An Aversion to Ladders 12

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

The opportunity to visit the library in Peabody Hall provided an excuse to pass through the student union, Nadir Hall. This great building was built after the trustees purchased an old train station that adjoined school property. A large clock of some legend was the only thing surviving from this earlier incarnation, and it was entombed in a glass case at the main entrance. The story goes it stopped at high noon one day when a train car carrying the remains of a famous racehorse passed through town on its way to Chicago. Ironically, the mare’s name was Eternal Noon. A yellowed copy of The Stonesthrow Register was framed beside the relic for any doubters to fact-check the validity of the event.

Beyond this curiosity at the door, Nadir Hall was a sprawling affair intended to impress. It boasted of restaurants, rental halls, a bookstore, and even a bowling alley. It resembled a Medieval monastery from outside; and inside, its many interlocking stairwells and passageways could have been designed by M. C. Escher. In making his exploration of the premises, Michael was struck by discoloration on the walls where a considerable number of large plaques had presumably hung. A collection of paintings and watercolors now hung in their stead, though they in no way matched up with or covered the ghostly outlines. The visitor followed the echoes until he happened upon one artwork by Seth Bowles. The fellow painter paused to ponder it, as well as an accompanying photograph showing the professor receiving an award.

The philandering professor was typical of the ivied institutional experience in Michael’s opinion. “With institutions,” as Omar once wrote him, “self-congratulation is the sincerest form of obsolescence. The more irrelevant you become, the more accolades they heap upon you.” From the outsider artist’s point of view, ivory towers tended to be oxygen-poor work environments, and those lured into them as young men with youthful vision invariably become pickled in all the naiveté and vice of that age.

Truthfully, Michael’s lack of art-current cachet was a symptom and not the underlying cause of his contrary nature. He had no great love for the fin de siècle art world, to which he had grudgingly tied his meager fortunes. He had cultivated no useful allies in his profession, and saw most artists, rightly or wrongly, as either being chattel or poseurs: artisans of proficient but mediocre gifts who, in the main, pandered to the vanity of collectors by replicating ideas too old to be new and too recent to be classified as nostalgia. Omar, in occasional rhetorical letters, never tired of bolstering his friend in these opinions. He was forever pointing out culture was myopic by association, not design. It was the politics of familiarity, which is first rewarded with gold and later with contempt. Culture, to his philosophical turn of mind, was simply the “myth of the group” by another name, and it served primarily a calcified bureaucracy of grant endowers and professional grant recipients, and few others. “Wherever two or more people are gathered in the name of culture,” he would say, “there is already a conspiracy against it.”

Still, for Michael, being a painter was almost beside the point. It was neither a career nor a calling for him but a means to an end. His primary love was for the imagination. Unfortunately, from his perspective, imagination in fine arts was viewed mostly as a bastard relation. In the titanic struggle that places realism and craft on one side, and highbrow conceptual gimmickry and political agendas on the other, it falls somewhere off the table. Its scarcity is always reason enough to either hate it or, more charitably, regard it as novelty deserving only of polite indifference.

In a wider context the painter had never met anyone even remotely like himself. In his areas of interests, he admired talent, but was only excited by genius. This admiration did not proceed from immodesty or self-delusion about his own abilities but from a like way of thinking he could instantly recognize and value. It was only one more proof of this “like-mindedness” that so few shared his appetite and giddy excitement for strikingly original ideas. By his reckoning most creative ventures undertaken by others were little more than “aspects,” which, like one-trick ponies, he could readily digest within seconds of looking at something or hearing it explained. He could draw three circles around what other people were doing without them ever being able to draw once around his thought process. And was it arrogance that he could demonstrate what he knew to be true while it was not arrogance for others to devalue with their silence or lack of curiosity what they could not or would not understand? This further explained why the prideful man drew no one into his confidence, for he did not relish engaging in vague platitudes simply for the sake of misrepresenting himself to others. What he shared with fellow travelers of a discipline was, he told himself, a tangential experience and little more.

The painter continued down the corridor, needing little encouragement in his calloused role as self-anointed pariah. There was never an antidote to his bitterness—never a second opinion bouncing around inside the echo chamber of his mind. He seemed to find himself alone in empty buildings more often than not. Whether he sought them out or were left them by default, they only underlined his acute isolation. The fact he had never walled himself off like some but, instead, chose to parade his “quiet desperation” in a public space was debatably a cry for help (albeit one perpetually performed in an empty rehearsal hall).

