I look ahead. Which way should I go? Up these stairs? And into the building? Twenty-nine steps. I walk breathlessly through an opening between two columns and from there in through the tall door that stands open. Inside is an elegant hall and at the end of the hall are broad steps. I walk up the steps and sit on a wooden bench that stands to the right once I’ve got to the top. I’m looking at my shoes, brown, worn out leather boots. I take the striped scarf off my neck. I take off my leather jacket and tug the white, crumpled cotton T-shirt away from my chest and let the air inside this cold building play around my bosom. From the opening bursts a rhythmic sound; my heart beating its way out of my mouth.
A door opens to the right of me. A young woman in a dark-blue skirt suit, her hair neatly arranged, holding a piece of paper, addresses me by my surname, my father’s name, and welcomes me. I follow her into a narrow passage. She extends a hand to me, offering to take my jacket and scarf as she nods her head toward the door at the end of the passage, which stands open halfway. In there, a chair appears. In the middle of the hallway. A chair I’ve waited to settle into as far back as I can remember.
I’m sitting and looking straight ahead at five people seated along a long table seeming not to pay any attention to my being here. Furthest left is a rather chubby middle-aged man, bald. Totally. He is dressed in a white, long-sleeved cotton tee. Next to him is another man, long-faced and birdlike, dainty even though his skin is coarse; slender, he has a crumpled cotton scarf around his neck and is wearing a light-brown shirt underneath a brown tweed jacket. The third man? An angular face, yet swollen. His gaze harsh, like a hawk, yet still in some strange way sluggish. He seems drunk. He is scruffy compared to his neighbor, man number four, a young man in a light-blue shirt and blazer, his curly hair combed back. Right eye involuntarily blinking. A gold ring on his little finger. At the end of the table, to the far right, sits a woman. Probably fifty-two years old. Or three. Light hair down to her shoulders, a long nose, gentle eyes. No or little makeup.
Blazer breaks the silence with a formal address, giving a short speech while he looks at the screen on the laptop on the desk in front of him. The others leaf through papers. Papers about me. Now they all look in my direction. Had I been asked questions while my attention was focused on people’s appearances? My silence at the hypothetical questions proves strategic when Chubby poses a question about how to depict the sky. I had expected this question and answer confidently. I say we need to look back to the origin point. At aesthetic and emotional experiences, using the academic principles as a guiding light. We need to take up the thread in the belief that history could have turned out different than it had once impressionism took over from romanticism.
With these words of mine, the five all become one. They unite in a stirring silence that now clashes inside the hall. And lasts until the woman comes to my rescue by leading the discussion from the theoretical to the personal. She asks me why I am enchanted by landscape. The theme of the sky. I answer, in a shaky voice, that it is the fact that the subject lies always in front of our sight, real and material yet untouchable and unpredictable. She looks straight into my eyes and I think she knows I want to say something more, but am hesitant. I look down and then up. Chubby leans on the table, hiding his face in his hands, looking like he’s sleeping. Bird looks right through me. The drunk Hawk is about to drop off. I look at Blazer slowly and calmly turn the gold ring on his finger while he lets himself peer into the computer screen. The woman is still looking at me and now she smiles. Then I look back down. I take my ring finger, run my fingertips over the stone Dad gave me and think of his words. “To be yourself?” Something of that sort because, written on my mother’s forehead, who still tried to agree with Dad’s words with a gentle smile, were the words: How on earth can you be anything else? But does it matter what I say? I think. Because when I speak, I speak. I can, of course, choose from a few versions of me, but the one that gets selected becomes I as soon as I speak. And so I start, without preface:
A little girl in a small-sized city is out walking with her mom, who holds her daughter’s palm with one hand and uses the other to point out a mountain that rises high above the city, naming it. The girl knows the mountain’s name but points up to the sky. To the light beyond the clouds; she asks what it’s called, that opening. Mommy says she doesn’t know, that the girl needs to find out when she grows up, find out and tell her. There is only one way. And so the child’s destiny was set.
As soon as I set a period after my words, I realize that this little story I just told, which has been told on countless occasions, arousing the admiration of all its listeners, is nothing but sentimental nonsense. The story is meaningless; it does not apply here because it does not answer the question that has been proposed. Rather, it bears witness to the temperament and inattentiveness of the applicant summoned before this board to show herself worthy of admission to this temple of art. That’s how I tear myself down, deliberately, to prepare for the worst. But when I look up, I see that my hypothesis has been confirmed: The gentleman at the computer knits his brows. Then he turns to Bird, who has not said a word since I walked into the hall, and asks if he would like to add anything. He shakes his head, distracted, but the one who was sitting between the two, the drunk one, has disappeared. He seems to have departed the hall when I was in the middle of the story about me and Mom and the clouds that stood out against the clear sky. Without my noticing.
