Excerpts from 7th Meditation
7
The First Synthesis: The Sabbatical Artist Breaks the Equatorial Line
The sky seemed to let go, disgorging itself of its heavy burden. All the shades of blue, all the tones of grey, every burr and edge, every billow and streak came slashing down as though from an overturned paint can. The wind had brought the snow, and with it the white pall of colourlessness. The snow fell rapidly upon leaves shredded into paste by rain and shoes.
Leopold felt like a stranger today, a kind of lurching hostility pirouetting in his brain that made his eyes appear hard and hateful to those who passed him. Even the music in his earphones went its own course, alienating him, despite his occasional attempts to arrest it with his careful attention. As vain as he could be, he would mentally place himself in a scenario where he was the one singing, the one who belted out the lyrics or the guitarist whose fingers glided like the sound of rain on a shingled roof or in the seat of the pianist whose skills did not surpass the occasional trill. He had felt this way as the incipient self always in a deferral, always waylaying the onset of a truly cohesive and unified self. The cruelty of the more robust boys and the pride that was hung between their legs like the butcher's best cut of meat in the window... It was they who caused Leopold to recede and shrink into his shell like a scared tortoise. It was they who had had a hand in making him a stranger - even to himself. On days like this, he spoke so little that he could hardly summon his voice to request a pack of cigarettes from the shopkeeper without it coming out in a strained squeak or rattle.
Other memories assaulted him, for today was a day marked with reminiscence. He thought of his older sister and the peeler girl who looked like her, the fatal Alexa Richter.
[First encountered textual reference in this book to Alexa Richter, the daunting woman Jakob was devoted to in Setzer's labyrinth. A possible lead? Perhaps I should query my neighbour about this woman, what her connection really is to all this – if any at all].
He didn't know which of the two, as memories, caused more pain, a kind of dual source pain that collided into one bruise on the memory.
On this day, when his voice failed from lack of use, it seemed like every object in his field of vision would trigger a small emotional episode. He began to analogize his emotions, transient though they were, in this way. He asked himself what colour he would paint today, what the essential character of his emotions were as if to derive a bottom line statement, some normative claim. On this day, he felt them all, and the combination of all the colours was in itself not a colour at all; the blank white of the canvas. All his thoughts had pushed to the fore, but none would come out... a kind of constipated crowd of thoughts stillborn in the threshold. And though the canvas mocked and dared him to express even one thought, he could not: he was not a colour, yet every thought individually inside him shone with a threatening vibrancy, an untouchable sense of the sublime. This thought mutated into something related, to a similar memory from childhood. In primary school, he had experienced a moment of innovative bravado. What would happen if I were to take every colour in the crayon box and mix them up? he asked himself. Would I discover a new colour? And he had set to work on it like a scientist while the teacher merely glanced over at his project with an uncaring, glazed, disinterested smile. Leopold had set out all the colours. First came the green, thatched in blocky wax across the page, and then the red overlaying it. The young Leopold was so excited about the prospect of discovering something new and receiving the praise of an intimidating adult world that impatience set in. He could not colour fast enough, though he had to be precise lest the adults not take his results seriously. But the idea was faster than his ability to execute it. Then came canary yellow, then deep blue, purple, sarasota orange, and then every minor and arbitrary shade in between. Once he had spent the last possibility, the disappointment set in: the product was a chaotic mess that appeared to have no colour at all, but rather this same crayon vomit colour of brownish-purple green all child predecessors had attempted before. He had inherited much of the same failures Jakob Sigurdsson would also inherit.
This was about the time that he had first been plunged into a classic paradox, the constant attempt to become who he was but always lagging at some distance. Tried as he did to traverse this distance, he was eternally halfway there... and another half, another half, always splitting the distance but never making contact. But Leopold knew that he would most likely die instead of ever eliminating that distance before what he was and what he could become. Applying this paradox to painting, he could not envisage how his paintbrush could ever touch the canvas in any meaningful way as that canvas blinked hard at him like an unsatisfied lover whose patience has run out. Would all this change with the possession of that inspired sketchbook?
