Tate Britain, Bacon and Moore Room, 12.58

Triptych August 1972

Two hours here for research before train back to the coast. Position myself on the bench so the middle painting of the three is in the centre of my vision. End of the bench, a school pupil sketching; they are littered around the gallery with their blazers on and their pencils tightly grasped, opinions loud. I like them. I like how certain they are. Wonder when/if this certainty will lessen. This one sits looking intently at the painting in the same way I am about to. We do not look at each other. The steady rhythmic click of Donald Rodney’s Visceral Canker is audible as ghost almost, two rooms away, the artificial blood pumping its way round and round and round, as it must all night too.

For a long time Bacon was too much. Now he is not. I don’t know what this says about me. Or I do, but would rather not know.

Sitting like this, looking as intently at these near unbearable paintings is a feat of endurance more than enjoyment, in the same way the shower is when I turn it to cold every morning, just to start the day with something difficult. I think I might be able to live with one on the wall, but all three, a mournful stretch.

Yesterday, a remarkably good day. And now I have to ruin it with this.

No. Not ruin.

Look. Look for so long they aren’t what they were but what they are. Something new reveals itself. The central seated figure in 1 and 3, Bacon’s partner, George Dyer, dead by suicide the year before, disappears as he appears; appears as he disappears. Against the black void of the doorway parts of his body are not so much missing but never there, in each, where the heart should sit, only a void. Appearing, disappearing before Bacon’s eyes. The inevitably of all love stories becoming ghost stories, ‘til death do us part is to consent to this haunting. The frustration of the survivor who cannot capture the essence of what’s left.

What’s left?

The void. Flesh against the void. All that’s left is flesh and so much of it, spilling and moving and no longer contained but rouge; and flesh is pink, is ectoplasm, is candy almost, oozing down the back of the chair. Not feet. In neither image, feet. He cannot run. How hobbled the sitter is. How captive. How bound. The bounds of partnership. How consumed this figure is with parts missing like this. No blood. No bone. For Bacon, only flesh. All only flesh. And obliteration. And flesh consumed, rotting pink almost. How love consumes. How cannibal it all is. How mournful it is. The guilt of being left behind. The fear. The love that’s in the paintings, still. Flesh, bubblegum pink. The colour of fantasy. Still, search for blood. For the mess of it. Only blood in the third figure, at the left temple of the sitter, or where the temple would be if temple was not disappeared now, only a thin line, some further down the leg. Could be sweat almost, in the way Jesus sweated. How much stress it takes for sweat to become blood.

How carnal it is. How fleshy. On the last visit, Avery became convinced Dyer’s wearing an oxygen mask. Stand. Peer to try and see it, hands behind back. Security guard walks in. Pupil has left. Jonathan Safran Foer said in an obscure short story the impossibility of not falling in love with a stranger next to you in an art gallery, but not in front of this, think of what would begin in front of this. And yet the colours, strangely carnival. Carnival - to remove the flesh. Language giving the game away again.

Sit back down, pay attention now to the middle painting. Same colours but different perspective. In the other two, Bacon views from standing, but this, this is viewed from the floor. Security guard leaves, crouch to test the theory. Yes. First figure joined by a second, both naked now, could be wrestling, could be making love; could be killing him, could be saving him; could be Thanatos, could be Eros; could be reading too much into it. But the upper figure, muscled and dominant and Bacon surely and the other, face to the floor, if there was a face to face the floor with. Feet fused. Always the feet, one flesh, bound together now. An act of consummation. Language, giving the game away again. If a game here, it’s painful one. Stare long enough and a snake emerges from the lower figure’s ear, surely not, not a snake in the ear. Surely not. Blink. Still there.

Nothing sure when staring at this for so long. The horror of what we contain. Under. Inside. Before. During. After.