Being a portrait of the artist as a no longer Jung man.
ONE
As, with the morning's trash, they haul away my portrait, already shredded as a precaution against the chance it should escape the fiery fate I have decreed, my thoughts do not return (as might be expected) to that distant morning my father took us to the bohemian side of town to visit my lunatic grandmother, to see again the long avenues where the glorious antics of his childhood were enacted, and to have our likenesses hastily sketched in charcoal (immortalizing thereby my blue and white striped sweater and rosy cheeks): I think instead of Titus Androgynus.
A passer-by at this moment, glancing upward, seeing me framed by the bedroom window and frozen in contemplation, might almost take me for another portrait, later but still unsatisfying - bristling and balding, with a nose like one of those potatoes on which a small protruberence has sprouted, miniature version of the original potato, organic exemplar of fractal theory - in short, an image, like that shredded picture of the child, from which I would like to distance myself with all haste.
I suspect it doesn't exist, the picture that would express, to my satisfaction, the whole me,
the real, the true me, especially since, in addition to my constantly changing physical appearance, I possess, and identify more deeply with, that invisible self who abides in the insubstantial country of the mind.
Imagine, then, the dilemma of Titus Androgynus, faced with the prospect of rendering no mere human likeness but the face of God. I see him there, alone in the basilica, in the swirling heat of Byzantine summer, poised with his brush before the blank panel, considering how, with line and in colors, to capture the infinite, to portray the invisible, to express the divine.
Perhaps a blasphemous thought flickers across his mind: he likens himself to God at the moment of creation, confronting chaos without a guide. For my part, he calls to mind the Abstract Expressionists - Hans Hofmann, Phillip Guston, Mark Rothko - in the Greenwich Village studios from whose windows I like to think of them glancing down to the scene below, bemused at the breezy facility with which the street artist executes my odious semblance, as they quietly wage war at the edge of the abyss.
I continue to watch from my upstairs window as my shredded portrait mingles ``with all the town's detritus in the truck's compressor, recalling my Nana's habit of "accidentally" dropping flower pots from her window as her neighbors strolled below. Suddenly I am struck by a worrisome thought: what if, on the verge of incinerating the trash, the men recognize, among the banana peels and candy wrappers, the remnants of an art-work? Perhaps, with hopes of discovering a priceless masterpiece, they will attempt to reconstruct it, fitting the pieces as in a puzzle, fired by dreams of fame and fortune. (Or what if, thousands of years hence, in the wake of nuclear catastrophe or climatic disaster, aliens arrive on lifeless earth in search of clues to the nature of our civilization, and find all is destroyed except the pieces of this painting which they, like the garbage men, attempt to restore, but without a proper concept of the human form, arriving thereby at an image completely different from the original portrait, though perhaps, from an aesthetic point of view, no less, and maybe even more, pleasing?)
And it occurs to me, over the drone of mechanical digestion below, that I've accomplished, through these ruminations, precisely what I most desired to avoid: in the immaterial form of thought, in the marble halls of memory, I have safe-guarded, perpetuated, immortalized, the very image I so sought to erase.
TWO
When my father died, my mother already being gone, we placed their belongings in a gigantic storage bin in upstate New York. More than a year passed before my brothers and I resolved to meet there again, in the cavernous solitude of that soulless mausoleum, to divide and discard their pots and pans, and their prints and paintings - including those forgotten charcoal sketches of us, made so long ago.
I remember, as a child, visiting my uncle George in the hospital, finding him trapped between the equally miserable prospects of dying from the effects of surgery and surviving, which meant returning to Aunt Mary, whose life-mission would seem to have been, on the one hand, to instill, in her husband and in her children, a wish to become a millionaire, a movie star or a professional athlete, while, on the other hand, to burden them with a profound conviction of their inadequacy, guaranteeing thereby both their failures and her disappointments.
I was to learn, some time after that hospital visit, gradually, through conversations with my mother, that this aunt of mine, her older sister and childhood nemesis, had suffered amply
at the hands of my grandfather whom I knew as the gentle old man that would slip out the door on Christmas morning and reappear as Santa Claus, with a thick Greek accent.
Oh, where does it end, this invisible thread of thraldom, that binds us to the sins of our fathers? The pattern of our parents' feelings, as much as that bulbous nose in the mirror, cling to us, and it's no wonder we feel toward ourselves what we feel toward them: a mixture of disgust and love, and the need, at once, to fulfill the decree of our inheritance, and to escape to the blessedness of a freely chosen life.
