The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (24 page)

One of the things that appealed to me about this new system, and prevented me from
rejecting it out of hand, was that its multiform proliferation did away with the
need for traditional talents and their cultivation, which had been seen as the
substance of art. It was no longer necessary to be a born artist, or to undergo
special training; the days of masters and apprentices, virtuosos and botchers, were
over. Anyone could do it; there was only one condition: it had to be something that
had never occurred to anyone before. Year after year I was amazed by the ideas that
kept occurring to the new artists appearing on the scene. And often, almost always,
those ideas were perfectly simple; their only merit was originality. The reaction
they elicited was invariably the question: Why didn’t I think of that?

It was this line of reasoning that led me to see the two men, with their strange
deformities, as an artistic idea. An idea that might have prompted me to wonder,
somewhat ruefully: Why didn’t I think of that? And indeed, never in a thousand years
would I have come up with it on my own. But there it was: given to me, to me and
nobody else. In practical terms, I might as well have thought of it. In a sense, in
every sense, it was typical of the “artworks” that I kept seeing in the magazines,
the kind that got noticed at biennales and documentas, the kind that won prizes and
were discoursed upon in articles. In a sense, too, I had a right, after all I’d done
for that “idea,” to say that “it had occurred to me.” Admittedly, if that had really
been the case, if I’d been choosing an idea for an artwork, I would have chosen
something else. Morbid and monstrous subjects didn’t appeal to me, although they
were fashionable in the art world. But I had to make the best of it, because, left
to my own devices, nothing at all would have occurred to me.

At least, nothing that good. Because although the subject wasn’t to my taste, I had
to admit that the “idea” was excellent. Two men, one with enormous hands, the other
with enormous feet, symmetrical, asymmetrical, inexplicable: they had everything it
takes to work as art. No one would believe they really existed; they were too much
like the inventions of a mind intoxicated by contemporary art magazines. As to
keeping the secret and not betraying the trust that had been placed in me, I could
set my mind at rest because labeling something as art dispels all suspicion of
reality forever.

But how was I to proceed? The medium didn’t matter, I knew that much. All the medium
had to do was record the idea. In these new forms of art, recording and
documentation are everything. My initial plan of photographing the men might seem to
be at odds with my artistic project. But although they might have thought I was
intending to reveal their reality, no one else would have seen it that way. These
days, in the art world, thanks to digital editing tools, which are widely
accessible, photography is just another medium for documenting fiction. And apart
from the fact that it’s used extensively by avant-garde experimenters (though not as
much as video), photography would have been ideal for me, mainly because I wouldn’t
have had to manipulate the images (I couldn’t have, anyhow, given my technological
ignorance), but everyone would think I had, and very well at that.

However, as I said, I had to give up on the idea of taking photos. Which left the
perfectly adequate alternative of drawing. A series of drawings, a folio, and maybe
a book eventually, with texts to explain or justify the idea—but not too much
because the value of the idea depended on its mystery, its inexplicability, its
openness to any kind of suggestion. It would be an open series, but not too
extensive, twenty drawings at most, enough to show the men in all their positions
and from every angle, at rest and in movement. I set only one constraint for myself:
both men had to figure in every drawing; there would be no drawing that showed only
one of them. That would unify the project, and supply its enigmatic meaning.

But the problem was that I didn’t know how to draw. I’d never learned. Or, granting
that everyone knows how to draw (badly, at least), I should say that I’d never
actually sat down and done it: I’d never practiced. This wasn’t an insuperable
obstacle, because the quality of the draftsmanship wasn’t crucial; the drawing was
just a means of documentation, so all I had to do was make sure the viewer
understood that it was a picture of two naked men, of normal size and shape, except
that one had the feet of a giant sixty feet tall, and the other’s hands were
correspondingly huge. It can’t have been that hard. The scene might have been made
to be drawn.