Every painter learns that colours betray, and Leopold was quickly learning that the lulling charms of inspiration by way of theft was the scene of his betrayal of a now dead artist. Leopold rationalized to himself that this was no plagiarism, and that plagiarism itself was impossible when everything already existed and only needed to be mixed and mashed up into a new arrangement. Leopold leafed through the sketchbook once more before discharging the last vestiges of his underdeveloped moral decency. He had overtaken the identity of the former artist who had owned the book, somehow stepped into this artist's life as the perfect double rather than a rank emulator. Leopold would, upon the urging of Ensopht, write his own name over the former artist's, making the sketchbook his own creation. In doing so, he had doubled his life, incorporating the entire essence and artistic corpus of another into his own. In a particular section - “The Gallery of Femmes” - he came across a quote by the photographer, Peter Basch: “the bosom should be round, high, and firm, requiring no special posing to achieve this appearance.” This was how the section began, immediately preceding the table of contents and methodological statement. Leopold would read more about this new methodology as applied to the aesthetic. He would learn the fascination of art and its place as a form of orgiastic catastrophe. He would peruse the typology of women as set down in the book, and train his eyes to see the world on these terms.
The first sketch was of a woman with mechanical arms in a short party dress. Her head was tossed to one side, interpolated by a leopard-print shadow from multiple light sources. It was entitled “Femme Machina”. Running down the side of the page was some explanatory text, a kind of recurring legend for his types: Machine girl: I love you. There is an age for togetherness, for the pure connection technology has failed to provide in its calculated platform of promises. You are the pinnacle of fashion. Do you fuck with the lights off or do you rush for the strobe to render your contrived moments of hedonistic delight a stuttering of still images? The needle holes last forever: craters of pseudo-sex ecstasy meteors pockmarking fine flesh. O this lusty elegance, this torturous enmity ephemera of the fast-fuck-bang. O that you live in that kingdom of the moment, and are but a bond slave in only being able to retreat to those moments after the fact. I saw you kissing the magazine cover, your face, regarding every twist, whorl and fibre of that digitized flesh in print, those patterns on the night phallus. Cast another shadow of sexy blue-grey smoke love. Count those cigarettes like you count stimuli buttons pressed desperately in an effort to efface the inevitable tomorrow. How many adornments, pieces of designer wireless ware upon your person connecting your vacuum to all other vacuums?
Another image, this time a woman with short feathered hair in a vainglorious pose in a rainbow cotton tube top. The shadows obscured her eye in profile, a shadow in the roughly hewn shape of a bird's wing. This was the story of “Femme Narco”: Immortal you: glory, glory self-bomb destruction, that darkened spiral twist corkscrewing to the loud end. Every moment, another representation so plastic and non-biodegradable. A divine majesty that takes hold as hard, fast, and short as cocaine. Worry not about ephemera's touch, for I promise you a dynasty of a thousand years - a plastic castle.
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��Femme Electronika” was drawn in a bas-relief style with a featureless, blank face with an enormous ringed piercing protruding from the middle where the nose would have been: She pierced her energy siphuncle and claimed divine pleasure from the transience of a phantom kingdom. Though she could transform into various avatars and fuse her body with the astral surfaces of sound, she couldn't break from the omnipresent kick-drum beat that kept her gyrating, rhythmically immobile. All out of flesh estate, every inch of skin surface conquered by tattoos and steel rings, she had to open up space on the inside. An alien on fire, a blue polyurethane pill-popping fanatic making the planet ill with her constant bristling.
