Duchamp Versus Einstein

by Christopher Hinz

  He froze. Indeed, the first American appearance of his work had been at the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, held in New York’s 69th Regiment Armory. At the time, Marcel had still been in France. He had not learned until weeks after the opening that his painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, had caused a furor and rendered him an instant celebrity in the American art world.

  He retraced his steps back to the alley, more curious than ever about the identity and motives of the mysterious Stella. It was likely she wasn’t a harlot, drunken socialite or the façade for some lowlife criminal enterprise.

  But the strangeness of the encounter justified caution. He inched past the twin staircases until he was two paces from the alley’s entrance. It was then that he realized there was something strange about the alley itself. It didn’t look like it belonged. The rectangular perimeter possessed an odd blurriness that contrasted with the clear geometrical lines that defined the flanking brownstones. Marcel had wandered along many of Manhattan’s streets but had never encountered such a passageway between homes. He peered into the depths, straining to comprehend shape within the gloom.

  “Did you attend the Armory show?” he called out.

  “I bore witness to it.”

  If the voice was attempting to heighten Marcel’s curiosity, its ploy was excellent.

  “Have we met before?” He had the oddest feeling that indeed they had, although a place and time remained elusive.

  “We are meeting now,” she replied.

  “Why don’t you come out of there?”

  “Why don’t you come in?”

  Marcel’s confusion grew. He didn’t know what to make of this verbal sparring and remained in the grip of uneasiness. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Stella represented some form of profound danger.

  “I’d prefer to stay out here where the lighting is better and more conducive to friendly conversation.”

  “Light is not always what it seems.”

  He stepped closer, drawn by what seemed to be intelligence brimming beneath those words. He was now only a pace from the alley’s mouth.

  “Just one more step,” she urged.

  Marcel continued to hesitate, torn between fascination and apprehension.

  “Fear does not become the man who, a few months hence, will purchase a porcelain urinal, inscribe it with a nom de plume, and deliver it anonymously to a Lexington Avenue hall with the hope of entering it – upside down – as a radical work of art in an exhibition.”

  Marcel was at a loss for words, a condition from which he seldom suffered, even when the conversation was in English and not his mother tongue. Was the woman some sort of gypsy soothsayer of the type he’d occasionally encountered in Paris? If so, her confident prediction of future events would be followed by a financial request. The solicitation might involve a sad tale of familial suffering, perhaps relatives detained on nearby Ellis Island who were in need of assistance to make the final leap into America’s promise.

  “I have no money,” Marcel said. The statement was untrue. On this night he carried six bits, a combination of nickels and dimes. The coins were enshrouded in a handkerchief in his trouser pocket to stop them from rattling so as not to entice thieves.

  “I do not seek money.”

  “Nevertheless, I feel more comfortable remaining out here.” He paused, not wanting her to know he was afraid, and forced a smile. “But I have no problem continuing our verbal chess match.”

  There was a long pause on her part, as if she was giving special consideration to his remarks.

  “Chess,” she said finally, endowing the word with a strong emphasis. “The warlike confrontation inherent in the game would seem foreign to the creator of such artistic abstractions.”

  “To be human is to be confronted with dualities,” he countered, aware that his response also served as an appropriate answer to her initial question about how he maintained his balance.

  There was another pause as she mulled over his answer.

  “Do you play chess?” he asked.

  “I do not. But I know that you are enticed by the game. Therefore, allow me to offer a trade. Enter my domain and I will arrange a chess match the likes of which you will never have experienced.”

  Given the circumstances, the proposal was strange if not outright ludicrous. Yet somehow, Marcel believed her. Intrigued to the point of overcoming trepidation, he stepped into the shadows and reached out his hand. His fingers brushed against something that inexplicably felt both solid and ethereal. At that instant, in his mind’s eye, he again perceived the glowing infant.

  “The baby is yours!” he uttered, astonished by the conclusion he had come to.

  Marcel’s world exploded.

  A barrage of heat and light swept over him, hurling him backward amid a shock wave of tingling energy. For an instant, it felt as if every muscle in his body was connected to a powerful electric current.

  The sensation vanished and he slammed hard onto his back out in the street.

  Overcoming his shock, he righted himself and brushed splotches of dirt from his coat. Other than a few sore spots where the rippled cobblestones had bruised, he didn’t seem injured.

  What had happened? Had a bomb gone off? Had Stella been one of those mad assassins who blew themselves up in the name of some arcane political belief? Had she been attempting to entice him into the alley to carry out an assassination?

  It seemed a reasonable scenario. Considering his minor flirtation with American fame, surely there would be more prominent newspaper coverage of the bombing. The killing of Marcel Duchamp would mean more than the mere self-annihilation of some unknown radical.

  Those questions and more bubbled through his mind as he tried to make sense of it all. However, when he returned his attention to the alley, there were no traces of the explosion, neither shattered windows nor scattered debris. Far stranger, there was no evidence of the alley itself. A solid wall joined the brownstones. Stella, had she ever existed, was gone.

