The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella (7 page)

Now
initially
, I thought, Kruger was one of those individuals of a race, a species, who would help us survive. I was even rooting for him. But I have since modified my original thoughts.

He is a somewhat divergent individual. An artist. Now you might ask why I don’t remove him from his environment and drop him into, say, mine. But that would defeat the purpose of what I am trying to communicate. Human beings in history until now have demonstrated great diversity in their variations. We’re big and small, smart and dumb. Now, however, after our degeneration, we need to get back.

We’ve suffered starvation, natural disasters, viruses, war, you name it. But the interesting thing is, nowadays, bodily and mental diseases have virtually disappeared. Perhaps now the population will increase. If that is to happen, will the correlative be more evolution? I am optimistic. We will not follow the dinosaurs yet. Natural extinction for human beings is not obvious. Restoration is possible.

Of course, with over ninety-nine percent of all life extinct, and with the human race cut by about 9-3/4 billion, this might be grounds for pessimism. But that is not human nature!

Dinosaurs once ruled the earth for millions of years. We can read their history and decline in the rocks. Now they have vanished. Most of the animals are gone and much of the plants. So, back to human beings. I believe we will adopt a great strategical measure to ensure our existence! I think we still have a million years left! For this purpose, scientists like myself must be called in and to contribute in acquiring the necessary knowledge for our next struggle.

But what of artists?

Kruger once showed me a painting. It was about the size of an average flat-screen TV. As one approached the smallish canvas at close range, it was difficult at first to decipher the subject matter. However, as one moved back from it, the composition came in focus, as if on demand, and revealed itself to be a loaf of bread from an overhead perspective.

Of course, it was a fictive loaf of bread, since Kruger had not seen one, let alone eaten one for many years. However, given that Kruger had dreamed up this loaf of bread from his childhood, it was not difficult to read Kruger’s still life as a commentary on our recent upheavals. This is, of course, speculative. Kruger would not and could not comment on his painting or his intent.

One could readily walk past this painting without taking much notice of it. Perhaps a title such as “Loaf of Bread” would have helped the viewer with such an allusion. However, without the verbal cue, one might not infer
what
the picture implies—that is, what it depicts, at first or even tenth glance. This inscrutable composition was, perhaps, the apex of Kruger’s painting. Kruger did tell me he was dissatisfied with his other images of a loaf of bread. No matter the quality of the image. He did not want to compete with those images, he said. What he did do, he told me, is paint a loaf of bread in a more realistic style, and then scrape away several layers of paint to render his canvas as an atmospheric suggestion, rather than an explicit depiction of a loaf of bread.

So, when one approaches the painting, the image is at the very edge of being recognizable, at the ambiguous point where the information of the painting could be read in many numbers of ways and one would have to approach the painting to create one’s own picture using the artist’s diffuse, ill-defined contours of forms and the apparently brown coded color.

In sum, one would have to mentally reconstitute a likeness that is in effect disintegrating before their very eyes. Kruger’s version of a load of bread, then, was an eroded representation of not only a food, but a way of life, a culture that was now blown to smithereens.

Kruger’s painting was
psychic
, I initially thought, and could
heal
a culture. Unfortunately, very few would have understood his painting, let alone enjoy it, and certainly would not trade for or buy it, since we pretty much lacked a marketplace for art, let alone one for any other goods and services.

This was my interest in Kruger. Not as an art appreciator, or god forbid, an art historian, but more in understanding his behavior—his behavior as an artist when the world around him is negative. I wanted to symmetrically study Kruger and his painting in these dreadful conditions. For this reason, I ventured to study him and anything interesting about his quest as an artist.

It’s obvious I considered Kruger to show some of the greatest divergence from type than most others in Old San Francisco.

My interest in him was accepted without comment by Kruger. He told me he understood he was different from others. He said he cared little about facts and what concerned him habitually was observation. He often carried a sketchbook, in which he drew frequently using his charcoal, or his crayons. He wrote a question—or a series of questions, really—both what he called objective and subjective—on the first page of each sketchbook, which, he said, prompted him in his observations.

His current sketchbook had the questions—“How might my drawings help the world, ease the world’s pain, its facelessness, its obsolete past, our lack of selfhood, sense of identity, how can we find ourselves again? If I draw a line, what is the nature of that line? Can I make visible on this paper things and even substance, can I make it more than a habit?”

I used to wonder if we had more Krugers, would the world be better? After all, before the War of Annihilation, we often said our time was the time of the
Killed Imagination
, a time of such technological resurgence, that this technology had all but killed creativity and the imagination, which, of course, had been one the major traits, which distinguished us from the lower primates. I initially saw Kruger as an anomaly, but a
useful
anomaly that should be reintroduced into the gene pool, to ensure a happier future. As I said earlier, I was biased, I admit it, and I rooted for him.

After everything, years later, we had to adapt to the new conditions of life. After the initial cowering, it was time to reboot. Science destroyed us. But that didn’t make religious superstition safe now. The vision of an orderly universe superintended by a God who created rational-minded creatures in his own image seemed dated. We were all irrational now, but some would rise with their rationality. However, even naturalism seemed suspect since the collapse. And yet the alternative, seemingly friendlier to science, and its random process of natural selection seemed a bit nightmarish, a lot to swallow, especially in these times.

We had lost belief in a past which formerly may have not been in need of a proof, or the philosophy of humanism, or even in the existence of other minds. All most of us knew is something(s) happened. Bad things, which practically wiped us out. We live in time, but who knew that anymore? Who understood that very well? Let alone all those old crazy theories of time. Bending, parallel, twisting, double ling back, reversing, slowing down, etc.

