XXXVIII

B

eauty; its antonym is no more ugly than its synonym is pretty. Beauty is unrelated to the beautiful. The act of labelling a piece 'beautiful' diminishes it.

"Votre nez, monsieur, est tres grand."

There is no beauty that is not realized. It exists only in the instant of appreciation, yet still we prattle on and on upon the thing , the vessel, that had brought the sublime sensation into our orbit. Beauty does not decay, per se. We can watch it day upon day and it will maintain its celestial place, but look away, step away, spin away in folly from beauty and you have nothing in that morgue of memory. Beauty leaves no corpse to be collected, tagged, and immortalized. Stand rapt before Beauty but know that it cannot be carried away.

Beauty is only in the eye of a beholder.

Pain is only in the mind of the pained.

I can imagine some aesthetic empathy, exercised upon seeing the widening eyes of wonder when another is infused with the rapture of magnificence. When, before the last sound waves of the soprano cease to quiver through the theatre's air. some solitary figure springs to his feet and gushes eager "Brava! Brava! Brava!", we might well echo his enthusiasm and mirror his movement, but that has naught to do with aesthetic empathy for the beauty, at that moment, has passed. That rogue enthusiast is carried away by his brush with beauty. He seeks to gesticulate his appreciation, but he is no longer in the present of beauty. He can now only rhapsodize upon the ended moment that now hurtles untended, unobserved, unheard through space and time.

And memory cannot retain beauty.

As I apply each fresh layer of glaze to the image of the peach, I am obliged to age it a little more. A touch more blue will colour the rot that unadorns the fruit with passing days. Ruin's gait is a measured pace and every morning when I set myself once more before the easel, I see and mark the strides of time. The yellow flesh of the still subject is soiled in ochre patches. Uneven bruises besmirch the surface. Death, burrowing up wormlike from the core, presses upon the skin of the plucked thing to bump against that translucent surface like a pitiful child, drowning beneath pond ice. The rounded circumference of the peach is pocked, pulled in as a sinkhole, where the deathly earth-brown stains constrict. The juices of the fruit are drying, failing, fading, and that shadow that it cast three days before is shrunken. Where life fails this painted thing, decay rises up in patient triumph.

I imagine more the black ruin that is yet encased within this lost peach shell. In this still pinkish food, I see the withered and wasted elder, weighed down by regrets, wrinkled by shames. One has only to carve away at the soft walls that imprison the ruined apparition to reveal it to other eyes as mine see it.

The form of this dying peach is imperfect. I justly paint the arc with an unsteady brush. Every layer of the glaze has slightly thereby strayed and instead of some sharp contrast with the red apple there, behind, it is a blur and blending. Is it poorly painted or well applied? It is not yet ugly and not so crassly conjured as to allow the label of gaudy. Is it clever? Is it genius?

Otherwise, I perform exactly as the primer dictates. The pages are always open while we work. This still-life assignment is almost novel for me. Once, as a child, I must have taken some pallet-knife painting course, for in my parent's home there hangs a flower pot, translated as ugly by thick and muddied blobs of oil. Family legend marks me the craftsman. I know nothing of the person that earlier covered that square canvas with paint. I assume that anything learned from that youthful enterprise is lost to me. If I profited from errors made in that particular yesteryear, there is no accounting of it on the ledgers.

Should one be incapable of recounting the source of knowledge, to cite references, does it invalidate the knowledge? When does a posteriori become faith? I know what I like but I have no memory of why.

I know, but I do not know why I know.

There is no recollection of the first time that I was burned by grasping something that was thought to be hot. I cannot reliably see the kitchen where I first felt the searing or summon to mind the memory of my bright red hand thrust under cold water. Constructs can be pastiched when I make some effort, but in that critical moment when I turn to take up the boiling pot and know to pause to first encase my claw in cloth, there is a mnemonic footnote that associates a thing learned. For me, it is the lightning quick mental image of someone else's hand being burned.

The author cannot see a red fire alarm on the wall without, in every instance, being compelled to witness the flash of his empty elementary school hall and be obliged to consciously ask himself if he should sound the claxon. Laudably, thus far the answer is ever 'no' and it is without debate but the question must every time be asked. Some unknown schoolboy instant taught me that there is a decision that must be reached when confronting alarm bells.

When, directed as I may be by the 'How to Paint in Oils' manual, I choose to let my varied layers of diluted oils assign inconstant edgings, I am transported in mind not to the Uffizi but to the back of some art history classroom where a luminescent Vermeer bottle is cast glowing upon a white screen by a humming slide projector.

Few enough of my learning memories take me back to a moment where I work on a painting. There is one involving burnt sienna undercoats and another that has me learning emphatically that I do not understand green and so should avoid it at every opportunity.

I recall beauty no clearer than I recall the womb though I might have been ten thousand times so recreated. Petit Naissance.

If the memories of these learning moments, beauteous moments, had been cut out and cast away along with my tumour, would I have ceased to know what these unconscious instants taught me?

Ten millions of us, and twenty millions dead, carried a warped and wrong image, an imperfect mirror of that certain mural of Adam's creation. As brown spots rise up to mark rot upon our flesh, as grey matter of the brain loses its shape and energy, we fall toward decay until the day when, dead or dysfunctioned, we lose the means to once again summon the unsatisfying memories of beauty.

I could paint a still life of a brain (and perhaps I have). It would be aged and drying, perhaps dripping glistening fluids upon some antique tabletop. It would be neither beautiful nor clever. There should be no skull depicted and so, by such disconcerting disconnect, I might fail to summon nausea.

XXXIX