by Robert Irwin
Not that all this is going on in my head at this moment. Rather, mindful of Mucor at my back, I rush straight into the painting and there I find instant comfort. My God, I could have my dinner off these tiles!
A force stronger than my will draws me to my knees on these gleaming tiles and I run my moist fingers over them, ravished, almost swooning at their tactile values. Amazing! There is not even any dust in the joins between the tiles! This floor must have been gone over with a tooth-comb. (Mind you, if I was going to have my living room painted I’d be jolly sure it was clean too, but still …) Wonderingly I raise my eyes. The whole room is just so. It gleams and sparkles. No dark shadows anywhere. (If it had been a Leonardo, it would have been full of dark shadows. Shadows fascinate Leonardo. But it is a De Hooch, just the painter to appreciate a nice clean house. Stephanie said something funny about De Hooch this morning. I can’t remember what it was now. No matter, it will come back to me.)
What a picture! Once inside, the mind’s eye can travel in every direction and have a good look round. The furniture is solid, varnished, dustless – all of it, even down to the fretted cabinet under the table that contains the chamber-pot. The white table-cloth on the table is so dazzling and so sharply creased with starch that it aspires to the condition of cut glass. On it rest not plastic utensils that can be washed by a quick dunk and a rinse, but solid silver and pewter that must be and that have been polished. Just look at the milk churn by the door! It has a handle that shines like gold! Through the open door one can glimpse the garden path running away in diminishing perspective and one knows without having to check that the very bricks of that path have been scrubbed. And the secret of the house – it is from the lips of the child that I learn the secret of the house. The little girl who stands beside The Lady Peeling Apples has been practising her reading, by deciphering the poker-work motto on the fire screen in the corner of the room. The motto from the collected sermons of Pastor Warburg reads, ‘God lies in the detail.’
Goodness! And thank goodness that I just had a bath! For it is as if I am in the painting and dripping over this wonderful floor, and the Lady is smiling at me and her eyes following me as I seem to crawl towards her. (I knew that this was a good painting. You can tell when the eyes of the people in the painting follow you.) I am going to tell this Lady everything about myself. It is time to come clean.
And I do. I tell her of my problems with the bed-making and about my archaeological experiences and my conversations with Teilhard and with Leonardo and about the low mentality of the ladies at the coffee morning and how my Hoover has packed up. Nothing is omitted. Above all I tell her of my lonely struggle against Mucor. One may sleep with other people, one may eat with other people, but essentially one does one’s housework alone. I am terribly alone.
I am conscious of going on a bit, yet my confession is only a prelude to my inquisition. I want answers from the Lady. Who am I? Why have I been chosen? I am not one of those who go about their work without a second thought, and many questions have come to me as I have stood over the washing-up bowl. In the first place it is extraordinary that I am precisely the housewife that I am. In the second if there are others like me, why do they not reach out and contact me? How is it that I find myself to be the only housewife to whom has been revealed the menace of Mucor and his legions of rubbish? Why have I been chosen?
Lady, you say nothing. Give me answers. Why is it that the world spins around me? That the sun follows me when I walk? That things close to me are large and things distant are small? Why is it that the clouds, the walls, the very grains of dust talk to me and to me alone? There have been poets and painters of vision, but history has not recorded any housewives of vision before my birth. I cannot deny my visions and I sense that I am chosen, yet I feel my visions are a curse that has been laid upon me. Save me from them. At least explain them.
The Brazilian clinic, the washing up, tracing the passage of the invisible beast through the cornfield, one thing after another in my working day and there seems no point to it, just one damn thing after another. And housework is unending. After today’s dishes there will be tomorrow’s dishes to be washed and dried. Housework is like painting the Forth Bridge. When one has finished it then one knows it is time to start again. But still, when all this is said, I know that what I do has a meaning. Some great mysterious Meaning. What tells me this is something I sense but cannot see. Though it is invisible I know for certain it is there, an invisible audience. As I go about my dusting and sweeping I know that I have an invisible audience. A vast yet unseen audience follows me round the house watching how I do things and it drinks up my thoughts, word by word, image by image. It is for this invisible audience, I think, that I keep this running monologue going on in my head. I have to think loud and clear for them to get it all. I picture this invisible audience as flies upon the wall, thousand upon thousand of them, so closely pressed that some are humped on the backs of others, so many twitching wings and feelers that their presence is almost audible. (Commercially prepared insecticides, by the way, are not much use against the common house-fly, which can rapidly build up an immunity against such products. Personal hygiene and conscientiously performed housework are the best defence against these pests. Flies are extraordinarily filthy in their habits, devouring our food and our excrement quite impartially and paddling their feet in both.) But no, that is all by the way and I mention flies only for comparison, and to make a vivid picture. The truth is that I think of my invisible audience as somewhat closer to human beings than to house-flies.
But why do these invisible creatures watch and listen to me and only to me? Why am I always at the centre of things?
