Wittgenstein's Mistress (16 page)

But also that Katharine Hepburn had the part of Clara Schumann.

So perhaps it is the notion of Brahms having had an affair with somebody like Katharine Hepburn which strikes me as so agreeable.

Especially if his affair with Jane Avril did not last.

And even if I have no idea what I have been saying that has now reminded me that Bach was almost blind, before he died.

This was from copying too many scores late at night, if I remember.

Homer was blind too, of course.

Although possibly this was only something that was said,
insofar as Homer was concerned.

I believe I have already mentioned that there were no pencils, then.

Which is to say that when people said Homer was blind, it was because what they really did not wish to say was that Homer did not know how to write.

Emily Brontë was one more person who did not have children.

Well, doubtless it would have been extraordinarily interesting if Emily Brontë did, what with the considerable likelihood that she never even once had a lover.

Still, I would perhaps find it difficult to think of anybody I would rather be descended from than Emily Brontë.

Unless Sappho, of course.

Well, or Helen.

To tell the truth, I may even have made believe that I
was
Helen, once.

At Hisarlik, this would have been. Looking out across the plains that once were Troy, and dreaming for a while that the Greek ships were beached there still.

Or that one could even see the evening's watchfires, being lighted along the shore.

Well, it would have been a harmless enough thing to make believe.

Even if Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically.

Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then.

Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.

I do wish that that last sentence had some meaning, since it certainly came close to impressing me for a moment.

There is a great deal of sadness in the
Iliad
in either case, incidentally.

Well, all that death. Wrist deep in that, and in loss, so many of them so often being.

But too, with all of it so long ago, and forever gone.

On the way to certain of his own conquests, Alexander the Great once stopped at Troy himself, to lay a wreath at Achilles's grave.

That older war seeming so much closer to then than to now, of course.

Still, even by the time of Alexander, it was almost a thousand years.

I can almost not conceive of that, come to think about it.

Julius Caesar laid a wreath at Achilles's grave, as well. Although that was only about three hundred years after Alexander.

When I say only, what I imagine I mean is that it was practically as close as between Shakespeare and today, for instance.

In which case I have unquestionably now lost track of what I was trying to conceive of altogether.

Bertrand Russell was born fifteen years before Rupert Brooke, and was still alive more than fifty years after Brooke had died on Scyros, if that is perhaps connected to anything?

If I have not mentioned having been at Stratford-on-Avon before, by the way, this is only because I assume it is taken for granted that everybody who goes to London will sooner or later also go to Stratford-on-Avon.

London and Stratford-on-Avon always remaining equidistant from each other too, as it happens.

Whatever the people who wrote the instructions in Japanese about situating phonograph speakers may have believed.

And in the meantime I would appear to have let still another day pass without putting that one in, either.

As a matter of fact I did not sit here at all, yesterday.

For some reason, what I felt like doing yesterday was dismantling.

Although after that I went for a ride in the pickup truck, as far as to the garbage disposal area.

The tires on the pickup truck are getting a little soft.

Have I said that on certain mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens?

It is what I sometimes have instead of a rosy-fingered dawn, possibly.

Possibly the garbage disposal area is one more thing that I have never mentioned before, as well.

One would have little reason to do so, however, it being nothing more extraordinary than a hole in the ground.

It is quite a huge hole, but still.

One follows a sign, to get there.

To the Garbage Disposal Area, the sign says.

In a manner of speaking, one follows the sign.

What one is actually following is a road, of course.

Possibly I did not need to make that explanation.

My own garbage is always meager enough to be disposed of by being buried on the beach, incidentally.

I do this while taking my walks, perhaps every third time I take one.

And doubtless it goes without saying that any such garbage as had once been disposed of at the hole has long since decomposed.

So that the hole is just a hole, as I have said.

Although there is an enormous heap of broken bottles nearby.

Perhaps the latter is somewhat extraordinary, after all.

Certainly the bottles are extraordinarily pretty, being of various colors.

Too, they glisten much more dramatically than do my wet morning leaves.

In fact the entire mound of them is sometimes like a kind of glistening sculpture.

Michelangelo would not have thought so, but I think so.

Sculpture is the art of taking away superfluous material, Michelangelo once said.

He also said, conversely, that painting is the art of adding things on.

Although doubtless he would not have thought that the heap of added-on bottles is like a painting, either.

Yet it is not one hundred percent unlike a painting by Van Gogh at that, when one comes right down to it.

If one squints just a little, it is even very like a painting by Van Gogh.

It is all of those swirls in Van Gogh that I am no doubt thinking about. Such as for instance in his painting called
The Starry Night.

As a matter of fact, at night is exactly when Van Gogh would have most probably chosen to paint such bottles.

Assuming there was a moon, obviously.

El Greco was fond of painting at night also, but only indoors. And one seriously doubts that El Greco would have been given inspiration by a garbage disposal area, in either case.

Actually, the bottles could be effectively done by the light of a fire, as well.

Even if it would have to be quite a large fire.

Now and again I have built fires along the beach, by the way.

This is always a pleasant diversion.

This is also not including when I have built other sorts of fires along the beach. Such as out of entire houses.

Doubtless it has generally been on an unexpectedly chilly evening in summer, when I have built the former.

Or on the first evenings when one senses that winter is finally almost ending.

Along the sand there will be frisky shadows, that will dance and fall away.

