The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella (5 page)

“I guess I don’t.”

“Why do you stop?”

“I’ve got to stop sometime.”

“But if this is me, am I finished?”

“No, you’re a work in progress.”

“But the drawing is finished, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes, I do it fast, sometimes slow. My mother told me artists used to get intoxicated by the actual act of painting. As if, the inner life of the artist was more important. I stop when I got tired.

Lisa continued to gaze on her image. It never failed. It was like magic. He didn’t copy her. That’s how I could do it so fast.

“You expressed me.”

“I could draw you so crudely, you wouldn’t recognize herself and you’d still view it with awe.”

Somewhere in her, in us, somewhere in our brain, there remained this worship of the image, he thought.

Tony stared at Lisa. She was beautiful but a pain in the ass. Always arguing with him. He tried once to explain to her that there’s a first bloom in all human feelings but she wouldn’t hear of it.

As he acquired more concepts from Ivanova, Kruger felt a remorseless pessimism, “sickness unto art,” his own sickness for the world’s sickness despair, metaphysical isolation; there’s no such thing as pessimistic art, art affirms, he fought back.

He was an increasingly isolated figure, at odds with the world, and deliberately evasive, increasingly working for his own satisfaction. He fascinated Ivanova.

“You’re a visionary,” she said. “Aware as nobody else—what art might be.”

“I’d like to think,” he said. “An exceptional artist could transcend the time, be understood as untimely.”

“A German philosopher once said something familiar,” she said.

Lisa Ivanova was about the same age as him—just past thirty. She sat there on a low stool, in her clinical white uniform she wore inside, and leant her chin in her hand. Her compact brown hair, already a little grey at the sides, was parted in the middle and waved over the temples, framing a sensitive, sympathetic, dark skinned face, which was Slavic in its facial structure, with a flat nose, accentuated cheek-bones, and little bright black eyes.

After their discussions, he walked the streets and looked at the objects in the world. She encouraged him. On the streets he was aware of solids, utility, strangeness, overheard fragments. He saw himself as seeing, the myriad possibilities, the transitions, objects as massive obstacles, around which his thoughts could not pass. Kind of primitive society, everybody with tattoos, piercings; computers are illegal Slogans on walls, screens,

Even the most virulent among them can survive that transcendent one-two punch— connoisseur concurrence and the passage of time.

He confided in Ivanova. He even told her he enjoyed talking with her. He had never enjoyed talking before. She told him about the concept of cognitive dissonance psychology, and he was able to recognize his mental discomfort came from holding two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time and she confronted him with new information that conflicted with his existing ideas.

“Strive for internal consistency,” she said.

“That’s just not something I’ve been able to do,” said Kruger.

After she told him consciousness is gone, dead—there’s only the brain and behavior—he said, “I’ve got consciousness at least. They used to say, my mother used to say, let animals be animals, let humans be humans. But then we learned we’re all animals anyway, so what were we supposed to let be? I love to wander the streets of Old San Frisco. Everything’s quiet here. Know what I saw once? A cow skull. Polished. They say that was the butcher’s district—old Union Square—until the animals ran out. I thought, somebody must have eaten what was around that skull once. I thought I could smell something there. I like to watch the men defecating and smoking indifferently. Don’t even wear Tsuits. Most lie on the ground sleeping. That skull was stripped of skin. I look at the rows of men defecating and smoking, gazing blankly into the distance that’s not really distance, and I wonder, looking at their brooding eyes gazing blankly towards the water—I think, what’s the difference between them and me? Their dirty dark bodies, the black water—Black-Kali—my mother said she worshipped Kali, some kind of god, she said. We used to grin into our iMeMys like baboons, she said. Punching buttons, grinning, shrugging, sending messages. Plugged in to Speak, using Think, what kind of life was that? Good riddance, she said.

