Nine

 Don’t be fooled, brothers and sisters! There is more magic in what you bring to my art than there is in the art itself! I am only able to bring you into a room; show you a few of its more precious objects; allow you to study this or that item; take you from one place to another, an aspect here and there; introduce you to this person or that, so you may silently contemplate them; I allow a few choice words to appear, and eventually let some dialogue spring forth—but that is not all, is it? There is more! How much more, you ask me? There is as much as there is creativity in you, brothers and sisters. As much—or as little, sadly—as that. Don’t be lulled into drinking up so quickly the detail my art delivers, only to dispatch it when the cover slaps shut; even if it seems to wax and wane in its detail (have you ever thought about it?), this pulsation is contoured specially for you!

He became excited as the thought well up inside of him, and he searched frantically for his notebooks. Which one today? It must be the right notebook—one for philosophical sketches, one of poems, one for half-baked dear diaries, one for … They went on and on; all of them were the right notebook for a thing he would have dreamt, if only the dreams had deigned to arrive, he thought, cynically. Ah, yes—a black-and-white speckled notebook presented itself during his search. He took it up, and tried to continue, no, to stoke, the frenzy. Too late in the evening, there is no more power, but he couldn’t keep up the sleepless and frenetic nights, growing early into the morning with promise. The afternoons were the worst, after the children were shooed, or managed to escape one of his disquisitions, a ramble without connection to their innocent lives. He smirked at that thought.

One can measure—he continued, renewed in his convictions—the artistry of a work by the depth of its weakness, its unique deprivation installed quite on purpose only by the greatest of the geniuses (not all were great; genius could be like a reflex, automatic, boring, consistent, predictably felicitous; the greatest sprouted through chaos and pain, and nonetheless flashed brilliant with a gay science—yes!). This deprivation, this purposeful hole, was where you sat with the work, where you were actually allowed inside to do your work. There were gears and levers constructed for the purposes of working your imagination, dear ones. Had you not seen? Had you not known this? They were mechanical elements for the activation of what you’ve got going on inside you. It’s all basically pornographic: you do something to yourself in order to get your body working along with what you’re imagining. That’s the basic premise of any work, really. But there’s nothing specific in it about you—and here’s the genius. The gears and mechanisms are all perfectly general, until you sit down, open the cover, and start it up with your eyes. Then, if you’re careful and attentive, there you are—right inside, working it along with the work itself. It’s not right, therefore, to say that a work of art allows for infinitely many interpretations—for you’ve got to ask, what is an interpretation? No, that’s all abstract nonsense. The only thing that’ll ever be real for you is what you—you there!—can manage to get going, besides the usual passing of your eyes over the whole thing (which isn’t really working with it, anyway). Your limitations for feeling and working it are the ultimate limits of what you can actually get out of the thing; there’s nothing more for you. Somebody else can get something else out of it—maybe a lot more. And you can be made aware of that; but that’s all—it’s just “being made aware of something” that’s not your own. Unless … you do the work to sit in this stuff that somebody else got from the thing; then you can do what you might have not been able to do on your own with the original, which is get a lot out of it. And that’s the value of a second-hand experience. It’s still an experience, right? It’s first hand, just after it’s been handed off to you. You’ve still got something there, but then it’s going to get a bit fuzzier in all likelihood. What somebody manages to take from it, in their own way, is never going to replace the original—it’s just something else. The original is what it is, nothing more and nothing less. If it wasn’t like that, dear ones, then nobody could possibly fail at anything. Not that failure makes a thing less valuable or anything—but it’s just a failure if nobody can work with it, if there’re no functioning internal mechanisms, or if the gears don’t work right. Sure, you can try them, and try to repair them, but then you’re just refurbishing; and yeah, you can then say you built something. And if you want to know the truth, only the rarest and greatest of geniuses manage to do two things at once: refurbish something that’s already had a go at being a thing, a work—and also to show that it had to be refurbished, without saying so. It’s a double-whammy: you rebuild something nobody thought needed rebuilding, and you show that it had to be rebuilt, that it had become a failure and without your intervention, it would’ve just broken down to bits, scraps nobody’d soon care about.

He got up from his writing desk, which was found in a hovel of a room tucked in the back of the house, just off a later addition and near to one of the several sheds in the garden. It was a small room, with a sloping roof but good light that, at the right time of the day, in the summer months, was mottled by one of the many dozens of fruit trees his former, and now long gone, friends had cultivated through their retirement years. It was of course a chore in the autumn, with the dropping fruits and the endless cleaning and clearing; and of course there was the great startle you got from them as they slammed to the roof, and then, bouncing, made it finally to the earth. He thought of them as comets, transformed into asteroids—at least from the perspective of the ants and flies that flitted about all summer and who then died, or hibernated, sometime in the late autumn as the bright summer light itself seemed to gasp for breath. Autumn meant hiding, resting, recounting the wonders of summertime spent producing things of joy. But the autumn was itself productive in its own way; everything reversed, and what had been produced dried, had to be picked and transformed, for the winter. Nature produced again and again.

Now he moved into an interior room, which was again filled with notebooks where there weren’t books. But the specialty of this particular room was the many dozens of photographs. Everything in the room was somehow related—the works on the shelves, his notebooks, the writing that took place here, all of it was beating with the heart that was behind the images he covered these walls with. They were tall walls, and the room was actually comprised of several rooms interconnected, and joined by a hallway, which itself contained at least two stairwells to different levels of the house. It was a house of dreamwork. He fancied that only his dreams could send him clues as to how to proceed through the many passageways he envisaged over and over as he went about the house.

He thought that he must soon, and quickly, connect with another of his sets of ideas somewhere else—hence he took up another frantic search for the right notebook. It was found only because, as he suddenly recalled upon seeing it, he had put the spine of the thing into the opposite direction as the rest, so that its fan of pages was visible—a band of white amidst the multicolored panoply of books whose spines revealed something of their contents. This notebook would have none of that.

From behind the photographs, she leapt at him. She was free, yet he found in her a freedom that was like a hoped-for moment of repose after a long, difficult journey. But it was more than this, he thought. It was a battle; great battles were behind those eyes, long decades of ceaseless fighting which ripped open the ground where famine or blight sealed it from human hands, where vanquished lives, lost in the battles, left fields fallow—graves for forgotten harvests and impossible hopes. They had hoped through these years, but for what? Surely not for unison of voices filed into compliant bands, arguing out abstract matters of rights and justice for a people patched together from the fragments of prior nations, bloodties, kinship (all the ancient ways laid to rest in those fallow plots). Now, their bodies disfigured with that failing hope, bruised, mutilated—it was only now that they turned inward and to each other, and found new wars. But she turned from them, leapt straight out from her photographs, and pulled herself inside out with the lens, speculating with the grandest of speculators, and, with a presence so given over to her individual self that she, like them all, vanished in a gust of creative drive.

She left behind a clue, he thought, to a different world—and insight from an outsider into something that was only in its initial stages of formation. A promise and, yes, a hope and a vague, visionary prophecy that took them all into its beating chest and converted the hope and promise into a substance of nourishment, but a thing utterly banal for all the fervor shown in all their tiresome speeches, treatises, and commercial ventures made live from the new fuel. And suddenly, in a flash, he thought, and sought quickly to find his old place in these his penned recollections of a time and people that strove never to know or concern themselves with this thing called history. Yes, in their images—in her images—was a genocide. Of moments. If there were to be no past, what then was death? Was it a victory for life? He flooded the pages hastily…