Standing at my uncle's bedside, with what I now recognize as an appalling lack of tact, my father shrugged and offered, "I don't know about you, George, but I'm ready to go" - by which he meant, "to die" - "tomorrow."
Ready or not, my uncle died, but it was much later I had the opportunity to observe the change that took place in my father's attitude on this subject, as his strength ebbed, and an opportunity, as well, to repeat his mistake, the mistake of assuming that, approaching death, we will feel as we do when in perfect health, whereas the truth is quite different: along the path of our relentless demise we are robbed of the very health, the strength, the optimism, that are the necessary conditions for courage.
I struggled in those last years to find the requisite patience and sympathy for those wispy forms, awash in silent suffering, even as my own children grew in their independence, forming thereby an uncanny symmetry with their grandparents' demise.
And so that sunny afternoon at the warehouse with my brothers had for us a ceremonial quality, marking the end of a period of time that had been overcast with fears and frustrations, a phase of my life I looked forward to leaving behind, unaware as I was of the changes wrought in me both by recent events and by the effects of time, as, like the sea foam at the water's edge coursing over the smooth pebbles, it wore, with gentle persistence, upon my soul.
And as that accretion of attitudes and thoughts, built up in my youth and solidified through habit, but somehow extrinsic to my essential nature, wore away, gradually it become evident that, deep inside me, something was stirring, disturbing my dreams, that had been hidden but growing, awaiting its chance to rise to the surface, something monstrous and inescapable, from the irrational ground of self and world, from my dark, forgotten home in the mind of God, in the womb of the universe.
At first this Beast was in my head. I would awake, a few hours before dawn, filled with anxiety, tired but restless, forcibly wrested from slumber. Pacing back and forth, increasingly frantic, unable to locate the source of my discomfort, I would think of death, and realize, with a shock, that I, who was prepared, in this life, for anything, was not, for this single certainty, prepared at all.
One such night I fled the house into the cool dark air and stumbled down the empty street.
A neon sign for an all night diner appeared; like the storm-tossed sailor who espies the lighthouse beacon I steered my course. Entering, I was enfolded in warmth and light, bewitched by the aroma of coffee, consoled by the hum of human voices. Amidst the casual clinking of cups, with the sun blazing up from behind the hills, I was saved that morning by a jelly doughnut.
Eventually, discontent with being restricted to the private world of my thoughts, the Monster would take human form, weaving himself into the loom of my life, insinuating himself into the people I’d confront at work and in the streets. I realized clearly then that a violent conflict awaits us in the end with an unimaginable foe, with no parent, kindergarten teacher or police to intervene, for which we are ill prepared in a world that shelters us from dying and makes of aging an unforgivable sin.
I stopped writing music. I needed to explore this land of the unconscious welling within me, this primitive wilderness for which my professional self, layered by centuries of civilization, was unsuited. I knew too much: when you master a craft everything becomes forseeable. Instinctively I longed for fresh vistas, I desired the shock of surprise. I needed to find some primal self by renouncing everything I had become, for this raw core of my being might be at home in the Void, might even make peace with the Monster.
And so it was, without training, technique or talent, without even a clear idea of what I was doing, but giddy with vague hope and drunk on the sensuous beauty of color, that I began my new life, as a painter.
THREE
Hans Hofmann died in 1966, the year I sat for my charcoal sketch. He had been teaching and painting in Greenwich Village since the '30's, and so it's possible that, on some summer afternoon, the stickball hero who was to become my father smashed a home run through his studio window, causing the artist's hand to jerk, with unexpected results he found charming, as much on account of the serendipitous circumstances as for the aesthetic effect. Or perhaps, instead, he was distressed, interpreting the action as a hostile warning by some conservative faction to desist in his experiments in abstraction, in which case he felt the same fear and anger as Titus Androgynus must have experienced twelve hundred years earlier, returning to work one morning to find his frescoes white-washed by the iconoclasts, the decapitated heads of marble strewn about the sanctuary.
Sitting for that portrait, I had worries of my own. The broad streets and busy sidewalks created in me a sensation of vague discomfort, and the thought of my father's boyhood friends, those urchin offspring of poor Italian immigrants with names like Sante Soup and Amerigooch, filled me with apprehension, an irrational fear of encountering them, preserved from the passage of time, in their knickers and caps, with their sharp tongues and flying fists.