Michael had not intended to be a failure, or to be so profoundly poor and friendless. He often wondered how someone with so much potential could come to be in such a wretched state. It was a collusion and confusion of many factors: Had being born into a family that placed little value on his interests been the impetus that forced him into a life of hardened self-reliance and seclusion? Or was his solitary, contrary nature there from the beginning? And was this nature, along with his phobias and eccentricities, the thing that made him poor? Or even artistic? It was impossible to say what was cause and what was effect, or whether all the factors that defined his circumstance were not conditions of something else. At the most fundamental level, he knew he was his own worst enemy. His turbulent emotions made it difficult for him to tie his priorities and outlook to anything realistic. With delusions of grandeur at one extreme, and irrational low self-esteem at the other, little lay in between. Mountains were molehills and molehills were mountains, which created plenty of opportunities to fail, or to quit in anticipation of failing.

It was more a matter of impracticality than a lack of seriousness that he entered music school in his twenties. Somewhere in the back of his mind he certainly knew he would never be able to perform on the piano in public, or work collaboratively with other musicians. This level of discomfort even extended to avoiding private piano lessons, which gave him his only failing grade in college. To save his grade point average, he abandoned music for painting. Regrettably a public dimension awaited him here too, although he did not fully meet with it until he entered the political world of graduate school. Somehow he managed to get through a two-year program by talking only twice with professors in private critiques. One, in confidence, told him he would be given a special honor in achievement upon graduation, but it was not forthcoming. If such a distinction was ever in the offing the painter was sure it was rescinded because of his lack of participation in graduate activities.

Past the hydra of art school, there were weightier social matters to contend with: namely, mingling at art openings and pressing flesh with prospective collectors. Cartooning offered him his most lasting refuge from the public, but there was no more money in it than there was appetite for his odd humor. Writing, as a profession, was even more rife with reclusive personalities, but in itself it was the most socially inclusive of the arts; and this could only expose the depth of his conceit and isolation. Writing was not a pure art, although it had an unnerving way of bringing impurities to the surface. These impurities not only proceeded from personal deficiencies, like mild dyslexia, but also extended to difficulties of process, as with his inexhaustible capacity to perfect text. Michael reread and rewrote without cessation, which made the craft of writing too much like masturbation to inspire confidence.

To the larger point (and to the artist’s admitted frustration), he never actually finished anything he started—or, better put, he had difficulty letting go of things. He would reach a point where the return on a creative project would be less than the energy put into achieving it; and what was exhausted was not the possibilities of something but, rather, his will to continue. More times than not he ended up walking away with paint still on the palette or notes still pinned to pages. Prior undertakings were never officially abandoned—only reprioritized; and the only thing worse than not being able to let go of his obsessions was being left temporarily marooned between them. In short, his fecund imagination was as blinkered as it was boundless. And for all the joy it brought him, he feared it would never be more than opiate in his veins. His multiple talents were not only an excuse to be fickle or changeable, not only “an embarrassment of riches”—they were symptomatic of a disorder.

Once he had attended a recital given by a former composition teacher. He wanted to speak to him afterwards, but did not have the stomach for the encounter. An explanation of his life would have been required, and surely there would have been disappointment in the face of the teacher to find his once-promising student had amounted to so little in life.

Somewhere ahead the painter could hear the sound of a vocalist and a band, and was thankful for the interruption. He followed a mellifluous rendition of But Beautiful to pass into the darker end of the cavernous building. Beyond a row of impervious busts of past college presidents, two towering oak doors marked the entrance to a banquet room. A pretty little girl in a pink dress was peeking out the gap, and with more curiosity about the approaching man than the lively wedding reception behind her; an unseen hand materialized to pull her away. Sudden movement in his peripheral view diverted Michael’s attention to a vestibule, where a small finch circled frantically between two sets of double glass doors. He thought of going over to free the poor creature, but feared opening the door from the lobby-side would create an opportunity for the bird to move deeper into the building. With any luck, someone coming into the hall from outside would shoo it out. Wanting to escape the bird’s dilemma, he stepped guardedly up to the banquet room entrance and watched couples twirl on the dance floor. Touched by the sentiment of the occasion, he wondered what different steps he could have taken in his life to place him on the other side of these doors. He saw nothing of the newlyweds; a four-tier wedding cake sat still uncut across from a table covered with gifts. One imposing box on this second table was wrapped in black foil, yet it bore no tag. The sight of it reminded the interloper of his true point in coming on campus.

In turning back to the corridor, he saw nothing more of the bird.