Beachcombing at Miramar

by Richard Bode

  They were not always consistent in their public or their private lives. They could be devious, even calculating, when they believed they needed to be. They were highly political, waiting for the favorable moment to speak, the propitious moment to act. I accept all these traits as signs of their humanity. I admire these men because they were driven not by the winds of ideology but by something deeper, something more profound. It was their compassion—not their creed, not their doctrine, not their dogma—that changed the world.

  I yearn for leaders who are not addicted to any party or any creed. Instead, I get zealots, some religious, some political, who rise up on public platforms, command the airwaves, and announce that they have the solution to all the problems that plague mankind. Perhaps that is the purpose, the only purpose, of the doctrines they espouse—self-aggrandizement. They concoct a web of conceit to call attention to themselves.

  The struggle is not for power, not for wealth, not for fame. The struggle is for authenticity. The struggle is to live without guile, without artifice, without chicanery, so that we may become the men or the women we were born to be. I say this now as if the thought began with me, but I borrowed it from Polonius, who spoke it long before I came along:

  This above all: to thine own self be true,

  And it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

  Polonius is supposed to be a sententious old fool, and that is how he is almost always played. But that is merely Shakespeare’s ruse, his test for the playgoer, you and me. He assigns his words of wisdom not to kings and princes, but to clowns, jesters, and buffoons.

  There are those who view this sojourn of mine along the sands of Miramar as aberrant behavior, a way of escaping the pressures of the world. A friend inquires in a recent letter if it isn’t time to stop “this idleness, this drifting. When will it all end? Where will it all lead?” he wants to know. I send him a postcard, thanking him for his concern, assuring him that I am well. I do not address his question, but the answer burns in my brain: It will lead where it will lead. It will end when it will end.

  Alone on the beach, gazing into the breakers, I am more sure of my destination than ever before. I am not drifting. I am moving by design, aware of the teeming life about me and the choices I must make—when to resist, when to accept, when to bide my time.

  Those who ignore the words of Polonius, who are not true to their nature, who are driven by forces beyond themselves, they are the drifters of the world. When the wind shifts, so must they.

  I rise and continue for a mile, two miles, three miles, wading in the surf, the jellyfish brushing against my legs, washing over my feet. It seems to me there are more by-the-wind sailors on my stretch of beach than people in the world. Hapless, they collect in long, winding ridges on the sand, where they wither and die.

  fourteen

  the sphinx of the seashore

  I keep thinking of Paul Gauguin. As I sit on the beach reading his journals, I discover that his journey to paradise was not much different from mine to Miramar. As a young man, he got distracted and for a while he lost his way.

  Gauguin was only twenty-three when a friend of his family secured a position for him in a stock-broking firm. He was only twenty-five when he married Mette Sophie Gad, a prim and prudish Danish woman. They had five children in ten years, and he loved them. But it was the wrong job and the wrong woman at the wrong time.

  When he was thirty-one, he painted Mette Sewing, a cozy domestic portrait. She is sitting at a table, her figure covered by a loose dress. Only her face and hands are bare. About the same time he painted the nude study Suzanne Sewing. The full-bodied woman in the painting, a professional model, is sitting on cool white sheets at the edge of a bed, mending what appears to be a gauzy undergarment. A shapely mandolin hangs in the background, suspended from a purple wall, adding a seductive note. A critic referred to Suzanne as “a woman of our day.” Mette so despised the painting that she refused to give it houseroom.

  His business career did not go well. He and Mette moved from Paris to Rouen and then to her native Denmark. He went from stockbroking to banking to selling tarpaulins. But the desire to paint was there, as it was from the beginning, and it could not be suppressed. Agitated and despondent, caught between art and commerce, he went on painting because that was the only life he knew.

  The popular notion is that one fine day he suddenly left for Papeete, going from businessman to artist, forsaking wife and children in an impulsive leap. But his route to the lush tropical isles of Oceania was far more roundabout. He went from Denmark to Paris, to Brittany, to Martinique, then back to Paris and Brittany. He was in his early forties when at long last he reached Tahiti, the one place on earth where he felt at home.