On top of that, a visit to my Nana was a relatively rare event, and this, combined with her strange volatility as well as my dim awareness of discord between her and my mother, made it impossible for me to relax.
She never completely forgave my father for abandoning the seminary, and marrying a Greek only made things worse. He was positioned between an older brother, whose status as first-born was his most distinguishing feature, and a younger brother who, by choosing to live, as an adult, two flights below his parents, enabled and encouraged into his late middle age his mother's extravagant dotings.
This younger brother we knew as Uncle Anthony, a visit to whose apartment on such a day formed part of our routine. My siblings and I could never understand our father's air of impatience and dismissiveness during these brief episodes, as his "kid brother" chattered at us with a kind of merry sarcasm, adopting a stilted, clucking tone one might one might use to amuse a very small child but which we found absurd.
"And do the children like my painting?" he would chortle. "It's all done with my
fingers, and I used mostly toothpaste!"
We didn't: it seemed a mess, and we could not fathom why this man who daily
donned a judge's robes and dispensed justice with admirable assurance would wish, in his free time, to sully himself and smear such nonsense.
But what was my father's opinion? He epitomized the free-thinking, self-made
man who took the best from his ethnic upbringing while refusing its limitations.
He made himself a scholar, a linguist, an opera buff - but there are limits: it was
Verdi he adored, not Varese, Rembrandt, not Rothko. My uncle's Post-Impressionistic
foray certainly left him unmoved.
Much later, as a doctoral student, I was to experience this inflexibility, as I viewed it, of my father's, on the subject of music. I presented him one day with a recording of works by my composition mentor, eager for his opinion. The doubly damning verdict - "He stinks - you're as good as him!" - was swift in coming, for it was my father's assumption that anything he didn't understand was without meaning, and anything he despised was worthless. And so it would have been useless to try to persuade him that the very spirit of Romanticism he found so uplifting in 19th century music and literature found its apotheosis in mid-20th century abstract painting, an art consecrated to freedom, individual expression and personal style.
The last time I saw my grandmother I was about 20, and though I made this visit without my father, I nonetheless followed the old custom, stopping off at my uncle's apartment before leaving. The same finger-painting still hung on the wall, and its presence motivated me to inquire whether my uncle was familiar with a New York-based painter I had learned of in an Art History course: Hans Hofmann. I don't remember his response, but in any case Hofmann would have been dead by that time, along with Rothko and Pollock, with Guston nearing his end. Alcoholism, depression and suicide were the norm with this generation, living as they did at the edge of an abyss, teetering between the sublime and the ridiculous, harried by doubt and starved for sympathy. In the absence of comforting conventions, Rothko and Pollock took refuge in increasingly consistent styles, the former, with his floating rectangles, becoming associated with "color-field" painting and latter, with his famous "drip-paintings," inspiring the "gestural" technique. These signature styles, emblematic of increasingly intractable ideologies of art, replete with critical theories but half-understood by the painters, ultimately became prison-cells from which escape could only come through death.
Hofmann was different. It probably had to do with his background: he came of age in the Europe of Les Fauves and Picasso, Kandinsky and Mondrian, and he professed a lifelong antipathy to style, an unending desire to explore the unknown, and, however abstract his results might appear, an allegiance to nature as the source of inspiration. He died in a
blaze of glory, shocking the world in his eighth decade with a flurry of masterpieces and a marriage to their 29 year old dedicatee.
To walk these Village streets now is to realize how little of the spirit of a neighborhood abides across the years, as if the bricks and the cement were too barren for thoughts and feelings to take root in, while the modern inhabitants come and go without that vital exchange whereby a sense of continuity, a sort of oral history, can develop.
And even I, despite my efforts to reanimate this place, to recollect my experiences, to record what I have learned, to speculate on what might have been - even I find myself in the end confronting an impassable wall, facing an insoluble mystery: There is a face that I seek, an image behind those charcoal sketches, the form of the unknown artist who bequeathed, in lieu of his own visage, the portrait of another that speaks all the same, somehow, of himself.
And as the garbage truck drives off I realize, with a start, that, in my selfishness and in my haste, I have consigned what may be the final remnants of another human spirit to oblivion.
