Part I: ~The Giverny Life~
A single spray of rain dashed against the glass as the
thunderstorm rolled across the landscape, somehow over the horizon and directly
overhead at once. Then another splash,
and another, quicker and quicker until the individual drops were lost in the
constant wash of water over the city.
Through the stormy haze: drooping
scrub oaks and grim-grey buildings and steaming cars all blur together,
imprecise blobs of motion and muted tail-lights immersed in a depthless murk,
merging reluctantly into meandering slippery hues joining together into the
drowsiness of a million prismatic splotches, a groaning, a wavering, a suṣupti dreaming, not-dreaming, an
endless flow of incoherent impressionistic lily-colored liquid streams
swirling about each other, a Giverny life.
All
my senses muddled and muddied, right in the midst of the mutable madding crowd,
I lingered in the darkened corner next to the balcony door, thinking of other
words that started with ‘m’ to describe my current situation. Further accommodating my search for
alliteration, people mingled and mumbled about me. Occasionally, they meandered near me, a
muddle of meaningless murmurs.
Leaning against the wall, I
closed my eyes for a moment and shook my head, as if I could somehow disperse
the incoherence by doing so. The
incoherence refused to be dispelled. It
settled in and made funny faces at me.
Metaphorically-speaking, that is. I'm not crazy. Usually.
The sounds all ran breathlessly
together as I opened my eyes and stared at the door. The door’s wooden frame contained a shattered
fractal of stained glass, mostly purples and ambers and reds spreading out in a
manner that could be called an artistic spiral if one were being generous while talking
to some three year old proudly presenting the door as artwork. Since no three year old stood anywhere nearby
for convenient disapprobation (unspoken, of course, I’m not a monster), I just
grimaced at the ugliness of the glass.
The raindrops now sliding down it did trace pretty patterns under the
candlelight, at least. In the center, a
solitary pane of completely clear glass allowed me to see outside.
It bothered me, just a little, because it had no business being an outside door to a domicile.
Because the power had gone out
almost an hour before, all the corners were dark. Mine was the darkest, though. That’s why I chose it. The host had tracked down several candles,
plus a couple of battery-powered camping lanterns belonging to a neighbor, so
the room wasn’t actually completely dark.
One could still make out individual faces easily enough, though the
jaggedness of the flickering shadows made them seem sharp and a bit alien.
Still, I had lost track of the
people I’d come with. Perhaps I’d done
so deliberately. I honestly can't remember. And if I had done so for that reason, I certainly didn't realize it consciously. Pulling away in such
moments can be a gratuitously random act with uncertain motives. They moved, I moved, the world moved, and
when I found myself in that shadowy corner, I settled in. I watched the street two stories down and
shut out the rest of the room as though it were nothing more than a momentary
distraction, easily ignored, easily forgotten.
Chilly air blew from a vent overhead; I shivered and squeezed more
tightly into the corner to escape the direct flow across my bare arms. The cold breeze against my skin felt too
much like numbness.
But it was a damp warm evening
in a room that had seen more than its fair share of cigarettes and joints and
cheap alcohol, all enhanced by lackadaisical college student cleaning
habits. The crowd smelled of faint sweat
and fainter deodorants of every stripe, and, just beneath those, the pervading
scent of old dust and dank and the slightest raw hint of incipient decay. There was no escaping the sense of humanity
huddled against the world, the herd instinct quelling their day-to-day fears
and uncertainty, allowing them to hide in the endless moments of slightly
drunken camaraderie at 11 p.m. on a Friday evening. These were the sorts of evenings I knew, the ones that made me decide to be ridiculously melodramatic about their natures and impulses.
Though I could not make out
specific conversations, I could isolate and tentatively identify various voices. Recognizing neither friends nor
acquaintances, I wondered how many of them actually were friends and
acquaintances, passing in the shadows at the corners of my vision, the
distinct, recognizable voices turning to wisps as they reached my ears.
I
could have looked. The candles (mostly
floral-scented in ways nature never actually intended flowers to smell) and
electric lanterns (both of them glowing in the dullest and driest shades of
dusty-white) might have provided sufficient illumination to find them. Here and there, the tips of incense sticks
glowed. They didn’t actually light the
room to any meaningful degree, of course.
They just provided points of reference.
