5
I didn’t know much about the music Blake liked, but I knew enough to understand that music was a thread. He was a pretty good drummer and he played around on piano and guitar. But he didn’t call himself a musician—not in the way musicians call themselves musicians. He was, however, musical—a lot more musical than I am. He was a teenager when I realized that he had the capacity to dream up a melody. Out of the blue. I’d have been only slightly more astonished had he revealed to me that he could fly.
His music was strange, often eerie. But there was a pop happiness to it. Blake’s love of dancing was never far away from what he was composing.
After he got sick there were vocals he recorded that were more keening than singing. But there was something in them that made you curious about what was going to happen next.
There was music in his editing. And there was music in the way, when he was doing camera, he’d come in close on a pair of hands and stay there, for what would prove to be a long and revealing time. This wasn’t only rhythm—although Blake’s sense of rhythm, like the inventiveness of his beats, was sharp. It was more a matter of wanting things (like movies, like stories) to unfold with the same balance of surprise and inevitability as music.
What made Blake’s career path a little confusing (to my mother, for one) was a concept that seemed to cause no confusion for Blake. He wasn’t going to be any one thing—at least, not for a while. He wasn’t going to stop being a documentary film editor, for instance, because he was going to be a music video director. Being a music producer didn’t cancel out being a cameraman. And being a DJ was not unrelated to composing electronic music, and composing electronic music was not unrelated to creating an animated short and the process of animation wasn’t so removed from writing a graphic novel. And so on.
“Ours was a simpler age,” my mother would say when I tried to explain to her what Blake was doing.
My parents must have felt some of the same anxiety when I announced to them my first not-entirely-ludicrous career ambition: I was going to be a sportswriter for the Hamilton Spectator. This was not a goal I ever achieved, but for a few years it was my standard answer to anyone (adults, inevitably) who asked what I was going to do when I grew up. How somebody became a sportswriter for the Hamilton Spectator must have been as obscure a path to my parents as Blake’s ambition to become a film director was to me. But Blake’s game was far more complex than mine ever was. The future he pictured was in an emerging, not-yet-formed, still-on-the-drawing-board world. This was not at all how my future looked when I was in my twenties. When I was starting out, any magazine or newspaper I could work for was one that my parents, maybe even my grandparents, would have at least heard of.
I think it’s fair to say that the broad outline of Blake’s view of his future would be something like this: if civilization was going to survive environmental, economic, and democratic cataclysm (not an outcome on which he’d be willing to bet) everything was going to be different. Very different. As I pointed out to my mother, if your general context is the collapse theory, career planning can be complicated. Certainly, more complicated than her generation, or mine, had known career planning to be. “Sometimes,” she’d say at a conversational impasse such as this, “I don’t think I can get out of this world fast enough.”
A combination of all the things Blake did was what Blake was becoming. I couldn’t know what that would be. Not knowing was always, for me, part of who he was—but not as big a part as you might think. I don’t ever remember worrying about Blake. From the time he was a little boy there was a core of confidence to him that seemed mostly unshaken by a few less-than-brilliant marks and some unimpressed teachers. He excelled at what he wanted to excel at. There was something out there—some mash-up of all those sequestered corners of all those grotty apartments. And whatever it was, it was bound to be obscure to anyone with one foot in the analog world. To be absolutely specific, it was bound to be obscure to the subject of John Hartman’s painting.
The portrait measures five feet by five and a half feet, painted on a stretched, unframed rectangle. Oil on Belgian linen.
The composition is that of an enormous passport photo. As is true for owners of passports, the painting can be identified with a few basic points of information.
Surname: Macfarlane. Given Names: David Blakely. Date of Birth: 19 Aug 52.
Hair: long, grey and thin. Eyes: more grey than blue, more sad than happy, and, in their actual measurement in the painting, as big as oyster shells. Attire: open-necked white shirt with blue and red stripes that my wife gave me for my birthday a few years ago. Place of Birth: in the background.
Were you to come upon this painting by surprise, with no context whatsoever, you would notice a few things about it. Hartman’s elevated point of view, for one. This is characteristic. Looking at his paintings can feel like you are approaching a city for a landing. The writer Noah Richler evoked the image of Icarus (wings; sun) in an essay on Hartman’s work, and it’s true: there is something dizzying about the perspective. There is something dangerous but irresistible in the silence (only the wind rushing) of that height. We are gliding over Hamilton, the noise of urban life far below. Hartman says he dreamed of flying as a child.
You would also note a certain affluence. A certain privilege. A certain whiteness. The subject’s age might suggest that this is not a picture of a man with an entirely firm grasp of the contemporary. The ground has shifted underneath feet that are not visible in the painting.
But the zigs and zags of Blake’s professional career did have one underlying principle that I understood. It had been a factor in his general storytelling technique from the time of his grade-school compositions: nothing could be boring.
