Domenico de Clario is one of Australia’s better known artists. He is the Head of the Experimental Art Foundation in South Australia. He was born in Triest and migrated to Australia at the age of 9. He is represented in major Australian and o/s galleries . His speech was given at a dinner during the symposium “Give time to time”, a poetic phrase reflecting on the nature of the ephemeral, as is explained in the text. GTTT was the title of the series of talks delivered at this year’s Mildura Palimpsest, a regular event that began as an exploration of themes relating to art and science and how we forever rewrite the landscape. However, in recent years Palimpsest is a slightly more project driven Committee that explores a variety of issues in modern art. This time Palimpsest was dedicated to a review of the roaring years of the Mildura Sculpture Triennial, possibly the single most influential event in the history of Australia sculpture over a period of some 30 years.
(to) give time to time
Mildura site
Symposium dinner talk
Stefano’s café / 25 deakin avenue mildura
Saturday September 18 2010
The Ephemeral
Good evening all; I hope you’re enjoying Stefano’s wonderful food and this great company! I will try to keep my interruption to your many excited conversations to a minimum.
But firstly I want to acknowledge the original owners of the land we are on, the Latchi Latchi nation, and their ancestors.
And then I want to pay tribute to Peter Tyndall who couldn’t come from Hepburn Springs to be with us tonight; Peter really wanted to be here to speak to us on this occasion but is looking after ill members of his family so for this evening I am his replacement…
I think that the least invasive way to speak to you whilst you are all still enjoying Stefano’s magic - and there is more to come! - may be to accompany the conviviality we are enjoying at this very moment with the voices of many others who, like Peter, are not physically here to share with us the various discussions on the ephemeral, or perhaps, thanks to Ted Colless and his paper today, on the ephemer-os and the ephemer-is.
Many over the chronicled millennia have grappled with the attempt to understand the nature of time and how it defines the manifestation of all expression.
We are here tonight because we have also attempted at some point or other of our professional or private lives to understand and then express to others some micro-aspect of the complexity of this strange phenomenological continuum we find ourselves in, whose principal motor seems to be the unfolding of time. Or does it unfold?
And how evasive this elemental motor is, how fleeting are our glimpses of its workings and how feeble are our efforts to make sense of the whole it encompasses.
From our perspective an experience of ephemerality seems to distinguish all of its workings. For me the word ephemeral (from the Greek meaning ‘lasting one day’; some of its associated original meanings come from an understanding of time that describes the duration of a fever, or that of a flower blooming; one meaning originating from the Aegean island of Samos describes the ephemeral as the length of time it takes for love to arise and fall) has come to describe much of that quality through which I decipher and attempt to understand the key experiences of my life.
Both the substance and the structure of the experiential flow that from an early age has presented itself to me has determined how I approach everything I feel, think and do, and the nature of this flow has felt overwhelmingly and determinedly temporary (ephemeral), determined from moment to moment by who knows what…
Consequently both my mistrust of appearance and my belief that the essential substance of the invisible determines and animates everything we see grew out of the seeming temporaneity of most things.
The two most significant aspects of my early experiences regarding time were the tabernacle and my grandfather’s sewing needle. The tabernacle is that mysterious cavity inside the actual walls of the church, inside its actual body, where the host and the holy wine are kept. This sacred space is unlocked during mass so that its contents may be extracted and distributed to the faithful. Imaginative children and deeply faithful adults believe that the body and blood of Christ reside in the holy host and wine, which are kept inside this cavity.
My grandfather’s sewing needle, the most ephemeral of utilitarian objects, is responsible for my being alive. My father met my future mother only because, when stationed in Trieste, he was ordered by his commanding officer to report to the ageing tailor – the originally commissioned younger one having taken an illicit vacation - living in Number 3 Via del Bosco in order to have his uniform made as urgently as possible. He and my mother, then fifteen years old, met on the narrow stairway up to that first floor apartment.
My grandfather’s favorite phrase, like all tailors and seamstresses used to having to exercise extreme patience as a virtue, indeed as a vital component in the creative act of sewing, was: ‘su, dai tempo al tempo…’ which could be translated as ‘come on, give time to time…’ This was emphasized by the waving of his needle and thread in the air, each word followed by a slow downward stroke of the needle-wand, re-emphasized by coloured thread whirling and snaking in the air…
On those occasions the needle-wand was instantly transformed into a living manifestation of this dictum-incantation, as though its virtually invisible tip itself could miraculously dispense the luxury of extra time to all those who needed it…
I didn’t understand the full value of this dictum of course until very recently when most of its practical benefits have become blunted, to say the least, given that time seems to be running out so very quickly.