History is what? Remembering. Testimony. Explanations. Digital. Writing things down. Documenting. But it seemed as if things had just happened and we were here. I mean this current situation was way beyond mere molding or determining. First of all, adapting to what? The conditions of life. There was very little activity now. No memory for
solace
, no matter how elusive they may have once been for human beings. It was as if we are now part of a huge
experiment
. Go about your business. Reboot the economy, the system. Adapt to the new conditions of life.

Many just hung out. There was nothing to do. No entertainment, imagine that. Some went on aimless walks, not so much for foraging, but just to alleviate the boredom. We couldn’t go back to the past. It no longer existed in any way. We couldn’t just speed up the future, speed up time, which might have been exciting, that is, to be caught up in the process of rebuilding (and not repeat the same mistakes!).

Some played a game of make-believe. Some came to terms with the moment, the lack of the days ahead. With nothing left but a past, that few remembered. And remember, the documentation was gone. We—certainly the young—were increasingly ahistorical.

Now there were few who could recount the past, let alone, remember it. Usually, in history, this was the time for courage, willpower, endurance, hope, all that. Otherwise, there would be despondency at our predicament.

The good news, we were not despondent. The bad news, we were indifferent.

There would be no redeeming moments from the Annihilation. They wondered, or squatted, forlorn at all hours. The outside world did not exist. There was no entertainment. No distractions. No escape from things.

Horribly, there was little imagination, even if you shut your eyes. Very few of us could close our eyes and picture other things. Conjure up with all our might, Mount Tamalpais, a redwood tree, a mother’s smile. There was nothing to cherish. We could only live for the day, most of us, in horrible boredom.

The vast indifference around us, and in us. The abandonment of us. The futility of it all. With not even the weather to talk about. We weren’t even weather-conscious. If anything, we were at the mercy of the weather. The warming stifled our interest in the weather.

I, like Kruger, used to walk around and observe the brooding. The sufferers brooding in distress. Human language all but atrophied decades ago, nobody could even tell a story, or what quaintly used to be called an anecdote. “Sup,” “Nothin,” was about the most, many of us could come up with in greeting and a discussion, let alone compose a poem, song, play, or god forbid, a literary work. Only the scientists produced but their language, giving concise and correct information, does not make a culture. To be sure, most of language was useless. We didn’t have much to say, to promise, to lie about. Monotony is preverbal. There was little ordinary conversation, and hadn’t been any for decades. But without entertainment, we now had to come to grips with the world, the emptiness of the world.

I often enjoyed, like Kruger, looking at the old toppled cranes across the water in Oakland. Of course, they reminded me of dinosaurs. A rich symbol. Dinosaurs who once ruled the earth. If I could have explained that to Kruger! But in my disinterest in his work, I did not want to appear a connoisseur.

If only, there was digital. But even those were dead. Besides, even if you had something and could “play” it, what good would it do but kill a few hours?

Altruism might have helped. That’s still a mystery to neuroanthropologists.  Giving a thought for others. And certainly, overpopulation was no longer a concern. There was less of a public to address. A government might have helped us give a thought to the general public. Civic duty. Certainly there wasn’t any public welfare beyond sharing the synthetic food, and we had plenty thanks to foresight. Our private welfare now was so little demanding.

Kruger lived in a world of art, divorced from reality. The old screams, cries of grief somehow lived in him. As the summer blazed, the scorching winds drying up the dust, the daily downpours flooding us, as we survived in the incessant heat and light and water, most of us in our Tsuits, at least. Some of us, walked in the empty sweltering nothingness of the Old city with the spaciousness of the skies above us, a kind of primitive shelter.

If you asked the average man in the street, what was the meaning of life, no one could have said what it was. Some had an inkling that the question—if that’s what it was—was boring. It was meaningless. It didn’t exist. The feeling of exile and separation from the past was so dominant, the subject may have ceased to exist. All we had to do was adapt to the current conditions. To the very conditions of the situation. With desire, certainly without emotions. It wasn’t just falling into line. There was no line. It was just existing. Most choose it with listlessness, indifference, even boredom. There was little to be aggressive about. Everybody was mostly modest.

We were for the most part without memories, certainly without any documentation of them. We had no hope, little desire, we lived for the moment. The here and now meant everything. No friendship, no love. We were filled with utter apathy for the future since we had no memories. We couldn’t really make plans. The idea that we used to make plans, or one made plans was beyond most of us.

We weren’t jealous of each other. Most had it the same. The lack of energy was the defining characteristic. But there was no void, at least. That was too abstract for most of us, the sleepwalkers, the trancers, the zombies. We were exhausted.

And yet in Old San Francisco we all hung together. It was so hot and muggy, but nobody remembered fog. Our Tsuits made the conditions somewhat comfortable in the elements. Those without the artificial skins, stripped, filthy, sweating—their bodies glowed like—like what?—very few could make a metaphor.

What did we do? Nothing. Our empty hands, our idly dangling arms hanging from our thin shoulders, quieter and quieter. All we could do was bond together. Connect in that primeval way going back millions of years, or even just thousands of years, listening to the buzz of flies, scratching. Were we dignified?

I used to look at them “thinking.” The vacant gaze. What did life mean to them? They didn’t even think of death, they thought of nothing. Nobody was really thinking anymore. There was nothing to think about. There was no diversion except for the flies and itching.

At least there was a lack of crime. We sat in the sweltering heat with the golden sun bearing down on us, scorching us, sandwiching us, the smell of piss and iodine in the air, the water lapping on the fallen stones. Nobody ever smiled.