CHAPTER NINE
The whole canvas has been primed; one section of the painting has been executed with such meticulous regard for detail that the pattern of the individual brush-strokes can only be distinguished under a microscope. The general plan of the work, however, is far from clear. Pieter de Hooch is toiling over ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’. It is – or rather was – an essay in light; that is, in the controlled modulation of pigment. Light enters from a window high over the woman’s left shoulder. Yellow on the glass of the closely leaded casement, it is accurately transcribed by the painter as bluish white where the leaded pattern of light is reflected on the rear wall. The light catches the high domed forehead of the woman, the glittering silver of the sharp knife in her hand, the faint gleam of the golden bowl at her feet. Where the sun catches the highlights of the gilded stucco round the mantelpiece, its super-saturation is expressed in flecks of white pigment. The further from the window the more sombre the colours roused by its fading light, but glowing coals under the bubbling pot provide a secondary source of illumination and spread their gleam over the polished floor tiles. Behind the neatly stacked coals, in the recessed gloom of the fireplace, the existence of a poker is expressed only in silvery threaded streaks.
An exercise in control certainly, in the poised moment. It is late afternoon. Mother and child have the house to themselves for this moment. Soon the men will return, but for this moment the woman is enthroned in control of her environment. In this eerie picture space, this speculative mystery, De Hooch has caught the mystery of housecraft and its transmission from generation to generation. The mother’s hand above and the child’s below are linked by a shred of refuse; the apple peel falls from the knife into the daughter’s eagerly outstretched hand. How many brush-strokes will it take him to create a sliver of apple peel? Each dab of the brush stands for a unit of perception and, prompted perhaps by his work on the apple peel, it seems to De Hooch that he pulls his perceptions out of himself in an endless chain, like a sick man drawing an apparently endless tape-worm out of his mouth.
To have recreated ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’ as it once was would be a simple exercise in nostalgia. De Hooch is not interested in that. His single-haired brush has already registered the rhizomatic spread of craquelure that has afflicted the canvas in its centuries’ ageing – and
the dust flecks that certainly were not in the original Dutch interior, but which were caught on the canvas when it was photographed. Beyond that, as an additional gloss to the original Delft light of late afternoon, De Hooch’s new painting wickedly mimics the bogus shiningness of art in the state of mechanical reproduction. Now he is at work on the mirror over the Woman’s head. Half the mirror lies in the direct light of the sun. Hitherto both halves, light and dark, have only reflected bare walls, but presently the grinning painter with his one-haired brush is inserting a tiny, tiny figure in the shadowed half of the mirror, so tiny it is like one of those animalcules he has seen under Cornelis Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope. Indeed De Hooch has to work with a lens to execute the figure. The lens-box duly appears beside the figure and with equally meticulous accuracy the canvas, easel and maul stick. It is a Lilliputian De Hooch that he is painting into the shadows of the mirror.
The next bit is trickier yet. He estimates that the Woman who peels the apples is no larger than his actual hand. She is as seen from a high vantage-point disposed as an irregular solid on the steep perspective of the receding tiles. Now how large should Marcia be? Marcia stands looking at the painting in her living room mid-way between it and its painter. Two Marcias will have to be executed. The first, in the living room, shall be considerably larger than the Woman with her apples. He will catch the colonies of dust that already form on her shoulder-blades and buttocks. (She is of course still naked and slightly wet.) But her face must be seen, and this he will trap in miniature in the mirror. It will be tiny, but still considerably larger than his own.
Marcia is rabbiting on to herself about how what you never see in these old Dutch paintings is wastepaper baskets or dustbins and how on earth do they manage? Quite charming, but De Hooch would like a more interesting expression on her face.
He calls out to her, ‘Ho, woman! You got dust on your bum!’
That is better. It falls out as he had hoped. She does not turn round. Instead her panicky eyes find him reflected in the mirror. Her hand reaches behind her.
‘Oh, you are so dirty!’ He roars with laughter. ‘Your arse is so dirty!’
Her mouth opens, perhaps to scream.
‘No. Do not talk. The woman’s talk I do not need when I am at my painting. It is better so. This you I love, I think. I shall have you wet and filthy on my canvas.’
While De Hooch talks, his brush flicks as quickly as his tongue to reproduce the straining of Marcia’s tendons as she stands on tiptoe to look at the mirror.
‘Dirty, dirty slut! Look there! That good woman has not your modern tricks and devices, but her house is cleaner than yours I think. Look here! I am having to learn new tricks, I, a very old painter. It is a cobweb in the corner of your living room. Never before have I had to paint a cobweb. Look there! You see no cobwebs. Nothing is dirty. The good mevrouw, she has rubbed that poker with emery, she has bought Spanish white for the window-panes, the knife is cleaned with Venetian red, she has polished the tiles and she has a pointy stick with which to scrape between the tiles. So it is good. Dutch culture is not germ culture. But you I can hardly see for dirty germs.’