  * * * * *

  She was a creation apart. A non-participant occupying a realm beyond what organic lifestreams perceived as the knowable universe. Coursing through nonlinear dimensions while cradled in a perpetual observational context, she bore witness to the lifestreams’ pasts and futures, observed their brief journeys from birth to cessation.

  Only a few species of lifestreams ascended the three-rung evolutionary ladder to become Tripartites, progressing from pure physicality to emotional awareness to cerebral intelligence. Most of those who achieved the third rung of self-awareness developed coherent civilizations, but it was the exceptions that interested her – the Anomalous Tripartites, she called them – those species whose physical, emotional and intellectual components smoldered in perpetual conflict. Her own existence – predictable, secure, largely unaffected by spatiotemporal events – lacked contradictions, whereas Anomalous Tripartites possessed it in abundance. She perused this rarer subset with the scholarly dedication of the outsider, yet with a specific purpose in mind.

  The latest expulsion was coming. An amalgamation was required.

  Early in her research, she focused on a species of blue-skinned insectoids who fashioned subterranean chambers. Their world’s surface had been rendered a radioactive wasteland by another Anomalous Tripartite species that had self- destructed eons earlier.

  The insectoids scavenged technological junk from the departed civilization and refashioned it into nonfunctional sculptures, cramming the sculptures into their underground abodes. The highest social standing was given to individuals who acquired so much junk they no longer had living space. At that juncture, cheered on by family and friends, they abandoned their homes for ritualistic climbs to the surface, where they soon perished from radiation poisoning.

  She next turned her attention to an equally strange species, oily amphibians fascinated with all things genealogical. The amphibians occupied a hot, seismically unstable planet that suffered perpetual quakes. They compens
ated for the instability by constructing floating swamp cities to buffer the turbulence. Each city was built near a volcanic vent that expelled magma-heated water into a bubbling thermal pool, and many amphibians claimed to see the faces of ancestors within these cauldrons, beckoning them to a better world. A popular social activity, as well as a voluntary form of population control, was diving into the pools to be scalded to death.

  But of all the Anomalous Tripartites she studied, none seemed as steeped in the anomalous as a species of fleshy bipedals living aboveground on the land masses of a world three-quarters aquatic. Although the bipedals sometimes committed suicide, in general it was not a socially sanctioned activity as it was for the insectoids and the amphibians, where voluntary termination achieved high status.

  The bipedals had developed their own unique means for assuring high casualty rates. By banding together in large groups, called “nations”, and fighting brutal wars with others in the name of freedom, for the acquisition of resources or for the placation or worship of beloved deities, they existed in a state of near-constant strife. Their wars tended to enhance the power and wealth of the nations’ ruling classes, a concept to which the majority of those directly impacted by the combat remained blissfully unenlightened.

  Yet it was not their overall belligerence that intrigued her but the strident uniqueness possessed by a tiny percentage. These aberrations defied social conventions and served as counterweights to the warfare-encrusted majority.

  A decision was reached. She would select the amalgamation from among the species known as “humans”.

  * * * * *

  Marcel Duchamp

  23 St. Hippolyte

  Paris, France

  9th of August, 1914

  Walter Arensberg

  33 West 67th Street

  New York City, NY, USA

  My dear Walter,

  A strong urge prompted me to compose this follow-up letter to the one I sent you last week, which I hope you have received and digested by now. It concerns what occurred a few days after the events I previously described to you, namely, another journey into mysterious realms.

  I had been staffing the reference desk at the Saint- Genevieve Library while reading Poincare’s Science and Hypothesis, and in a moment of wandering attention from the text, I recalled having read somewhere that the physicist Albert Einstein read this very work a year before he published his special theory of relativity in 1905. Poincare, in less mathematical terms than Einstein, ingeniously asserts that there is no such thing as absolute time or, for that matter, absolute truth.

  I then began to reminisce about the first time I had met Einstein, during my visit to Prague in 1912. It was during an afternoon at Bertha Fanta’s literary salon that I encountered him, in conversation with a writer by the surname of Kafka. No ordinary chap himself, Kafka was vigorously debating with Einstein about whether the use of an omniscient narrator in literature implied the existence of a higher power.

  The debate was in German, but I was fortunate enough to be in the company of a translator and so able to follow most of it. At several points, I desired to add my own thoughts to the debate, yet held back for fear of being seen as an interloper. But finally, with an invigoration of courage and the assistance of the translator, I jumped into the fray.

  I suggested that there is no such thing as a definitive verdict – only a momentary point of view – and that even God must have his own army of bureaucrats.

  Einstein and Kafka accepted my incursion with agreeable nods, then returned to their animated discussion.

  And it was at that moment, my dearest Walter, that the world again went strange. Lo and behold, a waking dream – at least I think it was a dream – swept me away, and I found myself in a labyrinth of administrative officials, each hard at work at a typewriter. I attempted to ask several of them where the exit was from this perplexing maze within which they performed their duties, but they merely hushed me while averting their gazes. After several minutes of walking helplessly in circles, I decided to try something more extreme to get their attention.

