XIX

C

ross as I was with myself, I was, more alarmingly, angry at Beatrice. More miffed. Anger would have been mad and I was yet certainly sane. Were it anger, that would had made her correct. As much as I knew it to be a rational fallacy, I could not help but feel that she had wronged me. She was not acting her part. She was not playing the game properly. Beatrice, like Mathilde, was assuming that I was worse than I claimed, with honesty, to be.

The transmission was clear. Somehow the message had been misunderstood at the receiving end. It had to be put down to operator error. Communications does not work that way though. No, the transmitting party is entirely responsible for a message until it is received and perfectly understood with acknowledgement. If the medium is corrupted or compromised then the message must be sent using other means and it must be sent and sent again until communications is achieved.

It must also though be allowed that the message has been perfectly received. Was it, in fact, the case that my words, deeds, and posturing was far more accurate an indication of me than my thoughts led me to believe? Does what we hope to communicate say less about us than what we eventually do say?

We must each be judged on our actions, our interactions, and our productions. There are no great men wandering alone in the desert still. Yet still, what greatness could lie within those sun baked minds, only to evaporate and leave the soul parched. What dry wit has been spit across cracked and bleeding lips? Out of the desert then we stumble and, incoherent, we try to communicate but words cannot articulate the path through the sand track that we have left behind. None of us can know what path we traced. The sands swept all trace away. We have each though journeyed through the wilderness and remain certain of what we learned under the solitary sun's celestial light. We, each, are alone.

How many abusive spouses imagine their selves forced into their actions by the choices of their mate? Terrorists, no doubt, feel that it is not their fault that they must do what they will. Events, shaped by others, have overwhelmed them. Their hands are forced by the actions and inactions of others. If only those others would change, this violence against them would not be required.

Through Christmas I painted Salome. My Salome is no lithe maiden but instead sits Sybilian on a low bench, oval and slouched, flanked by two wide pillars of earthen ochre stone. In composition she is more Madonna than temptress. The golden plate lies limply angled from her right hand, forgotten. Her left palm is poised atop the Baptist's severed head which sits obscenely in her lap, directing dead,, questioning eyes at the spectator. Her long, spider-like fingers idly caress the cadaver's scalp like a mother would her child or a spent lady her lover.

Salome's face is reflective. She meditates upon the weight of what she has done but there is no sign of regret and no consequence. Nobody had been obliged to grant her request. The blood was on her King's hands. Saint John's blood spills crimson against a pure white cloth, carefully laid down to protect her brilliant painted gown.

The girl is gigantic. She is a monolithic form that fills the frame while hunched about her silent instrument, plucking unconsciously at the strings of the dead man's hair. The woman's red hair, so rare for Herod's tribe, is tightly bound back from her focusless green eyes. This might have been as bright and splendid as ever I painted Beatrice's costume yet still it was dour and formless. She wears Giotto.

There is nothing heroic in the empty eyes of John. His end is not that of either martyr or warrior. Dragged from his desolate cell, he is butchered for pubescent whims. Some stories end in senseless, sad accidents. Others are stripped of their tragedy by indignity. Conceive the Mona Lisa tagged.

What vice does Salome wield? I fear that she but lacks in gravitas. My Salome, weighty as a stone, shows the showgirl in the instant that the world takes hold of her and draws her in. It is the moment of maturity. It is this Salome that can show herself at Christ's deposition. This Salome, redeemed by the end of her teen years, can give solace to the Virgin who has lost her Son.

My application to this painting was perhaps greater than any other since my seventy-five figure Battle of the Rebel Angels but even so, I took this particular work to a unique level of completion for me.

No painting that I have started has ever been finished. They are but set aside when I can no longer proceed without lessening the effectiveness of the work. Call it the point of critical critique.

This one though kept going. This one pushed past and still no flaws emerged. The eyes of The Baptist, that wicked hand, the toe tip poised on decision, each was beautiful but more, the whole of the rectangle was unified in tone and attention. Something very good was being achieved.

One might suggest that my emotional state, my impious anger toward Beatrice, my own reinforced self-loathing, was being projected through the oils and onto the canvas. That one might contend that the painting was not a product of rational decision making as much as it was an outpouring of raw emotion.

I would disagree.

My Salome employed a classical composition. The lines were clean and precise. Nothing was gestural. Nothing was Romantic about the piece.

Her face, pensive and downcast, betrayed no emotion but only intellect. Even the severed head was clean, composed, and sedate, perhaps resigned. The empty eyes might indeed be accusing the viewer but it was necessarily passive. The viewer must bring that idea with him to the viewing as I did.

What my situation did fuel was more fearlessness than frenzied inspiration. Too, to turn my attention from the toil was to free my imagination to dwell upon my life's affairs. Depression disciplined me. For perhaps the first time, I was more afraid of failure than success for there was a vague sense of finality to this enterprise.

She, Salome, was testing me. Was I the wretch that Beatrice believed me? Could all that I claimed to be lie as just so much meat and bone upon a gilded platter?

I scraped grey macaroni off a purple plastic plate that New Year's eve and stared fixedly at the coloured canvas. Skinny, unshaven and unwashed, I was but barely clothed while I worked. On that night I had to concentrate to find my silence despite the batteries of my radio having failed days before. A Florentine New Years Eve is a boisterous affair. Fireworks were a chorus for wandering drunkards determined to show their love of song. Life and Camaraderie were being celebrated on the streets while I crouched in front of my small rectangle and pushed oily paint into a shape to make a picture that nobody would ever see.

XX