Also, covered up the smell of pot, but I make no legally-actionable
claims about the partaking, or not, of illegal substances in the area. The room wasn’t that large; the crowd was
approximately twenty-five people shoved into a space big enough for a dozen,
maybe half that again if people weren’t too bothered by the prospect of getting
to know each other a lot better than they intended. They had been spread throughout the apartment
before the power outage. Now, only the
living room and the part of the kitchen that contained the alcohol were
lit. So they gathered there, unwilling
to call it a night with the rain still falling and the parking lot pitch black.
But
I didn’t look. In the moment, it seemed
an oddly futile act, as though I would understand only half the story being
told by someone with little interest in making things clear to me. All sound and fury, signifying nothing. The sounds felt hard and heavy, an almost
tactile tensile barrier between me and the rest of the party guests. Instead, I sidled over to the balcony door, emerging into the halflight of a stormy day.
The
storm continued in sound and futility, blowing leaves against the door. I could see it, feel it, and even smell it
from a nearby window that had been opened the tiniest sliver. The rain and wind shook the stained glass as
I touched it lightly with my fingers.
The thunder growled more than it rumbled. For a moment, I couldn’t remember
properly. Had it always growled? Was the crack and rumble I expected nothing
more than a flawed memory of cinematic and stage convention?
Was
I being ridiculous?
Somehow,
the last seemed most likely. I’ve spent
entire portions of my life being borderline ridiculous simply for the sake of
enjoying the charm of the inane. But I
imagined the sheet of metal being shaken somewhere behind the curtains, a sound
simply for my own benefit. It was a ludicrous yet somehow pleasing thought.
Wedged
drowsily in the corner, time passing like slow fog sliding over me, I finally
felt a hand on my shoulder. *Stacey stood
next to me, her dark wetsheened hair hanging limply over half her face as her
mouth crooked into a smile – or a half-smile, I couldn’t confirm for the part
of her mouth concealed beneath her hair, after all – and she said something. Her expression and the way she looked into my
eyes told me she was saying something gentle, something encouraging, something
she clearly thought I needed to know.
Though I could hear her
speaking, if only barely, and partly by old instinct filling in the remembered
sound of her voice, I couldn’t make out the words.
I shook my head slightly and
lifted my hand to tap my right ear with my forefinger.
She cocked her head a bit,
looking puzzled.
It’s bad, I said quietly, and
somehow she understood.
Or
perhaps she didn’t, at least not at first.
She simply repeated herself in the same voice, same tone, same volume,
and I had to tap my ear again before her smile faded and she pulled me in for a
hug. I felt her lips against my right ear, a brief
quiver of motion before she caught herself.
It felt like a kiss, and perhaps it was, at least in spirit.
We stood there for several
seconds that felt as long as the entire evening preceding that moment, and she
slid her fingers along the edge of my cheek and gave me another, sadder, smile
before returning to her boyfriend *Henry. I watched them for a couple seconds before
turning my attention back to the window.
At some point, *Stacey must
have spoken to our friends about our interaction, because the last thing I
remember about that night is *Jason helping me out to our vehicles, holding me
steady even though I wasn’t even remotely drunk. But I allowed him to support me, and allowed
*Stacey to help me get into my car, and they didn’t ask whether I was okay to
drive. They knew I was. Instead, *Stacey waved before snuggling into *Henry’s
not-inconsiderable amateur lacrosse-playin’ frame. *Jason took the more direct approach to the
mystique of human commonality by giving me a semi-solid punch on the shoulder
and asked if we were still on for racquetball tomorrow. Though I understood him, he mimed swinging a
racquet, almost hitting *Stacey in the process.
*Henry practically growled and *Jason shot him a sheepish grin.
Yeah, I said. We’ll
get a court at 8. *Jason smiled and
punched me again before closing the door and letting me leave.
All
these years later, though I remember the delicate angles of her face at that
precise moment she spoke, the exact color of her single visible eye as she met
my gaze, the exact sensation of her fingertips on my face, I still have no idea
what *Stacey said.
I
wonder if it was important.
That night is my earliest memory of everything going to
an endless static tinnitus for an extended time. It would go away later that same evening,
when I lay on my sofa, listening drowsily to some Dave Brubeck coming from the
speakers. That specific memory is
perfectly clear, though I could not tell you what happened between the time we
left the party and the moment I flopped down to rest. So I cannot recollect or describe the exact
moment the static finally fell away.