FOUR
Of Titus Androgynus nothing remains. His frescoes, white-washed beyond recognition, resemble a series of winter landscapes inspired by his sojourn to Mount Athos, while the tale of his existence lies hidden as if beneath the snow-drifts of those inaccessible heights.
Even his name is a fantasy I must fashion since, customarily, the Byzantine artist left his work unsigned, like the theologians of that era, spurning originality and innovation, preserving tradition, so that, as with the chance mutations that occur perennially in the cycles of plant and animal reproduction, sporadic and random variations appear from one generation to the next, resulting in a stylistic evolution unconscious, imperceptible, and constant.
With no help from history, then, if I wish to speak of this man at all, I need to construct an arbitrary fiction - say, that the artist is left-handed - what Slovoj Zizeck calls a primordial lie
on which to ground my narrative, and out of which truth might emerge. And immediately, as I begin to form the fictional image of the painter, as this arbitrary detail of his left-handedness spawns other details that seem less and less arbitrary, more logical, even inevitable, as the fictional work reveals its own inner consistency, I feel a kinship, unsolicited, unanticipated, with the real artist, dead and forgotten, whom I sense having had these thoughts, having chosen as I must choose, in the face of infinite possibilities, pondering, perhaps,the image of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, likening himself, with a mixture of excitement and guilt, to the unknowable God, cloaked in swirling chaos, deciding to let be the light.
He pauses with his brush in the air, wondering what God would say. The
iconoclasts would contend that God, being immaterial, would have no mouth,
thus wouldn't say anything, and Titus Androgynus concedes a certain logic in
this. But there are dangers in abstract theorizing of which his age bore painful
witness. For the veneration of icons, so characteristic of Byzantine piety, had
been, by turns, violently repressed and encouraged with enthusiasm, according to the sympathies of the changing emperors who evidenced, in this conflict, a growing fascination with cruelty, and an impressive ingenuity in the administration of punishment. Perhaps, the painter thought, if Jesus had a face, and that face, both stern and compassionate, were gazing down from the apse of Hagia Sophia, the politicians and the populace, the scheming eunuchs and fanatical monks, would be less prone to maim and to blind, to exile and to
murder, their fellow man.
A face, then. He begins to trace an outline and, in the pleasure of this activity, his mind gives way to his hand. Large, almond eyes appear, a long and graceful nose: to his surprise his Uncle Thaddeus, notorious for his noisy flatulence and horse-gambling, begins to take shape; Titus Androgynus is amused to imagine what his aunt would think, having travelled at Easter-time, from the far end of Constantinople, as, entering the basilica, she knelt in the pew, making the sign of the cross from right to left as the Greeks do, lifting her gaze toward the holy images that were not, properly speaking, objects of worship, but symbols (as John of Damascus insisted in his eloquent defence of their efficacy) - symbols that mediated between the world of sense and the realm of spirit - what would his Aunt Sophy think to discover, floating in the midst of the martyrs and the saints, her corpulent husband, haloed in glory, bedeck in diadems?
Of course, Titus was aware of God's injunction to the Israelites to avoid all graven images, the injunction that formed, in fact, the cornerstone of the iconoclast argument. But Scripture also teaches that man is formed in the image of God, and besides, through the miracle of the Incarnation, the Word (the unspeakable Word, the inconceivable Deed, the unimaginable Image) became flesh, establishing that bond between creation (right down to the palettes and paintbrushes) and Creator, investing the objects of art with symbolic significance.
But it was precisely this, the subtle nature of the symbolism, that those obtuse, literal-minded image-smashers failed to comprehend. The Greek-speaking, Eastern Fathers of the Church had elaborated, over centuries, a system of apophatic, negative theology that attempts to suggest the divine, to evoke the ineffable, through provocative paradox. Thus Dionysius the Areopagite, in his Mystical Theology, exclaims, "Guide us to that topmost height where the
mysteries of heavenly truth lies hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness." So just as, beyond the visible beauty of this world lies an ultimate Beauty, so different from that which we se`````````````````````````````e as best to be described by its opposite, so too the elegant symmetry, the hieratic forms, the discrete, unmodulated colors and quasi-geometric patterns formed upon the garments in the mosaics point toward the Abyss, toward a Godhead shapeless and invisible, floating in a cacophonous silence.