I don’t remember having left the building, only having stood under the bare ceiling on the top step, a six-meter high pillar on either side of the door behind me. A vacuum filled my head, a strange disquiet, I heard music from the floor-to-ceiling window to the right of the entrance. It was being played on a violin, but elsewhere I could hear a piano. Was someone trying to perfect the perfect music recital, or to interpret the tune in a way that must surely have been done before. Or was music being written? Trying to find the last combination of available musical notes, which are self-evidently in scant supply given how much time has elapsed since the beginning of composition. And the eternity that lies ahead. Are there fewer remaining possibilities in this field than the one where people strive to rearrange words, to stretch the shape of written language in all conceivable directions? Are there rules still extant in prose that have not yet been broken? Firmer boundaries, ones that creative types imagine are present even though they no longer are? I silently curse time. In the arts, time is nothing but a destructive force; the challenges of science, on the other hand, are unbreakable, causing our wrestling with them to be more constructive as time becomes the future. In science, you open doors for whomever comes next; in art, you slam doors shut behind you, causing the story to gradually wind down: it is now at an end. Not because the distinction between non-art and art has long since disappeared, but because anyone who wants to start up a story, to continue to spin the thread of visual experience, cannot progress forward because both subject matter and technique fix the imagination, restrict creativity. And our world cannot refresh itself fast enough to feed us new illustrations for old methods. Put another way: how many pictorial versions of people can we make? Is there something beyond the idea of distorting faces and bodies, expanding the gluttonous flesh out into the infinite, creating dismay and alienation with a mess and a mash that soon enough undermines its original craft? Such novelties are worn out as soon as repeated. Is there somewhere a picture of clouds that has not been painted? I had intended to convince the five at the long table that there is, but I no doubt failed.
Poor wretch that I am, not even the future will succeed in throwing the past’s glittering resplendence on contemporary art, for everything has been used up, over and done with. Looking down the steps, trying to remember how many there were, an idea almost comes to me. Hazy at first but with repeated attempts to reach for it, each time not quite grasping it, I move ever faster down the steps, soon taking two at once, and as I approach the last steps I jump, airborne.
I’m in the air a long time an
d soon realize I’ve made the wrong choice; the landing is going to be painful. However, to my great surprise, I land with both feet on the ground. In front of me, a crowd mills busily by the building across the square. Something has changed, the city suddenly so grayish, all at once murky to my eyes. People’s movements are also somehow cruder, abrupt. But I can’t stop to think about that any more. I’m in a hurry. My path lies along a street off the square to the right of the building. There, in the corner, in front of an old textile store, two men stand with hands in rumpled overcoat pockets. The men talk without speaking any words from their lips, just nodding to each other, eyes fixed on the sidewalk. As I pass, one of them looks up, toward me. For one moment, I feel like it’s Bird, from the interview, but by the time I am ready to look again and see if it is so, the men have gone.
Now I head back to the right, into a narrow street. Past old buildings that seem to collapse over me; as soon as I arrive at my destination, I go straight for shelter. Directly into a large and smoky kitchen. There I can see the outlines of two older women at work. I walk through the kitchen and open the door into the hallway. I walk along the elongated corridor, which opens at its end in two directions: to the right four steps lead down while in front of me there are steps up to the next floor. As I head upstairs, I see they turn to the left, and then my path goes left again, up three more steps. And yet again to the left, this time four steps. And then the same story: back to the left and up, and when it’s over and I look right, I realize I’m looking along the same corridor from which I had originally entered. I go back along the hallway and decide to ask the figures in the kitchen how to get up to the next floor. But when I open the kitchen door, I realize I must have mixed everything up because there’s no kitchen, just a big room, some sort of atelier. Up against the wall opposite the door there’s an old writing desk, and at the desk sits a young woman, leafing through papers. She’s wearing a black dress, short but flouncy, with light-colored stockings and high-heeled shoes with buckles. Around her neck is a lightweight scarf, but her covered hair is unbound. I probably should announce my presence to her, but hesitate for a moment when she raises both hands into the air and lets out a sound, a half-howl, which does not sound exactly like a cry, although her hand gestures indisputably signal this. Then she gets up and walks into the middle of the room. Up against the wall stands an easel; on it, a small painting. I follow the woman. The image is a brown area on a light background. An abstraction, some sort of Russian Suprematism from the early twentieth century, it seems to me. I move a little closer and see it rather might be a miniature landscape; the light background seems like a frame around the image. Growing altogether uncertain, I get closer, standing right behind the woman. Have I seen this before? I ask myself, looking at the canvas; a picture of the back cover of a painting. Concept work, maybe not very original, I think as I realize it’s probably high time to account for myself. But just before I address the woman, I take a few steps back for safety. When she does not seem to answer my greetings, I walk back toward her and place a hand on her shoulder. Still no response so I walk in front of the easel and nod politely. She does not seem to see me, but what I see strikes me as even more amazing than the possibility that I’m invisible. As soon as I turn back, an awful brightness creeps through the window behind me and illuminates the artist’s face, the swollen nose over the tired mouth. It’s a man. And not a man in women’s clothes, rather a man from far away in time. I get a final confirmation of that when I look away from his foul-smelling face and out the stained window in the corner of the room. By the riverbank, a lot is going on. There’ a tied-up sailboat; out on the river, men punt and row small dinghies. I think about the painting on the easel. Could it be? I turn around, planning to get a better look at it, but the artist is standing right in front of me, and sticks his foot out as I walk past him. I fall to the floor and crack my shoulder painfully against the stone, but when I try to get to my feet, someone puts a hand on my head: “Are you okay, love?” An elderly woman in a light poplin coat with a thin nylon scarf about her neck thrusts her worried face in front of mine and extends her hand to me as I lie there by the bottom step. Some passersby have stopped and watch me as I crawl to my feet and limp away from the big building. Dragging my hurt leg out into the square with my right hand on my left shoulder.