  There, in the fragrant land, he painted as he wished to paint, in jungle colors, parrot colors, in violets, somber blues, vermilions, orange-tinted yellows, and rich golds. He painted the landscape, the women of the landscape, still and statuesque, unsullied by European civilization, dwelling in a luxuriant realm somewhere between the actual and the spirit world. He painted in poverty, in sickness, in fever. He did not drive himself to paint, any more than he drove himself to breathe. He painted because not to paint was unthinkable.

  In 1891, shortly after his arrival, he painted Vahine No Te Tiare (Woman with a Flower in Her Hair), one of his first portraits of a native woman. It is unforgettable: the dark, handsome head against a brilliant yellow background, a barely visible white flower in her straight black hair. She is wearing a deep blue dress with white cuffs and collar, set against a disk of sunset red. Green leaves and white flowers flutter like butterflies about her noble head, and she holds a green sprig ever so tenderly between the curled fingers of her hand.

  He wrote about Vahine No Te Tiare in Noa Noa, his account of his first two years in paradise:

  I worked quickly—with a passion. It was a portrait which was true to what my eyes veiled by my heart truly perceived. I believe that above all else it revealed what went on inside her; the strong flame of a restrained force. She had a flower in her ear which absorbed her own perfume. Her face, in its majesty, and with its raised cheekbones, reminded me of a phrase from Poe: “No beauty is perfect without a certain singularity in its proportion.”

  She is a foretelling of Tehamana, maybe Tehamana herself, the woman of the island who gave herself to Gauguin as artist and man, lifting him out of his despair so he might do the work he was meant to do. She asked nothing of him, expected nothing from him. She was there, always there, when he was working, when he was dreaming, waiting in silence, knowing when to speak, when not to speak, filling the thatched hut in which they dwelt with her perfume.

  On the other side of the world, Mette waited, too. Consumed with bitterness, she criticized the paintings he sent her, sold them without comprehending them, and demanded, constantly demanded, that he send her money he didn’t have. In the eyes of her friends and family, she was justified, for he had Tahiti, but she had the care and feeding of their children.

  In 1893, he returned to France for an exhibition of his work, but the lure of the South Seas was too powerful to resist. By 1895, he was back in paradise, this time for good. But there was a residue of guilt, and it preyed on him. He wrote to a friend:

  Look what I have done with my family life; I ran away without any warning, letting my family solve its problems by itself, for I am the only person who could help it any way. But I am really going to finish my life here, and, as far as I am concerned, in complete tranquility. Of course, this means I am an utter scoundrel. But what does it matter? Michelangelo was too, and I’m not Michelangelo.…

  In August 1897, he wrote to Mette:

  Madame, I asked you that on 7 June, my birthday, the children should write “Dear Papa” to me with a signature. You replied, “You have no money, don’t count on it.”

  I shall not say, “God guard you,” but more realistically, “May your conscience sleep to save you waitin
g for death as a deliverance.”

  His final words to her, a hammer blow.

  I sit upright on the sand, the journal in my lap, remembering how I felt when my children were small. I was a newspaperman, living on a reporter’s meager salary, but I yearned for a home for myself and my growing family. A real estate agent showed me every house in my price range; I rejected them all. Then one afternoon she drove down a tree-lined street in an exclusive part of town and parked in front of a white Dutch Colonial. The house had a long center hall, a formal dining room, a living room with a brick fireplace and French doors at either end that opened onto a porch, an oak-paneled family room, a staircase that led to a landing with a window seat, then turned up to the second floor.

  Before marriage, I had thought of myself as one who would starve in an artist’s garret before succumbing to the creature comforts of a white house with blue shutters set so properly on a green lawn. I had a small inheritance, which I used as a down payment. My family and I lived in that Dutch Colonial for twelve years. But the artist hunger remained, simmering under the surface, burning in the soul. After a while I felt as if I were an imposter, a man pretending to be at home in a house he no longer wanted to own.