Or, if there is snow, the flames will write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness.

For the life of me, I cannot remember what I had been trying
to get that nine-foot canvas up the main stairway in the Metropolitan Museum for.

Doubtless my ankle was only sprained. Though it was swollen to twice its normal size.

One never does solve what it is about watching fires, really.

Although probably where I should build my next one is at the garbage disposal area after all.

One would have never created a painting by merely lighting a match and then squinting, before.

El Greco did not care very much for Michelangelo as a painter, by the way.

For that matter Picasso did not care very much for him, either.

A good deal of Michelangelo reminded Picasso of Daumier, as a matter of fact.

One doubts that Alfred North Whitehead's little bell would have rung if he had heard Picasso saying that.

Daumier was somebody else who went blind, incidentally.

Well, as did Degas. And Monet.

And Piero della Francesca.

Although Piero della Francesca is again not to be confused with Piero di Cosimo, the latter having been the one who would hide under a table when there was thunder.

In fact the other Piero had an even worse phobia than Turner about not letting a single person ever see him at work, too.

And frequently would cook as many as fifty eggs at one time, in the same pot in which he was boiling his size, so as not to have to fret over meals.

When Maurice Utrillo was mad, he once tried to commit suicide by repeatedly hitting his head against a wall in a jail.

And in the same period when he was trying to reform Sien, Van Gogh was known to give away all of his clothes to the poor. Or to start to cry in front of churches.

Although Piero di Cosimo did have one pupil, who turned out to be Andrea del Sarto. So doubtiess he was at least sometimes
agreeable enough to share some of the eggs.

Don't bother to get up, doubtless Andrea said in his turn, if it stormed during lunch period.

What Sien shared with Van Gogh was her venereal disease.

Turner grew up as the son of a barber. In a street called Maiden Lane, near Covent Garden.

Utrillo's father may have been Renoir.

Although he could just as well have been Degas.

Suzanne Valadon, who was Utrillo's mother, evidently never knew.

If Renoir or Degas knew, they evidently never said.

Andrea del Sarto has such a poetic sound for a name, when one reads it.

Although all it actually means is that his own father was a tailor.

Andrea senza errori,
he was also called. What that means is that he never made a single mistake, when he was drawing.

Naturally I had to look that up too, whenever it was that I memorized it.

It saddens me to also happen to know that how Andrea died was during a plague, poor and neglected.

Although Titian died during a plague, as well. If in his case at the age of ninety-nine.

Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, no more than ten minutes away in the pickup truck from where I am sitting right at this moment, on August eleventh, 1956.

I forget Pollock's birthday, on the other hand. Although doubtless it is not something I ever knew.

I had also forgotten Renoir's arthritis.

My own left shoulder has not troubled me at all lately, however.

Gauguin was one more painter who had syphilis.

Even if, had he lived during the Renaissance, he would have had to belong to the guild of pharmacists.

All painters did. This was because they compounded pigments.

On my honor, that was how things worked, then.

So possibly the drugstore I forgot to notice in Savona was not called the Savona Drugstore to begin with, but was named after Gauguin.

In Madrid, I once lived in a hotel named after Zurbaran.

Unless perhaps it was named after Goya.

And was in Pamplona.

Although what I would more seriously wish to know is why any of this is now making me think about seagulls.

Aha. Seagulls being scavengers, of course.

When I say being, I mean having been, naturally.

But which in either case was only to suggest that there surely once would have been any number of seagulls at the garbage disposal area.

One has no idea how great a number, but surely a considerable number.

Doubtless other creatures would have come and gone also, of course.

Such as dogs and cats, one imagines.

Then again, perhaps even large dogs would have been leery of that many seagulls.

Certainly cats would have been.

Unless of course there were a considerable number of cats, basically approximating the considerable number of seagulls, which one sincerely doubts.

Actually all I had in mind was a house cat or two, put out for the night.

Once, when I was painting in Corinth, New York, for a summer, I put my own cat out each night.

I remember this because the cat was a city cat and had never been put out before.

Every night for weeks, I worried about that cat.

As a matter of fact I felt quite guilty as well, even though I was never quite certain what it was that I was feeling quite guilty about.

Surely a cat which has been locked up in a loft in SoHo for all of its life will find it agreeable being outside at night, I attempted to convince myself.

Possibly it will even find other cats to associate with, which it has likewise never done before, I additionally rationalized.

Nonetheless my condition of feeling quite guilty continued for the longest time.

Even after I had become reassured that the cat would always come back, so that eventually it would often be as late as noon before I even remembered to look, my condition of feeling quite guilty continued.

Except that by then what I was feeling quite guilty about was having forgotten to let the cat back in.

Frequently I suspected that the cat had done little more than sleep under the porch all night in any event.

Nor have I the slightest notion what this might have to do with the garbage disposal area, since I do not remember a garbage disposal area from the summer when I painted in Corinth, New York.

That summer's garbage was collected at the door.

There is likewise no connection between the cat I am talking about and the cat I saw at the Colosseum, incidentally.

The cat I saw at the Colosseum was gray, and appeared to be playing with something, such as a ball of yarn.

My own cat was russet colored, and was basically slothful.

There is also obviously no connection between my russet cat and the cat which scratches at the broken window here.

Even if for the life of me I cannot remember having put that tape on.