The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella

THE QUEST OF THE ARTIST

BY

PHIL SEMLER

Cover image: J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851),
Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway
, 1844, oil on canvas, National Gallery in London

To Zoe, the artist of the future

This novella is a homage to Thomas Mann. I first read
Tonio Kröger
when I was eighteen in 1972, and it continues to inspire me. Tonio was born approximately in 1875, Tony about 2100.

Only that which has no history can be defined

Nietzsche

The winter sun, poor dim-ghost of itself, hung reddish and washed-out behind layers of haze above the old highway. The thick, damp air engulfed him with heat and humidity, though he did not feel uncomfortable. He stared at the sun and at the same time sketched. The performance had just ended and school had let out.

Hands was late for their after-school walk. Tony cried miserably as he drew, thinking he would not come.

“Ah, there you are at last, Hands,” said Tony Kruger. He had been waiting a long time on the highway and went up with a smile to the friend he saw coming out of the gate talking with other boys and about to go off with them.

“What?” said Hands, and looked at Tony. Tony closed his sketchbook.

“Right! We'll take a little walk, then,” said Hands Hansen. Tony said nothing and his eyes were clouded. Did Hands forget—had he just remembered that they were to take a walk together today on the abandoned highway? And Tony had looked forward to it with incessant joy.

“Well, good-bye,” said Hands Hansen to his comrades.

Feeling a bit short of breath, Tony Kruger felt released.

He didn’t so much feel the oppressiveness of the end of the world, but the oppressiveness of his love for Hands.

Often he confused the end of the world (if we can say the end of the world is an event), with causes and effects, and really, he knew nothing, nothing about this world, and where it had come from, where it was going, if he should have hope or not.

Tony did not speak. He suffered in silence. His slanted thin brows were drawn together in a frown, his sensual lips were rounded to whistle, and he gazed into space with his head on one side. Both his posture and manner were habitual.

Hands played with his Cat’s Cradle string, making patterns and shapes, constructing buildings.

Suddenly Hands shoved his arm into Tony's, with a sideways look—he knew very well what the trouble was. And Tony, though he remained silent for the next few steps, felt his heart soften.

“I hadn't forgotten, you see, Tony,” said Hands, gazing at the asphalt, “I just thought it wouldn't come off today because it was so hot and that it might rain. But I don't mind that at all, and it's great of you to have waited. I thought you had gone home, and I was mad....”

He put away his string. Everything in Tony leaped and jumped for joy at the words.

The two chattering teenagers walked on the rubbish laden asphalt near the old Mill Valley/Highway One exit. The old freeway was abandoned and wrecked. Unreachable Old Frisco across the acrid red bay smoked and spurt fire like a kiln. The collapsed ruins of the two major bridges were like severed arteries. The flaccid red water was empty of objects, like a desert.

After the afternoon’s squashing tempest of rain, the excruciating heat and humidity made the two sweat slightly, even pleasantly; they were comfortable in their Tsuits. The Tsuits made the conditions bearable, even pleasant, no matter the sultry tropical-like Bay Area weather.

They were both fourteen year old teenagers; with limited vocabularies, boundless useless hope, with no kind of intelligible future. Hands was absolutely Tony’s physical and intellectual opposite. Hands had wavy blond hair, was athletically built, with narrow hips and thin lips, and blue-eyed; Tony was nearly a bag of bones, Asian and dark, with a “mongoloid” face, including single-lidded eyes, black straight hair.

The interests of the two boys differed as well, as Tony was well aware. Tony liked to doodle and draw and already had the ineffable artistic drive, which made him feel different from others

Hands had utterly no interest in imagination or unreal sad nostalgia—he lived in the moment.

Tony
already
felt a strong sense of isolation and loss, and saw himself as a romantic figure, the
disillusioned artist who did not have any feelings for humanity, which he understood to be “normal” feelings. He felt artistic self-consciousness and wondered of the role of the artist in society, what his role might be for the future.