And just as the unknowable God can be approached through a study of the works he has fashioned, so the life of the man history calls Dionysius Areopagite, about which no reliable information has survived, can be investigated indirectly, through his writings. And here we find an enigma: Titus Androgynus and his contemporaries accepted on faith the claim of Dionysius to be the companion of Saint Paul and an eye-witness to the apostolic tradition, but modern scholarship finds evidence that his work, showing signs of the influence of fifth century Neo-Platonism, should be dated several hundreds years later. What then? A fraud? A pious fiction by some sun-dazzled desert monk? No matter: upon this fertile lie sprouts a luxurious garden of mystical theology from Maximus Confessor to Gregory Palamas, while, like Schumann's dual-personas, Florestan and Eusebius, this alter-ego made by the anonymous zealot, endowing his work with the necessary status of authenticity, looms larger than, eclipses, the mere man that he was born.
Now it's I who pause, pen in hand, transported on the magical train of thought across millennia, and wonder: was Mark Rothko having fun at our expense? Was Jackson Pollock hoaxing us all along, laughing at our theories of the sublime? Or, out in California, what if Clifford Still's messianic rhetoric was calculated to dupe us into taking seriously what was conceived from the outset as a prank? Would I have to love these paintings less? Or could such duplicity serve better than sincere intentions as a starting-point for transcendental art?
A paradox, like those beloved of the Areopagite. Beloved because the reasonings of philosophy, expressed in logical propositions, are inadequate to our experience, at the core of which is mystery.
The art of Titus Androgynus was nourished on such paradoxes: that God is three and God is one, that God is immanent and God is transcendent, that Jesus is human and Jesus is divine, born of Mary and eternally preexistent as world-creating Word, that there is a divine plan, but that men are free.
Logic is repulsed by these formulations, but our hearts know their value, and are grateful for painting, where the paradoxes of thought are resolved on the canvas, as on a primordial battleground of creation - but on the condition that we are free of preconception, unburdened by style or technique, innocent as a primitive, enchanted like a child, free to find our way, as death approaches, back to our unborn dreams, back to the womb of the nascent universe...
In the end, the iconophiles were victorious, and Titus Androgynus was able to return to his work without further interruption. Some of his paintings he found unspoiled; most were damaged irreparably. In some cases he would attempt to remove the layer of white-wash, troubling not to erase the underlying image - and surrender after a while to the futility of the endeavor. A sleepy acolyte, a diffident nun, or a curious parishioner, passing by under these circumstances, would have seen the dejected artist facing a formless entanglement of white
brush strokes, executed with passionate haste, and behind it, barely perceptible, like harbingers of a latent image, a pair of eyes searching for a face in the mirror of the world.
FIVE
In the archives of the school of the Church of the Good Shepherd, on the northern tip of Manhattan Island, there is a photograph of my fifth grade class, taken around the same time my portrait was sketched. And whereas I have been persuaded through the contemplation of Titus Androgynus and Hans Hofmann that a picture can synthesize the dichotomies of language, making accessible higher realms of truth, as I look upon this old photograph of my childhood friends, I realize, conversely, how opaque an image can be, how closed its inner import must remain to anyone innocent of the stories encased within those mischievous faces, and I am led afresh to an appreciation of the power of language to penetrate the heavy husk of reality, revealing something of its sweet, interior essence.
The neighborhood of Inwood was then comprised almost entirely of Irish-Americans, and all these years later, confronting this picture, I can still reel off the names of my classmates - Dennis Dougherty, William McCutcheon, Timothy Scarry and Francis Carmichael, James Murphy and James Ford (my two closest companions), Patrick Lynch, Steven Hayward, James McNamara, John McGinty...
My schoolmates inculcated in me early on the belief that life, without the constant leaven of humor, was shamefully dull; there was a kind of moral imperative to make mischief, to buck against the system, to risk punishment (for the modern clergy were as ingenious as, if less severe than, the ancient Byzantines) in the name of a wild and unfocused need for freedom.
I did not know as a child that this zaniness I found so entertaining might in some measure be accountable to the secret disarray of my friends' homes in which the abuse of alcohol, though inspired by concerns less existential than those which beset the Abstract Expressionists, wreaked comparable havoc. In the elaborate hierarchy that develops in a schoolroom, everyone becomes known for something - toughness, brains or good looks - or sloppiness, obesity, myopia. The popular ones would vie for the presidency, a position whose main function was to monitor the class during those brief episodes when the teacher needed to leave the room. In such circumstances our leader's choices were clear: he could either enforce a semblance of order by "taking names" or he could effectively abdicate his role, instituting thereby a state of pandemonium, guarded over by a lookout whose job it was to alert us all to the imminent return of the teacher: in a flash we'd be back in our seats, and the good woman would enter a silent classroom filled with panting, red-faced children, their blue neckties askew, while a book-bag teetered from the ceiling lights.
