I imagine a man walking up those concrete steps and through the glass door into the main lobby of a local museum. He hands over double the suggested donation to view the works that ultimately leave him uninspired. What’s worse is a major section of the gallery is cordoned off while they prepare for the next exhibit making its way around the country. And he thinks to himself, “a day too early, or maybe a day too late.” The money is of little concern in spite of the expectation in getting what he paid for that hangs about his mind. Still, he decides to leave.
About eight blocks east on second south is an artists’ residence set up innocuously enough from the outside as a regular brick building except for the grand mural that covers the eastern wall. The brick is old and time stained with drilling holes from long gone signs filled with foam or caulk or backer rod. The smooth brushed joints worn away such that sediments of white aggregate show like bits of teeth within the mortar beds. The brass push plate on the main door polished bright from sixty years of use, and used again this day as he enters.
What hooks him first is the smell. Solvents and the faintness of creosote. And beneath that first impression is the old building smell. A dampness in the wood and brick, of earth wafting up from beneath the stuffy crawl spaces in the way of old buildings. A bouquet like a whiskey that tastes better while inebriated.
Next is the sound of the door snugging in to place with a squeak and click from the bolt against the misaligned strike plate. Then the squeak of the floorboards beneath his feet as he makes his way up the stairs that amplify the sounds of his steps no matter how conscientious he is of rocking his feet from heel to toe, and heel to toe.
He looks around from floor to floor, from studio to studio, and gets his view of the artist in the raw, of unrefined ideas, of creativity so schizophrenic it comes about like wild gashes no matter the medium; as if the works were so lit with meaning that he was blinded to their very nature. And, of all the creation myths that persist in the world, it seems that all before him is of another kind of clay.
Yet with all these works, there was one that stood out among the others, and it started with a side-glance that stirred the feelings in the depths before realization catches up some four strides after. And so he turned. And he stepped back to peer through the doorway into the meager studio of paint splattered on the walls and a sink seemingly covered in fordite from layer after layer after layer of paint washed from the brushes.
In this tiny studio were canvasses leaned up against the walls with their backs turned or stacked from left to right like a library of books. But there was one still easeled. A landscape about four feet high and six feet wide. It was dark in value except for the scrapes of titanium white like phosphenes skittering past the dark light when you close your eyes, and then other colors alternating between hues of grey and blue and violet. Simply brutal in its composition of straight lines knifed on. And haunting in that it was understood beneath the surface of an unstirred mind — understood only through the lens of a deep sleep, where somehow, the next morning arrives and the world is different.
I imagine this man, walking home, yet completely oblivious to the intensity of the undercurrent stirring. The only inclination in his mind that something happened is that the particular painting lingers. And it lingers into the next day, and the next. After a while, he is so aware of the lively opinions in the world that he can see nothing else except the limits of acceptability. So he goes to a bookstore, a major retailer traded on the New York Stock Exchange. But he finds much the same as he imagines the books here are similar to the books on the south end of town as are the books on the west side.
They’re the classics — there’s no denying that — so their profit margin is almost guaranteed. And these others are popular and along the trend. And still others sell better than what they would not carry. And as he wanders, he sees an empty author’s booth, either to be filled up or taken down until the next time a new artist hustles their work.
“A day too early, or maybe a day too late,” he says to himself before leaving.
Not more than an hour later, he is at a cafe and drinking coffee and staring blankly at his surroundings when a bookcase in the corner caught his mind. It was a secondhand antique of Art Nouveau: the simple curve of the valanced skirt upon slippered feet leading to the rounded mid-molding and to the uppercase where on the top shelf sat a spiral bound notebook among board games and magazines and the occasional schlock. But it was that notebook that stuck out most of all, as if within that bookcase was a portmanteau emerging from the mismatched ideas, but it was the notebook that struggled its way through as the best fit for its place.
And who knows why he found significance in what he saw; the meaning was arbitrary in much the same way a schizophrenic obsesses over a specific leaf in a tree via some preternatural awareness, as if to intuit another rank in the taxonomy of life where this blade of grass comes from the other side of the river. Sometimes, things just work out in the daily meanderings, where there is no reason other than faith or some stubborn belief or delusion or inspiration. But still, significance remains, albeit, beneath the trappings, and it was significance that lead him to this — a notebook written by a teenager. At least, that’s what he surmised from the class list on the inside cover.
At first were the studious notes as nothing more than a mirror to the voice of education and structured like a simplistic religion. Soon, however, the thoughts wandered off into a blooming adolescence faced with the death of a mother in poetic form:
Today, today — a summer’s day —
Seems cold and gray
With your departure,
But forced to grow up this day.
And I fill the space
Into your absence.
What will I do without the grace
Of a mother’s embrace
When life is hard?
Of all the things there is to say,
While in the fray:
“Not today. Not today.”
I am me 