74: Thieves in the Temple

Graffiti Bridge (1990)
After a bruising break-up in my early 20s, I planned to channel all my confusion and hurt into creating an artwork – a magnum opus perfectly encapsulating my pain with such exquisite detail it would cause my ex to finally realise the depths of my soul and reconsider. It was going to be titled “Me and You Could Have Been a Work of Art.” I never completed it. It never got beyond rough sketches. In my head it was a pure beacon of beauty, shimmering with fractal meanings that would, unfortunately, evaporate on contact with reality. A grandiose vision, that to start would mean to face my artistic folly. For a few days, I was Jodorowsky and it was my Dune. Memories of that time only resurface when I listen to the song from which I took the title. Thieves in the Temple is one of Prince’s incredible cenotaphs of heartbreak, written during the aftermath of his relationship with Kim Basinger. He and Kim could have been a work of art, but their break-up produced this better one. I often wonder if the song was as immaculate in his eyes as he first conceived or did he view it as what novelist Iris Murdoch called every book: “a wreck of a perfect idea”? With hindsight however, I realise being able to paint the pain with crystal clarity doesn’t help the road to recovery. The healing is in the creative process, not the outcome. Sublimating negative energy into creating art is healthy but dwelling on how the finished product will win back a love – or even worse, inspire jealousy – is not. My failure to start my hoped-for masterpiece wasn’t due to any discrepancy between an imagined ideal and its flawed execution. It stalled because I was only drawing energy from the fantasy of recalibrating a power imbalance – a fantasy that was easier to maintain when the fruits of my labour remained in my head. Even Prince, with his ability to take life’s lemons and make the world’s finest lemonade, was not immune to revelling in the thought of the effect his art would have on his subject. In the extended version of Thieves in the Temple he sings: “u done me wrong and everybody knows it / now the sound of my voice is pumpin’ in ur chest”. This is playback as payback. His later Tina-Turner-twisting boasts that he’s “the best, better than the rest” and his screams of “you lie!” sound like cathartic howls into the void, but they’re the battle weapon of a bruised ego. He wants to wound and drapes himself in imagery of Jesus at his angriest to virtue-coat that urge. The closure he sought wasn’t found in lashing out and shaking columns though. The seeds of it were found at the concert where Thieves in the Temple made its live debut. It was there he met future-wife Mayte for the first time. Love came quick. Love came in a hurry.