Afterword By Louise Gluck Reading what I have just written, I now believe I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes. Why did I stop? Did some instinct discern a shape, the artist in me intervening to stop traffic, as it were? A shape. Or fate, as the poets say, intuited in those few long ago hours— I must have thought so once. And yet I dislike the term which seems to me a crutch, a phase, the adolescence of the mind, perhaps— Still, it was a term I used myself, frequently to explain my failures. Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings now seem to me simply local symmetries, metonymic baubles within immense confusion— Chaos was what I saw. My brush froze—I could not paint it. Darkness, silence: that was the feeling. What did we call it then? A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed, to the tree that confronted my parents, but whereas they were forced forward into the obstacle, I retreated or fled— Mist covered the stage (my life). Characters came and went, costumes were changed, my brush hand moved side to side far from the canvas, side to side, like a windshield wiper. Surely this was the desert, the dark night. (In reality, a crowded street in London, the tourists waving their colored maps.) One speaks a word: I. Out of this stream the great forms— I took a deep breath. And it came to me the person who drew that breath was not the person in my story, his childish hand confidently wielding the crayon— Had I been that person? A child but also an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom the vegetation parts— And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted solitude Kant perhaps experienced on his way to the bridges— (We share a birthday.) Outside, the festive streets were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights. A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano— Bravo! the door is shut. Now nothing escapes, nothing enters— I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems) on all sides, shifting as I speak, so that I was constantly face to face with blankness, that stepchild of the sublime, which, it turns out, has been both my subject and my medium. What would my twin have said, had my thoughts reached him? Perhaps he would have said in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument) after which I would have been referred to religion, the cemetery where questions of faith are answered. The mist had cleared. The empty canvases were turned inward against the wall. The little cat is dead (so the song went). Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks. And the sun says yes. And the desert answers your voice is sand scattered in wind.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 03:39:33 +0000
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