The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella (6 page)

“But what is it, to be an artist? Nothing shows up the general human dislike of thinking, and man's innate craving to be
normal
, better than his attitude to this question. When these worthy normals are affected by a work of art, they say respectfully that that sort of thing is a ‘gift.’ And because in their innocence they assume that beautiful and uplifting results must have beautiful and uplifting causes, they never dream that the ‘gift’ in question is a very dubious thing and rests upon something sinister. Everybody knows that artists are ‘sensitive’ and easily wounded; just as everybody knows that normal ordinary people, with a normal ordinary wallop of self-confidence, are not. Now you see, Lisa, I cherish at the bottom of my soul all the scorn and suspicion of the artist that my upright Mill Valley normals there across the bay would have felt for any phony entering their houses.

“Oh, yes, Lisa, art is a draining job. In human society, a reserved and skeptical man can be taken for stupid, whereas he is only arrogant and perhaps lacks courage such as my father. Don't you think there's a good deal of phoniness in the prompt and superficial way an artist can get rid of his feelings by turning them into a painting? If your heart is too full, if you are overpowered with the emotions of some sweet or exalted moment—nothing simpler! Go to the artist, he will put it all straight for you right away. He will analyze and formulate your condition, label it and express it and discuss it and polish it off and make you indifferent to it for time and eternity—and not charge you.”

“I have listened to you carefully, Tony, from beginning to end, and I will give you the answer to everything you have said this afternoon and the solution of the problem that upsets you,” said Ivanova.

“You really love life, despite its incongruity with art,” she said. “You love the health and innocence of the normal people who prefer to simply live without self-consciousness,” she said.

He thought for a moment about Hands. How he had loved him and his direct simplicity and he wouldn’t have wanted him to suffer as he did.

“Still my art and life can only combine painfully,” he said.

“You’re a lost burgher—”

“What’s a burgher?”

“It’s an old word. It mean a regular citizen—or a member of the bourgeoisie—”

“Bourgeoisie?”

“Another old word. To be a bourgeoisie was the opposite of the artist, do you see? Like what you’d call a normal.”

“In other words, you’re saying I’m a member of that from which I’ve always felt so separate—my old town,” he said.

“You got it,” she said.

“Am I?” he asked crestfallen.

“Yes, that hits you hard, it must,” she said. “So I will soften the judgment just a little! You are a normal on the wrong path, a normal who failed to live up to being a normal.”

Silence.

He got up resolutely.

“Thank you, Lisa Ivanova. Now I can go home in peace.”

After the collapse of America with its chemical and economic collapse, its lost relevance, transnational terrorists, urbanism, mass hallucinations, the final abandonment of the malls and stores, then offices, finally, homes. Foreign languages banned, libraries destroyed, the closure of museums, suppression of books, destruction of culture, only pharmacology and biochemistry had priority. No old age, euthanasia; finally, the young partaking of the easy out.

Whole cities like Manhattan gone, then most of America, Asia, Europe gone. The last straw was China forcibly repopulating ruined American with over a billion of its citizens from its major cities. The war with China—The War of the Annihilation—afterwards, a kind of back-to-nature, with little consumption with the limited resources. Population cut by nine or ten billion back to the level of the year 1.

Survivors chose among several options. Some created societies of just several people, kind of low footprint nomads. They walked more, tried to hunt and gather. They initiated their young males by cutting and tattooing their bodies. While the young girls’ initiation was into childbirth by dancing and gesturing toward their genitals. There were only rumors on their successes in Northern California. Use it or lose it was the expression for these people. But it’s difficult to know how they’re surviving.

For those who chose to do nothing, that is, to remain where they were, some survived. There was sustenance, the various paste synthetic foods, clean water, the Tsuits. The problem was there was just so little to do. These people, often in the ruined cities like San Francisco, often did not get up, even sit up, they stayed off their feet, their bones and muscles atrophied. They lost it. They were the equivalent of the extinct jellyfish.

When Kruger was five, he produced one of his first paintings, now missing, of a body disposer’s wife having a baby. The little drawing of the woman directing her newborn down, while not remarkable, showed Kruger’s propensity for unsentimental observing. He drew the woman squatting in simple black coal, with highlights in white. He expressed the wretched conditions of the times with a remarkable sincerity showing their families and their harsh and meager existence, as she gave birth. Kruger’s mother served as a midwife and you can observe her large arms holding up the birthing woman as she expels the infant, with no waste of energy, just as the painting shows little wasted energy. It’s as if your Kruger is already plugged in the feminine energy, which was to be necessary for his art.

One of the few existing early works shows the husband—the body disposer on his way home from the disposal grounds near the bay. A dark hood conceals his face except for his nose and mouth. His stooped posture and his difficult progress uphill away from the bay—his left hand rested on his thigh indicate his exhaustion after a hard day’s toil of disposing bodies.

Even in this early work, Kruger captured the awfulness of existence, the reality of the situation. Given he had probably never seen any images, and, of course, had no formal training in design and coloring, he reduced the figure to one of essentials. The shoes were simple rectangles. The footpath barely made out. The robe barely sketched out. The hooded head was executed in detail, especially the curves of the overhanging hood. The surroundings were minimal. As a young child in Mill Valley suffering deprivations in the bleak suburb, just emerging from his survival shelter with his mother and father, perhaps he created the drawing as an alternative to the surroundings outside him. In other words, he created an imaginary world in his head. Perhaps this compensated for the lack of entertainment inside the shelter, the lack of food, for being lonely and scared.

