The Music Lesson (8 page)

We named her Katie because when I was about six months pregnant with her, Sam woke me in the night to tell me that he had dreamed that our baby would be a girl
and that I was insistent that she be named Katie Cathexis. (Sam was in his sixth year of psychoanalysis at the time. I wonder if he’s finished yet.) It seemed hilarious, but then it stuck.

We gave her a different middle name, of course—Ellen, for an aunt of Sam’s. Katharine Ellen Hodgson. She was a wonderful baby. Sometimes I would hear Sam singing to her in the night, when she was colicky or teething and it was his turn to be up with her, Katie Cathexis in the deep blue sea/Swim so wild and swim so free—

No. I can’t do this. Not even now. I have to stop.

Later. It’s crashing with rain. So much for drizzle and fog signifying that it won’t actually rain, according to that great weather predictor Kieran O’Mahoney. I have spent the past hours up in the small windowless middle room where she must be locked away from the world, contemplating her again. I can join her in that simple, peaceful chamber, with the rich afternoon light falling through the window across the wooden grain of the table, the glazed surface of the gleaming white pitcher, the soft, precise fuzz of the peaches on the windowsill. The sun has warmed the smooth black and white squares of the stone floor. The lute lies in her lap, under her fingers. Her gaze has a steadying, hypnotic effect; with her, I feel safe. She connects with something in me. The smile that isn’t quite a smile. The knowingness, the intelligence
—they’re generous gifts across the centuries. Nothing is more real, not the view out this window to the sharp little islands that have broken off this ferocious coast, not my own hands holding the pen moving across the page. Her presence dazzles me. How could Vermeer have made her up?

She must have lived, I have to believe that there was an actual woman possessed of this sensibility who lived 330 years ago. And lives in the present, made immortal by the greatest painter who ever lived. What I can’t quite reconcile, given my art history training (Smith, then Mt. Holyoke—my thesis was a consideration of the relationship of Cubism to the still lifes of three seventeenth-century Dutch painters) is my own refusal to know that I am responding to a painted image.

I confound myself with the feeling that this painting is merely a representation of something actual. While intellectually I can accept that this is indeed illusion—that I am in the presence of the genius of Vermeer—I am simultaneously convinced that she lived and she still lives, brought to life and kept alive on a painted panel.

Which is, incredibly, here in the room with me, alone in this cottage on the edge of Gortbreac Cove, in Ballyroe, County Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, on the western edge of Europe, in the world, in the universe, and so on, as Stephen Dedalus would have it.
What was after the universe? Nothing
.

I
WONDER HOW
I would judge me. I mean if I were told about a woman doing what I am doing, I wonder, What would I think?

As an outsider, I would say at the very least that this woman is playing with fire.

That’s what obsessions do for a person. I am in the grip of a fine synergistic madness. I am in a fog of lust and I am the true fruit of the Dolan tree in my hatred of the British in Ireland and my belief that I am taking part in an action that will help move us closer to a solution. Many people would say that I am not in my right mind. I’m certain that’s correct. What a relief, I say. I look back on three numb years of being in my wrong mind. In front of me is an unknown future, but it’s something very
bright and very hot, like the sun. So pardon me if I don’t mind the danger. I’m skimming over the ground now, faster, weightless, rising, barely touching the treetops. Soaring higher. Higher.

T
HE WEATHER
has been very wild, with a few sunny intervals, as they say on BBC longwave. The always moving sky always moves me. The always changing weather produces incessant rainbows. At home, a rainbow is, almost by its very nature, kitsch. But an Irish rainbow isn’t one of those anemic little colorized wisps. These Irish rainbows are a full 180 degrees’ worth of spectacular showmanship on the part of God or the Irish Tourist Board. From here, it looks as though the pot of gold must lie on Red Strand, just past Galley Head.

The first time I glimpsed a rainbow, on my second morning waking up in the cottage, my impulse was to take a picture, to regret that I had not brought a camera with
me. What is that? A basic American imperative to seize and record foreign experience in order to take it home, own it, consume it? Here in this cottage, among these simple necessities, I don’t like that impulse. I reject it.

Having rejected it, at moments when I experience the drama of changing light, or happen upon an extraordinary view, I can just look, or turn away, as it suits me, having gotten past the wish to possess it all on film—in these days here, I’ve lost the urge. I’m traveling light.

A photograph can convey a false authenticity, a last word in experience and knowledge. This is what it looked like at this moment.

What would Vermeer have made of photography? It’s been debated for centuries that he may have employed a camera obscura in his work. My own view is that he was a genius who was capable of recognizing and appropriating the “objectivity” of the camera obscura, which is not to say that he literally projected camera obscura images and traced them in his work, as some have suggested.

Vermeer was original—he did not need the camera obscura. Why can’t people understand that? Because he had seen camera obscura images, Vermeer saw things in new ways, which led him to paint in new ways. I cannot abide the art historian’s way of concluding, that smug “aha” that signifies only information, not feeling for art. Like this century’s Dutch master de Kooning, Vermeer was a “slipping glimpser.”

