Then I saw myself, about twelve, at the scholastic art fair, jotting down flaws in the works I saw in a little field book. Little Holly Rander’s “Two Faces”? Too baroque! No one’s eyelashes curl to that degree! And Johnny Wiles’s “My Mom, Dad, and Brother”? I remember my pleasure at coming up with: All the sap of Norman Rockwell with none of the skill! Then everything sped up, and it became harder to tell what time period images came from. Some were mere snippets—an exhibition catalogue falling to the floor, a fountain pen presented in a velvet case for a bygone birthday, an artist using the same circular gesticulation over and over to describe his series of tondo paintings, as if I needed his help to visualize “round.” The visions kept coming, and nothing tied them with the present moment except that they were a showcase of a life absent of Microaestheticism, a life where a clear line was drawn between art and science, cells and paint, illness and art-making.
If Markus O’Hara had his way, no life-review hallucinatory episode would ever be without the firm presence of Microaestheticism. A memory of kindergarten would draw up a different method of finger-painting, one which owed a heavy debt to O’Hara and his theory. Kindergarteners would simply rub their bare hands—still with abandon, of course—over a line-up of slides, which they would then look at under a microscope to see what sort of image their skin cells, oil, and perhaps PB&J residue would create. “A more accurately dubbed ‘finger painting,’” O’Hara would likely say of it. And a scholastic art fair? Maybe, rather than questioning the unearned sentiment of a colored-pencil family portrait, a young critic would comment on a diptych of a cartoon daisy and a few chambers of skin cells arranged to mimic it, pointing out that the resemblance between the two was too obvious to be evocative.
Perhaps that was, after all, the most damning criticism of Micro-aestheticism. Both the body, with its still-inchoate vagaries (ever mocking science), and art, in its untraceable power and inscrutable victories, still largely elude us, and rightfully so. To pin both art and science under a single slide, never allowing them free play in the unknown, is to sacrifice mystery for control. Still, when the vagaries of the body are upon us, when chests contract, when arms go numb, when vision falters, when retching asks for more than mere vomit, seeming to demand that the innards rise up in the throat as well—the mystery, admittedly, can be a bit hard to appreciate. But a critical mystery, I maintain, it nevertheless is. Through the in-and-out flickering that had now become my visual and aural field, I heard O’Hara, and as usual he hardly seemed to second me.
“Mmmm …,” O’Hara began. “I think I know exactly what’s going on here. You’ve been skeptical about Microaestheticism this whole time, and now you’ve seen proof—in the image of your own blood nonetheless—of its validity. So you play up a coughing fit to stall until you can think of some clever way to refute it. Not a gracious loser, eh?”
Playing up a coughing fit? Of course. No drama exterior to the drama in O’Hara’s own mind could be anything but a ploy. “But I’m used to this stuff. Comes with the territory, as they say. But you are gonna look at the slide again. It’s shifted into an even better composition. There’ll be no denying it then, friend. No denying it then.” His words were followed by a series of what felt like seismic shifts, as my movement seemed to occur absent of my volition. “Oopsies,” O’Hara said, as I felt my body hurl forward. “Gotta watch out for these cords. Up you go!” It occurred to me that O’Hara was likely pushing my chair, but when I tried to feel around me, no definitive conclusion could be made on that. “Final stop, ’Scope Terminal. Everybody off.” I felt O’Hara grab me under my armpits and hoist me somewhere, presumably at the ’scope. I opened my mouth again in an attempt to impress upon O’Hara the gravity of my condition, but all that happened was a bubbling up of something bile-like, which I had barely the energy to choke down.
“Look.” I felt O’Hara’s hands at the back of my neck and head, directing me into the proper craning at the ’scope. While he pushed down on the back of my head, presumably to line me up better with the eyepiece, the sudden force caused my legs to slide under me. As I felt myself oozing to the floor, like so much precious substance spilled from a beaker, O’Hara tightened his grip on my head. “Ah-ah-ah … you’re not getting out of this so easily.” At that, he pulled me up, cranium first, and again thrust me at the ’scope. “Look.” O’Hara moved in closer to support me, effectively jamming me between him and the table, while the ’scope served as a balance point for my head. I probably looked much like Dali’s seeping clocks, kept only from puddling by their precise arrangement on the crutches. Such an image could double as a representation of theories, like Microaestheticism, that try to balance something as fluid as the sublime on something as rigid as fact.