Occasionally, if a child was shy and possessed no visibly outstanding features or remarkable quirks, he might manage to get by for years largely unnoticed. Patrick Lynch was such a boy, small and chubby, with little eyes set close together and light brown hair that, were it not cropped, seemed ready to stand straight up. The class photograph shows a placid face, congruent with my impression that he passed his days happily, content in quiet obscurity - until the day his father decided to invite his son's classmates to the family candy store after hours for complimentary snacks.
If Sister Laetitia from the Girls Department had eloped with Brother Gregory we could not have been more amazed, and if old Father Michel, the pastor, had proclaimed the Second Coming was imminent, that the Heavenly Jerusalem would descend to earth like a bride adorned for her husband, our only thought would have been, can it wait until the weekend so we can visit Lynch's store?
Instantly a celebrity, Patrick resembled one of those nocturnal animals that burrow their homes in the cool dirt, who has wandered, blinking and disoriented, into a sunlit field; recalling his happiness, I am led to wonder what could have motivated his father to such an exceptional action. Where we assumed benign indifference did he recognize in his child a sadness he sought to assuage? Was his wish to catapult his son to sudden preeminence, thereby fulfilling an unexpressed desire for recognition, a desire shared by the father, trapped, as he might have felt, in a menial existence inadequate to his vague, romantic dreams?
We didn't bother to ask. As it turns out I was unable to attend the event; in fact I bear no recollection of hearing of it from my friends, and the absence of any further memories on this subject inclines me to believe that the whole plan petered out. It's even possible, in this matter, that the Lynches were behaving with the kind of poetic delicacy of the Hindus who, inviting us, say, to tea, on a certain day and hour, have in mind nothing so tedious and clumsy as an actual meeting, but the idea of sharing tea which, abiding undisturbed in the realm of imagination, can remain as pleasant, and last as long, as one might wish.
And so it has been with me: the unconsummated dream of endless sweets took its place in my heart alongside those other fantasies of childhood, the more alluring for being stigmatized as unhealthy, as taboo. For does there not persist in us, through the years, a secret wish to enter some dark and unattended room and to taste therein some forbidden pleasures, to enjoy them to an excess, disdainful of consequences, oblivious to their harmful effects, a wish we are not flattered to find within us, like the desire that wells up in the honorable old gentleman of Death in Venice for the beautiful boy he espies on the beach, a wish that threatens to topple a lifetime of discipline - is this monstrosity love? - and that, rising so unexpectedly from our depths, makes us realize, with a start, how little we know of our nature?
But if the visit to Lynch's store had occurred, if I had eaten my fill of chocolate-covered cherries and cream-filled pies, its lasting legacy would have been the memory of indigestion and the onset of cynicism. But as the wish, remaining unfulfilled, continues to exert its illusory attraction, it can serve, these many years later, as the subject of artistic composition. And so I can see, in my mind's eye, though I have not yet succeeded in its realization, a canvas strewn with streaks of pink and orange pigment, irresponsibly gay, on a bright yellow background: Lynch's Candy Store, and just as Debussy said of La Mer, that he sought to fashion, not the sounds of the sea, but those feelings it elicits, I would say of this picture that its contemplation should give rise, not to the taste of those forbidden sweets, but to the emotions aroused by the prospect of their enjoyment.
If my friends taught me to laugh, my teachers taught me to pray. On the first Friday of every month we were relieved of our routine and herded to the church next door to sit in the coolness and the dark of the pews and have our confessions heard. As I waited my turn I would gaze, as my teacher bid me, upon the carven image of Jesus, pondering by turns the mystery of his incarnation, the agony of his crucifixion and the depth of his love for me, whose sins might keep him nailed to the Cross, as Rilke suggests, forever, this Son of Man whose wanderings formed a white thread running through the darkness of antiquity, this rabbi, wise beyond his years, brave and gentle in a brutal age, pregnant with his mission and prescient of his doom, this Son of God, debunked by a modern world that cannot understand that he became true through our need.