And it is almost true. Tiny translucent creatures, wild yeasts, seem to swim languidly in the film that coats the aged painter’s eyes, and smaller spore moulds flicker round the yeasts like erratic tug-boats, and there are still smaller bacteria in that film. De Hooch is, momentarily, a prisoner of his eye for detail. With difficulty he enlarges his vision to encompass Marcia. De Hooch, looking at Marcia, decides to call his painting ‘Woman Looking at De Hooch’. Time to get the feel of the woman. Make her flustered; get her moving.
‘That cobweb please, I do not like it in my painting. Have you a duster? No need for a chair. I want you to stretch. And there please, crumbs on the floor that your friends have left. Show the dustpan and brush – and your haunches. I want to see those haunches. Now smile at the mirror. No, do not get up. Good so. Now with the duster at the painting. Stretch again. Keep that sulk. I like the sulk. Perfect.’
Marcia’s angry body is blushing red all over. De Hooch is now sure that she is a worthwhile subject and continues, ‘The worms you despise make a cleaner job of picking a cockroach’s corpse than you do of cleaning this room. When your Philip comes home in the evening and finds his living room like this, what does he say! Oh, it is shameful! If you are not here all day to clean, then for what? Pardon me for asking. But your house is not clean and that is not so funny I think. And how long have you to make the whole house clean? From the light in the window it is mid-afternoon. Two hours then maybe. Maybe not so much time. But you must be preening before a great Dutch painter.’
She is almost running now, as she moves around the room, duster and brush in hand. Quite charming. But it is time to catch her in a pose. Have her looking at her master.
‘Now stop. Look up at the mirror. Don’t try to look back at me. Look at the mirror. Hold that. And what will Philip say when he comes home and finds you like so? No. No talking please. Good girl. Is this how she does her housework, he will be thinking, or has she got some fellow hidden here, some artist type perhaps? Ho ho! What has she been doing all day? It is not cleaning, that is for sure. Wholly not so. Now see how you look. Look into the mirror, and you can see me there too, showing you how you look.’
And De Hooch accompanies these words with curves crudely drawn in the air by his brush and maul stick.
I have looked as he directed and I am doubtful, no longer quite so sure that there is the miniaturized image of an artist in the darkened half of the mirror in the reproduction of ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’ on my wall. Perhaps there is only a trick of the light. I dab hesitantly at it with my finger and find that there is in fact a bit of gunge adhering to the surface of the glass. Well, it has been a beguiling fantasy while it lasted … In that it got me through a lot of cleaning in this room. The crumbs from the coffee morning are all gone now, and I should have noticed that half-shred of cobweb before. It takes the eye of an artist to notice such things. De Hooch’s voice is stilled. It was never more than noisy thinking, the sort that echoes unbidden in the head when one is very tired. But a touch of nastiness in it that must have come from Mucor. A pity. I was counting on De Hooch to see me through getting the wash done and then giving the kitchen a final tidy before Philip comes home. A failure of the imagination.
As Blake says, ‘He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.’
I say, ‘I have had enough of painters for one day.’
‘The grubbing Hollanders show only the outer lineaments. That was only Analytics & no true Painting,’ Blake replies, and gesturing disparagingly at the bowl and the poker in ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’, he declaims:
‘Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod,
Or Love in a golden bowl?’
‘Well, I don’t want to be painted in the nude anyway and besides it’s getting cold’, and I cast around for something to cover my nakedness. His hand on my shoulder stops me.
‘No need, Angel, for you are clothed in Light. Besides I shall not paint today. Show me instead, O Angel of the Hearth, a Wonder.’
‘Ooh, I know what will interest you. I have been reading about them in Shirley Conran’s Superwoman.’
I am about to show him some interesting specimens of Lepisma saccharina or silver fish. These tiny, brilliantly scaled vermin lurk about under wallpaper, particularly in damp corners. They eat the backing off the wallpaper. Although they are born in damp, when winter comes they look for warmth and move under the wallpaper towards some convenient fire or stove.
But Blake is there before me and recites from his epic poem ‘Collembola’:
‘Lo silver fish
That thread the walls!
Silver fish that eat on paper balls,
Cryptophagic little beasts,
Eating starch, consuming yeast!
Seek out the fire,
my little ones,
And find the heat.
For fish to fire must come to fry,
And little fish just burn to die …’
He breaks off and concludes, ‘There is a Wonder indeed.’ But darkness passes over his face. ‘Angel Marcia, I am come to warn you of your peril. Walk with me thro’ to the hallway.’
In the hall Blake has no trouble in finding the mouldy patch on the carpet. This he apostrophizes:
‘Mucor, fearsome creature of dust!
Dost think thyself a Thing of Joy?
Shak’st thou thy shaggy spores at us?
Vermin of mould and slime and must!
Vap’rous Horror in the Optic nerve,
Eagerly festering, Satan for to serve.
In a dream when I was sleeping,
I saw a maid with duster in a room.
Maid, I called in tears and weeping,
Or is it Angel? There is your doom.
What is the Hoover but the breath of Man?