hope light fear cowardice destruction
hope light fear courage resolution
The person who lived in this house never gave up.
WOW
, I could not wait to tell Nadine about this. And then, the real revelation occurred. It was about Nadine herself. That SHE was what made this excitement all worthwhile in the first place. Because I could share it with her. If I had no one to tell it to, what would be the purpose of living it? What was the point to learning how to love if there is no one to love? Then I understood Glick’s tragedy. She had learned how to love but had no place to enact her understanding except this sticky outdoor painting welcoming nonexistent guests to her nonexistent front door. It was the art of loneliness.
After all, if a person wasn’t lonely, why would they ever make art? They could just be with Nadine instead.
And then I rang the bell.
“
What a sad surprise,”
the bell sang to me. “
How unexpected. I
wanted it to be different and so I’ve waited patiently for so long, with
no reason. I waited for something better, but only missed out on fully
realizing more of the same. Ding Dong.”
It was that kind of doorbell you only press once.
I guessed that Glick was some kind of eccentric. It made sense. As my friend Michi Barall says, “Alienation creates eccentrics and revolutionaries,” which are not, after all, the same thing. Her out-of-it-ness was obvious from the state of her front door. That was a fate I wanted desperately to avoid. Also, being considered by others to be a crackpot was out of the question. I’ve never been stable, so I don’t need stability. I don’t need safety, I’ve never been safe. But strength is a necessity for the strong.
“Come in,” she said, standing in the doorway, blocking my way. And there you have it.
Glick stared and stared until I finally took responsibility and pushed her aside so that I could follow her command. Then we sat down on mismatched kitchen chairs. The interview had begun. It was clear from the start that she was a typical old-fashioned artist from the Old-Fashioned School. The kind Nadine dreamed of joining. She was not conceptual, digital, aerospacial, or architectonic. She was not botanographical, electrictronicfecal, or Inter-D. Glick used paint. All her books had smudges on them. The refrigerator was covered in blue fingerprints. Every single article of clothing in her doorless closet had white paint smears. There was paint in her hair, and it had always been there. Her walls were one big abstract smudge.
I checked my notes.
“What do we owe you?” My first question.
“You owe me …” Glick fell out of contact. She hadn’t thought about compensation in so long, her fantasy had expired from lack of use.
“What do WE owe YOU?” I tried to emphasize, snap her into it.
Glick looked up, her pale grey eyes clouded swamps. Her skin, sagging and pasty, her nails bitten, her hair like abandoned steel wool. Her veins, her ragged forgotten nails. “You owe me …” And again she faltered.
“What?” I shouted “What?” I got much closer, tried to move energetically, smile, and sparkle—anything to wake her up. “What do WE owe YOU?”
“You owe me …” She coughed phlegm into a crusty old brush cloth. “You owe me
radical heterosexuality
.”
“What is
radical heterosexuality
?” It sounded vaguely familiar, yet meaningless. Like
People’s Court.
Invigorated by the elixir of someone paying attention, her eyes boinked open. Attention was the tin man’s oil can, fresh raw meat on a rusty soul.
“You owe me …
THE VULVA
!” She yelled, and its propulsion knocked over her chair. Glick sat on the oilcloth covered floor now, her legs out before her, her bottom dangerously near a pool of turpentine. “You owe me …
REPRESENTATION
. You owe me …” She fell back on the floor. Exhausted. And then suddenly popped up again, fully revived. “
YOU OWE ME A LIVING
!”
Shocked, Glick blinked. Then, robotically, she dragged out some old scrapbooks and showed me photographs from her distant past. They seemed like more primitive versions of the kind of pseudo-neo-arty advertisements designed by graphics students who had studied Nan Goldin and Audrey Hepburn, and then photoshopped them both on the same day. These pictures were quaint. They were naturally distressed, cockeyed, and overexposed. As if by accident. There were young people looking old, instead of the other way around. These authentically young adults all wore some strange version of Gap clothes, but each one’s outfit was slightly different, off-kilter. Like the photographs. There was a feeling about these photographs that was very strange to see, it tingled in the back of my neck, and then I recognized it from some very ancient memory. These people were … ugh ... sincere.