I can’t say exactly what happened as I lay there, insensible, it could hardly have been more than a few seconds, but I know the thought I’d had at the top step had not left me on the path I had chosen. My attempt had been to look at my existence as a past and try to revise it as a historical period, as I’d loosely outlined before the Five; an attempt destined to fail. I had meant to re-experience moments from the past, trying to break down their working parts and so discover each thread of the visual experience within them. I had ended up in a different place than I had meant to, but that didn’t matter, the result was the same, the message simple and oft-repeated: intellect, not emotion, controls our visual perceptions, our experience of beauty. The result: that people can only be citizens of their own time. Or, as Mom always said, “How could anyone be ahead of his time?” I felt that was the one definite thing restricting human artistic creation amid the uncontrollable vacuum of expression, with the exception of history where statements no longer have meaning. The thought of a painting’s distant future was almost too much for the imagination to bear.
Well, all of those weighty speculations proved pointless. The envelope from the Royal Art Academy; I opened it carefully in front of my parents, reading the letter and reporting the decision by shaking my head. Mom’s face betrayed no emotion, but my Dad made a face that merely intensified my irritation over the situation I had ended up in; in his mind the rejection was nothing more than a conclusion based on the most talented professionals’ judgment. Mom knew that perhaps things weren’t so clear-cut, but she did not say anything because the idea of the misunderstood genius cannot be put into words except in jest, mockingly; a genius needs to be discovered to have been misunderstood. Until then, he’s not misunderstood, and consequently he’s not a genius. In addition, there’s nothing she could have said in the present circumstances, she couldn’t urge me to persist, because it was she who had indirectly given me the signal that the second-best school would not be enough if I was going to amount to something in this field. So it was strange, given this, that she did not seem particularly convinced of my talent, a conclusion I reached based on how she chose the scant few artworks of mine that she put up in her house.
I went up to my room, shut the door behind me, and lay down in bed. I looked at the ceiling above me and thought to myself that maybe Dad’s understanding was the correct one, even if it was based on ignorance. But that realization did not help me much: preparing for this entry exam had taken me two years and now I was back at the starting line. I did not know what to do, but I knew that the story of the little girl and the cloud that stood out against the sky would not be the story in this house anymore. Then I heard voices outside my window. I got up and peered through the blinds. The industrious and virtuous upper class were taking hands to their own garden as a way to distract their minds from the bad news. Mom—perhaps already having the idea I should study art history at Hans’s school—in her scruffy gardening outfit, shears in her gloved hands. Dad starting up the lawn mower. I carefully closed the slats.
The street soon reaches its end. From here, the way to my parents’ house lies uphill to the right. I walk faster, slow down, then suddenly stop and take a few steps back. In the window of the antique shop two houses from the corner stands a girl. I bend down and put my face up to the glass. It’s her! With a scarf on her head, a goose under one arm, leaning back a little as if to balance the bird’s weight, so that he won’t pull away from her grip. A porcelain statue my dad gave Mom before I was born, a statue with an emotional resonance I never understood. I just knew that those feelings must have run deep because such ornaments were never to Mom’s taste and she was not one to value anything
of which she did not approve. And that’s why, too, I flung the statue against the floor in one of my teenage moods, after Mom had banned me from something she did not like. I watched her cry over the dead object, knowing despite my lack of insight that her tears related to the story behind the gift. However, I had no concept yet that maybe Mom was crying over the loss of a child, the barrier all parents of teenagers cross when their offspring become distant, alien beings. But now the goose girl is standing here, a telltale sign that what has once been broken can be mended again; my meeting with Mom will be perfected with this gift!
I decide to obey this turn in the narrative, pushing the door open to the sound of a bell. There’s nobody inside, but after a few seconds a white-haired man appears in one corner of the store. As though he effectively jumped up from the floor. The attendant welcomes me, quite softly but with a polite gesture. I point to the statue in the window. He nods his head approvingly, reaches for the girl, and shows me the price on a crumpled label under the pillar on which she stands. It seems to me for a moment that it might be the same price my dad paid for this little object back then. The man puts the statue on the counter, reaches under the table, and gets a cardboard box, rather big for such a small object. He asks if the girl is a gift and then gently places it inside the box, but only, it seems, to take it back up and lay on the table. He shakes his head and disappears into the room behind the counter. The statue is a dust trap. The white-haired fellow is going to get a cloth.
History. a Mess. Page 10