The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella (8 page)

At this time, in his self-willed isolation, Kruger seemed to be increasing aware his time was “limited.” At this time, we had our conversation when I called him a “burgher” and he was so crestfallen.

After our discussion of life, he decided to visit his homeland of Marin in order to escape what he now perceived as the sterility of his life in the city and to experience the ordinary joys that he had missed in his childhood. He decided to return to Mill Valley. I told him I had connections to help him leave the city.

On an old, still usable surfboard, as he paddled on the water across the Golden Gate, he felt himself as isolated, more than even before in the city, an isolated thinking being no longer simply object but subject. Nobody else can solve my problems, my situation, he thought.

I have to face them, sink or swim, he thought, detouring around the wreckage of the bridges, as he made his way across the bay. At that time, Kruger didn’t know that it was Ivanova herself who’d allowed him to leave the city. She had already decided he was not essential to creating a new society. She wanted to send him away, an exile so to speak.

After an absence of thirteen years, Kruger returned home north across the water. In his hometown, he found a kind of peace, communing with the source of his childhood memories and the quiet of the village.

Kruger’s trip home turned out to be a strange one. He walked about, unrecognized, facing many of his old fears and ghosts from childhood. He wasn’t sure but he thought he could smell the eucalyptus when he removed his head gear. He came upon his childhood home, which had become a museum displaying his work. Just as he believed art had replaced his life, so too had art works literally filled the inside of his house, replacing all of the objects of his former life.

Hundreds of watercolors hung on the walls filling up the whole building. Drawings of the naked Hands Hansen, chiaroscuros of Inka Holm, birth scenes, the magic mountain—Tamalpais—in its myriad of moods. His mother from every possible angle, even looking up at and down at, like an earth goddess.

Primitive drawings he didn’t remember doing. He must have been younger than five and still in the shelter during the war.

He suddenly remembered his youngest years, maybe two, holding pencils and crayons. His mother saying she’d gone first to an art supply superstore nearby, everybody else looting the markets for food, alcoholic beverages, useless consumer machines. She’d looted artistic supplies enough to last decades for one man.

While in Mill Valley he continued to examine his isolation, his estrangement. He observed and was observed. He produce a kinetic art piece out of some colored glass he found. A man stopped to observe it. As it moved in the breeze, and tinkled the man laughed. Kruger felt vindicated. A validation of the artist, of his contribution to society, his understanding of culture, and even, principles and values. He wondered if he had a reputation and for a moment thought of posthumous vindication in a world finally ready to accept him. Perhaps a feeling a mortality, which his mother had always said was necessary for art and the artist.

Just as he decided to leave his hometown, he ran into trouble with the authorities, as they  looked for a thief—an escaped criminal—who was known to be traveling. The criminal had stolen a dead person’s Tsuit—to do what? Kruger was mistaken for the criminal, which reinforced his inner suspicion that the artist must be an outsider relative to “normal” society.

Kruger proved his identity by quickly drawing one of the authorities and, thus, his position as artist gained him some respect within his old society. However, it was still only a grudging respect, as the authority was still not fully convinced.

He presented the authority with a painting done on the spot in minutes, his old house from his imagination.

Kruger again saw that, while he was not totally separated from life, he still did not fully belong.

Another of the authorities explained Kruger had been given a pass by Lisa Ivanova, a scientist, and then Kruger realized he’d been a “test subject” for Ivanova.

Kruger accepted the equation of art and death but perhaps now more subtly. In order to create, the artist must be other than human, must be separate from human concerns and common human perceptions of respectability and propriety. This was necessary to his or her art, to his ability to create for others with attention to style, to the game, the wiles, of representation.

True, simply having deep emotion does not produce art. Everything for the artist occurs and exists at a distance. The artist is, then, in a very particular fashion on the side of death, witnessing life without being alive himself.

The artist and art exist as an
unhealthy
state of the spirit. Tony Kruger did not want Hands and Inka in their
perfection
as living creatures to
fall
to art like his unhappy world and enter a world other than vital and healthy, as much as given the circumstances.
There can be no healthy society in which all men and women are artists
, that would be a sanitarium in which even the doctors are sick.

The artist expresses things healthy men cannot express, and that Kruger hoped they did not feel, but that nevertheless exist and are real in the society in which the artist lives.

There are men who play at being artists, and then there are the helpless artists who, despite their desire for another, normal existence, cannot be other than who they are, can only be creative or sterile.

Kruger the artist, then, lived and worked in the tension between the living and the dead, in the realm of impossibilities, communicating across the lines.

Walking to the north county, he saw a few small animals. He drew them quickly. Something with hair.

He noticed new growth, new plants, including ones with edible roots, which gatherers were eating.

He saw buildings with high walls built around them. He suspected normals were doing some kind of work within them. He asked somebody about the building, and she said, they were growing petroleum.

Kruger settled in a hostel in Petaluma where, he learned, there were to be visitors for a dance that night. As he watched the guests arrive, he suddenly saw Hands Hansen and Inka Holm pass through the room. He stood in the corner and spied them.

The group began to dance—kicking and shaking and yelling—on the dance floor. He realized it was a kind of initiation dance into sex and procreation, just as it had always been, he thought.

He wondered that more life seemed to be happening here than in the city.