“It’s all here,” she said, pointing at her heart. “That which I was. That which I did.”
Next she showed me photographs of happenings, performances, and plays from the past. Live people being watched without screens or projections. Just standing there. I guess they were Art Shows. Frankly, they looked like jokes. Like parodies of Political Correctness, that sort of thing. I was seeing the originals of some phenomena that had only been satirized, but never preserved. It was impossible to look at it without irony. The soul of this memory could not be engaged with a straight face. It was like bell-bottoms, or Peace.
“Excessive form and suggestive content,” she muttered. Then Glick turned off the lights and hauled out a loud and creaky old movie projector, the kind that only turns up these days as a reconstituted planter. She actually projected a Super-8 film onto her smudgy walls. It was weird. I had never seen anything projected with a light coming from behind me before. With monitor screens, the light comes right at you. It’s an entirely other engagement. With a film, you have to want to watch it. There is a way out, not a monitor standing directly in your path. It’s a choice. Weird.
This particular one looked like a video clip except that it was out of focus. It had these painstakingly slow renditions of effects that nowadays are achievable in less than a second with a computer. But I think she had to spend weird laborious lonely hours achieving them in airless isolation with dangerous chemicals and creaky machines.
“I have a quiet yearning for tenderness,” she said. “And that would be fulfilling.” Then she looked to see if I had written that down.
“I’m recording it on my watch,” I assured her. And she didn’t know what to say.
When the film ended, the lights came back on and she handed me a framed, paint-stained photo of a group of friends, all young, with their arms around each other. They all looked different. They were each wearing different clothes. It felt psychotic.
“Where are they now?” That was Glick speaking.
“Yeah, where are they?” That was me.
“Mad at each other and me, or dead or stupid or boring or too depressed, too pathetic, or defeated, out of ideas, delusional, or bitter. Afraid.” Then she scrunched her forehead. “Wait! I just remembered. This one is rich and slick and therefore equally out of reach.”
I looked at the face of the only one who made it. He knew the secret of straddling opposing universes. He was a winner. How did he do it?
“I forgot I ever knew him,” she said. “Personally, I have never sold a piece.”
That seemed impossible. Everyone wants to buy something.
“Is it because you think it would be bourgeois?”
This was a sentence I had picked up along the way. Over and over again we were reminded that the reason people were excluded was because they wanted to be. They looked down on those who were in. They thought it would be bourgeois to be recognized and happy, so they purposefully kept themselves from enjoying what the generous winners so wisely chose to enjoy. I had been told over and over in so many ways that people like Glick loved being alone.
Glick looked confused and then laughed insanely.
“Is that what THEY are telling you these days? That I chose obscurity?”
“Yes.”
“What a lie.” She gnashed her silly teeth. “No way.”
“Really?”
“No!” She couldn’t believe it. “I have never sold a piece because I have never figured out how to shmooze. I just always said whatever I thought was true.
WHAT A MISTAKE
! Do you know how to shmooze? You’re young. Can you teach me? It might not be too late.”
“You’ll never be able to do it,” I said, without thinking. It was so obvious. “You’re not user-friendly. You’re too needy. You have no social currency. You’re a freak. Without a normative side, you can’t get in. That’s it. Sorry.”
I felt a special kind of satisfaction, because I was just about to be let into the world of the special, by Mr Harrison Bond. That’s how I knew for a fact that she never would.
“But,” she whined. “I have a personal momentum of ideas.”
“Like what?” I felt sorry for this dork. Being user-friendly had nothing to do with ideas. “I’ll try to squeeze them into eight words.”
“Like the flesh and bone of cities.”