Tony, intellectual—whatever that could mean in this context—and sensitive, too much so, without any hope, with no kind of discernible future, carried a piece of charcoal in his hand and his sketchbook under his arm. Occasionally Tony stopped to draw something on the concrete, make an image, a sign, even just a few lines, while expressing his sadness to Hands.
  Hands was against all the doom and gloom talk from pessimistic Tony.

“Man, I mean, shit, what the fuck. It’s all good, dude. Even this. There must be a plan. Maybe divine intervention. We just got to invent something new. That’s what my dad says,” said Hands passionately. Rather than doodle, he liked to fiddle with his hands, always playing with something like string or wood.

All they had ever known was war, disaster, and scarcity. “We got gypped,” as Tony often said. Kruger felt childhood memories of Mill Valley, the sense of being cheated by the world, with memories of something different that he could not possibly have ever experienced. Tony felt both superior to Hands in his insights and envious of Hands’ innocent vitality.

They had very little stuff. Food, water, even a place to sleep was getting problematic, let alone any hopes for urban renewal. SEC was over—Sacred Electric Connectivity. It was gone. According to Tony’s mother, SEC—it was really something, the sacred connectivity. Now most information technology was dead, and satellites in space had outlived their usefulness, and most had plunged from space.

The plug had been pulled. Technopolies almost killed us, said Tony’s mother. She said: We humans only need food, water, a place to sleep, and face-to-face connectivity. That’s all at a bare minimum. And that’s about all we have now. No more manufactured stuff, no more virtual reality

Stuff is dead; technology needs to invent something new, said Tony’s dad. New ways to live. Get business rolling again!

This was Kruger’s world—felt memories of Mill Valley, the sense of being cheated by the world, with memories of something different that he could not possibly have ever experienced and yet the bigger picture was much worse than what he imagined to be his alienation.

Tony’s mother said we needed to think outside of the box. Problem, she said, we’d been shut in a box with no possibility of escaping the box, let alone thinking. She hated euphemisms, she said. Things were fucked, no doubt about it. Didn’t have many objectives. Planning was a joke. It was unfair. It was not unfair. It is what it is. Fate. Don’t take it personal. God does not exist. God is punishing our hubris. This was her language, always speaking in dichotomies, testing contradictory points. The irony was beyond most people nowadays.

All the two teenagers really knew was the world was
lacking
. There were so many negatives. The information, the content, the explanations, and worse, the interpretations weren’t hopeful. The thing was, you didn’t know what to believe. War with billions dead, destruction, food running out, death camps, forced euthanasia, and basically, no more entertainment, let alone learning, had done a number on us, Tony thought. The world was fucked up.

Some said we were like apes in the primitive times of millions of years ago, but with more developed brains that would need to adapt more quickly.

Just as after any crisis, like a plague, the smart and brave would survive. But how could anybody really know? It was as if history had stopped.

They still had to go to school. They learned mathematics, the alphabet, how to read and write, though there was little to read or write, took gym, or at least an exercise class. “You are the future,” the elders pounded into them every day.

In school that day, both Hands and Tony had watched a performance by Mary Verme called “The Plague,” about the aftermath of the Great War. She was also an artist, but Tony was wary of her, even though she seemed to gravitate towards Tony. She was an actress. She enjoyed taking on roles, memorizing dialogue, and performing. She claimed humans were innate story tellers. Tony was moved by her performance; he felt something like purification, but Hands thought it was a waste of time. “That’s not anything for me,” he said. But Tony didn’t defend Mary, since he felt ambiguous about her, and about his feelings during the performance. But he still felt sorry for Hand’s “normality,” though he wouldn’t have wished his own artistic sadness on anybody.

His mother had told him long ago, maybe when he was six—to be an artist, one has to be dead to everyday life. That had started to make more sense now that he was fourteen.