This didn’t mean that a story had to be spectacular—although Blake had nothing against the spectacular. Mad Max: Fury Road, for example. Thumbs up. (This was the expression we used to sign off in e-mails when he was in the hospital. No emoji. We’d just type: thumbs up.) But a story could be quiet. It could be funny. It could be gentle. It could be sad.
It just couldn’t be boring.
He wasn’t in favour of narrative floundering around. The playground, for instance. He raised the point in the hospital that day. Why start with the grey rectangle of the playground? To the right of my right eye.
These were the kinds of questions Blake asked when I read to him from what I was working on. What’s with the playground? So I told him.
The painting is: my head and shoulders in the foreground; Hamilton in the background. Its elements are dashes of colour. Some of the brushstrokes are as small as the words on this page. Most are larger than that. But not by much.
The portrait is not very figurative when the strokes and swirls of oil paints are looked at closely—which is one of the things that’s fun to do when you have a huge painting of yourself in your living room. When I let the overall effect of my grey hair and sad, oyster-size eyes slip into my peripheral vision and I focus on what I take to be the detail with which Hartman works, I wonder how he knows that these abstractions of colour will add up to something.
Language and music suggest an order. One word comes before a second word. This note follows that. What we normally understand as the sequential nature of time is as predictable as a golf course. The dogleg of the eighth always comes after the footbridge of the seventh. The putter follows the nine iron which follows the three which follows the driver.
Paintings are rarely sequential by nature. If golf games were paintings, all eighteen holes would be played simultaneously—because paintings show you everything about themselves at the same time.
This doesn’t mean you see everything at the same time in a painting. Seeing a painting is another matter.
The dead must miss the world’s light with the same pang of sadness by which we miss the dead. It must be a souvenir of our world that they wish they had. Wherever they are. And that�
��s what makes the painter’s art so complex. If you look closely at a small section of the painting in our living room, and think of it not as an effect of pigment but as the literal representation of an hour’s work, the order in which the work was done is not apparent. Where do you start? Where do you begin when you are painting light?
That two follows one and three follows two are matters of statistical truth but not absolute. Or so Carl Jung suspected. Or so my friend told me on the night I first took LSD, which I mention now only because it happens to be germane to the painting. That’s why Jung became interested in the ancient Chinese divination text the I Ching. Or so my friend told me when we sat on the lid of a culvert in the woods of the Niagara Escarpment that night. He had his doubts about causality. Jung, that is. It was exceptionally good LSD.
What I told Blake was that I wanted to begin with the playground because once, on a summer night long ago, I had ended up outside Earl Kitchener Junior Public School. It was the summer I worked at the steel company. We were out, roaming the neighbourhood. Roaming the neighbourhood in the middle of the night with friends while insanely high was one of the great delights of being a teenager, in Hamilton, in the late 1960s. Imo.
We were perfectly safe. Of this we were certain. We didn’t think in these terms at all (and that, in itself, is evidence of how certain we were), but we were white, middle-class teenagers. We’d have had to throw a rock through a picture window before anyone would dream of calling the police. Even if we were on the swings in the playground at two in the morning. Even if we were (as must have been obvious to anybody peering at us from a bedroom window) on drugs. But nonetheless we tried to be quiet. It was our strong preference to have no encounters with other (particularly, adult) human beings.
The tumult of trees on our walk to Earl Kitchener was a culled version of the woods along the side of the escarpment. The leaves were up-lit in the same dramatic way trees are up-lit in contemporary horror movies. (See: Get Out. See: It. Both of which I did, with Blake, when he was sick, but not stuck in the hospital.) At night, the big, high boughs looked like billows of dense smoke.
The deciduous forest combined with street lights and hallucinogenic drugs to great effect. And what I told Blake was: I discovered that I could stand under the trees that bordered that concrete playground and name the names of schoolmates I hadn’t thought of in years. In years! I could go up and down the rows of those varnished desks. Zintar! Ingrid! Howard! Karen! Gordon! Lonnie! Sian! Guntar! Linda! Terry! Cindy! John! Malka! I had no idea those memories were still there. Donny! Out of nowhere I remembered Donny! Franklin! I could remember Franklin. I could remember Donna! I could remember Susan’s plaid hair ribbon and white sweater! I discovered I could name all my teachers—from kindergarten (Miss Thompson) to grade six (Mr. Parsons). I remembered where the honour rolls were in the long, polished hallways, and the gloomy Group of Seven reproductions, and the portrait of the Queen. The stairs at the back had a very particular clang. That grey playground was like a portal that led straight to what, until that psychedelic moment, were forgotten details of my past.
“It was quite amazing,” I said to Blake.
He wasn’t convinced. He sometimes pointed out things to me about writing. Things like: at the beginning of Get Out, when a young couple hit a deer on the road on their way for a weekend at the young woman’s creepy parents’ place, the moment the deer strikes the car is given the weight it’s given (violent, terrifying) because hitting the deer has something to do with the rest of the movie.
Blake’s observations would sometimes be followed by a pause.
