Kazim Ali
The Perfect Painting
He thinks the sky is a living creature turning on its back.
Rain is the caress.
He is warned not to personify so much.
So bored by music.
Why always the same progressions, the same formulas, why only twelve tones?
Why not the shamelessness of Satie: but only those periods of silences in which there are no notes, only the piano strings reverberating.
Revertebrate.
Why not thick layers of static, with the slightest modulations at the level of microsound, shifting the way a person shifts in his chair, or in bed.
Why not tone changes so subtle a listener might not even know that a change has occurred.
Why music that depends so deeply on being consumed.
He looks up at the gray, cloudy sky and thinks:
“That’s the perfect painting”
Why, he wonders, does he love art like this?
Is it because he is emotionally dead.
Or scared.
Or unable to communicate.
OK, what do I love about it, he thinks, looking carefully at the sky two specks—birds flying across his field of vision a mile up.
It’s the gradations in color, so subtle.
The vast space, supposed formlessness.
But actually not.
Actually burgeoning.
Actual possibility.
The open space
Because suddenly there is not time at all.
“You really like this?” a disbelieving friend asks at the Agnes Martin exhibit.
He’s not paying attention.
He’s thinking of your hands leaving his back.
Thinking it felt like being brushed by birds’ wings.
The talks in the night after sex—when you realized you loved each other but weren’t fulfilling each other’s desire.
How does he work his way back from that?
Remember the scene in Four-Chambered Heart where Djuna burns all the books—because she realizes they can’t save her.
That’s what he thinks as he writes his novel into the notebook: “how will this save me?”
And what should we say to him?
No one will save you.
Don’t go back?
Be unsaved?
All those novels about eros or extremity end in either
silence
abandonment
or death.
Ether.
So how have you been helped.
As he’s driving, a huge—and it seems to him golden—bird flies low across the road.
Likely it’s a hawk but today he needs to believe in phoenixes.
Even this could be about anything.
The disbelieving friend.
The emotional distance.
Monochromatic.
Abandonment.
Silence.
Death.
Duras. Nin. Maso. He wants to lie down with them, flesh against flesh.
Where he’s gone.
Where he’s going.
“History Happened Here,” reads the cast iron sign at the thruway exit.
He always reads the signs.
Though, he thinks, history happens everywhere.
How do you go back and fix something?
It’s too late.
Nothing gets fixed.
Even this.
Could be about anything, about disbelief, could be the river surface, could be about what hasn’t been said yet,
could be just about the wind.
“Partially cloudy with a chance of showers.”
He thinks of leaving this morning.
“Fish fly through the ocean, men crawl along the bottom of the sky.”
If the sky is a living thing, filled with gas and vapor and water all undergoing perennial transformation, then raining is actually the sky falling down.
What open ended
“We picked mates out for you one from the other”
He always thought he would stay with the phoenix forever.
Separation from the phoenix—five empty years after that—then the raven.
What’s the use—he’s explained all this before
Tried to make you understand.
Even thought to himself, “he doesn’t make me burn like phoenix did—phoenix is fire; the raven is water.”
Like rain.
How do we travel our way out of this.
How about not having the answers.
Scattered thunder showers, possible storm warning.
He remembers going to see Ono’s film “Apotheosis.”
You know he loved the first part: the balloon getting higher and higher over the snowy fields.
Sounds from the English countryside below.
Gun shots, dogs barking, sounds getting fainter and fainter…
Landscape fading and fading into snowy gray and white.
Finally vanishes into the clouds.
Seven minutes of blank screen and the sound of the gentle gas flame holding the balloon aloft, sound of the wind against silk.
How many people viewing simply got up and walked out because there was “nothing” to “see.”
Look for the last one, in the back row, a young man in his thirties, bad haircut, a little horsey looking, but beautiful because his eyes are on the screen of snow, transfixed.
Then the balloon bursts through the top of the cloud cover into brilliant sunshine and blue blue sky.
Coming from winter.
What if this is what it’s like he prays.
Remembering the clarity of the outlines of objects the day after the storm.
But what if it isn’t like that.
What if we go through clouds and there isn’t anything after.
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