But Tony had to admit this was an extreme view. Wasn’t everything already dead? What about the need to live, to be happy, and to procreate? To be safe, as a child, as a teenager, as Hands felt and Tony did not. His mother loved art. But she had the old knowledge of it. It was gone now. She told Tony your infatuation and entanglements of your heart, your passionate heart, would—was destined—to give shape to its feelings in art, but that was no consolation to Tony.

Tony looked over at Hands. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, muscular and pale, Hands was beautiful. Tony imagined drawing him naked without his Tsuit. He’d already made hundreds of secret drawings of a naked Hands using his imagination. He wouldn’t dare share  them with Hands or anybody else.

Hands scarcely questioned anything. He wouldn’t understand. Culture meant nothing to him. He said there was only one choice—to rebuild again.

Tony’s mother questioned everything—the “venerated conventions”—she called them —science, religion, art, politics, morals, and language. She said science killed us. She said there’s no such thing as morals—it’s all custom and habit. Religion was all myths (Which wasn’t a bad thing, she said. She liked Mary Verme’s outlook.), language had evolved to banality.

Eventually Chinese conformity and consumerism became the ideal until they initiated the forced migration of their people to other parts of the world. She didn’t have anything against the Chinese, she said. His father was Chinese. Supposedly they were the ones that finally destroyed everything in the War of Annihilation.

We’re all animals now, she said. She was suspicious, nonetheless. Seeking the truth? She was against that also. Anyway, who sought truth nowadays, she said. What is truth, anyway? She didn’t believe in divinity. Religion she mocked. The Tech First terrorists everywhere had blown things up, poisoned the food and water, destroyed. Anything unexamined was bogus and anything examined turned out to be bogus, she said. We’re always evolving, she said. It’s perpetual adaptation.

It’s hard to believe his innocence, Tony thought—Hands’ innocence in all of this. It’s all good, he said. He still believed. He was no doubting Thomas, man. The world was gone, man. It was beyond dystopia, it was meta-dystopia. The world was dead. We’re so separated from life, Tony thought. Yet, his mother said it had always been so—Dichotomy—she called it. Between art and life, intellect and nature—we who still had consciousness had to explore the ramifications of this separation. We could be agents of reconciliation, she said. But it wouldn’t be anything practical. That’s
our
role, she said. This was confusing for Tony, even as her words molded his vision. The world seemed to demand practicality now, and he felt
lesser
than Hands and embarrassed for Mary the thespian.

Not that we could have art for art’s sake, said his mother. That was certainly ludicrous, she said. Dumb. Over three hundred years ago—the end of the 18th century—she ranted, the Germans started a movement. It was called romanticism. The idea that anybody could escape into some kind of aestheticism, which promoted art as a refuge from actual living. He was fourteen and didn’t understand all that, other than his mother was worried.

Tony didn’t remember his father very well. After things started really getting bad, he disappeared. He was a businessman, but that profession no longer had any use.

She told Tony his last name was no longer Kung, but Kruger. Her name was Consuelo Diaz. She hated her name. She said her first name meant “Our Lady of Consolation,” which was another name for the virgin mother of Jesus. Her grandfather’s name was Carl Wilhelm Kruger, a German immigrant to Mexico. She preferred to call herself Sophia Kruger.

His father distanced himself from the world, his mother said. Now I am distancing myself from the world. The world doesn’t love me. It doesn’t care about me.

Or course, how could it, said his mother. Until recently, we believed the earth was the center of things, of the universe; we were homocentric, species centric, whatever you want to call it. First, it was all about man, then humans, then us, then me.

But the horrendousness of physics had destroyed the world, his mother said. It had destroyed
being
. What is
being
, asked Tony at a young age. Being is
that which is
, his mother said, which didn’t help much. You know, your father didn’t understand irony, she said. Only things and money which could buy things. What’s
irony
, asked Tony? It’s when things turn out to be much different from what you expected, his mother said.

She was a philosopher, his mother, but with nobody else to talk with but a fourteen year old boy who knew nothing and felt like he’d been thrown into this primeval wasteland.