But I treasure its commonsense practicality and the wisdom of its universal applicability. I have always attempted to make sense of the world according to this dictum, especially as an artist. When I initially decided in the mid 1970’s that the word artist was essentially misleading because its etymology defines its operational range as mechanistic instead of spiritual – doing as opposed to being – it had been in response to a renewed consideration of my grandfather’s dictum. And this lead me eventually some years later to conceive of a new word that could describe the entire range of our activities, a word that would inclusively encompass both action and spirit; the word is apocalyptist, from the Greek meaning to reveal, to pull the veil back.
Consequently the weight of this involvement with such ideas meant that when I was conceiving this project I could look no further than these words as the most appropriate indicators of what both the AEAF’s mission and this collaboration with Mildura Palimpsest are attempting to achieve. The (to) in brackets in front of the main phrase is there to add a dynamic dimension to its meaning; it renders the transformation of this thought into action seductively possible and turns a casual observation, a piece of empathetic advice into a loving plea, or at least a generative questioning of the nature of our relationship with the world around us.
But having said all that I have concluded that the ephemeral does not necessarily constitute a quality in itself; it is not a value that can be quantified, discussed, measured, held in one’s hand or even assessed. Rather it might emanate as a kind of experiential glow after one completes an objective examination of the world around us, of what is; it then emerges as the ultimate residual value - wordless, colourless, timeless – of any such deep contemplative act.
In brief when one is truly able to give time to time, the sense of the ephemeral pervading all things slowly emerges.
There have been many attempts, over the millennia, to engage with an understanding of the temporary nature of all things. Some of the outcomes have resisted the ravages of time and have survived as fragmentary evidence that this path, no matter how late in our lives we may come upon it, is the one which might facilitate the most serene ending to our journey.
And the degree to which an instructive clarity about such matters can be achieved is perhaps determined by the extent to which a purity of spirit is able to characterize each individual search.
Before I left my house in North Adelaide on Wednesday in order to drive here I hurriedly and randomly scooped up some books from my shelves and over the last few nights I have leafed through them looking for some of those very fragments. I would like to offer you a series of varying accounts, fourteen in fact (that’s twice seven!), of how the experiential glow emanating from a self that has been able to give time to time can eventually manifest as art.
Forgive my indulgence as I read some of these texts out to you:
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on the relationship between speech and silence, which might be defined as the key to all our activities:
‘There would be needed a silence that envelops the speech anew, after one has come to recognize that speech enveloped the alleged silence of the psychological coincidence. What will this silence be? As the reduction finally is not for Husserl a transcendental immanence, but the disclosing of the Weltthesis, this silence will not be the contrary of language.’
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great Italian civil poet and filmmaker, in ‘Roman Poems’:
The Song of the Bells
When evening loses itself in the fountains
My village is a confused colour.
I’m far way, I remember its frogs,
the moon, the sad tremolo of the crickets.
Vespers sound and fade into the fields.
I’m dead to the song of the bells.
Stranger, fear not,
In my sweet flight over the plain,
I am a spirit of love
Who to his land returns from afar.
The last four lines of this poem are inscribed on my grandmother’s tombstone, as she rests somewhere inside the vastness of Melbourne’s Carlton Cemetery. She was born in the same village as Pasolini’s mother and I remember her speaking her native Friulian dialect with much joy. Pasolini wrote some of these ‘Roman Poems’ in that dialect and I must read out the original for you; the Italian doesn’t quite measure up to the sung quality of this ancient dialect. In Friulian the title of the poem is Ciant da Li Ciampanis; the last three lines read as follows:
Forest, al me dols svuala’ par il plan,
no ciapa’ poura: jo i soj un spirt di amour
che al so pais al torna di lontan.
The final poem in this collection is titled ‘The day of My Death’; first I’ll read it to you in Friulian and then in English:
Ta na sitat, Triest o Udin,
ju par un vial di tejs,
di vierta, quan’ch’a mudin
il colour li fuejs
il colarai muart
sot il soreli ch’al art
biondu e alt
e i sierarai li sejs,
lasanlu lusi, il seil.
Sot di un tej clipid di vert
i colarai tal neri
da la me muart ch’a dispiert
i tejs e il soreli.’
I bieij zuvinus
a coraran ta che lus
ch’i ai pena pierdut,
svualant four da li scuelis
cui ris tal sorneli.