But ours was a world at once more sacred and more profane, and while I wrestled with theology, my classmates, who, my father explained to me, being of Celtic ancestry, were but recently converted from barbarism, would slip beyond the sanctuary to a hidden vestibule and taste that sweet wine, mingled with water, which, through the miracle of transubstantiation, was to become the life-giving blood of Christ.
Little did I know at this time that, some ten years hence, I would be accompanying a new generation of Moriarity's and McGinty's in this same church, as organist for a boy's choir, directed by a priest of saintly dedication and rudimentary musical training. In the spirit of those medieval masters who used to appropriate from secular sources any melody they found useful, replacing the bawdy lyrics with pious poetry, this holy father was in the habit of
transforming those light waltzes from Viennese operetta he loved into so many spirited Ave's and Hosanna 's, inciting the incorrigible choristers to sway in rhythm as they sang.
Eventually I was called upon to replace this good priest, to the consternation of most parishioners, whose musical tastes were even more simple than his, but who had no trouble in recognizing an honest and trustworthy man. With ambitious idealism I instituted a program of arcane and recondite music, including some poly-tonal improvisations for which I was berated, like Messiaen in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, by more than one irate rosarian, who thought they heard the devil in the organ pipes.
By that time my old friends were already declining, for, sadly, those early years were their happiest: the upheavals of adolescence and the quotidian concerns of adulthood became for them a tightening noose; they were like good-hearted outlaws harassed to extinction by the encroachment of modern law, fairy elves forcibly removed from their home in the enchanted forest of childhood. Alcohol and drugs, prison and suicide, have called them, or else they eke out marginal existences, and I am led to believe that the fault lies more in their stars than in themselves, these exuberant imps, betrayed by the sophisticated hypocrisy of a world that, long ago, bartered happiness for the assurances of dull respectability.
SIX
Where is this story headed (you may be wondering) and how will it end? I have proceeded, in the task of writing, as I might in forming an abstract painting, allowing ideas to flow one into another, melting the edges, discovering, as I go, fortuitous connections. And if I fail to reach a satisfactory conclusion, I succeed at least in demonstrating a creative process: the non-image on the canvas is more myself than what I find in the mirror.
But the morning is passing! The hum of the garbage truck has given way to the mingled chime of school-children at recess. I must rouse myself, descend from the bedroom window, and attend to my tasks. And with this realization comes the solution to my dilemma: the story ends here because I've other things to do - which is to say a work of art arises from the tension between our intuition of the infinite and the constraints imposed by the dimensions of the canvas, the spectrum of visible colors, the finite nature of our existence.
And so I gather my paints and my brushes and place them within my reach; I spread a cloth beneath my feet and begin, without hesitation or fear, to paint, as Sue has requested, the four walls of my living room.
But this is torture, this mindless, mechanical motion; I am like a reluctant iconoclast, white-washing my own soul with every stroke. Resentment and impatience lead to haste: soon there is paint on the floor, the ceiling, the furniture, my head. Irony of ironies, to paint, at last, yet to be unable to express my hidden self, unable as well to escape my self through improvisation. Those vistas I seek, home to unsuspected beauty and happiness, are inaccessible, shut out by the iron gates of the perfunctory.
To be honest, though, I should admit that, were I relieved of this burden, and able to paint as I wish, I'd immediately feel confounded by too much freedom, I'd be dying for direction, troubled by an abundance of choice. We spend our lives,it seems, resenting what's imposed on us and fleeing from independence, like anarchic revolutionaries who, tiring of the chaos they've unleashed, hasten to recall their banished king, or like atheists grown old and feeble who turn, in panic, to the consolation of conventional religion.
I think with admiration of the primitives, in whose world the functional has not been divorced from the decorative, and the idea crosses my mind to mingle a magenta arabesque, to dribble some apricot squiggles, enlivening thereby these dull, white walls. But I am swiftly dissuaded by a second thought, that of Sue walking through the door, pausing in mid-step the way she does for emphasis, hands on hips, turning her head slowly from the wall to me and back again with a look of disbelief.
I wish to escape this mess, to rise like some great, dark, solitary bird such as are found in the last paintings of Milton Avery, passing over the earth before my final departure, depositing a mark, a sign of myself, a big, wet splat wherein are contained all my thoughts, my dreams, even my favorite foods - a mark like that single, lightning-word Byron seeks but cannot find, in the voluptuous immediacy of paint - and be gone.