All I could do was stare with astonishment at her ineptitude. Immediately, to protect myself, I assessed the differences between us so that that gap would never be bridged. Those differences would keep me from ever turning into That.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked her paintings. In some ways they were overwhelming me with feeling, feeling so strong that I couldn’t get up and leave. But they were feelings about Loss, about the Irretrievable, and the Lack of Justice. Those feelings were not in demand. Forget about them.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked. Why did I ask that? To keep her even further away. I knew that she didn’t have a boyfriend, and I wanted to reinscribe her failure.
“Oh,” she said, minisculely. “You know.”
“No, huh?”
“Well, while I do need to have sex to realize my passions, an actual relationship is ultimately too ephemeral for me. I’m too ambitious. I want my passions to last.”
“Ambitious?”
“My ambitions are greater than yours,” she glared, recovered. She started smoking and eating garlic.
This startled me.
Ambitions?
No one with ambition would ever act, look, think, dress, speak, or smell this way. How could she realistically expect advancement when Glick did everything wrong? I knew what I was talking about, after all. I was just about to achieve my subconscious career ambitions by following Harrison Bond’s orders. She wasn’t following his orders. I was. And I was also achieving my emotional ambitions by talking to Nadine while loving her. Doing both at the same time. Glick was loving and talking to no one. I was soon to be a complete person, while Glick would never, ever matter.
“People are so vague and unreliable,” she said, speaking unknowingly about herself. “My ambition is for them to be reliable. My ambition is to offer and be accepted. I mean, I’d rather show a man my vagina than have him find it. I am so ambitious that my breasts are a threatening piece of industrial machinery. My ambitious sympathies lie with the lonely. What could be more desirous than that? I stake all on the intuitive character of thought. By presenting my obsession, I’ve humanized it. If you dig a hole, you need something to hold back the earth. I’ve got that something. My obsession. See?”
“But …”
Confused, I smoked my first cigarette in thirteen years and coughed.
“Look,” I said, astounded by her lack of perception about other people. “Pure abstraction is not appropriate to our time. People cannot interpret. Analysis is a drag. Abstraction, nowadays, keeps people from seeing the real and so feeds their baser, crueler instincts. Or else it is so real that it is too much to bear.”
Then I really thought about what I had just said, and realized that I was about to realize something from which I would never be able to return, something that would fuck up all my dreams. This could not be.
Deliberately, I stood—took in the failure of will standing before me. I realized that I must never speak to her again. I had to forget that this way of living/thinking/looking/feeling was an option. It only leads to pain.
“Do you want some coffee?” she said, trying to remind me that she was a human being and had thirst.
Before capitulating, I ran out of there. I did not want to know yet another thing that would make my life harder. Even if it was true. I wanted to be like Harrison Bond. On top of the world, The World. I did not want to turn that corner.
7. THE UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE
by Honoré de Balzac
T
HE PAINTING ON
Glick’s door haunted me. But it intrigued Nadine, who asked for its description over and over until I realized that she only wanted the gestures of hands squeezing paint and didn’t need the words. One night she photoshopped what she fantasized the door to look like, but it wasn’t even close. Then, two nights later, she murmured in her sleep, “Glick. Glick.”
I worked night and day on my article, when I wasn’t working at work. In my research, I discovered that Glick’s door was in the tradition of a visual idea first expressed, surprisingly, in a work of nineteenth-century French realism by Honoré de Balzac. He wrote it more than a century before painters discovered Abstract Expressionism. Weird, huh? That a writer could think of a painting before the painters could.
Amazingly, dear Reader, in a kind of event that can only take place in fiction, it was this very story, “The Unknown Masterpiece” by Honoré de Balzac, which Harrison Bond was reading alone, in his fictionalized apartment, at exactly the same moment. Like me, he had turned to Balzac because of a personal quest. Whereas my goal was to understand the origins of the idea of abstraction, Bond wished to conquer the word
like
.
The word had been bothering him quietly for some time, but his disgust grew cumulative, and finally he wanted to be done with it forever.
Why use?
he thought, in the fragmented way that people actually think.
What’s the point?
he thought, in the more conventional and less naturalistic way. And so he decided to turn to a great master to find out how Balzac had avoided the mundane comparative.