In a city, Trieste or Udine,
along the linden boulevard,
when in spring
the leaves change color,
I'll drop dead
under the ardent sun,
blond and tall,
and I'll close my eyes,
leaving the sky to its splendor.
Under a warm green linden
I'll fall into my death's darkness,
scattering linden and sun.
The beautiful boys
will run in that light
which I've just lost,
flying from school
with curls on their brows.
Nothing can quite match poetry for its ability to describe the ephemeral, and our life itself, being ephemeral, contains within it an infinity of ephemeral moments. Our last instant usually defines us and remains for others as the most fugitive of the traces of our existence. The poet’s ability to enter this moment and to courageously feel it ahead of time so as to preserve it for us is astonishing.
Umberto Saba, the great Triestine poet, in ‘Songbook:
Portrait
Never mind the mirror. Don’t gaze in it
like some young girl. For women the body is
luminous; for you the soul counts.
The sweetness with which you oppose innocence to evil
gives your eyes their goodness. And yet the lock
of hair you toss lightly aside
expresses simple pride in being you,
like a flag atop a house
already finished,
freely flapping in a sometime wind.
Helen Cixous, on the ephemerality of dreams in ‘Dream I tell you’:
‘When a sin comes back (its memory) you absolutely must bury it. How to bury the memory of a sin that comes from a distant past? I shut it up in a clay pot. Then I dug right into the cold hard ground, deep down. Without of course telling anyone what I had in the pot, then I stuck this pot the size of a little quart saucepan into the ground and I covered the hole in the ground with ice for a long time, and that despite the presence of people who had no inkling what I was ridding myself of in this little improvised coffin.’
James Joyce: The last 48 lines in his immense novel ‘Ulysses’ must be the most compelling and confronting of all novel endings written in the English language. I won’t read it out to you but please try and find it and read it out aloud to yourself. Even better if you are able to read it to a group of gathered friends.
Anna Ahkmatova, on the ephemerality of love in ‘Poems Without a Hero’:
My voice is feeble, my will strong
I am better without love,
The clouds are high,
The wind blows from the mountain
And my thoughts are innocent.
My sleeplessness has gone away,
I do not sit over ashes,
The oblique hand of the clock tower
Is not a fatal arrow.
And the past loses its force!
Freedom is near.
I watch a strip of sunlight
Catch the wet new ivy
And I forgive…everything.
To Alexander Blok, January 1914
I went to visit the poet
At noon on Sunday
It was quiet in the large room
And frosty outside the windows.
The sun was raspberry red
Over the tousled blue smoke…
And how the radiant quiet host
Looked at me!
Those eyes –
No one can forget them;
Full of caution
I preferred not to look.
But I remember all our words
On that smoky noon, Sunday
In the high grey house
At the sea-gates of the Neva.
Jorge Luis Borges, on the ephemerality of sight, of things, of the psychological moment, in his ‘Collected Poems’:
Things
My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.
From his last book of poems ‘In Praise of darkness’:
New England, 1967
The forms and colours of my dreams have changed;
now there are red houses side by side
and the fragile bronze of the dying leaves
and the chaste winter and the righteous firewood.
As on the seventh day, the earth is good.
Deep in the twilight something carries on
That nearly does not exist, bold and sad,
an old murmur of Bibles and of war.
Soon (they say) the first snow will arrive;
America waits for me on every street,
but I feel in the falling light of afternoon
today so long and yesterday so brief.
Buenos Aires, it is along your streets
I go on walking, not knowing why or when.
Eugenio Montale, on the same psychological space, in ‘The Occasions’:
…but let it be…
…but let it be. A blowing bugle
converses with the swarms among the oaks.
In the shell where the evening star is mirrored
A painted volcano happily smokes.
The coin embedded in lava
also shines on the tabletop, weighting a few scraps
of paper. Life, which once seemed so vast,
is smaller than your handkerchief.
Isabel Eberhardt, a Swiss adventurer who lived a brief and largely invisible life from 1877 until 1904, wrote her single and most astonishing book, titled ‘The Oblivion Seekers’, drawing upon her experiences in Morocco.
