Oh My Beloved, How Sweet It Is

Oh my beloved
how sweet it is
to go down
and bathe in the pool
before your eyes
letting you see how
my drenched linen dress
clings married
to my body
Come, look at me.

That love poem was written a thousand years before Christ.

...We've come a long way down - maybe now is the moment for you to look up.

Her portrait was painted from life so that when she died her likeness, painted on this piece of wood, could be bound with cloth onto her mummy. A kind of passport for the long journey from Fayum to the Kingdom of the Dead.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

At any moment...

And why have they not aged when most other portraits look old? Giacomettis look old. Paintings by Rubens look old, and they look old because the artists were studying their sitters to make a record for prosperity. And in Fayum something different happened.

Did we love them in another life?

The looking was the other way round.

Of course it was.

The Fayum painter wasn't summoned to make a portrait, to register what man or woman looked like.

That's right. It was the painter who had to submit to being looked at by his client. And then he painted what it was like being looked at by her, or him.

And the sitters knew what the portrait was for. They were looking at Death's painter. They knew it.

And the painter saw how each one looked at him differently.

And the sitter looking at Death's painter, and the painter who was submitting to be looked at - both of them in their looks used the second person sungular:

thou, toi, esy, tu, ti... up there on the street it's different, isn't it? Faces look up at us from every corner but they are not there as passports for the Kingdom of the Dead.

Nor as records for posterity. The faces up there harangue, provoke, they provoke envy, they create new appetites, sharpen the sharp edges of ambition and, occasionally, they provoke pity - combined with a sense of impotence. And they are all haranguing, because each voice needs to outplead and eliminate the previous one. And we up there, we come to believe that that din is a proof of our being alive.

Listen. Here it's very quiet and the wind has dropped. I've got a portrait out of my pocket. There's a silence in her face. She appeals for nothing. They appeal for nothing, the Fayum faces, they ask for nothing. They look at us and their look says -

We know we are alive.

And you are alive because you are looking at us.

Thou, esy, toi, tu, ti, thou, esy, toi, tu, ti...

Oh my beloved
how sweet it is
to go down
and bathe in the pool
before your eyes
letting you see how
my drenched linen dress
clings married
to my body
Come, look at me.