The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition)

by William Gaddis

  —You . . . she said again looking back to the bed, for she’d turned quickly.

  There on the floor at her feet was a drawing, it was a meticulous self-portrait, and she took a step before she saw it, saw it was not a detail of brushwork that is, and leaned down to pick it up. —You, she said, —all upside-down. Then she righted it and repeated, —all upside-down.

  She stood there staring somewhere between the bed and the drawing as though a hand were on her; and then turned and pulled the mirrors again. She cocked one leaf open with the toe of her right foot, holding the picture up with effort as though it were a great weight, and looked at the prompt emergences, settling her eyes on the even image, the same that she held in her hands; then raised her eyes to the second image of her own face, and let the leaf go closed with a clap, so that a part of it broke out and fell to the floor separating as soon as it sounded, to reflect the glare of the bulb in the ceiling back, in shapes of breakage, to the ceiling.

  The room was filled with the odor of destruction: as though there might arise on the smoke a difference, when a storehouse of chemicals burned: here in the squat fireplace were chemicals, some of them inorganic, and the organic transmutations suffering oxidation with the immediacy of a chain reaction on the page of a chemistry text; but where, in this consummation, the law of the conservation of energy? Could brush strokes make the difference, then? Science in magnitude, biology and chemistry as triumphantly articulate as subordinates are always, offer no choice but abjure it in frantic effort to perfect a system without alternatives, the very fact of their science based on measurement; and measurement, designed to predicate finalities, refusing the truth which shelters in possibility: in the weight of the smell of the smoke there was more than the death of the body, the cellular sucking construction, hunger of tissues unconscious of any end but identical reproduction. But if strokes of creation fed the flames, strokes in whose every instant possibility had been explored for the finality which is perfection, torn apart in the attempt to free it into the delineation of that baffled enclosure of its own medium, here were brush strokes whose future had been dictated by the thwarting enclosure of the past, a past whose future was struck dying with every instant of the delineation of its everlasting life.

  —You, she whispered, back seated on the edge of the bed, and then kicking out, —Go away egg . . . in a mocking voice as the coconut rolled away from her foot. She raised her eyes across the room again to the picture she’d turned from the wall; and faint under a single thin coat the Byzantine earrings showed through. —But . . .

  —with your eyes closed, she whispered, turning back to the bed there. —I dream and wake up. The love I have from others is not love of me, but where they try to find themselves, loving me. I dream and I wake up, and then at that moment you are somewhere being real to other people; and they are a part of your reality; and I am not . . . But you are the only person I am real with . . .

  She sat staring down.

  —If you are the only person I am real with . . .

  Her eyes strayed; and suddenly she had the leather box, spilling everything but the archaic hoops of gold which she held in a hand and was up, raising and dropping her shadow across the room in an instant as she crossed and went into the bathroom.

  When she came out, wearing the Byzantine earrings, there was blood on them and on her shoulders, running down in singular unpaired lines over her bared breasts, breaking where they broke away from her, mocking their slightness by assailing it, respecting their fullness by parting above the two swollen stains whose color they ridiculed in passing, down, to delineate the unbroken rising below along the sharply broken lines that her walking so quickly forced with each step, to come apart and disappear where that rising fell away in the white hollow of her thighs.

  —Then with your eyes closed, she whispered, pulling a blanket from the welter of blankets over her.

  The fire had died under the steady censure of the electric glare, and its emanations contended bitterly until, one by one, their poisonous violence was exhausted by such severe emergency, and left only lavender to rise and spread in a diffusion which penetrated without edge, which cut without sharpness, impetuous without haste, filling without distending as a color deepens in saturation and exalts in brilliance at once.

  —Oh yes . . . she whispered fiercely, —Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes . . .

  As the fire died even the lavender became indistinct, and lay in with the smell of Venice turpentine, and stand oil, burnt photographic prints, burnt canvas and tortured gesso until, when she woke, there was neither triumph nor dissension in the air she breathed, standing, looking round her, back to the bed suddenly, and round her again.