A short story titled ‘The Breath of Night’ comes from this collection: everything in this story rises and falls, is created and disappears; sounds, actions, emotions, sand storms…
The Breath of Night
It is the time of evening when the rays of the setting sun pass through an air already cooled by the first breath of night, while the mud walls give off the heat they have stored all during the day. Indoors it is like being in an oven. You must be outside, and feel the touch of the first shadows. And for a long time I lie idly stretched out staring up into the depths of the sky, listening to the last sounds from the ‘zaouiya’ and the ‘ksar’: doors creaking as they swing heavily shut, the neighing of horses, and the bleat of sheep on the roofs. And the little African donkeys bray, a sound as sad as protracted sobbing. And the sharp thin voices of the black women.
Nearby in the courtyard there is the sound of tambourines and ‘guinbris’, making an accompaniment to some very strange vocalizations. These seem less like music than like the cries uttered during love-making. Sometimes the voices die down and all is quiet. Then the blood in the veins speaks, by itself.
Soon life starts up again. Mats, rugs and sacks appear on the roofs of the slave-quarters. The ear still listens for muffled noises, kitchen sounds, arguments going on in low voices, prayers being murmured. And the sense of smell is jarred by the odors in the smoke that rises from the confusion of black bodies below, where the flames flicker joyously in the braziers. There are other silhouettes in the doorways of the holy men. It is all here, the daily life of the ‘ksar’, like something I have always known, and yet always new.
Over toward the right, behind the Mellah, there is a patch of wall that remains lighted up until very late. Its reddish surface serves as a backdrop for the curious plays of shadow that are projected upon it. At times they move back and forth slowly, ands then they seem to go into a furious dance. After all other voices have grown silent and everyone roundabout has gone to sleep, the Aissaoua are still awake, as the night grows perceptibly cooler, the members of the enlightened brotherhood, the ‘khouan’, pound on the tambourine and draw strident sounds from oboe-like rhaita. They also sing, slowly as if in a dream. And they dance beside the flaming pots of charcoal, their wet bodies moving to an ever-accelerating tempo. From the fires rise intoxicating fumes of benzoin and myrrh. Through ecstasy they hope to reach the final target of unconsciousness.
I hear something more. Whenever the Aissaoua have sunk into sleep, I still see moving forms. A breath steals across the terraces, disturbing the calm. I know. I imagine. I hear. There are sighs and catching of breaths out there in the cinnamon-scented night. The heat of rut under the quiet stars. The hot might’s languor drives flesh to seek flesh, and desire is reborn. It is terrible to hear teeth grinding in mortal spasms, and lungs making sounds like death- rattles. Agony! I feel like sinking my teeth into warm earth.
In the morning the west wind arrives suddenly. You could see it coming, raising high spirals of dust, black as smoke. As it moved toward us through the calm air, it made great sighing sounds. And then it was howling like a living thing. I had a fantasy of being lifted up and carried off in the enormous embrace of a winged monster, come to destroy us all. And the sand showered onto the terraces with the steady, small sound of rain.
Jan Morris, who wrote, among many illustrious others, a book about the city I was born in, titled ‘Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere’. The book focuses largely on Morris’ sense of the ephemeral, which she believes permeates that city more than most. In it she quotes a most remarkable poem by James Joyce on the melancholy of the ephemeral. Joyce lived in Trieste for eleven years and wrote a number of his most significant books there, including the first half of ‘Ulysses’:
Watching the Needle-Boats at San Sabba
I heard their young hearts crying
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing
No more, return no more.
O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return.
Morris, who is Welsh, ends her book on Trieste in this way:
As for me, when my clock moves on for the last time, the angel having returned to heaven, the angler having packed irt in for the last time and gone to the pub, I shall happily haunt the two places that have most happily haunted me. Most of the after-time I shall be wandering with my beloved along the banks of Dwyfor; but now and then you may find me in a boat below the walls of Miramar, watching the nightingales swarm.
Shunryu Suzuki, whose 1971 book titled ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’ revolutionized both my life and my approach to making art, was a Japanese Zen monk who introduced Zen to the US in the 1960’s. His seemingly simplistic utterances opened up a new way of thinking for me, and of course Zen Buddhist practices focus on the acceptance of the transience of all.
Beginner’s Mind:
‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’
Breathing:
‘What we call ‘I’ is just a swing door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.’
And on the ultimate ephemeral action:
No Trace:
‘When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.’
From another perspective, but perhaps it’s the same one, simply its obverse, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben discusses the ephemerality of love and light.
From ‘The Idea of Prose’:
The Idea of Love
To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent – so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed off.
