Bradley Septimus Nodule, who has passed away (or as he would no doubt have phrased it, “returned home, for I was summoned” (I take the phrase from his unpublished magnum opus, “We, Worthless Bags of Skin Forged in the Heavens”)) as the result of an abseiling accident in the fenlands of rural Lincolnshire, will not be a name familiar to readers of national newspapers and magazines, loiterers on the internet’s information highway, or devourers of social media laundry-twaddle. That was exactly his intention.
I count myself fortunate to have lived close to, in fact surrounded by, Nodule’s enormous body of artistic works. I was his lodger for 32 years (and am, by the way, currently sleeping on my sister’s couch while I look for somewhere to live, Nodule’s house having passed to a brother I did not know he had and who was very quick to kick me out; I had no rental contract – Nodule cared nothing for such trivialities. If you know of anywhere that might be available for rent, please let me know. (No, I don’t know how. But please try.)) and I was able to see and read etc. his art as it was strewn about the house, on the condition that I never took any of it off the premises and, to be exact, kept my “big mouth shut”.
Bradley Septimus Nodule, circa 2008
I can see Nodule now, looking very gloomy, resting his face on his chin, and taking another sip from a tumbler of neat Scotch before asking me for an advance on my rent because he was having what he would refer to as cash flow problems. He was unlovable, certainly, but he was wise. Or at least, he gave the impression of having wisdom, which I would describe as the impression of being the kind of man whom one felt had had old shoulders on his head from a very early age.
What a treasure trove of unknown art is in that house! But that bloody brother struck me as the kind of imbecile who would hire a skip and throw everything out without a second thought so he could get the place cleared and on the market asap.
Nodule (or, as his friends (both of them) called him, affectionately, “The Nodge”) was (in no particular order)
1. A writer who had no truck with those for whom the credo of “What is the point of writing if no-one reads you” leads them to publish any old drivel; he once characterised his novels and poetry, of which there is a lot, all of it unpublished, as an endeavour to put round holes in square pegs;
2. A painter who never exhibited, because (as he put it in the first of his (unpublished) autobiographies, From Babyhood to Manhood: My Incredible Journey, “Whenever I’ve been to an art gallery it was full of vegans”;
3. A sculptor, but his creations, which he usually made in his basement, were always too large, too heavy, and altogether too unwieldy to get up the very rickety stairs, and so almost always, as soon as they were finished, he would take a sledgehammer to them and start on something new;
4. And he composed music by the lorryload, although by his own admission he was not especially musical, and only owned two musical instruments, a stylophone and his old schooldays recorder, but he did not let that stop him: in another (unpublished) autobiography, Life Before the Afterlife, he pointed out that “anyone can make a noise”, and no-one has yet been able to satisfactorily disprove that – not anyone worth listening to, anyway.
All of which may or may not explain why none of Nodule’s artistic output has made its way into the public arena. In short, he did not want it to. For my part, I have nothing but admiration for his works (although I did not like all of it) and, if I could find someone able to handle some complicated legal wranglings, I also have a significant claim to ownership of some of it, although I suspect it’s already too late. He would often ask me to lend a hand, e.g. to hold his brushes if he was painting, or to help him lift a heavy piece of wood or metal or stone when he was sculpting. And I’ve lost count of the number of times I sharpened his pencils, or mopped up spilt ink – tasks he refused to undertake, saying they were beneath him – when he was writing. He wrote everything by hand, by the way. I do not know why.
For what it’s worth, I hereby stake a claim, in writing, to the following:
Nodule wrote several novels, and I read some of them even though his handwriting was often next to indecipherable. My favourite was Adored To Death, in which, I believe, the main character (Benjamin) was modelled on yours truly. In the novel, as I understood it, Nodule envisioned a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that has solidified since the 18th century, and leveraged the generic restraints of the form to a disguised autofiction in which the author imagined himself as transgender and worked to abolish gender exclusivity altogether. At least, I think that’s what was going on, although I would be open to being corrected if anyone else ever read it, and I could never discuss it with Nodule himself because he would not talk about sex or gender or anything anywhere near any of those things. I forget who it was that said “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” I think that’s relevant here.
I loved some of his paintings, and he once did a portrait of me, which I believe still exists somewhere in the house. I don’t know why he didn’t give it to me. It’s true that portraiture was not one of his strong points, and I don’t think he had ever done one before (and he never did another one after) but I talked him into doing it, and he was never afraid of grasping the nettle by the horns and trying something new. Sadly, he was hopeless at it. The picture looked nothing like me at all, and I recall that seeing it for the first time was simultaneously disorienting and yet strangely clarifying, and I regarded it as something of a meditation upon the self and otherness, which only goes to show how art can be misinterpreted. I would like to have it, if only for sentimental reasons.
I don’t know if it would be possible to remove “Soft Rubber Wedge” from its home in the basement of the house. I know it’s still there because it’s more or less a part of the floor. It was always my favourite of his sculptures. It’s an extremely shallow black slope, three meters long and rising from almost nothing to a height of just over four centimetres. On the one hand it is an abstract hole in the concrete floor, a void of airy delight; on the other, it’s a picture of the sublime, a slow elevation, calling to mind Sisyphus and Evel Knievel. At least, that’s how I always saw it.
Finally, there will be a lot of old cassette tapes of Nodule’s music in the house, and I wish I had a couple of them. Two would be enough. They are all much of a muchness, to be honest, each one full of thrilling contrasts, with a tendency to cacophony on the one hand and a very sweet tune on the other (when there was one). If there was a tune, usually a pummelling din behind it would be trying to drown it out. When there were vocals they sometimes felt intimate and understated, even when Nodule slipped into a pained falsetto, and there was a cocktail of emotional intensity and almost camp floridity in the lyrics, or one assumes there would be if one could have made them out. I wish you could hear some of it so you would know what I’m talking about. It was always music to my eyes, with the occasional headache thrown in free of charge.
In summation, I do not think it is overstepping the bounds of critical perspicacity to suggest that Nodule’s lifework asks whether or not we are true to ourselves or mere social constructs of our upbringings. If his work could be put before the public it would be clear how, in resolutely confronting his singularity with our plurality (or the other way around) and materialising occasional collagist approaches to his own identity and a wider cultural identity, his works encourage the viewer or reader or listener (were there any) to question and reaffirm their own truths. Having said all of that, I suspect that Nodule’s art works, by and large, are something one either loves or hates. And while there are works I love, there are also things I hate, while in general I most of the time tend to take the middle ground. And with that, I am pretty sure I have hit the nail on the hammer. I miss him, in a way. Plus, I am homeless. Please let me know if you can help.
.
Conrad Titmus
.