And others... “Femme Fascist”: A genesis of anti-culture that preserves the old ruins of a collapsed Reichstag... A post-mortem pastiche of media bonhomie... “Femme Nihilo”: A Byronesque debonair ad nauseam worthy of the mausoleum or an ornate kind of suicide between the teeth of a Cheshire Cat's grin... She is a pious depiction of her abuses... The phallic rise pf neo-substantiality, the urban 'urbine' turbine engine of ideology. “Femme Chemi-Pious”: She's a well-worn insignia, a drug-poking priestess pointing the way to nihilist salvation, a chemical juggernaut... She's the junky pharaoh with the ankh syringe, or perhaps much later with the rood syringe of a Heroin-Christ... The icon slowly grows iconoclast of itself. And “Femme Fatale”, “Femme Urbanus”, “Femme Pharaoh”, “Femme Peni$ Envy”, “Femme Nova”, and “Femme Ephemera”. And where are you in the club mosaic? was written across the top of the page with bright blue and desperate strokes, pleading with the panoply of women in this age to fit themselves neatly into these new categories, these types. “I must have written all of this so many times before,” Leopold thought to himself, deluded. “I must become this man, setting myself at the dawn of the possibilities he provokes.”
Alone in his unkempt apartment, Leopold gave voice to an inner tangent that was burbling in that kind of way that felt as if despite him, the airs of a broken shaman:
“A dream of dogs without flesh... Nothing in the world is proscribed except morally. Deviance is the moralist's magical fish - their word, not mine, a word they use to pinion me, to coerce me into the arena of guilt. They react, and I act... creatively, with affirmation, by being different. They and their cheap, empty words like 'deviance' tries to limit what I can do... But , I will make myself worthy of what happens to me. To be an artist, one must not have patience for dogmatism and the stagnant complaints of whining moralists. In art, all is permissible, there are no taboos. No act should be valued in the narrow binary opposition of right and wrong, for those terms have lost their currency. If I choose to murder a man, remove his entrails, and arrange them in the name of art, no state authority should prohibit or punish me - No! I should be praised as a genius, loved like a physician. Wherever my creativity brings me, no boundaries should impede me. Let my art song, my invincible creative spirit, shatter all the stones of the law... those petty and inert laws... The might of the artist is the only true divinity... “
The words, although he took ownership of them, were not entirely his – emerging from the reservoir of the other five figures of the synthesis.
Leopold approached the canvas by way of an intoxicated siege, a kind of infernal bloodlust to apply the mixed principles of the sketchbook as it felt to thrum through his hands. He felt as though a glory of inspirational arcs were animating his limbs, the hesitance in his brush was gone, the weakness consumed by the fiery passion of pure will divested of weakness. Suddenly, he was deluged by an endless succession of creative possibilities. One after another, he slapped paint on the canvases in an inexhaustible fury, but he paused on the completion of one painting he was particularly pleased with. There were two figures, a man and a woman, emaciated and naked. Their hands held crosses with puppet strings. These strings - more like fishing wire - were attached by way of piercings that were in turn connected to erogenous zones and the miscellany of the body. Their faces twisted in agony and pleasure. “I will attach three to the penis, two to the testes, one for each nipple, four to each ear, and three to the lips. This will be the man, the one name Adam whom I created from the mere clay and shaped with my spirit of creation! I will attach two to the the clitoris, three to the labia, one for each nipple, three to each ear, three to the lips, five to the glans... And this will be woman, Eve, as born from the rib of pleasure. I will then draw in secondary wires that will directly connect the erogenous zones of the man and woman. There, yes... they are interconnected, attached in the intricate relation... The immanent plane of morbid sexuality par excellence!”
Although it could not fairly be said that Leopold had achieved anything as outre as it was orthodox in the domain of contemporary art, and although his application of the sketchbook's principles was juvenile and amateurish at best, it had broken the long and sleepy spell of his inability to commit himself to this fiery act of making.
His next cavalier act of inspirational fury involved a projector and a canvas scrawled with the caricatures of every member of the alleged synthesis, harsh-angled and severe. The only missing member in this diorama was himself. From stock footage he had of red paint falling in long streaks down a white backdrop, this was projected unto the scene while a camera filmed him standing in front of the projection with arms out as if in crucifixion. The projection gave the appearance that it was his blood flowing over the faces of the to-be-synthesized. Leopold was in a state of ecstatic trance.