For obvious reasons, writing, reading, writers, and readers are passé. However, these observations and thoughts are necessary to help us eventually cohere again as social human beings, Ivanova thought. This, then, is a work about the habits and adventures—the quest—of Kruger—and his art in a language unique to him—which perhaps will shed some light into the artistic process, and the role of the artist in society.

Ivanova observed Kruger for over a year, and believed she had insights into him—and his art produced in a language unique to him—and into human beings, and where we are heading.

Old Frisco was of great interest to those studying the human race, Ivanova thought.  She knew there must be many other academics pursuing this project. But she wanted to narrow her neuroanthropological study. This is why she wanted to focus on Kruger and specifically, what she called the “Quest of the Artist.”

She believed Kruger was of special interest in any kind of study, of acquiring information, whether neurological or psychological, or anthropological. If fact, she would have liked to utilize all these methods of inquiry in her thesis.

We know less about human beings, she wrote, than ever before.

In fact, we know no more about them than we did of any other land animal, of which, of course, there were very few. The reasons for this, of course, are the current problems.

This is not the time, she wrote, to discuss the wars, environmental collapse, the social and economic collapse,
et al
. I’ve just touched on this history to supply some background.

Suffice to say, we’ve, human beings, that is, have returned to a primitive state of nature resembling the apes. Ape study was very difficult due to the extreme inaccessibility and, of course, the final demise of the last ape. Studying them in captivity, unfortunately, led to many errors understanding them in an artificial environment and of course, captivity eventually contributed to their extinction. The good news is human beings living in Old San Francisco can now be studied. I (We), the researcher(s), can keep them in sight most of the time. We can interact. We can watch days on end, taking note and documenting their behavior.

Neuroanthropology is the study of culture and the brain. This would have been my preferred area of study, but wasn’t possible because we lacked the machines to map the brain. But it’s only a matter of time to reacquire this technology. This field explores how new findings in the brain sciences help us understand the interactive effects of culture and biology on human development and behavior. In one way or another, neuroanthropologists ground their research and explanations in how the human brain develops, how it is structured and how it functions within the genetic and cultural limits of its biology. “Neuroanthropology” is a broad term, intended to embrace all dimensions of human neural activity, including emotion, perception, cognitive, motor control, skill acquisition, and a range of other activities.

My interests is in the evolution of the
hominid
brain to now, cultural development and the brain, the
biochemistry
of the brain and alternative states of consciousness, human universals, how culture influences perception, how the brain structures experience, and so forth. Art is why I was specifically drawn to Kruger.

In comparison to previous ways of doing psychological or cognitive anthropology, it remains open and heterogeneous, recognizing that not all brain systems function in the same way, so culture will not take hold of them in identical fashion. But the current situation had turned things upside down. We were now a new culture in an incubator and I was particularly interested in what use a pathological disease, so to speak, like Kruger, would be in this brave new world.

Human beings like Kruger must now adjust rapidly to the new environment. Without technology, an outside-the-box adaptation is necessary. New habits and new behavior will develop, taking into account the now bleak surroundings.

So, conditions are favorable. Human beings, a few million in the United States, at least, continue to exist. From a high of ten billion, after the death rate increased dramatically, we think there may still be a quarter-billion human beings left in the world, mostly in Africa. Of course, I’m just tossing numbers around. I am confident that with research like mine, we will soon arrive at the near-precise number.

(As an aside, don’t think me callous—if that word even has any meaning after what has happened in the last forty years—we must all keep on. I am a human being also. I am also alarmed.  I have more than most, and could be said, to still have rational “consciousness.” However, to be sure, remember, I have feelings. I am also a scientist. I am going to keep on keeping on. What choice do I (we) have?)

I will not be looking at subsistence, which fatefully, is not an issue. However, man does not live by bread alone, as they used to say. What of low and high brow entertainment? Subsistence is not sufficient to give purpose in life. We must be entertained? Or do we? This is to a degree my own quest. So, as I said, the reader will notice some contradictions, some perhaps, aversions on my part. But also purpose. I mean what else can I do? To move on—I intend on showing to the reader that Old San Francisco is the perfect place to study remaining human beings in a natural state, and in which, the human beings must make changes of habit to live.

This is why it is essential that I record my observations, no matter how difficult for my conscience or even my life. Again, what makes this study so important is its
urgency
. Obviously, it is a self-seeking reason—as is usual with human beings, even scientists. Our continued existence on earth is now jeopardized. We’re going to have to make some changes. What those changes are nobody knows. We destroyed ourselves. That was the price of our knowledge, it could be said. We foolishly thought the purpose and reason for human beings were apparent in the evolution. We thought we progressed. Religious centric thinking, consumerist thinking, what came to be called sacred electronic connectivity, claimed human beings to the
perfect
product of nature. The goal of the last thousands of years, millions of years, or billions of years, depending on what your origin beliefs told you.

Of course, there were scientists who told us this was foolish thinking. All we had going for us, was natural selection. We as humans could fit into any kind of environment due to natural selection. Of course, climate change put the “perfection” myth of  “infinite adaptability” to rest. Anyway, natural selection is still true. Inhabitants of Old San Francisco must still take refuge in a horrific natural environment, uneasy to live in, but will have to learn new knowledge, which will be essential for our existence. We have paid dearly for our previous knowledge. But it is
only
this hostile reality where human beings can jump start natural selection, and ensure the survivability of our species.