It’s easy to say, “All I had to do . . . ,” but in order to achieve that effect,
some effort and a certain degree of skill were required. Especially to make sure
that the viewer understood
exactly
. Because if the
drawing was clumsy, as mine would have been, the disproportionately large hands and
feet might have come across as just another clumsiness, or a bad imitation of
Picasso. And even if the drawing were adequate, there were still dangers: for
example, the hugeness of the extremities might have seemed to be an effect of
perspective.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There was a prior difficulty, which I noticed when I
started thinking about it in practical terms. I realized that substituting drawing
for photography didn’t get me very far. One way or another, you have to draw from
life, and just as I couldn’t take photos, I couldn’t pull out pencil and paper and
proceed to draw the two men. Or I might have been able to, but I wasn’t planning to
try.

Drawing in the absence of the model means working from memory, which would have
required me to retain visual detail, and that was a capacity I didn’t possess. Or
maybe I did, but unwittingly, because it wasn’t something I’d ever tried to do. So I
began to try, without taking any precautions, not suspecting that the trial, even if
it never went beyond the planning stage, could alter my relationship with the men. I
tried to imprint them on my retinas: their lines, their shapes, their volumes. It
was a new way of looking at them: in all those years, those decades, which made up
the greater part of my life, I’d never looked at them like that. The difference was
that now I was bringing memory into play, anticipating its operation, trying to turn
time to my advantage. I’d never done this before. Why would I have bothered, when
the one thing I knew for sure was that I’d be seeing them again the next day? Now my
presence in the room, and theirs, was charged with memory in the form of an
intensely physical, palpable, almost sensual attention. “I’d never looked at them
like that.” I wanted to take them away with me, and that intention, though I never
came close to realizing it, disturbed me, stirred dark impulses, and left me feeling
guilty. It didn’t produce the desired effect. My visual memory, which had never been
exercised, wasn’t about to spring into action just because I told it to.

There were other ways of going about it. A drawing without a model was a caricature,
a scribble, a diagram. But I didn’t have to use a live model: life drawing was for
students, and I wasn’t studying to become a painter. Those jointed dolls that
graphic artists use presented the same problem: too didactic. My very specific and
pressing requirements could have been satisfied by photographs, or good drawings, of
naked men. I could have copied them or used tracing paper (an invaluable crutch for
novices like me). I would have been able to find satisfactory specimens in any
pornographic magazine; but of course I would never have dared go to a newsstand and
buy one, which made me curse my fearfulness, because that would have been the ideal
solution. There was another possibility: those drawing manuals with anatomical
plates. I could trace the outlines of two men, leaving the hands off one and the
feet off the other, and then use a photocopier to magnify the original drawing by a
factor of fifty, and trace the hands and feet off that. But what would they think at
the copy center if I asked them to blow up drawings of naked men? The best thing
would be to make a good tracing of the hands and feet, without bodies, and take that
to be enlarged.

All this ingenious and detailed planning got me nowhere. It might have been different
if I’d done it at the start. But earlier, when I was planning to draw the men from
memory, I’d developed that new way of looking, the gaze with built-in memory, which,
although I’d since given up the idea of using it, discouraged me from copying or
tracing photographs or drawings, and even from looking for them. There was a vast,
yawning gulf between the two approaches. Seeing the men in that new way, I
discovered how inexhaustibly rich the form of a body is, and how drastically it is
simplified by drawing, which intellectualizes it and turns it into a game. Perhaps
if I had gone for a long time without seeing the men, memory would have worked
naturally and accomplished the process of simplification. But since I was seeing
them anew every day, memory adhered to vision, and was loaded with subjective and
objective reality; this enriched it, admittedly, but with a sterile richness, which
paralyzed me. My artistic dreams dissolved and left me with nothing.

I don’t know if the men noticed these subtle machinations. I had momentarily taken on
the role of hunter and attempted to make them my trophies. It was a short-lived
fantasy, soon swallowed up by a broader and darker confirmation of our
relationship’s immutability. Though it wasn’t a real relationship, or not what we
normally think of as a relationship between human beings. But that only made it more
intimate. Again and again I wondered how it had all begun. I had ceased to wonder if
it would ever end.