As O’Hara pushed my head more firmly on the ’scope, my vision finally graduated from intermittent to all black. I was embarrassed to admit that my instinctive interpretation was utterly layman. “I have gone blind,” I thought, falling prey to that stock reading of everything going dark. Not wanting to give O’Hara the satisfaction of pointing out a conventional interpretation (even in my inner monologue), I concentrated until the darkness become something more. Balanced on the scope, I suddenly saw something—a vague form, a patch of lighter dark—emerge from the otherwise consistent field. The image was similar to Ad Reinhardt’s “Black Painting #34,” with a ghost-of-a-form manifesting after enough concentration. It was a brilliant use of subtlety; a subtlety employed so successfully that it became more extreme than a white swath on a black canvas. The thing about blackness is that no one looks at it long enough; viewers assume there’s nothing to see. But forming an image, even the shyest silhouette, in the language of black is more powerful than introducing color because it introduces the idea that there is no absolute saturation. Everything is a study in value.
If only I could have spoken then, I could have reached a tenuous common ground with O’Hara, conceding that what I saw under the slide was indeed spectacular, perhaps calling for a reevaluation of the worth of Microaestheticism, and thus forging a truce in awe. I tried to speak, but all I think I managed was “Blackkkkkkkkk …,” followed by a hot, wet clot spat up against the back of my teeth, which soon occupied all my energy in its gagging-down. O’Hara, still behind me to ensure I was wedged at the scope until I hit an acceptable epiphany about his work, saw this as a good time to make a pun. “Black? Hardly. For an art critic, you certainly have a limited ‘palate’ of words! Ha! To me, the real beauty of those cells is their almost utter transparency … Hmmmm … It’s sort of like jellyfish layered upon jellyfish, upon jellyfish …”
“Upon jellyfish”—which sounded like a fit title for a Damien Hirst work—seemed to ricochet around the room, multiplying and becoming a sort of nonsense mantra, terrifying in both its implications and ultimate meaninglessness. Again, I felt myself sliding into an even worse conventional reading, both philistine and alarmist. I’m blind! I’m dying! But I gamely pulled myself back: perhaps O’Hara, in a jittery haste, had just left the lens cap on. Perhaps that was the black I was seeing. I swung my head away from the ’scope to test this theory, before O’Hara grabbed my head and pushed me back. “C’mon now. What do you gotta say about this image now? Huh?” In that instant away from the scope, the blackness remained.
Yet it seemed too variously shaded to be blindness, too permeable to be the lens cap, too solid to be the image of my blood cells. It was something else, something that encompassed all those things but committed to none of them fully, or perhaps better said, committed to none of them restrictively. It was a rich overlay on the present moment, a cryptic light-blocking, oppressive, yet aesthetically one-upping every specific—blindness, the lens cap, blood cells—I could dream up as its source. It was, in essence, what art should be, what theory could be—an expanse outside all specifics. O’Hara, likely sensing how beyond him and Microaestheticism I now was, threw his hands up and let me finally fall. In that sweet drift away from the confines of theory to the release o
f art, I went over and over the options for what the darkness could be, granting, finally, that what it was truly was not as relevant as what it was critically. The blackness had achieved the only triumph to be had in art: an irreproachable ambiguity.
I tried to lift my arm to indicate that I was, in my own highly qualified way, a believer. Perhaps not in Microaestheticism and certainly not in O’Hara, but I did believe in the desire to extend the reach of art—to science, to the body, and beyond. But as I raised my arm in what was meant to be a sort of reverence for the communal enterprise of art-furtherance, my body chose to express this reverence in a far more explosive way. Blood shot from mouth like paint from a stepped-upon tube, my breath drew violently into my lungs, where it sulked, refusing to release itself in an exhale. Worst of all, the glorious blackness before me, with its eloquent language of value, was suddenly shot through by a blinding white light, the kind of impulsive, stupid mark that instantly demotes a painting from masterwork to let’s-get-out-the-gesso-and-start-again. The whiteness expanded, beckoned; like all bad art it was notable only in how blatantly solicitous it was of the viewer. Unlike bad art, however, this swath of white seemed to have the manpower to back it up, and drew me in and away despite myself.