  Is that how Gauguin felt when he made the missteps of a young man? There is a formal portrait of Paul and Mette, a photograph taken in Copenhagen in the twelfth year of their marriage. Mette, wearing a long dress and light jacket with a collar fitting snugly around her neck, is sitting stiffly in a curved chair with a tassel dangling from its back. Paul is standing behind her, body aslant, legs crossed, left hand on his hip, right hand braced against a stack of books on a tabletop. Who was the artist deceiving when he posed for that masquerade?

  Gauguin had less than twenty years of life left in him when that photograph was taken. Even then, in his darkest moments, in his secret thoughts, he must have known what riches he would leave behind. He must have known that the further he strayed from himself, the more arduous the journey home. But whatever the price, the journey had to be made; it had to be made.

  My thoughts are broken by a horse kicking up sand, which blows in my face as he gallops by, no more than twenty-five feet away. Horse and rider arrive so suddenly, pass by so swiftly, they take my breath away. I watch as they fly down the beach and disappear in the haze. A sign on the beach, duly posted by authorities, prohibits horseback riding, but I see horses and riders along the beach almost every day.

  I head down the beach in the direction of the horse and rider; all at once they emerge as one from the mist and pass me again, going the other way. I admire the animal, his power and gait, and I admire the grace of the rider high up on the saddle, so perfectly poised. Behind me, a siren wails.

  I turn to see a four-wheel-drive vehicle driven by a park ranger roaring up the beach at top speed, leaving deep tracks in the sand. The race is on. The ranger is chasing horse and rider, and horse and rider are fleeing as fast as they can. I imagine the high-horsepower car overtakes the low-horsepower horse somewhere in the fog that is blowing in from the sea.

  I continue the opposite way, considering my options, the speed at which I choose to move through the world. Walking the beach, I progress at a human pace, two, three, perhaps four miles per hour. Mounted, I gallop at twenty miles per hour, but I leave the human dimension and enter horse time. In a car, I shift to combustion-engine time, which is the artificial clock—days compressed into hours, hours into minutes, minutes into seconds—that I am forced to live by whenever I leave Miramar.

  Often, when I am driving, a car will pull out of a side street, barely braking for a stop sign. The driver will have gained ten seconds on his route to somewhere, or so he thinks. But he is traveling at an inhuman rate of speed, so he has no way of knowing how much life he loses in the time he thinks he saves.

  We live in an age of hysteria. In a frenzied period of my existence, I once flew through two time zones in the morning, and in the evening flew back through the same two time zones again. I passed myself coming and going. For days afterward I was dazed and disoriented, but I walked around as if I were sane and the flights made sense. It never occurred to me how completely the thrust of the jet engine dictated the terms of my daily life.

  Of all the earthbound animals, only man elects to travel faster than his legs can move. It is speed that takes us away from the journey to the center of ourselves. It seems to me that the faster we go, the more jaded we become. The boredom mounts; we respond with still more speed. At sixty miles per hour, we lose all sense of where we are going and who we are. We step down harder on the pedal, hoping to find the missing person somewhere down the road. At seventy, eighty, ninety miles per hour, we plunge headlong over a precipice and kill ourselves.

  How many appointments can we keep in a single day? How many sights and sounds can we absorb before we go completely out of our minds? We admire motion, abhor stillness, treat the reflective person with disdain. I don’t have time to sit around contemplating my navel, the man of action likes to say, never thinking that the umbilicus is the center of his being, the point of nourishment that connects him to his future and his past.

  Paul Gauguin escaped to the South Seas. A few close friends understood; everyone else considered him eccentric, an intransigent painter of orange rivers and red dogs. But he was engaged in a pilgrimage of a particular kind. “In order to produce something new,” he said to a critic, “you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.”