The Idea of Light
I turn on the light in a dark room, naturally the lit room is no longer the dark room; I have lost it forever. Yet isn’t it the same room? Isn’t the dark room the only content of the lit room? That which I can no longer have, that which infinitely flees backward, and likewise thrusts me forward is only a representation of language: the dark which light presupposes. But if I give up the attempt to grasp this presupposition, if I turn my attention to the light itself, if I receive it – what the light gives me is then the ‘same’ room, the non-hypothetical dark. That which is veiled, that which is closed in itself is the only content of the revelation – light is only the coming to itself of the dark.
Franz Kafka is perhaps the one thinker/writer that more incisively than anyone else has described the ephemerality of the world around us, both of relationships and of things.
He is the one who has, more effectively and assiduously than anyone else, denounced the world of appearances as illusory.
From his ‘Collected Short Stories’:
The Trees
For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lay sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. But no, it can’t be done, for they are firmly embedded in the ground. But see, even that is mere appearance.
And the mysterious Excursion into the Mountains
‘I don’t know,’ I cried without being heard, ‘I do not know. If nobody comes, then nobody comes. Ive done nobody any harm, nobody’s done me any harm, but nobody will help me. A pack of nobodies. Yet that isn’t all true. Only, that nobody helps me – a pack of nobodies would be rather fine, on the other hand. I’d love to go on an excursion – why not? – with a pack of nobodies. Into the mountains, of course, where else? How these nobodies jostle each other, all these lifted arms linked together, these numberless feet treading so close! Of course they are all in dress suits. We go so gaily, the wind blows through us and the gaps in our company. Our throats swell and are free in the mountains! It’s a wonder we don’t burst into song.’
Finally I would like to finish with Raymond Carver, the American short-story writer, who has written extensively on the ephemerality of life in small town US. The last few pages of his short story ‘Cathedral’ perfectly describe both the anxieties and the revelations that such experiences can bring.
The narrator of ‘Cathedral’ has an epiphany when he meets a blind friend of his wife. He is not so enthusiastic about this blind man’s visit because blind people make him uncomfortable. In addition to his uneasiness with the blind, the narrator is uncomfortable with his wife’s relationship with the blind man.
The wife and Robert, the blind man, have maintained a close relationship via tape recordings mailed back and forth, and the narrator finds this unsettling. Despite the narrator’s feelings about the visit, Robert shows up, and the three of them dine together. Robert and the narrator get to know each other as TV together. The narrators’ wife falls asleep on the sofa between them and when she awakes she goes up to bed. Eventually a late-night program comes on about cathedrals.
From the story:
‘The TV was showing another cathedral now. This one was in Germany. The Englishman’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,” the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.”
I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else.
I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “To begin with, they’re very tall.” I was looking around the room for clues. “They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.
He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.
“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said.
He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he listened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. “They’re really big,” I said. They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. I’m sorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just no good at it.”
“That’s all right, bub,” the blind man said. “Hey, listen. I hope you don’t mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you a simple question, yes or no. I’m just curious and there’s no offense. You’re my host. But let me ask if you are in any way religious? You don’t mind my asking?”
I shook my head. He couldn’t see that, though. A wink is the same as a nod to a blind man. “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?”
“Sure, I do,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
The Englishman was still holding forth. My wife sighed in her sleep. She drew a long breath and went on with her sleeping.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “But I can’t tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn’t in me to do it. I can’t do any more than I’ve done.”
The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me.
I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.”
It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said.
So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.
The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet.
He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.
“All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.”
He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.
So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a hose. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.
“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”
I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of the fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.
“Doing fine,” the blind man said.
I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But I kept drawing just the same.
My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.”
I didn’t answer her.
The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said. “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?”
My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?”
“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me.
I did it. I closed them just like he said.
“Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.”
“They’re closed,” I said.
“Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.”
So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.
Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What do you think?”
But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.
“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”
My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.
“It’s really something,” I said.
This is probably the most astonishingly marvelous ending of any contemporary short story.
I’m always amazed at how Carver has managed to both tell us as well as imply so much in the last few spare sentences.
Well, like all that I’ve read to you tonight my talk is also ephemeral!
I hope I haven’t put you to sleep and I thank you for your kind attention.
Forgive me as well for the ongoing focus on Trieste, but as Italo Calvino says in his ‘Invisible Cities’, I cannot speak of anything at all without referring to Trieste.
As the implicit first city of my birth it’s in fact the only entity, no matter what I am saying, that I ever speak about.
Thank you again Stefano de Pieri and your staff for the wonderful food, all so lovingly prepared, you have gifted us with!
Please continue to enjoy this most lovely of evenings.
Domenico de Clario
No comments:
Post a Comment