  She put on her coat, and sat on the stool where she’d got it from. She sat there for some time, almost under the light, so that her shadow lay steady and small over an irregular blow of verdigris on the floor, confining its elation within the clear and casual bounds of her retreat.

  —Why did you not write to me? she said, still unmoving, not even to look toward the bed.

  Then the green she had retired leaped out under the light as she stood, and began searching everywhere, pushing aside Kinder-und Hausmärchen with her foot, picking up a piece of paper, kicking Thoreau and a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, stepping on an eggshell, stooping again in a distracted pause to pick up an unopened container of indigo, kicking, again, Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar, and the broken glass, finding more paper, slipping, and almost falling in a pool of stand oil, picking up, with the same distracted pause, an unopened container of rose madder, and another piece of paper which she threw down because it was smeared on one side with blue paint, and on the other had written in large characters, semper aliquid haeret, and going on so until she had a number of pieces of paper in her hand, which she laid out on a drawing board and commenced to write with a broken penholder, and a point she got from the leather box.

  —Here is the letter, she said sitting over it, and turning to look across the room. —Because you must not close your eyes now because you cannot, she said. —Because now you are alone, she said. Still looking over there she put down the broken penholder and picked up the rose madder, running her thumbnail to open it. —Because you cannot, she said, as the rose madder spilled into her hand, and she looked down at it, and shivered in the open coat.

  Then she began to write. She wrote there for some time; and when she broke, between words, or in the middle of words, seldom between sentences or paragraphs, she would look over across the room, all the while, with the fingers of her left hand, applying the coarse rose madder to her lips, and the indigo around her eyes. She wrote for some time, and before she was done the rose madder was half gone, and the indigo had caked wetly round her eyes.

  When the letter was finished she laid it in the middle of the floor, and looking round for something to weigh it down, found the coconut and stationed it there. Then going to the door she closed her coat, twice, each time after stooping and straightening from the floor, and went out. The crumpled twenty-dollar bill, which had stuck to her shoe with the stand oil she’d stepped in, came off before she reached the street.

  Here is the letter she wrote, and left there.

  You:

  The demands of painting have the most astonishing consequences In my life at this moment you are one of them

  Perspective since De Chirico manipulated it plastically; resolved it in his painting paradigms, now exists in the mind; a nostalgia; a co-relative isolation; a plenary; a playa, where, one must, to see the water, go immediately after the rain, and to see the broad level ground, must visit before. Painting is exquisite as the punishment for the thinker: denied the thoughts of his grave-diggers, his own death-face and his final curiosity, a vision of his bones—the skeleton: of which he was always aware, moment by moment emerging to that static release he, the thinker, cannot joyfully sit, a separated thing, shaking his bones Perhaps a heart petrified, or a brain, an eye, an unborn child, would roll deliciously inside it, to ra
ttle there, the way a dead man rattles in the sea nor find a solution to deny all this, a solving, nor a solvent, to disappear those bones, make it an improbability the other’s joy, nor to deny the priceless departure into death.

  Since paintings are in the service of my desires, I can disdain no ruse to accomplish them.

  To paint to intensify, to remember but what could I remember here, in this place, where, in truth, I have never been before? a street of accidents all designed to happen to me?

  Chroniclers, replacing instinct, become us more and more to lose our sensibilities, but, how can I refuse this slan-derous name when I shall paint, and then insist upon it?

  It would doubtlessly, be kinder not to insist so, or investigate less directly, more discreetly: ask my mother, not my brain; “what sort of little girl I was?” and lover: “what woman I became” in order to define the strange significance of the avowal of these episodes of paint, like circumstance divorced from motivation

  This, though, would place it, in sum, upon another level of being, every delusion of my energetic brain engages itself alone, then, in this enterprise, this demonstration of itself.