He joyfully contemplated all that time while observing—it was for them and those like them that he painted, and slyly peered around to see if they, too, were clapping together.

At the dance he also saw a girl reminiscent of the actress Mary—who’d he’d once shunned, and he helped her up when she fell while dancing. She thanked him and he went back to his corner. He suddenly thought to himself that it was people like her who spoke the same language as him. She would
appreciate
his art.

He was exhausted with jealousy for them, and worn out, even though he’d had no part in the evening’s dance. Just the same, just the same as it had always been, he thought. Always with burning cheeks he had stood in his dark corner and suffered for you, Hands, you blond, you living; and for you, Inka so brown and no-nonsense—you happy ones!

Somebody must come now! Inka must have noticed he had gone, she must slip after him, lay her hand on his shoulder and say: “Do come back to us—don't be sad—I love you, Tony.” He listened behind him and waited in frantic suspense. But such things did not happen in this world.

Yes, all was as it had been, and he too was happy, just as he had been. For his heart was alive. But between that past and this present what had happened to make him become that which he now was? Icy desolation, solitude—mind, and art, really.

He lay down, with images racing in his mind. Two names he whispered into his cushion the few pure words from his youth, which meant for him his true way of love, of longing and happiness; that meant to him life and home, meant simple and heartfelt feeling.

He looked back on the years that had passed. He thought of the dreamy adventures of the senses, nerves, and mind in which he had been involved; saw himself eaten up with art and introspection, ravaged and paralyzed by insight, half worn out by the fevers and frosts of creation, helpless and in anguish of conscience between two extremes, flung to and fro between austerity and lust.

He wanted to tell Ivanova that artists like him can be nothing other than what they are. Successful or unsuccessful, paid or unpaid—all meaningless concepts—they would still be distinct and separate from the people around them, they would still create and work.

So after that night’s frigid and artificially heightened ecstasies, the erring, forsaken, martyred, Kroger sobbed with nostalgia and remorse. Here in his room it was still and dark, but from below in the large meeting room, life's rhythms came faintly to his ears.

Even when society, class, and wealth inequity have been destroyed, we can still say that manners and conventions permeate society and play a dominant role in our relationships to one another. That is a necessary part of our social reality as humans, this world of signs and symbols by which we recognize one another and allow our fellow humans to categorize us as friends, as enemies, as indifferent entities passing through. But he would play the role and he would continue to produce art. That’s what his heart told him.

Kruger sat up in the room, composing his promised letter to Lisa Ivanova. In the letter from Kruger to Ivanova, delivered by an itinerant, Kruger at last revealed he’d “come to terms” with his position in life as a “burgher who’s gone astray in art”—even using the word “burgher”  and he admitted he in truth did connect his love of the “normal” condition with that love of life, an idea that was often received as a welcome idea from Ivanova.

“Dear Lisa,

You probably still remember you called me a burgher, a bourgeois man. Or as I prefer to call it, a normal man. You called me that after, led on by other confessions I previously let slip to you. I confessed to you my love of life, or what I call life. I ask myself if you were aware how very
close
you came to the truth, how much my love of  ‘life’ is one and the same thing as my being a normal. This journey of mine has given me time to ponder the subject.

My father, you know, had the Chinese temperament: solid, reflective, puritanically correct, with a tendency to melancholy. My mother, of Mexican blood, was beautiful, sensuous, naïve, passionate, and careless. The mixture was extraordinary and contained extraordinary dangers. The issue of it, a normal who strayed off into art, a rebellious artist who feels nostalgic yearnings for the easy life, an artist with a bad conscience. For surely it is my father’s
conscience
that makes me see in the artist life, in all irregularity and all genius, something profoundly
suspect
, profoundly disreputable; that fills me with this lovelorn
weakness
for the simple and good, the comfortably normal, the average respectable human being—what you call bourgeois.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. A real artist would call me a normal, and the normal try to arrest me... I don't know which makes me feel worse. The normal are stupid but necessary, and artists... But you adorers of the
new world
, who call me apathetic and without aspirations, you ought to realize that there is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

I admire those proud, cold beings who adventure upon the paths of great and demonic beauty and despise ‘mankind,’ but I do not
envy
them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a maker of art, a painter, it is my “normal”
love of the human
, the living and the usual. It is the source of all warmth, goodness, and humor.

As I write, the ocean bay breezes whisper to me and I close my eyes. I look into an empty and sick world unborn and formless, that needs to be ordered and shaped; I see into a whirl of shadows of human figures who beckon to me to weave spells to redeem them: tragic and laughable figures and some that are both together—and to these I am. The work I have so far done is nothing or not much—as good as nothing. I will do better. I will combine art and life!

But my deepest and most
secret
—isn’t that a taboo concept now—“secret love” belong to the blond and blue-eyed Hands and the brown and green-eyed Inka, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace.

Do not
rebuke
this love, Lisa; it is
good and fruitful
. There is longing in it, and a gentle envy; a touch of contempt and no little innocent bliss.

Tony”

After he finished his letter, he went to bed.

Kruger was a type.
He lamented he was at home in neither of these realms but he was not completely cold to life. Though he still felt excluded at the dance, he said he rediscovered his love for such people as Hands Hansen and Inka Holm, and even Mary Verme.