I know beforehand I will fail: I will never say what I wish. I will always be the wrong man in the wrong place making the wrong painting. Or maybe not wrong but incomplete: perhaps that which we call intuition, and in which we place our trust, is a distant echo, a fleeting affirmation, of the infinite multi-verse whose fullness is achieved through eternity, and whose ineffable image we approach through the indefinite, the mysterious, the rhapsodic. It is impossible, but we must paint, and live, and love. Then come thou, dark daimon, and take me wither thou wouldst.
I emerge from these thoughts to discover I've completed painting the living room walls. (Easy to break things, difficult to make things, as the iconoclasts used to say.) I survey the scene with ambivalence: without the alchemy of art, the paint is merely sticky and irritating, and its odor I find oppressive. But Sue will be pleased, at least.
Yet there's something else in the room: an image is taking shape, struggling from behind the freshly painted walls, an image - not of the boy in the sweater, nor of the man in the window, but a new image, the one we could not have anticipated, for it was fashioned through the labor of writing, it was formed through the act of reading. See: it rises now, manifest in the completion of this work: it is the author, a new me - here I am!
EPILOGUE
The story that has just come to its end has been composed, not on the east coast of North America, where it takes place, but across the continent in a small town in southern California where, along with Sue, I am visiting family. I am lying on my back beneath the morning sky, cobalt blue and already hot, in the swimming pool of our hotel, propelling myself with a frog-like kicking motion. The forty-five degree angle my body forms in relation to the water allows me to wear my eve-glasses without wetting them too much: I look foolish but I can see:
Beyond the black gate of the swimming pool lie the walls of the hotel, half-hid by those prehistoric palms that astound the visitor; rising above this I see the grating of our balcony, garnished with plumerias and surmounted by the sloping tin of the pink, sun-paled roof. Behind the pool on the opposite side, a thick wall separates us from the sights, but not the sounds, of the highway. If, awakening from a dream, I were to find myself here, I might think myself in Morocco, or perhaps Sicily, in a luxurious palace rather than an economy hotel, and imagine that those Fords I hear are Ferraris, filled with celebrities and pursued by the paparozzi.
This shows ignorance, I know, but also innocence, for while an experienced, wealthy traveler would quickly find a host of subtle clues that would lead him to an accurate appraisal of his environment, it is possible that his preconceptions, his prejudices, would obscure from his vision, like that thin layer of smog that darkens the Los Angeles skyline, the modest beauty of this locale.
Within my hotel room, hanging on the wall behind the bed, is an abstract painting. I am capable, in a limited way, of detecting, in this work, the influences of both Cubism and Kankinsky, synthesized and reinterpreted in an indigenous, west-coast manner that calls to mind the late works of Richard Diebenkorn. But this kind of analysis is like explaining a symphony by Beethoven as no more than a mixture of Mozart, Haydn, and a headstrong temperament, like explaining a person merely as a combination of genetic inheritance and acquired culture. The painting is alive, and I see in its various aspects a harmonious whole, a unique, miraculous entity.
I find it enchanting: rich in emotions that have no verbal equivalents, redolent with meanings as compelling as they are untranslatable. But my appreciation is tempered by the disappointing awareness that this is schlok-art, mass-produced, a fact I had not the perspicuity to infer, but that was thrust on me last night when I stumbled upon a perfect double of this painting in the "clearance" section of some "home-goods" store.
I think I will begin a new career: a merry life, not only abandoning my musical occupation but laying aside (at least for now) my frustrating essays in painting - a new career as an art-collector, critic and exhibitor. I will travel across the land in search of unknown masterpieces of abstract painting, on the condition that each costs no more than twenty dollars; I will visit junk stores and yard-sales, Walmarts and Targets. I will select what touches me, analyze, extol, arrange it all, encouraging, through my unorthodox exhibitions, fresh eyes and open minds, challenging the canon of high art, while making of my life a heady adventure, not lacking in a touch of comedy, nor in an element of danger (as, for example, if, in a bizarre reversal, some well-reputed artist should attempt to emulate the style of one of my beauties, hoping to pawn off this fake upon the unsuspecting art-world as legitimate pseudo-art)...
...and die, if it is possible, confused and happy, in the middle of some work I find engaging, perplexing, enriching, a work whose unfinished form, after all, is the best self-portrait I can imagine.