There is an ancient practice among seafaring folk, now defunct, known as the “Baptism of the Line”. It was usually an initiation rite played on a fellow sailor who was crossing the equator for the first time. An elaborate and mischievous ritual, five participants would dress up as a cask, a courier, the Devil, a hairdresser, and a miller, respectively. These masqueraders would then proceed to hassle the uninitiated (whom was called the Virgin). The origin of this practice is enigmatic, patchy, and for the most part unknown, as are the reasons why these specific parts are played. Their significance has been lost to us. That Leopold had passed into the equatorial region of his creativity was most likely prompted by external forces, and these forces all have their faces. A line was indeed being crossed, and the synthesis was the baptism of an age, an avatar.
8
Where the Scientist Succumbs to a Metanarrative Moment
A motley of musical transgressions besieged his mind, and the sea gull squawk of a saxophone finally gave way to the flatulence of passing trucks. In the corner of his eye, he saw small hallucinatory images, tumbling cylinders that changed colours and flared their ends before retracting into the tight, collapsed yellow cornea ring it began with. The mirror's frozen face was full of the greasy prints of careless fingers, this mirror stuffed full enough of the faces that had been poured ritually into it. He saw himself in it, old, worn, a leathery vessel of fatigue. It would be fair to say that he was, indeed, losing it. It? Himself, perhaps, dissolving into that pool of the others, melting and fusing into that one being the alleged Prophet spoke of. Entirely absent from his thoughts were the concerns of the laboratory, the fruit flies multiplying winglessly, eyelessly. He tugged at his sagging cheek and was assailed by images unsavoury, a vast grey realm of cubicles, ergonomic chairs and gel padded wrist rests and paper nameplates and random pictures of their putrid children and forsaken lunch fruit and paperclips and coffee spotted mugs and awful personalized coffee cups and insincere birthday cards given by pseudo well-meaning coworkers – and, suddenly, that vast arcade of computerized and cubiclized hot flashes was sucked into itself, forming a dense and swirling dot like a neutron mass. From the center of this emerged a bloody hand grasping at the air. Glass shards showered down, obscuring what was left of the low-pile hypno-patterned office carpet. A series of manuals and textbooks formed a treacherous orbit around the now enormous hand that was beginning to look gnarled, misshapen, like that of a beast. The hand formed a fist and a geyser of blood sprouted from between the clenched fingers, refusing to adhere to the glossy surface of dry
-erase boards frescoed with primary colour equations and PLO messages in hasty block capitals. The carpet edges were beginning to blacken as if burning from an invisible fire. The shards of glass were now seemingly suspended for a moment, electrified and entering into the orbit of office debris around the large fist. He saw someone who looked like him loping from desk to desk wearing nothing but his underwear, clawing at the air, his face, leaping on the furniture like an enraged ape. That vision of himself was unplugging wires from computers and trying to attach them to his body. His inner eyelid finally slammed shut on this scene and he was back in the bathroom, breathless at the mirror.
I'm sick, he thought. “Cetera Desunt” had been psychographically written with the smudge of his fingertip on the glass. The tousled hair and gaunt face of Leopold, the artist, eddied its way for dominant mental attention. The inner Leopold wanted stroking, pets of affection to make him or it purr. Dr Aymer saw Leopold in the mirror approaching. Was it him?
“I had some hell of a fucking time getting here,” Leopold said, shutting the front door behind him with a nudge of his dirty designer sneaker. “Cabbie lost his way four times – four fucking times! Can you believe it? He was lucky I paid him anything at all.”
It was Leopold, but Dr Aymer could not recall inviting him. Leopold was carrying a great deal of equipment and a canvas partially wrapped in brown paper.
Noting the confusion on Dr Aymer's face, Leopold said, “What? You commissioned this, didn't you? D'you have a place I can set it up? It beats the piss even out of what Jubal Brown does.”
He didn't know who that was. He didn't remember commissioning anything. Why was Leopold in his home? Who was Jubal Brown? He merely gestured impotently to the living room, and Leopold took this as his cue to set up the projector there.
The Infinite Library Page 43