“You mind if I use this stuff as a sample? It’ll save me a lancet.”
ORNAMENT AND CRIME
My father has died, and in my hand are his remains—ashes pressed and fired into a small flattish cube—and I’m laboring to insert him into something so that he sits flush. He always wished to be a geometric form (so often did he rail against “the tyranny of the organic” that I could tell myself he’d be happy), but he also hated bric-a-brac and I think right now he’d qualify, being a small object with no function. Better to join him with a nice flat plane. Shim up a gap on a sleek modernist home. There are plenty around here. Some are monolithic and shimmering, with metal roofs that sweep across the facades, the entrances coyly obscured. Others are crouched tightly to their lawns, their recessed windows narrowed and aglow.
I walk through the backyards, pretending to be a meter reader. I’m wearing Dad’s red jumpsuit, the one he wore in prison, and a tool belt to complete the look. I stop and study each house. I pull out the cube and run it along siding, storm windows, blocks, etc., hoping to feel it dip into place. It does, in the back deck of a glass monolith, a house that resembles a drive-in movie screen upon which a scene of a Weimaraner darting between two midcentury daybeds repetitively plays. I almost leave him, but the cube looks too obvious in the space between boards.
Before he set our neighbors’ dollhouse shed on fire using a plain silver Zippo (triumph of utilitarian design) and naphtha, we lived together in a Danish modern home. What I recall most was cleaning the stainless steel refrigerator, chasing a smudge of grease round and round, driving it across the surface with a Windexed rag only to have it reappear on the other side, so teasing and full of character it seemed like a friend. Then Dad went to jail. For him, prison was a revelation—he thrilled at the cells, with their efficient layouts, the clean-lined cinderblock walls, the low toilets, the austere bunks. The iconic red Princess phones, heavy with engineering, the Plexiglas, turned nicely matte from all the scratches. The pleasingly unadorned speech of prisoners.
The afternoon light quivers on the horizon edge of an infinity pool. Blocky red chaises sit in this backyard near cast-concrete stools made to look like tree stumps. I consider dropping him in the pool—it is a nice pool—and saying my goodbye into a swirl of deep-end bubbles. A safe place for the dead arsonist. I am holding him up to the sun, ready to let go, when a shadow crowds my peripheral. It’s a man, dressed in a beige polo, rounding the corner. I step behind a streaky potted grass. The man is carrying a rake. With superfluous flourish, like someone signing an important document with a triumphant lift of the pen, he makes a small pile of silver leaves. Paid by the hour, my dad would say, not by the job.
I remember Dad running his hands over surfaces—our granite countertop had pink striations, like veins. When it was clean—which was often—he would run his palm, quickly, over the whole length and off the edge. Then he would hold his arm out, trying to keep it at the same level for a second. If there were things on the counter—junk mail, mother’s shed bracelets, restaurant mints—they were swept off in this way. My mother used to stop his hand by putting hers down on his and pressing. For a few moments he moved both their hands along, very slowly, before his fingers lifted up under the weight, like those overloaded donkey carts you sometimes see on dusty streets, held aloft by their burdens.
While on probation, he tried burning down a house with busy stained glass windows. The windows depicted a lush jungle scene, and the interior of the house was buried under zebra print, fake palm fronds, and red velvet couches. The owner was the retired principal of my high school. After he left the school, he wore a fresh kimono every day and walked five small, exotic dogs on a complex twisted leash, so it seemed the dogs were leading one another while the line to my old principal was slack. During one of these walks, my dad set the old man’s garbage on fire, hoping it would ignite the house, but it only melted the bin part way and made the neighborhood stink.