I wonder if Vermeer could have ever anticipated a time when photographic images would themselves be considered works of art. Maybe he would have been thrilled by the possibilities of technology. I like to imagine that Vermeer would have recognized how cameras create new ways of seeing, but it would have been as a means to some further inspiration to making paintings.

Walter Benjamin wrote, “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” He wrote about the aura of objects, and called it “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.” He wrote about “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”

I look at the painting and it takes my breath away. She does. I forced myself to meet her gaze this morning, to hold it, and then I started to cry, flooded with the feeling that I wasn’t seeing; I was being seen.
So this is what it is to be known
.

I wonder what Vermeer would make of the way we prize the authenticity of photographs, much the way autobiographical writing is more popular than fiction these days, because it claims to tell of actual experience.
But what is the “real” truth of anything? Vermeer’s woman conveys her own reality in her grace, her strength, her nobility, her beauty—they are human traits, surely, but Vermeer has applied them evenly to the room, to the objects, to the light itself. It’s a love of the real expressed on a thin slice of oak, in paint, some 330 years ago.

What is painting but the art of expressing the visible by means of the invisible? It’s made up. It is a product entirely of the human mind. A mind has meditated to conceive it, and minds must meditate to understand it.

I had a message from Mickey this morning. I’ve settled into routines, and the short hours of sunlight dissolve the days into fleeting intervals between long, dark nights. I was taking a walk up a tiny rutted boreen to nowhere that loops around above the village, past some crooked little farms. My favorite local character, Mary Carew, a Scot by birth who has lived here most of her life, has the last place on this road, a tiny pink cottage. We talk about all kinds of things when we meet.

The first time I passed by her yard, I couldn’t believe the number of cats about the place—up on the windowsill, under the hedge, lying on the top of the wall, sitting in the doorway. Mary came out the door just then with a pan of milk for them (or perhaps she was curious
about me). Her white hair was coming loose from its old-fashioned mooring in a swirl on top of her head, she wore a generous smear of bright pink lipstick that went well beyond the upper and lower margins of her lips, though it didn’t quite cover the corners, and she looked slightly crazy to me. I asked her how many cats she had—there were easily a dozen in plain view.

“Oh, I can hardly say it to you; I’d be ashamed for you to know” was her answer, in an unexpectedly high little voice, like a child’s. She’s nearly eighty, widowed since the war. Her husband, George Carew, had spent summers in the cottage, which was in the family because he had an Irish mother, a McCarthy from Tipperary. Late in the war, George Carew was shot down over Germany. They had no children—they were just married, living in a flat in London, when the war began. Mary has lived in Ballyroe since the war ended, in the place where George spent his childhood summers. She’s got almost no family, just a nephew of George’s who married an Irish girl and lives on a farm near Myross Wood, beyond Union Hall, just a few miles from here.

From that first encounter, we’ve developed an almost-daily habit of a little chat. And Mary has, finally, in a show of confidence, revealed to me that she has twenty-eight cats. Tiggy, she has told me, comes from her farm. I know I’m supposed to keep my distance from people so as to avoid calling attention to myself, but Mary’s
not Irish and we never discuss politics, so it seems like a harmless little connection. If anything, my visits with her might allay suspicions on the part of the locals that I’m so solitary, I must be up to something. Mickey is paranoic, I say, if he really believes that talking about cats and books with an old Scottish lady up the lane could doom our enterprise in some way.

And I’m a little lonely. Other than almost daily encounters with Nora, who obviously feels responsible for me, and is also probably proud that she has me to look after, and my little bits of conversation with Kieran O’Mahoney in the shop, my chats with Mary are a welcome diversion.

She’s amazingly well read, I blurted out to her yesterday at the end of a rambling chat in the shelter of her chicken house doorway. We somehow got onto a Margaret Kennedy novel I had read as a kid, only because it was misshelved next to
Profiles in Courage
in the downtown branch of the Boston Public Library. Mary had just finished
A Constant Nymph
, having found it in the little library in Clonakilty, which she frequents when she does her shopping. She drives an ancient Morris Minor for errands, though she loves to walk.

“Och, Patricia, the telly’s so depressing, newspapers are depressing and dear as well, and there’s not much else to do with myself but read in the dark of winter, with my garden put to bed until spring.” Mary sighed, the closest
to complaint I’ve heard from her. “You’re a treat to have around for the odd chat,” she added, hugging herself in her shapeless gray cardigan against a sudden wet gust. “Though who’s to say when you’ll get the wind up your tail feathers and be gone.”

She’s offered me cups of tea, but I keep refusing, because then I’d be in her house, sitting by the fire, and that might be dangerous.

Compared with the locals, Mary’s unusual in her tolerance for personal exposure to the weather during our chats. She’s probably considered eccentric, and she is, of course, an outsider; she goes to the Protestant services in Union Hall or Clonakilty. I get cold and wet nearly every day, which makes Nora think I’m “daft as a brush” and likely to come down with pneumonia or at least some sort of nineteenth-century fever. I suppose if being dry and warm were a precious state, one difficult to achieve, then a person would become obsessed with preserving and maintaining it. I have always lived with the luxury of hot water and the certainty of a warm and dry change of clothes. And I don’t know what it is to grow up without those things.