Because I remember the music –
it was “Take Five,” on repeat, until I finally switched to “Blue Rondo à la
Turk” – I know the tinnitus had left, if only for a time. But time enough, really. Given the bare and banal alternatives, you
take the time, right?
Because I don’t remember the
second time this happened, or the third, or any other time I could safely
assign a specific place in the ongoing sequence, I don’t know when the music
really started to go away for good, or which songs I started to lose first.
And because I have always
suspected these days would come, I could no more feel sorry for myself than I
could feel pleased at these gradual click-clacks tick-tocks of the inexorable.
In the ensuing years, my
hearing faded in and out, in and out, a slow slow slow see-saw always tilting
just the tiniest bit more toward the pervasive silence with each motion, dulling
bit by bit as the pieces of the world around me slipped away.
When you start to lose a sense,
its absence – darkness or silence or insensateness – almost seems to follow you
over the weeks and years. There’s the
sense that something is out there, stalking,
just waiting for you to be remade completely.
You slowly cease to be what you were.
Or what you are. It’s no easy
thing to separate yourself from the agglutinated self-image developed over the
course of your life. At times, you’re
still 12 years old and perfectly able to follow a movie in the theater. You’re 22 and deep in conversation with
friends at a bar while the sounds of thrash metal thunder through the room. These things happened. You were there. You know what you were capable of, and what
you weren’t. So when the silence looms
like a great fog across the heath, you always wonder, just for a moment, why
the expanse of the land suddenly seems so fuzzy.
Even when you accept it, as I did
long ago, you can’t always escape the momentary apprehension that acceptance
means you’ve given in, steeled yourself and marking an ‘L’ in the loss
column. Knowing better doesn’t always
help – it’s a sudden thing, an insight that you weren’t looking for, like an
unsummoned memory.
Mind you, it’s not a bad
thing. When it comes, it’s not so much a
memento mori (metaphorically-speaking,
of course) or a foreboding as it is a realization that life continues along its
path as it should. You were once this person, and that will never
change. And, though self-pity seems
attractive to some, it’s not worth the effort, any more than swatting at that
great fog across the heath is.
There’s a reason I chose the Giverny metaphor a few
years ago. I do understand how
impressionism works, and, at first blush, the comparison doesn’t work
well. Monet painted the truth of
sensation, the way colors came together to create objects. Hearing loss is, in a word, loss. No greater insight is gained by transforming
formerly stark and clear sounds into a muddle of background noise.
But:
As he aged, Monet’s eyesight worsened as cataracts
slowly cut him off from the world; even the untrained observer can see the
effect on his impressionistic paintings.
By his mid-60s, Monet’s vision problems had already started seeping into
his art. The muddled and indistinct
slowly became more muddled and indistinct.
His previously-vivid grasp of colors grew stranger, reproducing shades
and hues that would never have passed muster in his earlier work. Painting from memory, his output became more
erratic, less accurate. While this sort
of break from authenticity and realism would come to be embraced as the 20th
century developed, Monet’s metiere lay in colors, in creating image from
impression. Without clear eyesight, he
lost access to much of what he’d striven toward for most of his life. The disconnect proved frustratingly pervasive
and definitive, so much so that he didn’t really grasp how bad it was until
people told him.
Knowing the art world, had
these changes been intentional, he would have likely been lionized for his
evolving artistic vision. But they were
the product of eyesight grown foggier, of treacherous memory slowly transforming
familiar scenes. Breaking with the
solidity, the sharp-hewed angles and replicable details became lionized. This was never Monet’s intention. Monet eventually went under the knife with an
early form of cataract surgery. Though
it was incompletely successful (for reasons I can only speculate on, he declined
to have an operation on his left eye) it did provide him with a scant few years
of improved vision toward the very end of his life. If nothing else, he could finally learn to appreciate
the world’s colors once again. And when
he saw his output from the cataract years, he found it wanting,
embarrassing. He destroyed several
paintings because they failed at matching his rediscovered reality.
Some might argue that going
blind also deserves its own reality. Dim-eyed
Monet experienced a different world from bright-eyed and bushy-tailed
Monet. All worlds are created equal
under the lens of life experience. All
worlds have worthwhile truths, and a painting through cataract-impaired vision
is no less reflective of the artist at the time than one free of
obstruction. I can’t dispute this. The world grows fluid, and you work with what you get. There are far worse fates, I think.
~Fin~
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