Blake felt as most sons do at some point in their relationship with their fathers: obliged to state the obvious. Hitting a deer is not written into the script of Get Out only because the handsome black boyfriend and the beautiful white girlfriend can remember it happening. Just because something could be recalled didn’t mean it was worth a detailed description.
Pause.
The closer you get to the painting, the harder it becomes to guess what follows what. You leave the narrative of a portrait, and end up someplace new. You are a musician following a melody not in the score. You are a golfer who, for eighteen holes, follows a different order than the sequence of strokes. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” Virginia Woolf once observed. “Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
As a luminous, semi-transparent case in point, I mentioned to Blake that I was thinking of including something about a professor I once had. Dr. Nancy Lindheim was majestic in her black academic gown. Blake was skeptical.
“But listen,” I said to him.
I’d just got back from refilling Blake’s two (as stipulated by Blake) glasses with the correct ratio of ice and water and I was sitting in the orange vinyl chair at the end of his bed.
The fall after my summer job at the steel company in Hamilton I was a first-year student at the University of Toronto. That was the reason for the summer job. My favourite course was Introduction to Modern English Literature. Tuesday and Thursday. Second floor, Larkin Building. No prerequisites.
“You know To the Lighthouse?”
Blake nodded. Patiently.
“Well, there’s a painter in To the Lighthouse…”
Her name is Lily Briscoe and with her brush raised, Lily stands on the Ramsay family’s holiday beach on the Hebrides. The lighthouse that James, the young son of the Ramsays, hopes to visit the next day is on the horizon.
But in my memory of this scene, Professor Lindheim is always present. That’s what I explained to Blake. I remember Professor Lindheim reading a paragraph from To the Lighthouse in response to a question somebody in the class had asked. And I remember being dazzled. Yes, actually: dazzled. My attention was held by the point under the seminar table where her black stockings met the hem of her academic gown. That was part of it, I will admit. But so was the fact that I’d never met anyone who knew as much about anything as Professor Lindheim knew about To the Lighthouse.
Professor Lindheim reaches for her well-worn copy. And as Lily Briscoe stands there, buffeted by the sea breeze and made anxious by the irritating Charles Tansley, Professor Lindheim reads.
Her paperback does not look like it will survive very many more terms. Her steady, respectful voice is further confirmation of what the first year of college is beginning to make clear: I don’t know very much. I’d never known anybody as smart as Professor Lindheim.
With her brush raised, Lily Briscoe pauses. “For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin?”
6
I know a lot about Hartman’s painting. I even know the houses that aren’t in it anymore. I know characters long gone. In regards to this painting (and only this painting) I could be one of those threadbare tour guides encountered outside cathedrals. I’d hold my closed umbrella aloft amid the throngs. Who I was and how I came to be such an expert would be mysterious subtext to my one-hour, three-times-a-day-in-high-season walking tours. Was I a failed academic? A defrocked priest? Or was I someone who had, as a young traveller, fallen in love with this cathedral and decided, therefore, to devote my life to studying it? Who knew? But what would be clear to the small cluster of people who followed me from flying buttresses to crypt to rose window is that I know my subject very well.
Look, I could say. Here. I’d point exactly to an area of the Hartman painting behind where I was standing without turning around or taking my gaze away from my audience.
This is the part of Hamilton where my grandmother was born. It’s well to the east of the downtown core, as you can see. She lived in a neighbourhood of understated respectability. Its generous-sized homes were built before the steel mills and their attendant industries dominated the east end.
Victorian. Also red brick. They were mostly rooming houses by the Secon
d World War.
My father was a doctor. So was his father. They shared an office for a few years when my father was starting out. I could show you the Medical Arts Building. It’s on James Street, although it’s not actually visible in the painting. In the imaginary space of Hartman’s painting James Street is behind my head—which is very visible. In fact, my head is central to the painting although (speaking as a viewer and not as a subject) I tend to be drawn to the background.
7
The Medical Arts Building was like the central fortress of the more sprawling fiefdom of Hamilton. That’s how it looked to me when I played with friends in the woods on the side of the escarpment. There were not many bigger buildings in Hamilton when I was growing up.
The grid of the city was splayed below us, just as it is in Hartman’s painting. Just as it was (so I told John Hartman on our walk through my old neighbourhood) when I first dropped acid. The elevated point of view feels uncannily accurate to me—as if Hartman has cut a deck to the very card I had in mind. But even from that height and from that distance you could see the corner windows of my father’s office. He was an eye doctor. My grandfather was an ear, nose and throat man. Suite 610.
Sharing a practice was not a happy arrangement—at least according to my mother it wasn’t. My grandfather underpaid his junior partner. That’s what the wife of the junior partner thought. But even more damning than Pappy’s stinginess was his emotional distance. These were opinions my mother expressed more than once.
Over time, my mother’s critique of what she referred to simply as “Hamilton” got boiled down to a few repeated soliloquies—“Hamilton” being mostly, but not exclusively, that portion of the city’s population to which she was related by marriage. And one of the most recurrent of her subjects was something my father never denied—although it seemed always to bother him a good deal less than it bothered her.
Likeness Page 2