In the course of writing the above and trying to
reconstruct my abortive artistic adventure, I realized that its failure was only
part of a larger defeat. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t produced my folio or book of
drawings; I’d never even tried to draw the men, not even in the sort of idle
doodling that you do while chatting on the phone. More than that: I hadn’t even
drawn them mentally. It was as if some kind of taboo had been operating. It wouldn’t
surprise me: the whole thing seemed to have been placed under the sign of taboo.
“Art” had come into in the story more as a means of deep explanation than as an
actual project. The men themselves were the “artwork,” such as it was, and they
resisted transposition into any medium apart from the harsh reality in which they
existed.

If art had been, and was, an unrealizable daydream for me, perhaps it had served to
lighten the crushing load of reality waiting for me every day when I had to face
that scene in the back room of the house. Which wouldn’t have been all that hard,
because there was already something unreal about the scene itself. Yet it was on the
side of reality, and probably all the more real for being near the limit. I would
have given anything to escape. But I didn’t have anything to give, and I suspected
that the limit would follow me: I was myself that blurry line separating the real
from the unreal. The flight was within me already, crucifying me.

I don’t think the descriptions I’ve given so far fully convey how desperate I felt.
I’m not going to try to remedy that; my means of expression have wasted away under
the effects of solitude and secrecy—they’re means of isolation now. I couldn’t
even express it to myself. I felt only emptiness as I set off on that route I knew
so well, there and back, the mute emptiness so typical of anxiety, an empty feeling
that wasn’t opening but closing, enclosing me, forever. I ended up trying not to
think at all (which is impossible). I would have liked to be a machine, an
automaton; and in a way that’s what I became, at least in part. I brutally repressed
all calculations of the time that had passed (the most distressing thing for me).
But the calculations performed themselves, using various reference points, the
handiest being the ages of my children. I had been visiting the two men in their
house since before my children were born (though how long before, I refused to work
out), and my children had grown up, they were no longer children, or teenagers, they
had turned twenty, then thirty . . . I could see the signs of aging in my wife’s
face, as she could no doubt in mine. My family, my loved ones, the only ones with
whom I could have shared a human destiny, had always been separate from me, leading
separate lives. I had lived in the hope that my isolation would come to an end, as a
blind man dreams of seeing or a paraplegic longs to walk again. These are not
gratuitous comparisons. In some ways, if not in all, I seemed to be a normal man,
one of the many who assuage their pervasive ill-being or psychological distress by
reminding themselves that they’re healthy, they have money, and that others are
worse off. It’s true that I could see and walk. Every day I walked to the house
where the two men lived, and I saw them . . . The miracle that the blind man and the
paraplegic hoped for in vain had been bestowed on me, but only to engender a secret.
There
was
something miraculous about the situation;
but it was the worst kind of miracle, the kind that occurs only in real life.

That was what weighed most heavily: the reality of the secret. Not so much its
substance as its defiant persistence. That was what I found so mortifying, such an
unfair punishment; the secret had given real existence to the most unreal aspect of
the world: time. The content of the secret, on the other hand, was not so
problematic, because it bordered on hallucination, literature, cinema, and “special
effects,” any of which might have provided a justification. It was not a mere
coincidence that I had looked for a way out via “art,” whose function would have
been to cover reality with a veneer of fantasy, and give me the illusory impression,
at least, of having regained control.

But it didn’t work. It backfired. Reality persisted, and the contrast with my
artistic daydream made it all the more real and cruel. I began to long for another
kind of secret: the kind that is kept in the mind and stops being a secret as soon
as it is expressed. Mine was an external fact, with all the willful independence of
facts out there in the world. And it wasn’t one of those accidental facts, some
fleeting, inoffensive conjunction in time and space. For my benefit and mine alone,
it had revoked that temporariness in which the rest of humanity lulled itself to
sleep with a beatific smile. I had to go to that room every day and see the men; I
had to “believe my eyes,” as novelists used to say in the old days (but the men were
saying just the opposite). The golden light coming in through the large window, in
mysterious gradations of transparency, was like an oil that made the men’s movements
fluid and silent. There was something animal about them; they had the poise and
indifference of wild beasts. It seemed as if they could destroy the world from
within, at the atomic level, just by being there . . . But these are digressions,
disconnected ideas, the only kind I ever had when I thought about the two men.
Humans have no way to construct the perception of beings like them. That was the
source of my solitude, and also, perhaps, of their human inhumanity.