That’s what ugly smells like, he said, paging through an interior design magazine as two policemen clomped up the stairs, joking with each other so boisterously that when I opened the door, false solemnity snatched over their faces like sheets yanked over caught lovers. They hid their snickers with coughing fits as they walked Dad out. For a few days the house was a peaceful place. Without his expansive connoisseurship, the tyranny of taste, I could experience the toaster, switch plates, and spoons without a thought to the missteps or glories of their forms. Mother and I ate off the old flowered china and didn’t bother to nicely plate the meal, monograming it with sauce. He always told me I had the worst problem—no taste—worse than even bad taste, since bad taste required at least a point of view.
The cube is warm in my hand, and I keep sort of tossing it in front of me as I walk. I’ve never been a good catch, but I’m catching it fluidly each time. A few people—nannies, mostly—rattle by with strollers, and kids squeal as they spot my game. When I was young, after my father left, my mother dressed me bizarrely for quite some time. For instance, she sometimes had me wear different plaids from head to toe, or found several zippered pieces—pants, shirt, boots—and put them all on me at once. It seemed to be a problem for everyone else but me. Even schoolkids, with their reputation for cruelty, felt compelled to give me gentle tutorials on what looked right, speaking with strong authority about what buttons to leave unbuttoned and the like. When I told Mother this, she grabbed my face, looked me in the eye with unsettling intensity, and told me never to forget the freedom that was ugliness.
My girlfriend Yolanda picks me up by the gate to the development. I lean over to hug her, and she feels the sharp angles of the cube in my palm. She wants to know why I still have the cube; wasn’t I supposed to finally say my goodbyes? Yolanda is dressed like always—a skirt and shirt, big jewelry, and her purse, fat like a bladder, quivers by the shifter. It’s made of a soft, crinkled leather and resembles, in its general aspect, those old-fashioned cold compresses for headaches. A leather tassel hangs off its side. There is something obscene in the way the purse rests between us—plops, really—opulent, heavy-bellied, and insolent, like some coddled prince of a foreign land. The gray-brown color—a versatile neutral, Yolanda said—is so much like the gelatinous skein of fat at the margins of cheap meat cuts. It is terrible.
The windows are down and the air rushes around us. I hold the cube of my father in one hand. In a sudden motion, I grab the purse with the other and hurl it from the moving car. Yolanda howls. The brakes engage and the car skids to a stop. Yolanda jumps out. I look around, praying this was a fluke. I see the clean-lined road, the nasty brackish ditch water where the purse sinks, the lovely tree canopy, the overstuffed lumps of cumulous clouds. The world cleaves into beautiful and ugly things; it is just as bad as
seeing double or hallucinating. I watch as Yolanda pulls the purse out of the ditch gingerly, backing up with it like a collie pulling a drowned toddler from a river. She slips and curses up at me.
I put my head down for a moment and sit in my own dark. For years Mother darkly intimated that I would end up like Dad. She’s in Florida now, amongst her ceramic cow figurines, crocheting garish beach totes—hideous objects meant to ward off any tastemaker retirees who might spirit her away. Just a blip, I say to myself, but then I look up and see the shabby-chic glamor of my Yolanda (her skin through the mud like peeling strips of Victorian wallpaper, freckled buds among cream), and I tighten my hold on the cube.
SNIPPET AND THE RAINBOW BRIDGE
I
A pony hangs from a sling in the middle of a barn aisle in Indiana. His front right cannon bone is broken and in a thick white cast with a slight curve for the knee. He is a silver dun with patches of white on his head and belly and streaking his mane. His name is Snippet, and he is eleven years old and thirteen hands high. His past is unknown, though for a time he was likely owned by the Amish and used as an errand-running horse for the children. At some point he was neglected, and he ended up skeletal and shaking in an auction ring in Shipshewana, Indiana. There he was purchased, for sixty dollars, by Heart’s Journey, an equine rescue nonprofit. After he was rehabbed, he became known as the Painting Pony, one of the few horses trained to lift a brush in his mouth, dip it into a bucket of paint, and press it to a large sheet of paper, again and again. Then he broke his leg.
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