intended to film a drowning but, running the tape backwards,
"inadvertently created images of ascension, from death
to birth."
He calls the screens Birth Angel, Fire Angel, Ascending Angel,
Creation Angel and Departing Angel.
If angelic myth ignores this image, and Viola discovered it
by accident, how is it possible that it formed the crux of
a novel which, while I was writing it, absolutely possessed
me?
The central image of my story Ella is of a drowning - the
protagonist, Peter, almost dies in a boating accident, but
is saved by an angel who floats above the surface as he struggles.
Ella herself dreams constantly that she is staring down into
water, trying to save a drowning boy. And when she herself
is almost dead from an eating disorder, Peter deliberately
drowns himself in a misguided effort to restore her energy.
Staring at Five Angels Of The Millennium was like staring
at out-takes from my imagination, as though Viola had filmed
the book and left me to find out on my own.
He is not Jewish. His biography describes a suffusion of Zen
Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism in his video
installations, which date back to the early Seventies, exploring
concepts of birth, death and consciousness.
I am certain that this image of the angel erupting through
water to rescue us from drowning
is a universal one - everyone understands it and is awed by
it, regardless of their religious heritage.
Yet I cannot find any reference to it in myth or holy script,
and both Viola and I seem to have discovered it unconsciously.
My only half-answer is that it might remind us of the moment
of our births - but that's vague enough to be virtually meaningless.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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