“Thing is, you know, nobody’s free. My mother always told me that. She said we were all dishonest and insecure and if we wanted to remain alive, we had to use those qualities to remain alive. Like my father, she said. I always wanted to turn my sickness into art. That sounds profound, doesn’t it? This was a lunatic world, she said. Full of cause and effect. Don’t let it happen again, she said. But there was no hope. It was historical necessity, she said. But the crazy thing, she said, was that history was a now a myth. It was a fantasy, fantasies, nobody knew what was up, what was cause and effect. What happened to progress, she said.  We were taken out of time. We had no history. She said we’d lost our memory, but actually, she said, I didn’t have any memories, she had only a few, not enough to make a difference, and the little she had were getting wiped out, she said, and my memory was bogus, she said, I didn’t and couldn’t have memories of something different, all I ever knew was this dystopia, she said, not that things ever were a utopia. She said people, cultures used to have alternative values and practices, but the wars, scarcity, entertainment, pollution, and technology had killed this kind of diversity. We were all the same now. We were all primitive now, she said. We’d made the final adaptation—the neuron adjustment—it was no longer survival of the fittest—now it was take the line of least resistance.

“I told you I like the feel of charcoal in my hand. Have you ever wondered what charcoal is? Since the War, we’ve got a lot of charcoal. We must have had some forests here. Eucalyptus, pine, bamboo, or something. Anyway, I’ve got little sticks and clumps of charcoal I use for drawing. I like the feel of the charcoal in my hand. I feel power. I feel like a god ready to create. You don’t see too many holding a piece of charcoal. You know what I saw? I saw the defecating men
eating
bamboo charcoal. They say it relieves hunger and indigestion. How ’bout that Mother Nature? I did some drawings of the defecating men. My drawings hint at the terror of existence, I hope, though we hardly need any more hints, do we? Anyway, still, that’s what it does—hints at the terror of existence. Can’t escape that. But at the same time, my drawings affirm existence. How about that? We’re human. Rational and all that. But we’re dark. Like we have some unfathomable strains inside us. Those defecating men. They could be our ancestors. They could be lined up in some kind of sexual fertility rite, they could be the obliteration of consciousness, the  beginning of consciousness, the simplicity of existence, rootedness, with hardly a thought intervening in their existence. I mean, my drawing, could be standing for something else! Perhaps my drawing expresses a longing for our earth—our poor destroyed earth. It could stand for plenitude and well-being. The drawing could be a tragedy, the end—or beginning of violent ritual, a tragedy. The return of the earth goddess! A longing. That’s art! My drawing could be an allusion. A metaphor. A representation. An expression. A symbol. It could even be humor. It could be a social caricature. I mean what’s more funny than a row of defecating men, eating coal, and smoking too! But would this drawing give you solace? Them? So why do I do this, you ask? I don’t know. I don’t know why. I only know I like to do it. I’m not into science and technology, you know what I mean? Sometimes after I hang my drawings up in the street and watch people’s reactions, I feel a little happiness. They look and walk on. Look and look and then walk on. Look, mumble to themselves. Some look and call somebody else to look. Sometime they look and another looks and they—talk to each other! Some pull it down and run away. Some take it off and rip it up. Some turn it backwards. Crumble it and toss it. Some even try to eat it.

“I went for a walk today and hung out at the Chai stand near the Buddy Brook running down old Stockton Street toward the bay. The Chai person had set up some chairs near the tunnel to enjoy the view. Everything was quiet. I enjoy sitting in the street drinking a Chai—wonder what they use in it—I watch the cockroaches—so large now—they say—feeding on the minerals dropping out of the sky in the air pollution. Some corporation, or some guy, was distributing the Chai. He spoke a little English with a clipped Punjabi trill. He reminded me of a girl I used to love in Mill Valley. She was Punjabi. The dubious purified water, sugar, some herbs, tea—wasn’t that once from China—was it really tea, well, it was a leaf—probably sorrel. But just to think it—a Chai stand. Things must be improving...I mean this is a world of extremes, isn’t it?

Extreme beauty, extreme repulsion—but to have a wonderful delicious taste of tea—to smell it—I think it’s one of the most beautiful things —the Chai stand. The Chai stand, with its steaming pots and pans, wafts of sweet aromatic sensuality, gathered crowds and sweltering conversations.