  The “something new” he had to produce was himself, his authentic self, the same task that taxes the artist in us all. Wracked by illness, tormented by poverty, plagued by the death of his daughter, he began the one painting above all others he deemed his masterwork. In February 1898, he wrote to a friend, “I have decided before I die to paint a great picture, which is in my head, and all this month I have worked on it in a kind of unaccustomed frenzy.”

  He called the painting Where have we come from? What are we? Where are we going? It is an allegory, primitive, deliberately devoid of perspective. At the lower right, a baby sleeps peacefully beside three women in the shade of a tropical tree; at the lower left, an old woman sits, her head in her hands, resigned. Between them there are other figures: a child eating fruit, a woman picking fruit, another woman listening intently to a goddess standing on a stone pedestal. “The idol,” Gauguin wrote, “its two arms rhythmically and mysteriously raised, appears to indicate the hereafter.”

  The nude figures in the foreground stand out in bright orange. But the scene, oceanic and idyllic, is set beside a stream with the sea and then the mountains of a neighboring island in the background. “Despite certain tonal passages, the general aspect of the work from one end to the other is blue-green, like Veronese,” according to the creator of this strange, compelling masterpiece.

  Peopled as it is with the symbols of his Tahitian life, the painting confounded viewers in the civilized world, who stared at it in disbelief. What is the meaning of the white bird, the blue idol, the purple she-goat? Why is the orange nude sitting with her back turned, her hand arching over her head? Who are the two women in a leafy bower, cloaked in purple, and what are they talking about?

  At another moment in my life, I might have asked myself the same questions. Now I dismiss the symbols of Gauguin’s idyll as the least-important aspect of his work. For me, the power of the painting lies not in what it signifies but in what it is. The work bespeaks an inner harmony that belies the anguish of the painter’s life.

  After he finished the work, he went into the mountains and swallowed arsenic, but the dosage was too small and he survived. His final eight years in the South Seas were the most productive of his life: one hundred paintings, four hundred woodcuts, twenty sculptures and wood carvings. He died in May 1903, a pauper, deeply in debt, never knowing how much the world owed him.

  I look about me; the shore, the dunes, the bluffs are transformed into planes of color, a seascape defined by delicate gradations and subtle hues. Boundaries
disappear; I am drawn into the painting, too. The pain-filled life of the artist Paul Gauguin passes into myth, like the pagan gods of Mount Olympus, like Prometheus, Sisyphus, Icarus, like Odysseus and his fateful voyage back to Ithaca and home.

  I return to my beach house, a deep longing somewhere within me. I have been beachcombing for months, collecting bits of shell and pieces of stone. Now I have a desire to go beyond the bounds of Miramar. I drive into the city, to the museum in Golden Gate Park, and wander through the galleries, searching for Gauguin. I can’t find him anywhere, but in a corner of a quiet room, I come upon an oil on canvas by Elihu Vedder, called The Sphinx of the Seashore.

  In the background, ruins appear: Roman arches, bleached bones, conch shells, the broken hull of a ship, a half-buried anchor chain. The sky is low and ominous with a reddish glow from the sunset filtering through a cover of cumulus clouds.

  In the foreground, the sphinx stretches across the sand, not a stone monument, but a living creature with a woman’s head and breasts and a feline lower body and tail. Her long red hair falls in bangs over her forehead; she has an anguished expression on her face. Part human, part cat, she sprawls on the beach, lips apart, eyes wide and filled with expectation, holding me in her gaze.

  As I stand staring, I remember the story of Oedipus’ journey. In search of his origins, he travels from Corinth to Thebes, but when he reaches the gates of the ancient city, he finds his way blocked by the Sphinx, who holds the inhabitants hostage, killing those who fail to answer her riddle:

  What goes on four feet, on two feet, and three

  But the more feet it goes on, the weaker it be?

  Oedipus answers: Man—who as an infant crawls on all fours, as an adult walks on two feet, and in old age moves with the help of a cane. The Sphinx, distraught that Oedipus has solved the riddle, kills herself, and Thebes is saved.