  The mere coincident of materials at one’s disposal cannot make a painting, nor, even a journey where nothing had been selected, nor lost by traveling, a journey, indeed, that might as well never had been taken.

  To paint without means, desire or justification—a dubious use, habit sloughed away from reason or, in an indecisive moment, “wasn’t it good of it to rain?” or “who was it, came to see me at three in the afternoon?”

  A law-maker, unable to formulate laws, can be a painter, or a land, where, laws when broken, punish, not the offender, but the law-makers, can produce painters. A painter in any other place must struggle to be what he is.

  Rooted within us, basic laws, forgotten gladly, as an undesirable appointment made under embarrassing pressures, are a difficult work to find. The painter, speaking without tongue, is quite absurdly mad in his attempt to do so, yet he is inescapably bound toward this.

  To recognize, not to establish but to intervene. A remarkable illusion?

  Painting, a sign whose reality is actually, I, never to be abandoned, a painting is myself, ever attentive to me, mimicking what I never changed, modified, or compromised. Whether I, myself, am object or image, they at once, are both, real or fancied, they are both, concrete or abstract, they are both, exactly and in proportion to this disproportionate I, being knowingly or unknowingly neither one nor the other, yet to be capable of creating it, welded as one, perhaps not even welded but actually from the beginning one, am also both and what I must, without changing, modifying, or compromising, be.

  The painter concerned for his mortal safety, indifferent because he fears to scrutinize, paradoxically sacrifices that very safety, for he will not be allowed to escape painting.

  He will make paintings or they will revolt and make him, unhappy being in the grasp of them. He compulsively must, then, live them cold as they are, static, perversely with warmth and movement he cannot know but feel painfully, a bird with broken eggs inside.

  On the other hand, a no-painter—resourceful as he may be, cannot paint. He cannot say, well, “I did not get the job but I shall say I got it anyhow”—by this distortion of fact he deludes, not himself, but other persons, until, that moment arrives to receive the reimbursement. With nothing of value to show the fact will disappear. There is no fact but value.

  The painter knows, sadly enough, that experience does not suffice unto itself, has no proportion, dimension, perspective, mournfully he eats his life but is not allowed to digest it, this being reserved for others, not knowing, but who must somehow, at any sacrifice be made to know, then punished for the sight of this knowledge, by aiding it on its journey from brain to brain.

  It does not seem unreasonable that we invent colors, lines, shapes, capable of being, representative of existence, therefore it is not unreasonable that they, in turn, later, invent us, our ideas, directions, motivations, with great audacity, since we, ourselves having them upon our walls. What rude guests they prove to be, indeed: although paintings differ from life by energy a painter can never be a substitute for his paintings, so complete so independent as reality are they. Imagine the pleasure they enjoy at this.

  They by conversion into an idea of the person, do, instantaneously destroy him. A tragic gesture that actually leads to tragedy but diabolically exists only in an absence of tragedy, nevertheless procreating it, however, they are unreasonably enough, insufficient, because they are not made of ideas, they are made of paint, all else is really us.

  Paintings are metaphors for reality, but instead of being an aid to realization obscure the reality which is far more profound. The only way to circumvent painting is by absolute death.

  ——Close your eyes for the next sixty seconds and try to walk around the room . . .

  The man behind the bar reached up and turned it off.

  —I got a friend he’s got a glass eye with the American flag on it, said the man on the outside.

  The man behind the bar poured whisky until it ran over his fingers. —This’ll put lead in your pencil. He pushed it in a wet trail across the bar. —Now if you got somebody to write to you’re all set.

  —Here’s Rose.

  At the far end of the bar Otto stepped aside for the dumpy woman who came in the door. Her nose was red, so were her eyes.

  —What’s the matter, Rose? Cold enough for you?

  Otto joined the cold coin on the bar with a warm one from his pocket, signaled with his empty beer glass, and put it back down beside the newspaper, folded there on the bar across one of the girls in the vice probe, whose dark glasses he had been staring at.