Many were smoking cigarettes and drinking. Who knows where and how they came here. Were they once the Gung-Hos? The men and women smoking. Outside the boundaries of the Chai Stand, others were lying on the ground sleeping. The Sleepers. Near the old garage, I saw a pile of stripped out skulls. Some other men were defecating near the tunnel. They looked like stone statues. Buddy Brook was a sewage hole really with the stench of the feces—don’t they know not to shit there—and the large rim of black water sluggishly flowing toward the bay. The sparkly oily gloss, the skim, was shiny. I saw some men pacing, walking the same path, turning around repeatedly, like under a spell, a trance. Most covered in filth, eyes gazing blankly at the water. I even did some drawings—
Chiaroscuro
—all black and shadow.

“I thought of my so-called quest. To go somewhere. But there was nowhere to go. A journey to the north, the growth of the soil, life’s path. It used to be, my mother said, you didn’t die because you lived on in the future children. The children were the hope. Our progeny would ensure our immortality. But now we’re expired. My mother told me many times, it’s cruel to bring children into this world. She was sorry she brought me into it.

“Looking around at the Chai Stand, I saw everybody greeting each other like baboons. Hugging, touching, picking, low-vocab slang, ritualistic, the pats on the shoulders, and I wondered what instincts of our being were downloaded and rebooted in this utopia?”

Later Ivanova sat there measuring Kruger’s work with her head on one side and her eyes screwed up; her features were drawn with a look of misgiving, almost of pity. Lisa Ivanova was a good friend, to whom he told all his troubles, his deepest thoughts.

“Did I disturb you with all that babble, Lisa,” said Kruger.

“Goddamn, Tony Kruger! Don't be so formal,” she said, with her lilting intonation. “Everybody knows you were taught good manners in your compound. I listened to your rambling, didn’t I?”

He transferred his brush to his left hand that held the palette, reached her with his right, touched her cheek, and looked her in the face, smiling and shaking his head.

“Yes, but you are working,” she said. “Let's see. Oh, you've been getting on,” and she  looked at the color-sketches leaning against chairs at both sides of the easel and from them to the large canvas covered with a square linen mesh, where the first patches of color were beginning to appear among the confused and schematic lines of the charcoal sketch. A portrait of his mother.

“Why do you do them?” she asked.

He had a sense of nostalgia about the past—a melancholic longing for his mother. He was exhausted confessing to Ivanova. He held his hands clamped together. Time has moved on and he would never be able to return to what now lay far away in the past.

He looked at his work. His mother was a thing. She was formless and chaos. Not static. She was energy. Round tube-like genitals hanging. Crusty. Inscrutable. He wanted to take her face and alter it. Enlarge her lips. Then he decided to change the face to Ivanova’s.

“You know I’m having trouble with this painting because of the hot weather. My mother used to say, ‘Goddamn the summer!’ because she was unable to think, ‘while harassed by a swarm of inappropriate sensations,’ she said.”

“Only a normal believes a creative person is allowed to feel,” said Kruger. But it wasn’t true. He needed to keep
distance
from human experience and feeling, he thought, in order to depict it in any kind of art.

“But you’re not a normal,” she said.

“I’m ashamed…of being an artist...but I’m touched by the warm and awkward human feelings that my art has evoked.”

“It’s like a curse,” said Lisa.

This touched off another explosion in Kruger.

“When does one begin to feel the curse?” said Kruger. “Early, horribly early. I should have been living in peace and harmony with the world. It begins by feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, normal people; there’s a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, skepticism, disagreement between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize you are alone; and from then on any relationship is hopeless! Your self-consciousness is kindled, because you among thousands feel the sign on your brow like Cain and know that everyone else sees it. I once knew an actor, a woman of genius, who had to struggle with a morbid self-consciousness and instability. When she had no role to play, nothing to represent, this woman, consummate artist but impoverished human being, was overcome by an exaggerated consciousness of her ego. It used to embarrass me to observe. A genuine artist—not one who has taken up art as a profession like another, but artist born and damned—you can pick out, without boasting. I didn’t like her. Mary Verme was her name.