  I jumped onto one of the desks, kicked the typewriter to the floor and began to undress. The official utilizing the desk reacted to my display by standing up and walking swiftly in a direction I had not yet attempted in my efforts to escape. I hopped off the desk and followed him, but mysteriously soon found myself alone. I was in a large hallway flanked by windows interspersed with bizarre paintings, ranging from undecipherable montages of famed cultural icons to a gigantic portrait of a yellow frog in a tropical forest.

  And then occurred the strangest part of this already strange experience. A woman appeared. She was stunning; tall, blonde and slim, and wearing a long dress that initially seemed to be made from some uncommon black material, perhaps some variant of silk. But as a shaft of morning light appeared through one of the windows, her dress brightened into a dazzling array of fierce colors, ever-changing blends of red, gold and violet. It was as if the dress was composed of the very heart of a great dawn.

  She smiled at me from a few paces away, and spoke in a voice seemingly both lyrical and ordinary.

  “You will consider a game of chess.”

  For a moment I did not know how to respond.

  “I am not thinking of now,” she clarified. “I am thinking of then.”

  “Then?” I asked.

  “So be it,” she said, in a tone that suggested the two of us had just settled something of great importance.

  At that moment, for reasons unknown, my thoughts returned to the previous week’s evening chess bout with Picabia, which as usual had featured a heated debate about the future of art, with Francis adamantly claiming that New York City was the place to be, that it was a metropolis with a younger and more subversive sensibility than other global communities. I was not so certain, and argued against it. In the end, we did agree on one thing. Many of Europe’s young artists will be creatively and physically handicapped by military conscription, making the New World all the more enticing compared to the morbid dourness of Europe.

  “A final question,” the woman said. “Would you prefer to live underwater?”

  It was precisely at that moment that I was awakened by church bells ringing from across the street. I was surprised to find that I had nodded off at the reference desk of the Saint-Genevieve Library, with Science and Hypothesis plopped in my lap.

  This event was the end, or nearly the end, of these several days of unusual experiences. One more odd thing happened however, about an hour after I had awakened. A customer approached me at the reference desk and asked if I had a book about tropical amphibians.

  Clearly, life can be as strange as a dream. Clearly, everything can be a form of art.

  Most sincerely, and with regards as always to your dearest Louise,

  Marcel Duchamp

  23 St Hippolyte

  Paris, France

  MANHATTAN, 1917

  By the time Marcel arrived at his apartment he’d churned over the mysterious incident to the point of distraction, and upon entering, he tripped over one of his own works of arts and landed face down on the floor. The object that had snagged his ankle was, appropriately enough, named the Trebuchet, from the French verb meaning “to trip.” In reality it was a wall-mountable coat rack – four metal brackets on a wooden support – that he’d never gotten around to hanging up.

  After stumbling over the coat rack on several occasions, he’d decreed that it deserved Readymade status. Like his other Readymades, Trebuchet had been chosen on the basis of it being a mass-produced object severely lacking esthetic qualities. Representing neither good taste nor bad taste, it simply was. With that criterion in mind, he’d nailed it to the floor.

  Righting himself from this latest fall – the second one in the past half hour – he entered the bathroom to wash up. The toilet beside the sink reminded him of Stella’s prediction that he would buy a urinal and promote it as a legitimate art piece. In reality, he indeed had considered just
such a purchase several weeks ago while walking past a Fifth Avenue iron works and seeing a Bedfordshire-model urinal on display. Such a piece would provoke strong reactions while representing the network of sewage systems that functioned as the bloodstream of civilization.

  But what had really occurred back at the alley-that-wasn’t-an-alley? Had any aspect of his bizarre encounter with the woman been real? And what about the glowing infant, who he remained certain was Stella’s offspring? The two incidents must have a deeper connection than Marcel could fathom. Or had he simply been caught up in a lengthy hallucinatory state due to, overindulgence in revolutionary fervor or tiredness?

  The latter interpretations held appeal. But as he splashed cold water on his face and scrubbed his hands with a coarse sliver of soap, a true explanation seemed as far beyond his grasp as the liquid swirling into the depths of the sink’s drain.

  * * * * *

  Utilizing a chronobiological scan across 50,000 human years and a selection process infused with both rationality and randomness, she chose an individual for more intimate exploration. Examining the lifestream from birth to death, she narrowed her range of interest to a year that his species reckoned as AD 1917, in a nation called the United States of America, in a place called New York City.

  The United States was at that time on the cusp of entering a conflagration that had enveloped many nations on another continent, a so-called Great War that would result in more than sixteen million dead. For bipedals, that represented an above-average casualty figure for a single conflict. Historically impressive as it was for them, however, the number would be greatly exceeded within most of their lifetimes by a second global war.

  The individual she selected was a man who created art that confounded sensibilities, even the sensibilities of someone like herself, whose tastes were forged from the observation of millions of lifestreams over countless millennia.

  She was struck by Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, and the shattered composition sandwiched between pieces of glass referred to as The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Those creations, among others, blended the sensible and the nonsensical in unexpected ways. They straddled a fence separating sanity from madness, somehow maintaining their balance in the face of relentless turbulence.