  To his left, the mirror and the window conjoined at such an angle that vehicles on the street outside appeared to come into one another head-on. A bus telescoped and disappeared. He withdrew his bloodshot eyes and turned them straight before him; but he did not see his face for the sign FRANKS AND KRAUT 20¢ was pasted on the mirror just above his collar. Below, where his hands met sensitively on the empty beer glass, twitching somewhat, touching at the fingertips, frankfurters turned on hot rollers, slowly, receding and coming forward, passing each other forward and back with dull nudges like fat jointless fingers in meditation. He withdrew his left hand back into the loose sling.

  —Here, pussy pussy pussy, said the dumpy woman.

  —We got three of them.

  —I lost mine, said the dumpy woman. —I raised him from this big. He had blood in his kidney.

  —Human beings has to go too.

  —I lost two husbands that way. Overnight.

  Otto signaled with his empty glass. Then a tall blonde, in a fur cape, wearing dark glasses, walked to meet herself in the glass. Otto turned and looked out the window. He could not see her. He looked in the mirrored pillar behind him, and saw her coat-sleeve disappear. He looked before him, and saw her merge into herself. He looked out of the window again, and saw a man in a Santa Claus suit.

  —Could I have a beer here? he said. He waited. Then he put down his empty glass and walked toward the back, taking out his wallet.

  In the telephone booth a moment later he sat with the receiver to his ear, listening to a clock ticking in the Sun Style Film office. Finally a voice came through.

  —Hello? Otto said, and named the man and himself in introductory greeting. —I’m sorry I’ve been so long calling you, but I . . . Yes, but . . . What? No, about Central America. You remember, I . . . When can we get together for a . . . No, it was Peru and northern Bolivia, you remember . . . Yes, I . . . What? But I . . . you . . . Well that bastard, he repeated to himself, leaning back against the wall of the booth. —“We have nothing to discuss.” Well that bastard. That bastard. Then the sling gave way.

  He came out with his wrist pressed against his wallet. He had forty-one dollars. —And why I gave a five-dollar bill to that Harlem nigger yesterday, to keep an eye out for that damn dispatch case. Damn
it. That black bastard too.

  The dumpy woman was drinking a manhattan. —I can feel it down to my toes, she said. Her stockings sagged over her broken shoe backs.

  —Who you saving the cherry for, Rose?

  The man behind the bar turned the radio on again, and left it while it warmed to strains of Mozart. Otto’s glass was still empty, but he stood there as though unable to call and command, staring at the man’s striped necktie, the signal of another final club which had not invited him to join.

  —What’s the matter, Rose? You blushing?

  Otto waited a moment longer. Mozart continued, rising and gathering to exquisite pauses: and each of these apertures was obligingly filled by a saxophone. Otto picked up the two cold coins, and left the newspaper on the bar. Mozart measured a subtle withdrawal; and a voice from the saxophone world heralded,

  —Here’s an oldie, friends, Rudy Vallee singing, Love Made a Gypsy Out of Me.

  —Hey Jack, you want your newspaper? the man behind the bar called after him.

  —Never mind, Otto answered over his shoulder. —It’s yesterday’s.

  The tropic breeze ruffled Otto’s linen, boarding that banana boat, then standing on deck gazing out over the Caribbean, a whisky-soda in his free left hand, skin warm with memory of the sun: so he stood, serene and unapproachable, in the memory of the unsteady figure appearing now (wearing a new green muffler which enhanced the yellowness of his skin), an old friend whom Otto only now fully appreciated, and would like to see again. He passed the steamed windows lowering a handkerchief, where two black rings witnessed what desperate barriers are the fine hairs of the nostrils, and pulling open the door of the Viareggio, interrupted this with his entrance:

  —Philogyny? I thought you said phylogeny.

  —I said, misogyny recapitulates philogyny.

  —Misogamy . . . ?